We are reposting the speech of our Marija Stajić at the scientific conference “Serbian Identity, Serbian Language and the Law on Gender Equality” , organized by the Press Office of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Matica Srpska (Serbian language institution) on 16 January 2024 at the Serbian National Library in Belgrade.
IFamNews
Your Holiness, Your Graces, Distinguished Ministers, Honorable Fathers, Dear Colleagues,
A person is born either male or female.
Only women can conceive and give birth to a child.
Only women can breastfeed a child.
It is not possible to change sex.
These four statements with biological and medical facts are now considered homophobic and transphobic in the progressive democracies of the West, a form of hate speech that “denies the existence of transpersons” and provokes or reinforces their sense of gender dysphoria, i.e. the discrepancy between the body in which they were born and their subjective notion of themselves.
Violent changes in language stipulated by the Law on Gender Equality concern not only our language and our national and cultural identity, but also the very existence of us as free human beings. The authors of the Law say that gender-sensitive language will “influence the consciousness of those who use this language.” We must ask who has given the authors of the law the right to change other people’s consciousness, and even more so to use the apparatus of state coercion for this purpose and impose high fines on those who do not comply and obey?
Who has the right to force others to call a man a woman, and a woman a man? Who has the right to define the word “woman” in the dictionary as a “non-male person”? Who has the right to ban the use of the word mother, and instead introduce the grotesque phrase “birthing person”? I am a mother who breastfed her child with mother’s milk. I do not want my daughter to live in a world where “birthing persons chestfeed their children with human milk” merely for the sake of not offending women who have rejected their femininity and claim to be a man capable of giving birth.
Today, the phrase “biological sex” is also considered hate speech and instead of saying that, the gender ideologues want us to say “gender assigned at birth”, and instead of “sex change surgery” we now have to say “gender reassignment.” Nothing is changed here, they say, it’s just that some external features are adapted to conform to the inner sense of the gender identity of the person concerned. We are really just correcting what the doctors and midwives wrongly observed at birth.
A boy playing with a doll or a girl with a toy-car are now transgender children who are actually sending us signals about their gender even in the pre-verbal stage when they still have no notion of sex or gender differences whatsoever – a baby girl who has not yet learned to walk is pulling hairpins out of her hair and thus telling her parents that she is actually a boy.
Before the onset of puberty, the child is given puberty blockers, which are supposed to temporarily pause changes in the child’s body so that he has time to think about what he wants to be. One of these drugs is lupron, which, among other things, is used to chemically castrate convicted sex offenders. We can freely say that one of the most terrible experiments on children and young people is underway – because what else would you call the practice of giving healthy children a drug for the chemical castration of pedophiles?
Side effects of lupron are bone thinning and brittle bones, deteriorating tooth enamel, joint pain, degenerative spinal disc, serious mood swings, suicidal thoughts and even fibromyalgia.
Parents are generally not familiar with all the possible side effects of hormone blockers, or cross-sex hormones, and if they are, they are forced to choose between those side effects and their child committing suicide, because gender experts tell them: “It’s better to have a living son, than a dead daughter” and vice versa. One mother testifies: “The message was, let the child drive the bus. Wherever they take you, that’s what you have to do.”
Note the use of the plural pronoun “they” for one child.
This woman’s 13-year-old daughter was told by a psychiatrist that she was a good candidate for puberty blockers after an hour-long session, and an endocrinologist confirmed it after just 15 minutes. She is now addressed by a male name and pronouns, and she uses breast binders to flatten her chest. Under the law of the state she lives in, once she turns 18, she is allowed to have her breasts removed, which is what she currently says she wants to do.
Because of the cross-sex hormones, young transgender people in their twenties have brittle bones as if they were 80 year olds. Many have autoimmune diseases, as well as geriatric conditions, although they are still very young. They are at increased risk of heart attack and stroke, thrombosis, genital atrophy, infertility, decreased cognitive ability, anxiety, neuro-developmental disorders and other conditions. If children do not go through puberty, they will not reach sexual maturity and will become sterile, no matter how they identify.
I can safely say that I spend too much time researching genderism and transgenderism and reading the experiences of various unfortunate persons. I have never once encountered a transgender person who had good mental and psychological health before coming out, who was a healthy and a fully functional person, with no other underlying conditions or a history of psychological or physical trauma. A 2020 study found that while 5% of the general population has autism, among the gender minorities it is 24%. People with different gender identities also have higher rates of schizophrenia, depression, and attention deficit disorders. Young people become victims of transgenderism at a time when they need a different kind of professional help, and not a lie that removing healthy parts of their body will solve their psychological and mental issues. There is not a single long-term study that shows it is safe to give puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children, or let them undergo sex change surgery.
In 2021, the gender reassignment industry in the US was estimated at $1.9 billion. In 2009, the British gender clinic at the Tavistock Institute admitted 80 patients. Ten years later 2,700 patients were referred to it, or 33 times more. In 2007 in the USA there were two gender clinics, and in 2022 almost 200, of which about 60 are pediatric gender clinics. Between 2016 and 2019 – in just three years – the number of double mastectomies on healthy girls increased by 400%. Boston Children’s Hospital proudly announces on its website that since 2007 “we have expanded the program to accept patients aged 3 to 25.”
Puberty is not a disease. It is a key period of normal development that is radically disrupted by puberty blockers such as lupron. When the normal course of puberty is stopped, precious time is forever stolen from children for important bone and brain growth, as well as for sexual and psycho-social development. That time can never be recovered or compensated.
Between 80% and 96% of children with gender dysphoria overcome the feelings of discomfort with their own body by the end of puberty. They do not need irreversible surgeries, but rather help to cope with mental health problems and to accept their body. No one is born in the wrong body, but you can end up in it if you take the path of hormones and surgeries.
One young girl admits her mistake: “I can’t believe I did this to myself at 19. I’m 22 now and I feel like I”ll never have a normal adulthood because I had an unnecessary double mastectomy when i was still a teenager and I’ll be marred by huge scars and physical numbness forever. … The discomfort I was feeling with my breasts wasn’t “gender dysphoria” – it was just a feeling a lot of other young women have. That’s the most awful part of it, the most painful thing for me to face. I did this to myself over something that many women feel everyday because of things I read online. I want to be who I was supposed to be before I transitioned, but I feel like I killed her.”
And while we welcome developments in Europe over the past few years, where Sweden, Finland, Norway and the UK have banned the use of these hormonal drugs for minors due to the lack of scientific evidence of their safety, benefits for patients, and the inability of a minor to give informed consent to these procedures, I remind you that the girl whose testimony I have just shared made the wrong decision at the age of 19.
We are all who we say we are, and so “Transmen are real men, and transwomen are real women.” A male-presenting pregnant woman is proof that a man can give birth. A female-presenting man beats women in women’s sports, is declared the prom queen, the most beautiful woman of Spain, Nevada, Portugal and the Netherlands, the woman of the year in several magazines in Europe and America, advertises women’s makeup and feminine hygiene products, is made the face of various products to celebrate the International Women’s Day on March 8.
If you say this is not so, if you speak about biological gender, you’ll be charged with transphobia. Never mind that a woman living as a man sustained serious injuries during intubation upon urgent admission to the hospital, because the tubes are made in different sizes for women and men, and her documents said that she was male. Never mind that another woman’s baby died of suffocation because she was admitted to the hospital as a man in severe pain, and the doctors lost valuable time because they did not immediately think about the possibility of pregnancy in a man.
It only matters that everyone lives an “authentic life” that requires validation from all other people, including random strangers on the internet. And when that person changes the gender designation in the documents, we can extend our congratulations as follows: “Congrats! Such a difficult process to correct a doctor’s mistake at birth.”
When the law in question was proposed, it was presented as a way to increase the visibility and presence of women in society. In reality, it opened the door to the unconstitutional concepts of “gender” and “gender identity” and now paves the way for the law on gender identities, which is the next logical step and has already been announced here in Serbia, and will allow for gender self-identification. In all honesty, we fail to see how the position and visibility of women in society will be increased and improved if any man can simply say that he is a woman and gain access to women’s spaces, jobs, fulfill the so-called “pink quotas” for employment and other positions, and win the title of the most beautiful woman.
One thing is certain: if you raise your voice in defense of biology and the physical reality of the world around us, you will be accused of transphobia. Still, when someone complained about the offensive icon of the Most Holy Theotokos shown at the pride parade in Belgrade, we heard that: “The very fact that someone perceived a certain message as offensive is not enough grounds for conducting criminal proceedings, because freedom of expression includes messages that can cause different feelings.”
It remains to be seen whether this sentence is a two-way street or an ideological dead end.
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