“I just don’t want men in women’s spaces, and I don’t care how those men identify.”

The clip is Kellie-Jay Keen (AKA Posie Parker) attempting to converse with someone called James Max, “It’s up to everybody however they want to live their life, but when it impinges on my life – ” 

“How does it impinge on your life?” Jim is cavalier in his home field advantage.

“Being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic.”

An anonymous Tumblr post expressed a common shame in simple words. It rippled through Gender Critical social media in the form of screenshots after the original post was quickly deleted.

Her spurt of stifled frustration struck a chord, breathlessly relating a firsthand account of female suppression: “You go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualized, 

“Among the ‘strong-minded women’ who met to attend the convention was Amelia Bloomer – The lady who goes in for breeches and buncomb.”

Dress historian Abby Cox quotes a catty article from 1853, describing feminists as women who subscribe to pants and nonsense – You know, that crazy stuff about women being full people who deserve rights.

“I didn’t actually wanna bring it up, because of some personal biases towards it. It gets brought up a lot when people talk about feminism and clothing in the 19th century, so [it was] kinda me being like, ‘Ugh!’ 

The new Daily Show is pretty bad.

Jon Stewart recently rejoined the conversation on his own non-network show, a little grayer but with his signature energy intact. He’s back to his consciousness-raising schtick, covering topics like gun violence and economic inequality with the deft balance we came to expect during his 16-year tenure in the Daily Show anchor chair.

Your Replacement Is Here

“Of course people are gonna challenge these ideas. There’s nothing really holding these ideas together, is there?”

King Critical argues in a recent video that straying from Liberal orthodoxy does not a Conservative make. He describes the arbitrary groupings with panache, walking us through how going to the source material first started him asking bigger questions.

“So, I looked into Islam and I came to an uncomfortable conclusion – I literally could not believe Islam is true. Because if I did, I would have to believe lots of horrible, horrible, evil things.” 

There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. Why? Because, while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. 

My DVD copy of V For Vendetta froze about halfway through, not so much as a smudge on it. Not currently available on any streaming service, the eloquence of the fictional freedom fighter was out of my reach.

Strangely fitting for this Guy Fawkes Day, when even words have fallen under suspicion. Transwomen are women, and women are birthing people. 

“We define our sexual orientation as one thing and you’re changing it to another, and that’s the issue.” Self-described “old-school lesbian YouTuber” Arielle Scarcella sits stubbornly at the center of our cultural confusion.

“Now we have people telling us things like we have ‘complicated relationships’ with genitals? I don’t think me being a lesbian is a complicated issue. I think it’s just me being attracted to females,

However you feel about Dave Chappelle, he’s too big for the mainstream to ignore. His special The Closer has broken the cultural dam, unleashing the torrents of questions TRAs have worked so hard to keep us from asking.

The Flow Of Information

The staff walkout at Netflix made the news. NBC probably spun it the hardest, summarizing the day of protests as, “The media giant [was] forced to listen to its workers.” Because a longtime pillar of the establishment, now owned by Comcast, is just happy to see workers getting their own back, right? 

What makes a cult?

Dr. Steven Hassan thinks he knows. “After my deprogramming from the Moon cult in 1976, I became interested in mind control… but needed a master’s degree to receive ethical training in hypnosis… I have been attending workshops (and giving them) ever since.“

Feminists on Twitter have latched onto Dr. Hassan’s words from last June, “Young people are not getting good ethical counseling regarding their trauma, their body image issues, their gayness… They are being rushed to taking hormones and in some cases surgery.“

Last time our Readings took us to some pretty deep places in the Freudian unconscious. This time we’re looking at behavior that is in front of our faces every day.

I’m not the first to write an article inspired by Dr. Martha Stout’s superb book The Sociopath Next Door. It is riveting and filled with educational details. Dr. Stout employs narrative to draw characters who illustrate points from the easily digestible lists the book is populated with.