The Poetry Editor

Trying to understand the "woke" personality

(Note: If you see a small triangular dot in the text [ˑ] I am using it as a non-breaking space because Substack does not have that function at present. It is the most unobtrusive character I could find. Please ignore it. Also, I use British spellings for some words.)

A year or two ago I was posting poems on a poetry critique forum, and I became acquainted with another member, whom I will call Mitchell. Mitchell runs a rather large poetry site on the internet. He liked my poetry, and we discussed the possibility that he might put some of it on his site. As I keep saying in my articles, I am a liberal, but Mitchell’s liberalism was so obvious that it occurred to me I should make him aware that I am not liberal on all issues. So I posted one of my anti-trans poems on the critique forum we were participating on, as follows:

The New Amazons

Some of them actually look like women,
though most of them can’t pull it off. I do
admire their courage to risk ridicule.
For the rest of us, years of laughing
at comedians in wigs, pearls and frocks
must be forgotten, for the law says
that we must take them seriously.

So many musts.

We must accept them as real for what
they think they are. We must let them tell
us who we are, for they are experts on
everything surreal. We must speak about
them only in words they specify.

Women must welcome them into their games,
live with them in shelters, prisons, dorms;
appreciate their naked bodies when they bathe.
Children must accept them as their guides.

This is the New Order, a world in which
every impossible thing is true. Blue is pink
and pink is blue. No one is who she seems to be.
Should you decide to disagree, take care.
The army of the monster will engage you,
slap you down, cancel, crush and shame you.
The truth is on your side, but may not save you.

Almost immediately, Mitchell objected to the poem, and we began to argue via the forum’s private message feature. The argument became so intense that we took it to emails. (As a side note, it turned out that the forum administrator was reading our private messages, and we were both thrown off the forum. The lack of ethics that some forum administrators exhibit is astonishing.) After arguing in emails for a while, we both gave up trying to convince the other.

Mitchell’s support for trans people didn’t make a great deal of sense to me. Why should a heterosexual man in the prime of his life care about men who imagine they are women? He seemed especially concerned about children. He described how horrible it must be for a three-year-old child to feel trapped in the wrong body. Theˑavailable evidence, however, indicates that gender dysphoria is fairly common among children, which makes sense given that they are new people and would naturally wonder why they were born one sex or the other. But there is also mounting evidence that many if not most children outgrow these feelings as they age. For this reason, it’s my opinion that children should be required to wait until they are adults before starting any medical treatments to transition them to the opposite sex. In my view, a child does not have the right to make life-changing decisions on behalf of the adult yet to come. The medical treatments that trans people undergo generally have permanent side-effects.

Transgender activists would have us believe the opposite, that being a trans child is so exquisitely painful that children must transition while still young lest they commit suicide, but the statistics don’t bear that out. Indeed, children are very resilient. They understand that when they grow up they will be able to make their own decisions, and most of them are willing to wait. To the extent that society is giving children the idea that this is a decision they have the authority to make, we are doing them a disservice.

A year or two passed and Mitchell and I found ourselves exchanging emails on another matter (the horror that is the poetry forum Eratosphere). After exchanging a few notes, the trans issue erupted, and we started arguing again. I decided to be more careful this time — i.e., to try to explain things in a logical manner which Mitchell might understand, so I said this:

“The standards of society must be based on reality. This is reality: (1) Human beings are physical creatures. (2) A man is a person with a male reproductive system. (3)ˑAˑman who feels like a woman is a man who feels like a woman, and nothing more. Now, society should accept men who feel like women (and vice versa), but pretending that they are real women is a step too far. When you accept that trans women are real women, you have entered into La La Land.”

Now, perhaps I shouldn’t have said “La La Land” — I said it because it made my point well — but he might have felt that I was mocking him. In any event, he wrote back, disagreeing with (3), and then he became abusive, saying that I made him “sick to his stomach”. We exchanged a few more notes in which I remained civil, but he continued to heap abuse on me, calling me names and using swear words and even making a threat. Then he sent me an ugly limerick in which he mocked me! And this is a fellow who loves poetry and writes serious poetry himself!

It should be noted that the first time we argued about the trans issue, he wasn’t abusive, so something had changed since then.

This experience brings up several larger questions which need to be addressed:

1. Why are trans people pushing so many bad ideas on society?

2. Why do trans people feel that we must accept all of their ideas in order for them to be accepted by society?

3. Why are so many liberals willing to accept those bad ideas?

Why are trans people pushing so many bad ideas on society?

All I can offer here are my opinions. It seems to me that trans people want to feel normal, and that’s difficult to do when your group constitutes one-half percent of the population and has a recognized disorder called “gender dysphoria”. So to normalize themselves, trans activists developed the idea that what makes a woman a woman is her female “gender identity” (and vice versa for men). In order to make the concept of gender identity plausible, it has to be applied to everyone, not just to trans people. Thus, I am a man, not because I have a male body, but because I “feel” like a man. See? If both I and a transgender man (who has a female body) have the “gender identity” of a man, then that makes both of us equally men. But of course, people with common sense know that a man cannot have a female body.

Indeed, some people question whether human beings even have a gender identity.
It seems to me that trans people must, since they want to be the opposite sex; but the rest of us would probably say, “I am the gender I am because of my body.” If the concept of gender identity applies only to one-half percent of the population, then it isn’t a legitimate concept.

“Gender identity” is the centerpiece of transgender ideology. Trans women, having concluded that they are real women because they feel like women (or think they do), believe they have the right to break into all of women’s single-sex spaces, including women’s sports. But most people understand that that is wrong. Indeed, every time I see images of that selfish usurper Lia Thomas (at least one foot taller than all of his competitors, and clearly stronger) standing proudly on the women’s victory platform after a women’s swimming meet, I become angry. That the poetry editor Mitchell isn’t angered at such displays of misogyny just shows that his values are twisted.

Why do trans people feel that we must accept all of their ideas in order for them to be accepted by society?

As I just explained, trans people want to be seen as normal. In order to accomplish that, they must redefine men and women in such a way that trans people qualify as real men and women, not just imposters. But their concept of “gender identity” hasn’t caught on with enough people, and so they use a variety of offensive techniques to get what they want: Devising their own vocabulary which they expect people to adopt, demanding that people talk about them in specific ways (e.g., pronouns), influencing children to believe they are trans (in order to increase their overall numbers), ramping up their status as a pitiful minority to gain sympathy, censoring (or attempting to censor) a public discussion about transgenderism (“no debate”), trying to derail the lives of people who speak out against their bad ideas (J.K. Rowling), and shaming people by calling anyone who doesn’t agree with them a “transphobe”.

Ultimately, trans people feel that society has an obligation to accept all their bad ideas because Western society has an obligation to accept all minorities, no matter how pitiful they may be, and the bad ideas of trans people are part of the package.

If instead of fighting all of society, trans people took an honest stance, they’d have better success: “Through no fault of our own, we feel like the opposite sex, and so we ask society to accept us as the sex we feel to be and allow us to live our lives the way we want to.” Such a simple position would be met with more sympathy, but it would not permit them to pretend that they are actually the opposite gender, and that means their freedom would be curtailed.

In short, trans people have opted to demand more rights than they have a right to, believing that the more trans-accommodating ideas they spread, the more likely they are to be seen as normal. It isn’t enough for them to enjoy the normal rights that everyone has, they feel they must demand extraordinary rights.

Over the years, as black people have demanded equality in society, they managed to do that without demanding extra rights. If, for example, black people had demanded that everyone use the “soul” handshake instead of the normal handshake, and also demanded that everyone refer to them as “Nubians”, they would have hurt their cause. That’s what trans people are doing today: They are hurting their own cause.

Why are so many liberals willing to accept those bad ideas?

Transgender ideas will inspire sympathy in anyone who has ever felt oppressed in his life — not everyone, of course, but there is a large contingent of liberals (the “bleeding-heart” type) who feel intense sympathy for anyone who is disadvantaged. (Iˑfeel sympathy too, but I am more practical.) Presently I am corresponding with a gay man I knew in my youth, and even though he finds Trans Speak (as I call it, with its special terminology and absurd use of pronouns) irritating, when we discuss transgender ideology, he always defends it (or, at least, the right of people to believe in it). It is a knee-jerk reaction for him: Having felt oppressed as a youth because he was gay, he now sides automatically with anyone he perceives as oppressed; and if those people are making demands, he’ll go along with those demands.

I assume that the poetry editor Mitchell has at some time in his life felt oppressed. Perhaps he was oppressed in a past life, or perhaps he just had strict parents (bad parenting can make anyone feel oppressed). Mitchell isn’t gay, so he doesn’t have that excuse. I do have that excuse, since I am gay, but I never felt oppressed because of my homosexuality. Well, sometimes I did. But when I encountered gay-haters, I had the sense to realize that they were the ones with the problem, not me

But one thing is clear about Mitchell: He doesn’t know what reality is. For thousands of years human beings have taken their gender from their sexual reproductive system. Trans people haven’t given us enough reason to stop doing that.

Let me close by saying that transgender people in the U.S. legally have all the same rights as the rest of us (due to a recent Supreme Court ruling). That includes protections against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and government benefits. But the extraordinary rights that trans people are demanding are not anything they deserve or need. Indeed, I recommend that my readers buy the book Transsexual Apostate by the English writer Debbie Hayton, a trans woman. Hayton agrees with me that trans people are asking for too much.

More: In one more attempt to reach Mitchell, I sent him the link to this article. His response was off the deep end. Logic means nothing to him. He clings to the talking points pushed by transgender activists. Even though his name isn’t Mitchell and I haven’t revealed his identity, he threatened to sue me if I don’t alter this article in certain ways or take it down. So, it seems that I have failed to come to an understanding of the “woke” personality. Well, perhaps I understand it, but I have had no success deprogramming this particular person. It still puzzles me: How has one of the smallest minorities in existence managed to brainwash so many people?

                                                                   *          *          *

So far I have written only two anti-trans poems. Here is the other one. I posted the poem on a poetry critique forum, and the first person who read it thought it was great, viewing it as a tribute to diversity and tolerance. But he didn’t realize that it is satire (I hadn’t added the subtitle at that time). I finally realized that this poem is a test: People who take it seriously and think it is great are exposing themselves as brainwashed woke liberals, and the people who take it as satire are the ones with common sense.

The Changing World
This poem is satire

Transphobia is our human inheritance.
The husky delivery man who just brought me
my food looked to be one-hundred and fifty
percent male, and yet ... how could I be sure?
I just assumed. I didn’t look for high heels;
perhaps that was rouge on his ruddy cheeks.
A more sensitive poet, a better liberal,
would have asked for pronouns. She/her/hers?
He/him/his? They/them/theirs? Xe/xem/xyrs?
Implicit bias stalks us; it’s no easy task
to eschew a lifetime of gender privilege.
Was that a pink bow I saw in their scraggly beard?
If I see them again, I’ll give them the hug
I should have given them the first time.