When it comes to aspects of the current gender-swapping madness towards which I am most adamantly opposed, the spectacle of teen and twentyish born males putting on a dress, calling themselves Loretta and demanding to compete as a female athlete tops the list, because of the inherent unfairness of it. Human sexual dimorphism is a stone-cold reality: the mature male of our species tends to be taller, heavier, faster and more muscular than the female. Personally, the last time I was ever able to hold my own, physically, against my brother and his friends was at the age of twelve or thirteen – right before puberty set in. I will concede that there are outliers and variances; I am fairly sure that Ronda Rousey could smack the tar out of that skinny little twerp Dylan Mulvaney every day before breakfast and twice on Sunday.
Medicine
The Lie At the Heart
There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.
Will There Ever Be an Apology for Covid Overreaction?
In the light of this story, and this one as well, I am more than ever glad that my daughter and I said “no” to the Covid shot and follow-on boosters. Of course, I know that any new vaccine or drug can have a small number of unfortunate side effects but honestly, aren’t well-informed adults allowed these days to calculate the risks and make their own decision? Apparently not for many employees, who were ordered to get the Covid vaccine or be fired … and are now facing health problems that make Covid itself look like pretty small potatoes.
History Friday: The Infatigable Mother Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Bickerdyke, who really ought to be at least as well-known as Florence Nightingale for superhumanly heroic efforts on behalf of nursing wounded soldiers, was born in 1817 in Ohio to a family with the surname of Ball. At the time, Ohio was the just-over-the-mountains-western frontier. She was supposed to have been one of the first women to attend Oberlin College, but never graduated. The two post-Civil War biographies that I have read say that she was called home to attend family members during an epidemic. She is supposed to have studied herbal/botanical medicine which given the parlous state of medical education and practice in the United States at the time probably put her as being as effective a medic as most. She married Robert Bickerdyke and settled in Galesburg, Illinois, where she bore two sons and established a reputation for being a quietly formidable woman.
I Remember, I Remember
Some days ago, Buck T. at Ace of Spades HQ linked to this essay regarding the great Satanic Day Care Abuse Panic, and how elements of that exercise in public/law enforcement/media insanity duplicates many of the features of the current Trans-Kids! Eleventy!!! panic. Which it does, in some respects, especially in how the establishment news media elevated the panic …because that’s what the media do: Scare the ever-living-snot out of the reading/viewing public because that is what sells issues and page views. Once the panic-train gets going, every cynical exploiter of the panic wants to leap aboard the current trend.