The man box is full of proof. Except that there is no man box, the man box can never be filled, and real men don’t need proof.
Let’s start with Abraham and Isaac. You know the story. God tells Abraham to slit his child’s throat. Abraham ties up his son, raises the knife, and at the last moment God says it was a test. End of story. Lesson? Abraham shows, by his willingness to violate his child, the proof of his worth. And Isaac learns that his father was willing to kill him rather than act against the cult of masculinity, against the rules of the man box.
There are many rules of the man box, even though there is no man box, and there are no rules. Why call it a box when it’s the way things are? And why call it a rule when it’s who you are?
Rule 1: There is no man box.
Rule 2: There is no box but the man box, and thou shalt have no other boxes before it.
Rule 3: That’s the way things are.
Rule 4: That’s who you are.
So I’m in a restaurant, and I overhear one guy say to another that he’s in pain. The other responds, “Suck it up. When are you going to quit being such a woman?”
So yes, I understand that men are taught to not feel. Yes, I understand that the cult of masculinity is all about not feeling. I understand that must be hard. But honestly, I don’t give a shit about understanding the emotional state of members of the cult of masculinity, except insofar as that understanding might help stop them. It’s a bit late in the game to be worried about the feelings of perpetrators.
The ones I care about are their victims, because the man box isn’t about putting men in a box, it’s about putting everyone else in a box, the box of other, of less than, of trophies, the box of the violable, the box of targets, the box of victims, the box of the violated, the box of proof of the men’s own manhood.
Have you ever done the math on how many women who are alive right now have been raped? There are almost seven billion people on the planet, so there are about 3.5 billion women. About one in four women is raped in her lifetime, and another one in five fend off rape attempts. So more than 800 million women living today will be raped in their lifetimes. Let’s say half of those have not yet been raped. So 400 million women living now have been raped.
And another now.
And another now.
This also means, among many other things, that unless a few men are excruciatingly busy, there are a lot of rapists out there, a lot of members of the cult of masculinity, a lot of men who adhere to the rules of the man box.
But you already knew that.
But of course there is no man box, and there can be no man box, because if there were a man box, that would mean there’s something outside the man box, and there’s nothing outside the man box because there can be nothing outside the man box, and there can be nothing outside the man box because there must be nothing outside the man box.
Because if there were, well, there isn’t, and can’t be, and mustn’t be.
Because if there were, that would mean members of the cult of masculinity aren’t as omnipotent—as completely potent—as they must be. And also because if there were, why would any victims put up with this shit?
So there must not be a man box, because everything is part of the man box.
That is, everything is violable. And everything must be violated.
Rule 5, which is actually Rule 1, which is actually the only rule there is: I exist only insofar as I violate you.
But of course rule 5 does not exist. Nor does rule 1.
The other day I saw an astronomer saying why he thought it was important to explore Mars and other planets: “It will,” he said, “answer that most important question of all: Are we all alone?”
I have an even more important question: is he fucking crazy?
No, just a member of the cult of masculinity.
Did you know that 200 years ago there were flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time? And flocks of Eskimo curlews so thick that ten, fifteen, twenty birds would fall to a single shot? There were so many whales in the North Atlantic they were a hazard to shipping, and there were runs of salmon so thick they would keep you awake all night with the slapping of their tails against the water. And he asks if we are alone?
Only if you’re a member of the cult of masculinity, in which case you are of course alone, with other members of your cult, because you have declared yourself to be the only one who matters, the one who does to as opposed to everyone else, to whom it is done.
Did you know that this culture is driving two hundred species extinct each and every day? Did you know that stolid scientists are saying the oceans could be devoid of fish in fifty years?
And do you know why?
And did you know that the world used to be filled with thousands of vibrant human cultures? And that human cultures are being driven extinct at an even faster relative rate than nonhuman species?
And do you know why?
The man box is full of women. It is full of passenger pigeons. It is full of whales. It is full of indigenous humans. The man box is full of the entire world.
But the man box isn’t full, because the man box—which does not exist—can never be full.
The psychiatrist R.D. Laing famously asked, “How do you plug a void plugging a void?”
That’s the question, isn’t it?
But of course it isn’t the question because men don’t have a void, and if they did have a void they certainly wouldn’t plug it with a void.
Someone once told me that any hatred—or maybe any void—felt long enough no longer feels like hatred, but rather like religion, or economics, or science, or tradition, or just the way things are.
With all the world at stake I need to speak plainly. The problem is that within this patriarchy, identity itself is based on violation. Violation becomes not merely an action but an identity: who you are, and how you and society define who you are. Within this patriarchy men’s masculinity defines itself by identifying others—any and all others—as inferior (which is why those stupid fucking scientists can ask “Are we all alone?” as they destroy the extraordinary life on this planet), and as being therefore violable, and then violating them. For men under this patriarchy, these acts of violating others are how we become who we are. They validate who we are. They then reaffirm who we are, as through these repeated acts of violation we come to perceive each new violation as reinforcement not only of our superiority over this other we violated but as simply the way things are.
So without this identification of others as inferior, without this violation, we are not. We are a void. And so we must fill this void, fill it with validations of our superiority, fill it with violations. Thus the rapes. Thus the violation of every boundary set up by every indigenous culture. Thus the extinctions. Thus the insane belief in an economic system based on infinite growth despite the fact that we live on a finite planet. Thus the refusal to accept any limits on technological progress—more properly termed technological escalation, as it really involves an escalation of the wielders’ ability to control and violate at a distance—or on scientific “knowledge.” Thus the sending of probes to penetrate the deepest folds of the ocean floor. Thus the bombing of the moon.
What makes this problem even worse is that because there are always those who have yet to be violated, and because this violation isn’t really solving the needs it purports to meet—it’s a void plugging a void—this drive to violate is insatiable.
This culture will continue to violate, until there is nothing left to violate, nothing left.
So what is at stake in this whole discussion is life on this planet. This cult of masculinity must not merely be left, and must not merely be exposed. It must be destroyed, or it will continue to violate its way to the end of all that is alive.
But before we can leave this cult we must understand that it is not all that is. That there is a cult of masculinity, and there is a man box, and you can leave them both. Burn this into your heart: this imperative to violate is not natural. It is cultural.
And we must resist every effort by the abusers, by the violators, to “naturalize” this drive to violate. For this is what abusers, violators, must do. They must attempt to convince themselves and everyone else that their way is the only way, that there is no other way. They must convince themselves and everyone else that not only is there nowhere outside the cult of masculinity, nowhere outside the man box, but indeed there exists neither a cult of masculinity nor a man box.
There is only this one way of life, which is not just a way of life because it encompasses all that is or ever was or ever will be. It is everything.
They say.
But they are lying, to themselves and to you. Even if they have an entire culture to back them up, they are still lying.
We must never forget that. There is a cult of masculinity, and there is a man box, and we can leave them. We can not only leave them. We can destroy them. We must. With all the world at stake, we must.
Some days, queer theory feels like an elaborate practical joke.
I’m writing this after a good four hours spent in a marathon Twitter exchange, so forgive me if I’m a little short. The man in question was your average trans dude, berating women for their refusal to accept his identification as female; he did not take well to the news that, black choker and bad haircut aside, he wasn’t actually a woman. Over dozens of obnoxious Tweets, he accused so-called “TERFs” of “gatekeeping femininity,” “denying him womanhood,” and deciding that he wasn’t “worthy of the feminine.” Yes, he was actually claiming that his inability to wear fuck-me pumps was 1) due to the heartless machinations of radical feminists, and 2) evidence of oppression. Amazingly, all of this was said with a straight – and heavily painted – face.
This idea that men suffer greatly from being “denied” femininity is becoming more and more common. You can’t go far in queer circles without seeing males lament their inability to freely wear high heels, corsets, lipstick, and other feminine gender markers. The implication is always that women are comparatively privileged because femininity is socially acceptable for them, whereas these poor men are endlessly mocked, shamed, and even brutalized for dressing as they do – unlike women, of course, who never experience violence in public places from masculine men.
This whole idea is really, really stupid. Femininity is ritualized submission, a set of culturally enforced behaviors created by men to make obvious the division of power in society. The alternate belief – that femininity and masculinity just exist, and that some people are magically born with an innate connection to one or the other – is fundamentally conservative, even if the category of “naturally submissive people” is defined by an intangible identity instead of the physical body. It isn’t something anyone, but especially men, should be reifying into a valuable or fulfilling practice.
Some men sidestep this by saying that femininity isn’t inherently submissive; it’s only seen that way because society denigrates anything associated with women. But while it’s definitely true that anything women do in our culture is automatically devalued, it’s just historically inaccurate to argue that our culture’s feminine markers somehow preexist their association with inferiority. Things like face paint and tunics may be found all cultures, but their specific social construction inside patriarchy was defined by the need men had to delineate oppressor from oppressed.
Just like European domination constructed race, male domination constructed gender. And just like white people have always alternatively denigrated and fetishized non-white culture, many men find vacationing in femininity to be a delightfully naughty transgression. Somehow, this narcissism is passed off as some kind of radical strike against gender norms – as if men doing exactly what they want to do, regardless of how it impacts women, is a particularly novel thing. There is nothing edgy or dangerous about playing around with the tools you invented to maintain your privilege. People with dicks “empowering” femininity is no more effective than people with white skin “reclaiming” racial slurs.
The male embrace of feminine gender markers is to sex what gentrification is to class: The ultimate insult of the powerful. We build a cage, toss in our victims, and then demand they leave the best seat open when we want to drop by and visit. Amazon executives do it when they spend their nights “experiencing the culture” of Seattle neighborhoods their tech industry is destroying. Dreadlocked trust fund kids do it when they play at poverty for a summer on the fortune their daddies made repossessing homes. And men do it when we decide that women’s chains also happen to really bring out our cheek bones.
The narrative of “exclusion from femininity” hinges on the idea that a man being told no and a woman’s right to say no being removed are equally oppressive. But oppression doesn’t work that way. When men are prevented from wearing high heels and lipstick to work, it’s a bummer – when women are prevented from not wearing high heels and lipstick to work, it’s a human rights violation. Discomfort with power is never worse than any level of comfort with powerlessness. Sorry, but a master who wants to be a slave is still a master.
There’s nothing particularly tragic about the oppressor being unable to take on the markers the oppressed. There is, however, something almost audaciously shitty about mourning your exclusion from the category of Who Gets to Be Hurt while we consign billions of women to die inside its boundaries. As men, we are born with the privilege to live free of constriction, modification, and mutilation. The vast majority of women on Earth are not as lucky. Throughout history, but especially in the last century, womenacrosstheworld have engaged in struggle to dismantle the system of compulsory femininity. Yet somehow, quite a few First World men have decided the real injustice is being unable to adopt what women are literally dying to reject.
Originally published at Gender Detective August 31, 2015.
It’s easy enough, some sixty years after the fact, for us to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism. It’s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then, they would certainly have had the courage to stand up for discourse and to stand up for those being blacklisted. That’s partly because universities like to present themselves as bastions of free thought and discourse, where students, faculty, and guests discuss the most important issues of the day. Liberal academics especially like to present themselves as encouraging of these discussions.
Bullshit.
A new McCarthyism—complete with blacklisting—has overtaken universities, and discourse in general, and far from opposing it, liberal academics are its most active and ardent perpetrators, demanding a hegemony of thought and discourse that rivals the original.
For the past decade or so, deplatforming—the disinvitation of a speaker at the insistence of a special interest group—and blacklisting have been, to use the word of an organization that tracks the erosion of academic freedom through the increased use of deplatforming, “exploding.” Between 2002 and 2013, disinvitations from universities went up six times. And no longer are the primary blacklisters the capitalists (as was the case in the 1950s) or the pro-Israel lobby (as it has been for the past few decades). The pro-Israel lobby is still blacklisting like mad, but it’s been overtaken these days in the anti-free-speech sweepstakes by those who often consider themselves the brave heirs of Mario Savio: the liberals and leftists. And the targets of the liberals and leftists are not confined to the right (although they do certainly target right-wingers as well). Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges was recently deplatformed because he speaks out against prostitution as exploitative of women. Only outcry by women forced the college to reinstate him. Writer and activist Gail Dines was recently deplatformed because she speaks out against pornography. Last year an anarchist organization called “Civil Liberties Defense Center” lent its efforts to attempts to deplatform writer and activist Lierre Keith from the University of Oregon because she’s a radical feminist. The irony of an organization with “civil liberties” in its title attempting to deplatform someone because her ideology doesn’t fit its own doesn’t escape me, and probably won’t escape anyone outside of anarchist/liberal/leftist circles. Last year, female genital mutilation survivor, child bride survivor, and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree at Brandeis because she writes, from unspeakably painful experience, about how millions of women are treated under Islam.
Capitalists used the rhetoric of “communism” to blacklist. The pro-Israel lobby uses the rhetoric of “Anti-Semitism.” And the modern-day McCarthys use the rhetoric of “oppression” and “trauma.”
Things have gotten bad enough that comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy have all said they can’t or won’t play colleges any more. As fellow-comedian Bill Maher commented, “When Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry the Cable Guy say you have a stick up your ass, you don’t have to wait for the X-rays to come back. That’s right, a black, a Jew and a redneck all walk onto a college campus and they all can’t wait to leave.”
Things have gotten bad enough that this spring The Onion put out a satirical piece titled, “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty, Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.” The article concludes with fictitious college President Kevin Abrams stating, “‘Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.’ Abrams told reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made uncomfortable by the viewpoint.”
Things are much worse than I’ve so far made them seem. Brown University recently held a debate about sexual assault on campus. In response to the very existence of this debate—and this time it’s not The Onion reporting, but rather The New York Times—the college set up a “safe space” where those who might be made uncomfortable, or to use the politically correct parlance, “triggered,” by the debate could remove to relax with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” A student gave her reason for using the safe room: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”
Silly me. I thought being challenged was a primary point of college.
Over the past few years I’ve talked to several university instructors (especially adjuncts) who’ve told me they’re afraid of their students. Not physically, as in their students killing them, but rather they fear that uttering any opinion that any of their students—either
conservative or liberal: it swings both ways—find objectionable will lead to that student complaining to the administration, after which the instructor may lose her or his classes, in effect be fired. And I just read an essay by an instructor in which he mentions an adjunct whose contract was not “renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.”
The political correctness posse has started coming after me. I’ve been deplatformed twice this year, by liberals at Appalachian State and Oregon State Universities. The logic behind the deplatformings makes an interesting case study in the McCarthyism and circular firing squad mentality of the liberal academic class.
Part of what’s interesting to me about these deplatformings is that given what I write about—my work more or less constantly calls for revolution—I always thought it was inevitable that I’d start getting deplatformed, just as I’m always detained when I cross international borders, but I thought this deplatforming would come from the right. Not so. It’s come from the left, and, well, to use a cliché, it’s come out of left field.
To be clear, I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written scores of lines like, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written about the necessity of using any means necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written about taking down capitalism. I’ve never been deplatformed for making the satirical modest proposal that a way to stop environmental destruction is to attach remote controlled cigar cutters to the genitals of CEOs, politicians, and land managers who claim their decisions won’t harm the land (let them put their genitals where their mouths are, I say (which is something they’ve probably already tried to do)) and when their decisions harm the land, well, bzzzt, and I guarantee the next CEO, politician, or land manager won’t be quite so quick to make false promises. I’ve never been deplatformed for calling in all seriousness for Tony Hayward, ex-CEO of BP, to be tried and if found guilty executed for murdering workers in the Gulf of Mexico, and for murdering the Gulf itself. I can say all of those things, and not have the slightest fear of deplatforming.
Why was I deplatformed? In both cases because I hold the evidently politically incorrect position that women, including those who have been sexually assaulted by males, should not be forced—as in, against their will—to share their most intimate spaces with men. I’ve been deplatformed because I believe that women have the right to bathe, sleep, gather, and organize free from the presence of men.
That’s it.
Yes, I think it’s ridiculous, too.
Even though I wasn’t going to talk about this right of women at all, but rather the murder of the planet, a small group of students—in this case those who identify as transgender—at Applachian State was given veto power over whether I would speak at the university. They said that my mere presence on campus would be “an offense” to their community. Bingo: disinvitation. I was likewise deplatformed from Oregon State because, in the words of the professors who deplatformed me, my presence would “hurt the feelings” of the students who identify as transgender. Never mind, once again, that I wasn’t going to talk about them at all.
Do we all see what’s wrong with deplatforming someone because he or she may hurt someone’s feelings? Once again, silly me: I thought I’d been invited to speak at a university, not a day care center.
My recollection of the universities I have attended or taught at is that a primary purpose was to foster critical thinking and the exploration of vital issues of the day, not to protect students from anything that might “hurt their feelings.” A purpose was to help them become functioning adults in a pluralistic society. Clearly, that’s gone by the boards. And I wasn’t even going to talk about transgender issues, which means it would be my mere presence that would hurt their feelings. Do we all see what is very wrong with basing campus and regional discourse on whether someone’s feelings will be hurt, and worse, on “hurt feelings” that won’t even be based on what the blacklisted speaker was actually going to talk about? What does it mean to our society and to discourse that one group of people—anygroup of people—is allowed to hold campus and regional discourse hostage by threatening that their feelings may be hurt? Should Christians be able to deplatform Richard Dawkins because he hurts their feelings? Should atheists be able to deplatform Christians because the Christians hurt their feelings? Capitalists are killing the planet. The murder of the planet certainly hurts my feelings. So let’s deplatform all the capitalists.
The kicker on me getting deplatformed because my presence would be an “offense” to, and “hurt the feelings” of, those students who identify as transgender, is that not only was I not going to talk about them, I barely even write about them. I’ve done the math, and out of the literally millions of words I’ve written for publication, only .14 percent (yes, that’s point 14 percent) of those words have to do with their issues: two short essays, only written after my female comrades began receiving a host of rape and death threats simply for wanting to sleep, bathe, gather, and organize free from the presence of males (and you’d think that rape and death threats by men who object to women wanting space away from men would be the end of the discussion: it is, but not in the way you think: it’s the end of the discussion because the men win and the women and their allies get deplatformed). .14 percent of my work is 1.4 words per every thousand. That’s the equivalent of five words in this entire essay. Even if it were worthwhile to deplatform me over the issue at all, they’re deplatforming me because they disagree with .14 percent of my work. Hell, I disagree with a lot more than that. The cult-like demand of loyalty on the part of the new McCarthyites is so rigid that 99.86 percent agreement does not suffice.
And the essays they object to weren’t even disrespectful (which is more than I can say for my treatment of, say, capitalists), just a political and philosophical disagreement.
Part of the problem is that a terrible (and manipulative) rhetorical coup has taken place in academia, where political and philosophical disagreement have been redefined as “disrespect” and “traumatizing” and “hurting their feelings,” such that the “victims” may have to dash off to a “safe space” to play with Play-Doh and watch videos of puppies. As the (highly problematical) professor and writer Laura Kipnis puts it, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” A fearful college instructor observed, “Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.”
That is a rhetorical coup because it makes discourse impossible. Those who perpetuate or support this coup have made it impossible to talk about the subject (or, clearly, any subject, including the murder of the planet), because any disagreement on any “triggering” subject is immediately labeled as a lack of acceptance and as disrespect.
To be clear, if no one is allowed to disagree with any one particular group of people—whether they be Christians or Muslims or capitalists or those who support (or oppose) Israel or those who identify as transgender, or, for that matter, members of the chess club—for fear their feelings will be hurt, then there can be no reasonable discourse. And if the purpose of a college lecture series is to make sure that no one’s feelings will be hurt, there can be no speakers. Allowing any group to hold discourse hostage to their feelings is the death knell for pluralistic society. It leads to fundamentalism. It is a fundamentalism.
It’s a classic trick used by despots and pocket despots everywhere: to ensure agreement with your position, make certain that all other positions are literally unspeakable. For the religiously minded, the epithet of choice has often been blasphemy. For the patriot, it’s traitor. For the capitalist, it’s commie. And for the liberal/leftist/anarchist, it’s oppressor.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
When I was a sophomore in college, the Colorado School of Mines invited Edward Teller to speak. One of my classes required attendance. The lecture was precisely what one would expect from one of the worst human beings of the twentieth century. But some thirty-five years later, the only thing I remember of that year-long class consisted of the great classroom discussion the next day, with some students hating him and others defending him. The professors—no fans of Teller’s insanity—used this as an opportunity to teach their twenty-year-old charges to build and defend an argument. Why did you find his views so offensive? Defend your position. Convince us.
To my mind, that is the point of college.
I once asked my friend the Okanagan activist Jeannette Armstrong what she thought of an attack by another writer on Jerry Mander’s book In the Absence of the Sacred. Her answer has guided my life and career: if he didn’t like the book, he should have written his own damn book.
And that is the point of writing.
So, if you disagree with me, great! If you think women don’t have the right to gather free from the presence of males, then make your argument. If you feel Israel is not committing atrocities, then make your argument. If you feel capitalism is the most just and desirable social arrangement possible and that communism is the devil’s handiwork, then make your argument. In each case make the best argument you can. Show that your position is correct. Make your argument so sound that no sane person could disagree with you (and lots of people—sane or otherwise—will still disagree with you: that’s the fucking point of living in a pluralistic society). And when somebody doesn’t agree with you, don’t fucking whine that your feelings are hurt or that you’re offended by an opinion different than your own, but instead use that disagreement to hone your own arguments for future disagreement. Or change your perspective based on that disagreement.
That is the point of college.
We’re not all going to get along. But no one is saying you have to invite every speaker into your home. No one is saying you have to accept them into your internet- or face-to-face-discussion groups. No one is saying you have to like them. No one is saying you have to listen to them. Hell, no one is even saying you have to acknowledge their existence. But if you fear a certain discussion or lecture is going to traumatize you such that you need to go blow bubbles and watch videos of puppies, then maybe you should just not attend that discussion or lecture, and later on maybe you should discuss those feelings with a therapist. Don’t project your triggers onto your fellow students. Don’t deprive everyone else of something because you object or because it might trigger you. It is not everyone else’s—or the world’s—responsibility to never make you uncomfortable.
That’s the point of living in a pluralistic society.
I blame society for this mess. Every indicator is that people are becoming significantly more narcissistic and less empathetic: as Scientific American reported back in 2010, “A study of 14,000 college students found that today’s young people are 40 percent less empathetic than college kids from 30 years ago,” and noted that “the sharpest drop in empathy occurred in the last nine years.” The article reports that “today’s students are less likely to agree with statements like, ‘I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective’ and ‘I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me [sic].’” So it should not come as a surprise that these students demand and expect that public discourse be formed so as to not “hurt their feelings.” Pretty much everything in this society—from capitalism to consumerism to incessant advertising and corporate culture to the selfish gene theory to neoliberalism to postmodernism to the superficiality of Internet culture—reinforces this narcissism. How many decades ago was “The Me Decade”? And how much worse has it become since then? Well, about 40 percent.
I also blame liberals/leftists/anarchists, who are in some ways merely replicating the Stanford Prison Experiment, in that having gained some power in the Academy, they’re using that power the same way that capitalists or anybody else who gains power so often does, by denying voice to anyone who disagrees with them.
And I blame the groundlessness of postmodernism, with its assertion that meaning is not inherent in anything, that there are no truths, and that each person’s perception of reality is equally valid. As well as destroying class consciousness—which is one reason modern blacklisting is often based on claims of how some speaker will supposedly hurt or trigger the individual, rather than emphasizing harm or gain to society as a whole—postmodernism has led to much of the insanity we’re discussing. As philosopher Daniel Dennett commented, “Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.” And if all you’ve got is rhetoric, that is, “interpretations” and “assertions,” as opposed to, say, factual evidence, then the only way, or at least the most tempting way, to conclusively win an argument is through rhetorical manipulations. If you can’t say, “Your opinion is wrong, and here are facts showing your opinion is wrong,” you’re pretty much stuck with, “Your opinion is oppressing me, triggering me, hurting my feelings.” And that’s precisely what we see. And of course we can’t argue back, in part because nobody can verify or falsify your feelings, and in part because by then we’ve already been deplatformed.
Among other problems, this is all very bad thinking.
And finally I blame the professors themselves. The word education comes from the root e-ducere, and means “to lead forth” or “draw out.” Originally it was a Greek midwife’s term meaning “to be present at the birth of.” The implication is that the educator is an adult, who is helping to give birth to the student’s capacity for critical thinking, and to the student’s adult form. This is not accomplished by making certain that no one be allowed to speak who might “hurt their feelings.” This is not accomplished by protecting students from “viewpoints that go against . . . dearly and closely held beliefs.” It’s accomplished by challenging students at every moment to be better thinkers, challenging them to question their own assumptions, challenging them to defend their positions with far more intellectual rigor than merely stating, “That hurt my feelings.”
I blame the professors also for not standing up for discourse itself. If you’re going to be a professor, if you’re going to be a midwife present at the birth of the critical minds of your students, then defending free and open discourse should be a calling and a duty. It should be a passion. It takes no courage whatsoever to fail to stand up to attempts to destroy discourse, whether the blacklisters are capitalists, the pro-Israel lobby, leftists, liberals, or students who perceive themselves (and who are evidently perceived by professors) as so fragile their feelings will be hurt by dissenting opinions, their feelings which must be protected no matter the cost to society and to discourse. This failure of courage does great injury to everyone, including the students perceived as needing protection from disagreement. I wish the professors understood that their job is to be educators, not baby-sitters (and codependent baby-sitters, at that). I wish the professors were defenders of discourse.
Editor’s Note: This video was streamed live on May 14, 2015, by TRTV Show Real Talk. Deep Green Resistance volunteers transcribed the dialogue, published here.
Mark: Hello, hello, and good evening and welcome to transition radio live from the land of enchantment: Silver City, New Mexico. My name is Mark Angelo Cummings.
Lynna: And I’m Lynna Arielle Lopez, and I’ll be your hostess.
Mark: Yes, and I am your host, hostess. Gender, what is gender?
Lynna: Male? Female?
Mark: We’re human beings. The way I always like to say, we’re spirits having a human experience.
Lynna: That’s right.
Mark: Some of us have taken this human experience a little too far. It’s all about growing and learning. And talking about learning and growing, you get to know your true friends are all about times of situations when you no longer sing the same tune that you used to sing before, and then people freak out. They attack you, they unfriend you. They go as far as to take away your livelihood.
Lynna: Sabotage maybe.
Mark: Yes, sabotage. I wanted to share a little email that we got from somebody who was giving us a heads up on who actually contacted the sponsors. The email goes:
Just a heads up Mark, this was posted in FTM Wolf Pack. Josh Ortiz—good friend apparently….
Lynna: Fellow FTM
Mark: Yes, which I thought.
“What can we do to stop him”, he quotes. “That’s what I’ve got to know. I work closely with Spunk Lube”—one of our sponsors—“I contacted them yesterday morning and advised them of his agenda. They pulled their sponsorship immediately. Same with the Breast Form Store. I contacted them also and they pulled their sponsorship” He stated: “he will be teaming up with hardcore right-wing conservatives. My fear with that is this: the 1% has 99% of the funds. The funds they will gladly pay to someone like his dumb ass”—he’s referring to me—“and their agenda. What can we do?” Well it seems to me that they’re actually threatening. God knows we’ve already got some threats on Gender Trender “we know where you live.” This is bizarre. Truly Bizarre.
Lynna: All because we want to say the truth.
Mark: Because we want to expose that this whole transgender—gender dysphoria—is all a lie. We’re going to have shows about that, explaining what we mean by “it’s all a lie”, and go into greater details. Really put some light on this subject.
Lynna: Transition Radio TV is more like transitioning from that thought to a new type of thought.
Mark: Like our intro says: a new beginning, a new way of thinking, a new way of being. This whole concept of black and white, people have to realize that there are so many shades of grey.
Lynna: So thanks to Josh we don’t have a sponsor for our show anymore. Thank you Josh. We’re going to be looking for new mainstream sponsors to sponsor our program.
Mark: Individuals that believe in what we’re doing are always telling me they didn’t help us because this has been our focus. We plan to take this to the next level. We plan to educate: do seminars, talk in schools, and try to prevent this black and white you’re either a boy or a girl. We need to stop this mentality and especially stop these drugs that are being given to our kids. The blockers, and hormones and 14 year olds having their breasts cut off. I look back on what I’ve done. I want to have a show especially on this, and really pour my heart out in what’s created these changes in me.
Tonight we have two amazing ladies, Michelle Peixinho and Mary Lou Singleton. Michelle San Buenaventura Peixinho is a Filipino-American originally from Manilla and Honolulu. She has been living in Rio Arriba with her family since 2000.
Lynna: Michelle has over 20 years non-profit experience beginning in 1992 with the environmental, and environmental justice movement. She has worked as a community leader, organizer, program manager, development director and executive director. Since moving to northern New Mexico she was appointed by the governor to serve on the New Mexico Women’s Health Council from 2005-2009. Michelle served as a Midwives of Color section chair for the Midwives Alliance of North America from 2008-2010.
Mark: Michelle holds a Bachelor degree and is a certified professional midwife and a licensed midwife in the state of New Mexico.
Mary Lou Singleton was raised in an Irish Catholic working class family in a dying steel town during the Reagan recession. She has been a lifelong advocate for the rights of females.
Lynna: After graduating from Grinnell College she moved to Albuquerque New Mexico to study midwifery and herbalism, and has lived in New Mexico since. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the Midwives Alliance of North America and the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives, and worked for over 15 years as a busy home-birth attendant.
Mark: Welcome to the show, the lovely Mary Lou and Michelle.
Mary Lou & Michelle: Thank you. Thanks for having us on.
Mark: It’s a pleasure, it’s a pleasure.
We were watching some videos earlier today to get a little glimpse of the lives of midwives and what they actually do, since it’s pretty much gone to the wayside. Or am I wrong, is it something that’s still very much used nowadays? Or is the grim hospital what waits for pregnant women?
Michelle: Only about 1% of the babies in this country are born at home. Compare that to a country like the Philippines—or another developing country—where almost 60% of the babies are born outside of the hospital. So that’s how far we’ve come in our use of the hospital.
Lynna: Is that in a very short amount of time? Within the last 30-40 years?
Mary Lou: Before World War II about 90% of births occurred outside of the hospital, and since the 50’s it’s turned to 99% of births happening in the hospital. It very much paralleled the industrialization in the rest of our culture, turning everything into a mechanized scientific process rather than a natural process.
Mark: My great grandmother in Cuba was a Midwife…
Mary Lou: Great, you’ve got it in your blood!
Mark: It’s pretty sad though that society, and the human race, puts so much trust in the medical system. They don’t even realize that the medical system is not there to help them. That includes the process of birthing.
Michelle: It is a market driven system. Bottom line. When you have a market driven system those are going to be the priorities. Right now our maternal health system is such that we have natural assets right there in the room that we are not even utilizing. In fact we are negating, and making it impossible to utilize them. That is what is embodied in the woman herself, in her body. The hormones and the biological system that is available to us if we wanted to use it, and the natural world; the plant life, and the animal life, the spirit life, whatever it is that we have access to. Those are things that are extremely powerful, and at the heart of midwifery and child birthing that is not presently used at all in maternal health in hospitals.
Lynna: In a hospital setting when the woman is pregnant, the hospital and the doctors all encourage them to just go with whatever is available in the hospital. They install a fear of complications and issues that may arise. That’s one of the first things I hear when people say “Oh you’re going to have a baby at home with a midwife. Don’t you know that you could run into all kinds of complications?” What do you say about that?
Mary Lou: Our species has been very successful at reproducing. We’ve taken over the entire planet. Birth works really well. If it didn’t work so well we wouldn’t have evolved to the point where we have hospitals. I think for a healthy low-risk woman, birth 90% of the time will happen just fine attended by conscious careful loving midwives who can, like Michelle said, channel that power that is inside the body that comes through our biology and life. Everything in the hospital is designed to suppress that power and to turn off maternal instinct—to turn the woman into the patient.
Michelle: Not just only to suppress but to appropriate. So for example: we’re not even allowing a woman to access her own pituitary process to produce the hormones that stimulate the uterus and create labor. Instead what we’re doing is using a synthetic form of it called Pitocin, which was the first synthesized human hormone ever: Oxytocin. So Pitocin is the synthetic form. So not only are we just not using it, we’re actually appropriating it. Medicine is appropriating it, synthesizing it, putting its own name on it, then disallowing us to utilize our own endocrine system—what our own pituitary gland could produce—and then pumping women full of this synthetic hormone instead.
Mary Lou: Close to 100% of women giving birth in a hospital will see that synthetic hormone either during delivery—most of them during delivery—and definitely after delivery if they haven’t received it before.
Mark: That seems to be the wave of the future with everything. Everything is synthetic and then our own bodies stop producing certain things and we become like robots. Back in the day before there were hospitals, and even before there were midwives, women would have the babies on their own. It was just a very natural thing. You pushed—you know they were all working on the field then—until there she is or there he is. We’ve lost our way; we’ve become so dumbed down and so mechanized. It’s like we’re robots. It’s really sad that people can’t think for themselves. They don’t realize that they could tap into their own healing ability. And tap into mother earth. She provides everything we need.
Mary Lou: Absolutely. What I’ve witnessed in hospital birth is that no other mammalian species would put up with being treated that way during birth. A cat would rip your face off if you were treating her that way when she was giving birth.
Mark: Exactly.
Mary Lou: They are very much destroying our instincts, destroying our innate power.
Mark: So what got you interested in midwifery? What was the ah-hah! moment to enter that profession?
Michelle: We all have different very unique stories. I didn’t even know anything about midwifery when I was first pregnant. I was homeless, and was doing my prenatal care at San Francisco General Hospital. I was very intimidated by the authoritarian nature of the hospital. I felt very child-like when I went in there. This was before I had recovered my childhood incest memories, but for some reason I was very repelled by the idea of trying to get this baby out of my body in the midst of these authoritarian figures that really seemed to trigger me. I didn’t understand it all at the time, but I was blessed somehow.
The creator guided me—at 7 months pregnant—to friends who told me “you know you can have your baby at home with the midwife, you don’t have to have your baby that way.” I didn’t know that! I hit the road. We went up to Oregon where midwives are much more accessible than in the Bay area where I was at the time. I shacked up at a friend’s house at a mobile home park, space number 34. That’s where I pushed my baby out. That changed the course of not only my parenting, my relationship with my child, and my own body sovereignty, but also my trust in myself to make health care choices for my children, to trust nature, and the power of nature. So I was able to then use natural remedies for my children. I might not have been able to develop that relationship and that trust otherwise. It was through my own body first. Being a 19 year incest survivor, really it was the first time that my body did me right. I was so grateful. It was the first time that I said “oh,wow, this shit works”. It felt powerful. So that’s why I became a midwife, because I really realized at that moment how important that was: the power that I experienced.
Mark: And what about you Mary Lou?
Mary Lou: Me? I sort of came out of the womb this way. Just really angry about the patriarchy, and justice. Ever since I was little I wanted to help women have babies. I remember being very small, in kindergarten or first grade. I was told that means you want to be an obstetrician. So I was pretty good at school, I went through grade school and high-school thinking I was going to be a doctor. Went to college, and in my sophomore year took a class called Sex and Culture and learned about midwifery in a contemporary context. I didn’t even know it existed before that. It was the classic light bulb, this is what I’ve always wanted to do, I just didn’t know there was name for it.
So I immediately dropped organic chemistry—which I hated—and I started working towards being a midwife. I studied with a birth center. Before I had children I was in college. I studied with a group of nurse midwifes and saw my first births which was amazing. The next summer I lived on a farm with one of the founders of a well-known midwife organization. Then I moved to New Mexico to be a midwife.
Like Michelle, I had my first baby at home. I’m also, like so many women, a sexual abuse survivor. I had been at war with my body since childhood. Very much hated my body, always wore big clothes, bound my breasts, didn’t want any male sexual attention, or wanted too much, acting out hyper-sexually. Like Michelle, when I gave birth, it healed me. I realized my body rocks. I just made a human being and pushed it out. Now I’m feeding it with my breast. I’m a freaking super hero. It made me feel powerful and intact; and not in a way of having power over someone else, but being in my power. My sovereign self. And I also wanted to share that with women. I would love to live in a culture where the majority of mothers feel that way.
Michelle: Or people. Everybody.
Mary Lou: People. Yes.
Mark: We want to go ahead and share a little clip of a video that we found on midwifery. Let me go ahead and share this video here.
(Video clip of Midwives Season 1 Episode 1 S01ED1 Delivering Under Pressure)
Midwife: Little pushes, little pushes.
(baby being born)
Narrator: When we’re at our most vulnerable, we all need someone who isn’t afraid. Midwives are responsible for bring our children safely into the world.
Midwife: It’s a very, very intimate relationship with something you’ve never met before in your life.
Narrator: But now they’re facing the highest birth rates in 40 years. Parents are more demanding, and pregnancies more complicated.
Midwife: When you see a baby come out like he did you just think “oh no.”
Narrator: This is what it’s really like to be a midwife in Britain today.
Mark: In Britain it seems like they’re having a lot of babies so they’re in need of midwifery.
Mary Lou: In Britain midwives attend the majority of women. Most of those are in the hospital setting. They have a very different system of maternity care. They don’t have a capitalist health care system there. They make decisions based on what produces better health outcomes for the population, not what makes the most money for profit health care companies.
Michelle: Yes. Countries like that, like in Ontario also is another example where there’s really strong collaborative care between hospitals and homes so that you might even have a continuity of care where the same provider attends you either way if you have to transport or you can choose which location.
Here, everything is very segregated. So the hospital is its own system. Birth centers are even, a lot of times, their own systems, or completely co-opted by hospitals and run by hospitals in which they’re not free standing autonomous birth centers. They’re bound by hospital policies. And then there are home birth midwives who operate almost completely separately. So what happens in England, Ontario, and other places, is a much more integrated system.
Mary Lou: Right. We know how our medical system works. There’s money in pathology—and the manufacturing of pathology—and birth is in some sense just a microcosm of that. But it’s also the right of passage into a technocratic society that wants to sell you a lot of health care, and other products.
Mark: Yes, and push all the drugs, and create all these diseases and labels so that they continue to push you through the system. I know it all too well. I’m an occupational therapist, worked in the system for over 18 years, and couldn’t stand it anymore.
Michelle: Yes, based on pathology.
Mark: I’m a spiritual person. I believe that the body is capable of healing itself through nutrition, through proper meditation, though visualization, and they offer none of that. Everything is based on a Band-Aid approach and pills that give you more problems.
You were speaking earlier about you bound—Michelle, or Mary Lou actually was the one who said that you bound—and that you hated your body. I wanted to bring this up because that seems to be a lot of the scenario with female to male transgender or transsexuals. They think that it’s such a horrific thing to go through the stage of hating your body. I think it’s a very normal thing for people to go through dysphoria at one point or another.
The abnormality is when you have to do the terrible thing that I did. I ripped my breasts out, and I ripped out all of my female reproductive organs in quest of what to me now seems very delusional. I’m forgiving myself for what I did, but it’s something that is bizarre. Totally bizarre. And that’s why the passion right now to move forward with this quest. Can you give me a little more in-depth, or share your experience and what you think the scenario is with these female to male transgenders.
Mary Lou: One of the reasons I feel passionately opposed to the marketing of gender dysphoria is from my own experience and how I think, if I’d been born 20 years later, I would have been convinced by this relentless marketing on the left—and on the right now too—that hating your body is actually an identity. I didn’t like my body, I had an eating disorder at one point, I tried to starve away my secondary sex characteristics. I was happy when my period went away, I was happy when my breasts went away. A lot of that was because of childhood sexual abuse and unwanted sexual attention.
I think even people who aren’t physically sexually abused— all girls in this culture—have all of this abusive attention coming at them. We live in a rape culture and every female is a victim of that. Every female is a survivor of that.
A lot of times I just didn’t want it. I shaved my head. I would wear the tightest sports bra I could find, I would wear the biggest, baggiest, clothes I could find. At one point, I remember walking around in college and thinking “everything I own I bought in the men’s or boy’s department. I am a female transvestite”.
At the time there wasn’t this huge trans phenomenon. This has happened really quickly in our culture. I’m not an old woman by any means. I think body dysphoria is the norm for females, and also for males now. I think that capitalism thrives on making us hate ourselves and think that we have to buy something outside of ourselves to feel good. To feel great.
Mark: Definitely. When you talk about being sexually molested, I was sexually molested at 8 years old by a so-called friend of the family. It was almost like a grandparent for me. I think a lot of FTMs and probably a lot of MTFs experience this as well, it’s a big psychological issue. And that’s what we’re trying to bring out that GD is just like a cough is to a cold. Gender Dysphoria is not the main psychological problem. There are a lot deeper problems. Narcissism, bi-polar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, the list is mile long. The therapists are missing the point. They’re handing these papers out like they’re handing out candy, for people to take hormones, to alter their bodies. Something needs to be done, this should be made against the law. These doctors should be held accountable. These therapists should be held accountable.
Mary Lou: We have no idea of the health outcomes that we’re going to be seeing from this even in the next couple of decades. I am a nurse practitioner. I know, talking to other practitioners, people are seeing lots of elevated lipids in people taking these hormones in adulthood. We’re seeing cardiac anomalies, and other health problems from the hormones. Frankly, I don’t even like giving out birth control pills because of the risk. I don’t like giving artificial hormones to people. I understand that’s everybody’s choice, but I feel like it’s dangerous to do that and people need to know the risks. This is a big untested experiment that’s being pushed on our children.
Mark: Definitely.
Lynna: Can you tell us about the latest accusations that you were assigning gender at birth?
Michelle: Mary Lou introduced me to radical feminism only a few months ago. So a lot of this is new to me, but my thinking, my thoughts as a person, as a midwife, is not new. And for years I’ve been involved in reproductive justice, and this is where I was first confronted by some trans midwives, who were saying that my language was incorrect and that I needed to be referring to this process of assigning gender at birth. This is the first time I heard this. I maintained that women are giving birth, and we have biological reality that exists, before even a baby is pushed out of the womb. I was black listed in those circles as a bigoted closed-minded person.
We absolutely have nothing to do with assigning gender whatsoever. That’s something society does. Gender is a socially constructed thing. It’s not an immutable fact. It’s not something that’s innately part of a human being. So you have a child that’s born, we look at that baby, and you know, in our practice, and our training, we don’t even actually name the sex of that baby. Even though we look, we can see what’s going on there, we don’t tell the mother the sex of her baby. We let her do that herself. At best, if she asks us, we’ll lift a leg. Maybe if she asks us to tell her what the sex is, and she just can’t see the baby at that moment, we might whisper it to her. Very rarely will any of us home-birth midwives really be the person to disclose that information to the family. And the other thing is that we’re looking there at the baby, when the baby emerges, and we’re noticing based on the fact that we are a class of beings that have male and female, that is how we are biologically determined.
Mary Lou: This is science.
Michelle: It’s a fact.
Mary Lou: It’s not social science.
Michelle: So females have ovum, and males have sperm. And we know that there are many variances, just like there are variances in chromosomes with Down syndrome babies. There are many variances in the human body. So, many intersex people are born yes, but this is something completely different. This is not the same as trans. So, when the trans people are always wanting to confront the fact that somehow we have determined, as the birth attendants that receive this baby, what gender roles this person is supposed to adhere to. That’s not possible. It is not our determination whatsoever what gender role a person is going to subscribe to. And it doesn’t matter to me what gender role somebody chooses. If they want one, if they don’t want one. Some people identify heavily with gender roles. That’s fine. And it doesn’t matter to me if it matches your biology or not. Those things are all social. We can do what we want with that as a society. That’s a beautiful thing.
But what we’re talking about is the biological reality of a human being in a dimorphic species of male and female. And all we’re doing is observing: what is presenting on this body? And when that mother is ready to receive that information, most of the time, she process that information herself.
Mary Lou: I’ve been at so many births where the 45 minutes goes by before the family even thinks to look because they’re just so excited that the person is here, the baby is here. And the sex of the baby doesn’t even matter until they sort of come back out of the, like you said, that spiritual awe of the experience. But to say that we’re assigning sex or gender is no different than saying that we’re assigning human to the baby. Or that we’re assigning the baby’s species. These are biological facts and observations. When we do a newborn exam we always test to see if the baby’s palette is intact. We’re not assigning the baby with an intact palette. We’re observing.
Michelle: Either the baby has one, or the baby doesn’t have one. We’re doing an assessment. We do a new born exam and we’re looking at what is the characteristic of the baby. Have the testicles descended. These are all biological realities.
Mary Lou: Are there ten fingers, are there ten toes. We’re not assigning—I’ve assigned you two hands—you know? And even beyond that, midwives have been arguing for a long time against pre-natal sex determination, and that we don’t believe ultra sound should be used gratuitously. We feel like that technology is unnecessary. Midwives have been advocating not finding out the sex particularly because we don’t want families assigning gender.
Michelle: That knowledge. The knowledge of knowing what the biological sex is of the baby you’re carrying can only be used for you to assign gender to that child. The only reason parents want to know so bad, is because they want to know how to decorate the room. They want to know what color clothes to buy. They want to know what name to give the child. They want to assign gender to that baby. That’s the only reason to do an ultra sound, because nothing else changes in what the mother’s going to eat, how the mother’s going to take care of herself, how the mother’s going to push the baby out. And when that baby is born, that baby could care less when they look up at that person who gave birth to them, the gender identity of that person. That person is their mother. That person bore them in their body, and created them of their flesh, and pushed them out into this world and they’re still one being. Gender identity is not a factor in that. That is a purely biological process.
In fact, in birth, if you were to remain in an intellectual space of identity as opposed to your biological reality, you would actually hinder your birth quite a bit. Because you would stay in a thoughtful place of the forebrain as opposed to the place you want to get to in birth where it is not intellectual. Totally primal. The oldest part of your brain that you will use.
Mary Lou: We give birth with our biology, not our identity.
Michelle: Not our gender.
Mark: Can you talk a little more about the realities of biological sex, in your opinion?
Mary Lou: I don’t think it’s opinion. I think these are scientific facts that we are a sexually dimorphic species. Like all species that reproduce sexually with a male and female, we have two sexes. One that produces sperm, and one that produces eggs, because we’re mammals, the females of our species gestate our children inside of our bodies and then feed them with our breasts when they come out. I don’t think that’s a matter of opinion, I think any biology text book would state that as fact, and to anyone who can actually step out of the postmodern insane rhetoric and just look at the world.
Michelle: It’s a beautiful thing actually. When you’re carrying a female fetus, you are carrying all of her ovum. So in that moment you have three generations within your one body. That’s the reality, the biological reality, what a woman carries. And that is a huge biological difference between a man and a woman. Because a man cannot do that. There is something about that experience, or even the potential for that experience. It’s very powerful, that reality. That’s what makes the concept of assigning gender false. When these biological miracles are happening in utero, there’s no barrier between that mother and that baby, or the family and that baby, no difference between when it’s inside the uterus and when it’s outside the uterus. So, it’s the same being, it’s the same biological being.
Mark: And what’s happening with the transgender community, especially with the MTFs is that they are totally just negating all these biological things. And they’re totally just, to me, becoming insane.
Lynna: Claiming womanhood when they have no right do to so.
Michelle: The problem in midwifery that I’ve found actually, is not the trans women, but the trans men who still have their uteruses, and are accessing reproductive health services or midwifery services, but claiming to do so as men. This is where I had, in reproductive justice, put out a beautiful sticker that said “midwifery is a woman’s tradition” and I was confronted about that because it was exclusionary. And I consider midwifery to be a woman’s tradition. Midwife literally in Old English means “with woman”. It’s women helping and serving women. It’s often times the aunt, or the sister, or whoever is around that has been to the most births. Often times it’s very much a woman’s tradition.
But we have been confronted at one time. And now our professional midwifery organizations are actually changing the language of their core competency documents to refer to the pregnant individual, or the pregnant person, as if female biology wasn’t at the core of what was happening in this process.
I personally have in my life many trans friends, exes, and just dear ones that I love. My son has a best friend who’s transitioned. We all have love towards their struggling with this on one level or another, because it has become so common, so prevalent. And yet to sit there and be confronted by some of these peers to say that I am supposed to remove the word mother, or woman, from my rhetoric around pregnancy and child birth, while people who are born in female bodies, who are female bodied people, if you identify as a man, you live as a man, you present as a man, wonderful, but you’re not giving birth with your gender identity. You’re giving birth with your body, your biology. That trans man, is using something that he acquired when he was a female, when he lived as a female, when he was born as a female, however that rhetoric is supposed to be said. He still has it, and he is using it, but he is not naming the source of that act and power. It’s possible for him to give birth because that female body, that’s what’s giving birth. That biological miracle. Right now we’re dealing with midwifery organizations actually changing their language in their documents as if to say that it is possible to change your sex, when it is not possible to change your sex.
Mark: You’re right, it isn’t. It’s really sad that this community has gone to the point of madness. They want to re-write all the rules. They want to tell people what they can and cannot say. And actually that’s what started really pissing me off. I had Cathy Brennan as one of my guests last year, and they all attacked me. Cathy Brennan has a right to voice her opinion. No one is going to stop me from having who I want on my show. To me, there are so many deep mental issues with some of these individuals.
Mary Lou: We were discussing that earlier, have we covered that?
Michelle: It seems like we have talked about that a lot, but… with that question you really are, you talk about the power in the female and the power of nature. You talk about that too in one of these questions. We mentioned it a little bit in the beginning. That is the greatest asset in childbirth. One of the things that I take issue with is that as midwives we’re trained to manage and attend women who are having a normal healthy human pregnancy and birth. We’re trained to see when things fall out of the range of normal, and then how to use natural assets to bring things back into balance. Maybe some herbs, or some lifestyle adjustments, stress management, counselling, nutrition, many many many tools that we use. Because we want the woman to try to stay in this range of healthy and normal. And what is striking me right now, is that instead of talking about how as midwives are we supposed to be providing healthy normal human development—midwifery care—to a person who has now been taking hormones for many years or…
Mary Lou: Cut their breasts off….
Michelle: There’s such a huge range of ways that a person could present to us at this point, but we’re not educated in those things, and I don’t perceive those things to be normal, healthy, development. So it’s really outside of the scope of our practice. I just bring that up because the differences in sexes and the differences in the biology is really… I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I lost my train of thought.
Mary Lou: Can I?
Michelle: Yes please, because I know that you know what I’m trying to say.
Mary Lou: I want to say that patriarchal oppression, absolutely exists, and by patriarchy I am using what Bell Hooks phrased as the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy exists to control female reproduction. If power is passed through men, women’s sexuality and reproduction has to be controlled. And the basis of our oppression is from our biology. Our power is in our biology absolutely, and the patriarchy does everything it can to control and own that power and try to keep women from having sovereignty over that power. One of the most frightening aspects of this erasure of the reality of biological sex, and the complication of gender identity as the legal definition of male and female is that it legally codifies sexual stereotypes as what it means to be male and female, and poof sexism magically disappears. So we have things like the recent supreme court decision, where because a female-to-male trans person gave birth and breast fed, a woman who was discriminated against at work for breast feeding, and she had a sex-based discrimination case, and the supreme court said that’s not sex discrimination because men can breast feed now. So we are losing our protections that are based on our biology.
Michelle: And yet it’s our very biology that is the reason why it has been the tool of control. And even to this day, I mean we’re arguing about abortion, and we’re arguing about reproductive rights, and trans men are demanding their inclusion into abortion. But we’re not talking about prostate cancer issues. All these other issues that go along… we’re only looking at reproduction.
Mary Lou: The way this movement is playing out, it seems to be all the attacking is being done in the places where women actually have some power. I find that really interesting, that they’re going after the midwives, when no one is picketing women’s hospitals. No one’s going after the American College of Gynecology for their transphobic language. They’re going after the lesbians, they’re going after our bathrooms.
Michelle: They’re going after the home-birth midwives. I also notice too, in our midwifery circles, it’s not the trans women that are coming to become midwives. It’s the trans men that are becoming midwives. You know, because they’re women. But I don’t see trans women joining us and becoming midwives.
Lynna: It seems that in arguments I’ve had with other trans women, they seem to want to appropriate things that belong solely to biological women. I would never think to take that from any of you. I just wanted you to talk about maybe some of the nuances, some of the uniqueness of being a female, and when you are with child, and you have a fetus inside your womb, what is happening, so that those that are male to female transsexuals, that they can understand that they will never know. They will never understand, because they don’t have that biology.
Mary Lou: Menstruation is power. There’s so much, there’s so much magic and power. The one thing I specifically…Michelle articulated it so beautifully is when you’re carrying a fetus, a baby, stem cells from the baby enter your system, as the mother, they go into the brain and actually change our brains to make us more like our children. We are partly our children, as much as our children are us. If we’re partnered, we’re more like our partner now, because our child is half their genetic material. And that is an amazing magical biological transformation. That only someone has carried a fetus can experience.
Michelle: You said that about the fetus and being with child, but really it is from time that you start bleeding. I was sitting on the couch and my husband and I were both on the couch, and I just was moaning and groaning because I had cramps coming all the way down to both of my ankles on both legs. I’m a little premenopausal right now, it’s getting that way, and I looked over at him and there I was moaning. I just looked at him and said you have no idea what I’m experiencing. He said no I don’t, I have no clue. I have been bleeding for 34 years. Not even just for like a week or a month, but every single month for 34 years. It’s really something, menstruation, and this filling. Your uterus is filling up with life. This is not a joke, it’s not even a metaphor when people say women are the first environment. Because literally that lining in your uterus is the very soil in which your seed will implant and germinate. It’s literally the soil, and the sun, and the water, and everything for that seed. We have that all the time, every month, that we reproduce and we mature ovum. We prepare for that. Our body is ready.
So many times, if you are in a heterosexual relationship, if you are allowing yourself to potentially become pregnant, or even unintentionally, many times we even have implantation and don’t even know it. A lot of times we have implantation and miscarry, many times. It presents as a heavy menstruation. A lot of us are aware of it, many of us aren’t even aware of it. Conception happens quite more often than we realize.
I don’t want to limit it just to being with child because that’s one of the things that gets used against us. “Oh, this person doesn’t have a uterus anymore, does that make her not a woman?” or “this person has never had a baby, does that make her not a woman?” Woman is not just limited to utilizing your potential. Just innately having that potential is all. Like I said, my daughter had within her, all her immature ovum, all the ovum that she will mature in her entire life, she had inside of her body, inside of my womb during the time that I carried her.
Mary Lou: We carry the seeds of our grandchildren in our own bodies. It’s so miraculous. I’m a very egalitarian person, like I said I’m a gender abolitionist, let’s just all be human and live our potential. But as home-birth midwives, if we had to pick a superior sex, it wouldn’t be male.
Michelle: We’re midwives. We get to be with women in the most spectacular time so I don’t want to limit how we talk about women just in the sense of menstruating and having babies of course. Because I think part of how we got where we are with this disembodiment, we’re dissociating from our bodies, and dissociating from womanhood somehow. There’s so many people unwilling to call themselves women. They identify as trans but they’re not transitioning, they’re not even changing their gender. They’re just a gender variant female. That’s how I see it, they’re women to me. But they identify as trans because they’re identifying with a culture, and a movement, for them very exciting. A sense of belonging.
And at the same time, I’m identifying very strongly with my body. This is my identity. It’s very difficult when we prioritize gender identity over biological identity. So I don’t want to limit it to just reproduction because I don’t want that be ever used against us. A lot of the trauma around reproduction, the trauma around loss, pregnancy loss, infertility—which is rampant because of environmental issues, environmental health situation that we’re in—has caused a lot of women to feel confused about their bodies, about reproduction, and not wanting to be defined by reproduction because of what Mary Lou was talking about—the patriarchy—basically the reproductive control being the most important thing in controlling women. And as a result we have distanced ourselves, and disembodied ourselves so much from our ability to give birth and bring life. We don’t want to be defined by it. But I don’t want us to be not defined by it either. There’s not really a way to disregard those things.
They’re right here, they’re part of our bodies. It’s called biology. Bio. it’s life. It’s all one. So that’s what I wanted to say. As midwives we do love to talk about birth, we love to talk about these babies, the way that we create them and grow them and sustain them from our breast. There could be a whole two years’ time when that baby does nothing except sustain its life off of your very body. And nothing else. That’s so miraculous. And when you do it, it’s so amazing. Maybe it’s painful for women who can’t do that. That would like to do that. I can see how it could be painful for men who can’t do that, because it’s so powerful, so beautiful. I can understand these things. I have compassion for these things. But it is what it is. It’s immutable. It is what it is.
Lynna: Well, humanity has become synthetic, and filling their lives with technology and forgetting the gifts our planet provides. What are your thoughts on this?
Mary Lou: Well we agree with that. I think that it’s really painful times to be an ecologically conscious person. The systems of life are unravelling all over the planet. I think we’re at end stage capitalism and by end stage, I mean terminal. It will either kill us all, or we will stop it from doing so. I think that a lot of people are wanting to disengage from the natural world because it’s very painful to be present with it right now. Our bodies are all poisoned. Human breast milk is the most toxic food on the planet. There’s not a single mother on the planet that doesn’t have dioxin in her breast milk, and that’s just one of the many, many chemicals. It’s not just our species. The whales have very toxic breast milk. All the mammals have toxic breast milk. The air is poisoned, the water is poisoned. Chemicals have permeated everything. Unfortunately, our culture—because it is a capitalist culture—is pushing more of that. Instead of, as a society, we’re not organizing to stop it. It seems like we’re driving over the cliff.
Michelle: I think this is where attachment theory comes in. I really do. I’ve done a lot of studying about environmental health, and attachment theory in that context. One thing that’s beautiful about midwifery is the way that we allow nature to unfold. There’s more oxytocin receptors in your body in the moment after you give birth than any other time in your entire life. It’s the same for the new-born baby. And the reason is because in that moment that bond needs to take place. This is nature, what we’re talking about, a natural process. So those oxytocin receptors are going wild, there’s more than there’s ever been, and what you have is a maternal blueprint that clicks on. I think that when we don’t develop healthy attachment somehow, not only do we have attachment disorder with our parent, our person that was supposed to take care of us, we have attachment disorder with nature. With god. So now we no longer have the same natural attachment to nature that we’re supposed to have. I think part of it is that the attachment disorder is out of the trauma and the grief around what is being done to our planet, like Mary Lou was talking about. The endocrine system is such a crucial part of the connection to this natural world, this nature and how it can be distorted.
Mark: That’s the key right there, the endocrine system. That’s why all these children, and individuals, are coming up with the so-called gender dysphoria. When I wrote my book The Mirror Makes No Sense, I mentioned that this was going to be an epidemic, I saw it coming, because we do live in such a toxic environment. Our endocrine system has been totally messed up, everything is chemical. What we’re trying to do is to alert the community to look, this is not normal. This is something that’s happening due to disruption in our endocrine system. Because this is happening doesn’t give us the right to chop off our breats, or remove our uterus, or to create a neo-vagina, and go around saying “I’m a woman”, or “I’m a man”, and all that stuff. It’s crazy. We are destroying humanity by doing this. We are destroying the normal rhythm of life.
Mary Lou: It’s definitely not something to celebrate. Endocrine disruption is not something to celebrate. It’s something serious. So grieve, and then get full of righteous rage, and stop it. We need to stop the poisoning of our world, and ourselves.
Michelle: There’s a great book called The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert. She was an NIH scientist. She’s actually the scientist that discovered the opiate receptor in the 70’s I believe. And she’s since passed away, but she really does a great job of outlining the endocrine system, the Endo-Neuro-Immuno system that’s all connected. She describes the science and how it is the science behind mind-body medicine. Basically it is how she looks at the endocrine system. And these chemicals, these proteins that travel through our blood. And the way that receptors work, it’s such a miracle. I have no idea, I am so uneducated around this hormone replacement, and opposite sex hormones, and things that go into puberty blockers. These things with which we’re not practicing a precautionary principle at all in understanding the impacts before we condone them society wide with young people. It’s a huge concern around the endocrine system, and what might be coming down the line as a result.
Mark: That’s what started us on this whole mission. We became totally alarmed. Oh my god, there’s no way this can be happening, they’re just pushing it like candy. There’s a lot of gender variant children being born, it’s part of what’s happening. Call it evolution, call it chemicals, whatever it is. It doesn’t mean that you have to block these children’s puberty, and make them something that they think they are, when in reality they are who they are. There’s no need for them to go from one gender box into another gender box.
Lynna: It’s controlling the endocrine system. It’s dumbing it down to where function, the way it was intended to function biologically, it would only make common sense. I didn’t go to medical school, but the fact that these puberty blockers are inhibiting the children, the youth, from developing in an adolescent-normal puberty period, that has got to do something terrible to the body.
Mark: You’re looking at growth spurts, their bones, their development, the neurological system in the brain. There are so many systems that have been hindered by doing this. Their answer is, “oh, but it’s reversible”. The body doesn’t understand the opposite puberty. It understands the puberty it’s meant to have, the biological one. When you’re blocking things like that, you’re creating major problems. The body is going “alert, alert, something’s happening here”. These kids are going to have mental problems; they’re going to have a slew of problems. You know what? Everybody’s “hush hush” and the medical system is going “more money making here”. They’re sacrificing our kids, and that’s wrong.
Michelle: And ultimately, if you want to call it the wrong body—which it’s not really possible to be born in the wrong body—we get what we get.
I have a lot of compassion and I’m a lot more soft about this than others. Mary Lou’s a lot better. I really do have a lot of compassion and I do understand that people are suffering. People are tormented inside. People are trying to make sense of this crazy, crazy, world. I absolutely understand it. I’m right here in the world too, trying to make sense of it too. So I just think that there are answers that are going to be far more empowering to us, because ultimately whatever you do to your body it’s still the same body. So if you thought it was the wrong body to begin with, nothing’s changed. I don’t want it to be like that. I sure want people to find answers. I sure want people to find a way to be happy. I just am not convinced that this is a healthy response to the kind of pain we’re all suffering on this earth right now.
Mark: It’s a crazy thing, you know. And again, people call me a hypocrite because I did it. As you mature and grow you look at life totally different. I would have never thought in the day that I was going to wake up one morning and tell myself, wow, what have I done. I think a lot has to do with meeting Lynna and our story and everything that’s happened. It’s made me realize too many things. I have matured so quickly, and having to take care of Lynna in the past four or five months. It brought that maternal instinct in me that I never had, because I never had a child. So to me, she was my child, that maternal instinct. Maritza, which was, is who I am. That came back to life when I had put her to sleep, and all of a sudden it was like “I am woman, hear me roar”. What have I done? What have I done to myself? People are going, “oh your nuts, your transition was not right, you’re not happy”. It’s not that I wasn’t happy, I am happy. But I’m a happy person that realized the mistake I made, and I realized that there’s more to life than a gender marker male or female. We can’t change who we are. It is who we are, it is our essence. I just want my—I don’t even want to call my trans brothers and sisters because they’ve disowned me—but these individuals who’ve taken that step and thinking they’re doing the right thing, to think again, and realize what they’re doing. They’re hurting themselves, they’re hurting their family members, and they’re hurting the planet by doing what they’re doing.
Mary Lou: And there are other people who get it within the trans community. There’s the New Narratives who made a beautiful statement about how biology is immutable, there’s a difference between sex and gender, female space needs to be respected, the rights of females need to be respected.
One thing we haven’t covered that I really want to talk about is the aspect of this that to me, from my observations, is clearly backlash against gay rights. It’s amazing to me how so many people don’t understand that all of these gender non-conforming children, who 30 years ago would have grown up to be happy gay and lesbian people, are now being told they’re born in the wrong body, and are being transitioned into a heteronormative reality. To me it’s so profoundly homophobic. I don’t understand why there’s not more critique of that.
Mark: That’s one of the things we want to really rally our LGB brothers and sisters. They added that ’T’ to the LBGT and they realized that the ’T’ is just voiding all the LGB. Can somebody wake up and realize what’s going on here?
Mary Lou: Pat Robertson is supportive of transgender, but profoundly homophobic and misogynist. In Iran they will kill you for being gay, or put you in jail for life, but they’ll pay for your sex change operation, and change all your gender identity on all your paperwork. Rick Santorum is pro-transgender, but again, one of the worst misogynists. He’s one of the male authority figures who routinely gets on the airwaves to tell the women of America that if he has his way, we will be forced to give birth to rapists babies. The guy hates women, and he’s a patriarch. He’s totally behind the trans thing. This whole thing is being marketed by government of Iran, Pat Robertson, Disney, People Magazine, and Entertainment Tonight. It’s not a liberation movement for anybody.
Mark: It’s actually bringing us back.
Lynna: They’re indoctrinating mothers, and families, husbands. To make them feel like, just because little Jimmy wants to play with dolls, all of a sudden that he’s a girl.
Mark: It’s crazy.
Mary Lou: Whatever happened to “free to be you and me” you know that song? Billy wants a doll, and some day Billy might grow up and be a dad and he needs to know how to be a good one. We grew up in the 70’s. All those revolutionary movements of the 60’s influenced our childhood. It was amazing. The slinky commercials, a toy for a girl or a boy.
Michelle: We were talking actually about the toys and how when we were growing up how the toys, like all the Legos were the same colors. And now when you go to the Lego isle there’s these Legos that are pink and purple, and that are all domestic toy figures of house things, and they’re for the girls. If you look at pictures comparing toys from the 70’s to toys now, how absolutely divided and clear the gender stereotypes are. The more it seems that we’ve pushed ourselves into that extreme gender stereotyping, the more of this “gender dysphoria” that we’re having because it’s absolutely being shoved down our throats that we’re supposed to be one or the other. And then we’re completely supporting this whole binary concept, and these gender stereotypes by saying ok, well the kids who have long hair… and this is all you see in the articles. They like to play with these certain kinds of toys, they like long hair, they like this certain kind of game or whatever that’s stereotypically for girls, therefore they must be a girl. We’re just perpetuating this binary, even more so than we did 30 years ago even.
Mark: It’s the trans agenda. A total trans agenda, which is what we’ve been saying. It’s eugenics. We had a show Tuesday regarding that. Back all the way to 1810, it’s just been program, program, created, almost like a Nazi protocol type of thing. It’s crazy, like you say, what happened to be whoever you want to be, and feel however you want to feel without having to fit into these gender boxes and doing horrific things to our body.
Lynna: It just stems from homosexuality, bisexuality. All that is wrong. So we have to divide you, take the weaker ones and sterilize them.
Mary Lou: There’s no money in people being happy gay people, but there’s a whole lot of money in getting people to hate their bodies, and think they need hundreds of thousands of dollars of body modifications and hormones for life.
Mark: And therapy, and pills, and what is it, $1200 per month for these blockers.
Lynna: $1500 for the implant that lasts a year.
Mark: It’s crazy. They’re going to push it, they’re going to breed these gender confused children so they can make them one thing or the other. It’s scary. People aren’t seeing that. They’re villainizing us and they’re not seeing that we’re saying, “Hello, the sun doesn’t revolved around the earth” or whatever, and they’re saying “Oh Galileo, let’s put you in jail”. They’re not seeing what we have seen for quite a while. It’s sad. So give us your views on counter-revolution.
Mary Lou: Counter revolution. So whenever liberation movements—revolutionary movements— start to really become powerful in a lot of population, the oppressive power structures do everything in their power to crack down on it. In a capitalist system, usually that means coopting the revolution and twisting it in a way that it will help capitalist forces, and selling it as something liberal, not revolutionary.
I think about how I was ten years old when Ronald Reagan was elected. I feel like most of my live has been living in a counter revolution. The busting of the unions was counter revolutionary to the labor movement. The way we’ve undone all the environmental protections is counter revolutionary to what was happening in the 60’s and 70’s. We definitely live in counter revolutionary times.
Mark: Definitely.
Lynna: How did this happen that we’ve gone from “start a revolution, stop hating your body” to hating the body being framed as revolutionary?
Mary Lou: That’s called counter revolution. Isn’t that sad, we really have gone from that. “Start a revolution, stop hating your body”, we grew up with that phrase from the feminist movement. To know what’s being sold to children, that it’s revolutionary to hate your body and to feel that you’re in the wrong body. That is capitalist commodification: selling an oppression identity to people as a product.
Mark: That’s one of the reasons I believe that this whole Pandora’s Box needs to be open and people need to be exposed. Having been in this so-called trans community for the past 12 years, and hearing all the stories, and all the interviews that I’ve done, it’s like the violin of life. Let’s pull up the script, it’s the same repeated line: “I knew when I was 3 years old, I was in the wrong body, and I’m going to kill myself”. You say that, you’re going to get: “ there’s your hormones, and there’s your surgery”. And people don’t want to understand. They’re so caught up in their lie that they are believing it. It’s brainwashing. I was brainwashed too, like from 0-60 it’s like a zombie, “brain, brain”, you see nothing else but this transition, you know nothing else but this transition. And then everything is fine for whatever, 10,12 years, and all of a sudden you wake up and you go, “what’s happened? What did I just do? Where did my breasts go?” Your life has been taken from you.
Lynna: The narrative is that this is normal. That they’re selling, like Bruce Jenner is normal. People that are being interviewed these days are normal. It’s not. There’s nothing normal about it. We’re the ones that do something different. We’re the ones that went against the tide. We’re the ones that made a different choice.
Mary Lou: You’re not having a million dollar interview with Diane Sawyer. People need to look at the money behind this and who’s selling it. It’s being marketed heavily.
Mark: Big time. It’s really sad because a lot of lives are going to be ruined. Not just your own life. Your own life, you’ve taken years from your life, from taking toxic hormones, from doing what you did, you just destroyed yourself completely. People around you are being disrupted. The environment is being disrupted. Have people even thought about all these hormones that we’re taking, when we’re going to the bathroom, that those hormones are filtering into the environment. We’re destroying everything.
Lynna: The fact is that children as they develop up and grow into puberty, you can’t really distinguish sex. If you get the boys hair, if you get the girls hair, it’s pretty much, it’s all the same. Why do they have to make it so gender specific when realizing that that kind of gender specificity really damages children developing as people that they are? A gay future child can get suppressed and then thinks the only way out is to be transgender. It’s crazy.
Mary Lou: Growing up Irish Catholic what I saw was that the gender nonconforming boys were encouraged from a very young age to go into the priesthood. Were told over and over again, oh you’d be such a good priest, we can just tell. Now I think those same boys are being encouraged and groomed to be women, to think that they’re actually woman, and to take on that role. It’s very disturbing to me that the cage of gender is locking down. I don’t believe this is really about gender stereotypes, that this is actually going to free us from gender stereotypes.
Michelle: It’s reinforcing gender stereotypes.
Mary Lou: I don’t see any men who identify as men, wearing makeup and dresses. It’s not freeing people from gender stereotypes. Women fought really hard to wear pants. They went to jail for wearing pants. They lost their freedom for wearing pants. They got beaten up for wearing pants, probably a lot of them got raped for wearing pants. They fought hard for the right to not be constrained by gender stereotypes in their dress.
Men are doing now, if you want to wear dresses and you really like all that stuff that means you’re really a woman. It’s locking down gender more, not freeing anybody.
Mark: I believe that it’s being done to eliminate what they call the weaker individuals. Let’s sterilize, let’s mark their puberty, you’re doing that and you’re taking hormones, you’re going to be sterilizing yourself. It’s almost a master plan. People say, “Oh, you’re a conspiracy nut”. No, there’s something behind all this. People aren’t opening their eyes to the reality of things. It’s really sad.
Michelle: Well Big Pharma is behind this. The medical institution has a lot to gain, apecifically pharmaceuticals, and plastic surgery surgeons. I can’t even begin to grasp all of the complexities of it really, but there are profiteers in this.
Mary Lou: I was just watching a film by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, the son of Robert Kennedy. He said that Big Pharma gives more contributions in the form of lobbying our government, than oil and gas and the military industrial complex combined. This is who is running our government. Big Pharma is very powerful. It’s not a benevolent force.
Mark: Big Pharma, Monsanto…
Lynna; The highest paid “female” is a CEO, is a trans woman, and runs a pharmaceutical.
Mary Lou: The women’s average salary is going up now that more men are “women”.
Mark: It’s almost like men couldn’t have enough of just being in power, they had to also take the power away from women some more in becoming women. What a better way than to do what they’re doing. It’s crazy. I don’t understand why the community is not accepting what we’re saying. We’ve gotten death threats. It’s like, ok, really?
Lynna: Sponsors get pulled, death threats. People are just vehement about expressing their opinion on Facebook, on social media. They will tell you everything to justify their position when their position doesn’t have grounds to stand on.
Mary Lou: That’s why, that their position doesn’t have grounds to stand on, that’s why they’re so adamant about locking down discourse, forbidding discourse on it. Women—radical feminists—all over the world are losing their tenured positions in Universities for speaking out about this, they’re losing book deals, they’re losing speaking gigs. Men who speak out against it are being de-platformed. We’re seeing really horrific authoritarian, anti-intellectualism; the kind of stuff that you see in totalitarian states around this. We’re not allowed to critique it. We’re not allowed to discuss it. That anti-intellectualism, and that aspect of forbidden discourse should make everyone nervous. People should be cautious about any ideology that forbids discussion.
Mark: That’s why we have to do what we have to do. Educate, do seminars, go out there and, probably have to get some bullet proof vest and some sort of body guards, because—you said there’s a big force trying to stop the actual—the pendulum is going this way, we need to bring it back to the beginning.
Lynna: We need to be able to tell kids they can express how they want to. They don’t have to be tied to their gender stereotype. A feminine boy can express to be a feminine boy. A masculine girl can be a masculine girl. There are different.
Mark: Or be two-spirited. I posted pictures of myself when I was younger, there were times when I looked like a boy. I cut my hair. There were times when I felt the female energy flow, and I would let my hair grow, and I would wear dresses. People would always ask me are you butch or are you femme, and I would say it depends on the stars and the moon.
When this whole programming kicked in, I just all of a sudden… “Oh ya! I’ve got to be a man”. It’s brainwashing. I can’t even put the right words to explain what happened. I was talking to my sister today. She said there was not any talking to you. I was on this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. That’s the mentality of the majority, I would say 99% of trans individuals 0-60.
Michelle: I perceive it that people are so determined towards it because it’s couched as the answer to their problems. That’s how I perceive it. Everybody’s problems are being summed up in this gender dysphoria and it’s going to be solved by doing these things. Like you said, that’s actually not the diagnosis itself. There’s so much going on in the bigger picture of that human being that is actually interrelated and connected to everybody else’s trauma, pain and grief—which is absolutely interrelated and connected to the entire total of the planet, the earth—that we are all just part of this organism together.
This concept of individualism, and I get to do what I want because it’s what I want, I have the right to live my life the way I want, that is such an American value. It is such a western value that is so damaging in reality. It’s so damaging, because we’re not just individuals. We’re interrelated creatures coexisting. Breathing in and out the same air, living off of one water that we all share on this planet, and so on, and so on. Those are things that are important. To compartmentalize yourself, and imagine that your problems are individual and separate from the rest of the world, and now you’ve been told this thing is going to solve your problems.
Mark: It’s the psychosis, and narcissistic behavior that the planet is facing right now. Unfortunately a lot of the trans individuals have major narcissistic behavior. It’s screaming “me, me, me, I, I, I!” They don’t care about anything else. Like we mentioned in our intro is returning to oneness. Before we return to oneness there’s all this chaos that’s taking place. Anything else you ladies would add?
Michelle: Thank you.
Mary Lou: Thank you.
Michelle: Really. We both have been very moved by both of your courage and honesty and…
Mary Lou: Sanity.
Michelle: Telling your stories, owning your stories. I can’t even imagine how challenging it is on so many levels. We do know the back-lash and what that feels like.
Mark: It’s been an amazing interview. We hopefully will be able to meet up with them soon, because I know they’re here in New Mexico.
Lynna: You can get that coffee that you want. Because you said you want to sit down with coffee.
Mark: Green tea or something. Anyway guys thank you so much for tuning in and joining us for another show. Tuesday we have another show, we don’t know exactly what we’re going to be covering but bet your bottom dollar it’s going to be interesting. Something controversial and something that the trans community doesn’t want to hear about. But we’re here and determined to help the evolution of our species and to stop this madness of being born in the wrong body and doing all these things that align ourselves. The alignment is already in you. You are perfect the way you are. There is no need to do anything else but breathe, love, and be.
Lynna: If you can’t live your truth, than it’s just not worth living
Mark: Not at all folks. Have a great evening, and good night.
When they find out, people ask me incredulously if I regret not attending my father’s funeral.
I had no relationship with my father for all of my adult life. I lived a childhood where he hit my mother often. I could never reconcile it and fought him as a boy. As an adult, I never forgave him. He died a stranger, someone in my past I never talked about.
Violence was not my father’s only indiscretion. He grew up hard, and did his best to raise me with the totems of manhood as he saw them, for better or worse. All men, and especially men of color, learn quickly and from an early age that our existence depends on our performance of masculinity. My father tried to teach me to survive in a world that looked at we dark-skinned men with the kind of hostility my generation would never know.
Unless I told you, you’d probably never know my myriad traumas, or how many people I failed on the way to healing them. You’d never know I don’t know when Father’s Day is. Or how I never had children because I reasoned it best to break a cycle not worth repeating, to spare someone else from being damaged the way I was.
As a boy who craved his father’s approval, as young boys often do, I can’t help but wonder how different I would have ended up if my father taught me what I needed to understand about love, about principle, and about respect. Would I have hurt the people I hurt? Would I be as I am, still restless and unsettled? I will never know.
I write about this now because I want you who are fathers to not have a son like me. I don’t want you to have the moments my father had in his later years, desperately wanting a relationship with a son who stopped believing in him years before. This time you have now to share and talk with your son is far more important than you think. Use every minute wisely. Don’t take the casual things you say and do for granted. Make sure you don’t end up where we did.
I have lost count of the conversations I wish my father and I would have had, or the things I wish he helped me to see, instead of the lessons I spent years undoing.
It was not until some time away from my father that I learned to love my emotions. If I’d had a son, I would tell him to live your happiest feelings boisterously. It can feel very isolating to be that man who acts, speaks and expresses differently than other men. People question your intelligence and sexuality for it, moreso for men of color. But there is no reason to not be ostentatious, bold and open in what you feel. Holding it in proves nothing. Stuffing it down doesn’t make you better. It often makes you worse. More importantly, you have but one life. No one’s last days are spent thankful for all the times they avoided tears, played cool so someone didn’t know where they stood, or just didn’t share feelings.
I wish my father had told me it’s always easy to see the down side of things, but to take a moment to appreciate the people around us. My view today of my father is more nuanced — he had his own demons, and many resentments he never resolved. I wish it was not still a daily battle against sinking into his familiar morose and bitter place. Or to let the anger that comes with male entitlement rule my day. It’s hard sometimes to find joy in simple things. I learned gratitude matters far more than almost anything. Perspective means a great deal. It can always be worse. The best day is what you make of it.
I’d tell my son that respect for women is our responsibility to do and speak up about. Not just because we have mothers or sisters or partners, but because dignity is not about what people do for and mean to us. I’d remind him that you don’t talk like you know what others go through, because men almost reflexively always do that. And you especially do not to talk like you know what a woman goes through. Men are taught that is okay and do it often. Really though, men will never know.
I wish my father had told me freedom of choice can’t be divorced from how the world works, and from the power that men have. Everyone can get fixated on making their own choices. We’re told people make decisions and that’s okay, but we never hear about context, or how decisions come to pass. Our choices as men have consequences, often for those with far less power than us. The same gender binary that depends on choice and demands we act in particular ways also calls on us to acquiesce to things we may not agree with. As men have the greatest privilege, my father could have told me asking questions and standing up for my beliefs are virtues.
Most of all, I wish he had spoken through his actions. I don’t know one man who has a positive relationship with his father in instances where he was physically, emotionally or verbally abusive to the male’s mother. Not one. Like anyone, I’ve been upset with partners who hurt my feelings, said unkind things or seemed not to care. Maybe because of the way I was brought up, I never thought for even a second to put my hands on anyone. Physical violence against my mother defined my life. It scarred me for years. It changed the way I think of my father. I can’t say strongly enough how critical respect for partners, even when times are bad, is for a child.
My story is going to surprise even close friends, because it’s something I just don’t talk about. I’m doing it now because I recognize it must be hard for a father, with the expectations of maleness and more on him, to talk to sons about women and respect, about emotions and about vulnerability. Yet they’re the issues that come to matter most as we grow up. Teaching your son to fix a car, clean a handgun or fight a bully might feel urgent. Showing a boy to be tough in the face of adversity could seem right. From experience, I can tell you that if your son has to learn on his own how to respect the women in his life, how to express his feelings, and how to be just in a world that is often unjust to women and those with the least power, you’ll not only have failed him, but yourself.
If that’s not enough to convince you, let mine be your cautionary tale. For you who are fathers, the last memory you want is of a son who doesn’t even say your name or remember your face. If pressed, he can’t recall when you were born. Or one whose good memories, and even most of the bad, are gone. You don’t want your son to be me, with no regrets about erasing you out of his life or not attending your burial. I can only encourage you to teach them well and show them a better way. Do whatever you can to make sure the day my father and I saw never comes.
In 1993 Michael Carter was arrested and indicted for underground environmental activism. Since then he’s worked aboveground, fighting timber sales and oil and gas leasing, protecting endangered species, and more. Today, he’s a member of Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, and author of the memoir Kingfishers’ Song: Memories Against Civilization.
Time is Short: You mentioned some problems of radical groups—lack of respect for women and lack of a strategy. Could you expand on that?
Michael Carter: Sure. To begin with, I think both of those issues arise from a lifetime of privilege in the dominant culture. Men in particular seem prone to nihilism; I certainly was. Since we were taught—however unwittingly—that men are entitled to more of everything than women, our tendency is to bring this to all our endeavors.
I will give some credit to the movie “Night Moves” for illustrating that. The men cajole the woman into taking outlandish risks and they get off on the destruction, and that’s all they really do. When an innocent bystander is killed by their action, the woman has an emotional breakdown. She’s angry with the men because they told her no one would get hurt, and she breaches security by talking to other people about it. Their cell unravels and they don’t even explore their next options together. Instead of providing or even offering support, one of the men stalks and ultimately kills the woman to protect himself from getting caught, then vanishes back into mainstream consumer culture. So he’s not only a murderer but ultimately a cowardly hypocrite, as well.
Honestly, it appears to be more of an anti-underground propaganda piece than anything. Or maybe it’s just a vapid film, but it does have one somewhat valid point—that we white Americans, particularly men, are an overprivileged self-centered lot who won’t hesitate to hurt anyone who threatens us.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
That’s a fictional example, but any female activist can tell you the same thing. And of course misogyny isn’t limited to underground or militant groups; I saw all sorts of male self-indulgence and superiority in aboveground circles, moderate and radical both. It took hindsight for me to recognize it, even in myself. That’s a central problem of radical environmentalism, one reason why it’s been so ineffective. Why should any woman invest her time and energy in an immature movement that holds her in such low regard? I’ve heard this complaint about Occupy groups, anarchists, aboveground direct action groups, you name it.
Groups can overcome that by putting women in positions of leadership and creating secure, uncompromised spaces for them to do their work. I like to reflect on the multi-cultural resistance to the Burmese military dictatorship, which is also a good example of a combined above- and underground effort, of militant and non-violent tactics. The indigenous people of Burma traditionally held women in positions of respect within their cultures, so they had an advantage in building that into their resistance movements, but there’s no reason we couldn’t imitate that anywhere. Moreover, if there are going to be sustainable and just cultures in the future, women are going to be playing critical roles in forming and running them, so men should be doing everything possible to advocate for their absolute human rights.
As for strategy, it’s a waste of risk-taking for someone to cut down billboards or burn the paint off bulldozers. It’s important not to equate willingness with strategy, or radicalism and militancy with intelligence. For example, I just noticed an oil exploration subcontractor has opened an office in my town. Bad news, right? I had a fleeting wish to smash their windows, maybe burn the place down. That’ll teach ‘em, they’ll take us seriously then. But it wouldn’t do anything, only net the company an insurance settlement they’d rebuild with and reinforce the image of militant activists as mindless, dangerous thugs.
If I were underground, I’d at least take the time to choose a much more costly and hard-to-replace target. I’d do everything I could to coordinate an attack that would make it harder for the company to recover and continue doing business. And I’d only do these things after I had a better understanding of the industry and its overall effects, and a wider-focused examination of how that industry falls into the mechanism of civilization itself.
By widening the scope further, you see that ending oil and gas development might better be approached from an aboveground stance—by community rights initiatives, for example, that have outlawed fracking from New York to Texas to California. That seems to stand a much better chance of being effective, and can be part of a still wider strategy to end fossil fuel extraction altogether, which would also require militant tactics. You have to make room for everything, any tactic that has a chance of working, and begin your evaluation there.
To use the Oak Flat copper mine example, now the mine is that much closer to happening, and the people working against it have to reappraise what they have available. That particular issue involves indigenous sacred sites, so how might that be respectfully addressed, and employed in fighting the mine aboveground? Might there be enough people to stop it with civil disobedience? Is there any legal recourse? If there isn’t, how might an underground cell appraise it? Are there any transportation bottlenecks to target, any uniquely expensive equipment? How does timing fit in? How about market conditions—hit them when copper prices are down, maybe? Target the parent company or its other subsidiaries? What are the company’s financial resources?
An underground needs a strategy for long-term success and a decision-making mechanism that evaluates other actions. Then they can make more tightly focused decisions about tactics, abilities, resources, timing, and coordinated effort. The French Resistance to the Nazis couldn’t invade Berlin, but they sure could dynamite train tracks. You wouldn’t want to sabotage the first bulldozer you came across in the woods; you’d want to know who it belonged to, if it mattered, and that you weren’t going to get caught. Maybe it belongs to a habitat restoration group, who can say? It doesn’t do any good to put a small logging contractor out of business, and it doesn’t hurt a big corporation to destroy machinery that is inexpensive, so those questions need to be answered beforehand. I think successful underground strikes must be mostly about planning; they should never, never be about impulse.
TS: There are a lot of folks out there who support the use of underground action and sabotage in defense of Earth, but for any number of reasons—family commitments, physical limitations, and so on—can’t undertake that kind of action themselves. What do you think they can do to support those willing and able to engage in militant action?
MC: Aboveground people need to advocate underground action, so those who are able to be underground have some sort of political platform. Not to promote the IRA or its tactics (like bombing nightclubs), but its political wing of Sinn Fein is a good example. I’ve heard a lot of objections to the idea of advocating but not participating in underground actions, that there’s some kind of “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy in it, but that reflects a misunderstanding of resistance movements, or the requirements of militancy in general. Any on-the-ground combatant needs backup; it’s just the way it is. And remember that being aboveground doesn’t guarantee you any safety. In fact, if the movement becomes effective, it’s the aboveground people most vulnerable to harm, because they’re going to be well known. In that sense, it’s safer to be underground. Think of the all the outspoken people branded as intellectuals and rounded up by the Nazis.
The next most important support is financial and material, so they can have some security if they’re arrested. When environmentalists were fighting logging in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, Paul Watson (of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society) offered to pay the legal defense of anyone caught tree spiking. Legal defense funds and on-call pro-bono lawyers come immediately to mind, but I’m sure that could be expanded upon. Knowing that someone is going to help if something horrible happens, combatants can take more initiative, can be more able to engineer effective actions.
We hope there won’t be any prisoners, but if there are, they must be supported too. They can’t just be forgotten after a month. As I mentioned before, even getting letters in jail is a huge morale booster. If prisoners have families, it’s going to make a big difference for them to know that their loved ones aren’t alone and that they will have some sort of aboveground material support. This is part of what we mean when we talk about a culture of resistance.
TS: You’ve participated in a wide range of actions, spanning the spectrum from traditional legal appeals to sabotage. With this unique perspective, what do you see as being the most promising strategy for the environmental movement?
MC: We need more of everything, more of whatever we can assemble. There’s no denying that a lot of perfectly legal mainstream tactics can work well. We can’t litigate our way to sustainability any more than we can sabotage our way to sustainability; but for the people who are able to sue the enemy, that’s what they should be doing. Those who don’t have access to the courts (which is most everyone) need to find other roles. An effective movement will be a well-organized movement, willing to confront power, knowing that everything is at stake.
Decisive Ecological Warfare is the only global strategy that I know of. It lays out clear goals and ways of arranging above- and underground groups based on historical examples of effective movements. If would-be activists are feeling unsure, this might be a way for them to get started, but I’m sure other plans can emerge with time and experience. DEW is just a starting point.
Remember the hardest times are in the beginning, when you’re making inevitable mistakes and going through abrupt learning curves. When I first joined Deep Green Resistance, I was very uneasy about it because I still felt burned out from the ‘90s struggles. What I’ve discovered is that real strength and endurance is founded in humility and respect. I’ve learned a lot from others in the group, some of whom are half my age and younger, and that’s a humbling experience. I never really understood what a struggle it is for women, either, in radical movements or the culture at large; my time in DGR has brought that into focus.
Look at the trans controversy; here are males asking to subordinate women’s experiences and safe spaces so they can feel comfortable. It’s hard for civilized men to imagine relationships that aren’t based on the dominant-submissive model of civilization, and I think that’s what the issue is really about—not phobia, not exclusionary politics, but rather role-playing that’s all about identity. Male strength traditionally comes from arrogance and false pride, which naturally leads to insecurity, fear, and a need to constantly assert an upper hand, a need to be right. A much more secure stance is to recognize the power of the earth, and allow ourselves to serve that power, not to pretend to understand or control it.
TS: We agree that time is not on our side. What do you think is on our side?
MC: Three things: first, the planet wants to live. It wants biological diversity, abundance, and above all topsoil, and that’s what will provide any basis for life in the future. I think humans want to live, too; and more than just live, but be satisfied in living well. Civilization offers only a sorry substitute for living well to only a small minority.
The second is that activists now have a distinct advantage in that it’s easier to get information anonymously. The more that can be safely done with computers, including attacking computer systems, the better—but even if it’s just finding out whose machinery is where, how industrial systems are built and laid out, that’s much easier to come by. On the other hand the enemy has a similar advantage in surveillance and investigation, so security is more crucial than ever.
The third is that the easily accessible resources that empires need to function are all but gone. There will never be another age of cheap oil, iron ore mountains, abundant forest, and continents of topsoil. Once the infrastructure of civilized humanity collapses or is intentionally broken, it can’t really be rebuilt. Then humans will need to learn how to live in much smaller-scale cultures based on what the land can support and how justly they treat one another. That will be no utopia, of course, but it’s still humanity’s best option. The fight we’re now engaged in is over what living material will be available for those new, localized cultures—and more importantly, the larger nonhuman biological communities—to sustain themselves. What polar bears, salmon, and migratory birds need, we will also need. Our futures are forever linked.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
