Rubbing the gendery sleep from their eyes

What Burns misses is that most gender critical women have no real concern for how adults wish to live and to express themselves. Their real worries came when the very act of defining the word “woman” as adult human female was labeled a prejudiced act. Women began standing up and rubbing the gendery sleep from their eyes when the concept of womanhood changed from the culture of those with biologically female reproductive systems into those who costume in feminine garb and claim they feel like women. The gender critical feminist was born when men who wanted to dress, express, and live visibly as women declared that not only are they women now but have been their whole lives.  

That was the first problem. The second problem came when the transgender movement, under the misconception that those adults who transition to the opposite gender had been the opposite gender all along, began foisting this in both ideology and practice onto children. The idea was that if adults had always been trans, there must be trans children, and those children could be saved trouble in adulthood if they were able to transition in their youth. This led to the medical and pharmaceutical industries feeding drugs and surgeries to the young under the guise of a panacea for their lives.

Libby Emmons

Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls

On the road

The biographer David Leeming, in Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism, reports that “the weather was impossibly hot” during the trip and that “one night the only room they could find was in a brothel. More pleasant highlights of the trip were Lenny and Bertie’s keeping themselves awake to drive by singing the complete score of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes; Stephen and Lenny pretending to be T.S. Eliot and Serge Koussevitzky; and the trio’s listening to a recording of Bernstein’s recently released recording of Gershwin’s An American in Paris in a Santa Fe music shop. As the record played, Bernstein stood near a photograph of himself, but no one recognized him, even though his brother and Stephen addressed him loudly several times as ‘Lenny.’ ” 

The impromptu renditions of Peter Grimes made an impression on Spender, who told Secrest: “He was mad about Ben Britten. All the way across America he sang the music from Peter Grimes. Of course, Britten hated him. Britten once told me the only person he had ever hit was Bernstein, in a taxi I think. Auden, too, disliked him. I think he thought him vulgar. I always got on extremely well with him, but I was aware that there was something very public about him, so that it was difficult to have a personal relationship.” 

James M. Keller in The New Mexican

Unrelated photograph of Josef and Anni Albers.

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