The fifth horseman of our apocalypse is a functionary on a mission. Religious imagination expects apocalypse to arrive in a fury. We do not recognize it when it comes, as evil does, in the banal guise of bureaucratic authority and expertise. Our seemingly rational bureaucracies are conduits for camouflaged derangements. Transgender ideology exceeds them all.
In The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for Physicists, Robert Oppenheimer wrote of man’s technical capacity to achieve self-annihilation by weapons of his own making:
No world has ever faced a possibility of destruction—in a relevant sense annihilation—comparable to that which we face, nor a process of decision-making even remotely like that which is involved in this. . . . We are the first men who control the apocalypse.
Oppenheimer’s diagnosis was delivered in 1964, at the beginning of the Cold War. Signals of apocalypse have not disappeared. They simply present themselves in different modes. Among the more cunning of them is transgenderism. Gender mania is the frenzy of an historical moment in which the sole criteria of things hoped for lies solely within the untrammeled self. Norms are an illusion. There are none. There is only me, myself, and the I that I say I am.
Listen closely. In pronouncements of the trans lobby you can hear the whimper of T.S. Eliot’s hollow men, a confession of hopelessness amplified into a boast by a culture gone rancid. Today’s spiritually dead assert their own extinction and solace themselves by seeking the ruin even of children. A treacherous tolerance smiles on that despair.
Ugliness, Too, Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it follows that ugliness must reside there as well. Beauty is a popular topic these days. Ugliness is not. A shame, really. Certain things would be easier to talk about if we were less fearful of stating the obvious. An eye for beauty is a tricky thing. Uncoupled from an eye for gall and wormwood, it leaves you half blind.
Moral beauty, something quite distinct from physical beauty, is not readily seen. Neither is emotional or psychological deformity necessarily visible. But there exist striking instances of convergence between inner reality and its embodiment. Look again at Dr. Rachel Levine, newly appointed assistant secretary for Health and Human Services in the Biden regime.
As told in the previous post, Rachel is the pharmaceutical/surgical reset for Dr. Richard Levine. If he were installed in some other bureaucracy—e.g. housing, transportation, taxation—his singular psychosis could possibly matter less. It might prompt only sympathy for the anguish at the core of his “transition.” We might then close our eyes to his disfigurement and let him get on with his job. But Levine is a prominent, outspoken poobah in public health. That he is both a pediatrician and professor of pediatrics and psychiatry makes his own psyche of some concern to the public he instructs.
Sympathy is not ours to apply here. Parents can leave Caliban to pity himself.
It is impossible not to wonder what the man sees when he looks at himself in the mirror. Does he see an appealing woman? One to whom the now-eradicated Richard might have been drawn? The nail polish, the exaggerated bleached blonde hair, the knee length skirts—what fantasies of femininity sent a married man hunting an improbable Snark?
His form is ungainly—his intellect small—”
(So the Bellman would often remark)
“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,
Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”
The narrator of Lewis Carrol’s nonsense poem declares, “I have said it thrice: / What I tell you three times is true.” The apostles of self-annihilation never stop repeating to us that a transwoman is an honest-to-God woman—The Real Thing. No Jamesian irony intended. In 2015, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate confirmed him as the state’s top doctor. The vote was unanimous: 49-0.
Were Pennsylvania’s senators as delusional as the candidate? Or were they intimidated—following orders, so to speak—by cultural and bureaucratic imperatives to recognize transgenderism as the latest frontier of self-expression? If any of them saw in Levine a thick-bodied burlesque of a Valley Girl gone to seed, they kept mum and played the game.
Recruiting Parents To The Game
Typically it is mothers who first discern the transgender potential of a child. Fathers, less gnostic about their parental role, are more apt to follow the lead of that mythic thing: a woman’s finer instinct. In the main, fathers assent to, rather than initiate, belief that their son—or, increasingly, their daughter—was born into the wrong body. Authors of The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals briefly acknowledge the contrast:
It is not uncommon for parents to react differently to their child’s gender variance. Typically one parent feels more comfortable allowing their child’s self-expression, while the other feels that they are thereby “encouraging” it. As much as possible strive for a unified approach. We understand that this is not always possible.
The authoresses, Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper, commit themselves to disarming parental prudence. They frame assent to cross-gendering a child as a social justice issue. Become a missionary and cleanse the world:
Parents are agents of change. You can embrace this role actively, knowing that the way you present gender to young children will influence them for the rest of their lives. By encouraging gender equity and gender diversity you allow no room for discrimination and bias. Just as you would stand up to other inequities and stereotypes, make it a point to do so for gender inequity and gender stereotypes. In so doing, you support all children. By celebrating all people in their right to natural expression you are also boosting the confidence and self-esteem of gender variant children.
In sum, the erasure of biological sex is an ethical imperative.
Correction: Rachel Levine’s birth name was Richard, not David as originally stated. The text stands corrected.
