Another round of leaked files has hit the internet. This one rocked the medical apparatus that is profiting from abusing children with puberty blockers and grotesque surgical procedures performed on misguided minors. I urge you to read the files that were leaked from WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH was considered a leading authority on transgender health, but as Michael Shellenberger reported, “the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medicine.”
Since the files have been published, National Health Service of England has stopped prescribing puberty blockers for children and young people with gender dysphoria or “gender incongruence,” citing a lack of clinical evidence for their effectiveness. The current treatment protocol offers a battery of psycho-social therapies before anything else.
Dr. Jordan Peterson and Michael Shellenberger discussed the WPATH files on Dr. Peterson’s podcast. They touched on the implications of the WPATH practices on society, psychology, religion, politics and culture.
“The picture that this organization, WPATH, had presented to the world was a picture of real professionalism grounded in the best available science and evidence. It is not. There is no evidence base to support these radical interventions which is puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, meaning testosterone for females and estrogen for males, and genital surgeries, which are of course irreversible. The assumption is that you are trans, and I think because if you accept, that this treatment is widespread, it is so damning.” - M. Shellenberger
In the latter part of the conversation, they discussed the way forward. They suggested – mostly Dr. Peterson did – that western society has lost its source of values by becoming more secular. I sense they both feel the only way out of this chaos is through a return to traditional religious observances. They are not alone, although I don’t share their views on the existence of a single transcendent entity, nor do I share their view that religion is a sovereign remedy, given how much war and suffering have been instigated by religion. In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy wrote, “Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.”
Let’s back up.
Among the many horrors they discussed regarding the butchering of children and the criminal conduct of doctors prescribing puberty blockers, Dr. Peterson and Mr. Shellenberger talked about the woke ministers of the trans ideology who have formed a narrative for those people suffering with gender distress.
The distress arises from a belief that the body someone sees in the mirror doesn’t match the gender that person believes themselves to be. It is no longer the case that biology determines gender; it’s a sensation that morphs into reality. The crux of the argument is that being trans is as innate as being gay or heterosexual.
The idea that feelings repudiate science has captivated much of the entertainment media, along with governments and private industry, afraid of the negative publicity that will befall them for being “transphobic.” Abigail Shrier published Irreversible Damage to a total media blackout. Michael Shellenberger recounted a broadcast in which Barbara Walters introduced Jazz Jennings by saying, “…this beautiful little girl, born in the wrong body.”
But what exactly does it mean to be born in the wrong body?
The idea that someone could be born in the wrong body implies that the self exists not only outside the physical body but existed before it. To be born in the wrong body means the gender identity of a person is a consciousness which exists prior to birth or is somehow extra-corporeal, like a soul. The writers of the woke narrative inadvertently hijacked this concept from religion to validate gender expression as somatic truth.
Within the discussions of trans ideology there has never been, as far as I can tell, any mention of a soul-like presence being the source of the gender identity. It’s always been about perception, yet with this insistence that someone could be born with the wrong biology. Jazz Jennings and others have talked about the transition process as spiritual but never do they argue for the self as a separate being from the body, certainly not in any scientific way.
It is the human need to believe in life after death, that fostered the idea of souls to give us hope for eternal life and to feel within us some vestige of the creator. Fears of nature, the night, and death begat god and hope for the afterlife and then as Carl Sagan said, “Religions arose in part as attempts to propitiate and control, if not much to understand the disorderly aspect of nature.”
The being who thinks, reasons and makes the life choices that determine the path of eternity exists within the biological body, which is merely a vessel – an unnecessarily complicated vessel – for seeing and speaking the truth along the journey back to the promised land. As a young Catholic I was marched with my schoolmates to church to have my throat blessed on the feast day of Saint Blaise, during which the priest said, “Remember now that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” It was our annual reminder that our bodies were expendable but necessary porters of the soul and its burden of free will.
It seems ironic that people are suggesting that we turn to religion to fix a problem that was in part caused by a belief in a creator.
It’s curious how religion attempts to define souls. They are both apart from us and a part of us. They seem to be able to communicate with our guardian angels, yet our conscious minds are never privy to these conversations.
If they live within us, they are made of a matter as yet unidentified by science. We know how the four forces of the universe work and among them, there doesn’t seem to be an explanation for the conduct of souls. They are in us when we’re born and leave us when we die. They make important decisions about morals and ethics but use our prefrontal cortex to create the illusion of free will. But those decisions must, by definition, be made by the part of us that will answer for them in the afterlife, or else there’s no point. Our brains are the master control station that directs our thoughts and actions based on the decisions made by the soul. It is our soul that suffers for eternity if we don’t adhere to the dogma of the religion in which we were raised. Our brain just rots with the rest of our body.
Speaking for the Catholic world in which I grew up, the whole purpose of life on earth is for our bodies to act out the free will of our souls and to do so in such a manner as to be welcomed back into the kingdom of heaven from which we were breathed into existence. It makes me wonder why children die.
Why did billions of people live and die, some horrifically, centuries before the deity proclaimed the rules? Were they test subjects? How many souls are there? How many are yet to come? Do they all exist now or is there a plan to make billions more?
Billions.
I mean, don’t we get it already? Why does god keep making more, day after day, year after year? Why does he manically persist in this infant onslaught? The deity is engaged in a frenetic creation of souls, all the while knowing that the message won’t reach most of them and hasn’t reached nearly all of them for tens of thousands of years. About 85% of people believe in some religion, but not yours. That means the message carried from heaven to the expanding flood of souls is lost on most people, assuming that one version of religion or another has it exactly right. I can’t be the only one who sees the insanity of this strategy, to continue to do the same thing over and over again for millennia while expecting different results.
Does god make a new soul for every birth or do souls already exist, waiting in a celestial bullpen for their turn on the mound?
If he makes a new soul for every newborn child, how long does he plan to carry on this process? No religion can answer that question and one that would answer it would be claiming to know the mind of god, which is intellectually insulting on several fronts. Sources vary, but well over 100 billion people (souls) have lived on this planet. Only a small percentage were ever exposed to the true path to heaven. Was that on purpose?
Roughly 385,000 people are born every day around the world, 140M a year. That’s about 4.5 kids every second. Jesus Christ! That’s 385,000 new souls dropped daily into one level of society or another and left to chance to determine which religion or secular government will control their minds. Here's the thing. God knows this.
If souls have pre-existed mankind, then god knows how many there are and where they’re hanging out at any moment in time. This means he knows when the grand experiment will end. If he makes souls on the fly, then he may or may not have decided when he will stop. We’ll get a clue when the world takes note that birth rates are dropping by the hundreds of thousands per week until there comes a day when not a single woman on earth is pregnant. That’s when we’ll all suddenly drop the pretense of war and overrun the churches in a final, whimpering plea for salvation. Would god really end the world while there are still pregnant women? What would happen to the souls of the unborn? Does god recycle the souls of the mentally challenged, the insane, and those kids who die before puberty? Did they ever have a soul?
Born in the wrong body.
Do they mean at their actual birth or is it that at some time during the gestation period, the self develops separately from the body? If the argument that “born in the wrong body” is just an expression to validate the innateness of the trans identity then it still needs to be proven that identity determines gender and not biology. Otherwise, it’s merely a claim made in an attempt to give scientific credence to an otherwise aberrant idea.
If indeed a transgender person was born into the wrong body, then that person and his or her properly assigned gender must have existed prior to birth. But where?
No one seems to have answered this question or asked it for that matter. Where are the people waiting to be born into the right body and how did some of them get in the wrong queue? I’ve never heard a transgender person say, either about themselves or their child, that god made a mistake and put my male soul in a woman’s body or accidentally gave my daughter a dick.
We have been told that God doesn’t make mistakes. How do they reconcile this? There is, reportedly, a god who made plasma, platypuses, pulsars and the intricate machinery of the ribosome, only 25 nanometers across, that operates within cells, which takes in amino acids and connects then folds them into the proteins that enable us to function. That god. The god who created the expanding universe, 94 billion light years across, accidentally put a woman into a man’s body?
No.
If the identified self was somehow mistakenly born in the wrong body, then that self must have pre-existed the birth of the biological body that has entrapped its opposite gender and the only way to free the true identity so it might live out its intended life is through a radical surgical procedure and massive hormone replacements, completely fucking with, by the way, the biological body as it was programmed to be through DNA and other epigenetic expressions. So although the wrong-body problem for these child victims was created in the ethers, the gender affirming Mengeles can fix it with a scalpel.
If the identified self somehow co-exists with the biological body of the other gender then there must be a time in which there comes The Rivening, a time in which the true identity of the individual manifests its existence to the cognizant brain in some quantum manner and they unite in horror at the realization that this person they know themselves to be is in the wrong body and must unremittingly work to liberate itself from its biological straight jacket. However, since they can’t do that, their only recourse is to take the drugs, have the surgery and get shopping at Sephora.
Where does this leave us?
The video ends with Mr. Shellenberger wondering if there might be a secular way out of this mess so that as they take up this fight, they don’t alienate the non-believers in divine providence. Dr. Peterson is hard pressed to find a secular solution but believes by way of invitation to the light, the secular types will follow it.
Perhaps challenging the WPATH cabal to show that the self exists prior to birth is a start, but they are unlikely to accept the challenge and are more likely to dismiss it as hateful.
If Peterson and Shellenberger mistakenly believe you can’t find beauty and truth in a secular world view, I urge them to listen to Carl Sagan’s “A Universe Not Made for Us”
or even better, the great Christopher Hitchens, “If You Want to Be Awe Inspired.”
You will be moved by words I could only dream of orchestrating into a symphony of reason and magnificence, far beyond anything religion has tried to teach me.
The point is simply this. Using pseudoscience to mutilate children and steal their right to grow up is the great atrocity of our time, but I believe reason and science can save them.
To be clear, this is not about adults, at least not yet. This is about the sadistic practice of performing irreversible, sterilizing surgeries on gender-confused children, nearly all of whom grow out of this phase. Gruesome medical procedures performed by psychopaths on children cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. As of now American society is actively supporting it. Let’s hope for the futures of our kids that the Petersons, Shriers, and Shellenbergers of public discourse can educate people about these monsters and help us muster the rage to stop them.
Great Article, it’s atrocious the way society attacks its most vulnerable populations to exploit it for profit .
What better way to make money than to prey on the desperate. Peace and Comfort cannot come from the end of a scalpel . To misguide a troubled community by removing body parts won’t add up .
Thank you Joe for shining light on the darkness.