This bill, if passed, would fundamentally redefine family life in California. It would devastate parents’ rights. Your rights over your children – to love them, to look after them, to socialise them as you see fit – would be utterly contingent on your acceptance of the new state religion of transgenderism. AB957 is best seen as an act of forced religious conversion. It sends a stern message to parents across California that if they do not sign up to the cult of gendered souls, to the cranky belief that even young children sometimes feel a mismatch between their ‘real’ gender and their cursed biological casing, then they’ll be treated as the morally lesser party in custody hearings. Your worth as a parent will be determined by how willing you are to take the knee to the gender beliefs of your superiors.
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Samizdata quote of the day – California gender cult editionJune 17th, 2023 |
 35 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – California gender cult edition |
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We moved out of California in 2020. As we crossed the Colorado River, I felt as if we were crossing the Red Sea. But the state seems to have become increasingly totalitarian since we left. And on one hand I think of Francisco d’Anconia saying, “Just exactly what it deserves,” but on the other it’s sad to see the place where I lived almost my whole life falling into ruin, and at the hands of its own people.
@William H. Stoddard
We moved out of California in 2020. As we crossed the Colorado River,
You might have escaped for now, but do not rest easy. It’ll be following you real soon. As goes California, so goes America. You might want to consider crossing not only the Colorado river but the American border too.
Soapbox
Ballot Box
Jury Box <- You Are Here
Bullet Box
How is that (those?) fault line looking?
If you read the actual bill, and you have familiarity with family court principles, you can see that California has now vastly increased the number of custody cases that will require a full evidentiary hearing on “gender” issues.
Custodial issues in divorce are about to get much more expensive and bitter. This is generally what court systems work to avoid, but they’re going to do it anyway, to serve this narrow ideological stance.
(ETA: If you’re not familiar with reading bills, the strike-out text is old language being removed.)
Fraser: That’s all very well, but what other country is less oppressive? Canada is accessible, but Canada was deeply authoritarian even before the current prime minister took office.
This is just one of the many evil things being pushed in California – both by the government and by the corporations.
What happens in California today, happens in the rest of America in a couple of years, and then in the rest of the Western World.
As was pointed out to me recently (by a good person on this site) even in the Dominican Republic there is a proposed law that would send people to prison for opposing “Trans” ideology – so the “Third World” is not free of the tide. Freedom of Speech is being systematically exterminated.
In once strictly Catholic Ecuador (where so called “Panama” hats really come from) judges recently ruled that doctors and nurses had to take part in baby killing – not only that baby killing was “legal” (that is being pushed all over the world), but that a person must take part in baby killing – whether they want to or not (so much for “pro choice”).
“You must affirm us” “You must personally take part in this”. The blood must be upon your hands.
Governor Gavin Newsom would be delighted.
There’s a basic disconnect in the ideological thinking here. Marxist philosophy, which underpins much Leftish thinking, holds that people are born as blank slates and their behaviour may be ‘perfected’ by ideological processes.
Yet Leftish thinking also holds that children are not blank slates when born because they have gender preferences that may be at odds with their biological sex. Alternatively children are born as blank slates but they have been already influenced by the ideological processes of their peers and/or trans activists. Either of these options makes children the ammunition in the war to make all people ‘perfect’.
Since people have proved to be un-perfectible over and over again, you may assume that another ‘children’s crusade’ is using up children for no good purpose.
“Conservatives” and “Liberals” who say that the Frankfurt School Marxism, for example that Freedom of Speech is “Repressive Tolerance” (Herbert Marcuse) because it “harms” “disadvantaged and marginalised groups”, pushed in the schools, universities, the media (especially the entertainment media), and the supposedly “capitalist” Corporations, does-not-matter – should have such laws presented to them.
Thanks to Credit Money the economy is dominated by a few corporate bodies – and it is pointless to appeal to individual shareholders as (due to tax laws – as well as the creation and pushing out of Credit Money) most shares are no longer owned by individuals.
A few Credit Money created Corporations (not owned by individual human beings – controlled by other corporate bodies, such as BlackRock) pushing “Woke” Frankfurt School Marxism is what the Economist magazine (the house journal of the international officials and corporate managers – at least the junior ones) calls “the principles of free market conservatism” which “Populists” have “betrayed” by opposing. And by “Populists” they mean people such as Governor DeSantis of Florida – supposedly a true “free market conservative” would have done nothing to oppose the evil pushed by the Disney Corporation and others.
DiscoveredJoys.
Unlike the late Karl Popper I accept that Classical Marxism made scientific predictions – the problem for it was that all its scientific predictions were shown to be FALSE by what happened over time, the “empirical data”. Just as the basic principles of Classical Marxism, such as the Labour Theory of Value (taken from David Ricardo – who, in turn, may have got it from some of the errors of Adam Smith in his old age) had already been shown to be FAlSE logically (by reason).
At this point Marxists faced a choice…
They could either abandon Marxism, admit it was nonsense, or they could abandon both real science (not “the science” – real science, allowing predictions to be really tested) and abandon logical reason.
The Frankfurt School (“Woke”) Marxists have chosen the second option – they reject both empirical evidence and logical reason.
It does not matter to them (to the “Woke” Marxists – as opposed to the Classical Marxists) that their claims are contradictory and absurd – because what they really care about is POWER.
If one looks at the early writings of both Karl Marx and later Marxists such as Mao, it is clear that what they really cared about was POWER as well – the power to impose their vision on everyone else.
The “scientific theories” were just an excuse for their power lust. So the modern Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxists are going all the way back to the early dreams of Karl Marx and others – without bothering with either objectively testable scientific theories, or logical reason.
And this is the stuff the “capitalist” corporations are now pushing.
There have always been people who feel as though they were born into the wrong body and would prefer to be the opposite sex to the one that they actually are. The contention now seems to be that this condition is far more common and can be identified at a much earlier age. This coupled with the assertion that it is possible to literally change to being the opposite sex more or less at will. If these were some kind of newly discovered truths there would be no need for any kind of legislation to force people to believe them, simply presenting the evidence would be sufficient.
[shrug]
It’s gotta get worse before it gets better. The idiots doing this don’t seem to realize that the further they push the social pendulum off-center, the faster and further it’s gonna go when it inevitably swings back…
Rate they’re going, it’ll be in my lifetime when you see “teh gay” put back in the closet. Forcibly.
What they’re really doing is making it abundantly clear that sexual and gender dysfunctions are accompanied by abundant mental issues that are the real reason they’ve never been tolerated in any functioning society in history. The Greeks and the Romans weren’t quite as accepting as many think; they were fine with tops, but bottoms were never, ever seen as social equals. Same elsewhere; every society that people like to cite as being “accepting” usually… Wasn’t. When you get down to details. Even the native American tribes that bought into the whole “two spirits” BS? Yeah; go look and note the marginalized positions held by such people.
The sad fact is, most LGBTWTFBBQ individuals are rather more “Bradley Manning” than they are “Perry Watkins”. Actually met him, knew people who worked with him. Interesting detail they related about him was that he was openly contemptuous of a lot of “gay to be transgressive” types, and refused to have anything to do with them. Or, so it was reported to me… Supposedly, the activist types were constantly calling the personnel section he worked in, trying to get him to do things with them, be interviewed and all that. He just wanted to do his job, and live his life, and they didn’t want to let him do that any more than the strangely obsessed “straights” who were messing with him…
What was funny as hell to me was hearing, years after that whole thing was over and he was retired? The officer who’d been most heavily engaged in trying to throw him out of the Army and mess with him? Dude came out as gay, himself.
Which is entirely in keeping with my observation that the first sign of a deeply conflicted and closeted gay male is that he almost always goes to abusing gays in order to reinforce his heterosexuality. Real straights rarely care enough about the issue to bother with bashing “teh gay”.
Kirk – there is no guarantee that things will get better, that there will be a real “swing back”.
Take the example of California – the voters had the obvious evidence of decline all around them, but due to the brainwashing of the education system and the “mainstream media” (including the entertainment media) they re elected Gavin Newsom by some 60% of the vote.
And it is far more likely that Texas (and so on) will turn into California – than it is that California will return to sanity.
No nation or culture has a Divine Right to exist – many nations and great civilisations have collapsed.
As Ronald Reagan used to say – liberty is never more than one generation away from being destroyed.
If each generation does not have a basic understanding of the principles of liberty and actively make sacrifices to maintain liberty – then liberty dies.
That is why F.A. Hayek (perhaps following some version of David Hume – although it is Adam Ferguson that Hayek actually cites) idea that liberty just appears without anyone understanding its basic principles or wishing to create and maintain (“the product of human action – but not of human design”) is not only wrong (and it is wrong) – it is also incredibly harmful and dangerous.
The false view of history that Hayek (good man though he was) pushed, led some people to the view that teaching the principles of liberty was not important, that liberty just appeared (without people actively understanding and working for it) and did not need to be maintained by eternal vigilance.
Once understanding of the basic principles is lost – then civilisation is doomed, no matter how great that civilisation may once have been.
Great societies of liberty do not just appear (they do not just “evolve”) – people have to understand the basic principles and work to apply them. And each generation has to understand the basic principles – and sacrifice to maintain liberty.
But then, in his work “The Sensory Order”, F.A. Hayek seemed to show that he did not really believe that human beings existed – that humans were moral agents capable of real choice, capable of doing other than we do. In the “Constitution of Liberty” (1960) Hayek tried to keep the politics of the “Old Whigs” whilst rejecting the philosophy, the philosophical foundations (the “nature of man” – that a human is a human being, a free will moral agent) – this can not be done. If the philosophical foundations are undermined – so is the politics.
Read the Constitutions of the various American States – specifically the State limited governement Bills of Rights.
Then try to get to these documents, these political positions, from the philosophy that is now fashionable in the universities – from Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham…. let alone Karl Marx.
It can not be done – someone can not believe the philosophy that is taught in the universities and in the limited government Bills of Rights at State level – or the United States Bill of Rights, which are based on a totally different, and opposed, philosophy – on a totally different, and opposed, understanding of what a human is.
The Bill of Rights is based upon the principle that a human is a human being – a person, a free will moral agent capable of choosing to do other than they do. Without that understanding, the Bill of Rights is doomed.
When Hayek claimed that the Collectivists took “modern philosophy” (which is not really modern at all – its doctrines go back centuries, if not thousands of years) and made unwarranted political conclusions from it, he was exactly WRONG. If the doctrines of “modern philosophy” are correct then the pro tyranny political conclusions of the Collectivists are also correct.
If human beings do not really exist – then it does not matter if these flesh robot “humans” are enslaved, or exterminated.
As Paul Marks notes, California has an influence on the rest of the West.
Mind you, I’m ordering popcorn for when Sacramento tries enforcing this cult on Muslims.
Johnathan Pearce makes an interesting point about Islam.
Islam is indeed not compatible with Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxism – it is in total contradiction to it.
Thus such people as the First Minister of Scotland, and the Attorney General of Minnesota are caught in a massive, and obvious, contradiction – the contradiction between their “Woke” Marxism and their Islamic faith.
But they do not seem to care.
@Paul Marks,
Doesn’t matter to them; they’re wreckers, pure and simple. Similarly to Erdogan’s comment about democracy being a train that Islamists used to get to a station, they’ll get off once they’ve reached their station.
Expect a paroxysm of anti-LGBTWTFBBQ and -feminist action, once they’re in sufficient numbers to allow them to get off the train they’re on. It’ll be prolonged, nasty, and thorough.
And, I’ll be laughing my ass off all the while, as I go about my daily genuflections to the current powers-that-will-be. Self-inflicted wounds are always the most humorous… For the observer.
@kirk,
We’re already there….
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned
The AG of Minnesota is a Muslim to the exact extent that being Muslim helps him politically. And, here in Minnesota, it does help him greatly. One more victimhood vector.
His essence, though, is Minnesota Woke.
Expect a paroxysm of anti-LGBTWTFBBQ and -feminist action, once they’re in sufficient numbers to allow them to get off the train they’re on. It’ll be prolonged, nasty, and thorough.
Ha ha. Look for news from Hamtramck.
William:
You could have a look at the Human Freedom Index … which makes where i live look much better than the US.
However, that should not tell you where to move: it should just provide indications as to where you might want to move, when the shit is approaching the fan. You do not want to find out at the last minute, not even if you live in Switzerland (#1 on the HFI).
I regard being ready to bug out as an essential part of being a free person.
Paul, is it really the case Hayek didn’t think it was necessary to make the case for liberty?
I wonder what the Mullahs think about the fact that there are two, and only two, groups about whom no jokes can be made, no dis-respect shown, and with whom you MUST agree: trans people and Muslims. Strange bedfellows to say the least!
Johnathan Pearce – that is the implication of his philosophy that political and economic liberty just appears (“evolves”) without anyone wanting it or understanding it, which is historically NOT true.
However, the philosophy is more radical than that – in that it is clear (from such works as “The Sensory Order” and “The Constitution of Liberty”) that Hayek did not believe that philosophical liberty (human persons) even existed.
F.A. Hayek denied that this “modern philosophy” (which is not really “modern” at all – it goes back centuries, indeed thousands of years) had any Collectivist implications politically or economically – and said that the Collectivists were quite mistaken for holding that it did.
However, they were not mistaken about the implications – he was mistaken.
The philosophy leads off a cliff – into tyranny.
If a man walks off a cliff he may (like Hayek) sincerely not want to fall – but he still will fall.
As for preaching when your philosophy holds that preaching is pointless…..
Yes Hayek preached about political and economic liberty – just as the Predestinationist George Whitfield (and other Predestinationists) preached salvation.
When asked why they were preaching, when everything was predetermined anyway, they would reply that their preaching was also predetermined.
Isn’t this what the 2nd Amendment is for. I’m actually surprised that despite what has been going on for the last 6 years there have not been more incidents. Where exactly is this line drawn in the sand?
The deep problem is that such cases actually do occur. They are very rare, but they do occur and such children can suffer terribly, including physical coercion by rejectionist adults.
But as noted, these cases are rare, and at the present time seem to be greatly outnumbered by “false positives” generated by trendy teachers, counselors, and even parents.
(This last case is especially problematic. If one supports the authority of parents to reject transsexualization of a child as “recommended” by outside agency, does one support the authority of parents to transsexualize a child against the recommendation of outside agency?)
@Rich Rostrom
The deep problem is that such cases actually do occur. They are very rare, but they do occur and such children can suffer terribly, including physical coercion by rejectionist adults
I don’t really understand what that means. Are you saying some children feel confused about their identity or uncomfortable with their bodies? I mean isn’t that all children? To translate that into believing you are in the wrong type of body takes some adult to put such an idea in their head. Perhaps when children become teenagers and older they can begin to formulate such ideas themselves, but “children” as in pre-pubescent children? I find the idea that they can somehow self identify as trans-sexual assumes a level of capability and self knowledge that I have never seen in kids that age.
And moreover, just because children think there is something wrong with their body doesn’t mean we allow them to mutilate it. This really struck me when I read about a this poor distressed adult woman who identified as blind. She believed she should have been born in a blind body instead of the sighted one she had, and consequently she blinded herself with drain cleaner. It is too horrible to think about, and surely any decent person’s heart breaks for this poor woman and the demons that torture her. This is part of a broader term called transabilism. This sounds like I am taking the piss, but it is absolutely a real mental dysphoria where people want to cut off or destroy parts of their body that they are uncomfortable with. It isn’t clear to me how that is much different than the trans movement. If some five year old aspires to blindness are we really going to take his eyes? Does the fact that we do it with scalpels rather than draino somehow make it better? In my opinion it makes it worse.
It is terrifying and tragic, some small number of people live is a very disturbed state, but they need help dealing with their dysphoria, not affirmation that their crazy is real. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to cut off your arm or poke out your eyes, or cut off your dick as an adult, I won’t pretend to understand, and I’m not convinced that medical intervention is ethical, but it is your body, do what you want. But when it comes to children, foolish, unwise, capricious children, who we don’t even let cross the road without holding our hand, it is just monstrous child abuse.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that most of these people are just… Nuts. In an entirely incurable way.
Real issue here is why we’re letting them out into society in order to make rules mandating that the rest of us acknowledge and accept their nuttery as “valid”. That’s the real group-insanity at play, here. And, the one we need to work on.
Think you’re a woman born in a man’s body? Fine, fine… Sure you are. The problem isn’t in your body, but in your damn head, and if you want to force everyone else to play by your rules? Forget it; I am done humoring these people. “Tolerance” “Acceptance” and “Making room in society” for this insanity is how we got where we are today, with the perverts proselytizing among the children in taxpayer-funded schoolrooms that we force parents to send those kids to… WTF? I wonder how that would go over, were someone to suggest government-mandated religious training by known deviant Catholic priests? Think the usual suspects would be a little up in arms, about that? Yet, for their own sort of perversion, that’s not only acceptable, it’s damn near mandatory.
Every day I get up and look at the news, wondering how in the hell we got here, living in a world utterly devoid of common sense…
Back on my point about the clash between the Left’s encouragement of radical Islam and that of the “woke” gender agenda, events in Michigan are forcing me to order in more popcorn.
Paul: Hayek was almost “too clever by half”; maybe he thought (I cannot recall if he was ever asked this, and know we will never know) whether he thought making the case for freedom from first principles was a waste of time with people who liked tyranny (many do, by the way) and that it made more sense to point to the consequences of liberty and the results of bad ideas. Hayek was an immensely clever rule consequentialist (like David Hume, one of his heroes). His temper and attitude was that of the elegant, low-temperature Austrian intellect and gentleman, not a brash, rub-em-the-wrong-way firebrand such as Ayn Rand.
All that said, I think that Hayek and his buddies such as Fritz Machlup, Mises and others did have a strong emotional attachment to liberty, but I suspect they thought that the appeal of it should be self-evident, and hence it was a waste of time to belabour the point. What he spent the bulk of his life doing was explaining why fashionable ideas like planning and so on were a disaster, and why markets worked. In that, it was a crushing intellectual victory for a time. Would that you or I could claim something that runs even close.
And in my view, The Constitution of Liberty remains his masterpiece.
The real problem with all the various idiots that want to run everything and those who want to be run by them is the essential flaw in the entire premise: It’s people who’re supposed to be doing the running of it all. Which, when you consider the fact that human fallibility, gullibility, and sheer perversity condemn any such enterprise to utter ruin…?
You really have to wonder at the idiots that want to run things, or those that want another fallible human running their lives for them. It’s not even Hobson’s choice; down either path lies disaster, because man does not possess the god-like omniscience or omnipotence he’d need to make any such conceit work.
It’s rather like the knuckleheads plumping down for the “divine right of kings”, as though the bloodlines imbued with royal origin were somehow superior, which by performative demonstration throughout history, have simply not been all they were cracked up to be. So, why do we keep doing that crap?
Frankly, I want nothing to do with running other people’s lives, or having someone run mine. I can do enough damage on my own, to myself, thankyouverymuch. The entire premise of totalitarianism is flawed, when you get down to it; the idea that someone else is going to do a better job, or that you’d want the utterly thankless job of running other people’s lives…? Yeah, ask good ol’ Louis XVI how that all worked out, when the bills for generations of royal incompetence came due. Eventually, it’ll catch up with you, as the Ceaucescu family can attest.
My take is you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone, and we’ll all be happy. The idea that I’d want to take responsibility for your life, and the outcomes of it? Oh, hell NO. I know better… End of the day, you’re gonna have to look in the mirror and acknowledge that you ‘effed it all up entirely on your own.
Therein lies a problem for us.
The Right has more “leave me alone”, my-own-drummer types. Individuals, who make individual decisions. Don’t tend to join mobs.
The Left says to one and all “welcome to the Borg, here’s your pre-marked ballot, you should hate these specific people who are evil”.
That’s why they win so often. That’s why the ratchet always moves towards Woke. While we’re waiting to be convinced, they’ve mobbed another institution.
It’s almost like we should hold off on libertarian principles until we’ve won the war.
The problem with that thinking is conservative doesn’t equal libertarian. There are a lot of overlaps to be sure, but there are a lot of areas where what the Conservatives want doesn’t even come close to what little L libertarians want. Conservatives wouldn’t give up power after they’ve won any more than the Leftists will.
The only saving grace is the GOP is more than content playing the role of the minority party simply to line their own pockets while telling the rubes to keep writing those campaign contribution checks.
I’ve heard it said the Democrats love half of the Bill of Rights, the Republicans love the other half, but neither party care about liberty.
Fraser Orr: There is very solid scientific evidence that gender identity is wired in the brain, and that this wiring develops separately from the sex-specific characteristics of the rest of the body.
In a few (very very few) people, this wiring develops wrong: the person has a body of one sex, but the circuit in the brain says the other sex.
Such a person feels, very strongly, from early childhood, that their body’s sex is wrong. I have known two transsexuals personally; that’s what they both told me. No one had ever prompted them or “groomed” them. Also that living as the “wrong” sex was profoundly, almost unbearably uncomfortable. Ellen/Elliott Page seems to be another.
But what happens to a child in this situation? Who would one tell? The typical reaction would be flat rejection, combined with intense pressure to conform to the external sex – possibly including physical coercion. Most such children “suck it up” and try to conform – at considerable internal cost. Some “come out” and get the reaction above.
That is the very rare situation I referred to.
However… It’s also quite likely that there are people in whom neural gender identity develops partly wrong. Such people have doubts and confusion, but if properly encouraged will just “get over it”. There are also people who have gender-atypical interests and qualities. In the present fad, all such people are encouraged to assert complete gender dysphoria and undergo hormonal and surgical mutilation. Any opposition to this fad is denounced as equivalent to the violent rejection of a genuine case.
And that’s where caution is required. If one denies all cases, that discredits opposition to the mistaken cases.
Once upon a time, it was normal for neonatologists to make all babies with birth defects to the genitals female. The thinking was it was easier to dig a hole than to make a pole. Obviously those children who were genetically male would grow to have real problems and would require hormone treatment and often mental health care for life. Later, as genetic typing was used, the appropriate plumbing would be built, or as close to the chromosome called for. Often times there would still need to be lifelong hormones and whatnot, but at least it cut out the whole “I’m in the wrong body” part that went with it. I suppose there may be a a real mental illness aspect to all of this, and a lot of it comes from not having a mental health system worth the name, but we’re at the point where mental health is being treated by encouraging a patient to pretend to be what they aren’t instead of telling them to deal with reality.
If a man wants to pretend to be a woman because he feels like a woman, that’s fine with me. If he can find a quack to dose him up to the gills with a lifetime of drugs and hormones and God knows what else, so be it. If a man finds a surgeon willing to mutilate his genitals for pay, good luck buddy. But I draw the line at being forced to play along with their insanity by being forced to use his prefered pronouns or lose my job, or allow a man in the locker room or bathroom with my wife or daughter, or to preach to my kids how it’s totally fine for them to destroy their bodies to be something they aren’t. If it makes me a bigot, fine, I’m a bigot.
I listened to this video on some of the statistics and science behind transgenderism with regards to pediatric care. I thought it was was a very careful and agenda-less take on the subject. She seems to have done a pretty good job surveying the actual science papers on the matter and presents the results in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_RAp73ra0