Didn’t Rolling Stone start out as a magazine about Rock ‘n’ Roll music? Didn’t they embrace the edgy and the counter-culture?
If so, how did they come to be just another enforcement arm of a Corporatist Political party? People used to dream about being on the cover of that magazine. Now it’s hardly fit for lining a bird cage… if there’s even still a print edition.
Now, they’re a magazine best remembered for a bulls**t story slandering the Duke Lacrosse team with spurious rape allegations. They seem to spend a lot of their time writing clickbait stories about Trump, for some reason.
At least this time, they weighed in on something done by a musician… Paul Stanley, rhythm guitarist from KISS. Paul showed up on their radar when he did the unthinkable. The Hall of Fame rocker had the audacity to have a non-conforming opinion on the news of the day.
(Imagine how different the world would be if the rockers of the civil rights and Vietnam era were as neutered, milquetoast, and domesticated as today’s crop of jackboot-marching musicians.)
Paul Stanley accidentally wades into ‘controversy’
Here is a screenshot of the social media post where Paul Stanley dared to say that maybe — just maybe — we shouldn’t be in such a hurry to rush kids into an irreversible life-altering decision. That we should give them time and space to sort out the already difficult and confusing transition to adulthood.
Paul is arguing that we treat people with kindness and respect — whatever their background might be while being cautious of the immense pressure recently put on kids to embrace, as their own, novel understandings of sex and gender.
Paul leaves room for a huge distinction between kids innocently playing dress-up vs. people starting down a road that will leave them permanently sterile.
Rolling Stone gets up on a soapbox
Immediately, Rolling Stone whipped out its scolding finger and started wagging it self-righteously at Paul. Obviously, his brain hasn’t taken in the latest programming module and Rolling Stone is taking it upon themselves to re-educate him. How very ‘establishment’ of them.
It’s unclear what specifically prompted Stanley to make the statement, but what is clear is Stanley has conflated sexuality and gender identity, which develop independently. “People communicate their gender to others through gender expression. This may be done through mannerisms, clothing and hairstyles,” per the Mayo Clinic. “Gender identity develops separately from sexual orientation. People’s sexual orientation is related to whom they’re attracted to on a physical, emotional and romantic basis.”
In fact, most children between 18 and 24 months recognize and can label gender groups, identifying others as girls, women, and feminine; and boys, men and masculine. “Most also label their own gender by the time they reach age 3,” according to Mayo Clinic.
Stanley’s statement comes in the wake of a slew of anti-trans legislation taking root nationwide, including in Virginia, South Dakota, Texas, and Tennessee. Last week, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s new law new law banning gender-affirming treatments for minors, one of several bills targeting the state’s LGBTQ+ community, arguing that SB1 violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause by denying “necessary medical care to youth” based on transgender status. –RollingStone
Gee thanks.
Surely Rolling Stone is everyone’s go-to source for all the latest information about biology and psychology. And isn’t it precious how they make a brief reference to the Mayo Clinic to justify the claims?
Refuting Rolling Stone
Buckle up, because we’re gonna hit them with a tidal wave of receipts. For anyone who doesn’t like wading through dense citations, we’ve made it easier by putting most of the important parts in bold.
Rolling Stone shilling to help Mega corps turn kids into cash cows
It’s weird how these hacks seem desperate to use their influence to help turn children into lifelong dependants on Big Pharma… or better still, a ‘cash cow’ for Planned Parenthood. But don’t take OUR word for it.
The ex-employee also described how providing cross-sex hormone treatments to trans-identifying children is a lucrative business for Planned Parenthood.
“[T]rans-identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation,” the ex-employee said.
Shrier notes that in recent years Planned Parenthood has become one of the largest providers of hormone therapy for trans-individuals in the nation. — TheBlaze
What’s that old saw about following the money?
What’s REALLY driving this ‘trans’ trend?
We’re supposed to pretend that this sudden shift in rapid-onset gender dysphoria was entirely random and organic. We’re supposed to pretend it has not been actively and systematically pushed on us by various people with specific, undisclosed agendas (some of which may even be at odds with one another).
Remember when BLM had to scrub the ‘about’ page on the website because the founders had been a little too honest about the organization’s darker objectives?
The group, whose co-founder Patrisse Cullors has described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists,” removed a page titled “What We Believe” that included its public policy positions as well as describing itself as part of the “global Black family” — a change first reported Monday by the Washington Examiner.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the website formerly read.
The page, which was no longer available Thursday, also said BLM aimed to “dismantle the patriarchal practice” that leads to mothers having to work double shifts to make ends meet.
[…]
A central tenet of Marxism is the dismantling of the “nuclear family structure.” The language was removed days after a poll found support for the group dropped 12 percent this summer as some of its protests descended into looting and violence. –NYPost
What connection, if any, does the anti-nuclear-family bias of the explicitly Marxist BLM movement have with the trans movement?
Well… here are two different sources weighing in on the wider agenda of at least some percentage of ‘trans activists’.
Introducing: Gender Nihilism
Judith Butler refers to gender as, “the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes.” If the current liberal politics of our trans comrades and siblings are rooted in trying to expand the social dimensions created by this apparatus, our work is a demand to see it burned to the ground.
We are radicals who have had enough with attempts to salvage gender. We do not believe we can make it work for us. We look at the transmisogyny we have faced in our own lives, the gendered violence that our comrades, both trans and cis have faced, and we realize that the apparatus itself makes such violence inevitable. We have had enough.
We are not looking to create a better system, for we are not interested in positive politics at all. All we demand in the present is a relentless attack on gender and the modes of social meaning and intelligibility it creates.
At the core of this Gender Nihilism lies several principles that will be explored in detail here: Antihumanism as foundation and cornerstone, gender abolition as a demand, and radical negativity as method. — Gender nihilism: An anti-manifesto
An essay that covers much of the same material — often word-for-word — explains why the idea of gender itself is contemptable in their eyes:
There is a practical component to all of this. The question of humanism vs antihumanism is the question upon which the debate between liberal feminism and nihilist gender abolitionism will be based.
The liberal feminist says “I am a woman” and by that means that they are spiritually, ontologically, metaphysically, genetically, or any other modes of “essentially” a woman.
The gender nihilist says “I am a woman” and means that they are located within a certain position in a matrix of power which constitutes them as such.
The liberal feminist is not aware of the ways power creates gender, and thus clings to gender as a means of legitimizing themselves in the eyes of power. They rely on trying to use various systems of knowledge (genetic sciences, metaphysical claims about the soul, kantian ontology) in order to prove to power they can operate within it.
The gender nihilist, the gender abolitionist, looks at the system of gender itself and see’s the violence at its core. We say no to a positive embrace of gender. We want to see it gone. We know appealing to the current formulations of power is always a liberal trap. We refuse to legitimize ourselves. — AnarchistLibrary
We may think we are having an honest debate about gender. We are not.
Even by treating this as an honest good-faith debate, we are walking into a trap set by people who have no interest in fair play or honest discourse.
In staking our claim on identity labels of non-binary, we find ourselves always again caught back in the realm of gender. To take on identity in a rejection of the gender binary is still to accept the binary as a point of reference. In the resistance to it, one only reconstructs the normative status of the binary. Norms have already accounted for dissent; they lay the frameworks and languages through which dissent can be expressed. It is not merely that our verbal dissent occurs in the language of gender, but that the actions we take to subvert gender in dress and affect are themselves only subversive through their reference to the norm.
If an identity politics of non-binary identity cannot liberate us, it is also true that a queer or trans identity politics offers us no hope. Both fall into the same trap of referencing the norm by trying to “do” gender differently. The very basis of such politics is grounded in the logic of identity, which is itself a product of modern and contemporary discourses of power. As we have already shown quite thoroughly, there can be no stable identity which we can reference. Thus any appeal to a revolutionary or emancipatory identity is only an appeal to certain discourses. In this case, that discourse is gender. — AnarchistLibrary
Returning to the closing thoughts of the earlier citation:
The Coming Insurrection states, “The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible.”[6] To be irreversible means the roots are dug up and patriarchy, and all forms of hierarchy, are dismantled. In more real terms, it means that we have communities and spaces that aren’t just safe, but dangerous to those who oppose our desires and our spaces. Not just a reading group safe space, but reclaimed territories capable of providing for the needs of the working class/women/the excluded (free from gender/gendered violence). These spaces can’t simply be given to us by a higher power. Through occupations of the borderlands and sites of production, or less formal territories of resistance, such as friends who have each other’s backs, we will make or take the commons back.
No Tucking, No Masters
Our insurrection against gender cannot stop with just gender self-identification, or with a new list of terms for everyone to learn to respect. Insurrection must push beyond these limits to a free-play of actions, behaviors, sexuality, etc. Where doing or enjoying one action or another does not categorize you into a limiting role.
To be free from governance entails being free from gender. Being free from gender entails being free from categorization, normalization, and exploitation of governance. –Autonomies
Both the BLM people and the anarchists admitted that they were engaged in a revolutionary movement intent on destroying what IS to build something new in its place. That model is explicitly Marxist in nature. It is nothing less and nothing more than a naked power grab.
Unlike Rolling Stone, Paul Stanley is able to recognize the difference between the innocence of children groping their way through the darkness as the find their way to adulthood and creepy adults with a hidden agenda.
And it’s about time that more of us did the same.
Sources Cited:
Rolling Stone
The Blaze
NYPost
Autonomies — Gender Nihilism: An anti-manifesto
AnarchistLibrary
