The theme of the week in the Serbian daily Politika this weekend (6 October 2024) was woke culture. One of the articles was written by our co-editor and author Marija Stajić, and we are reposting it here in its entirety.
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A person is born either male or female. Only women can give birth and breastfeed. It is not possible to change sex. These three statements with biological and medical facts are now considered homophobic and transphobic in the progressive democracies of the West; they are labelled as hate speech that “denies the existence of trans people” and causes or amplifies their feelings of gender dysphoria, i.e. the discrepancy between the body in which they were born and their subjective notion of themselves. They also very succinctly illustrate the essence of woke ideology that is spreading through all pores of Western countries and societies, rapidly spilling over into our part of the world too.
Why are these claims unacceptable in the woke world? For ideologues who believe that the world is divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, similar to how Marxism divides society into the ruling and working classes, certain social categories or groups of people are by definition weaker, and therefore disenfranchised – women, people with disabilities, people of color, LGBT persons and other “minority groups” such as e.g. obese people. All of them are victims of “systemic racism and discrimination” by dominant population groups, embodied in a white, heterosexual and Christian male, though woke ideology is also rejected by Muslim countries with non-white and obviously non-Christian populations.
The insistence on “systemic racism” and the victimization of the “weak” has led to the introduction of quotas in school enrollment, employment, politics, etc., thus completely marginalizing meritocracy. Biden recently said that Vice President Harris was chosen as a presidential candidate because she is black and a woman, showing once again that identity politics has become more important than someone’s qualities, knowledge and abilities needed for the job in question.
Woke ideology denies the gender binary of humans and claims that man and woman are social constructs and that children should not be “conditioned” to grow up as members of one of the two sexes, but that we should instead let them discover for themselves what they truly are – male, female, a little bit of both, neither of the two, or something completely different. In short, such an understanding has led us to the point that health workers are now ordered to say “birthing person” instead of “mother”, to replace the word “woman” with “a menstruating person” or “a uterus owner”, to stop saying “breastfeeding” and instead say “chest feeding”, whereby it is not “breast milk” that is produced but “human milk”, and to even ask men if they are pregnant upon admittance to hospital –all because a small percentage of men dress and behave as women, and an even smaller percentage of women present themselves to the world in the usual male clothes and manners. If it is still not clear that this is the path to erasing women, let us remember that the word “woman” is now increasingly defined in dictionaries as “non-male”.
Particularly problematic is the issue of protecting children from irreversible changes that occur during gender transition. It is indisputable that adults are free to do whatever they want with their bodies, but it is highly disputable to endanger the safety and health of children and minors who are unable to give informed consent to such medical procedures.
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, and 10 years later as many as 2,700, i.e., 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 accommodate patients ages 3 to 25.”
Puberty is not a disease. It is a critical period of normal development that is radically disrupted by the prescription of puberty blockers such as lupron, a drug normally used to chemically castrate convicted rapists. 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 counseling to help them accept their body. No one is born in the wrong body, but they can end up in one if they take the path of hormones and surgeries.
That this is not a physiological phenomenon in puberty, but a social contagion, is confirmed by the fact that girls are disproportionately more likely to declare themselves transgender than boys. Teenage girls admit to doctors and psychologists that they feel extreme pressure from social networks and the media to be thin and sexually active in order to be accepted in society. Previously, such stress usually drove girls to anorexia, while today girls who do not fit into the imposed image of handsome and skinny are told that this is because they were actually born in the wrong body. Also, as soon as one child in a class identifies as transgender and becomes the center of attention of progressive teachers, several others follow in the same footsteps because they quickly grasp that this is desirable social behavior.
Like any ideology, wokeism prescribes what is allowed to be said and what is not, and so laws in many US states, Canada and Australia now envisage penalties for addressing someone in the “wrong” grammatical gender, or denying a man who claims to be a woman access to women’s premises, women’s sports and even women’s prisons. In the UK, women victims of violence are no longer safe in shelters, because they are forced to be housed with transgender males and to even go to therapy with a male psychologist (who claims to be a woman), even though they are terrified in the presence of men due to the trauma they have endured. Women in hospitals are not allowed to request to be examined by a biological woman because this is discriminatory against men who feel like women. Has it become more important not to hurt the feelings of adult men than to amplify trauma and stress in women who have already suffered violence at the hands of another man or who simply do not feel comfortable being examined by a man?
Today, using the wrong pronoun – misgendering – is an act of violence. Then, what would we call the erasure of an entire vocabulary that describes women?
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