State of the Culture: The Year We Abolished Reality

By Jonathon Van Maren

2015 marked two important cultural moments: We legally abolished reality and feminism—or what it once was—died. Sceptical? Here are the news stories that prove it.

I’ve written before on the fact that the emerging ideology of gender transition—in essence, claiming all reality is subject to our whims and feelings—is nothing short of the Sexual Revolution experimenting on children. Now, that is being borne out in a truly terrifying way. From Breitbart:

The number of primary school-aged children, some as young as four, beginning to “transition” their gender is rising rapidly in the UK. The popularity of the fad appears to be clustered, with children copying others in the same schools.

Up to 80 primary school-aged children a year are now seeking help towards potentially changing their gender, the chair of Mermaids, a charity which lobbies for families who believe their children and teenagers are transgendered, has revealed.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Susie Green said that, in some cases, British children as young as four are already in the process of “transitioning” to another sex.

She also described how her organisation has observed a cluster effect across the country, with children following one and another in the same school; a school where there might be a teacher who promotes transgender ideology.

Her anecdotal evidence correlates with the results of a study by Mark Zucker at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada, which found that transgenderism was more prominent and persistent among children when promoted by adults.

Researchers observed that children who saw therapists and others in authority who assume that they belong to the opposite sex can actually become more distressed, exacerbating their “gender dysphoric identity.”

Another recent study found that 70 to 80 per cent of children who report transgender feelings spontaneously lose them as they grow up.

Remember when children used to play “make-believe”? Now adults play it, too. And they play it with children. And it comes replete with costumes, hormone treatment, and genital mutilation.

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But saying such things may soon be illegal. In one of our culture’s bitter little ironies, relativism is rapidly becoming established law as the gender ideologues demand that we seem them as they see themselves, regardless of the temptation to point out the fact that hey, doesn’t that chick have a penis?

From LifeSiteNews:

The New York City Commission on Human Rights has issued rules that fine employers for referring to transsexuals by their real gender.

The new “guidance” (“NYC Pronoun Ban”), which has power to levy hefty fines against “violators” who “discriminate,” is an extension of the New York City Human Rights Law, based on the city’s laws against gender discrimination.

Failing to use an individual’s preferred name or pronoun, under the new ban, will be considered a violation of New York City Human Rights Law, punishable by fines up to $250,000.  

“Refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment,” the new NYC Pronoun Ban reads.

“Gender is defined as one’s ‘actual or perceived sex and shall also include a person’s gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression,’“ the new ban reads, “‘whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.’“

Fines may be levied whether the man who wants to be called a woman, or the girl who wants to be called a boy, has legally changed their name or not.

Additionally, the new ban lists “refusing to allow individuals to utilize single-sex facilities and programs” as against New York City law, so boys may use girls’ toilets, showers, and locker rooms, and girls may participate in boys’ activities and programs.  This policy has the force of law “regardless of their sex assigned at birth, anatomy, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on their identification.”

The NYC Pronoun Ban makes a special example of a women’s shelter, which may not “turn away” a man who identifies as a woman, or a men’s shelter which “may not deny service” to a woman who wants to be male.  Critics point out obvious dangers for the safety of shelter inhabitants, such as a battered women’s shelter, inherent in the application of this policy.

Feminism, it must be said, is finally breathing out its dying gasps, having toppled onto the sword of transgenderism. What point is there, after all, in trumpeting the unique needs of a unique gender if in fact, that gender is not unique and can be claimed by anyone? The feminists, too, have lost their power in the face of the gender ideologies they helped to spawn—after all, they can yell about the rape culture all they want—but that won’t keep predatory drag queens out of battered women’s shelters. Not anymore. Because it’s 2015.

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Media complicity in all of this, of course, has been essential, as each new effort to bend reality to suit each new identity group’s personal delusion is trumpeted as ground-breaking. For example, from Fox News recently:

A couple in Ecuador is making history with a unique pregnancy: The father-to-be is carrying the baby of his transgender partner.

Fernando Machado and Diane Rodríguez announced their pregnancy, believed to be the first of its kind in South America, on social media earlier this month and it’s received widespread attention in a continent that has seen a sudden explosion in the rights and visibility of trans people.

Rodríguez, who was born Luis, is one of Ecuador’s most-prominent LGBT activists and says she and her Venezuelan-born partner, whose birth name was María, decided to publicize the pregnancy to help change attitudes in the staunchly Roman Catholic society. Although both take hormones, neither has undergone gender-reassignment surgery, so the child-to-be was conceived the old-fashioned way with no known medical complications to date.

“We’re trying to break the myths about transsexuality,” Rodríguez told the Associated Press.

I must point out here that there’s nothing particularly spectacular or historic about two cross-dressers successfully getting pregnant, but that would disturb the narrative, wouldn’t it? It must be pointed out–this is only an actual story if the media accepts the premises of the transgender activists to begin with. And so they have.

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Perhaps you think my claims of the Abolishing of Reality are rather dramatic. Well, not so fast. Slate magazine recently gushed over science’s war on discrimination—after all, the natural way of having a child with a man and a woman is clearly a bigoted thing of the past. Nature is discriminatory, and must be fixed:

In the not-so-distant future, same-sex couples may be able to have children that are biologically related to both of them. A recent article in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences outlines a new process known as in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, through which scientists use stem cells—taken from embryos or adults—to create gametes, the technical name for eggs and sperm, regardless of gender. Scientists have already had partial success with IVG on mice, and were able to create offspring that came from a mixture of one gamete created through this new process and one created naturally.

A lesbian couple using IVG could combine one naturally produced egg with sperm created in vitro from her partner’s stem cell to create an embryo that would then be implanted in one of the their uteruses. A gay couple would go through the same process, with the egg rather than the sperm coming from the stem cell, but they would need to find a surrogate to carry the baby to term. IVG might also make it possible for embryos to be produced from multiple parents, in which genetic material from more than two people comes together to create the embryo, as well as from a single parent. In that case—probably the most perplexing from a bioethical perspective—a stem cell from an individual would be used to create whichever gamete they don’t produce naturally.

While IVG is remarkable as a scientific breakthrough, it also represents the fast-moving, and long overdue, cultural shift that has taken place in attitudes towards same-sex parents. It wasn’t so long ago that same-sex parents couldn’t adopt one another’s biological children. Now scientists are working to help them make biological children together.

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For those who might object to these experiments, the totalitolerance of the LGBT-alphabet-soup crowd is already showing. An Oregon couple, Aaron and Melissa Klein, were ordered to pay a fine of 135,000 dollars for declining to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The lesbian couple claimed that their inability to get baked goods from precisely where they wanted to at the moment left them feeling “mentally raped”—and fortunately for them, we now live in a culture that regards both feelings and fictitious conditions with the utmost seriousness. From LifeSiteNews:

They claimed to suffer from 88 separate symptoms of mental anguish – including “surprise,” being “stunned,” experiencing a “dislike of going to work,” and that one or both of them had resumed smoking.

The Kleins, overwhelmed by a social media campaign that led to a lagging wedding business, closed their bakery that September. They briefly moved their business inside their home, but someone broke into their company van and defaced it by scrawling the word “bigot” on the side.

Aaron took a job as a garbage man. They say they are now making about half the income they had been with their bakery.

The State of Oregon went so far as to seize the Klein’s bank accounts, leaving them with no money whatsoever—this in spite of the fact that they have five children. But today’s gender ideologues would rather put a family with children on the street than walk down the street and ask someone else to bake them a cake.

But hey—Love Wins, right?