24AR29-37

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )

pdf = www.tinyurl.com/AR29-37

chimp = www.eepurl.com/i0LYOg

AR 29:37 - The trans vs. feminist battle in academia

In this issue:

GENDER - the confusing world of Judith Butler

PSYCHEDELICS - "the perfect substrate for psilocybin spirituality" ... isn't what you'd ever imagine

Apologia Report 29:37 (1,678)
October 1, 2024

GENDER

In "Phantasms & Fascists" ("Judith Butler's new book is both radical and superficial") by Tina Beattie in Commonweal (Aug 7 '24) -- one learns that UC Berkeley-based Butler is evidently "no longer a 'she' but a 'they,' now identifying as nonbinary. I shall respect that identity in what follows, though it negates an identifiably female lesbian voice. After reading their new book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, <www.tinyurl.com/exkzxn5c> I realize that I should have paid more attention to how radical they are in seeking to dissolve any significant distinction between sex and gender. Butler argues that these are historical and cultural constructs with no stable material significance. Sex is real but mutable. This has devastating implications for any attempt to defend the sex-based rights of women and girls. ...

   "The core of their argument is that a global 'anti-gender ideology movement' is fueled by the phantasm of gender, which has become the psychological repository of all our fears in a world threatened by spiralling economic, environmental, and political crises. Conservative political and religious leaders, whom Butler describes as fascist authoritarians, weaponize these anxieties by displacing the 'causes of destruction' onto gender so that it becomes 'a phantasm with destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics.' ...

   "Who's Afraid of Gender? is a rambling diatribe. Butler's observations.... are weakened by the book's superficiality and reflexively polemical tone. But the problem goes deeper, starting with the way the author talks about gender itself. ...

   "Butler fails to acknowledge that, whether we argue from biology or social conditioning, women and girls around the world are at risk from male violence and sexual domination. ...

   "Butler argues that, by insisting on the material reality of biological sex, gender-critical feminists have created an environment of 'bullying, censorship campaigns, and claims of hostile workplace environments,' while trying to 'shut down gender-studies programs and to associate scholars in the field of gender studies with scenes of abuse.'" Butler strives to "set the record straight."

   "[T]here are campaigns to have British gender-studies programs closed down, but none that I know of has been initiated by gender-critical feminists."

   Beattie (professor emerita, Catholic Studies, University of Roehampton in London) includes some terms for reference. "TERF" stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminists." (PWC: It has been applied derisively to none other than J.K. Rowling.) And "the term 'intersex' is widely rejected by persons with differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs), many of whom object to their appropriation by the purveyors of gender politics. That's why the 'I' is increasingly omitted from references to the LGBTQA+ movement. Butler seems oblivious to this development, despite their insistence that not using a person's own definition of who they are is tantamount to denying their existence.

   "Butler does not refer to growing concerns about the impact of puberty blockers on young people's physical and mental development or to the high risk of complications associated with sex-reassignment surgery. Butler ignores detrans people who sometimes express profound regret over irreversible changes to their bodies. ...

   "A recent report by Polaris Market Research predicts that profits from 'the global sex reassignment surgery market' will rise from $784.96 million in 2024 to $1.94 billion in 2032. <www.tinyurl.com/tr36czt8> Beneath the Orwellian newspeak of gender-affirming care, this report makes clear that the aggressive promotion of surgical transitioning among young people is a market opportunity for the corporate profiteers of Big Pharma and the health-care industry.

   "In a 1999 review in the New Republic, <www.tinyurl.com/ym7xcxs9> Martha Nussbaum wrote that Butler's 'obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.' ...

   "Butler's new book ... takes us through the looking glass to a world in which nothing is what it seems, with a methodology that owes more to Humpty Dumpty than to sociolinguistic theory: "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'"

   "Reviewing Who's Afraid of Gender?, <www.tinyurl.com/4wfd4ck5> [Kathleen] Stock rightly asks, 'What is Judith Butler afraid of?' Gender theorists can and must do better than this if we truly are 'searching for livable lives' in which all suffering counts, and not just the suffering of those who conform to the current LGBTQA+ zeitgeist." <www.tinyurl.com/2emas3x5>

   More on Butler in AR 29:23 <www.tinyurl.com/ye9bs4t4> and at City Journal ("Trans Factual" by Christopher F. Rufo, Apr 01 '24) <www.tinyurl.com/2fn6ycc8>

 ---

PSYCHEDELICS

"People Are Trying Magic Mushrooms for Depression - and Accidentally Meeting God" ("The medicalization movement is faltering. Maybe that's because psychedelics have been spiritual tools all along"), by Cassady Rosenblum -- "The first time Stephanie Brinkerhoff tried psilocybin, she was a Mormon mother of three and desperate for help. ...

   "In 2021, she swallowed her first dose of magic mushrooms with an alleged medicine woman she found on Retreat.Guru. 'I went in blind,' Brinkerhoff admits, expecting the mushrooms to iron out the kinks in her brain and nothing more.

   "Instead, Brinkerhoff says, she met God. ...

   "Within three months, Brinkerhoff had left the Church of Latter-day Saints, an organization she now describes as having committed 'soul theft' for robbing her of the intuition and sovereignty she credits the mushrooms with returning.

   "Yet despite leaving the church, her faith in a higher power has only grown. 

   "'It's kind of like we're God experiencing itself,' she says now. 

   "As psychedelics reenter mainstream, with psilocybin legalized for recreation in Colorado, and for therapeutic use in Oregon, millions of Americans are trying them for the first time, and some are walking away - quite by surprise - true believers. ...

   "[D]espite the fact that the very name - psychedelics - means 'soul revealing.' The alternative term that some prefer - entheogens - puts an even finer point on it: 'God within.' ...

   Timothy Leary (1920–1996), "who exhorted America's youth to 'drop out' and start their own religion ... reasoning that veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder would be safer poster children - this time around - than the born-again. 

   "Now, this idea that psychedelics are medical tools with spiritual properties, rather than spiritual tools with medical properties, is beginning to fray. On Aug. 9, the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD, citing insufficient data....

   "Yet at the exact moment medicalization is hitting its first snags, a spiritual wind is beginning to blow, offering a way forward that some say was more appropriate all along. In May, a new psychedelic church in Arizona, the Church of the Eagle and the Condor, became the third U.S. church to win the right to worship with ayahuasca (the other two are the Brazil-based Santo Daime Church, founded in 1930, and the Brazil-based União do Vegetal, founded in 1961). The settlement marks a historic shift in DEA policy, which, in the past, has tended to view Johnny-come-lately churches claiming drugs as their sacraments with an almost impenetrable degree of skepticism. ...

   "[S]lippery as they are, mystical experiences are on the rise. According to surveys from Gallup and Pew, 49 percent of Americans in 2009 reported having had a mystical experience, defined loosely as a 'moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.' By contrast, only 22 percent said they had in 1962. Jules Evans, a philosopher who writes about psychedelics, predicts that such experiences 'will become more common if and when psychedelics are legalized.' ...

   "In the last three years, hallucinogenic use, primarily of mushrooms, has nearly doubled among young adults. The nonpartisan RAND Corporation estimates that eight million Americans, or three percent of the population, used psilocybin last year, making magic mushrooms America's favorite hallucinogen - a fitting yen for an empire in decay.

   "Not all eight million of these consumers are touching the mystic shores, but if the scientific literature is any guide, a good portion are."

   Jeffrey Breau, a ketamine chaplaincy advisor at Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital in Boston, and a program lead for psychedelics and spirituality at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, <www.tinyurl.com/4em5hwtn> "sees psychedelic spirituality as a future - if not the future - of religion in this country. He points to the 'nones,' or people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or 'nothing in particular.' In 2006, nones were 16 percent of the U.S. population, but over the last two decades, according to Pew, they have nearly doubled to 28 percent, making them the largest single cohort nationally. ...

   "Already there is Ligare, a Christian psychedelic society in Savannah, Georgia, 'dedicated to making direct experience of the sacred available to all who desire it,' and Sacred Plant Alliance, a membership-based association of psychedelic churches with leaders who have a range of eight to 35 years of experience and congregations averaging 350 individual members. According to Sacred Plant Alliance president Allison Hoots, there are likely between 250 and 750 such churches nationally.

   "Breau is currently completing an ethnography of psychedelic spiritualities, including at Burning Man, and tells me that the majority of his sources are nones who were raised Christian. Many left the church because of their sexual identity, or because their childhood church didn't share their values, he says."

   Rosenblum discusses how "a vortex of contributing factors make Utah, which is still around 40 percent Mormon, the perfect substrate for psilocybin spirituality." Rolling Stone, Aug 18 '24 <www.archive.is/MzHL8>

POSTSCRIPT - Jan 3 '25: Also see the new TGC 2024 award-winner (new author category): Award of Distinction -- Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ (Lexham)

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )