Transitions real and artificial

Birth, puberty, death, and 'gender transition'

Life transitions are important. The rituals with which they have traditionally been honoured are less prevalent nowadays, and when they are still performed it is often with less meaning. Honoured or not, the transitions themselves remain profound - when they refer to real changes, that is, not artificial ones. Yet those real life transitions are under threat, from technologies that are being developed to deconstruct them.

Death

The last memory I have of my father is of him writhing on a hospital bed, enduring a painful and undiagnosed disease. The next morning, my mother and I learnt that he had died in the night. I was relieved that he would suffer no longer. After the post-mortem, we learnt that the undiagnosed disease was oesophageal cancer. It was not how the end of his life should have been.

Six decades later, shortly after I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, I was having a bone scan in the nuclear medicine department at the same hospital where my father had died. The rattles of the machine seemed strangely musical, and reminded me of the percussive hums and clicks in the coda at the end of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15th symphony. I had been haunted by those hypnotic rhythms a year before my diagnosis, in the concert hall a short walk down the road from the hospital. I was aware that the 15th was Shostakovich’s last and most autobiographical symphony, and that with it he anticipated his death and pondered the meaning of his life.

Pondering my own life and its possible end, I realised I had no idea whether or not some sort of consciousness remains when our physical bodies die. I guess I’m open to the possibility, but I don’t expect it. I take comfort, though, knowing that my physical body will return to nature, in a willow coffin by Angela’s physical remains, at a woodland burial site where it will be recycled into new life. As Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane express in the lyrics of their gloriously earth honouring Burial Blessing :

I will still be with you in the river’s flow

In the undertow, where the brambles grow

I will still be by you In the fox’s eye

In the sea bird’s cry, in the city sky

Birth

Lying under the bone scanner, and later in the radiotherapy machine, I was acutely aware that this NHS hospital I was in was not only where my father had died. it was also, back in the days before the NHS came into being, where I had been born. Memories came flooding back.

I was reminded of once seeing a therapist who was convinced I had suffered some sort of birth trauma. I don’t know what led him to imagine this, but I suspect it was my revealing that I was having persistent dreams of drowning. Back then I dismissed his ‘analysis’ as gibberish, and a denial of the patriarchal conditioning I was probably ‘drowning’ under. But decades later, when I was sorting through my mother’s papers after she died, I discovered that, during a bombing raid towards the end of the Second World War, she had come close to miscarrying the foetus that was to become me. She was told it was a miracle when weeks later she gave birth to a healthy boy (a few years after that, she did actually miscarry a foetus that would have become the girl she always wanted, a girl who would have been my sister). These were definitely birth traumas.

I remembered Angela sharing the trauma she underwent as a result of her first child being forcibly taken from her for adoption. This had affected me deeply. Her experience showed me how readily birth and the mother/child bond are belittled in our patriarchal culture, and it enabled me to honour my own mother’s gift of life to me in a way that my socialisation into that culture had muted. It propelled me, too, into involvement in campaigns against forced adoption, and, much later, against surrogacy.

Puberty

The transition from childhood to adulthood is both biologically and culturally significant. My upwardly mobile parents were convinced that the way to ensure I would be accepted in the social class to which they aspired was to send me away to boarding school. Neither they nor I had any idea that this would involve frequent beatings and occasional sexual abuse, and that Wednesday afternoons would be devoted to military training (each week, war was sold to us as character building and a possible career option. Experience commanding uniformed Wednesday parades would, we were promised, guarantee us direct entry into the officer class if we wanted it).

’A boy is like steel’, went a saying that was repeated when the school’s brutality was challenged. ‘The harder you beat him, the tougher he becomes.’

In the synthetic community that was an all-male English boarding school, puberty was not accompanied, as it should be, by ritual integration of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Instead, every bodily change or lack of change was noticed, scrutinised, and ridiculed. In place of a manhood based on responsibility, what was instilled was body horror, an objectifying sexuality, and a deep sense of male entitlement and class privilege.

Dabbling in the arts and seeking solace in nature gave me some relief from the school’s stifling of life energy. I seized on any excuse, from bird watching to cross-country running, to escape into the neighbouring heathland, where I could experience some connection with its heather, gorse, birds, and reptiles.

Discovering the economic class analysis in Marxism provided some intellectual relief as, years later, did the sex class analysis in Radical Feminism.

‘Gender transition’

Rachel Morris, in her 2020 book The Museum Makers, notes that “in what we do with our memories and the stuff that our parents leave behind, we are all museum makers, seeking to make sense of our past.”

The stuff my mother left behind included an unexpected further twist to the family secrets surrounding my birth. A letter she wrote to my father, in hospital just before she gave birth, revealed that she desperately wanted a girl. She was convinced that the pink towels a nurse had put on the cupboard beside her bed were a sign that her wishes had been granted, and that I would be a girl.

This was the wartime 1940s, long before ‘gender transition’ became a thing. I don’t know how long it took for my mother to put aside her disappointment that I was not a girl. I think she did come to accept, perhaps reluctantly, that I was a boy. Back then, there was no cult insisting there could be a ‘gender identity’ unrelated to biology. If there had been, I wonder if she would have been persuaded I was a girl born into the wrong body? And would I, uncomfortable with the masculine stereotypes I was supposed to live up to, have later been been made to undergo chemical castration to block my puberty and fool me into thinking I could somehow grow into a woman? Or that I might claim to be, in another denial of reality, ‘non binary’?

Gender medicine researcher Sarah Mittermaier has observed, in her gender:hacked substack, that “Sensitive boys and young men may see no way to be a good man. They see healthy expressions of masculinity ridiculed, dismissed, or problematised.” She suggests that such boys may come to believe that “Becoming a ‘girl’ absolves the ‘original sin’ of being born a man.”

Now, as an elderly male with prostate cancer, my experience of a disease that only a male can have strengthens my opposition to a cultish ideology that denies biological reality. Ironically, every three months I am injected with the same drug that the gender industry uses to block the puberty of children - not, in my case, to manipulate a young body into a synthetic sex identity with its associated long term health problems that require lifelong medical treatment, but to starve my old body’s cancer cells of testosterone in order to make a healthier old age possible. There’s a world of difference, I’ve come to realise, between medication that enhances health and medication that destroys it, even if it’s the same medication.

Real and artificial transitions

Birth, puberty and death are transitions central to our humanity. The medical interventions that sometimes accompany them are, on the whole, intended to ease a healthy biological process or to minimise associated pain.

So-called ‘gender transition’ is totally different. Instead of helping children to accept their bodies and integrate its changes, the gender cult denounces such help as ‘conversion therapy’. This is a deliberate pretence that falsely equates supportive talk therapy with now thankfully discredited barbaric procedures aimed at changing sexual orientation. A powerful gender industry promotes and profits from children’s alienation from their bodies, and uses medical intervention to block the healthy biological transition of puberty and manufacture an artificial transition into a synthetic sex identity.

‘Gender transition’ doesn’t stop there. Influential tech billionaires like Martine Rothblatt see it as a first step on a transhumanist journey - a journey that, he intends, will lead to total disembodiment, with digital immortality supposedly achieved by uploading individual consciousness into a machine. Another influential ‘trans’ scientist and politician, Petra De Sutter, is more interested in changing how life starts. He advocates the development of reproductive techniques, from IVF to gene editing, lab-created eggs and sperm, and ectogenesis, in order to create ‘the perfect famiy’.

Leaders of the gender cult are obsessed with pursuing tech reproduction and digital immortality,.They want individuals to be born from machines and to end in machines. Their aim is to bring about the ultimate artificial transition, away from humanity itself.