Death: it's coming for all of us. Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images
It’s funny, what gets you thinking about mortality. Wait, no. It’s not funny, it’s exhausting. Literally everything gets me thinking about mortality. I could be eating a Dairy Milk and think something like “Gosh, I wonder if I’ve already eaten the majority of Dairy Milks I will eat in my lifetime.” Then I might try to work it out. I have a problem.
But this time, the thing that got me thinking about mortality was digging a series of dams and waterworks on a British beach with my children, and thinking about doing the same when I was their age; my father bringing the proper gardening shovel from the shed in the house we were staying in, so he could shift some serious tonnage. (I have started doing this. If you go to the beach with a metal spade, you are King Dad, and the other dads have to build you a throne of sand.)
Those summers seemed to go on forever and there seemed to be an infinite number of them. These ones slip by in a rush: the children are speechless gurgling babies one minute; lanky-limbed argumentative great monsters the next. And the gap between my being the child and my being the spade-wielding, sunhat-wearing dad seems much smaller than it ought.
Anyway, middle-aged dad freaking out about mortality: breaking news, more at 11. But I read something recently that made me stay with the topic.
John Nerst, the blogger behind Everything Studies, read my first book recently. The book is kind of about AI, and whether it will kill us all; but it’s also about some people who worry about it, known as the rationalists. The rationalists are many things, but a lot of them are transhumanists: people who think humanity can and should change its base form, to extend life and become more than we are. And one key thing they want to change is the inconvenient “death” business.
Nerst doesn’t want to live forever. Our psychology, he thinks, requires finite story arcs – he doesn’t trot out the simple “death brings life meaning” thing, but starts from there, and he finds that the idea of living forever doesn’t work. “I want to live a long and happy life,” he says, “but I think I do want to come to a point when I’m satisfied, a point when I feel like it’s a good time for the story to end.” I really recommend you read the whole thing, partly because everything Nerst writes is worth reading, and partly because I can’t do the whole thoughtful piece justice with a few excerpts. But in essence, he thinks we don’t want immortality.
I’ll come back to whether I agree with him, later on. But for now I thought it was worth noting that the idea of hugely extended human life isn’t crazy. It’s already happened, to some degree: if you’re blessed, as I am, to be living as a well-off person in the rich west in the 21st century, you can already expect several decades more than could 99% of humans who have ever lived.
Transhumanists just want to do that more. They get held up as cranks and weirdos — partly because lots of them are into cryonics, which I think is unfair: surveys suggest they’re no more likely than the rest of us to think it will work; they just think the bet is a worthwhile one. And on the subject of ageing, I think they’re right that ending it, or at least hugely changing it, is a plausible goal.
I spoke recently to a couple of scientists who are looking at human life extension. One of them, Wolf Reik, works at the Babraham Institute, a life-sciences establishment outside Cambridge. He studies a process called DNA methylation.
The DNA in our cells is made up of four “letters”: C, G, A, T, the nucleotides cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine. Each is a tiny bundle of atoms; when strung together into long sequences they form the famous double helix shape.
Sometimes, the cytosines change a little, gaining another group of atoms called a methyl group. About five years ago, scientists at UCLA noticed something interesting. If you measured the percentage of the cytosines which had this methyl group, it told you — with remarkable accuracy — the age of the person you took it from.
“It’s the best biomarker for ageing that exists,” said Reik. “It is accurate to within 3.6 years.” And more than just predicting your chronological age, it also told you important things about your health. Reik found the same process happened in mice, accurate to within 3.3 weeks, which is very similar, proportional to the length of a mouse’s life, to the accuracy in humans.
There are two possible explanations for this. One is that this epigenetic “methylation” process is a sort of readout, tracking the real processes of biological ageing. That would be exciting in its own right — you could use it as an important health indicator, and, in the future, the patterns of DNA methylation could provide information on risks of specific cancers or other diseases.
But the second possibility is that this is the underlying process of ageing. And that would mean that, if you can change it, you would go some way to halting — or reversing — the ageing process itself.
At the moment it’s too early to say whether that’s the case. But Andrew Steele, a computational biologist whose book Ageless comes out next year, told me that there are a few interesting hints. First, this methylation process tracks ageing from fertilisation to death. At first it’s a rapid change, up until the age of about 20; then there is a slower, steady increase. “If this were just some random phenomenon,” he said, “you wouldn’t think you’d see the same changes from development to adult life, when you’re not developing. It’s suggestive, but not conclusive, that it’s something fundamental, something causal, about ageing.”
There have been some experiments that support the idea. If you turn an adult cell into an induced pluripotent stem cell, by inserting four genes called “Yamanaka factors” into its DNA, its methylation clock reverts to zero.
And in some experiments, scientists used the same process on mice, inserting the Yamanaka factors into their DNA. It was, said Steele, a catastrophe: the mice’s cells in their organs tried to turn into stem cells, meaning that they weren’t doing their jobs; the mice had systemic organ failures. And the stem cells also caused the mice to develop grotesque cancers called teratomas, horrible balls of teeth and hair and blood.
But when another group of scientists did the same, but this time with the Yamanaka factors switched off except in the presence of a particular drug, and then gave that drug at periodic intervals, they found that the mice aged more slowly than normal mice. It’s inconclusive – they observed proxy measures, rather than simply waiting to see how long the mice lived – but it’s tantalising. “There’s no guarantee it will work in humans,” says Steele, “but these processes are fundamental and appear to be conserved across biology, in mice and flies and rats and dogs, so there’s a strong possibility.”
If methylation really is the driver of ageing, then the dream, of course, is to create some drug that will slow the process. The Yamanaka-factor mice were all genetically modified, so that precise model wouldn’t work on adult humans. But the Yamanaka factors are a “sledgehammer”, says Steele, forcing all the cells back to age zero. “Reprogramming like this resets the clock,” says Reik. But in theory we can find a more precise method. “We could say, instead of zero, I want to go back to 20. That’s quite an exciting prospect.”
The first step is still to make sure that this really is a driver. Reik and colleagues have plans for more research — manipulating the mouse genome, seeing how methylation interacts with gene expression. He plans to look at certain developmental disorders, such as kabuki syndrome, that affect ageing, and see if they work via the methylation system. His lab has made, he says, “exciting breakthroughs” in rejuvenation since we first spoke about it two years ago.
Methylation won’t be the whole story. There are other forms of cell damage that accumulate over a lifetime and that this won’t fix — Steele’s book looks at ten “hallmarks of ageing”, things that drive and aggravate the ageing process. But it seems centrally important, and understanding it could lead to breakthroughs. Besides, there are other hopeful avenues. “The most promising current research is probably senolytics,” says Steele: “drugs that kill senescent cells, and which have made mice live longer, helped with arthritis and other age-related conditions, and are currently in trials for the same in humans.
“I think that curing ageing is a totally legitimate medium-term medical goal, and maybe short-term if we get lucky.”
And lots of other animals (Steele mentions tortoises and some salamanders as especially good examples) don’t age as we do. It’s not some inevitable fact about life. It could well be that we find something which will dramatically change how humans age. Major life extension is not wild speculative madness.
So let’s get back to whether we’d want it. I entirely agree with Nerst on one thing: actual, you-cannot-die immortality is likely a curse, not a blessing. No one reads vampire stories or ghost stories – souls forced to wander the earth long after all their loved ones have died, unable to rest – and thinks “Yup, gotta get me some of that.” Immortality is the archetypal monkey’s-paw wish-that-goes-wrong.
But on the other hand, ageing — look, I am sorry to say it, it feels like something you shouldn’t say — sucks.
Not getting older. I like getting older. Mainly, I like how little I care about what other people think about me, now. I wear practical, comfortable clothes and engage in pastimes I enjoy, rather than wearing and doing things I hope will make people think I’m cool. (They never did.) I feel I am much more myself than I was in my teens and twenties, as though for all those years I was building a personality, and now it’s ready to be taken out and used. There’s a lot of good stuff about getting older.
Ageing, though. Cancer is a “disease of ageing”, we’re repeatedly told, and it is. But almost all diseases are diseases of ageing, to some degree. All your organs start to go wrong. You get weaker, you get slower. Your senses lose acuity. Even your brain changes; there is real decline in your mental faculties which gathers pace as you reach the end of middle age. Then there’s dementia, which scares the shit out of me. Anything incapacitating does, really.
I’m still too young to really notice any physical decline; if there is any, it’s likely being offset for the time being by the fact that I drink less and exercise more these days. But I see older friends and relatives getting cancers and heart disease and all these other things, and they’re not that much older. I can remember when they were my age, and it doesn’t feel very long ago. So it would be nice to sort the whole ageing thing out.
“It’s crazy that more biologists aren’t focusing on ageing,” said Steele. “The potential is there to reverse the greatest cause of disease and suffering in the modern world, and yet there is surprisingly little interest.” Living fit and healthy lives right to the end: that seems worthwhile.
But I’m kind of dodging the question. Nerst wasn’t talking about making everyone healthy. I think most people would want that. How about real transhumanism? How about living for hundreds of years? Thousands?
Nerst suspects we wouldn’t want it. “My grandmother, who I spent a lot of time with as a child, passed away just about a year before turning 100,” he writes. “She remained present and independent until the end, but had for years casually commented that she was ready to go. I believe her. I think she felt her story was over.” And, he thinks, a lot of elderly people feel the same. I suspect he’s right.
I have three questions, though. First: how much of being tired of life is a product of being literally tired, just from living in a slowly failing body? Everything is harder work when you’re very old, and you can do fewer things, and learning new skills is harder. If we were capable of learning judo, or kite-surfing, or Go, at age 90 as easily as we are at age 15, would we still be so bored?
Second, how different would it be if all your friends and relatives didn’t have an unfortunate tendency to die? If we all could live on as long as we wanted, wouldn’t it be more appealing?
Third: maybe many people would still feel they have had enough after 80 or 90 years. Maybe most people would. Maybe almost all people would. But … what if I don’t? What if a few people get to their century, still healthy and fit, and think: actually this is still pretty good, I want to carry on for a few more years? What if they think the same after their second century? Their fifth?
I would like to have the option. I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m ten thousand years old. Maybe I’ll still be bang up for another ten thousand. And I think everyone else should have the option too.
Of course there are real practical difficulties. Our growing population right now is caused by people not dying quickly enough — birth rates are stable and will probably start declining soon, but the people who are already here are living longer, so the population is still going up. If people start living for millennia, we would struggle; it’d be like putting the plug in the bath but leaving the tap running. It’s not a coincidence that the rationalists, the transhumanists I write about in my book (all good bookshops!) are also keen proponents of getting humanity off Earth and to the stars.
Also, if you want to choose when you go out, you need to be able to choose. You can’t have laws against assisted dying in the glorious transhumanist future.
But they are practical difficulties. Maybe they’re insurmountable, but maybe not. I agree with Steele that ageing is probably the greatest cause of suffering and disease in the world, and we ought to try to do something about it. I sincerely doubt it’ll happen in my lifetime, but it’s a nice thing to hope for my children, or theirs.
Maybe this is all just a nerd’s version of praying for the afterlife, although I think not. But I like life, and being healthy, and learning about the universe. I’d like all those things to carry on. So even if I don’t want actual immortality, I would like to be able to choose the time of my leaving, without having to feel my body and brain slowly lose the fight against entropy.
In case that doesn’t happen, though, I have ordered the lesser dads on this Kentish beach to build me a mighty pyramid, and store my mortal remains in there, ideally with twenty or thirty of them entombed with me to serve me in the afterlife. It’s a long shot, but I may as well take advantage of being King Dad while I can.
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SubscribeI appreciate the author’s effort here, but please stop apologizing. Frankly, I’m frickin sick of it. The radical fringe is not the parents protesting. It’s activists and NGOs who think it’s appropriate to withhold information from parents about their own children. They are the radicals.
Thousands and thousands of Canadians attended protests across the country. Who cares if some loonie toons attended as well? I seem to recall a few fringe people at BLM rallies. That’s what happens with mass movements.
The day you start apologizing for it is the day you have lost the battle. They can’t argue on logic and reason so they resort to smears. Don’t give that tactic oxygen or legitimacy.
And frankly I’m getting sick of the gushing media coverage of Pierre Poilievre. The presence of extreme groups did not contribute to the Conservative Party keeping its distance from the march. Pierre Poilievre did. End of story.
Poilievre is a career politician, a political hack riding the wave of populism to boost his career. He would hack the genitals of every kid in the country, if he thought it would win an election.
Yes. Scary how it’s the parents that are cast as ‘fringe’ and not the ideologues that are busy indoctrinating infants in sex and gender confusion.
This artical is a work of fiction. A few people from the proud boy cheer squad – paid for by (shhh dont tell them whos the money)- scream at strangers with about made up phantoms is not Canadaian parents. Its global facisms stalking horse. Unheard is uncreasingly peddling garbage not idea. Shame and shame
Of course it is global fascism That’s why those parents are protesting, because they want to protect their children against global fascism.
No, your comment is a work of (terrible) fiction.
This. There’s a word for when a few elites in positions of power decide questions of policy and social direction, while ordinary folk are ignored, ridiculed, or painted as antisocial radicals and subversives. That word is aristocracy, and ours, like most of those in history, gets more reactionary the more people fight against their dictates. When they can’t convince people of their rightness, they try public shaming and bullying tactics, and when that fails to work, they resort to fearmongering. This is where our modern aristocrats are at. Unfortunately for them, this never works. By overusing pejoratives like ‘racist’, ‘bigot’, etc. and using them to denote any opposing view, they are in fact undermining their own movement by creating more racists and bigots. Sooner or later, the people they criticize will be desensitized to accusations of racism and bigotry. More and more people will just expect the criticism and ignore it, or even embrace the label and accept it as a name for their countermovement. Then, as more people just accept the label, the label becomes more acceptable. Simply speaking, if every opponent is a racist, there will never be a shortage of racists to oppose, and sooner or later they will no longer care what pejorative label they are assigned. It’s like trying to fight one’s own shadow by adding more and more light but in the same place. They’re empowering the thing they’re fighting. Such an approach is inherently doomed to failure.
I’m neutral on Poilievre at this stage. He has an unbelievably hard balancing act here due to how polarized Canada has become under Trudeau. What I take exception to is the concept of career politician. If we take its opposite, an unqualified moron selected solely on his name and looks being managed by ‘others’ versus someone who actually did the work to receive the qualifications and has an actual working knowledge of economics and law, I’ll place my money on the latter. That being said, the system is entirely flawed and cannot produce the leaders we need and does not have the appropriate mechanisms to remove all the truly bad incentives in it.
I understand the rationale, but your argument is fatally flawed. If intelligence and expertise correlated better with political success, your argument would have greater merit, but there is no such correlation. The greatest correlation to political success is attending an elite University, which leads to networking opportunities with other members of the elite class, and is also an indicator of the second best correlation to political success, access to generational wealth. Elites use their money to send their children to elite institutions where they mingle with other elites and build social connections that support their success regardless of personal ability or deficiency. They favor their own class and justify this by claiming superiority based on the factors you mention, but it’s all just smoke. A Harvard graduate is not necessarily better or more qualified than a graduate of whatever state university, but the elite class needs people to believe that there is to justify their continued rule. This is how the modern aristocracy functions. The excuses are different, but in the end the results are pretty much the same. Our modern aristocracy is, even in the most theoretical sense, only marginally more fair and meritocratic than previous aristocracies based on land and blood. In practical application, it is actually worse than those because we now live in a world of widespread literacy and broad access to education. If the question is “who is most qualified?”, then the clergy and nobility of feudal Europe could make a far better claim to intellectual and experiential superiority than any modern politician or Fortune 500 CEO. They at least could point to concrete things like the ability to read and do basic mathematics where our elites must resort to virtue signalling, nebulous claims of superior ‘expertise’, and raw socioeconomic advantage. Don’t buy the propaganda. Career politicians are not smarter or more capable on average along any meaningful axis other than wealth and the will to power and status. The bureaucrats they appoint and hire for doing the actual work of running the country SHOULD be suited and trained for said work, but even among these, there is a strong elite bias for their own social caste. We’d probably see very little difference in our governmental competence if we picked leaders by a lottery of basically anyone who wanted the job and wasn’t a convicted criminal, and we’d probably see a good deal less corruption, graft, and attention seeking behaviors as a side benefit. We’d probably be better off if we appointed bureaucrats with a similar lottery system accompanied by some list of qualifications and/or test of intellectual ability and related knowledge.
Well said. Having met US representatives and senators to discuss healthcare related issues, I can vouch for your point that political success isn’t tied to either intellectual firepower or subject matter expertise. Don’t know about the UK Parliament, but a huge amount of the nitty gritty of US lawmaking is done by congressional staffers, and then fed to the rep or senator.
Which is exactly what I said, the system is flawed and cannot produce the leaders we need.
I have no issue with politicians with extensive experience – none at all. What I have issue with is politicians who have never held a job outside politics. The three leaders of Canada’s main parties have never known anything outside the cloistered confines of politics. What we need are leaders who earned their stripes in the real world who decide to enter politics as a service to their country, not people who choose politics as a career.
Your last sentence, while I suspect quite true, still makes him preferable to the ideologues who ignore the broader public will entirely while pursuing their own ideology, or try to manipulate, coerce, and intimidate people into conforming to their dogmas.
Jim Veenbaas you may not like Pierre Poilievre but would you vote for Justin Trudeau in the next election? It is Trudeau and the Liberal Party that has led to all the political unrest in Canada and has nearly destroyed our global reputation. We may be caught between a rock and a hard space but the only road to change is Poilievre whether we like hm or not.
You’ve been drinking the koolaid on pp I see.
I’m in accord with your comment up the point where you veer into a diatribe against Poilievre. Yes, he’s a career politician, due to the fact that he has been politically active since high school and that he was elected on his first run for MP and has been consistently re-elected.
But unless he’s been underhanded and misused his position or shown a lack of principle, he doesn’t deserve the disdain you showed. I thought he was too strenuously partisan in the early years, which I found distasteful. In the last several years he has shown far more maturity, principled resolve, and concern for Canadian wellbeing than the current PM. He has trod lightly on the transgenderism issue, no doubt a political strategy, while making it clear that he supports parental rights over transactivism. Your last sentence is disgusting vitriol.
The 6 year old grandson of a friend came home from school crying in confusion. That was because his teacher had told him that just because he had a pe … s didn’t mean he was a boy. What can a parent or grandparent say in these circumstances?
That the teacher is an evil extremist
“Stop telling disgusting lies to small children.”
There is only one serious way out of this crap, it will have a chilling effect on all normal transactions between people and institutions if adopted on a mass scale, but at this point there is nothing much left to lose.
The way out is for groups of ordinary people, parents re schools for example, to launch legal challenges, a combination of civil and criminal, across all institutions simultaneously. Class actions. And not just the institutions but individuals – that teacher in your anecdotes could be challenged in the civil courts for damages, or even in small claims courts. If individuals are targeted, they will immediately go to their employing institutions for protection, and then we will see how much water they are all standing in, if their employers back them. Bring the fight into the light. Tie the buggers up in legal knots with the prospect of damages hanging over the institutions like the sword of Damocles for years on end. And this has to be done now – because the law is beginning to shift towards wokedom, but it isn’t there yet, vast tracts of law still nominally remain in the favour of ordinary people.
Excellent idea – class action lawsuits are perfect in Canada and USA. I only wish we had them in the UK.
Prashant – I absolutely agree with you, we’re dealing with this garbage here in Ireland too. I reckon the law, while it’s still objective, is the only way to effectively combat this. Liability and the threat of liability can expose their lies and put a halt to their galop..
Exactly right. This is what we’ve learned in the UK over the last four years: that these issues are the product of grossly distorted interpretation of the law, and that they need to be challenged in the courts. To date, every time the UK trans activists have tried to take their grotesque arguments to court, they have been defeated.
That process in itself creates important legal precedents. These issues should be fought in court, in the open, based on evidence. Not decided behind closed doors by people no one voted for. It’s the only way to put this gruesome misogyny where it belongs: on the wrong side of the law.
We can’t vote our way out of this nightmare.
Additionally, starve the beast by supporting private and charter schools that don’t engage in wokery and indoctrination. Vote with your feet (at least in the USA).
That approach might also be the answer to the (wildly unpopular) ‘hate-speech legislation’ currently being promoted by the Irish government to limit freedom of speech here!
Homeschool is the only option I”m afraid
There are other options springing up all over the place. One engineer founded a Socratic-method school with his wife and some colleagues. They started out with about ten students, all from age 6-16, who were not separated into groups by age. Instead, the older kids worked with the youngest. The school became so successful and popular, they had to expand. They now have parent-facilitated schools throughout the US. I wish I could remember the name of the one I’m thinking about: I listened to a long podcast with the founder several months ago and was very impressed. His independent school now has many copying his model.
Say? Remove the child from the school. All parents should be doing that. There are alternatives.
Actually that’s a perfect opportunity to disillusion the child in question by telling them their teacher is full of crap, and most people are full of crap. Also, those that claim to know what’s ‘right’ and ‘true’ are usually the ones who are the most full of crap and there’s usually an ulterior motive to go along with whatever crap they are full of. Teach your child or grandchild to be suspicious of anyone and everyone, because in today’s world unmoored from tradition, religion, and native culture, that suspicion is what will prevent them from being duped and taken advantage of by the many, many purveyors of nonsense in our modern world. It’s a harsh lesson for a six year old, and we shouldn’t have to do this, but none of us gets to choose the world we’re born into. If the system is going to try to manipulate and indoctrinate children as young as six, we owe it to them to give them the skills, knowledge, and tools to understand who is doing it, why they’re doing it, and how to resist it and keep their own sense of self-worth and their own self identity. That’s the duty one accepts as a parent.
What you’re advocating is not a critical attitude, but cynicism. Those who are “suspicious of anyone and everyone”, lose the ability to discern whom they should trust and whom they should not.
The best solution I can think of (absent an overhaul of public education) is to teach your kids science. Sex is biologically binary, because that is true of all mammals; were we not, we could not reproduce. There is no third sex. We are embodied creatures, and the fact we have higher reasoning does not change that. We ARE our bodies, not a disembodied “gender” trapped in what may be the “wrong” body.
Once kids have that clearly in mind, those who try to tell your kids something that is counterfactual/antiscience are the ones whose views on the subject are can’t be trusted, and it doesn’t matter that they might be a teacher. That last bit — the fact that those they should be able to trust to teach them fact, can be wrong — is the radical lesson. It’s unfortunate that these days kids have to learn it so young.
You shouldn’t teach kids to be suspicious. You should teach them to be open minded at the basis for the behaviour they are witnessing.
If financially possible, support pulling him out of government school and put him in a private school that doesn’t pitch this kind of rot.
My child has gone to classical Christian school K through high school and I’ve never regretted the expense. Superior academics as well.
When the acronym LGBTQ etc is used in articles like this, it always seems to be the TQ element that’s the cause of so much conflict and disruption. Behind which is a small but well organised and very vocal clique of activists.
The LGBs are just a useful stepping stone, and routinely get thrown under the bus, along with women.
The LGBs and the TQ+s are joined at the hip – all in it together until ‘gay marriage’. Now the TQs are coming for the kids and the LGBs are sweating.
There is absolutely no rationale behind an alliance of LGB and TQ. One is about sexuality, the other about identity. One is about behaviour, the other about feelings. One is about science, the other about belief. One relies on sex, the other denies it. They cannot both be real in the same world. Let’s face it, the LGBTQWERTY label was only ever a means for the TQ to lay their cuckoo’s egg in the extremely well-established nest it took gay activism some 50+ years to build.
The first gave birth to the second.
The LGB movement originated Queer Theory on one hand (‘Let’s deconstruct all norms so no-one or nothing may be described as abnormal.’) and gender-as-performance on the other (Judith Butler’s book ‘Gender Trouble’ is an explicit defence of the butch-femme distinction in lesbian relationships, borne from a debate within 1980s radical lesbian feminism). When I was at Uni 30 years ago, the gays and transsexuals (as they were called then) had common cause fighting together for societal acceptance. True, some lesbian feminists were critical of the transsexuals, but that is because they are and were equal opportunity misandrists.
Those distinctions were blurred by the gays years ago. ‘It’s not what I do, it’s who I am, and to disagree with my behaviour is to erase me’ was a common argument by gay activists and is now being used – with a gender twist, of course – by their TQ successors.
What we now have is the ‘respectable’ sexual revolutionaries complaining that their movement has been overtaken by a mish-mash of blue-haired crazies, teenage girls seized by social contagion and straight male fetishists – which they are ultimately responsible for. The mainstreaming of LGB led directly to this current situation. Revolutions don’t stop merely because earlier revolutionaries got what they wanted.
Same-sex attraction (and its normalization as a human variant rather than as a psychopathology) admittedly may appear similar to the attempt to normalize transgenderism, but the former is not based on Queer Theory. Queer theory posits that the very idea of “normal” should be “queered”, or eradicated, which would thus mean there was nothing abnormal about being “Queer”, which these days seems to mean “Trans”.
The existence of life-long same-sex attraction does have a basis in science. Those who in adulthood turn out to be homosexual, as children often “feel like” they were meant to be the other sex. (Consequently, a large number of the kids being “transitioned” right now are are actually Gay and Lesbian. Which is part of what has the LGB community upset with TQ+.)
On the other hand, the notion that all people have an inherent true “gender”, which has no inherent connection to the body, is pure Queer Theory, or in other words, counterfactual, antiscientific balderdash.
Untrue! I had had supper with lesbian friends last week and they were fuming about trans women in women’s spaces and women’s sports. They are considering voting Conservative for the first time ever – ages 60 and 61.
Perhaps it’s the boring middle class group I hang out with, but both gay and straight, we think children should be left alone to be children.
I think there is some class issue here too, and most people – whether they belong to sexual minorities or not – do just want to get on with their lives.
However, as I detailed in my answer to Huw, there’s a direct link between the groups. What we are seeing here is more like a family fight than totally opposed groups.
That bit about marriage is also an abomination.
Marriage was never about right to sleep together or asset sharing among partners, it was about the kids and enforcing parental responsibility.
The “gay marriage” show essentially took public sympathy and guilt over their treatment, and used it to force a revision in the very concept of marriage.
It would be a different matter if gays wishing to adopt or have kids fought for that right (or rather, obligation). But most gays don’t even have kids.
The problem here is that ‘straights’ had already gutted marriage of those things long before the gays even considered the possibility of marriage.
If it’s only an easily dissolved contract between two people who currently love each other, with kids and life-long commitment now optional, who can deny it to gay people?
The so-called ‘redefinition’ of marriage that happened in 2013 was just an acknowledgement that it had already been socially redefined by most people anyway.
Regardless of the law we are *all* civil partners now.
Yes, the alphabet soup parasites have piggy-backed on LGB rights, women’s rights legislation, not to mention equating themselves with marginalised ethnic minorities.
It’s difficult because of the progressive moral offence of ‘adjacency’. Kellie-Jay Keen has been monstered by the TRAs because a couple of far-right people turned up at one of her ‘Let Women Speak’ events.
I remember Jordan Peterson getting the same for being photographed next to somebody wearing an unfashionable t-shirt (the slogan on it, not the cut!).
I can even remember Cameron being lambasted because Yaxley-Lennon said he was going to vote for him.
It betrays a fundamental fallacy in people’s logical reasoning, but progressives don’t care about such concerns when their modus operandi is ad hominem attacks.
I think, though, that you just have to wear it. You can’t control who turns up. You’ll be attacked for it, but you were never going to change the minds of your attackers in the first place.
In 2020 blackshirt wearing BLM activists were considered heroes while those who counter-protested about statues being destroyed in Parliament Square were tarred as goose stepping racists. We live in a true clown world.
“It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.”
The author forgot to mention the courts. A judge in Saskatchewan has ruled against the province’s recent legislation requiring schools to inform parents when their child changes pronouns. The battle is far from over, but it’s a disgrace nonetheless, considering 87% of people there support the measure
Judges in Canada have long been coopted by the hard left. Beverly McLaughlin, former head of our Supreme Court, is now working for Xi in Hong Kong. Go to court at your peril.
This is 100% true. The hard left control every institution in Canada
‘taken over by extremists’ – Give me a break. So opposition to mandatory shots is ‘conspiracy theory’. The truckers convoy was ‘extremist’. The progressives are extremists. They are pushing the most radical deconstruction of western civilization in history. The truckers convoy was the first breath of sanity in the Canadian polity for a decade. Poilievre has turned out to be a shill like the rest of them. He hasn’t the b**** to actually take on radical gender and race theory in schools and universities, in the health system, in public bureaucracies – nor to weed out DEI from the corporate world. That is what needs to happen. Anything that falls short is on the wrong side of the culture war. It’s binary. Make up your mind.
So true. It’s perfectly possible for politicians of any leaning to speak up for truth & reality without it meaning that they’ve ‘aligned’ themselves with extreme groups. The words do exist – they just need to find the bollocks to say them.
I’m pretty sure in not being alone in thinking that while ‘liberals’ continue to try and silence ordinary people such as me by vilifying us and calling us extremists (usually right-wing) or bigots, we’re beginning to see that maligned groups (such as anti vaccers or political conservatives) perhaps are not so insane as we thought. I’ve also heard plenty of great opinions from Republicans commentators such as Dave Rubin, whereas I would have avoided his shows like the plague before based on his politics.
I get tired of coverage of the fringe who show up for these events. When BLM marches so does antifa and they invariably attack people and property. Yet somehow we aren’t expected to believe they represent the whole movement. There are more marches Oct 21 in Canada – I will be going to one simply as a protest against the way the protesters are being treated.
20% of Canadians did not get vaccinated – hardly a fringe. Some of these people are trying to raise awareness of the excess deaths where ever they can and good for them. The authors slander is pretty basic/standard by now.
Agreed. For those at the back – this is the tip of the iceberg
Yes and what alarms is the casualness of the slander, a total lack of self awareness because she has been absorbed into that particular groupthink.
“One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — …”
This reporting style is part of the problem. It is now unclear what the sex is of a person who self-describes as ‘transgender’ & journalists are going along with it. So was this a woman speaking? Or a man in some kind of ‘female’ attire with added fake breasts? The use of ‘she’ can no longer be trusted to refer to a female & this has implications for language & communication in every area of life. So – to call ‘trans’ identifying men ‘she’ means what exactly? How do we organise demographics or statistics or census figures or health data for men & women if no one knows any more what a male or a female is?
There’s a tendency to assume that opposition to this ideology is primarily led by religious people. This is probably because so many secular people have opted out of the debate, either afraid of the bullying & name-calling that they invariably get thrown at them if they make the slightest criticism, or thinking (erroneously) that they don’t have any skin in the game. But they do. We all do. Will it soon be perfectly feasible to ‘affirm’ someone who thinks they are a bird, feeding them worms & surgically affixing wings to their shoulders? It’s no more ludicrous than claiming to be the opposite sex…
Being atheist, I’m appalled that so many scientifically qualified & non-religious people are not standing up for objective truth & reality. Humans cannot change sex, although they may of course adopt whatever stereotype they wish to present as. Men have had autogynephile fetishes for generations, but until recently they kept it private – or at least light-heartedly ‘fun’ as in panto etc. So long as they weren’t making this about grooming children the rest of us didn’t pay much attention. Wonderful entertainers like Barry Humphries created witty & clever characters without the need to blur the boundaries between truth & reality. He knew he was a man…
The by-degrees infiltration of ‘transgenderism’ into every facet of public life makes these ideologues by no means the marginalised group that they claim to be. They have no fewer rights than the rest of the population and conflating their cause with that of the LGB is misleading & dishonest at best & vicious at worst. Women should not be forced to compete against men in sports, and organisations that remove the word ‘woman’ from their lexicons need to be called out. They are complicit in the erasure of women’s hard-won sex-based rights & the very reality of women’s existence (‘pregnant people’, anyone?)
By creating confusion in the minds of this generation of children, transgender ideologues will without a doubt be responsible for increasing numbers of emotionally damaged adults in the future. It’s time for it to stop.
Thankfully, the children at the school I’m working at seem to see through the transgender charade. As far as they’re concerned it amounts to nothing more than boring lecturing by well-meaning but stupid adults.
Thank you for this persective on the encouraging protest by Canadians. I hope we Americans follow suit.
I’m lesbian, and any time I hear LGB attached to “T,” I experience externalized homophobia. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender ideology; many of us who fought for gay rights in fact find it homophobic and misogynistic. We stand beside other concerned adults and parents and against this ideology in all its guises, and especially its indoctrination of vulnerable children and usurping of parental rights. Lesbian Canadian writer Eva Kurilova’s reflection on her participation in the recent march is worth a read to those who are still using various “LGBT” (+++) designations, which wrongly presume support from lesbians and gays. This was a strategic forced teaming by trans activists, hoping to capitalize on good will toward gays from straight people who don’t understand the distinction; it should not be validated.
while I have heard that from many L and G, I do not find it helpful. Pretty much EVERY big gay group is pro-TQ. I really don’t care about the individual L or G, because individuals have little power.
How are you attempting to get the Big Alphabet groups to drop the TQ? Human Rights Campaign, etc all support TQ.
So, for that reason, I am more and more blaming L & G for the TQ disaster.
The cranks and eccentrics are the vanguard of any mass movement. While the weekend warriors come out after the nutters have strewn their bodies over the barbed wire but it should not be forgotten that others paved the way. This article does a disservice to the Freedom Truckers and others that it mocks when they were out there doing the grunt work day after day.
While the 5G tower content would fall into a conspiracy Covid shot breaths Astra confirmed and very much not a conspiracy. These “vaccines” are not like the ones we are used to and are a disaster. Adverse affects, including death, are way more common than the media will allow to be told. Considering who funds the media that makes sense. No conspiracy needed.
What does any of that have to do with sexual education in schools though? These protests against what us being taught in schools would no doubt have enjoyed widespread support, but due to the anti vaccine crowd trying to force their way into them a good number will now stay clear.
If they wanted to still protest about Covid policies (which 99% of the population no longer care about) then they should organise their own rather than trying to piggyback on a much more popular cause
Covid conspiracy-theorists are to parental rights protests as Socialist Workers are to all left-of-centre protests.
Not wanting compulsion is NOT a conspiracy
Not at all sure about that 99% figure but I agree with the rest of your post.
Because the same authoritarian bureaucracies are weaponizing both issues to get rid of any opposition in universities. The few professors at Canadian universities who stood against mandatory vaccination and the idiotic masking policy (unions are still trying to demand compulsory masking)…are the ones who also have problems with the unrolling DEI regime, affirmative action hires, and the suppression of any dissident voices on gender, race, colonialism, residential schools……Simply asking questions gets you fired or frozen out, And this is routine now in the UK (see Eric Kauffman last week leaving Birkbeck). This is why the Truckers convoy was a litmus and lightning rod for all of this stuff. And you are wrong about 99% of the population. They don’t care…to the extent that the regime has now relaxed again. But union activists are STILL trying to get masks back….Byram Bridle – Professor at Guelph – STIILL not allowed in his lab …..and WTF do you think will happen when Trudeau introduces a digital currency? He froze citizen bank accounts FFS!!!!!!
In fact, regardless of the fact that their focus was not primarily on the reason for the parents’ march, it’s great to see the truckers swell the ranks of protesters.
Because in the article, it mentions the participation of anti-vaccers.
I know it does, my point is that their grievances have nothing to do with the trans debate so they shouldn’t be there protesting about Covid policies as it’s simply a distraction
“While the 5G tower content would fall into a conspiracy Covid shot breaths Astra confirmed and very much not a conspiracy”
I have no idea what this means.
It means that there have been demonstrable side effects from the vaccines – very serious for some people; that the trade offs were never adequately assessed, and such discussion was effectively banned in MSM; that the institutions DID ride roughshod over individual rights
I suspect there is an autocucumber typo in that sentence.
Whenever I think about this I can only reach the one conclusion: neo-Marxists have got behind an LGBTQ+ revolution where the traditional political economics have been abandoned for subversive new identities, and pursued in streets and civic spaces with missionary zeal.
I am getting so very tired of people who don’t want to be coerced into having allegedly prophylactic drugs injected into their healthy bodies smeared and gaslighted as being “conspiracy theorists”. It just makes me want to shut down all communication with the person speaking or writing in this case, because my needs to be heard and seen and taken seriously are simply not met – as though in the writer’s view I am a lesser kind of human being. How can these “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy theorist” labels be at all helpful?
Government funding needs to follow students, not union members. If that happened all of this would disappear.
I am getting so very tired of people who don’t want to be coerced into having allegedly prophylactic drugs injected into their healthy bodies smeared and gaslighted as being “conspiracy theorists”. It just makes me want to shut down all communication with the person speaking or writing, because my needs to be heard and seen and taken seriously are simply not met – as though in the writer’s view I am a lesser kind of human being. How can these “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy theorist” labels be at all helpful? Apart from to signal that a writer adheres to what they believe to be the majority, correct and good opinion, distancing themselves from those who are in their view lesser…
— What the data says: The Angus Reid Institute polled Canadians extensively on various aspects of culture wars in September, including flashpoints on gender identity. Instead of polarization, the pollster mostly found complexity.
“You’ve got the defiant objectors and the zealous activists who are consumed by these conversations,” Angus Reid President SHACHI KURL told Playbook. “But 60 percent of us are somewhere in the middle, trying to sort out our own opinions. In some cases, there are folks who are just throwing the pillow over their head, saying ‘Please make this stop.'”