Helen Joyce was in Berlin yesterday, for the protest outside the Bundestag against the new gender self-ID law that has just come into force. Here's her speech:
George Orwell is supposed to have said: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
We live in a time of deceit. The deceit we’re talking about here today is the deceit of gender self-ID. It’s the lie that what makes people men or women, boys or girls, males or females, is what they claim about themselves based on their ideas and feelings, not the reality of their immutable sexed bodies.
Think about what it would mean for that to be true. It would mean that humans are somehow fundamentally different not just from other primates, not just from other mammals, but from all other living things. This is a new, secular version of creationism. It’s a claim that our species is not part of Nature but is set above it, able to rewrite biological reality and the rules of life by sheer force of will, rather than subject to them like every other evolved species....
Worth reading in full.
This is the most depressing development of my lifetime. I’m old enough to remember when girls were told they were fully human, that within the constraints of physical strength and the facts of reproduction, we could do anything. Now girls are told instead – on social media and in classrooms – that what makes a girl is feeling like a girl. And what does a girl “feel like”? Every sexist, outdated stereotype you can think of. Now, accepting that you are a girl is accepting that you are not a fully rounded human, just as much the author of your fate as boys are.
And to add the final, outrageous twist to this story, we know that among the children demanding gender change, those destined to be gay adults are hugely overrepresented. Instead of growing up happy, healthy and same-sex oriented, they are being turned into permanent medical patients – and sterile, anorgasmic facsimiles of the opposite sex.
It doesn’t escape my notice that this makes them “straight” (and, for those who have gender surgeries, desexed via castration, a punishment beyond the wildest dreams of the most vicious homophobes of past times).
We should be telling these precious non-conforming children that they are beautiful just the way they are. That boys can wear skirts and makeup and grow their hair. That they can play with dolls and do ballet. That girls can climb trees, play in the mud, crop their hair and become lorry drivers. That both boys and girls can love whomever they want. That it doesn’t matter if a boy is “effeminate” or a girl is “butch” – the boy is still a boy and the girl is still a girl.
Instead we are telling children that if they don’t conform, there is something profoundly wrong with them. That if a girl isn’t girly, she’s probably a boy, and vice versa. That these children don’t just need time, space and understanding – they need their bodies fixed with drugs and surgeries. Of all the lies of gender identity, this is the most cruel.
This isn’t just any old medical scandal, it’s gay “conversion therapy” in the truest, most catastrophic sense.
Video here.
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