My 7-year-old chose this book at the Scholastic book fair held at her private Christian school:
What do you think the book is about? A girl and her pet kitty?
Nah, that would not be sufficiently ideological. The book is about a “non-binary” child who is trying to come out about her “pronouns” to her mom who is distracted by her new lesbian girlfriend.
I mean, you could argue that the cover does send a message about pussies.
Back in the USSR, we had this joke about a man turning on the TV and seeing Brezhnev. So he switches over to another channel and again sees Brezhnev. He switches over to the third and last channel (there were only three channels at best), and he again sees Brezhnev, who tells him menacingly, “Stop switching over, or else!” This is exactly like that. You can never relax and enjoy a cute story about pet kitties. Not even when you are 7 do you get a break from being indoctrinated, hectored and brainwashed every second of every day.
I swear to God, there was never an ounce of negative feeling in me towards the word “lesbian.” But right now there is because anything that is rammed down your throat with a hammer is bound to become unpleasant to you.
Clarissa's Blog 
I have deep misgivings about this. Grew up around the community theater crowd, so have an above-average number of lesbians, flamingly gay men, and professional drag queens in the “friends of the family” category. It’s a tight enough crowd that my mother, along with some other theater people, was helping make funeral arrangements for one of them last week (theater was the closest thing he had to family).
I am worried about them. The propaganda push has been so intense the last few years, and now every perversion big enough to have a subculture of any kind is demanding mainstream acceptance (nay, public accolades!) on the coattails of “LGB” acceptance. There is so much marketing of “alternative lifestyles” to children.
Revulsion is the normal, sane response. Pretty much all of the older gay people I grew up with are deeply concerned by the whole phenomenon. They appreciate being mainstreamed, and being able to add a partner to their insurance/lease/taxes and stuff, but they don’t have kids, they’re not interested in kids, and they’re alarmed by the new insistence on getting kids involved in the whole scene. It’s not their generation of queers (their word!) that’s pushing for it, they can see the angry resistance forming in response to it, and we are all very concerned about where that leads in the near future. The backlash could be very, very ugly… and also pretty indiscriminate.
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// an above-average number of lesbians … they don’t have kids, they’re not interested in kids, and they’re alarmed by the new insistence on getting kids involved in the whole scene.
Doesn’t it show the degree of past discrimination if even lesbians dared not let themselves experience the joys of motherhood?
I work with a gay man in a long-term relationship. They would be married, but Israel doesn’t recognize gay marriage since it doesn’t let anyone to marry in a secular ceremony. Thus, f.e. a Christian / Muslim and a Jew cannot officially get married in my country.
They are in their late 30ies and are planning to have 2 children born soon (done abroad) via surrogacy.
I expect the current gay people to be as interested in children as not gays, or almost so, leaving aside ” professional drag queens” and such.
Most gays I had seen look usual and want to lead normal lives, except being married to their own gender.
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I don’t know what the situation is like in Israel.
In the theater crowd here, at least, gay men radically outnumber gay women. In the US, gay women have not, in my lifetime, had any trouble having kids if they wanted them. Among the gay men of my acquaintance, “not interested in kids” means two things: they are not interested in raising children of their own AND they are not interested in being involved with other people’s kids– like as teachers, coaches, running programs for children, etc. Their lifestyle is not kid-friendly, they know it, and they’re OK with that. I really don’t think it’s a product of discrimination, but it may be a peculiar bias of the subset of gay men who are involved in the theater scene.
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That’s the narrative but it’s not reality. There absolutely are gay people who want marriage and kids. But there are also gay people – and they seem to be a clear majority, especially among men – who don’t. The whole point of excluding women from their sex lives is to have a lot of brief sexual encounters with a large variety of partners. We do nobody any favors by pretending that everybody gay wants to recreate the hetero dynamic with different body parts. Some absolutely do. But many don’t.
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This. 100%. The culture often also embraces recreational drug use. I trust that there is some subset out there of gay men who just want to do the normal family-and-kids thing, but I have not met them, and they are not the ones I grew up around. The gay men I grew up around do not have a lifestyle that would be good for raising children, so it’s a good thing that they don’t want any.
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…and it is a frankly weird underlying assumption that, in the absence of obstacles such as discrimination, everybody would just automatically want to have a sedate family life and settle down to raise kids. That is not the case even among straight people!
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\ The whole point of excluding women from their sex lives is to have a lot of brief sexual encounters with a large variety of partners.
I thought the whole point of being a gay man was being as repulsed by the idea of sex with women as I am (for myself) , even to the point of being physically unable to function with a woman.
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Yes, but sex isn’t just the brief moment of joining specific body parts. It’s a process with different components. All of these components are very different depending on the sex of the participants.
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I’m telling you, if even I, after a lifetime of being completely pro gay rights, now have an automatic negative response to the topic, something is wrong. One can no longer engage with any aspect of the world without being bludgeoned over the head with an issue that’s only relevant to a tiny percentage of the population. All that we wanted to do is buy a book about pet kitties for our first grader. Why can’t we be left in peace to do that?
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“The backlash could be very, very ugly”
Absolutely, in my more crazy paranoid moments (which are quickly becoming the norm…) I think that a big part of the trans… thing going on is about getting women out of public life and cracking down on gays and lesbians.
I’m not sure what the motive is (or if it’s planned at all or just a side effect of something else) but it seems really, really obvious….
.
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I have had those thoughts as well.
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What do you mean “chose this book”? Has Klara actually read it?
My first thought was that the book was about African American experience, racism, BLM, etc.
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She has to buy the book before she can read it. And how do small kids choose books to buy? They rely on the cover and the title.
No, she hasn’t read it and won’t because I studied the reviews. I’d so much rather she chose without my hovering but kids are being misled into this complete garbage, so I must hover.
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To be fair, the last time I went to a school book fair, more than twenty years ago, everything on offer was commercial trash. Maybe just take her somewhere else to buy books.
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I was always mad at my parents that they didn’t let us buy stuff at those events but, as you say, it has been almost entirely trash for a long time. My kids saw something like that once and got very excited but I was able to show them how many more books we could get for the same price from the thrift store or used online and they have never asked again.
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Yeah, I remember being stunned by the prices at book fairs. Most of our books were library discards my mom had picked up for free. The idea of paying that much for new books was kind of foreign to us, but we liked looking anyway. I remember being really disappointed by the last couple of fairs I went to, because there was so much emphasis on neverending formulaic series, and gimmicky books with floaty eyeballs attached, or squishy dinosaur parts, that sort of thing. They weren’t real books.
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…for comparison, I was maybe ten when Mom purchased me a large, beautifully illustrated hardbound copy of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind at the school book fair (not scholastic apparently– wish I knew what company was running it– must have been religious), and I think I judged all subsequent fairs by that standard… they all came up short.
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Re misleading book cover and title:
It’s the culture, which does not mean we should acquiesce in it. We must all be on our guard as even the most innocent-sounding expression may hide a wilderness of reactionary Woke so-called progressivism. I call it reactionary because under the guise of advocating for the “oppressed” and “marginalised”, this false gospel of liberty is destroying the very fabric of some of the most advanced, liberal societies, sowing discord and disunity.
Re “Gay Rights”:
I have long since stopped using such a term, recognising it for the blindingly misguided, bleeding-heart liberalism behind which Woke Neo-Marxists hack at the foundations of society. There are rights which belong to all individuals as individuals, and there are rights that only some people hold or should hold since those rights are inherent to specific characteristics possessed by those individuals. Anything else is just a way of undermining the Constitution in a round-about way that weakens the powers of lawmakers, thereby disenfranchising the mainstream majority.
I speak as a celibate, homosexual man who renounced the so-called “gay” lifestyle over ten years ago, well before I was received into the Russian Orthodox Church, which made it a condition for baptism. I left the “gay” life – there is nothing gay about it – once I realised that any personal identity based on who you are attracted to was fundamentally flawed as well as unbearably parochial and extremely confining.
Re “I think that a big part of the trans… thing going on is about getting women out of public life and cracking down on gays and lesbians.” (cliff arroyo)
I have no reason to believe that this is the intention or that it is part of a deliberate agenda, but the unintended consequences are precisely those that you, methylethyl, Clarissa, and every right-thinking person, fear.
Re “Israel doesn’t recognize gay marriage” (el)
Well, there is no civil marriage of any kind in the State of Israel, though marriages performed according to the canons and rules of 15 religious denominations are recognised by the State as having validity in civil law. However, marriages performed in foreign jurisdictions – including same-sex marriages where these are legal – ARE recognised by the State of Israel, through a procedure known as exequatur. Therefore, if at least one Israeli citizen marries a same-sex partner in countries like Canada, the US, Belgium or Spain, he or she will be able to have such a marriage recognised by any Israeli court, having legal effects which put them on a par with all other 15 religious marriages.
I know that I have abused everyone’s patience, but please, hear me out: it’s bad, really bad, and what we are seeing is only the beginning. Ultimately, it is linked to the sexualisation of children, the normalisation of abortion, the rationalisation of euthanasia, and finally the ideology of expressive individualism as the summum bonum of a liquid society, that is to say, the idea that each and every desire that an individual may harbour, from the most mundane to the most destructive and the most abominable, should be given unfettered scope.
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Exactly, and it’s maddening to realize that even a book about a girl and her pet cat should be sexualized in this way. I don’t want a book on either gay or straight sexuality for my kid. If it had a heterosexual mom with her male lover, I don’t want that either. It’s the sneaky dishonesty of this brainwashing that I detest.
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You know, I’m kind of with Cliff on that, still. I don’t actually want to believe there is some kind of conspiracy to kill women’s rights or provoke massive backlash against gay people.
But at the same time… there have always been narcissistic creeps in that scene (much like any other “scene”), and I can’t recall them ever having such a big megaphone before. It is like the most toxic, horrifying, perverted, pathologically attention-hungry people in the gay subculture are now the ones being given the most airtime. They’re being aggressively platformed, even though most of the American public vocally does not want to hear from these people.
So the question is… why? And by whom? What is the purpose in that?
Maybe it’s just the latest frontier of clickbait envelope-pushing outrage-whoring, because people stopped clicking on last weeks outrageous thing.
But if there was an agenda behind it, what would that agenda be?
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“if there was an agenda behind it, what would that agenda be?”
To paraphrase from the French…. “Cherchez le loot”
The women’s movement (in terms of employment) was successful because it aligned with the needs of capital to get more warm bodies into the workforce…
They’re not so needed now so the meta-message of the “ftm” trans movement to women is “you’re not needed, men can do everything we needed you for, stay home now”.
The trans thing is also nakedly about money, since it requires life-long expensive treatment and the younger they get people into it the more money they make from them.
In this view lgb is collateral damage, they simply generate less revenue than trans do… and if they suffer backlash then… so be it.
There are also some good-intentioned clueless people who aren’t deeply involved but support it on general principles because it seems ‘progressive’.
The movement toward same sex marriage seems to have been made up of two factions (roughly speaking). On the one hand were relatively normal people who wanted to be able to marry and settle down… on the other hand were deranged freaks for whom it was a first step toward dismantling any kind of domestic stability in the name of… something. The first group stopped the activism stuff after they won and now the deranged freaks are pushing trans stuff.
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I can’t –quite, yet– square the whole radical alphabet activist agenda with the need for permanent customers and ditching women from the workforce though. I feel like there has to be more to it than that. It’s a 2+3= 10 thing, where I still need to know where the other 5 came from
I do wonder, though, if the other five might lie in… institutional inertia? as you mentioned, the relatively normal folks who worked on gay marriage all dropped out once they got what they wanted. But there were whole organizations devoted to that cause, and quite a lot of activist momentum. Where did it go? Did it just evaporate? This is a perpetual problem with activist organizations: when you get the thing you’ve devoted your activism to, where do you go from there? Disband? More often, the answer seems to be: retool for a new cause. People have devoted years of their lives now, have made a career of, lobbying legislative bodies, organizing protests, drafting legislation, fighting court battles, and fundraising. Can this skillset even transfer to the real world, or do you have to stay in some kind of activism after you’ve spent a decade at it, because you’re unsuited to any other job? Can’t shift identity from activist to working stiff?
So… was gay marriage always intended as just the pointy end of the wedge, to then shove a lot of much-less-palatable things into legality and cultural acceptance like the more paranoid conservatives always thought? Or did that stuff come strolling along, find a well-oiled, experienced, massively successful and about-to-be-retired activist apparatus, and yell BANZAI!! Or, alternately, did some nefarious big-money causes see that same apparatus at loose ends and decide to pump money into it for their own purposes, like a mercenary navy buying a surplus battleship after the war’s over.
The whole trans customer-for-life thing I have a hard time with, because medical expenses are already an absurd, bloated, parasitical, totally unsustainable portion of our economy. It’s a bigger suck than student loans and real estate prices, I think. That whole system is headed for an ugly crash. If it’s really about profit and lifelong customers… where do they think the money is going to come from? We’re already spending more on the medical industrial complex than anybody can actually afford. They think they can get more? Or are we counting on killing off enough old people with mandatory drug experiments to balance it out?
I dunno. I don’t think it adds up, as a numbers game. I think for that to make sense, there has to be something else, and that something else pretty much has to be more than ordinary greed– like you have to go into evil-for-evil’s sake territory to make it connect, and I think I want to exhaust all the other options first.
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I’m inclined to think “pointy end of the wedge,” though I know plenty of individual people involved in gay marriage activism were normal and well intentioned and I don’t mean to smear them here. But if you look into early gay activism, it’s some sick shit (think NAMBLA), and I don’t buy that these views disappeared, I think they just went underground. I actually wonder if a certain cohort of the young woke LGBT are still carrying forward the torch, though I emphasize that if this is the case it’s a VERY small minority.
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I could buy that. But I’m still puzzled about where the funding is coming from.
Like, I viscerally recoil from the Q stuff, but what you’re suggesting sounds a lot like “elite pedo monsters with piles of money funding social change to increase their victim pool and decrease their legal risk”.
I think this is a follow-the-money puzzle, and if we knew where it was coming from, and where it was going, everything would be illuminated. Like, your average chubby blue-haired nose-ringed genderqueer propaganda-pushing second-grade teacher… where does she come from? What is she getting out of it? Sure, virtue signalling on tiktok etc. etc. but that didn’t come out of nowhere. There are virtually no parents out there demanding it. Elementary teachers don’t make the big bucks. But they seem to be the footsoldiers of the revolution. So who’s paying for their kit and training?
What’s the payoff for our footsoldier? Is she getting money directly from some NPO? Or did the money come in the form of generous grants to the teacher college she just graduated from? Is she a true-believer ideologue getting paid purely in virtue signalling points (thus the tiktok channel), or is she getting a cash bonus from a third-party source for this classroom performance art? Or does the payoff come from the ironclad job security of being un-fire-able? Did the money show up as a generous grant to the school that she works for, with a few strings attached? The school district maybe?
I just feel like so much of this could be solved by a nice public audit of everybody involved.
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–just want to add, not arguing anything here. I don’t pretend to actually know anything, I’m just in the “this doesn’t add up” stage and fishing for more info because I want to understand and currently I don’t. When I do this IRL people tend to get offended so I want to make sure you know that I like you, I enjoy reading your comments, I respect your opinions, and I’m hoping you have more info than I do so I can learn something. But I’m also really bad at tone and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way. 🙂
If you say that NAMBLA et al were involved in the movement from the beginning, that’s significant and shouldn’t be ignored. I am pondering it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k
Jennifer Bilek has been studying this for a decade and has a blog dedicated to it. Search her name on youtube for a start she’s on a number of podcasts. Very informed and articulate. She’s active on twitter also.
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@Sybil
Thanks I’ll check that out.
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“What is she getting out of it”
For or genderqueer middle-school teacher in particular, as opposed to other genderqueer people, it’s a profound loneliness, something that broke unfixably in middle school, and that they’re projecting outwards and into their jobs, in a way where their holy goal is to make sure no other child suffers as they did.
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I also think that the profit motive, while real and definitely involved in this, is secondary. Chaos and confusion is the primary goal.
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That is my instinctive inclination. Chaos and destruction. Burn it all down. Being religious, I have no problem tracing that source. Not so much a rational thing you can document… but it is an amazingly efficient sorting device: it is possible to draw a stark line between friends and acquaintances IRL based on who I am, and am not, willing to have that particular conversation with.
Maybe there’s a lot of temporary profit to be had from breaking the family and from medical dependency. Those things have gone hand in hand way longer than the trans thing has been around. It’s why we have nursing homes.
It seems like… we are on the downslope of resource abundance. There have been a lot of times where strong cultural, religious, and family structures got large numbers of people through hard times. So if you’re looking at a future of declining resources where we are all going to have to learn to live with less and do more… and you want to cause the maximum death, destruction, chaos, and horror… definitely do away with all that stuff. Go into lean times with strong families and institutions, people have a chance. They might make it. But… go in with family and culture shattered? That is the stuff of postapocalyptic horror.
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Being a lesbian or a gay is about sex, not gender. So, no need to blame lesbianism here.
To me, there’s mainly 3 schools of thoughts about sex and gender:
The SJW cis-lesbian-phobia: sex is a biological thing and gender is a social construct, so cisgenderism is invalid. However transgenderism is valid. Cisgenderism is bad, but particularly intolerable if you’re a lesbian
The trad conservative transphobia: gender and sex are the same thing, so genderism is great except for transgenderism. So cisgenderism is valid, but transgenderism is invalid.
The Radfem gender-exclusionary (mine): we agree with the SJWs that sex a is natural thing and gender is a social construct, but since genderism is invalid within a feminist perspective, cisgenderism and transgenderism are invalid. So only sex matters.
P.S.: I hate the term « woke » so I use SJW, because for many conservatives, woke is simply anything that they don’t like.
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