For reasons I’ll perhaps eventually delve into, I lamentably allowed my fledgling blog to linger in limbo for the past couple of years.
It sure was not from lack of disconcertingly pressing issues to talk about.
However, I cannot help but to feel compelled to opine on the demoralizing demonization and wholesale scapegoating of the LGBTQ community that over the past number of years has been revved up into overdrive.
The grifting peddlers of manufactured culture wars designed specifically to divide the masses and keep us yelling at one another while the ownership class laughs all the way to the bank, have very successfully convinced many otherwise decent and hard-working people that evil, sadistic bogeymen are brainwashing their kids into suddenly wanting sex changes.
That merely being educated about the fact LGBTQ people exist – and have always existed – is somehow a sneaky attempt to make girls want to become boys, and vice versa.
Some even apparently believe – free from the burden of presenting a shred of credible evidence other than something they saw or heard somewhere on the internet – that there are schools with kitty litter for kids who’ve been led to believe they are cats.
Sadly, this kind of fabricated hysteria has an historically well-established and frighteningly effective reputation as a tactic to misdirect anger and manipulate people to obtain power through fear, which of course quickly festers and boils over into hate and rage that become powerful motivators at the ballot box.
It must be noted that the LGBTQ community has not always been on the receiving end of these kinds of unfounded and egregiously erroneous accusations of preying on children.
They are merely the latest in a long line of marginalized groups of people who throughout the millennia have been labeled a threat to children by unscrupulous, self-serving and power-hungry actors who know all too well the visceral reaction people innately experience when told their children are at risk.
And they masterfully exploit that basic tenet of human psychology to sweep their way into power.
This has led us backward in time, to a place where up is down and people who supposedly want smaller government and more freedom, are now applauding new layers of burdensome and restrictive bureaucracy that prompted medical professionals to call out the inaccurate information being performatively presented by politicians and pundits eager to score points with their base.
It has also been pointed out that in Alberta, there are no bottom surgeries being conducted on anyone under the age of 18 as the procedure is already prohibited at that age.
And there were barely a couple of dozen top surgeries that were done in both 2022 and 2023.
But the government doesn’t track specifically what for. So, those operations were not even necessarily related to gender dysphoria and would have also included life-saving mastectomies, breast reduction surgeries to alleviate back pain, or even males with a rare condition known as gynecomastia, a condition in which fatty tissue builds up in a breast.
Some suggest the provincial government’s proposed policy is nothing more than a cynical sleight of hand and deliberate effort to distract from much greater issues that remain unaddressed; from soaring wealth inequality and stagnating wages to available housing shortages, a deepening health-care crisis, and oh yeah, right, an increasingly destabilized climate that is ushering in a whole new era of extreme weather and the devastating economic and human ramifications that will come with it.
Firefighters in Alberta are desperate to know what the plan is in the face of the real possibility of a repeat of last year’s record wildfire season.
Doctors are calling out the government’s near complete abdication on taking meaningful action to address the health-care crisis.
But what do Albertans get instead?
More culture war outrage.
And yet, it at this point seems to matter little.
For here we are, witnessing human rights being rolled back by one populist government after another.
How long before Alberta’s government summarily issues a decree-by-social-media banning LGBTQ “propaganda.”
Sound crazy?
Think again. It has already happened in Russia.
And plenty of people out here seem to love Putin for some reason. Well come to think of it, the former KGB agent’s well-known contemptuous disdain for the entire LGBTQ community is probably one of the reasons.
So one can safely assume there would be support for Putin-inspired anti-LGBTQ policies in this province.
The only question is to what extent.
Surely there is some irony in stomping one’s foot petulantly demanding the right to sovereign self-determination and the freedom to live as one sees fit for themselves, while at the same time so earnestly denying that same right to their own children, let alone anybody else’s.
The obsession some folks seem to have with what genitalia is to be found between the legs of other people that they will never even know let alone be remotely affected by, is itself rather perplexing if you ask me.
We by now have perhaps gone beyond the point of absurdity, and I feel a dreadful sadness and anxiety for girls and women who are not perceived as stereotypically feminine enough by those who will feel entitled to demand proof of sex.
Again, sound crazy?
Not as crazy as the guy who takes elementary school track meets this seriously.
Frankly, I’m not convinced “parents’ rights” folks so much want to protect their kids.
I mean, at least not any more than any other parent who also wants to protect their own kids from harm.
More likely than not, they are simply absolutely mortified at the thought of their offspring coming out as LGBTQ – especially the ‘T’ if the current rage is any indication. One will depressingly not struggle to find social media comment sections flooded with people who say transgendered people are unnatural, at best, or at worst, deny they even exist.
Or ramble on about the “alphabet cult” grooming children while for whatever reason selectively reserving their outrage when stories break about abuse in their beloved sports or clergy and other institutions, which statistically speaking represent a vastly disproportionate amount of abuse that actually occurs in the real world, where abusers generally turn out to be someone in either a position of authority or trust with access to the child.
And despite the reactionaries’ best efforts to pretend otherwise, there are also all too many cases of abusive parents going so far as to beat or disown children who come out. Sometimes even worse.
Tough love is about teaching responsibility with a side dish of discipline and not giving into a kid’s every petty whining want, not to instill within them such a deep sense of self-loathing that they would rather not even exist in the first place.
So, I am increasingly convinced that what the “parents’ rights” folks do want, is quite simply the “right” to create unthinking clones; exact carbon-copy replicas of themselves to continue repeating unoriginal, uninspired, reactionary outrage ad nauseam while the world burns around us and the rich eagerly race to become trillionaires while younger generations are being priced out of the hope of ever owning a home.
To think, they’ll unironically accuse pretty well anyone else of indoctrinating kids.
I mean don’t get me wrong – every parent obviously tries to impart values.
That’s the point, isn’t it?
But the subconscious projection in folks who want their kids to believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth and myths about global floods all while accusing others who encourage empathy, compassion and critical thinking of brainwashing, is remarkably powerful.
In a movie, it would be a parody and the audience would enjoy a heartfelt laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Sadly, this is not satire.
There’s certainly a line that connects today’s anti-trans hysteria, with those who decades ago would have had absolutely no qualms whatsoever with the cruel and unjust fates imposed on people like Dr. Alan Turing, who after applying his brilliance to the Allied cause and cracked the Nazi enigma codes during the Second World War – thereby saving untold numbers of innocent lives – was forced to choose between jail or chemical castration for the “crime” of being gay.
He eventually committed suicide, and all of humankind was subsequently denied the potential his brilliant mind still had to offer.
We are not talking about history from bygone centuries when pulling people apart with horses or burning free-thinking women as witches was in vogue, either. What happened to people like Turing in the West remains for some within an all-too-soberingly livable memory. In altogether too many places around the planet, the community is still targeted and even outlawed to this day.
And clearly, the narrow-minded attitudes and belief structures that led to the widespread support for laws that persecuted inspiring individuals such as Turing, did not disappear or die out.
In fact, they seem to be making a comeback.
Personally, I would just as well not see history repeat itself.
At the turn of the millennium, more than 20 years ago when I was a naive adolescent coming of age into adulthood, I – perhaps just like those who half a century before me thought there would one day be flying cars – deluded myself into believing humankind was finally moving forward.
Shaking off of its shoulders the shrouds of regressive magic thinking and finally taking our place in the cosmos as we embark on a never-ending adventure to learn more about creation.
I thought for sure the 2020s would see the first person set foot on Mars.
Our very own Apollo 11 moment.
But instead of seeking to fulfill our vast potential, here we are embroiled in endless culture wars.
And sadly, some all-too real wars as well.
With regards to another demoralizing and depressing development, which is to say the unspeakable human suffering unfolding in the Middle East that one might reasonably have thought would be the travesty to finally evoke within me a desire to express some thoughts, I will simply say this.
One appalling atrocity born of nearly a century of oppression, should never justify a blood-lusting campaign of revenge that unleashes daily atrocities upon a defenceless civilian population with nowhere to go.
And make no mistake, justice has absolutely nothing to do with the horrors being inflicted upon Palestinians.
It is all about power and control.
If the story of the three Israeli hostages who emerged from rubble unarmed and topless waving a white flag but were still summarily executed on the spot anyway by IDF soldiers with itchy trigger fingers did not shatter the myth that every effort is meticulously being made to avoid needless loss of life and exercise the greatest restraint humanly possible, I frankly do not know what will or indeed if anything even can.
Never mind all the other countless atrocities as the bodies of babies, women and children continue to mount daily.
The manufacturers of outrage have also capitalized on this opportunity to drive deeper the wedges of culture war through this very real conflict. Apparently, mere criticism of the Israeli government – not to be confused with the Jewish people, many of whom vehemently oppose their own current leadership – is tantamount to antisemitism.
Not unlike those who seem to label as child predators anyone who stands in solidarity with the LGBTQ community, the majority of whom knew very well who they were long before reaching the age of adulthood.
Of course such ad hominem attacks are nothing more than an attempt to derail discourse and silence legitimate debate.
Perhaps Carl Sagan hit the nail on the head when he once said that once we’ve been bamboozled, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
An unmistakable example of this tendency is how even after being exposed by James Randi as a opportunistic and manipulative grifter, the so-called “spoon bender” Uri Geller still managed to make an extremely lucrative career out of duping people who, well, quite frankly want to be duped.
Like Richard P. Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
That’s the only reason I can begin to imagine why anyone would actually listen to anything an accelerationist like Tucker Carlson has to say; a reactionary pundit who prior to being fired by masters of manufactured outrage Fox “News” was actually defended in U.S. court by lawyers who successfully argued and convinced the judge that no reasonable person would believe a word he says.
But in the upside down world, millions believe grifters like Geller and Carlson are truth tellers, and those who expose their fraudulent grift are the evil-doers.
If by the end of the century there remains any historians left to record this insanity, I wonder whether they’ll refer to this unfortunate epoch as the Age of the Grift.
One can only hope it is immediately followed by a sequel to the Age of Enlightenment where reason and logic once again light a path through the darkness of superstitious nonsense.
