I Am Trolled Over Trans People

I RECALL LISTENING TO A THEOLOGICAL LECTURE by Luke Timothy Johnson in which he gave an estimate based in medical reporting of the number of those born with inter-sexual bodies in the Atlanta area,  he was delivering the lecture at the Chandler School of Theology Emory University where he worked.  I can't find the notes I made on the lecture so I don't know what figure he gave though it was rather surprisingly large - the lecture was in favor of the possibility of living a moral life as an LGBTQ+ Person.   When you do the math a seemingly small percentage of a large population adds up very fast, even if the factor is 1% of it. 

So in answering you I've looked up the estimates of how many biologically Intersex People there are as compared to how many People self-identify as Transgender.   Certainly the biologically intersex population is relevant to any discussion of the question,  though I hardly ever see it included in that discussion. 

As I pointed out the other day, such estimates are of wildly varying  and ultimately unknowable reliability due to the same problems that all self-reporting is liable to,  though I doubt anyone would self-identify as "Transgender" unless they really thought they were transgendered given the social and, thanks to the goddamned Roberts Republican-fascist Court legal problems it brings.  For that reason I'd guess it may be among the more reliable of such statistics.   

You would think that the medical statistics on those born with indeterminate gender based on the genitalia they are born with is probably more reliable.   You would be wrong about that, though I suspect that's probably largely due to political-professional reasons rather than it being inspecific as to what that indeterminacy is.    The widely given statistic of 1.7 percent of the population who are born "Intersex" and the range often given of more than 1 to 2 percent  are disputed.  Though a lot of that dispute comes from psychologists and psychiatrists with a clear political-professional motive in pushing a far,  almost certainly ridiculously low number for that.  One of the worst of those a prolific LGBTQ+ hating shrink with a bad record of publishing nonsense far, far outside of their area of alleged expertise.  

I will say that based on what I think is probably the most believable range of percentages that between more than about 3.5 and 7 million Americans are biologically intersex.  Though if that number was 1000 or less that wouldn't make their own self-identification any less a matter of their right to self-determination in the face of the whipped up ignorant bigotry against them which is rampant on the Republican-fascist and in the media pushed shrink-professional hater racket.  There are a number of those out there, often featured in Republican-fascist media and organizations and published by them.  You can take your pick of which of them I mean as I type this.  I won't give you the gender because they come in both of the standard ones,  though most of those I'm seeing are male. 

The UCLA Law School's Williams Institute gives an estimate that 2.8 million Americans identify as Transgender.  One third identify as Transwomen, one third identify as Transmen and one third self-identify as Nonbinary.  724,000 of those Americans are between the ages of 13 and 17 who as children are the only ones that any legal consideration has any business discussing.  I won't even begin to address any claims about anyone else having any business telling adults who they are or how they interpret their own bodies and minds, that's their business, not yours or the goddamned Trump regime or the fascists on the Roberts Court.    I will note the hypocrisy of those who claim to figure their concern about the welfare of Transgender People below the age of adulthood is cruelly hypocritical given the known damage of Transgender hate to them. whipped up by the fascists' campaign to make a political target of them as they proclaim their concern for them.   As if they and their parents and their own physicians decisions about their welfare are not more valid than those of right-wing, often professional haters who whip up hatred of them for their own profit and gain.  Many of those paid millions in the media and those who have made billions of dollars,  not a little of that made from selling books to Transkids.   

I don't buy the validity of concern of the small percentage of anti-trans feminists whose reaction to he very small percentage of Transwomen* in the population is far, far larger than their reaction would warrant if mere principle was at stake.   Most of the feminists I know of have no problem with Transwomen.   But, then,  most of them aren't billionaires who have way too big an idea of their own opinion and too much money to spread that around with. 

The Williams Institute figures indicate that there is considerable regional variation in the percentage of those who self-identify as Transgender, though in almost every state for which a figure is given, they are well within and often far fewer than those who are medically, biologically identified as Intersex.   What to make of that,  I have no idea and I doubt anyone else does, either.  

As I said above, if there were fewer than a thousand biologically Intersex People in the United States,  their right to define their own identity is as absolute as a biologically cis-gendered, straight, white male or female to define their identity.    I am 100% in favor of the right of all People to come to their own conclusions about their bodies, their minds, their lives TO THE EXTENT THAT THOSE DECISIONS DON'T IMPINGE ON THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS TO DO THE SAME.   That's the basis of my thinking on this.  You don't need a medical statistician or a legal theorist to come up with a percentage of the population to figure that out.   You don't need to trust anyone's' self-interested, professionally advantaging claims about that to come to the conclusion on that.   The self-proclaimed defenders of "biological gender" will always have the issue of those who are not assigned a "biological gender" at birth based on their "ambiguous" genitalia or other reasons will always have that as an issue either that they won't or don't address but those very real People are still there as are those who have a right to the self-knowledge of their own minds.    That's something the hating cis-gender, straight, white males and females claim as their right even as they also claim it as their right to make that decision for other People.   That's the difference between egalitarian democracy and the varying degrees of fascist trending tendencies apart from that. 

* The Republican-fascists here in Maine were collecting signatures from the haters at the polls this month to ban Transathletes from playing sports in the state.   Since their signs claimed they wanted to protect women's sports they clearly were targeting Transwomen.   I asked one of them how many there were on school sports teams in Maine, they had no idea.  I asked someone who knew the issue and he told me no more than two in the entire state, if that.    

I told the ass that if it were up to me I'd get rid of sports in the public schools because it was dangerous in the case of many of the major school sports.  I'll bet that the injuries from sports are far more of a health and life endangering for thousands of athletes to the number of Transchildren in the state.   Not getting to the fact that sports take resources from the major business of schools, teaching.   Phys-ed should be teaching children to exercise and eat sensibly and getting medical care,  not now to play games. 

A Woman I Know

who was a 19-year-old wife of a Marine in 1987, during the sixth year of the military cult of the Reagan administration told me yesterday that when she heard the Marines at her husband's base weren't served Thanksgiving dinner because the base more or less shut down for the holiday, inexperienced and with a baby less than a year old ended up making traditional American Thanksgiving for a bunch of her husband's colleagues not knowing how to do it.  The story had its funny aspects because she had never learned how to do it and she, determined to give as many of them the kind of thing she imagined they'd eat - from all over the country with all kinds of backgrounds - ended up making all kinds of stuff ALONE.   And that she ended up doing the same at Christmas though she told them they'd have to do more pot-luck for that one. 

But the news for me is that at the height of the cult of the military as an idol,  the government, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense thought so little of its cannon fodder that they didn't even think it was the bottom floor of respect for them that they would provide them with a meal on America's major food holiday and leave them to fend for themselves at a fast food joint which was their alternative in their location in the major homeland of the cult of the military - a location in the American South I will not reveal - and at the height of the Hollywood - DC - NYC - Atlanta created cult of the military.

America's conservative establishment has always been full of shit about respecting the military.   Which is why a fat-assed, rich-boy, war supporting draft dodger can call for the murder of six veterans who tell their fellow military and intelligence colleagues that they have a moral and legal obligation to refuse to carry out his illegal orders and the news media, especially the conservative news media, is on the side of the fat-assed, rich-boy, war supporting, draft dodger.   

An Antidote To The Anecdotal History According To Ken Burns

 and his PBS conventional POV bullshit.  

I'm pre-ordering his book today.   

PBS could disappear and I don't think it would matter, at all. 

If The Republican-fascists Had Any Courage Or Intelligence Among Them

 or even the strong desire to do more than get the money and perks that being in the Congress get them that THEY WOULD BE AS DESIROUS OF BEING RID OF TRUMP AS ANYONE.  If only or those ignoble reasons. 

But that's the nature of the kind of materialistic, lazy cowardice that is typical of America's conservatives, who are inevitably caught up either directly or by chosen association with our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and the slaver culture that persists among our fascists.   It's why conservative voters are perfectly OK with having do-nothing or little congresses,  which has been the typical mode of Republican led congresses who are only enthusiastic in giving more money to the billionaires who bought them or destroying things and harming even their own consituents.  That's certainly true of those in the House led by Johnson,  McCarthy (one of the rotten Republican McCarthys),  Ryan, Boehner and Hastert.  You have to go back to the inept Tom Foley to find as ineffective a Democratic Speaker of the House.   You could say the same thing about the Majority Leaders of the Senate, though, as Sheldon Whitehouse and Lawrence O'Donnell have pointed out recently,  that's a far harder case to make because, other than Mitch McConnell and slime like Chuck Grassley packing the courts with corrupt, inept fascists where it's impossible to remove them,  Senate Majority Leaders of either party haven't gotten much done.*  The Senate, insulated as the corrupt founders and framers made it from the Voters and the house of larger egos is a harder body to discipline.  By contrast as I have been pointing out for almost twenty years,  Nancy Pelosi was probably the most masterful Speaker the house has ever had,  something that Senator Whitehouse also pointed out on O'Donnell's show a while back.  Not that many Democrats, especially those on the "left" noticed.  

Anyway,  I think one of the ironies of this period is that those handful of Republicans who pushed for a vote on releasing the Epstein files may have given their careers an enormous boost by doing what they knew would hurt Trump and some of the child-raping billionaires who have funded their corrupt party.  They may lose their seats, in which case they can walk away from the disaster that the Republican fascists are setting up,  I suspect a crash is coming on fast.   There will be a reckoning and, perhaps, if they don't move on to something in the private sector, they an say I told you so and profit from that.   I think that's the reason that so many of those in the House on the Republican-fascist side caved when they got the chance,  they suspect that the garbage scow they've had as a mother ship for the past decade is about to go down and they don't want to be pulled under with it.   I don't know exactly what Trump's motive in ordering them to do that was,  whether some attempt at guile or senility but if I were among the Republicans in the Congress,  I'd bet on hitching my wagon to Massie or someone like him, to mix metaphors.   I would feel enormously relieved by the end of Trump,  but, then, I'd want something more than to just keep the hand-job that being a Republican in Congress has been for the entire time. 

I do wonder what will become of the "never Trumpers" who were Republicans who jumped even before 2016.   I was talking with my sister about some of them the other day and she agreed with me that she has not heard a single one of them admit that there was something wrong with the Republican Party and the American conservative ideology that led to Trump and, before him, to Bush II and the Rehnquist-Roberts courts that guided America into Trumpian fascism.   If they've learned the lesson that there was something wrong with their ideology as I've admitted there was something wrong with 1960s-70s secular liberalism, liberal democracy and huge swaths of liberal ideology I have yet to hear it.   I would recommend that they do what I did and look at the consequences of their ideology in real life AND AS IT TRULY IMPINGED ON THE LIVES OF THE LEAST AMONG US AND THOSE NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THEM ON THE ECONOMIC SCALE.  The idiotic liberal-libertarianism that led even intelligent liberal lawyers to believe there was a "right to lie" especially in the mass media led as much to Trump as the collusion with fascism which has always been present within the Republican Party,  certainly as Goldwater and Nixon implemented the "Southern Strategy" of welcoming our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists into it.   And, I'll point out in fairness that there were plenty of those white supremacists in the North, too, especially those such as are concentrated in Maine's second district who have no connection to anything Southern.  

I strongly suspect that there are few to none who will try to hitch their wagons to Vance,  who is probably at least as detested as Ted Cruz and trusted even less.   We will see the extent to which Vance is promoted to victory by that most corrupt force in the United States, the corporate media, the authors of the corruption of America in the wake of the Sullivan Decision that gave the media the permission to lie about politicians with impunity.  As I pointed out they couldn't get Gerald Ford elected after he gave Nixon the pardon, though they certainly did what they could for him.    If I were a Republican who wanted Vance to succeed or at least hold the office past '28 I'd caution him on pardoning any of the criminals in the Trump regime.   If I were one of Trump's criminals who didn't have a pardon in my pocket already  I wouldn't expect that they'd get one.   Rudy Giuliani had to wait for his until just a while ago and he was totally exposed.   I wonder if someone tests the pardons Trump handed out to those criminals who tried to help him steal an election how the rotten Roberts Court will deal with the fact that Trump's pardons were in aid of his own criminality WHILE HE WAS OUT OF OFFICE.   I wouldn't bet on the Roberts Court Republican-fascists nullifying those corrupt pardons.   We need a Constitutional Amendment to reign in the idiotically broad powers  of pardon those founding fat-heads put in the hands of corrupt presidents.   And that's along with the one nullifying the Roberts Court making a Republican-fascist president a dictator - which was their clear intent, knowing that the most stupid and corrupt and only convicted felon in presidential history was going to be the defining figure in their conception of a unitary executive.   We probably need a vast restructuring of the Supreme and federal courts even more than we need to beat back the Roberts Court framing of presidential fascism.  

* I remember being enormously frustrated with my Senator,  George Mitchell in that regard as he and the Senate Democrats lost opportunity after opportunity to humiliate and force their Republican colleagues to take extremely unpopular votes that would have certainly lost them support even in Republican controlled states.   I don't know how much of the case for Schumer doing a good job with the hand he was dealt is true and if his problems come from his lack of communications skills.    I do think he could have made a lot stronger case for Democrats than he has,  though if Democrats in the Senate would have gone along with that is far from a given.  We do have a problem with Quislings in the party,  some in the house where their effect is more diffused but far more in the Senate.   I hate the Senate as a matter of experience and principle. 

And Here I Thought He Didn't Understand What "YMCA" Was About

 POSTED WITHOUT APOLOGY 

Sex Lies Social Science And Complete Hypocrisy In The New NAMBLA Of 2025

AS THE REAL BIOLOGIST RICHARD LEWONTIN pointed out, the alleged scientific study of human sexuality is faced with an insurmountable hurdle,  it is totally dependent on the self-reporting of human behavior and, worse, human mental states by the entirely unreliable and only possible source for that information, the person who is telling on their own self.  

And about an area of human behavior and thought that is rife with both deception of others and about their own lives.  And that's not to start in on the motivation of the deputed scientists in their collection, analysis, quantification of and reporting on their supposed findings, or rather sifted through entirely unreliable self-reports in which literally not a single one of their myriads of data is of reliable veracity.  

There remains, however, one realm of self-report that seems utterly resistant to external verification. Given the social circumstances of sexual activity there seems no way to find out what people do “in the bedroom” except to ask them. But the answers they give cannot be put to the test of incredulity. Surely we believe that there is no sexual fantasy so outrageous and bizarre, no life of profligacy so exhausting, that it has not been realized by someone, somewhere, perhaps even by a reader of the New York Review’s personals. But if by someone, then why not by 17.4 percent of white males with two years of education beyond high school and with an annual income of $43,217? What behavior that is credible in individuals becomes incredible in the mass? The problem is to turn biography into science. If research produced by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the organization that epitomizes modern objective statistical social science, designed and analyzed by two distinguished service professors and a past president of the International Academy of Sex Research, carried out by a full time project manager in charge of 220 interviewers, and resulting in a book of 718 pages, including 178 tables, 34 graphs, and 635 references, does not crack the problem of knowledge from self-report, then not just “sexology,” but all of scientific sociology, is in deep trouble.

"Sexology" as science* could serve as the primary evidence in the decadence of science starting in the last half of the 19th century as all manner of junk that shared the same defects and I would controversially note that that includes the alleged scientific status of literally everything claimed about how species evolved apart from the far more reliable claim that species did, in fact, evolve from other species.   Though I would say that sociology, among the most dubious of all of the so-called sciences, predates Darwinism as science.**

The bottle blond bimbo Megyn Kelly trying to soft-peddle the pedophile rape of Donald Trump by claiming that his pimp and pimpess weren't pedophiles but were devotees of "ephebophilia" which is a word, like "antisemitism" which was invented by dirty old men who lusted after teenagers to bathe their perversion in the conventionally sanctifying aroma of science,  as I indicated last weekend,  I think that was in no way different from the activity of those who founded NAMBLA and such academically ordained promotions of pedophile rape as Paidika was.*** 

The fact is that in 2025 the Republican Party plays exactly the same role that NAMBLA and its associated promoters of the extreme reduction of or elimination of age of consent laws, the better to facilitate the rape of children by the class of men who like to rape children (and women, don't forget that Ghiz Maxwell sexually used the girls she lured into their power) especially the privileged, the white, the rich and so powerful, etc.   Only it's likely the entire membership or associated perverts of NAMBLA are far, far fewer than even those in the sex club that Trump frequented.   I think the Epstein-Maxwell sex circle may be one of the largest in the Western world, though it's probably far smaller than the ones that operate elsewhere such as the sex tourism industry of Thailand.   That's what the likes of Kelly and Jesse Watters are trying to peddle to those who are suckers for the patina applied as "science" and the ideological belief that "nature" - so called - sanctifies everything no matter how clearly perverted it is.   

The superstition that "sexology" from which such terminology as Megums peddled last week come is actually scientific is, in fact, dangerous because so many in the media, in politics, in that intellectually deficient but enormously powerful profession, "the law" are such total suckers for such stuff.   As an LGBTQ+ person,  such stuff is entirely unreliable as a basis for our freedom, it is far more reliably founded in the egalitarian exercise of rights in which that exercise is always limited by the rights of those our lives impinge on, which is not a scientific concept but one of revealed morality.   If gay liberation had developed only as another of the many non-egalitarian-libertarian assertions of liberty,  I wouldn't have seen that as any kind of progress from what always was.  With few exceptions those who were privileged were always able to have sex with whoever they wanted, as long as they weren't members of a privileged class.   The Epstein-Maxwell rape ring got away with it for a long time, when it was discovered the legal system under the Bush regime let Epstein off on most of it and the thugish lawyers who were in on that deal prospered from it.   Many privileged gay men got away with leading elaborate and, at that time, entirely illegal sex lives,  Roy Cohn did even as he served as the lawyer for the Archdiocese of New York, then led by the notorious and rumored gay sex predator and opponent of LGBTQ+ rights  Francis Cardinal Spelman (AKA "Fanny") and his successors.  And all of that was an open secret.   

* I'll remind you that I've stopped with the dishonest convention that there is "real science" and "pseudo-science" the later violating the supposed ideal standards of "real science" because that's not what the word "science" as used in real life means.  Science is whatever the gatekeepers of science let in, no matter whether or not it practices the defined methods of science or, as in the case of every one of the social sciences and even many of those regions of science firmly embedded in the "harder sciences" these days much of science as so accepted doesn't begin to fulfill those requirements.   I think the theory of natural selection was something of a watershed which permitted everything from ideologically, economically self-interested conjecture get directly into the university based-scientific publication literature and liturgy of science though there was much allowed in even before then.   As Marilynne Robinson said, if religion is saddled with bad religion then science should not be allowed to variably and self-interestedly escape the consequences of bad science. 

** I think that sociology was an obvious creation of the ideology of materialism which was allowed to become academically respectable (though it has never been truly intellectually respectable) through that ideological license.   I suspect it was the first camel of social and behavioral science to get its nose under the tent, though economics may precede it in terms of chronology.    

** That is what "Darwinism" came to mean after 1860 when it referred to the theory of natural selection.  Before then it referred to the theory of Charles' grandfather Erasmus Darwin though I'm unaware of that ever having been taken as more than an abstract idea that had no actual status as science, though I might be wrong about that.   The consequences of his grandson's theory and its ideological-class-based insertion in the heart of biological sciences hadn't yet achieved its fuller effects.   Though much of the success of it was based on the desire among those who wanted to study the fact of evolution to pretend that they could find a force in nature that drove evolution.   The fact is that apart from the clearly founded belief that species evolve from earlier species, there is no real way to scientifically study that as a unified phenomenon or, really, even in the case of any naturally evolved species.   The physical evidence is simply too sparse and incomplete to do that.  Which may make biologists frustrated and angry but it doesn't require anyone who is honest to lie about that. 

*** The denials of several of the academics that their "Journal of Pedophilia" was unrelated to the legalization of and promotion of pedophile rape are about as convincing as the claims of Trump that he wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein pedophile rape circle he was a member of.    

Note:  For some reason Blogger has put a new button next to the scroll bar that will perform the entirely unwelcomed act of it automatically inserting Google search links in my writing.   If I hit it by accident and it fills one of my pieces with such junk, I'll try to remove all of them so the links I mean to put there will be the only ones.   

Also note that blogger has been screwing with the text size and formatting in ways I can't figure out.  I really don't want to go wading through the html to try to figure out how to fix that these days.  Sorry for the eccentric appearance of the text.  

I Heard Someone Wonder How Mike Johnson Could Live With Himself Knowing What Trump Did As Part Of

 the Epstein pedophile rape gang.  Here's my answer. 

Mike Johnson is a product of affluent, white supremacist-slaver culture in which those considered "little people" are objects to be used and disposed of at the pleasure of those like him, the affluent, white, males,  and  it being him, specifically,  I'll point out that historically plenty of affluent, white, gay males brought up in that and educated in that and in a white-supremacist pseudo-Christian church (one founded in supporting slavery) they're as willing to practice that kind of privilege as the straight ones. 

It's not even necessary to be an affluent, white male brought up in Louisiana slaver culture and a member of the Southern Baptist heresy.   The secular Brit bitch Ghiz Maxwell told other women in her class and circle that the girls she procured for her and Epstein's  rape-blackmail racket were just "trash,"  poor girls who were there to be lured in and used by them and the men they sold them to,  filmed and certainly either blackmailed or who they exposed to those who would blackmail them who certainly paid for that information.  Affluence corrupts no matter what other cultural and historical trappings it arrives in. 

 A creepy daughter-daddy chastity ceremony perv, Louisiana lawyer-liar,  Republican-fascist and Southern Baptist would have no qualms about doing that because literally everything about his "Christianity" is certainly what the Revelation of John identified as the "Antichrist".  It is a product of the past fifty years of the filthy American media identifying that heresy as "Christianity" that has led to it being identified with the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus.   Mike Johnson is just such a total hypocrite of the kind who is rampant in the Republican-fascist party,  more prevalent in the South and mid-west and Rocky Mountain states but the kind who isn't segregated to those regions,  we've got them here in Maine and they're in every state.  And, as I said, you don't have to come with those flavorings to cover the rot, he's just one variety of them.