fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

From ‘Bake My Cake’ to ‘Wax My Testicles’

Litigious transgender Jessica Yaniv hopes to extend love's winning streak
Screen Shot 2019-07-20 at 7.56.46 PM

Surely we live in the best of all possible worlds — or at least in the best of all possible Canadas:

A B.C. Human Rights Tribunal hearing devolved into repeated outbursts and name-calling this week as it considered a transgender woman’s complaint that a home-based salon discriminated against her by denying her a Brazilian wax.

At one point, the complainant compared the business owner to a neo-Nazi. The lawyer for the business owner accused the complainant of engaging in “half-truths and fabrications.” Tribunal adjudicator Devyn Cousineau frequently had to interject to maintain decorum and to keep the hearing from careening off course.

But a substantive question remained at the core of the raucous daylong hearing: should a business be allowed to deny service on the basis of gender identity?

Jessica Yaniv, the complainant, told the hearing she was entitled to receive the advertised wax service and that if the tribunal ruled against her it could lead to a “dangerous” precedent.

“You cannot choose who your clientele is going to be,” she said.

Jessica Yaniv, born Jonathan, and still in full possession of a penis, showed up at the salon demanding to have his testicles waxed. The salon owner refused. He made such a stink that she ended up closing her business. This extremely annoying Yaniv weirdo filed a human rights complaint against her, because as we know, Heinrich Himmler arrested salon owners who waxed Aryan privates. Yaniv has filed a number of complaints against female spa owners who would not touch his penis and testicles to remove hair from them.

This is exactly the right response to this insanity:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

But here is a longer one from Brendan O’Neill at Spiked. Excerpts:

Two of the women who refused to touch a penis they didn’t want to touch – sorry, who behaved transphobically – have already been forced out of business by the HRC actions. One is an immigrant from Brazil, who operated a female waxing service from her own home, where her young children live with her. Because she refused to let a born male into her home and to service his pubic region, she is out of work. A legal representative for the women who have been taken to the HRC says his clients have become ‘depressed, anxious and sleepless’ as a consequence of being talked about as human-rights abusers, transphobes and deniers of gender identity.

Many of the women who have had action taken against them are migrants. Some speak English as a second language. One is Sikh, and also works home, and she has a religious issue with waxing male genitalia. That this ‘human rights’ action is even taking place is utterly perverse. The question immediately arises as to who is really been discriminated against here: a born male who went to female waxer after female waxer to see if they would wax his testicles, or the women who find themselves either in a council hearing or already out of work simply because their religious, cultural or outright personal preferences mean they do not want to service male genitalia. Yaniv says if the case is lost then a dangerous precedent will be set for trans people. In truth, the real danger is if Yaniv wins the case, because that would set a precedent whereby the law could require that women must touch penises or risk losing their jobs. It would be profoundly misogynistic.

More:

This is the logic of gender self-ID. It’s the logic that has seen male rapists being sent to women’s prisons because they now self-ID as women. It is the logic that means a trans-woman who went through male puberty can now be winning gold medals in the women’s world cycling championships. It’s the logic that leads to people using actual phrases like ‘female penis’ without ever thinking to themselves, ‘What the hell am I talking about?’

Read it all. O’Neill is right: if all one has to do is say one is a woman to be considered by the law as a woman, then why shouldn’t Yaniv prevail? This is where we find ourselves. It is crazy. It is malicious. And yes, it is profoundly misogynistic.

By the way, people who have reading this blog for a while might remember Yaniv’s name from this space last year, when I talked about feminist blog being kicked off of WordPress for criticizing Yaniv after he speculated on social media about approaching adolescent girls and asking them for tampons. He is a sick, sick dude.

Amy Welborn writes:

In the future – hopefully not the too distant future – people are going to look back at this transgender moment in the same way they look back at the lobotomy moment or the satanic-childcare-abuse – moment. They’re going be amazed and maybe a little embarrassed for humanity’s sake.

They’re going to see in this moment the culmination of the worst aspects of patriarchal, misogynist thinking, aided by technology and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies: the moment in which the best women are men and women are better off by becoming men.

It’s also – although no one will probably see this, because we’ll be deep into Brave New World/1984 territory by then anyway – absolutely the consequences of a contraceptive, sterilizing, affluent culture.

When human beings are sterilized and approach sexuality as sterile beings in a sterile landscape, when procreation has no necessary connection to sexual activity and everyone has – relative to what human beings have had through most of history – loads of free time and money – what does “sex” and “gender” become?

A costume to wear during the pleasure-seeking performative exercise called Life.

More:

It’s called dysphoria. It’s about not feeling quite right. It’s about not feeling at home in your body or even in the world.

I am careful in speaking about mental illness, because it really is a challenge to understand and discuss. Who among us is “normal” or “whole?” Who relates to themselves and to the world with complete clarity? None of us. Not a one.

So I am not sure how to talk about this – what is not normal, what is clearly mental illness – without being required to define what normal is. You feel as if you are not a woman? Well, let me tell you what you should feel like.

Who can do that? I don’t think it’s possible. That was one of my points in those previous posts.

But clearly, body and gender dysphoria are forms of mental illness. They are rooted in various factors, they can present in different way for varying lengths of time, and healing, if it comes, is as varied as the individuals involved.

Now, honestly – once you accept that – this is a form of mental illness – much of the present moment clicks into place, especially if mental illness has ever played a part in your life: the insistence of putting oneself and one’s felt needs in the center of every, single conversation and issue, the unblinkered focus on the self and trying to find a way to feel okay and then being affirmed, from every corner, in that okaynes. No matter how difficult it is to define “healthy” and “ill” we do know that healthy people, in general – don’t act this way.

So yeah, that’s what’s going to happen. If you’ve ever been part of a group – a class, a workplace, a family, a neighborhood – where there’s someone who’s struggling with mental illness, quite often, those struggles tend to dominate everyone’s lives and every gathering, don’t they?

Understand that, and the pieces of that puzzle – how has the issue of such a tiny, tiny minority come to dominate the culture, and so quickly and why do they act like this? – click right into place.

They’re not well.

Read the entire post — it’s really thoughtful, and she’s furious about what is being done to women by this monstrous ideology.

I do not understand why more women aren’t vocally outraged about this kind of thing, and demanding action. And I do not understand why Republican politicians don’t talk about this issue. I know that they’re afraid to be called bigots, but I think they would have more people with them than they realize. How many people want their wives, sisters, and mothers to be forced to wax a man’s balls? It really does come down to that, as we see in Canada.

The Democratic Party, of course, is all in for the ideology of mandatory ball-waxing. Elizabeth Warren, by the way, is now letting you know what her pronouns are:

You think I’m being hyperbolic here? What does Liz Warren sharing her preferred pronouns have to do with compelled Bro-zilian waxing? I’ll tell you: it is the logical outcome of a philosophical position that says gender is completely fluid, and a matter not of biological reality, but of mental intention. There are no boundaries on this stuff. We already have biological males identifying as females and winning high school athletic competitions. Here’s a subreddit by women who used to think positively about transgenderism, until they hit their “peak trans” moment, and came to view the ideology as misogynistic, and leading to female erasure. . There are lots and lots of stories. One common thread is that when these women first voiced concern or skepticism, progressives (often fellow progressives) turned on them as if they were monsters.

“Wax my balls, bigot” is the reductio ad absurdum of this gender ideology. I’ll say it again: if Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv really is a woman, then why should spas that wax vaginal areas be allowed to turn away Yaniv’s womanly todger and testicles? Have we not all learned by now about the validity of the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”)? When progressives tell you that it’s crazy to think that we’ll ever have a case in which a transwoman files an anti-discrimination lawsuit against a salon for refusing to wax his testicles, don’t you believe them. It will happen.

Here’s an interview testifying to the Sovietization of American life around gender ideology, with Dr. Allan Josephson, an accomplished medical professional who was forced out of his university job because he publicly questioned (at a Heritage Foundation forum) some aspects of gender treatment of adolescents. From Madeleine Kearns at National Review:

Allan Josephson: Oh, I was speaking as a medical professional, clearly. And I was chosen because of the perspective that I would give. I had been directing the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Louisville for 15 years. I had been successful there and was asked to give a speech off campus and on my own time. It was not a university event, and I was speaking in my individual capacity.

MK: So what happened?

AJ: Shortly after that speech, it became clear that a few on my faculty were upset with some of the things that I’d said. Within a few short weeks — it was stunning how quickly it occurred — I was removed from my leadership position and then, within the next year, subjected to fairly hostile work-environment situations and, finally, not that long ago, informed that my contract would not be renewed when it ended on June 30.

MK: So this is because of your expressed professional opinion on gender dysphoria in young people. I assume you knew, going to the Heritage Foundation, that this is a very hot topic politically. And yet you felt compelled to speak up. Why?

AJ: Well, I was asked by people that I respected. Their concern was that we hear all kinds of information from one perspective. And the leaders of the seminar recognized that not all voices were being heard. I had given a couple of talks in other places. So, they invited me, and I was aware of the potential controversy. But I also had things I needed to say because I felt they were clinically true and appropriate and because this is a perspective that more people need to hear.

MK: How stressful has this ordeal been?

AJ: It has had various phases. The first phase was “this just can’t be happening to me.” I was very successful and very well liked. I built my division up from a few people to probably 15 and we had a clinic of almost 30 people. I was banned from faculty meetings. I was banned from certain kinds of interactions with staff and told what I could and couldn’t say to people. And this was a place that I built, you know. And then the stress of one’s personal relationships. My family worried about me, friends worried about me. It was probably was six months before I felt comfortable and was sleeping again. You know, the personal stress is pretty enormous, but then  I decided to do something.

Dr. Josephson is suing his former institution. More from the interview:

MK: The other thing you mentioned is that — to those outside this world — it can seem as though there are only a handful of doctors expressing your view, which makes them much easier to dismiss as crackpots or whatever.

AJ: I think it takes a certain academic perspective and knowledge of the field to say something. It can be lonely. For me, it was really three things.

First, it was a conviction that I had been wronged. It was just this moral sense. You don’t do this to someone who had worked this hard for university and in a few weeks get rid of them for expressing a view, which is really part of your job description. So there was a kind of a righteous indignation.

Second, I saw parents and children being hurt by this. These kids are, for the most part, very vulnerable people. You can see that when you spend time with them. Certainly, the teenagers have multiple problems. Most of the time, 60 or 70 percent of the time, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, they’re hurting people. And parents are confused because they’re basically getting one message from medical and mental-health professionals and that is “Affirm people.” And so I have encouraged people to explore before prescribing treatment, specifically to consider other developmental factors, family factors, that have gone into the insecurities that are associated with this.

And, and then finally, I spoke up because I’m at the end of my career. I have accomplished a lot professionally and had an established reputation. If someone like me can be demoted, harassed, and then effectively fired for expressing my views, think of what an intimidating effect this has on younger professionals, who are not yet established in their careers. And that should not be how academics proceeds or how science proceeds. We think together, we reason together, we talk together. My colleagues couldn’t do that. And I think we see that nationally as well.

Read it all. It’s very good, and Dr. Josephson is a hero. People, you simply have to understand that there is no place to hide from this madness. They will come for you and your job too. As a prominent religious liberty litigator told me in The Benedict Option:

“There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”

It is so insane that it’s almost comical: a Canadian human rights tribunal is actually being asked to punish a business owner for refusing to wax a woman’s penis and testicles. But this is where we are as a culture. We in America are not at all far behind Canada.  If you want a picture of the future the gender ideologues and their political and legal allies have in mind for us, imagine that you are a spa owner, and imagine having to put your hands on Jessica Yaniv’s penis and testicles — forever.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

UPDATE: Changed the headline to be less vulgar, though I really do think the vulgarity is necessary to emphasize the insanity of this phenomenon.

UPDATE.2: Reader Michael GC:

This is exactly the hill they are choosing to die on. The Equality Act, recently passed in the House by unanimous vote of Democrats, has provisions for requiring all public restrooms, showers, and dressing areas be gender neutral, that any male claiming self-id as a girl be allowed to compete against women (as is currently happening in Connecticut, with disastrous consequences for girl’s athletics) and that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act be disallowed as a defense of refusing to provide service for reasons of conscience, effectively repealing it.

The Dems have doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down on identity politics. They are 100% behind people like Jonathan Yaniv. He says that he is a woman and is being unlawfully discriminated against, He is covered by their Equality Act. Their response to the aestheticians would be “Shut up and wax her balls.”

From the text of the Equality Act:

(a) Prohibition On Discrimination Or Segregation In Public Accommodations.—Section 201 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000a) is amended—

(1) in subsection (a), by inserting “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity),” before “or national origin”; and

(2) in subsection (b)—

(A) in paragraph (3), by striking “stadium” and all that follows and inserting “stadium or other place of or establishment that provides exhibition, entertainment, recreation, exercise, amusement, public gathering, or public display;”;

(B) by redesignating paragraph (4) as paragraph (6); and

(C) by inserting after paragraph (3) the following:

“(4) any establishment that provides a good, service, or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency, or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides health care, accounting, or legal services;

“Salon.” Wax those balls, bigot.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now