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AR 26:33 - Destroying adolescent reproductive organs en masse
In this issue:
GENDER - "why 'gender dysphoria' has surged dramatically among adolescent girls"
HUMAN RIGHTS - "U.S. on Course to Become 'Digital Dictatorship'"
Apologia Report 26:33 (1,538)
August 18, 2021
GENDER
Writing in the Claremont Review of Books (Spr '21), Mary Eberstadt (Panula Chair, Catholic Information Center and senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute) reviews both The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society, by Debra Soh [1]; and Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier [2].
Eberstadt likens QAnon to the "craze" behind "one subset of transgenderism: so-called 'trans kids,' specifically, minor girls who want to be boys." Both are considered cults according to Eberstadt (who unhelpfully defines cult as simply "an all-encompassing belief system").
She summarizes Irreversible Damage as "the indispensable work on the question of why 'gender dysphoria' has surged dramatically among adolescent girls during the last few years." She also quotes Shrier as saying that "Before 2012 there was no scientific literature on ... gender dysphoria at all." Now teen-age "natal girls" are "the majority of patients identifying as 'transgender.' The statistics speak for themselves. In Britain, for example, the National Health Service reports ... a 25-fold increase in the last decade, mainly for girls 'transitioning' into boys.
"The question is why? - and the answer isn't always nature."
One outstanding reason is that "they were responding to a social contagion." As Debra Soh summarizes, in one study, for about 40 percent of adolescents, "more than half of their friend groups had also come out as transgender. This is more than seventy times the prevalence of transgender adults in the general population'....
"Another reason to focus on adolescent girls is humanitarian. What some teens are doing to themselves (or allowing to be done to them) in the name of becoming 'trans' is so masochistic as to jolt even the shock-proof: wearing breast binders whose side effects include breathing trouble and tissue destruction; taking puberty-blocking hormones that can destroy fertility; undergoing mastectomies that gouge out healthy breasts, and leave gruesome scars; attempting 'phalloplasties,' or the creation of appendages with flesh stripped from a girl's forearm, leading to more permanent scars; enduring hysterectomies of uteri that atrophy under the influence of testosterone....
"All of which brings us back to QAnon. If cults like QAnon are bad for the country, and bad for the people swept up in them, then the same must be true of other cults to which they bear family resemblance. That is the problem for the transgender phenomenon among children and teenagers. ...
"Both mythologies are protected and enforced by punitive reprisals, especially on social media. ...
"Thus, for example, an article on QAnon in the Atlantic in 2020 noted that many insiders would not speak with the reporter for fear of communal retaliation.
"Even so, policing by the trans enforcers is singularly fierce. ...
"A friend of mine was similarly mobbed several years later for stating on social media that only women could get pregnant. ...
"The commercial takedown of bestselling author J.K. Rowling, who dared to object to the notion that men belong in female spaces, became a cause célèbre. ...
"To QAnoners, enlightenment began with Q's electrifying first information drop ('bread crumb') in 2017. To the trans-kid craze, revelation arrived first with six-year-old YouTube star Jazz Jennings's 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters in 2007.... <www.bit.ly/3COeAT3>
"Within just a few years, deviation from its dogmas has become unthinkable for just about every liberal and progressive in the Western world - and for many others. Using the 'wrong' pronouns or 'dead-naming' (using a trans person's birth name) are now firing offenses. Educators have been ousted from their jobs. ...
"For QAnon - as for 'Pizza-gate' before it - the putatively endangered are children who are said to be trafficked by 'Deep State' cannibal-pedophiles. For trans believers, they are children and adolescents who want to 'transition,' and who (it is said) will kill themselves if thwarted. ... As the editors of the American Journal of Psychiatry put it in a correction <www.bit.ly/3yW8FJg> published in 2020, summarizing findings of the largest database yet on sex-reassignment procedures, 'the results demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care.'
"Trans-kid activists sacralize suicide and sadness to silence critics - especially parents....
"'Children will die' is the apotheosis of what psychologists call 'permission-granting behavior.' It licenses all interventions to stave off the supposed catastrophe and demonizes anyone who objects.
"This silencing is all the more dangerous precisely because of the elevated suicide risk among trans kids. ...
"Both [QAnon and trans-kid] cults harbor anti-empirical beliefs about human embodiment. ...
"Both cults are seized upon by emotionally vulnerable populations. ...
"Both cults have been fueled by familial disruption....
"[E]vidence from Irreversible Damage and The End of Gender suggests explanations for the trans craze among young girls, at least, that are more earthbound.
"The first is the use of testosterone," which is said to act as "a miracle drug" for some. ("...Imagine a substance that simultaneously carves away body fat from unwanted areas, that makes users feel stronger, that makes them literally stronger, and that induces a sense of confidence previously lacking.)
"A second answer to the question posed tacitly by Irreversible Damage and The End of Gender entails a glance at our civilization, and what it has become. Why, indeed, might record numbers of today's girls hate being girls?
"What finally unites online cult members is the unbearable heaviness of their beings - the alienation from friends and family....
"[T]he self-dealing authorities who stoke the trans-kid craze will answer for it - the corrupt doctors and politicos, the rubber-stamping 'gender theorists,' the online voyeurs, the merchants, including Planned Parenthood, who make a buck off this pathos.
"Meanwhile, fellow citizens can step up. If destroying the reproductive organs of healthy adolescents isn't objectionable, not much is." <www.bit.ly/3xoKa5G>
Also see "Gender Ideology Run Amok" by Shrier in Imprimis (Jun/Jul ‘21, Hillsdale College) <www.bit.ly/2VTNJDU>
For more on gender dysphoria from past issues of AR, see <www.bit.ly/3jrdFPi>
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HUMAN RIGHTS
If you think vaccine passports are a bad idea, you ain't seen nothin' yet. In "U.S. on Course to Become 'Digital Dictatorship'" (The Defender, Jul 26 '21) Whitney Webb reports: "The Biden administration is calling for a 'new biomedical research agency' [which is] set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA [and] modeled after the U.S. military's 'high-risk, high-reward' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ...
"ARPA-H is not a new and exclusive Biden administration idea - there was a previous attempt to create a 'health DARPA' during the Trump administration in late 2019. Biden began to promote the idea during his presidential campaign as early as June 2019, albeit using a very different justification for the agency than what had been pitched by its advocates to Trump."
Webb warns that "ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the 'breakthroughs' that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that 'cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech' post-COVID. ...
"As first proposed by [former NBCUniversal president Robert] Wright in 2019, the flagship program of HARPA would be SAFE HOME, short for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes. [Health] data would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms 'for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence.' ...
"Soon after Biden's inauguration, the new administration began using information from social media to make pre-crime arrests as part of its approach toward combating 'domestic terror.' ...
"During the COVID-19 crisis, this trend toward Silicon Valley dominance of the health-care sector has accelerated considerably due to a top-down push toward digitalization with telemedicine, remote monitoring and the like. ...
In September 2021, "Google teamed up with the Department of Defense as part of a new AI-driven 'predictive health' program that also has links to the U.S. intelligence community. ...
"As noted by Unlimited Hangout <unlimitedhangout.com> at the time, one of the ulterior motives for the program, from Google's perspective, was for Google to gain access to 'the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,' which is held by the Defense Health Agency. ...
"The military is currently being used to pilot COVID-19-related biometric wearables....
"[T]hese wearables are primarily intended for mass use -- a big step toward the infrastructure needed for the resurrection of a biosurveillance program to be run by the national-security state. ...
"BioIntelliSense <biointellisense.com>, cofounded and led by former Microsoft HealthVault developer James Mault, now has its wearable sensors being rolled out for widespread use on some college campuses and at some U.S. hospitals. ...
"While the use of these wearables is currently 'encouraged but optional' at these pilot locations ... several countries have already required foreign arrivals to be monitored through use of a wearable during a mandatory quarantine period."
In Singapore, "which seeks to be among the first 'smart nations' in the world.... the wearable token or the TraceTogether <tracetogether.gov.sg> smartphone app is mandatory for all workplaces, shopping malls, hotels, schools, health care facilities, grocery stores and hair salons. ...
"John Hancock and other insurers such as Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare offered various rewards for policyholders who wore a fitness wearable and shared that data with their insurance company. ...
"ARPA-H/HARPA's flagship SAFE HOME program reveals that the ability to monitor thoughts and feelings is an already existing goal....
"As recently reported, Facebook was shaped in its early days to be a private-sector replacement for DARPA's controversial LifeLog program, which sought to both 'humanize' AI and build profiles on domestic dissidents and terror suspects."
In 2017 Bill Gates "publicly urged the U.S. military to 'focus more training on preparing to fight a global pandemic or bioterror attack.' ...
Instead of only "losing our civil liberties and control over our external lives, we stand to lose sovereignty over our individual bodies. ...
"The third Obama-era health research project was the NIH's BRAIN initiative, which was launched, among other things, to 'develop tools to record, mark and manipulate precisely defined neurons in the living brain....'
"Biden's newly announced agency, if approved by Congress, would integrate those past Obama-era initiatives with Orwellian applications under one roof, but with even less oversight than before. It would also seek to expand and mainstream the uses of these technologies and potentially move toward developing policies that would mandate their use." <www.bit.ly/3A5qTrM>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society, by Debra Soh (Threshold, 2021, paperback, 336 pages)
Note: Threshold Editions has compiled an impressive conservative title list. <www.bit.ly/3jf0cKq> And while they could pile on lots of endorsements here, only one is provided (by Barnes & Noble): "[Soh's] new book ... lays out with exceptional care not just why we have got into the current impasse, but how we might get out of it." - Douglas Murray, The London Times"
2 - Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Shrier (Regnery, 2021, paperback, 276 pages) <www.bit.ly/37ibZC8>
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