Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines speaks at a rally outside of the NCAA Convention in San Antonio on Jan. 12, 2023. (Darren Abate/AP Photo)
Commentary
Women are women.
How's that for a sentence? A declaration.
To say a woman is a woman requires no prefix. It requires no qualifier. No extra start-up syllable. It requires no semantic trickery to take its plain
and always-understood sense — its sense since the beginning of time and the discovery of language itself — to try to turn it into something else.
The world, and all the men and women in it, have known and understood what it is to be a man and a woman since there has been a world with men and women in it. It is, if I may use the phrase,
one of the atoms, one of the very basic concepts, of human beings. Man and woman are two of the most primary, first-learned, lexical understandings of every language the globe has or has had.
Neither word can, at the flash of whimsical self-declaration,
be turned into its opposite. Merely for a man to "say" he is a woman does not and cannot in law, biology, sports,
or common sense, make him a her.
The consideration that in so much of the 2023 Western world — in universities, schools, companies, sports leagues, and news media — this patent self-contradiction, this plain nonsense, is now receiving support, is written into some codes of conduct, is made a matter of "bias training," and is being pushed with angry zeal by so-called trans activists, should be a matter of universal shock. But it is plainly
not so.
Should there be one incident to bring back the sense of shock, to call people to their senses once again, it has to be the
brutal, cruel, and horrible reception given to Riley Gaines, a star female swimmer, at San Francisco State University on the night of April 8. You may and should watch some of it on various YouTube clips.
After giving a talk and taking questions on why female athletes should not to be forced to compete with males, as she left the lecture room she was
literally ambushed by a mob of trans activists.
She was hit twice by a male wearing female clothes, and she was shouted at and screamed at with some of the most vulgar terms. She was
barely protected by a few campus police officers as they managed to get her into a side room. The mob then
demanded "money" before they would let her leave. Naturally Gaines refused. She was then kept virtually a hostage — remember this is on a university campus,
a home of inquiry and debate and civilized human exchange — for a whole three hours.
Here,
in her own words from an op-ed for the
Daily Mail, Gaines writes:
"Just over one year ago, I wouldn't have imagined that
I'd find myself barricaded inside a classroom in a building on the campus of San Francisco State University.
"
Outside the door a violent, racist mob chanted threats against me.
"'
Open the door, we want Riley,' they screamed.
"'
Why are you protecting a white woman?' the mob spit at security.
"'
This is vengeance.'
"'
You're protecting a transphobe.'"
The anger of the mob was palpable. But then trans-rights types
seem to make anger and abuse part of their tactics. The world-famous author J.K. Rowling, who also wishes to stand by the age-old and absolutely unchangeable meaning of man and woman,
has endured one of the great hate crusades, via the internet mostly, of our times. She is, in the clumsy coinage of the angry trans activists, a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, for those who want the sludge terms explained), their acronym for what they wish you to believe is the ultimate in bigotry and prejudice.
Female teachers have been fired for not obliging this newest lunacy. In Ontario, mild, multi-cultural, sensitive Ontario, a 16-year-old student
has been suspended from his Catholic school for daring to utter
the latest heresy: that there are two genders.
It gets worse/better. When he returned to the school
he was arrested by two local police officers and charged with trespassing. Josh Alexander is a boy. Attending a Catholic school. In enlightened Ontario. Arrested, effectively,
for asserting that men are men and women are women.
Is this why we have schools and police forces in democratic Canada? To
take a knee to every strange new dogma of woke madness? How have the modern nations come to this point? How can it be that a brave and extremely accomplished female athlete — who wishes to respect her sport and the other women who wish to participate in it — gets threatened, hit, cursed at, and held hostage by a deranged mob of "right-thinking" activists?There is nothing in the current round of many idiocies that matches the idiocy of pretending, or obliging, or acceding to the demented claim that someone with a penis and testicles, hairy legs, and a deep voice is a woman because he says so. And that it allows that man to don female attire, undress in female locker rooms, and compete against females, and
thereby rob them of honest competition with members of their own sex.
Why was Plato born? Or Socrates allowed to speak? Or Aquinas given to write? Or Francis Bacon to spell out the first notions of science and empiricism?
Why did the West have the Enlightenment?
Why did great minds unravel the universe — Newton finding the laws of planetary motion, and Einstein, brilliance personified, offering a correction to them?
Was it all so that we could come to 2023 and plunge back into what we have come to call the Dark Ages? At times it seems it does.
Why in this fit of current cultural madness are anger-drenched activists under
the specious banner of human rights allowed to turn reason upside down, gather many of the authorities to their side, have universities and schools shamelessly accede to their nonsense, and punish, harass, and persecute the few normal people willing to stand up against them?Riley Gaines is a hero, and deserves so, so much better than she has received.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times
.
Reader Comments
Those 'others' will have a hard time when the SHTF. They shouldn't expect that their Gender Studies degrees will grant them any sort of comfort. I won't be extending any of my resources to ensure their survival - and if need be, I will dispatch their useless asses in a heartbeat.
Protect yourself, nobody else will...
Leftists aren't capable of surviving economic collapse - here's why
There is one factor that constantly stands out as absolutely essential to a person's chances at surviving a crisis event, and that factor is mindset. Experience and training are highly valuable,...here is an article from a few months ago. Shows that the people who think gender bender and related nonsense to be important- won't really last too long. Just bolstering your statement.
Thankfully, I live in a small rural village that not only doesn't have stop-lights, it doesn't even have a stop sign. Like, you come to an intersection and then you use your common sense to cross it. As a small village people get to know you. If you are a productive person that is generous, people know it - and if you need some help they will provide it. If you are a parasite that wants to ride on others efforts, you get abandoned.
I've got lots of skills, One of which is I'm the 'chainsaw expert' in the village (I not only can fix 'em, I modify them to cut faster). I'm getting a bit old to keep working, but I have enough resources (including precious metals) to pay others to do the hard work. I've allocated two people to use my 50 square meter greenhouse to produce whatever food they want to plant. I just want the option to be able to walk out there and 'steal' a tomato or cucumber when I want it - works for me.
When the SHTF and the country is in survival mode, fantasies will not feed the wokeists, will not house them and will not clothe them. They will die. Only those who face facts and the truth can, and will, survive. It is exactly what destroyed the Soviet Union, and it is what will destroy the United States. A joke:
Comrade Commissar of Agriculture goes to visit a collective State Potato Farm. He is received with great ceremony by a Worker's Committee, headed by the Comrade Manager. He says to Comrade Manager, "So, tell me, Comrade Manager, how is the potato crop this year?"
Comrade Manager replies, "Ah! Comrade Commissar, the potatoes are magnificent, as big as footballs! The crop is stupendous! It is beyond a miracle! Why, if we heaped our potatoes up in one pile, they would reach unto the feet of God!"
"Come, come now, Comrade Manager, you must not say such things!" says Comrade Commissar of Agriculture. "This is Soviet Russia! You know as well as I do that there is no such person as God! That is pure fantasy, imagination, as you might say."
"Ah, Comrade Commissar , this makes me so happy, to hear you say so, that there is no God. I am so glad that you understand, how do you say it, fantasies and tall tales, as it were.... Because, you see, there are no potatoes either. They are pure fantasy, pure imagination, as you said."
That is how Communists operate, and that is why Democratic Communism will collapse, just as Soviet Communism did.
Yesterday, I moved cattle from the area they were being wintered and onto to an open hay field where they can nibble on the old grass. This is just to get them out and accustomed to pasture again and to stretch the remaining hay supply. I also like them out in the open where they can spread their own manure. We have had an extremely rapid snow melt over the past few days. But it will be another 3-4 weeks before real pasture.
We are tapping maple trees. The sugar run has just started, not sure how good it will be. It is not a money maker just something we do for food. Like growing a very large garden. We try to produce as much of our own food as possible. Been that way for over 40 years.
Speaking of pasture and manure, lots of fence to fix and manure to haul. Don't grow much corn anymore, not since our dairy farm was obliterated. Beef cattle and we only have few, don't need as much corn as milk cows. My wife has ended up buying feed for her sheep and goats, which also sorta have replaced the dairy cattle since our small family dairy farm was obliterated, by the PTB.
Mostly just have hay and pasture, don't turn the soil (plow)anymore. Not since our small organic dairy farm was obliterated. By the PTB.
Worked also yesterday on next winter's firewood. I really enjoy making wood. It heats our house and the sauna , another two things I enjoy, a warm house in winter and the authentic Finnish sauna!
Also spent time just walking around enjoying the fact that the snow is finally disappearing into the ground. Soaking in the bright sunshine!
Another boring day.
Who the hell is Riley Gaines?
ned,
out
(The losses are 😔)
Seems the Dark Ages are just getting darker.
fi/fy/fo/fum