GC Review - Saturday, October 22, 2022
In our weekly GC Review, we return to important articles from the war to date. You might have already seen some of them, but we think they all warrant revisiting.
This day in Herstory: Sarah Bernhardt, born Henriette-Rosine Bernard October 22 or 23, 1844 (died March 26, 1923), was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame Aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas fils; Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", while Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world,and was one of the first prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictures. (more)
Today in GC Review, we diverge from our policy of prioritizing written articles, and share this brilliant monologue by Andrew Doyle, the most succinct and eloquent summary of these issues that we’ve seen anywhere. We encourage you to take a few minutes to watch it. (Thanks to the amazing Eliza Mondegreen for including it in her “Top reads” today.)
The trans fairy tale
Pink News is shamelessly exploiting the “authentic self” to sell mastectomies to young people
From The Critic (UK)
By Nicole Jones
March 16, 2022
Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, has just announced the launch of a new series on Snapchat, Pure Trans Joy, described as “dedicated to sharing stories of Trans happiness from PinkNews”. The first episode is titled “What Is Trans Surgery Like For Trans Guys?”, featuring transgender influencers making a hard sell for double masectomies. There is little information on the specifics; instead, the show obfuscates and focuses on the positive, transformative outcomes that cosmetic surgery (which will set you back a mere £6000-£7000) can have on the lives of dissatisfied young women. In the words of Mad Men’s Don Draper, “advertising is based on one thing — happiness”.
Pink News first launched on Snapchat in 2018, and in the next year it significantly increased its revenues. Ever since, Pink News has become a “Snapchat-first” publisher, with the app becoming its “primary” focus, and Cohen isn’t shy about explaining the motivations behind the move: “We want to create great content to get people into the funnel and then once they are, we want to sell them products.” … read full article
Entering the parallel universe of transactivism
From Kathleen Stock (UK)
By Kathleen Stock
March 21, 2022
When people say things like “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”, what do they mean? In my book Material Girls I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.
Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box-set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it. Kids get immersed in fictions when inventing elaborate situations for their toys or playing story-driven video games. Actors can get immersed when plunging into new stage roles; as can workers doing role-play at away days, David Brent-style. Historical re-enactment groups spend weekends getting immersed in collective fictions about the past. … read full article
Sex Denialism: Collective Insanity or Religion?
From Virginia’s Room (USA)
March 24, 2021
Very few people would have believed me if ten years ago I had told them this assertion by Lola Olufemi (that sex is a human creation) would be taken seriously within western academia and humanities departments. Even fewer would have believed that University Unions would ban their academic members from discussing its scientific validity (as I have experienced first-hand) and that most political parties, institutions and corporations in the English-speaking world would be chanting slogans deriving directly from such demonstrably and evidently false premise, while silencing any dissent. And yet, here we are. Some of you might even be amongst the proponents of this sex-denialist craze. …
A striking shared trait between the 20th century science-denialist trends is their rejection of genetics and the theory of evolution. Sex-denialism is no different. Anisogamic reproduction is an integral part of evolution both as a product and as an agent of it via the mixing of genetic pools. The 20th century antiscientific beliefs that seduced the minds of successive generations seem to have one thing in common: they reel against a form of determinism and the idea that we have material limitations and little control over the natural world. They propose that god (a human creation), the people or the individual are not bound by material limitations but can transcend them, and that humankind is separate and above the rest of nature. They pose the human mind and will as the makers of the world and reality. I emphasize this point early on because it is important to understand that the belief we are currently dealing with is embedded in a long religious tradition that is highly seductive for the human mind. … read full article
How activists used a veil of secrecy to rewrite biology
As feminists are vilified online and politicians try and fail to describe what a woman is, the rest of us are entitled to ask how we got ourselves into this mess and how we can navigate a sensible route out of it, says Lucy Bannerman
From The Times (UK)
By Lucy Bannerman
April 1, 2022
What is a woman? And when did that become such a tricky question? For Jan Morris, the late, great Times correspondent, the question was profoundly personal and had little to do with labels or legal status. The writer spent the first half of her extraordinary life as male, breaking the news that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had conquered Everest as James, before crossing the Rubicon with her gradual transition into womanhood that culminated in 1972 with a sex change performed by a Casablanca surgeon “who asked no questions and imposed no conditions legal or moralistic”.
By that point, as Morris reported in Conundrum, her evocative memoir, only about 600 people in the United States and perhaps 150 in the UK had braved the reassignment surgery that had been developing since the 1950s. Being such a novelty perhaps, she found the British state responded to her new status “with unexpected flexibility”, reissuing a passport, driving licence and other documents to match her new identity.
Fast forward 50 years, and the confusion over issues of identity is so great that men are being asked if they are pregnant before hospital scans, an MP has declared himself to be transgender while continuing to refer to his biological sex, and the very fairness of sport is at stake, with athletes such as the cyclist Emily Bridges, who have had the physical advantages of male puberty, seeking to compete in women’s sport. … read full article (share token)
Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Synthetic Sex Identities
(Speech given at Hillsdale College July 2022)
From Jennifer’s Newsletter
By Jennifer Bilek
September 18, 2022
Hi everyone, thank you for being here, and special thanks to Douglas Jeffrey and Matt Bell for inviting me to Hillsdale College to speak.
I hope to clarify what’s happening in the name of transgenderism — why it’s happening and who’s profiting from it.
I began researching this issue because of my alarm at the censorship experienced by those trying to critique it. That was nearly a decade ago. What has emerged for me is a clear indication that we’re being manipulated and groomed to accept radical changes to human evolution engineered by those at the highest echelons of society invested in the biotech, pharmaceutical, technological, and financial industries. … read full article
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
From The Atlantic (USA)
By Jonathan Haidt
April 11, 2022
What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. …
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life? … read full article
It Is Time to End This Horrific Medical Scandal
Our institutions are using pseudoscience to justify surgery on healthy children.
From Reality's Last Stand (USA)
By Colin Wright
October 22, 2022
Yesterday, on October 21, 2022, I had the honor of speaking at The Rally to End Child Mutilation here in Nashville, Tennessee, organized by Matt Walsh and The Daily Wire. The rally was scheduled in response to the Vanderbilt Medical Center, where unearthed videos of a presentation made by Dr Shayne Taylor encouraged Vanderbilt to begin performing “gender affirming” procedures because they are a “big money maker.”
Reacting to these disturbing revelations, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee issued a statement condemning predatory hospitals that seek to push children into unnecessary surgeries for financial gain. Though Vanderbilt has since suspended gender surgeries and procedures on minors, they are likely to begin again soon.
While Vanderbilt contemplates their next move, many of us organized at the Tennessee state capitol to let them know the world is watching, and that many of us will not rest until these horrific procedures on minors are put to an end.
In my speech, I attempted to expose the pseudoscience being used as a justification for these irreversible “gender affirming” procedures.
Transcript (starting at 34:02):
My name is Colin Wright, and I am an evolutionary biologist perhaps best known for arguing the (now controversial) position that biological sex is real, there are only two sexes, the differences between males and females matter, and that women are adult human females. … read full article