#Genuine Orthodoxy

[kaurwreck]

we all need to get a little more eastern orthodox about fyodor.

[big-bird-nerd]

I know people have grown immune to the notions of “both sides-ism,” which is the proper move when you’re dealing with politics and history that you have direct experience with, are directly affected by, and know the history of. I think what people don’t realize is that the bourgeoisie will and does weaponize this to promote belief in racist myths, using it as a method to make people resistant to or outright immune to actually studying the conditions and history of the place they are trying to make you hate. I really think people would do well to understand why and how the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion functioned well as propaganda despite being complete and total bullshit, and yes it’s because people wouldn’t listen to Jewish people who told you it was bullshit because it played on very real hatred of Jewish people and of fears born of violence and oppression people faced in their everyday lives (which was not from Jewish people, but the bullshit protocols tell you otherwise).

Like, if someone is making a massive claim about something occurring in another place, particularly if it’s weirdly familiar to things happening where you’re living, and there is a large amount of people *from within the groups being talked about* who deny the claims, you should probably at least be ambivalent, if not use that as a sign for further research.

“But information from the other side is biased!” It is good to be aware of biased information. Understand that there is no unbiased information; the information you know is also biased info. It requires research of multiple perspectives to determine the truth from biased sources. The best way to determine degrees of truth within biased sources is to study the histories of the locations and relations between the cultures in question.

“Information from the other side is propaganda!” It is good that you’ve grown aware to the basic functioning of propaganda and are staying aware of how information manipulated you. Keep in mind; people said the same thing about Jews denying the Elders Of The Protocols Of Zion, a document that any sensible modern person knows was bullshit. If you’re afraid of being manipulated through misinformation, then read critically, but do not deny something just because it’s inconvenient to your current understanding of social oppression, one that is itself still biased. Also understand that since all information is biased, any political information is necessarily propaganda, which includes the sources of whatever has given you your current information; you should be reading that critcally too to avoid being manipulated. In fact, you’re vastly more susceptible to propaganda from home since the propaganda is actively targeting you, as propaganda tends to focus largely if not entirely within the confines of the country the government operates; nobody gives a shit how Americans feel about their country insofar as Americans aren’t actively calling to blow them up.

“Oppression isn’t unique to America/the west, and we must stand with all people who are oppressed!” This is correct information; oppression has a history across the entirety of the world. However, what it’s missing is an understanding of the meaning behind the fact that oppression is systemic and how this relates to being part of a colonial, imperial country. While your energy is not wrong on an individual level, the fact that it doesn’t account for your own racist colonial government makes it misguided in a way that supports the racist colonial system where you live. Racist misinformation and myths are used to manufacture consent for colonial and imperial violence upon another nation. That means uncritically spreading and believing such information promotes the colonial and imperial characteristics of your government.

To stop dancing around the biggest example of this; while you may have only the best of intentions for people in North Korea, the fact is that misinformation that makes people afraid and hateful of the DPRK, yes even its government, exists to justify the imperial history and ongoing actions that your governments take part in. They aren’t interested in saving the people of Korea any more than they were when they were “spreading Christianity to the natives to save their souls.” Their interest is in stealing the trillions of dollars worth of minerals in the DPRK, which necessarily means massacring the people who currently live and work there and devastating the landscape in potentially irreparable ways. This is already well proven from how the Korean War went, with some villages completely and totally destroyed by US bombing, as well as the use of biological warfare, which has had long term consequences on Korea as a whole and beyond; the US doesn’t care because protecting the people isn’t on their agenda, they just want the minerals.

Discussing the nature of misinformation is not overlooking or erasing the existence of oppression and bigotry in other countries any more than acknowledging The Elders Of The Protocols Of Zion is complete and total misinformation is denying the existence of Jewish bourgeoisie (a minority but still technically existing) or denying the imperial colonial violence enacted by the Israeli government on Palestine. People did not spread the Protocols because they predicted the current state of Israel and wanted to stop it, they wanted an excuse for perfoming and enacting pogroms on Jewish people, up to and including Shoah.

To use a more historic example, there was a lot of oppression and systemic violence in the Aztec Empire. According to surviving reports, it was an expansionist slave empire, not exactly the best of places to live. However, you see I said ‘surviving.’ The remaining accounts are largely Spanish colonial accounts, as the Spanish completely destroyed the empire, massacred the peoples across South America, assimilating and genociding peoples wherever they went. Even if all accounts of the horrors of the Aztecs were completely and totally true (which is rather doubtful but I’m not an expert), it does not mean the information was learned and spread because the Spanish wanted to save the Aztecs. It is an excuse for the genocide was enacted upon people. People back in Spain probably had good intentions when they talked about improving the life conditions of people in Spain. Improvement to life conditions did not occur; life was destroyed and people were enslaved to a genocidal power, and to this day are still fighting back strongly against the systems of oppression that continue trying to kill everyone off. Even if the entirety of the Spanish colonizers said they only hated the Aztec government, it doesn’t mean the violence they perpetrated did not primarily target the civilians and even the oppressed groups and slaves.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie, I’m not going to be acting on it and I don’t support the state anyway.” People do not make up lies about a hated national group with good intentions in their heart, and the existence of such lies should immediately alert you to violent intent, and spreading those lies must be understood as supporting those violent intentions and actions. This is what it means for racism to be systemic; your individuals beliefs and intentions don’t matter if your actions allow for the systemic oppression and violence towards these groups.

Western governments, and particularly the US, represent the most powerful global imperial force. They do and will continue to use misinformation to manipulate people into submitting to its systems of violence that seeks to oppress not just people in its own borders, but those in other borders too. You don’t have to like the governments of other countries, feel free to dislike the governments of China, Russia, DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, or whatever. If you are truly anti-racist though, you must not spread racist misinformation, even if to you it only would be harmful to the governments of those cultural groups; the government doesn’t lie to criticize the governments of other nations, but to push towards war to crush, rob, rape, and murder the people who live in their borders. Being anti-racist must necessarily mean not spreading these lies and even better, not allowing those you know to believe and spread such lies, for the good of the oppressed people in your own country as much as around the world. After all, misinformation spreads and creates hatred, and the people living within your own borders will enact that hatred on the people in your country, even if you won’t.

[itsawritblr]

Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

[orthopunkfox]

Being queer and a Christian is often very difficult. I experience alienation from both sides. Often these two parts of myself feel impossible to reconcile. But, I want to share something beautiful that my priest does that nearly makes me weep every time. The Orthodox Church is not known for its inclusivity or progressiveness. It is ancient and its gears turn slowly. During Holy Communion, those who are not confirmed members of the Church may come forward for a blessing. The blessing is done by gender.

"The servant of God [Name] is blessed..." for men,

"The handmaid of God [Name] is blessed..." for women.

The first time I went up for a blessing, I was hesitant. My gender is no secret and I do not try to hide my queerness. Which blessing would I receive? With sadness, I concluded the priest would do what was simplest and default to my assigned gender.

I stood before him and bowed my head, arms crossed over my (noticeably growing) chest. He raised the golden chalice over my head and lovingly said:

"The beloved of God Quinn is blessed, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen "

He has done this ever since and with this simple action, preaches one of the main, if oft forgotten pillars of Orthodoxy: It does not matter who you are, what pronouns you use, what colour your hair is, what clothes you wear, what mistakes you've made, what trials you have overcome, where you came from or where you are. You are beloved of God just as you are. You are created in the Image of God and are a sacred vessel of beauty, and there is a place for you here.

This is true inclusivity. Not the white liberal veneer placed on so many churches where the cishet, boomer congregation pats themselves on the back for the rainbow flag outside while actively misgendering the trans person sitting in the pew. My priest has not given any big speeches talking about how everyone is loved here. He doesn't have to. His genuine kindness and that of my fellow parishioners are the only sermon marginalised people need to hear. In these moments, the two parts of myself become one and I truly believe that the God I love delights in me.

[keow]

I know the theological explanation behind only men being priests. I just wonder why God designed the Church hierarchy to exclude women so efficiently unless He intended for women to be subservient to the teachings and guidance of men (who often preach that women obey their husbands and be good little wives at home rather than leading anything other than her children).

Surely there should have been a way for our all-knowing Creator to figure out how to give women an important role in Mass/the Church hierarchy that allows our voices to actually be heard, since we’re apparently equal in His eyes.

And yet there isn’t a real role for us. We aren’t heard and our thoughts have been considered illegitimate and irrelevant throughout Church history. But hey, at least the amount of women working in the Vatican has increased from 19.2% to 23.4% in the past decade. Maybe one day we’ll make it to 50%?

I love God but then I look at what is supposed to be a beacon of His Divine Truth, a safe haven away from the erring of the rest of the world, and find it incredibly discrediting. I would have intervened personally if I saw my Church was so full of terrible people who have apparently misinterpreted my message so badly.

Struggling with my faith because if the doctrines of the Church are true then that means God wants to condemn women to either a lifetime of suffering or an eternity of suffering if they go against it. Like tradcaths want to create a society where women are abused much more and men always get away with it. “That’s not what we believe! Abuse is bad!” But that type of society will always breed abuse because women won’t have the same freedoms and rights as men and those men will abuse that power. It happens in every “traditional”/conservative society even today.

So if that’s what God wants then that’s not a god I can believe in because that’s a god who delights in cruelty

[cosmic-metanoia]

Femininity Concepts in FFXVI

***Spoilers for Final Fantasy XVI***

Well, here I am again, now focusing on the female characters.

Like I did in the previous post, I will focus on the female Dominants first then highlight some secondary characters that really stood out.

*Jill - Come on, we gotta start with our beloved gal. She demonstrates this silent but strong (and even fearsome) spirit. She's very supportive of Clive but is not afraid to voice her opinions. She possesses a natural elegance and grace but demonstrates her fierce capabilities on the battlefield. She has a knack for negotiation and relating to others. We really see her unveil her dark side when she confronts her past head on in the Iron Kingdom. What's fantastic is that she asked for Clive's support and understanding but made it clear that she would be the one to face off against the Crystalline Orthodoxy's head priest (his name escapes me). Jill may not always make background commentary but her words are carefully selected and measured.

*Benedikta - She is your classic femme fatale that plays with men to further advance her position. Yet the one who she is in a love/hate relationship with is the one she can't have. She is ferocious yet what makes her different is that she contains this hidden sorrow and just wants to be genuinely loved. The way she frantically panicked when she lost her Eikon honestly brought tears to my eyes. She ended up with the wrong crowd and played this game of political chess in a room full of powerful men yet she instantly realized how useless she was to them in that moment of losing her most valuable piece.

*Side note: Let's hope that Leviathan the Lost is another female Eikon when the DLC hits in the next few months!! <3

*Jote - Okay, this awesome woman is HIGHLY underrated! She is incredibly enigmatic and we learn so much about her from the thoughts of other characters but never from her own lips! Initially players may brush her off as some unimportant maid servant but we see that she is so much more - a shield, a formidable fighter (though never witnessed!), a healer, a scout, etc. She's basically doing the jobs of Tarja, Clive, and Gav wrapped up in one! Yet her eyes give away her feelings towards Joshua and especially when she frets over his health. Yes, she longs for him but what makes it unique is that she loves him for who he is, not for what benefits his Eikon brings to the Undying that worships him.

*Mid - A freakin' prodigy. I mean, she is the head of the hideaway engineers! An occupation that is stereotypically masculine. She is 100% focused on her tasks and is not your typical 16 year old gal for sure. Her genius inventions, zest for life, and fast-talking mannerisms has all of the hideaway family wrapped around her finger (true, also because she is Cid's daughter). That whole scene with Joshua kneeling to kiss her hand upon meeting her cracked me up - she's the last woman who requires a chivalrous display but what I love is how she laughed and pulled him up and gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

*Charon - What can I say, this woman does not take s--- from ANYONE. She's even intimidating to some of the men at the hideaway which is absolutely hilarious. She is a hardened woman that commands respect but has her softer side which takes time to reveal. Money is on her mind but eventually she learns that there should be more to life - using her abilities as a cunning merchant to help a cause greater than herself.

*Tarja - Like Charon, she also does not accept any B.S. and takes her job as the non-magical physicker very seriously. What's great is that she isn't a nurse but the actual (and only) doctor of the hideaway. Her extensive knowledge is incredibly valuable and the hideaway would definitely not have survived without her.

*Vivian - A woman held in high-esteem who is so focused on the garnering of knowledge that she even gets targeted by assassins. Her intelligence certainly tips the scales in favor of the Cursebreakers to gain the upper hand.

*Anabella - I have a huge post written about her but I figure it's worth mentioning a particular aspect. She possesses quite the evil ambitions and is able to persuade not just the theocratic Sanbrequois emperor but powerful men from other nations - NOT just through her looks but through her conniving strategies. She longs for a powerful legacy forged by the greatest possible noble blood and even views herself as the prized breeding cow.

Some other examples of different aspects of female characters include: Eloise who is an astute businesswoman who conducted deals and contracts while her brother Theodore (sob) became her trusted porter; Martha who is the tough protector of Martha's Rest - the Rosarians put their trust and faith in her; the same with the Northreach residents when it came to Isabelle. What's great about her is that she is a courtesan but we see her blossom into a strong and trustworthy leader that many held in high esteem.

Even the stoic Dorys is the commander of a Cursebreakers squad.

I love how the story had female characters each with their own drives and ambitions whether they were motivated by a just cause or for evil reasons.

[transmutationisms]

I also don’t like maintenance phase and share all of your issues with michael hobbes but i’m confused by your saying that they peddle the obesogenic environment theory bc in the episodes i’ve listened to they specifically critique multiple elements of that theory that are laid out in the article u linked? like they talk at length about why they have no interest in policing individuals’ choices and how the “obesity epidemic” is totally socially constructed. i do get annoyed by how self congratulatory they are about their research though and imo they’re severely missing a racial critique in all their episodes

i have not listened to this podcast since my wet hot orthorexic summer & maybe they have changed their tune but i think they talk out both sides of their mouths because they absolutely do perpetuate the idea that fatness is caused by lack of access to 'healthy' foods, uncritically cite ppl like marion nestle, and try to critique ppl like michael pollan or alice waters solely on the grounds that their analyses lack calls for gov't regulation of 'fast food' / 'junk food'. these ARE the 'obesogenic environment' hypothesis, it's just gordon and hobbs are plugged in enough to superficially telegraph dissension, which makes it very annoying when it becomes clear they lack any actual alternative understanding of weight science, eg the actual relationship between metabolic syndrome & weight gain or the role of restrictive eating in contributing to the subjective lack of control many ppl report wrt 'hyperpalatable foods'. they have no genuine anticapitalist principles and little willingness to critique nutrition-sci orthodoxy, partly because as previously mentioned, they do no actual research and are consequently unable to push any of their ideas beyond what's already on the first 4 pages of google search results. but anyway i absolutely agree they are also sorely lacking any serious analysis of race.

[insertsyscoursehere]

So um… I don’t see enough people talking about Sophie’s older claim that the Abrahamic God (specifically the Christian version) is a system.

Look, I get it, the whole three people are one person thing? Yes, I get how on the surface that is absolutely a plurality staple. But that’s like… a piss baby understanding of the Trinity.

First of all, not all Christians accept the Trinity in the first place, so if Sophie says the Christian God is a system I’d be asking “which version of the Christian God”.

Certainly not the version of God from the Latter Day Saints, because they believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three distinct beings that are united in purpose known as “the Godhead”. And I’m sorry, despite what everyone says, they consider themselves a Christian creed, even if they are not a sect or denomination but a whole different religious group.

Certainly not the version of God observed by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who reject any divine claim of Christ and believe the Holy Spirit is an extension of God rather than any personified entity.

Certainly not Orthodoxy, which does not say that the Spirit proceeds from the Son.

Certainly not Christian Scientists, or Oneness Pentecostals, or La Luz del Mundo Christians, or Unitarian Universalist Christians (in some cases). None of these have Trinitarian beliefs and they’re all Christian.

But sure, tell me how it is that it’s fine to throw a blanket statement over all of the different flavors of Christianity like they’re all the same.

Maybe a non-religious person with no experience outside of American Christendom should NOT be speaking about religious topics.

If you wanna headcanon that for yourself, feel free to remember that you’re making a headcanon on someone else’s firmly and sincerely held beliefs like it’s an AO3 fic.

God, are you fucking 5? You act like you know better than experts and people who live through those experiences. Making a statement like that only serves to do two things: attract religious people who agree with you, and piss off religious people who don’t.

It’s not about research, it’s not about any sort of cultural delicacy, it’s not about genuine curiosity, it’s about numbers for your army of little keyboard goblins.

And you do the same to other religious groups, so I guess you’re an equal-opportunity employer of callous gestures. What gives you the right to discuss religion like that when you claim none and have no insight into the lives of the pious?

Elementary understanding of the Trinity, get that shit outta my sight.

—Jackalope and Proteus

[gemsofgreece]

Orthodox churches are a beauty! Catholic ones are very elegant and aesthetically gorgeous, but there's something about how Full Of Stuff Orthodox churches are that really gets me... maybe it's the maximalism :)

Hahaha yeah I get it... Like I also said in the previous Anon, specifically Greek Orthodox churches can be either very maximalist or very very humble. I believe it's more or less similar in the other Orthodox countries albeit with a few deviations, i.e Russian Churches are definitely more frequently maximalist than the Greek ones.

Here are five extra Greek churches & monasteries for example:

Churches in Patras, Athens, Meteora, Syros and Thessaloniki respectively.

On the other hand Greek religious architecture is also known about it's minimalism / simplicity or humbleness. It can be both, or minimalist without being humble, or humble without being minimal. Most of these are notable for the locations they are built on. IMO this is a genuinely significant part of Greek orthodoxy, and culture, by extension.

Five more examples:

Same monastery in Paros, exterior and interior.

Roofless church in Limnos, the rock funtions as a natural roof.

Monastery on a cliff in Amorgos. It is tall and long but has maximum 5 meter width.

The church in the Cave of Davelis in Attica and its interior. (Fun fact: they say it is haunted and there is an old female mummy in the Criminal Museum of Athens which according to rumours was found there).

Sifnos.

[christmasintheloonybin]

it is funny how the trend among disaffected alienated losers in their late teens early 20s has shifted from neo-nazi stuff to religion. Islam a little bit, but mostly catholicism and orthodoxy. it's really odd. but its a lot like the communists or whatever the hell is going on these days with the left, I'm not so tuned into that side of things. I mean there are almost no people who have genuine political beliefs and want to organize and improve society, they're all just angry losers lashing out at the world. and the saddest thing is they're not even internally motivated, trying to find the edgiest ideology, going to the library to read Mein Kampf or Kapital. they're really victims, they're just online and this shit gets shoved in their face and repeated through algorithms.

[paula-of-christ]

Hottake for my Catholic circle: I don't think everything wrong in the world is because of the Novus Ordo. Sure, certain things in the Mass are a problem because of it, but I remember someone saying on here one time that if the Church (body of christ) was so "traditional" before Vatican II council, why were they leaving the Church and those who remained trying to change it? Obviously not everyone did try changing it, but clearly the people who weren't were in the minority.

Like, c'mon guys, scripture tells us over and over again it's going to get worse. Schism with orthodoxy, schism into protestantism, schism with traditionalists. This is the same old song and dance over and over and over. It isn't the doing of any one human person. It's just the devil trying to divide God's Holy One's.

It is both more and less deep than everyone tries to say it is. Because this isn't natural, this is genuine supernatural disturbances. And that's why we ought to pray, that Satan be bound to the foot of the Cross. That all the evil spirits be cast back to hell. Invoke the names of the Holy Men and Women that we might win the race ourselves.

[mariacallous]

Writing for the Bulwark the other day Cathy Young asked a brilliant question: what on earth happened to the Intellectual Dark Web and its critique of the left?  

Go back to the 2010s, and all kinds of people, myself included, were wondering why leftists allied with the most fascistic versions of Islam, and why there was such screaming intolerance in liberal institutions.  All of a sudden we were told to accept that white people were inherently racist and that men could become women –  just by saying they were.

If you moved in​ leftish circles and refused to clap your hands and cheer the new orthodoxy, your career was over.

In theory the response ought to have been a liberal defence of democratic freedoms. And from many it was. 

But the “Intellectual Dark Web” - the melodramatic name came from a New York Times  piece from 2018 – was something else. It consisted of online celebrities opposed to progressive orthodoxy, who revelled in the joy of shocking the liberal bourgeoisie. 

The full list of its members ran: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Greenwald, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Claire Lehmann, Bill Maher, Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Camille Paglia, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers, Bret Weinstein, and Eric Weinstein.

As you can see, it was a journalistic concoction, which did not hang together well. Genuine liberals, such as  Steven Pinker and Sam Harris were yanked together with reactionaries like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.  

Meanwhile the self-aggrandising willingness of many of them to announce that they were  “heretics” and “dissidents” was ridiculous. No one is a true heretic, unless they are persecuted. And dissident is an honourable title you cannot in good conscience bestow on yourself – not that that ever stopped anyone.

But once the caveats had been made, you could say that these were people who were willing to attack progressive orthodoxies as they turned oppressive, and in 2018 had a kind of radical glamour.

All gone. Utterly gone. Many of those acclaimed in 2018 have become what they despised – or purported to despise. They are on the side of the enemies of liberty now. They threaten basic democratic freedoms. The alt right has turned out to be the far right, as perhaps it was always going to.

If you are looking for an immediate cause it is clear that Trump has done for them. When the crunch came far too many supposedly intelligent conservatives bent the knee and tugged the forelock, and engaged in an intellectual justification of dictatorial power.

In the process they showed that there are two ways of dealing with left authoritarianism. You can defend the values of liberal democracy, and ally with the many on the left who agree with you. 

Did the conservative members of the Intellectual Dark Web do that?

Did they hell. 

They produced arguments for tyranny, which the conspiratorial atmosphere of the alt right positively encouraged. In the process, they showed how a critique of the left can end up justifying the authoritarianism of the right.

If you paint the globalist elite as all powerful. If you maintain that progressives have the means to indoctrinate the young  through their control of the universities, schools and the mainstream media. If you further posit that they are guaranteeing their power by importing immigrants they know will vote for their centre-left parties, then a dictatorship is a justifiable response to such supernaturally powerful enemies.

Indeed, such is their supposed power​ of the "woke mind virus,​" overturning free elections is the only plausible response to a rigged system. 

If everything from immigration policy to the schools is a con played by progressive elites to ensure their control of society,  there is no other option available to the right. The 20th far right century used the justification that they were saving their countries from the communist menace. The woke menace serves the same purpose today.

I remember being interviewed by one member of the New York Times list, a media entrepreneur called Dave Rubin.

He could not get enough criticisms of the left. And indeed there was much to criticise. However, I pointed out that, if he was a serious man, he must be as willing to criticise the right. He assured the viewers he would.

Now he thinks there are “plenty of good arguments to make for voting for Trump,” even if he’s prone to “lying about everything.” 

How brave. How very, very brave.

Cathy Young records how principled people have walked away in disgust. Claire Lehman, the editor of the genuinely challenging online magazine Quilette, said that she had started out believing that the US liberals' claims that Trump threatened democracy were deranged. 

She assumed that warnings about Trump refusing to accept defeat  in the 2020 presidential election were also “hysterical nonsense”—until it actually happened. The invasion of Ukraine and the willingness of the US right to work for Putin were further blows to her conservative assumptions.

“It really made me reassess my priors,” says Lehmann. “I realized that I had had a blind spot on those two huge issues. So I updated my beliefs.” 

Others preferred to adjust the facts to fit their priors—or, Lehmann suspects, pretended to do so “because they don’t want to lose the audiences they built.”

Just so. Sam Harris added a second justification for intellectual cowardice  when he said that he was disassociating himself from the IDW label because of  other IDW figures’ embrace of Trump’s election-fraud claims. Some of  his former allies were “sounding fairly bonkers,” he concluded.

Indeed they were. But they had to. If they were not bonkers to begin with they had to learn to give a decent impression of bonkerdom, if they wanted to appeal to their audience. 

Jordan Peterson, a thinker who once had a few good arguments to make, now claims that covid vaccines caused more deaths than the “so-called pandemic,” and declares his lack of faith in every other vaccine for good measure. The podcast king Joe Rogan broadcasts vaccine conspiracism. As does a figure British readers may remember, ​​Maajid Nawaz, who was once a liberal Muslim who fought extremism and  now needs avoiding when the moon is full.

There’s a booming market for covid conspiracism in the US and beyond, and it pays to keep the customers satisfied. But, and perhaps I am being naive here, I do not believe cynics can do it. Like so many ideologues the alt-right ​must believe their paranoid fantasies as they tell them and  allow the mask to eat into the ​face  ​They cannot just pretend. ​They must believe. 

Young writes

“It may be that, because of the dynamics in today’s intellectual and political marketplace, any commentator, media outlet, or group that opposes the illiberal left but doesn’t explicitly oppose far-right Trumpian populism is in danger of being co-opted by it.”

And not only in the US. The next British general election will almost certainly take place near the date of the US presidential election. We have already had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss  announce their support for Trump, even though he is hugely unpopular in this country, and is a clear threat to Nato.  It would be politically mad for Conservatives to tie themselves to Trump in  an election campaign. And yet leading figures will do it for the same reason alt right in the US right do it.

First, they want the money. In the case of British politicians and journalists, the money American conservative lecture circuit provides. Second, they have talked themselves into a position where progressives are an enemy so dangerous that any measures are justified to bring about their defeat – including supporting a threat to the American republic and Western security. 

As someone who shared the critiques of at least some members of the intellectual dark web in the 2010s, I can make a fair prediction about what will happen next.

Whenever I wrote criticisms of the left, colleagues would say that the right would welcome and exploit all my arguments, and that was true. As someone once said, I think it was me, “the left looks for traitors and the right looks for converts”.  But, so what? A good argument must be made regardless of the consequences.

But then they made a further point. You should never listen to conservatives when they said they believe in freedom of speech, democracy and human rights. All they are concerned with is sectarian advantage.

It has been the historic achievement of the Intellectual Dark Web to prove that the sneering leftists were right all along.

[gayleviticus]

i finished reading damascus by christos tsiolkias (his novel about the apostle paul and early christianity) and was very pleasantly surprised by how it manages to be such a nuanced and complex look at such a controversial figure without descending into the saccharine preachiness of Christian fiction (and in fact, being written by someone who is not a Christian and also filled with enough shits, fucks, cunts, and reference to arse-fucking to instantly kill the average Christian fiction writer)

he manages to balance contrasts very effectively; a cruel, profane world of crucifixion and rape with a genuinely subversive religion of love and solidarity; a Paul flowing with genuine kindness and faith but also struggles with streaks of pride and jealousy.

but what impresses me most of all is the way the novel holds both Paul's apocalyptic gospel of resurrection in a world to come and its radical rejection of the injustice of this world with Thomas' naturalistic gospel that the kingdom has come and is among us already in Jesus' teaching. especially the way Tsiolkias acknowledges that even as Paul's gospel sits awkwardly with our modern scepticism it has heirs in any revolutionary tradition that wishes to change the world; it is this gospel that stands in condemnation of the systems of the world as they stand, and that spread the teachings of Jesus to the entire world (notably Damascus takes the interpretation that none of the other apostles bar Paul would fellowship with Gentiles). it would have been very easy to tap into the zeitgeist of scepticism and write a novel where Paul is a charlatan or crazy fundamentalist, and the gospel of Thomas marginalised and ignored as heretical and Gnostic is rather the true faith buried by orthodoxy. Paul is a very acceptable scapegoat to bash; if we can blame all the uncomfortable bits of the Bible on him (or the bloodthirsty and primitive Old Testament) we can maintain an unsullied image of pure Christianity. [and i don't mean to say this is entirely unjustified, especially given the way evangelicalism in particular loves to deploy isolated verses rather than entire texts! When your primary mode of engagement with him is not actually reading his epistles as works of literature, but throwing Romans 1.27 at gay people to convince them to stop being gay 100 times, that is naturally going to deeply warp your perspective of how much of his corpus is actually problematic (which, imo, when we account for 1) cultural norms re homosexuality and pederasty 2) the fact about 3-6 'Pauline' epistles were probably not written by him and 3) some verses possibly being interpolations, is really not that much).] But such a novel purporting to expose Paul as a fundamentalist charlatan would be just as didactic and simplistic as pious Christian fiction where Paul can do no wrong and harbour no doubts and is a direct mouthpiece for 21st-century evangelical doctrine. And so I very much appreciate the thought and empathy Tsolkias puts into this novel to understand Paul, rather than taking a few soundbites as an excuse to dismiss the man entirely. His Paul is flawed - a man who falls victim to jealousy, who sometimes makes his heart stone to avoid doubt - but also a man who believes in friendship and love across barriers of male and female, slave and free, Jew and Greek, one who hopes that this world mired in empire and oppression and crucifixion need not be the only way. and also a man who has a homoerotic relationship with Timothy that also has v queer-coded parallels in him bringing home an uncircumcised Gentile to the apostles in Jerusalem who he fears will reject this pagan. which is cool imo

[orthodoxadventure]

Orthodoxy, therefore, while insisting upon the need for a direct experience of the Holy Spirit, insists also upon the need for discrimination and sobriety. Our weeping, and likewise our participation in the other gifts of the Spirit, need to be purged of all fantasy and emotional excitement. Gifts that are genuinely spiritual are not to be rejected, but we should never pursue such gifts an an end in themselves. Our aim in the life of prayer is not to gain feelings or 'sensible' experiences of any particular kind, but simply and solely to conform our will to God's. 'I seek not what is yours but you' Says St Paul to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 12:14); and we say the same to God. We seek not the gifts but the Giver.

-- Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way

[mhaynoot]

[ch 2]

just finished ch2 and got sick so excuse the ramblings of an only partly functioning brain HAHAHA but anyways some thoughts so far:

i think while he was dead, wei wuxian was semi-conscious or at least aware of time passing? he has a few direct thoughts like "I've actually been dead for many years" (p.14) and indirect "Wei Wuxian had already lost count of the number of years it'd been since he last heard a live person speak ..." (p.13). It can help explain his rather vaguely cavalier attitude towards his traumatic death and his, well, peculiar attitude towards his reverse non-con body possession which is honestly a sentence I really never thought I'd write. I also believe wwx was active in choosing not to "haunt the living, for one, and he'd never saught vengence, for two" (p.17) which makes me think about where he was? I guess he could be in the underworld or something, waiting for his soup of oblivion and reincarnation cycle but there's really no mention of the afterlife and I assume there won't be either but I'm really really curious and could be fun to explore. Also this whole chapter has such a flippant tone and a very easygoing, almost jokey manner. Like calling wwx the most "decent and honest" (p.17) ghost there could ever be -- there's really lots of exaggeration and hyperbole and it's just so very wwx.

but also it's not completely lighthearted of course, you can tell when the narration becomes serious like when wei wuxian becomes incensed about mo xuanyu's life. he insults mo xuanyu at first, lots of "madman" and "lunatic" (p.20), but he continues reading mo xuanyu's horrible eye-straining letters, listens to this poor dead boy's words, and eventually his rhetorical questions become mocking towards the mo family, his narration becomes gentle towards mo xuanyu, ultimately questioning "what kind of hellish life was he fucking living" (p.21). it is forgiveness despite the reverse non-con body possession, and it starts the novels characterisation of wwx really well, a subtle moral declaration of standing with the weak and the helpless, of revealing his great and deep empathy. like i believe wwx genuinely felt bad this tortured boy destroyed his soul to fulfil his last wish only to get an evil ghost that wasn't even evil. like it just made me so sad reading this part, you can feel the tragedy of a life cut short because of cruelty. really, wwx so called trecherous, wwx the mad. wwx, forever righteous and just.

i adore foreshadowing and comparisons that can be made between mo xuanyu and wei wuxian, and especially how mo xuanyu's backstory sets up like a miniature version of wwx backstory vs the cultivation gentry, already establishing an anti-classism/aristocracy theme. "It appeared that, despite how the cultivation world had demanded Wei Wuxian's demise, they nevercheless had no qualms about making use use of of his his inventions." (p.33) truly what righteousness, what orthodoxy and what single broad path? only hyprocrisy and the insular gentry, a world soaked in the blood of the weak, gorged on by the powerful.

also wwx is so smart? i love how he questions and deduces his way into knowing how to fulfil mo xuanyu's unknown wishes. like him publically putting out a spectacle and humiliating the mo family was very funny but it makes it rewarding when it's also revealed as an information gathering situation of the mo family, the village, the servants, as well as finding out who the cultivators invited are, AND if this level of revenge was enough to fulfil the contract was just ingeniusly written into a very fun interaction. this plus the flag "stealing" scene really shows how wwx can really think on the spot to achieve his covert goals while masking it as fun mischief and like his understanding of social dynamics and utilisisation of prejudice/preconceptions is extremely proficient.

and he canonically meditates a lot even within the first few pages so I don't really understand where the fanon "he can't meditate" thing comes from alskkfl

also i like how wwx really didnt want to kill the mo family even if it meant like not dying but even worse dying this time cause his soul would be destroyed which allskdd huh maybe the traumatic death was an indication of smth but also wwx really isn't into killing or escalating situations at all. and then he's all like 'not like it'll be all that hard' about the killing too but still refuses to do so and compared to the whole massacre, blood, supreme evil lord stuff, it really reveals to not trust what the ears hear and only half what the eyes see (butchered edgar allen poe quote btw). and i really like how explaining the summoning also set up the spell backlash concept for later. and wwx really risking it all for the lan disciples because it was the good thing to do.

also i never really thought about it but mdzs is a really cool contrast to most transmigration/time stories I've read? mdzs is a really great reversal of the transmig/time-reversal genre tbh which should be expected of mxtx considering svsss i suppose! but like setting it 13 years into the future instead of the past, having the body snatching be intentional from the original owner, explaining the rules and that there had been previous and recorded historical accounts of this type of body trading, making the protagonist accidentally fulfilling the contract instead of actively, and many other things! it's great, it really is!

okay!! my brain is melting right now and i still have so much more to say like the lan disciples!!! and lan sizhui!! omhygod my boy!! but yeah! brain melt! so see you next time!!!

[littjara-mirrorlake]

Hey could I ask you to talk about Ixhel for a moment? I’m doing research for the next chapter of Steel and Oil by going back over the original story and looking at other people’s interpretations of her and figures you would be a good place to start, as tumblr’s resident Phyrexiaposter.

Oh absolutely! I'm honored :3

To see firsthand how I write her, I have two Ixhel fanfics at the moment:

Deeper Than Faith, Higher Than Hope is about Ixhel's compleation day, her glimpse of a less-than-perfect Phyrexia, and the shame that follows. It shows a lot of the self-gaslighting and subtle reinforcements of hierarchy that Orthodoxy life runs on, as well as Ixhel's need for her family to be proud of her. Deep down, she never stopped being a newt who yearned to see her mother smile.

These Ichorous Bonds is from Vishgraz's perspective, but sheds some light on Ixhel's sources of joy and how she loves. There's also discussion from Vishgraz's much more black-aligned viewpoint about what he thinks would help Ixhel (prioritizing herself, primarily).

I care deeply about Ixhel as a character and I'm really invested in portraying her in a way that does her justice (Aysha U. Farah knocked it out of the park, god damn). Some key points:

She is a child made to grow up too fast. Physically she is a compleated adult Phyrexian, but her narration consistently points to naivety. For example, she doesn't fully understand how humanoids work (calling Belaxis's tears "clear oil") and finds it genuinely difficult to conceptualize meaning outside of Phyrexia. The Orthodoxy tightly curates the information allotted to its members and it shows. Human-equivalent-age wise, I've put her at about freshly 18, but that doesn't correspond one to one.

She will never express this naivety or uncertainty openly if she can help it. She's been taught to cover up her uncertainty with Orthodoxy platitudes and the praise she receives for being a good little cog in Phyrexia's machine.

When we first meet her, she is desperate for praise and affirmation, which Norn and Atraxa drip-feed her in order to keep her on the hook. She commits incredible violence in their names in order to earn that praise and feel useful, which she, as a white Phyrexian, has been taught is the most important thing in life.

Her mother Atraxa now reinforces Ixhel's position as a tool, giving her orders and demanding to be called "Commander". She is deprived of parental love, but consistently craves it, while feeling like direct loving expression would be sinful and shameful.

She has a lot of internalized shame, but hasn't fully repressed her emotions. She will feel hurt or yearning or joy in a "forbidden" circumstance and then immediately chastise herself for it, possibly followed by some expression of pro-Phyrexia violence in order to convince herself she's still being a good obedient Phyrexian.

The feelings of freedom Ixhel gets when she is alone, being creative, are thrilling and shameful to her. She knows they are forbidden. She tried to justify Vishgraz's creation as a way to impress her mother, but I think deep down, it was for herself. She wanted to feel that accomplishment.

She feels a lot, but needless to say she has been starved of healthy expression mechanisms. The only form of expression "allowed" for her as her mother's tool is directed violence. (Even in trying to save and keep Belaxis, whom she knows she likes, she only thinks of killing him first.) After Vishgraz, she starts to realize that creativity is another outlet.

The most important aspect of Ixhel's character development and eventual rebellion, imo, is her growing black mana alignment and focus on herself. She needs to learn that she does not exist solely for others, despite what she's been taught; sometimes being a little selfish is a good thing. This is what Vishgraz wants to teach Ixhel in These Ichorous Bonds.

I hope this is a good overview! If you have any more questions, do reply or DM me. I love talking about my girl Ixhel <3