Upon the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada”. A poem by Sarah Gar, a visitor to the land of the Paiute and Shoshone people and the sagebrush creatures.
It’s quiet here.
And I’m not talking
about experimental silence,
American guru silence,
or any sleek human site
that seeks inner peace
(and other noise)
to drown out the drawing-down
and drying-up of every sacred thing.
I’m talking about silence
of lands beyond witness,
a silence embedded and embedding,
the one nestling in the nighthawk’s cries
and cradling these words.
Tall sagebrush touches it —
4 feet 33 millimeters
of branching space,
where voice and silence
play by listening,
weaving water and light
without worrying who
appears as what
before whom.
It’s as if nothing can be said
to arrive or leave in wild places.
Even our breath cannot be said
to enter this place
where it meets other selves
always here and already inside.
But when Grandmother comes,
wakes the fire with practiced taps,
the flames flare in reminder
of whose Spirits keep this place.
Even in “deserted” places
dry soil knows to gather
soft and firm around water,
forming delicate strata
to nourish roots
and catch the drifting seed.
We, too, know to gather,
asking if we are also this place,
and if so,
how we can return.
To get here
we must track ourselves
by species memory,
a long way back,
to when losing one’s way
first became possible.
We trace back to the end’s beginning,
when the volume had to rise,
to create an endless diversion,
to mask the pesky screams
of women and slaves.
Yes, we tracked ourselves,
even did a blood spatter analysis.
A few facts emerged to tell us:
We are the losing and the lost.
There’s nothing lonelier than empire, and nothing stranger than killing one’s beloved.
These facts cleared the room.
Even history couldn’t erase them.
The clock ticked.
Corporations continued to cut down the ancient ones.
And so we rose, rotating and revolving
pulled forward by the falling-apart feeling
which is love.
This must be love because,
as sung by Paiute and Shoshone,
danced by pronghorn and coyote,
this place would hold forever,
streams passing
through trouts’ gills,
sun glancing off scales
and into eagle’s eyes
as she watches over.
Past and future
would nest together,
quiet as grouse eggs,
speckled and constellating,
in tacit reference to each other.
Birth and death would spiral together,
strong and fragile as pyrg shell,
and we would learn again
to listen and to hold
this language,
the spinning of the silence
that found us first,
soft as jackrabbit,
buried as bones,
strong spines of sage
and mountain song.
As a former English professor from the East Coast, Sarah now focuses on writing and activism in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry grieves patriarchal and colonial violence, summons reverence for the natural world, and upholds matriarchal cultures which cherish life.
In this article, originally published on feministcurrent, Brenda Brooks describes how transgender ideology pushes more and more girls and young women into “gender reassignment” by dangerous surgery and hormone treatment.
Impressions formed around the delivery of bad news have a way of sticking around,
and I suppose this is why, to use a well-worn phrase, I still remember where I was the day a friend informed me that lesbians were being harassed for rejecting men as dating partners. I laughed, at first, and probably said something like, “You sure know how to inject a dose of warped humour into a relaxing coffee break.” For the next half-hour my friend’s solemn, intense explanation left me unwilling to absorb the news that men who “self-identify” as women feel entitled to add lesbians to their dating pool. I watched her grow edgy, fevered around the eyes, and anxious. She reminded me of that terrified guy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as he dodged cars on the noirish highway, warning belligerent travellers: “They’re after you! They’re after all of us! You fools!”
Why was I so reluctant to believe the news, aside from it being as unbelievable as it was true? It might be that I had let down my guard, and even gone a little bit “post-lesbian.” I mean this in a lightly humourous way, because it seemed to me that for a while, back in the olden days, it became possible to apply a touch of irony to the matter of “identity,” as people sometimes do when the worst of times are over and a relaxed atmosphere offers perspective — even jokes. I guess you could say I’d relaxed into the fair weather.
But over lunch that day, as my friend grew more emphatic, and I grew less relaxed, I soon found myself thinking: “What fresh hell is this”?
Now, a few years later, I know a heartbreaking amount about the nature of “fresh hell.” I know the number of American girls attempting to escape being female by seeking surgery quadrupled between 2016 and 2017. Journalist Abigail Shrier addresses this trend in her book, Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which transactivists and Big Tech have done their best to shut down. Her first publisher cancelled the book after threats from staff, and Amazon refused to allow Regenery, her new publisher, to sponsor ads on its site.
The phenomenon of girls transitioning to become “male” isn’t limited to the US.
A shift has been noted in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the UK, the number of children being referred for gender reassignment went from 77 in 2009 to 2,590 in 2018-19. But most striking of all is who is being referred — in 2017, according to TheGuardian, 70 per cent of referrals were female.
I’ve also apprised myself of the dangerous health projections for girls who proceed along the route from puberty blockers to surgery, which reminded me that I had once explored the idea of having my ovaries removed in order to escape the hormone-generated migraines that plague the women in my family until menopause. My doctor was quick to state the impossibility of that notion, stressing that surgery wasn’t available to “someone so young” (I was 35 years old). Why? Because my hormones protected me from heart disease and bone loss, among other things.
In her 2018 study of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), Lisa Littman determined that, “Without the knowledge of whether the gender dysphoria is likely to be temporary, extreme caution should be applied before considering the use of treatments that have permanent effects, such as cross-sex hormones and surgery.” Who could argue with erring on the side of being careful, responsible — ethical? Many, apparently, who have done just that, dismissing Littman’s suggestion that some cases of gender dysphoria may be “socially contagious,” accusing her of bias and promoting misconceptions about trans people. Among the young people she studied (83 per cent of whom were girls), more than one-third were in friendship groups in which half or more began to identify as trans in a similar time frame.
Despite all this, nothing affected me more than Dysphoric — a four part documentary series by Vaishnavi Sundar, an independent filmmaker, feminist, writer, and activist. Subtitled, “Fleeing womanhood like a house on fire,” Sundar’s film elucidates the way young women’s dysphoria is heightened through social media, as well some branches of the medical and therapeutic community, and of course trans activist ideology itself. There are a few clips in the film of social media personality Jeffrey Marsh, who refers to himself as an “internet mom,” offering a sort of alternative family (at least online) for the young, lonely, and confused. But the thing is, he is not a “mom.” Marsh, the author (ironically) of, How to be You, is a man — a gay man (who identifies as “non-binary” and “queer”) and his current metier involves promoting himself on YouTube — an activity actual mothers rarely have time for.
In Sundar’s film, endocrinologist Dr. William Malone stresses that most girls who experience dysphoria will outgrow the symptoms post-puberty, and psychiatrist Dr. Roberto D’Angelo reminds us that many of these girls will grow up to be lesbian. But, until then, they are simply young, vulnerable, and confused about how to handle their attraction to other girls.
I thought we had broken the back of this problem decades ago
— encouraging girls to be themselves, and grow up to accept their sexualities without shame. But that hard-won fight has been set back. And now the repercussions may mean the sacrifice of countless girls who are abandoning their bodies to a devastating illusion.
If this process of turning lesbian girls into straight boys isn’t conversion therapy, I don’t know what is. But now that “gender” has been added to the definition of the term, things have become confused. Now it is claimed that protecting young girls from rushing into body modification in an attempt to enter boyhood (and a life of medical intervention) is the real crime — the authentic “conversion therapy.”
I recently received a ballot from my local MP inquiring how I would like him to vote on Bill C-6, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy.) If conversion therapy still meant making it illegal to impose “correctives” on those who are attracted to the same sex, my position would be straightforward, and I’m sure many politicians feel they are being progressive in voting to prohibit such practices. But adding “gender identity” has changed things to mean that prohibiting “conversion therapy” pressures therapists and medical professionals to validate a child’s feeling that they have been “born in the wrong body” and require irreversible medical treatments. The Cassandra Project, a coalition of women’s organizations concerned about Bill C-6, have articulated a number of worries, not the least being that “services and therapy that do not encourage hasty transition” will be criminalized.
Considering the daily realities faced by so many girls in today’s world, there is a kind of logic to their transformative wishes — if only they could become wild horses instead, and run far away.
Teaching girls to believe in repressive and obsolete gender stereotypes — encouraging them to believe it is possible to be born in the wrong body because they don’t look, feel, or act the way a girl “should” — is the actual conversion therapy. The most authentic betrayal is leading girls into surgeries that remove their healthy breasts, endanger their health, and doom them to a lifetime of medical oversight. That is the true conversion therapy, and its message is as it ever was, except that now bodies are ruined along with minds — the message is that it is better to betray and renounce body and spirit than to be a lesbian (or a woman).
So much for being “post-lesbian.”
It seems I was too optimistic about the future. I failed to imagine its profound loss of soul. I grew complacent. I let down my guard. And now I am a member of the authentic counterculture once again. My primary surprise is that the repugnance and contempt for women is still great, and the example we set as lesbians is fragile.
Invoking Invasion of the Bodysnatchers feels eerily accurate. The urge to dart out onto that rain-slashed highway and implore fellow travellers to see what is in front of their faces — Look,you fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see?! —is almost irresistible. One can only be grateful to those who have been running into traffic for some time. I only wish somebody could assure me that this dystopian reality will be put right. Meanwhile I’ll hold my wish that young girls could become wild horses that no one can break.
At the close of Sundar’s film, she speaks of the various political, social, and religious dangers to girlhood: “We have this one life, and we must have the opportunity to live it the way we want. But this industry of hate that gaslights girls into turning against themselves infuriates me.” The one question that keeps Sundar awake at night, as posed by a future generation of girls, is this: “Where the hell were you?”
Brenda Brooks’ novel Gotta Find Me An Angel was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her 2019 book, HONEY, was shortlisted for the U.K. Staunch Book Prize, an award for thrillers “where no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, or murdered.”
Also listen to an interview of Vaishnavi Sundar in Resistance Radio.
Written by Jennifer Bilek. This blog piece draws together analysis on gender identity and post-humanism ideology.
By Jennifer Bilek/The 11th Hour Blog
The massive rearranging of western societies at warp speed, purportedly to address a human rights issue for a miniscule part of the population with identity issues, is the height of absurdity. That so many people have bought this ridiculous narrative and swallowed it whole as if they’d been living on a desert island and happened upon the first potential food source in a week, is a fantastic thing to behold.
People who understand the oppressive structure of corporate capitalism, who’ve been fighting its colonizing ravages at myriad fronts for the past two generations, are turning a blind eye to world governments, multi-national corporations, Big Banks, Big Tech and Big Pharma investments in the narrative of “wrong heads in wrong bodies” and the idea that men can be women. Likewise, no one is asking why they are investing in changing our language and our laws, disappearing women’s rights, supporting the drugging and mutilation of children and why the largest international law firm in the world is invested in the legal construction of “transgender children.”
It does not fit that all our human rights organizations, our institutions, our medical establishments, universities, and legal bodies are also simultaneously being engineered to this concept of gender identity and the tiny population of people who have identity issues focused on their sexed bodies, because they care. To think so, while we stand on a planet laid to waste because of corporate greed and malfeasance, is simply insane.
To believe such absurdities, we might as well be living inside a cult, much like Scientology, except global in scale.
Martine Rothblatt, a transsexual-transhumanist planted the seeds to foster a legal construct of disembodiment as identity, forged out of his paraphilia of owning female biology for himself, in the 1980’s. The advancement of his ideology that seeks to deconstruct sexual dimorphism in effort to cultivate the social and legal groundwork for melding humanity to AI, is too big a leap for many people to make. “Gender Identity” is a bridge to get you there. Transhumanism sounds like some sort of futuristic, dystopian sci-fi novel that could never actually materialize.
Yet what people don’t see is what Martine Rothblatt and the other elite corporatists colonizing human sex for profit do see – the advancements in technology and a totalitarian market that are rapidly moving us toward this melding. Most people do not see the technological advancements for governing the reproductive capacities of women or the colonization process underway toward that end. They do not see the correlations between transgenderism and transhumanism, which are vast and overlap, but are largely playing out in the different categories of human rights and scientific developments. Those different categories are only superficial, a political mask for social engineering purposes.
Scientists have created a Frog-robot from living skin and heart stem cells of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, a robot that mimics in many ways the frog it was molded from. The machines are tiny creatures, less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide, and can walk and swim, survive for weeks without food, and work together in groups. They, however, can’t evolve or recreate – yet. What’s unique about these creatures is that they can heal by themselves when wounded.
<Advancements in neuro prosthetic artificial limbs for humans have already melded humans with AI.
Bionic limbs can now go beyond being governed by the human mind. Sensors placed on the amputated limb, can now send muscle signals to the bionic arm which the AI in the mechanical arm then learns from, replicating human movement. The amputated limb melded to the new technology, can afford a sense of touch to the person whose limb has been removed.
At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s avant-garde research arm, the Biological Technologies Office (BTO), which opened in April 2014, aims to support extremely ambitious technologies ranging from powered exoskeletons for soldiers to brain implants that can control mental disorders. DARPA’s program managers at the BTO are free to pour tens of millions of dollars into ambitious projects without waiting around for niceties such as peer review. These developments are being studied at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Rothblatt has been a speaker at John Hopkins, the first hospital in the United States to perform surgeries for men who pretend to be female. His talks centered on digital immortality. He has also been involved in the human genome project and invented satellite radio. Rothblatt is a member of The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, funded by DARPA.
Lynn Conway, an 83-year-old man, who has posed as a woman since 1968, after marriage to a woman and fathering two children, is widely known for the Mead & Conway revolution in very large scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. He was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964, and was soon selected to join the architecture team designing an advanced supercomputer.
After learning of the pioneering research of Harry Benjamin in treating men who sexually desired female biology for their own and realizing that surgeries to hide one’s sex were suddenly possible, Conway sought Benjamin’s help and became his patient.
In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where he was a key architect of the Defense Department‘s Strategic Computing Initiative, a research program studying high-performance computing, autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology. He retired from active teaching and research in 1998, as professor emerita at University of Michigan – just one of many universities funded by the Pritzker family who have vast investments in both the medical industrial complex and the gender identity industry. Conway has lectured, along with Rothblatt at the University of Victoria British Columbia, Chair in Transgender Studies conferences, Moving Trans History Forward. The Trans Chair position was made possible with funding by Jennifer Pritzker, another man seeking to own female biology as his own. Conway, along with Rothblatt, has received an Honorary Doctorate from the University.
Conway, Like Rothblatt and Pritzker, are fierce advocates for LGBTQI.In 2009, Conway was named one of the “Stonewall 40 trans heroes” on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by the International Court System, one of the oldest and largest predominantly gay organizations in the world, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Petra de Sutter is another man pretending to be a woman, at the forefront of driving the technological colonization of female reproductive capacities, the gender identity industry, and the CRISPR technology poised to change the human race. He is a Belgian gynaecologist and politician representing the Groen party who has been a Deputy Prime Minister in the government of Prime Minister Alexander De Croo since 2020. He has also worked as professor of gynaecology at Ghent University, head of the Department of Reproductive Medicine at Ghent University Hospital (UZ Gent). He is the first transgenderminister in Europe. In addition to his role in the Senate, De Sutter served as member of the Belgian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2014 until 2019. He served as the Assembly’s rapporteur on children’s rights in relation to surrogacy arrangements (2016) and on the use of new genetic technologies in human beings (2017). In 2018, De Sutter discussed gene editing, transhumanism and the future of technological reproduction – sans women – in a TEDTalk.
Tim Gill, founder, Chairman and Chief Technology officer of Quark, Inc. a software corporation left his company in 2000 to create one of the largest LGBT NGOs in the US, pouring half a billion dollars into rearranging society to his cause, more recently gender identity ideology. He now operates a technologically sophisticated home-automation, AI company, for a luxury market.
We must understand the corporatism and social engineering at the root of the gender identity industry if we are to have any success in resisting the move toward transhumanism and post humanism. For the former, efforts are well underway, while society is being blindsided thinking they are supporting a human rights movement, when in fact, the ground is being cultivated for normalizing body dissociation by unmooring us from our roots in sex.
Posthumanism, is the end game of our species. If we do not turn this bullet train around now, we will enter an engineered evolution beyond what is human.
Jennifer’s article and the 11th hour blog can be reached here!
In this excerpt from her book Matriarchal Societies, Heide Goettner-Abendroth describes her journey to the shrine of Kali, which is at the meeting place of two streams. Heide’s writing brings to life the sacredness of both nature and women.
When they talk about her at all, Europeans describe the cult of Kali, India’s ancient great goddess, as being extremely bloody. It was apparent to me at the sanctuary of Dashkin Kali how many misinterpretations and western prejudices were tied up in this opinion. The narrow mountain road took me up the hill: below me the Katmandu Valley opened up in all it’s exotic beauty.
In the grey dawn, unimaginably high, blindingly white peaks of the Himalayas rose up behind the circle of mountains. Gradually it became apparent that the valley is shaped like a scallop shell, symbol of the fertile, creative goddess. And right there, set into the hills where the Bagmati River breaks through the Southern narrow mountains and leaves the Katmandu Valley behind, is the sacred place of Dakshin Kali. It lies hidden; only at the end of the road rounded, inwardly folded mountain, overgrown with the most luxurious green, was visible as a bright contrast against the dry, yellow-brown of the surrounding landscape. Even though it was dry season, two overflowing streams rushed down over this concave mountain, flowing together, V-shaped, into a small ravine. Not only in the nature religion of the Khasi, but all over India, the junction of two rivers is considered a sacred place, embodying the lap of Mother Earth from whom flow the endless waters of life.
The shrine of Dakshin Kali is markedly different from the Hindu temples and Buddhist stupas, in that it has kept, even today, the form of an old natural sancuary: a small, open place in the triangle where the two streams meet; shady, cool, and full of secrets in the green twilight of the gorge. I had to climb down to the goddess instead of climbing up to an imposing structure. There is no sacred building here; nothing keep nature out. Rather, the temple is the gorge itself. The site is marked by a low wall, and decorated with an arch over which a gilded yoni symbol hangs like a large drop of water, symbol of the uterus and female power. Covering the ground are clean black and white times, inset with a large six pointed star. This star, depicting two conjoined triangles, stands for the polarities whose powers create the cosmos.
A golden canopy, held up by four upwardly slanting golden snakes placed precisely in the four compass directions, stretches over this open air temple. Here again the snakes, the sacred “nagas” symbolize water, seen as the pure blood of the earth, and they symbolize the fertility that comes from the water, as well as divine female energies. The power of the depth, the transformation of life into death and death into life, is understood as “shakti”, or energy of the goddess Kali, whose small sculpture is at the knee-high back wall. A priest sat before her, bowed in deep prayer.
The assertion is that the basic spiritual shift in consciousness was from a reality-view that saw the entire cosmos as alive and fecund to a reality-view that saw the earth as meaningless matter to be used to battle the scarcity of the world. On the one hand, the human is at home on the earth sharing space with other cooperating neighbor species in a reality of mystery and power. On the other hand, one lives in a world of accumulation where fear of scarcity and survival is prevalent.
On a more profound level, one has spiritually severed oneself from a reality of participation in a living, abundant world and created a reality of scarcity and violence in which one is a competitive isolate in a meaningless world.
When a tree sprouts in the forest it begins to assemble life.
The tree extends its roots and no doubt makes contact with the mycelium of a mushroom, extending its energy flow and living relationship. It raises leaves to the sun and connects with that living energy system. It connects with water in the air and soil; it connects with the diverse soil community. The tree unifies energies in its living systems.
The life of the earth functions in its balanced way because each being lives according to its particular nature. The decentralized power of all life resides in each being. In contrast, the pattern of empire culture is to centralize power over life and consequently the natural patterns disintegrate.
A golf course, for example, appears very neat and orderly. With its edged borders, well-watered grass, and trees, it represents the epitome of orderliness to the mind conditioned by the culture of civilization. In the reality of earth life, created and conditioned by cosmic forces, it is a gross disorder. Where once stood a life potentiating, balanced and perpetual, dynamic, climax ecosystem with its diverse circulating energies and manifold variety of beings, there are now a few varieties of designer plants kept alive by chemicals and artificial water supplies. A staff of maintenance people are kept busy battling the integrated life of the earth that attempts to rescue this wound by sending in the plants, animals, and other life forms that are naturally adapted to live in the area.
Human life in the culture of civilization is severed from its source in a similar way.
It is alienated from its source. This profoundly affects the psychology of the humans involved. On the one hand, we humans as forager/hunters stand on the earth. When we eat from the earth, we have a certain dignity and security. Each one of the tribe has the culturally given knowledge of how to walk out on the earth and find food and shelter. It is a direct and intimate relationship.
In the culture of empire, people are dependent on other people for their food and shelter. They do not get their sustenance from their intimate relationship with the earth but from their manipulation of other humans in some manner. They exist in a vast productive mechanism that sucks materials from the earth to build an artificial reality such as a shopping mall where humans manipulate each other in order to achieve the needs of their existence.
The integrated nature of the organic form of the whole world and the adaptation of each form within is demonstrated by their place in the balanced metabolism of the whole. There is an organism within organic life that does not practice this balance within the metabolism. It practices a linear growth plan. This organism is the cancer cell within biological life and it does accurately reflect an analogy with the culture of civilization.
The cancer cell breaks the cooperative and sharing relationship with its fellow cells and becomes “God” as it were. “I am not satisfied with what has been given with this body, I shall create a body of my own design.” Instead of remaining integrated and adapted to the body it is part of, the cancer cells create a body of their own design and use the host’s body as its energy feed. This unlimited growth system of the cancerous tumor body built by the cells begins to colonized the body, establishing new cancer tumor bodies, all functioning in a parasitic metabolism until the host body dies.
This episode, recorded January 7th 2021 is a round table discussion of the January 6th protest and riots in Washington D.C. in the U.S. Capitol. The hosts for this episode are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan. They are joined by Saba Malik and Will Falk.
The discussion starts with Will outlining his work and allegiance to the natural world, and includes the needs for anti-civilization and a strong biophilic analysis. Saba is clear that the dominant US culture was founded upon kidnapping and genocide. Max describes the destruction of the systems of life support on Earth (soils, waters) and the current unrest is a sign of the collapse of empire. Jennifer describes the insanity of the recent events and asserts that people are literally going mad. Saba relates the earth as an organism in crisis because she is being killed and the behaviour of some people demonstrates the crisis and insanity.
Max, Will, Saba and Jennifer are clear that preparation, community building, and self-defense is needed as we see more economic and environmental collapse.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service.
Jennifer Murnan is a US based feminist activist and environmental campaigner. Jennifer is involved in projects focused on growing and supporting gynocentric communities, and is co – host of The Green Flame podcast.
Will Falk is a member of Deep Green Resistance, he is a writer, lawyer, and environmental activist.
Saba Malik is a mother of two and has been a feminist and anti-racist activist for most of her adult life.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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