Tea at Trianon: Gay vs. Trans

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Gay vs. Trans

From American Greatness:

Thanks largely to the media coverage of transgender role models like Lia (Will) Thomas, to books like Helen Joyce’s Trans, and Matt Walsh’s documentary “What Is a Woman?”, the public has become more aware of the trans movement’s ridiculous claims, outrageous demands, and dangerous practices. More and more people know that grade-school teachers are indoctrinating pupils into trans ideology (and that parents who object are labeled domestic terrorists); that teenagers are increasingly boarding the trans train (and, increasingly, being fast-tracked for “treatment”); that these teens’ teachers, psychologists, and physicians routinely lie to the kids’ parents and deny them the right to forestall hormone injections and the surgeon’s knife.

And as more light has been shed on all this madness, Americans have been losing their tolerance for the trans minority, whose members claim to be cruelly oppressed but act like authoritarian lunatics. This growing distaste is also bringing down public sympathy for gay people, simply because they’ve been yoked to transgenderism.
And yet, as it turns out, a great many of the Americans who are losing their patience with trans world are gay people who’ve decided it’s long since time to divorce “LGB” from “T.”

To this end, concerned British gay and lesbians have founded the LGB Alliance, on whose website you can read “that sex is binary, female and male, and that (for the vast majority of people) sex is determined at conception, observed at birth (or in utero), and recorded.” Heresy! LGB Alliance co-founder Bev Jackson, now 71, is a veteran gay-rights activist and woman of the Left, having become the spokesperson for Britain’s Gay Liberation Front way back in 1970. “I thought we’d achieved so much,” she told me on the phone the other day, recalling her decades in the trenches. But alas, thanks to the trans revolution, “homosexual has become a dirty word again.”

The threat posed by transgenderism to the rights and repute of gay men and lesbians is also the chief focus of a couple of brave, lively YouTubers whom I follow—an American lesbian named Ariella Scarcella and a gay Dutchman, based in Britain, who calls himself Mr. Menno. Four months ago, in a video called “The Tide Is Turning,” Mr. Menno cited a couple of recent developments in the U.K. that led him to feel that realism on this front is beginning to win out over ideology.

I hoped he was right. But I wasn’t sure. It depends a lot on where you look. This year, Britain’s only gender-identity clinic for children was closed down—a big win for sanity. But it’s also been reported lately that a San Francisco gender-identity clinic is treating children as young as 2 years old and that the U.S. Justice Department is ignoring the case of a Ph.D. student who’s selling hormones to teens. The other day, after the Twitter feed Libs of TikTok reported that Boston Children’s Hospital performs hysterectomies on minors, the hospital removed material proving the charge from its website and then denied it. (Read more.)