Thoughts on science and woowoo.

Lately I have been reviving my interest in astrology, and in the ‘paranormal’ in general, here irreverently called woowoo. Air quotes because what was magic yesterday may be explained by science tomorrow. 

As always, discernment must be used. Sturgeon’s Law* must be invoked.

For those who don’t know it, Theodore Sturgeon was a sci-fi writer, part of the mid twentieth century wave. 

Someone said to him: “Ninety percent of science fiction is cr#p”.  Sturgeon’s reply: “Ninety percent of anything is cr#p.”

AND I share the concern of many thinkers about the decline of the rational tradition in Western societies. I am very fond of the Enlightenment, with its  emphasis on open inquiry, the scientific method and individual rights.

Without it I fear people start burning witches and worshipping priests again. 

How to reconcile this?

Can humans live as materialist fundamentalists, limited to one lifetime with reason alone? It looks like they just invent fresh ideologies, without the benefit of transcendence. 

Doris Lessing’s classic novel “The Golden Notebook” describes a woman’s disenchantment with Marxism. The process has all the poignancy of a devout Christian losing faith. 

Others, notably John McWhorter and Brendan O’Neill, have pointed out the religious elements of  recent social justice movements. 

They demand unquestioning support for a certain set of beliefs, especially the more ridiculous ones, lest one is considered a heretic. Question dogma at your peril. The peril in this case is social ostracism, but that can go as far as losing livelihood. All together now: men can get pregnant!

I heartily applaud the movement away from religious dogma, but I also believe that we need some recognition of, and connection with, wider realities. 

The farthest reaches of science sound a lot like New Age gobbledygook. 

Does anything even exist? Quantum stuff is totally beyond me. 

Way back in 1974 I read a little book that made total sense.

In “The medium, the mystic and the physicist” Lawrence LeShan points out the many similarities between the extreme reaches of modern science and the description of reality told by mystics and shamans.

If  Truth with a capital T exists, then sooner or later all paths that pursue it must converge.

Meanwhile we are Here and Now, in the third dimension, most of us making do with five senses.

It is one thing to admit that there are realities beyond what our senses show  us. It is something else to  live daily life in threedee based on what we learn in altered states of consciousness. 

I have never had the patience to meditate. Perhaps I am groping towards the insight from this quote by Dõgen:

“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.” 

We are Here, Now, to Do Earth. 

In this box of time and place the scientific method, with its basis on reason and insistence on evidence serves us well. Let’s please keep using it, while acknowledging that it cannot  answer  all questions. 

Covid dilemmas, 2

So why not just trust the messages coming from governments and mainstream media?

The answer is that I would love to be able to do that, and I used to. 

These days I see too much corporate influence in institutions that I 

used to trust and too much censorship and bias in the media. 

As far as I understand, the reasoning behind the relentless drumbeat that “vaccines are safe and effective” is that we have to keep it simple for the sake of public health. Supposedly we the great unwashed are too dumb to handle the slightest hint of complexity. 

Yes, says the mainstream, there are some vaccine injuries, but they are extremely rare. When faced with a pandemic authorities have to focus on the big picture. If dissenting voices are being denied access to mainstream publication channels, that is for the sake of the greater good.

The censorship seems to have the reverse effect.

Instead of keeping the messaging simple it makes us wonder what ‘they’ are hiding. It encourages conspiracy thinkers.

“Follow the science”, they say.

That sentence goes against the very spirit of the scientific mindset.

This is a new disease. Both health professionals and for  policy makers are learning about it as we go, and should not be accused of  flipflopping if they change their mind on the basis of new evidence. Science thrives on open discussion. 

As a reasonably intelligent lay person trying to make sense of it all, how do I decide who is to be trusted? 

Before we go on here, let me make it clear that I do not accuse everyone working for a large corporation, pharmaceutical or other, of being evil.

The Solshenitsyn principle applies. The line between good and evil runs through everyone and everything, individual or collective. It doesn’t run exactly through the middle, but that is another topic.

Back to who I feel I can trust.

First off, I pay no attention to anyone who denies the reality of the disease. No, this is not ‘just another bad flu.’ 

This is one mean illness, not to be taken lightly.

But then, neither is it smallpox or the black plague.

 

Measures taken to minimise spread of the disease have to be balanced with damage done to people by those measures. There are conversations to be had about the trade offs. We are not allowed to have them. We have not been given access to the data on which to base an informed opinion.

Overall, it is beginning to look as if, for whatever reason, the severity of the disease has been over reported.  Did people die of Covid, or just with it? 

What is the average age of the victims? We are a mortal species.

I am 78. I enjoy my life and would love another decade, but if I don’t get it I will not whine. My generation has been fortunate. I do not want to see us protected at the expense of the young.

Meanwhile the damage done by ‘vaccines’ and lockdowns has been downplayed. Some of the dissident medical professionals based their stance on seeing too many adverse effects in their own practice.

We still have to take the disease seriously, but is it serious enough to justify the increasing authoritarianism?

The second group I pay no attention to is those who reject early treatment options and describe Ivermectin as “horse dewormer.”

This drug has a forty year long history of safe use in humans. Yes, its main use has been as an anti-parasitic. So what? Off label use is common in medical practice, think aspirin as blood thinner. Ivermectin has one big problem. The patent has run out and it is dirt cheap to make.

Remember the mantra about vaccines: safe and effective. 

According to the official benchmark of science, the randomised double blinded study, IVM’s efficacy has not been proven. Proponents of its use point to clinical, more anecdotal evidence. Let us leave that question open.

But safe? Among all the question marks that surrounds this new situation, the safety record of Ivermectin stands out as rock solid. 

Forty years. Billions of doses. A better safety record than common over the counter drugs like Aspirin or Tylenol.  Certainly a better safety record than the new experimental ‘vaccines’.

So why in Gaia’s name are the Powers That Be removing this drug from the hands of qualified doctors, top in their field, who want to use it as part of their toolkit? Even Ivermectin’s  most ardent proponents are not saying that it alone can end the pandemic.

The war on Ivermectin and other early treatments makes no sense, unless we remember that the  emergency authorisation for the vaccines depended on no treatment being available. It makes me so cynical about anything else the mainstream is putting out.

So who is left?

From the beginning I have frequently tuned in to dr John Campbell PhD from the UK. He is not a medical doctor, but a retired nurse and educator of nursing. 

For nearly two years he has been reporting almost daily on the situation as it develops across the world, as far as one can tell without fear or prejudice.  Links to whatever studies the talk of the day are based on are always provided in the show notes.

He has consistently recommended people get vaccinated, but he has also interviewed Ivermectin proponents and people damaged by the vaccines.

When John Campbell begged people to get their second shot, because the Delta variant was worse, I set aside my hesitation and went for it.

John is vaxxed and boosted.

The FLCCC doctors. Front Line Covid Critical Care. 

In the beginning of the pandemic these experienced mainstream professionals did what doctors have always done: they looked at the patient in front of them, observed, and dug into the medical toolkit to see if something in there might be helpful in that moment. They originated the use of  steroids in the second, inflammatory phase. It was eventually adopted as standard. In vitro studies had suggested that some  existing drugs might show promise in in the first stage of viral replication. Their safety was established, let’s see if they help. 

The hosts of the Dark Horse podcast, which I love, have been urging caution about mRNA therapy from the beginning, mainly because “We don’t know what we don’t know.” They always repeat their support for traditional vaccines. If they are wrong about something they will put a correction on the front page, in a manner of speaking.

They also consistently stress the fact that science is an ongoing inquiry, a method. 

Youtube warned them repeatedly to cease and desist critical coverage of the ‘vaccine’ rollout. They persisted in speaking out, and YouTube demonetised their channel. At the time that was half their income. 

They remain unvaxxed and recently overcame the illness, variation omicron, with minor discomfort and the help of early treatment by one of the FLCCC doctors.. Even if one disagrees with their information, one cannot deny their integrity.

Another channel I like is that of dr. Mobeen Syed, http://drbeen.com

Like John Campbell dr.Been MD had been a medical educator for some time. He is a proponent of both vaccines and early treatment, reports on complications from  vaccines and is himself  vaccinated. 

Dr.Zubin Damiana MD better known as zdoggmd. This doctor/educator is more pro vaccine and cynical about early treatment options. 

I like the way he addresses the public as grownups who can handle complexity. He is not afraid to tackle the thorny issue of risk/benefit analysis. He urges adults to get boosted, but thinks the risk/benefit analysis is different for children.

That is about it for now. 

The situation keeps changing, with new developments in the fields of medicine, politics and in media coverage. 

Sadly, it is NOT a simple situation. But we will have to cover that another time. 

Covid Dilemmas 1

I have been spending  much time lately trying to make sense of the politics around  the virus known as SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19. 

The discourse has become heavily politicised. Reading snippets from opposing camps one gets the impression that the sides live in different realities.

The  official narrative, touted by governments and mainstream media, is that the disease is deadly and the new vaccines are safe and effective.

The disease is bad enough to justify a slew of restrictive measures. Universal vaccination is  the only way out of this mess.

The opposition claims that the disease is less deadly and the vaccines less safe than presented.

Both sides have plenty of  anecdotal evidence to bolster their case.

As a person who likes  to think for herself, how do I decide who to believe?

Quite frankly, my brain has gotten lazier with age. Or maybe just less capable. Lazy implies that I could get this stuff if only I tried harder, and that may be wishful thinking. Anyway, my eyes glaze over at talk of receptors and blocking and docking and especially disputed statistics. I depend on reliable sources with integrity to digest the science input and spoon feed me the outcome.

Even though my brain is more the storytelling kind, I do have a deep respect for the scientific method. I understand a few basic principles.

Shout out here to my STEM teacher daughter. Dr. Nienke E. van Houten PhD teaches her students at SImon Fraser University how to evaluate scientific literature. Much of it goes over my right brained head, but I do understand the importance of looking at the methodology of a study first, instead of jumping ahead to the conclusion.

The phrase “studies show” is  meaningless without knowing more about the studies’ setup.

Studies can be useless for many reasons. They can even be set up to favour a desired outcome.

Some other basic principles to keep in mind.

Most people have heard these but they bear repeating.

Correlation does not equal Causation.

The fact that two things happened at the same time does not mean one caused the other.

Keep asking: What else is happening?

Anecdotes are not data. 

Fine. I get that. But all scientific discovery starts with basic observation, right? 

A single recorded incident is an anecdote. Many anecdotes are not data, but someone may see a pattern. When scientists see a pattern they form a hypothesis, and then the hypothesis gets tested, and if it holds up to scrutiny it becomes accepted science, at least for the time being. Science is ever evolving.

“Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to opening the way to the next better one.” Konrad Lorenz.

Some scientist, I forget who, quipped that science evolves one funeral at a time.

Some scientific conundrums do not affect most of us in daily life. String theory anyone?

That is not the case with medicine. 

In the case of Covid-19 the scientific consensus is far from uniform.

The mainstream narrative and gospel according to most governments is that the new ‘vaccines’ are safe and effective. Mass vaccination, potentially enforced by draconian measures, is presented as the only way out of the pandemic.

However, dissenting voices are many.  We are not talking here of anti vaccine activists.

For starters, hence the air quotes, dissenters point out that the mechanism of action of the new ‘vaccines’ is different from traditional ones. 

It may well turn out that mRNA therapy is the next penicillin and a great boon to humanity. BUT we don’t know yet.

That is a big but.

As a fat old woman, albeit one without comorbidities, the risk/benefit analysis was clearly in favour of me getting jabbed. Besides I am community oriented and willing to take one for the team so to speak. I started feeling hesitant around the second shot, and was talked into it by one of the voices I trust, dr. John Campbell of the UK.

Dr. John Campbell PhD  is not a medical doctor but a nurse and an educator of nurses.

His youtube channel is a wonderful resource of basic education in the medical field. 

He has been a calm, rational source of information since the beginning of the pandemic.

This is one source I trust.

And that brings us to the question: who do I feel I can trust, and why? 

To be continued.

 

But they did not say that! Interpreting words in the cancel culture.

It is February 11, 2021.

So far the year does not seem like a big improvement over 2020, but hope springs eternal. 

I wasted precious hours this morning on the culture wars. First reading about the latest incident of a person fired for voicing an opinion. I wanted to comment but  first had to make sure I had the allegedly evil utterances right. I wasted time trying to find the exact words, then thought better of it and quit. I treasure my online friendships and don’t need the aggravation on social media. 

The recipient of the outrage storm was unknown to me until today. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of pop culture.

Apparently Gina Carano, the actress in question, has been making other statements that are considered ‘problematic’, but they or her general character are not the topic of this post. 

The reason I feel compelled to wade in was the way in which her words were first twisted to say something I doubt she intended, then this  misinterpretation was repeated mindlessly across many news clips.

We see this a lot and it drives me nuts.

Remember the storm over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic verses?

The Muslim world was incensed because supposedly Rushdie had portrayed the wives of the Prophet as prostitutes.

No, he did not say that. 

What he did do is create a character, the madam of a brothel who worries about her business in the new climate of piety.

She has a brainwave: she names her best girls after the prophet’s wives, and continues to do a brisk business. The prophet’s wives themselves remain untouched.

Mordecai Richler wrote a book titled “Oh Canada, Oh Quebec!” that supposedly insulted the women of Quebec by calling them brood sows. 

No, he did not say that, rather the reverse. 

He accused the Roman Catholic church of treating Quebec’s women as brood sows. Not the same thing at all.

As for the latest fuel for the hashtag outrage mob, let us first show the actual words, then my take on them. 

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

The lady does seem guilty of the sin of hyperbole. In this she is right in tune with the spirit of the times. Also, ethnicity is a permanent characteristic, a political view is not. 

However I see neither anti semitism nor trivialisation of the Holocaust, both of which she stands accused. Again, rather the contrary. 

What I see her compare is not so much the victims of persecution, but the social process of ‘othering’ that laid the groundwork for the persecution that took place later. I don’t see her say  “Being a Republican today is as bad as being a Jew was in Nazi Germany”. I rather see a warning. I see her say “be careful with inciting so much hate, look where it can take you.” 

I may be hopelessly naive. But I shall continue to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least to start with. 

Review: A tale for the time being, by Ruth Ozeki.

I started writing this right after finishing the book, in audio format. 

I often don’t get around to writing, because the ADHD and CCD* kick in, and instead of taking the trouble to formulate my thoughts the iPad seduces me into going online to see what else is happening out there. 

However, that morning I was woken up by a howling windstorm, and then the power went out. No internet for me.

Just before falling asleep I had listened to the description of a windstorm, with accompanying power outage, on Cortes Island on the  B.C. coast. You have to admire the Universe’s wink.

First, I highly recommend this book. 

I could not get into it the first time I tried it. The first chapter introduces Nao, a Japanese school girl, scribbling a diary  in a coffeeshop in a notebook designed to look like a copy of a French classic. It did not appeal to me. I returned it early.  However, I had so enjoyed Ozeki’s earlier novels that I decided to try again. 

The story grew on me with the introduction of the second main character, Ruth. Like the author Ruth is a novelist who has been transplanted from New York City to Cortes Island  for  the sake of her husband’s work. 

Cortes Island lies in the Northern part of the Salish sea, in between Vancouver Island and the B.C. coast. It is a magical place, quite akin in many ways to my own beloved corner of the West Kootenays. It takes two hours to get from Nakusp to a larger centre, with ferries involved in two of the three routes, a bit  like getting off an island. I  loved the descriptions of island life, so much like here.

On a beach walk Ruth picks up a mysterious piece of flotsam, or is that jetsam? that contains Nao’s diary wrapped in plastic. How handy that Ruth’s mother was Japanese and she can read it.

How did the diary get there? Is it part of debris making its way to B.C. after the 2011 tsunami? We never find out. 

From then on Nao’s story alternates with that of  Ruth and the two lives become  intertwined, even though they never meet.  

Nao’s diary is addressed to whoever will read it, as a fellow Time Being, a being in time.

Nao had spent ten formative years of her childhood in California, where her dad had been working as a computer programmer. Something goes wrong and the family returns to Tokyo, ruined both financially and spiritually. Nao is mercilessly bullied at school, but does not let her parents know.

They have enough on their plate. Dad suffers from increasing depression

including suicide attempts.

Respite comes from Dad’s grandmother, a Zen nun, who lives in a crumbling monastery on a mountain.  Summers with her and the teachings of Zen give Nao the strength to cope with her challenging life.

Ruth becomes obsessed with Nao and starts to investigate whether she is still alive. Her dreams become enmeshed with events in Japan. Meanwhile  Nao is having spiritual experiences that involve her great uncle, dead as a kamikaze pilot in the last days of WW2.

The novel becomes increasingly surreal, playing around with life and death, time and space and consciousness in a most enchanting way. 

Highly recommended. 

*CCD Compulsive Comment Disorder. Coming to the DSM 6 as soon as someone concocts a drug for it.

Review: The parable of the sower and the parable of the talents, by Octavia Butler.

I am writing this  on January 9 2020. 

The Parable books were written in 1993 and 1998, set to take place from 2024 to 2037, with an epilogue set in 2090. 

I remember the nineteen nineties as mostly a good time, with the Soviet Union freshly collapsed and the whole internet thing just starting. The world was opening up. Yes, we were worried about the eco system, but progress was being made. True, we did not live in a world that was 100% fair for all, but when had we ever? Things were moving in the right direction.

Octavia Butler was less optimistic and more far sighted.

The dystopia that she describes as the future of Southern California is not only terrifying, it is much too close to present reality for comfort.

Warning. Plot spoilers.

In 2024 young Lauren Olamina grows up in a walled community that started as a regular suburban cul de sac, guarded by adults with guns. 

Everyone grows what food they can. Extended families are crammed in together, two young married couples sharing a garage. Young generations have no hope for any improvement in the future.

Outside roam mobs of desperate homeless people, some honest but dispossessed, some hard core criminals and on scary drugs, all dangerous. Packs of feral dogs roam the hills. Police are both useless and corrupt. People inside cling to an illusion of normalcy. 

Some families opt for a life of corporate servitude in fortified company towns.

Lauren is the oldest daughter of a Baptist minister and half sister to four younger brothers. Her father is a tower of strength and a  community leader. Her stepmother used to be a teacher, and teaches the children of the community as well as she can without resources.

Lauren is an independent thinker. Her father’s faith cannot hold her. Instead her own thoughts lead her to create a belief system of her own: Earth Seed. 

A combination of humanism and New Age thinking, Lauren’s religion postulates that the Universe and God are one. There is no personal deity to whom prayers can be directed. All is God and there is no God, though she uses different terms.  God is change. God is both shaper and clay, in constant mutual interaction with the world. Man cannot live by bread alone. People need a purpose.

The purpose of humanity is to become Earth’s seed and go live among the stars. All her life Lauren works on  the Book of the Living,  poetic verses with a biblical cadence that form the basis of the liturgy of her new faith.

When Lauren is 15 her community is overrun and destroyed. She has known this day would eventually come. She takes to the hills with a 

‘Bug out bag’ and joins the stream of desperate people who are moving North, where life is supposed to be better.

The rest of book 1 describes Lauren’s adventures on the road. People are encountered and a community coalesces around the young but charismatic Lauren. The book ends with the group finding a place to call home. One of the members  just happens to own a secluded piece of land in Northern California. Hey, this is fiction.

The parable of the talents has a rather idyllic start. Life in the growing community of Acorn is tough, but so are the people.

In an interview Octavia Butler mentions how hard she found it to get her protagonist out of that  village because she herself liked it so much.

In the world outside trouble is brewing. The desperate times have thrown up a fascist Presidential candidate. Andrew Steele Jarrett  promises to bring back law and order, promote Christianity, and generally pretend it is the middle of the twentieth century, or even a bit earlier. His most fanatical followers burn witches. Wait till  the end to see his slogan.

Eventually Acorn is overrun by thugs who call themselves Jarrett’s crusaders. The young children, including Lauren’s baby, are taken away and mostly never seen again. The chapters following the takeover are a harrowing description of slavery enhanced by modern technology.

After 17 months of horror they do manage to regain freedom. 

The community is forced to scatter. Lauren takes to the road again.

She desperately tries to find her baby daughter.  Sadly, by the time the two meet mother is in her fifties and daughter in her thirties, and  the daughter is unable to form a relationship with her mother. Butler is a serious novelist, not a writer of Marvel Comics. Not  all is heroism and happy endings.

 However, all this time Lauren continues to preach Earth Seed, eventually succeeds and in old age lives to see the first starship lift off.

The description of possible near futures is so uncannily harrowing I could not put these books down. Are you ready for Jarrett’s slogan? 

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Reader, I felt my hair stand on end.

 

 

Thoughts on the Trans phenomenon

I  do not pretend to scientific understanding of  the many ways in which body and soul/mind  can be in harmony, or not. 

I get that biological sex does not have to overlap completely with gender, and there are many variations.

My personal working hypothesis is that a soul may be on its first stint of being one sex after a number of incarnations as 

the other. Of course this is not a scientific statement and I cannot prove it.

Meanwhile, if a small number of people say they feel one way while their external body says something else, I will gladly 

take their word for it.  No problem there.

As for the whole Nature/Nurture thing, I have never understood why that is presented as a conflict. 

Of course it is both, in different degrees for individuals depending on other factors.

Some aspects of identity are a social construct, but others are pretty hardwired. Stereotypes exist because they contain a kernel of truth. 

Individual qualities vary and groups will overlap, but that does not invalidate some broad truths. Sure, a strong woman can beat a weak man. Even so, taken as a group men are stronger.  Imagine for a moment.

Picture a world where all education and choice of profession is 100% gender neutral and childcare is shared equally.

Do  we really think  firefighters and kindergarten teachers would both be 50% male/female? 

Is it not more likely that say, 80% of firefighters would still be men, and  80% of child carers women? 

We may never know, but what would be so bad about that?

Anyway, on to the Trans issue. I am, quite frankly, baffled by the contradictory demands of this whole gender movement.

On the one hand, we are supposed to recognise an endlessly growing number of gender expressions. 

No problem. I am all for letting a thousand flowers bloom.

We will try even though  a plural pronoun with a singular verb  grates on my nerves.

I am grammatically sensitive. It hurts! Plus for just a second I keep looking for the other person. But, never mind that, we’ll be a good sport. 

It is true that some other cultures have done a better job  dealing with people who do not fit the male/female binary. 

However, calling the basic concept of male and female a “colonial construct” strikes me as silly. 

We are a sexually dimorphic species after all. Isn’t some form of labour division fairly universal?

On the other hand, anyone who does not chant the mantra that “trans women are women” is considered a trans phobe and a hater. How does that work? Is that insistence not enforcing the very binary that the gender diversity movement is railing against? I find that confusing.

I have said this before: I wish we could adapt vocabulary and attitudes instead of bodies.

Hormones and surgery are an insult to the body at any age and come with serious side effects.

I picture a six foot tall human being with big hands and feet, a visible Adam’s apple, a deep voice, wearing makeup and a gorgeous dress and introducing self as: “Hi, I am Joan. I am a BomaSofe."

Everyone would acknowledge Joan as Body Male, Soul Female, and treat her as a woman 90% of the time. To be varied as needed. 

In most circumstances Joan can just be one of the girls. But there are some situations where Joan has to acknowledge that no, she is not quite a biological woman. She should not compete in sports with athletes whose muscles have not benefitted from years of testosterone. She should recognise that her penis may trigger anxiety in a rape crisis shelter. The shelter  caters  to vulnerable women who have been traumatised by male sexual violence. Is insisting on a penis-free zone really the 

same as hating trans people? 

I was appalled by the baying mobs outside the Toronto library protesting a scheduled speech by  feminist Meghan Murphy. Murphy was accused of hate speech and of wanting to deny trans people the right to exist. She says nothing of the sort. She mainly wants some spaces reserved for regular biological women. I fail to see why that is hateful. 

Somehow the mob has no problem with this image. A fist with a blood stain and the words I punch TERFS.

That stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. It is used as a slur. Now that is hate. 

Then we have J.K. Rowling, accused of the heinous crime of being a trans phobe and 

inciting hate. 

Funny. Somehow the many statements by Rowling that she wishes trans individuals well,  “Live your best life” and so on don’t seem to count. She does not like the bullying ways of the activist crowd and she thinks that a trans woman is not quite the same as one born female. I agree. It seems to be common sense. If that is as bad as hate or fear go wouldn’t this be a great world? 

“Trans rights are human rights!” shout the activists.

Well, of  course. Did anyone, even actual TERFs, deny the humanity of Trans people? 

However, one can be recognised as fully human without being 100% male or female.

Is that not behind the push to recognise  umpty  genders?

The following happened..

Human being, with full human rights, transitions from female to male but does not

have bottom surgery. This human is now a gay man with a loving partner. So far so good.

Like many gay couples they would like a family. Those female bits came in  handy after all.

Trans partner  goes off hormones, loses beard, gets  pregnant, gives birth. 

This is possible because underneath it all this Human being was still a woman. Human with full rights etc.goes back on hormones, regrows beard, becomes gay guy again.

No problem! Three cheers, welcome to the world little baby.

But now I am told “Some men can have babies”. That is when  I call BOLLOCKS.

If that makes me a TERF so be it.

Trans-gressions and Kerfuffles on Facebook.

This is the prequel to a post on transgender issues. 

Plot spoiler: I do not think  J.K. Rowling is a -phobe or a hater.

I admit it, I spend too much time on Facebook. I love my simple solo life but have this compulsion to ‘live out loud’.  Somehow I also feel the need to form opinions on matters that do not directly affect me.  I call it Compulsive Comment Disorder, CCD, and suspect that it may come to a DSM one of these days. 

For myself, I have always been cheerfully female and sexually attracted to the opposite sex, exclusively. The idea of sex with a woman just does not appeal.  As Marian Engel put it: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh just can’t get interested.” Which is too bad. Communication is easier with women. I rather envy people who are bisexual. Otherwise live and let live, equal human rights for all, let a thousand ways of being bloom has always been my way.

Let me briefly establish rainbow friendly cred:

Back in 2011 I posted a picture of my offspring with straight son in a rainbow beard and sporting a tutu, with the caption that I was proud to have raised people who marched as supporters in the gay pride parade.  I was not able to attend the wedding of one of my favourite men to his husband, but I sent a present and made sure I was there in spirit by writing a speech. His  mom read it out during the ceremony and it brought tears to his eyes. 

When was the year people donned safety pins to indicate they were an ally to LBGT?

My winter coat sported one. 

Discomfort started creeping in after what one friend called The Great Kerfuffle on Facebook.  (I looked up the dialogue on my timeline.)

The Great Kerfuffle started with an innocent question. At least I thought it was innocent.

After listening to a CBC program on gender diversity I posted this: 

“Somewhere, someone was using the term LGBTQIA.  I get the idea, inclusive yada yada, diverse yadayada, but how long can this list get? Perhaps we could come up with some 

easier vocabulary? How about just plain Queer? Or non-binary?”

At the time I did not know that the terms Queer and non-binary were already in specific use in gender jargon.

The flak! The outrage! You’d think I had asked people to crawl back into the closet. 

This went on for days, with comment threads branching off comments. At the time I had not yet discovered  the Notifications feature on Facebook, which allows one to click straight to a new comment. I wasted several blue summer days scrolling through to see the new bits.

One of the first commenters said it was like saying Europe instead of Holland, which I thought an excellent analogy. So I replied  by saying that there are times for both, and it is handy to have an umbrella term. Sometimes one may want to say Europe, instead of having to list all the countries and then getting pounced upon for forgetting Kosovo. On the other hand, if one were  dealing with the  Kosovo embassy one would want to know the name of its capital.

It was not enough. Some people  I had never heard of, friends of friends, piped in with  their reason for being deeply offended by my lack of respect for their victimhood. 

It was my first experience of an online pile on. A small one as such things go, and thank goodness I have stayed off Twitter. 

But here is  what really got me: the private messages from people who said they agreed with me, but they did not want to say so openly because they did not feel like dealing with the fallout. That could lead to a whole other topic. 

I have been weary of the whole gender scene ever since.  

These days I am so fed up with the general over-correction that I am more like: “Oh rats, another rainbow.”