That Is Not A Woman
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office arrested a woman who said she was playing a prank when she approached a group of people with a firearm Sunday night.
Deputies responded to a report of menacing with a handgun at Vista Brook Park in Raleigh Hills at 11:05 p.m.
A group of three people said they were walking in the park when someone approached them and pointed a handgun at them. The group ran to a nearby house and asked the homeowner to call 911. They described the suspect and firearm to a dispatcher.
Deputies arrived in the area and walked the Fanno Creek Trail, which runs along the south side of the park. They found and detained a person who matched the suspect description.
While searching for the suspect, they located a realistic-looking airsoft gun.
The victims confirmed that the person deputies detained was the same person who pointed the gun at them.
Deputies identified the suspect as Kadin E. Moore, 19, of Beaverton. She was lodged in the Washington County Jail on a menacing charge.
If that is a woman, then I’m the Sultan of Brunei.
Yeah, I know, we laugh at this stuff — “Ha! It’s Portlandia, what do you expect?” — but there’s a serious problem here. When language itself becomes corrupted, it becomes impossible to describe reality. Journalists are required now by their employers to write official lies, such as Kadin E. Moore is a woman, simply because Moore, a troubled, violent 19 year old, says he is.
I find it hard to encourage young people to consider professional journalism as a career. It used to be because jobs were scarce, but now, added to that, is the clear trend of having to use one’s words to lie. To flat-out lie about what is real, and to lie in a way that journalists working for Pravda and Izvestia had to do back in the day.
If one takes Solzhenitsyn’s counsel — “Live not by lies” — seriously, how could one work in mainstream American journalism in this era of gender ideology and political correctness? I’m not asking rhetorically. How could a person of integrity put his or her name on a story that requires having to refer to the Kadin E. Moores of the world as “women”? To be clear, I have no trouble with inserting a clause in stories like this saying Moore identifies as a woman. That is true. What I strongly object to is saying that Moore is a woman.
Let’s be honest. You don’t believe for one second that Kadin Moore is a woman. Only those who have undergone militant re-education at progressive universities believe that, and only those who are afraid that they’ll lose their job if they don’t go along with it say that.
I know a lot of you want to be progressive and compassionate and all, but look at that picture of that lunatic Kadin Moore, and say with a straight face, “That’s a woman.” Say it without hating yourself for your dishonesty.
We have to raise our children the way the communist-era Czech dissidents Vaclav and Kamila Benda raised their kids: to be aware that the Official Story promulgated in the media and in school is a lie.
UPDATE: Abigail Shrier writes in today’s WSJ about the language war over transgenderism. Excerpts:
If you want to control people’s thoughts, begin by commandeering their words. Taking this Orwellian lesson to heart, Virginia’s Fairfax County public school system recently stripped the phrase “biological gender” from its family life curriculum, replacing it with “sex assigned at birth.”
Without permitting parents to opt out, public schools across the country are teaching children that “gender” is neither binary nor biological. It’s closer to a mental state: a question of how girllike or boylike you feel. Students will fall anywhere along a gender spectrum, according to these educators.
More:
This is the left’s allegedly defensive battle, waged on behalf of an aggrieved microminority even as it sets its sights on broader ideological territory. Consider recent state and local actions punishing those who decline to use an individual’s pronouns of choice. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation last year threatening jail time for health-care professionals who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse to use a patient’s preferred pronouns. Under guidelines issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, employers, landlords and business owners who intentionally use the wrong pronoun with transgender workers and tenants face potential fines of as much as $250,000.
Typically, in America, when groups disagree, we leave them to employ the vocabularies that reflect their values. My “affirmative action” is your “racial preferences.” One person’s “fetus” is another’s “baby boy.” This is as it should be; an entire worldview is packed into the word “fetus.” Another is contained in the reference to one person as “them” or “they.” For those with a religious conviction that sex is both biological and binary, God’s purposeful creation, denial of this involves sacrilege no less than bowing to idols in the town square. When the state compels such denial among religious people, it clobbers the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise of religion, lending government power to a contemporary variant on forced conversion.
And:
“Words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them,” wrote John Locke. Ideas are merely the concatenations of words; if you can compel the use of certain words, you control thought and force those who differ into silence. Often, that seems to be the actual goal of gender-identity enthusiasts, since the minuscule numbers of those afflicted with true dysphoria couldn’t otherwise justify the rewriting of all manner of school applications and government forms.
If there is any issue that can rouse conservatives and drive them to the polls, it is this one, with good reason. They perceive that their way of life is at stake. They know that if gender activists prevail, they will be left with a world they neither recognize nor like very much. They will be unable to communicate their displeasure; the words will have been stolen from them.
Shrier is correct. This war is about defining the nature of reality according to progressive gender ideology. This is massively important. Even if voters are able to keep the laws from mandating these lies, people who work for certain companies — like KATU-TV — will have no choice but to obey the company line, or lose their jobs. Jordan Peterson defied his employer’s line, but kept his job because he has tenure. There is no such thing as tenure for the rest of us.
I wrote about this emerging reality in The Benedict Option:
It will be impossible in most places to get licenses to work without affirming sexual diversity dogma. For example, in 2016 the American Bar Association voted to add an “anti-harassment” rule to its Model Code of Conduct, one that if adopted by state bars would make it simply discussing issues having to do with homosexuality (among other things) impossible without risking professional sanction—unless one takes the progressive side of the argument.
Along those lines, it will be very difficult to have open dialogue in many workplaces without putting oneself in danger. One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality, out of fear that anything he said, no matter how innocuous and fact-based, could get him brought up on charges within his university, as well as attacked by social media mobs. Everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through “diversity and inclusion” training and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT co-workers but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.
Plus, companies that don’t abide by state and federal antidiscrimination statutes covering LGBTs will be not be able to receive government contracts. In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of antidiscrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.
“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.
Says a religious liberty lawyer, “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.”
David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive stance on gay issues, published a column in 2016 noting that the middle ground is fast disappearing on the question of whether discrimination against gays and lesbians for religious reasons should be tolerated.
“Neutrality is not an option,” he wrote. “Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”3
Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the helping professions; and of course, florists, photographers, backers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.
Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.
“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”
In past eras, religious minorities found themselves locked out of certain professions. In medieval times, for example, anti-Semitic bigotry in Europe prevented Jews from participating in many trades and professions, shunting them off to do marginal work that Christians did not want to do. Jews entered banking, for example, because usury was considered sinful by medieval Christianity and was kept off-limits to Christians.
We are already in such a situation now, regarding gender ideology, and it’s only going to get worse. What should believers do? How can we support each other? How can we prepare? Dealing with these questions is what it means to live in the Benedict Option, and to be a creative minority?
What do you think? I’m serious: we need some hard thinking, and plans of action. The churches are not preparing their people for what’s coming — indeed, for what’s here.
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