Recently, I was cited in a review of Matt Walsh’s mockumentary, “What Is A Woman?” by a media outlet known as Arizona Digital News; which seems to have many clone sites including but not limited to: Indiana Digital news, Mississippi Digital News, and others. The article has also been picked up by sites which act as article mirrors and scrape content, presumably, for SEO purposes. Due to the potential penetration of this particular review and the fact I find it inaccurate despite directly citing my blog as a source, I feel the need to publish a response with my opinion and reaction to it. It should go without saying that I disagree with opinions expressed by the author of this publication. Without further delay, here is my response to various points made in the article.
People who have woken up to the harm done to them by transgender ideology (and who lament that “nobody protected me from myself”) are just starting to find one another online and tell their stories; they are joining detrans support groups, doing interviews, suing healthcare providers, and attempting to make peace with themselves and their bodies broken by “affirmative care.”
Alisa RuddelL, Arizona Digital News
While detransitioners exist, they represent only a small portion of people who have medically transitioned. It is frustrating to see the existence of manipulative individuals like Scott Newgent assume that his own personal experiences are shared by a majority, and to have that parroted by reporters who appear to only do surface level research into the community and spend more time looking up unrelated phenomena. By her own words, Ruddell spent some time looking at castration cults and the like … for some reason?
The way that we perceive and picture reality is through a sex-oriented symbolic structure. Our thought, language, and even perception depend on the intuitive grasp of sexual difference. Sex predates humanity (and thus human language) by millions of years and formed a key component of the environment in which we came to be. This means that the categories of male/female and man/woman are simply too ancient and fundamental to be tampered with without consequences. This is no social construct; we didn’t make these embodied categories—they made us. Our words are an attempt to point to these categories that preceded and shaped us. To wage a war against this sexed symbolic structure which is embedded in language, in perception, and in our very flesh, isn’t liberating—it’s blinding. Smashing the gender binary is as useful as gouging out our eyes.
Alisa ruddell, Arizona digital news
To make her flawed point appear credible, Ruddell links to a video from Jordan Peterson and attempts to relate it with a video from PBS. If we’re going to link just about anything as a source, I think the fact that an article detailing Peterson’s mental health struggles, addiction to benzodiazepines, suicidality, and his seeking of controversial coma-assisted-detox in Russia is equally worth citing. Peterson is an angry, deeply flawed man who has used his medical credentials to become an anti-trans grifter, in opposition to the scientific opinions held by most major medical organizations and practitioners. Is anyone really surprised?
The fact that transgender people and non-binary people exist does absolutely nothing to conflate the understanding of sex. I would also argue that gender and sex aren’t the same thing, but we’ll save that for another post.
“Woman” and “man” are the kind of intuitive axioms that you see with; they are the assumptions that you use to navigate the world.
Alisa ruddell, Arizona digital news
At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I would almost certainly disagree! Many people have had a “is this person a girl or a guy?” in their youth, or even in adulthood, and the person they’re questioning the gender of usually isn’t a transgender person. It’s bold of Ruddell to make the claim that she did here.
Lady and Man as verbal definitions can by no means be exhaustively correct: too many exceptions exist on the edges, too many caveats should be made, and so they so simply degrade into stereotypes and sexism. (Therefore the Left’s critique of “essentialist” definitions of gender.) These truths shouldn’t be discarded; neither ought to we nail them down right into a boilerplate formulation. It’s truly these issues which are the toughest to articulate which are the deepest and truest issues, rooted in intuition and image and delusion, shaping the silence earlier than the spoken phrase, framing what we see as both masculine or female. These truths are greatest approached via image and poetry, which is how (in His kindness) God gave them to us
Alisa ruddell, Arizona digital news
Ah, yes. This is the appeal to religion that I was waiting for Ruddell to use. The other arguments she makes are hollow, so the old “This I know, because the bible tells me so” comes out.
I think we’re done here.