Fina gets the science right, say top swimmers

Cate Campbell in sizzling form at the Tokyo Olympics. Photo Source

Fina, the International Swimming Federation, voted at the weekend to stop transgender athletes from competing in women's elite races if they have gone through any part of the process of male puberty.

It means that transgender American college swimmer Lia Thomas, who has expressed a desire to compete for a place at the Olympics, would be blocked from participating in the female category, the BBC reports.

The decision was welcomed by former Great Britain swimmer Sharron Davies and Australia's four-time Olympic gold medallist Cate Campbell, who both refer to the scientific reality of the differences in male and female bodies.

The new policy, which was passed with 71% of the vote from 152 Fina members, was set during an extraordinary general congress at the ongoing World Championships in Budapest.

Fina members received a report from a transgender task force made up of leading figures from the world of medicine, law and sport.

Campbell, 30, told the congress before the vote was taken that she knows first-hand what it means to feel being an outsider. Her family migrated to Australia from the southern African country of Malawi when she was nine years old and one way the family integrated into their new community was through sport. 

"We see you, value you and accept you," Campbell said [addressing transgender athletes].

"My role, however, is also to stand up here, having asked our world governing body,  to investigate, deliberate and uphold the cornerstone of fairness in elite women's competition.

"And it pains me that this part of my role may injure, infuriate and, potentially, alienate people from an already marginalised [transgender] community.

"Believe me, I have wrestled long and hard with myself, with what to say and do. I am aware that my actions and words, no matter what I say, will anger some people — whether they are from the [transgender] community or from the cisgender female community.

"If inclusion is one of the cornerstones of sport, then the other would be fairness, fairness in regards to competition, especially elite, professional competition.

"The incongruity that inclusion and fairness cannot always work together is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to talk about this topic.

"Usually, they are terms of absolutes which work together, yet science now tells us that, in this issue, they are incompatible."

Campbell will later talk about how the reality of science must stand in judgment of "feelings" about perceived rights. She continues, providing insights into the world of competitive sport:

Unlike in community or amateur sport, in elite sport, winning and losing goes hand in hand with politics, money and power.

Creating a place where men and women can come up against the best of their contemporaries and battle it out — down to 100ths and 10ths of a second. This battle, this standing up and comparing of wills and physique is what draws people to watch sport — to see who can squeeze the very last ounce out of their bodies and minds and emerge victorious. Without fair competition, sport in its elite sense, would cease to exist.

Usually, inclusion and fairness go hand in hand. To create a place that is inclusive, is to create a space that is fair. Transgender, gender-diverse and non-binary athletes' inclusion in the female category of elite sport, is one of the few occasions where these two principles come into conflict.

The incongruity that inclusion and fairness cannot always work together is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to talk about this topic.

Usually, they are terms of absolutes which work together, yet science now tells us, that in this issue, they are incompatible.

I stand before you, as a four-time Olympian, a world champion and a world record holder. I stand before you, as a beneficiary of fair, elite competition. Yet my job today is not to explain the nuances of Fina's transgender policy. Nor is it to defend the conclusions reached by medical and legal professionals of much greater intellect than mine.

My role is to stand before you, as an athlete who has enjoyed many, many years in this sport and who hopes to continue to enjoy a few more years. To stand here and tell the transgender and gender-diverse community that we want you to be part of the broader swimming community.

We see you, value you and accept you. My role, however, is also to stand up here, having asked our world governing body, Fina, to investigate, deliberate and uphold the cornerstone of fairness in elite women's competition.

However, I am asking everyone to take a breath, to absorb before reacting. Listen to the science and experts. Listen to the people who stand up here and tell you how difficult it has been to reconcile inclusion and fairness.

That men and women are physiologically different cannot be disputed. We are only now beginning to explore and understand the origins of these physiological differences and the lasting effects of exposure to differing hormones. Women, who have fought long and hard to be included and seen as equals in sport, can only do so because of the gender category distinction. To remove that distinction would be to the detriment of female athletes everywhere.

The creation of this policy did not stem from "feelings", what we "felt" was the right thing to do. The policy was created with the inclusion of medical professionals, legal professionals, athletes, coaches and people from the transgender community. It is a policy that pays attention to inclusion, but prioritises fairness.

Ultimately, this not about winners and losers, it is about investigating and developing a policy which accurately represents the science and draws a line to protect the fairness of the female category distinction in elite sport.

Not community sport, not amateur sport — elite, professional sport. I want the broader swimming community to be a place of safety and acceptance for the gender-diverse — and I call on all the federations sitting within this room to examine your own policies to ensure the world of swimming remains inclusive.

It is my hope that young girls all around the world can continue to dream of becoming Olympic and World Champions in a female category prioritising the competitive cornerstone of fairness.

However, it is also my hope that a young gender-diverse child can walk into a swimming club and feel the same level of acceptance that a nine-year-old immigrant kid from Africa did all those years ago.

 The BBC's report states.

Fina will also aim to establish an 'open' category at competitions for swimmers whose gender identity is different than their birth sex.

British swimmer states 'They've done the science'

Sharron Davies states:

Four years ago, along with 60 other Olympic medallists, I wrote to the International Olympic Committee and said 'Please just do the science first' and no governing body has done the science until now.

That is what Fina has done. They've done the science, they've got the right people on board, they've spoken to the athletes, and coaches.

Swimming is a very inclusive sport, we love everyone to come and swim and be involved. But the cornerstone of sport is that it has to be fair and it has to be fair for both sexes.

"Sport by definition is exclusionary—we don't have 15-year-old boys racing in the under-12s, we don't have heavyweight boxers in with the bantamweights, the whole reason we have lots of different classes in the Paralympics is so that we can create fair opportunities for everybody.

So that is the whole point of having classifications in sports and the only people who were going to be losing out were females—they were losing their right to fair sport."

What did the panel of experts say?

Dr Michael Joyner, a physiologist and leading expert in human performance

Testosterone in male puberty alters the physiological determinants of human performance and explains the sex-based differences in human performance, considered clearly evident by age 12.

Even if testosterone is suppressed, its performance enhancing effects will be retained."

Dr Adrian Jjuuko, an activist, researcher and lawyer

The policy emphasises that no athlete is excluded from Fina competition or setting Fina records based on their legal gender, gender identity or gender expression.

[The proposed open category] should not become a category that adds to the already existing levels of discrimination and marginalisation against these groups.

I see this policy as only the first step towards full inclusion and support for the participation of transgender and gender-diverse athletes in aquatic sports, and there is a lot more to be done.

Dr Sandra Hunter, an exercise physiologist specialising in sex and age differences in athletic performance

By 14 years or older, the difference between boys and girls is substantial. That's due to the advantages experienced due to the physiological adaptations in testosterone and the possession of the Y chromosome.

Some of these physical advantages are structural in origin such as height, limb length, heart size, lung size and they will be retained, even with the suppression or reduction of testosterone that occurs in the transition from male to female."

Summer Sanders, of the US, former Olympic and world champion in swimming

This is not easy. There must be categories—women's, men's and of course a category for trans women and trans men.

Fair competition is a stronghold and staple of our community—this approach safeguards the integrity of the existing sports process in which millions of girls and women participate annually.

Duty to die: the hidden assisted-death imperative

Medical experts weigh the cost factor. Photo: Vlada Karpovich

News reports from around the developed world pop up regularly about the slippery slope that is euthanasia, also known as assisted suicide, among other terms. Canada is a good example of how slippery that slope is, with people telling how they don't want to die, but they cannot get the care needed to stay alive, to lessen their suffering, even though medical palliative care is now at a very advanced level.   

 The first report is from an experienced journalist, not someone likely to be fooled by a begging case.

A report [on June 9] by Penny Daflos for CTV News Vancouver concerns a chronically ill woman in her 30’s who was approved for [the Canadian government medical assistance in dying programme known as] Maid but who has been unable to obtain the medical treatment that she needs to live. “Kat” wants to live. Daflos writes that Kat had an easier time accessing death care than accessing health care. Daflos reported:

The chronically ill woman is in her late 30s and lives in the Lower Mainland, but given the sensitivity of the subject matter has asked us to refer to her by the pseudonym of “Kat.” She has applied to Fraser Health and been granted a request for Maid – even though she wants to live.

“I thought, ‘Goodness, I feel like I’m falling through the cracks so if I’m not able to access health care am I then able to access death care?’ And that’s what led me to look into Maid and I applied last year,”

Kat has been struggling to access health care. Daflos reported:

A decade ago she received a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a genetic disorder where the body doesn’t produce adequate collagen, essentially the glue that holds together connective tissues, skin and our internal organs, sometimes leading to complications and always resulting in significant pain.

As a result, Kat has been on opioids for years and says that’s interfered with finding a replacement for her family doctor, who moved away years ago. She’s been seeing nurse practitioners for several years, as well as a revolving door of rheumatologists, neurologists, psychiatrists and other specialist doctors, none of whom are experts in EDS.

[The regional Fraser Health Authority], who are the same health authority that defunded the Delta Hospice Society and expropriated their buildings for refusing to participate in euthanasia [update here], approved Maid for Kat but is not working to obtain the medical care that she needs. Daflos reported:

Fraser Health’s Maid documentation includes a summary noting that the “patient has an extensive medical chart” and that “there were no other treatment recommendations or interventions that were suitable to the patient’s needs or to her financial constraints.”

Daflos continued:

Kat’s disability and poverty are two of the key concerns raised by advocates warning Canada is moving too broadly and too quickly in expanding access to Maid.

Initially, applicants required a terminal illness in addition to suffering physically, but now physical suffering is the only requirement. Legislators are now hearing arguments from various groups about the next phase of the Maid program, which would allow those suffering mentally to apply for medically assisted death.

Two British Columbia families have pleaded for more scrutiny of the process and acknowledgement of wrongful deaths to protect those who are most vulnerable.

"It is imperative that these safeguards ensure vulnerable people are provided care as a first option, not death," said Alicia Duncan, whose mother’s Maid death in Abbotsford is now the subject of a rare police investigation.

Further instances are reported:

In 2019, Alan Nichols died by euthanasia in Chilliwack BC. Nichols was not dying but deeply depressed. His family begged the doctors to re-assess Alan based on the fact that Alan had been living with chronic depression, but they refused (Link).

Donna Duncan, from Abbotsford BC, died by euthanasia in October 2021. Donna was not terminally ill, but rather she was injured from a car accident in February 2020 and was living with post-concussion syndrome. Due to the COVID protocols, Donna did not receive adequate rehabilitation and her symptoms persisted until she decided to seek out death by euthanasia to escape her suffering. 

 Other such cases have been reported in the Guardian: 

After pleading unsuccessfully for affordable housing to help ease her chronic health condition, a Canadian woman ended her life in February under the country’s assisted-suicide laws. Another woman, suffering from the same condition and also living on disability payments, has nearly reached final approval to end her life.

The two high-profile cases have prompted disbelief and outrage, and shone a light on Canada’s right-to-die laws, which critics argue are being misused to punish the poor and infirm. 

The Guardian report tries to "balance" the concerns about Canada's rush to impose what are regarded by the woke as progressive policies, but supports the key concern:  

Jocelyn Downie, a professor of law at Dalhousie and expert in end-of-life policy, said there are extensive guardrails in the [Maid] system to protect Canadians.

“You have to meet rigorous eligibility criteria. And being poor and not having a home, or a home that is suitable for you, does not make you eligible,” said Downie. 

But she said that the cases do highlight societal failures [...].

“Listen to what people living with disabilities have been asking for years,” she said, pointing to investments in accessible housing and transportation.

Instead of fighting over the law, which lawmakers are unlikely to repeal given a string of supreme court cases upholding the right to physician assisted death, Downie said a greater emphasis should be on disability supports and services and mental health supports.

“The reality is, it’s a small number of people who qualify for Maid. But investments in mental health and disability resources would go so far to help so many more people live their lives.”

In late April, the British Spectator ran an analysis of the euthanasia programme with the headline: Why is Canada euthanising the poor? The writer* points out that of the organisations advocating for the disabled almost none supported the series of Maid legislation, with the latest law extending the programme to the mentally ill. 

In fact, cost savings in health expenses have featured in official figures, according to the Spectator:

Despite the Canadian government’s insistence that assisted suicide is all about individual autonomy, it has also kept an eye on its fiscal advantages. Even before Bill C-7 entered into force, the country’s Parliamentary Budget Officer published a report about the cost savings it would create: whereas the old Maid regime saved $86.9 million per year – a ‘net cost reduction’, in the sterile words of the report – Bill C-7 would create additional net savings of $62 million per year. Healthcare, particular for those suffering from chronic conditions, is expensive; but assisted suicide only costs the taxpayer $2,327 per ‘case’. And, of course, those who have to rely wholly on government-provided Medicare pose a far greater burden on the exchequer than those who have savings or private insurance.

In 2016, Canada passed a law allowing assisted suicide only for those who suffer from a terminal illness whose natural death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. The Spectator reports:

It only took five years for the proverbial slope to come into view, when the Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ for free.

Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.

Not coincidentally, Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialised country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable, to the point where the same Supreme Court which legalised euthanasia declared those waiting times to be a violation of the right to life back in 2005.

Many in the healthcare sector came to the same conclusion. Even before Bill C-7 was enacted, reports of abuse were rife. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law. To no effect: for once, the government found it convenient to ignore these otherwise impeccably progressive groups.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. A woman in Ontario was forced into euthanasia because her housing benefits did not allow her to get better housing which didn’t aggravate her crippling allergies. Another disabled woman applied to die because she ‘simply cannot afford to keep on living’. Another sought euthanasia because Covid-related debt left her unable to pay for the treatment which kept her chronic pain bearable – under the present government, disabled Canadians got $600 in additional financial assistance during Covid; university students got $5,000.

When the family of a 35-year-old disabled man who resorted to euthanasia arrived at the care home where he lived, they encountered ‘urine on the floor… spots where there was feces on the floor… spots where your feet were just sticking. Like, if you stood at his bedside and when you went to walk away, your foot was literally stuck.’ According to the Canadian government, the assisted suicide law is about ‘prioritis[ing] the individual autonomy of Canadians’; one may wonder how much autonomy a disabled man lying in his own filth had in weighing death over life.

Canada’s lavishly subsidised media, with some honourable exceptions, has expressed remarkably little curiosity about the open social murder of citizens in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Perhaps, like many doctors, journalists are afraid of being accused of being ‘unprogressive’ for questioning the new culture of death, a fatal accusation in polite circles. Canada’s public broadcaster, which in 2020 reassured Canadians that there was ‘no link between poverty, choosing medically assisted death’, has had little to say about any of the subsequent developments.

Next year, the floodgates will open even further when those suffering from mental illness – another disproportionately poor group – become eligible for assisted suicide, although enthusiastic doctors and nurses have already pre-empted the law. There is already talk of allowing ‘mature minors’ access to euthanasia too – just think of the lifetime savings.

The articles quoted here, first, make a clear case in refuting those who would hazard to state that slippery slopes are always a fallacy.

Secondly, we see principles opposed to each other, those that support death over life, that do not recognise the nobility of the human person despite poor health or a high level of disability, compared to principles that give rise to a generous community response in meeting the needs of fellow members of society, that encapsulate a vision of the human person as a noble entity in all instances. 

This is the choice members of society must make personally, and in teaching their children how to truly show respect to others, even when the elites in society manage to impose their agenda on a society that has lost its way.

💢 *The Spectator article is written by Yuan Yi Zhu, who is a senior research fellow at Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project and a researcher based at Nuffield College, Oxford.

💢 See also Journey to death should go all the way

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Abortion: what both sides do agree on

The reality of what an abortion destroys...a cluster of cells like all of us

Screaming down those who we think are wrong on the matter of abortion is self-defeating because it is an attack on our own right to free speech. To then argue that some speech—or the carrying of banners—is a form of violence in itself, and therefore is not worthy of respect is, again, undermining our own right to say what we regard as the truth.

In each society, the free flow of information and opinion—but not hate speech—is vital for the good health that is, the proper functioning of the corporate body, the community, in which we live and derive our well-being.

These thoughts arose a few days ago when I came across an argument relating to abortion, an argument dealing with what are often barbed slogans or catchcries that show the lack of thought by the person doing the declaiming.

That the fetus is not a person, that the fetus is simply part of  the mother's body, that the fetus is just a clump of cells, that abortion is a woman's right—all slogans that are more fashionable than factually true.

So let's look at some of these slogans, using for the sake of convenience, information on the website of the American organisation, Students for Life. The specific information we are using is available in full here:

Is the fetus a person? 

“Personhood” refers to the legal recognition of human beings in all stages of life—beginning at biological conception—as human persons having full natural and civil rights. Personhood is controversial to those who advocate abortion, for they view preborn humans as mere “clumps of cells” with no legal rights. All of us in the pro-life movement are for the full, legal recognition and protection of personhood for all human beings. It does not matter if these human “clumps of cells” are an embryo, toddler, adolescent, adult, or elderly person [My emphasis - BS].

What is unquestionable

Scientifically, abortion advocates cannot deny that a fetus (which is a Latin word meaning “young one”) conceived by two humans is anything other than a human. To do this would be to deny the fundamental law of biogenesis.

They must also admit that the new human is alive. A human zygote, embryo, fetus—all stages of pre-born life—align with the very definition of the word “life”, which is: “The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.”

Abortion supporters have been trying to convince Americans that personhood laws would outlaw hormonal contraception because it can destroy a “fertilized egg,” not a human being. Yet, a fertilized egg is a human embryo. In fact, 95% of biologists, including pro-choice ones, agree that human life begins at the moment of fertilization—when the sperm and egg unite and create a genetically distinct human being. [Go to the linked article and read the study that provided this statistic about the scientific agreement on the start of each person's life as a human being.]

Dirty work at the crossroads 

Nearly 60 years ago, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists changed the definition of pregnancy to begin at the implantation of the human embryo into the mother’s uterine wall, not the moment of fertilization—conception—when a human life is formed.

This definition of pregnancy was carefully changed in order to allow a “cover” for IVF, cloning, stem cell research, hormonal birth control and birth control devices, and other reproductive debates. It’s conjectured that this decision was also in the interest of making sure Christians and other pro-life Americans would buy birth control without concern about its morality. The effect has been devastating and today, many Americans now confuse the moment of a person’s creation (fertilization) with that of when the embryo implants into the mother’s uterine wall a few days after (implantation).

Both sides agree on a key point

Abortion supporters often admit that science says the embryo or fetus is a human being. They just refuse to accept that the human being in question is a person with rights. Even the most ardent abortion proponents, such as Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, admit that science proves life begins at conception, but choose to deny personhood to these most defenseless of human beings.

As pro-lifers, we believe that a human being obtains personhood, inherently, at the moment of creation (fertilization/conception).  We know there are dangers when the state decides if a group of human beings are persons or not. Think back to slavery and the Holocaust – both of these cases displayed an instance in which the state determined the "level" of personhood afforded to certain groups of human beings.

We know that the size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency of a human being should never determine whether or not that human receives personhood status.  So, yes, all pro-lifers are for “personhood.”

Personhood laws

Personhood laws that could be passed in the future would recognize that a human being becomes a person at the moment of fertilization. For pro-lifers, it seems like there would be no hesitation to vote “yes” on these bills. However, the debate rages among those in the “mushy” middle, and pro-abortion activists: would personhood laws ban birth control and IVF? 

If personhood laws pass, hormonal contraception will not be banned.  It is true that manufacturers of the birth control pill indicate openly that the pill is capable of causing early abortions by preventing implantation due to an artificially thin endometrium.  All evidence suggests this is true, therefore we oppose their use. However, if and when hormonal contraception is proven to destroy a human embryo, the state legislature would have to assemble all available evidence that it destroys a human person, and then pass concurrent legislation.

Other mislabeled “contraception” drugs and devices that have scientifically been proven to cause abortions, like [the morning-after pill] ella (www.ellacausesabortions.com) and IUDs, would be banned under this legislation, for part of their purpose is to destroy the human embryo. However, whether or not these would be banned immediately is anyone’s guess. The Legislature would have to pinpoint an instance in which one of these “contraception” methods worked as an abortifacient before this would happen.

If a personhood law were to pass, it is likely that a majority of IVF practices would be banned. Currently, many IVF practitioners take multiple eggs from a mother, create multiple embryos with the father’s sperm, and then implant 2-3 back into the mother, freezing or discarding the rest.  Learn more about IVF here. 

The most chilling notion that has been expressed recently about abortion is that even if the fetus is a human being, the mother should still be permitted to kill that being should she think some disruption to her life would occur by carrying the baby to full term. More horribly, some women go so far as to claim they have the right to kill the baby even after the birth.

I hope the argument presented here is useful in informing your understanding about what abortion involves. The ideas here are rarely aired in the mainstream media, which is besotted with the permissive stance of those who illogically claim rights in areas of life where there is no scientific, factual or moral basis for destroying life that is human. Fundamentally, rights cannot be invented for the purpose of shirking a responsibility to a fellow human, no matter the age of that "clump of cells", a topic of some sensitivity for me personally, being a member of the baby boomer generation!

Ω See full photo Mart Production at Pexels

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

Social warfare demands fresh perspectives

A pair of colliding galaxy clusters about 2.8 billion light years from Earth. Credit: NASA

We need a way of clearing our eyes and mind of the clutter of these turbulent times, says a connoisseur of the riches of the creative world, American Maria Popova. 

Popova would agree that every era in history has its trials and tribulations but from time to time there are peak moments where something deeply transformative occurs, or where the struggle for change foments turbulence that shakes the foundations of a nation, a society or a group of both. This is one those times when the members of many societies feel threatened by those wanting to impose a "new world order" on them.

The turbulence of the present time observed in WEIRD societies in particular, is caused by the rise of a new style of thought that disavows the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that makes possible the fraternity of a healthy society and the balanced functioning of democracy. The acronym stands for Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic.

Instead, there is a rigid adherence to a thin ideology, that for the time being, has altered politics, economics, religion and literature. What we know as Wokeism is all very disturbing because its underpinning ideology, termed Critical Theory, arose as a Marxist-inspired movement among German academics in the 1920s but which soon moved its centre of study to the United States. (See here and here).

Popova has been producing over many years an online newsletter called The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings. Having survived a difficult year personally, and being an observer of the anguish in the wider society, she offered her enthusiastic readers some reflections on how to survive when the world around them is in deep trouble.

Most Western citizens would perceive the trouble in their societies as being provoked by the elitist Critical Theory movement, which is a scourge for society not because of the criticism of social structures and the identification of oppression, but because of the manner of promoting social change. Liberty, fraternity and equality are being undermined by the moral deregulation of society on the one hand, but on the other, the imposition of a set of moral invigilators, high on sanctimony in that a distorted world view is at odds with a sense of the nobility of the ordinary person. 

With academia influencing education leaders, and denizens of the media, especially of the mainstream media, the corporate sector quickly fell in step.

Popova, who migrated from Bulgaria, writes in the aftermath of her year confronting multiple difficulties:

Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.

For perspective of how minor and temporary our troubles are in the larger scheme of things, Popova contemplates the Voyager mission NASA launched in 1977 "with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighborhood". She continues:

Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth captured in 1979, by Voyager 1. Photo: NASA/JPL

As well as exploration, Voyager had "another, more romantic mission", says Popova:

Aboard it was the Golden Record — a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, containing greetings in the fifty-four most populist human languages and one from the humpback whales, 117 images of life on Earth, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to a kiss to Bach — and [a] Bulgarian folk song.

Bulgaria is an old country — fourteen centuries old, five of which were spent under Ottoman yoke. This song, sung by generations of shepherdesses, encodes in its stunning vocal harmonies both the suffering and the hope with which people lived daily during those five centuries. You need not speak Bulgarian in order to receive its message, its essence, its poetic truth beyond the factual details of history, in the very marrow of your being.

To capture the environment from which such a song erupts, Popova attaches this photo of a Bulgarian sunflower field:

Popova comments: 

Carl Sagan, who envisioned the Golden Record, had precisely that in mind — he saw the music selection as something that would say about us what no words or figures could ever say, for the stated objective of the Golden Record was to convey our essence as a civilization to some other civilization — one that surmounts the enormous improbabilities of finding this tiny spacecraft adrift amid the cosmic infinitude, of having the necessary technology to decode its message and the necessary consciousness to comprehend it.

But the record’s unstated objective, which I see as the far more important one, was to mirror what is best of humanity back to itself in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when we seemed to have forgotten who we are to each other and what it means to share this fragile, symphonic planet.

When the Voyager completed its exploratory mission and took the last photograph — of Neptune — NASA commanded that the cameras be shut off to conserve energy. But Carl Sagan had the idea of turning the spacecraft around and taking one final photograph — of Earth. Objections were raised — from so great a distance and at so low a resolution, the resulting image would have absolutely no scientific value. But Sagan saw the larger poetic worth — he took the request all the way up to NASA’s administrator and charmed his way into permission.

The "Pale Blue Dot" is a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. Photo enhanced: NASA/Caltech

And so, on Valentine’s Day of 1990, just after Bulgaria’s Communist regime was finally defeated after nearly half a century of reign, the Voyager took the now-iconic image of Earth known as the “Pale Blue Dot” — a grainy pixel, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Sagan so poetically put it when he immortalized the photograph in his beautiful “Pale Blue Dot” monologue from Cosmos — that great masterwork of perspective, a timeless reminder that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was… every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician” lived out their lives on this pale blue dot. And every political conflict, every war we’ve ever fought, we have waged over a fraction of this grainy pixel barely perceptible against the cosmic backdrop of endless lonesome space.

Popova has a fitting way to conclude her article, "In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times":

In the cosmic blink of our present existence, as we stand on this increasingly fragmented pixel, it is worth keeping the Voyager in mind as we find our capacity for perspective constricted by the stranglehold of our cultural moment. [...]

I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us.

I can only add that my wish is that those who are so enamoured of the Christian principles of justice, respect for the poor, weak and marginalised—as in the history of Christian care of the sick, of widows and orphans—should respect the whole body of Christian teaching and act in the spirit of love and empathy, not only for those suffering but also for those who are seen to be the antagonists. My plea is that advocates of the application of Critical Theory social activism absorb Popova's cosmic perspective in the spirit of communion that Martin Luther King displayed instead of thrusting Marxist diktats on a society they no longer understand.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Pay inequality highlights broken world of work

But with a will, there's a way to limit gross inequality. Graphic: Reuters

We don't have to be slaves to our job. Working pay and benefits are something that we have the power to change, even though that power has to be gained in a struggle of wills between self-interested managers and investors, and those who actually produce the desired outcomes. In this struggle the government also has an important role.

The matter to remember is that working people are agents of their own destiny, as history bears testimony. US economist Dora Costa notes:

The length of the work day fell sharply between the 1880s, when the typical worker labored 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and 1920, when his counterpart worked an 8-hour day, 6 days a week. By 1940 the typical work schedule was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

“That I should be so lucky!” might be an employee’s response to such figures, but overall reductions in work time came with increases in vacations, holidays, sick days, personal leave, and earlier retirement. Making this possible has been increases in productivity and the political adoption of regulations that limit working hours. 

A data-crunching organisation comments:

As the economists Diane Coyle and Leonard Nakamura explain, the study of working hours is crucial not only to measure macroeconomic productivity, but also to measure economic well-being beyond economic output. A more holistic framework for measuring ‘progress’ needs to consider changes in how people are allowed to allocate their time over multiple activities, among which paid work is only one.

The insight that employees are to a large extent agents of their own destiny with regards their working life is important to appreciate as more than 3000 employees of 70 British businesses begin a trial of a four-day work week. 

Second, the results are just out of the massive CEO versus employee pay gap in the United States. In the set of companies examined, the gap grew last year to 670 to 1, compared with 604 to 1 the previous year.

In my post last month,Economy of Communion - people before riches, I showed how business leaders are increasingly following their consciences and structuring their operations to benefit their employees more equitably, but also to recognise the needs of their community. 

This is done by rejecting Milton Friedman's principle that a business had a responsibility only to its owners, that is, the investors, an idea popular with managers, who tap into that source of selective wealth-building through share-related remuneration. 

However, with the multitude of resignations besetting companies and the appeal of home working for many people, it is clear that businesses have to look afresh at how to shape their business practices to show respect for the human, personal, family needs of employees, going beyond the myopic focus on output. Output, yes, but as always, in all areas of life, balance is key to success. So we mustn't forget the need to "sharpen the saw".

The gig economy is also a growing factor in the lives of many families. Thorough scrutiny of this sector needs to occur to ensure that the workers are not exploited, the many generating wealth for the few.   

So let's use the statistics just out from the US Institute of Policy Studies to see how gross inequality is occurring in the world's biggest economy. 

As the Guardian reports, the institute ...

... found the wage gap between chief executives and workers at some of the US companies with the lowest-paid staff grew even wider last year, with CEOs making an average of $10.6m, while the median worker received $23,968.

[T]he average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). The ratio was up from 604-to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios above 1,000-to-1.

At more than a third of the companies surveyed, IPS found that median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation.

This news report has illuminating information about how the gap continues to widen:

The report, titled Executive Excess, comes amid a wave of unionization efforts among low wage workers and growing scrutiny of the huge share buyback programs many corporations have been using to inflate their share prices. US companies announced plans to buy back more than $300bn of their own shares in the first quarter of the year and Goldman Sachs has estimated that buybacks could top $1 trillion in 2022.

Share-related remuneration makes up the largest portion of senior executive compensation and as buybacks generally boost a company’s share price, they also boost executive pay. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called buybacks “nothing but paper manipulation” designed to increase executive pay.

The report found that two-thirds of low-wage corporations that cut worker pay in 2021 also spent billions inflating CEO pay through stock buybacks.

The biggest buyback firm was home improvement chain Lowe’s, which spent $13bn on share repurchases. That money could have given each of its 325,000 employees a $40,000 raise, according to IPS. Instead, median pay at the company fell 7.6% to $22,697.

Americans are concerned about what is going on, perhaps another cause of public alienation from traditionally respected institutions:

“CEOs’ pandemic greed grab has sparked outrage among Americans across the political spectrum,” said report lead author Sarah Anderson, director of the IPS Global Economy Project. She cited one recent poll that showed that 87% of Americans see the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem for the country. 

Political action and resurrecting unions are key to answering the wealth grab the IPS report highlights.

But action in other directions is also necessary. To give more attention to the well-being of employees  as a counter-balance to the drive for output and therefore profit is also essential as the evidence mounts of  the loss of a sense of solidarity within society. 

This gives us reason to look more closely at innovations such as the four-day work week, where personal well-being is central to its operation. To cite one completed trial:

In 2018, New Zealand estate planners Perpetual Guardian entered their 240 staff into a four-day-work week trial, resulting in 78% of them saying they were able to better manage their work-life balance. 

As for the British trial just starting:

More than 3,000 workers across 70 companies are starting a four-day week today, on full pay, in the world's biggest pilot scheme, as the nation struggles with more job vacancies than staff available. 

The programme is being coordinated by campaign group 4 Day Week Global, think tank Autonomy and academics at Oxford, Cambridge and Boston College in the US. 

There are a range of businesses and charities taking part, including the Royal Society of Biology, hipster London brewery Pressure Drop, Southampton computer game developer Yo Telecom, a Manchester medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk. 

Staff will be given 100 per cent pay for 80 per cent of their time — but they have made a commitment to produce 100 per cent of their usual output.

The team of researchers involved in the new pilot will study each company and assess the impact on staff, including stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel.

They will also look gender equality, with the four-day week thought to benefit women, who make up a higher proportion of part-time and flexible-hours staff.  

The wider view of what employing people is all about comes through in comments by organisers of the trial:

Joe O'Connor, the chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, said the [United Kingdom] is at the crest of a wave of global momentum behind the four-day week.  

'As we emerge from the pandemic, more and more companies are recognising that the new frontier for competition is quality of life, and that reduced-hour, output-focused working is the vehicle to give them a competitive edge.   

'The impact of the "great resignation" is now proving that workers from a diverse range of industries can produce better outcomes while working shorter and smarter.' 

It's not just small businesses that can cope with the organisational demands of a four-day work week:

In August 2019, Microsoft Japan implemented a four-day week giving their 2,300 employees five Fridays off in a row.

The company said productivity jumped 40 per cent, meetings were more efficient, and workers - who were also happier - took less time off.

Nine out of ten employees at the company said they preferred the shorter working week and other benefits, including a 23 per cent reduction in weekly electricity use, and a 59 per cent decrease in the number of pages printed by employees, which were also welcomed by employers.

This kind of empathetic arrangement of employees' working week stands in contrast with the stance taken by the Chinese tech entrepreneur Jack Ma, who at least advocated if not imposed on his employees that they have a 9-9-6 routine. That meant a 9am to 9pm daily attendance, six days a week, a total of 72 hours a week.

According to Wikipedia, "A number of Mainland Chinese internet companies have adopted this system as their official work schedule. Critics argue that the 9-9-6 working hour system is a violation of Chinese Labour Law and have called it "modern slavery". It added that "9-9-6 was deemed illegal by China's Supreme People's Court on 27 August 2021".  

The court spoke out based on the court action employees took against their companies:

 “We are seeing a strong trend towards encouraging people to use the court system to go after tech companies. We think civil litigation will increase,” said Kendra Schaefer, head of digital research at consultancy Trivium China.

Collective action in support of the common good is needed to provide a balance those enjoying power derived from wealth and political influence.  

💢 See a White Paper on the four-day work week here 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Woke — wreaking harm on the oppressed

Noelle Mering...wokeism is a thin ideology that harms rather than heals. Photo: Source

"Wokeness is a movement for justice but when you really understand what the internal logic of the movement is, I find it to be alarming," says author and Washington D.C. think tank member Noelle Mering. "It is fundamentally something that weakens people far more than it helps, and particularly the people it claims to want to help."

Mering lays bare the intellectual structure of the movement in her book out last year Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. In a video on the topic, she says that while the term "woke" refers to being alert and attuned to the layers of oppression in society surrounding the hot issues of today—race, sex, and gender—the underlying idea has a long history.

 "It is really a reformulation of old ideas and old roads that various countries have gone down," nodding to the various experiments in Communist countries based on the materialist and coercive stance of Marxism.

It's more than just a political movement, it's actually a spiritual movement before anything else. So the history of the movement is really important to understand.

You can [find] it in the Garden of Eden with a snake cajoling the first woman to be that she wants - you can be as gods. But if we want [...] a starting point in more modern times most people point to Karl Marx. [However], it's important also to understand who Marx was influenced by, and this is a philosopher named Hegel.

Hegel is important to understand because he started the engine of the modern progressive movement which he called the dialectic. [This ...] was just this idea that history is a movement of progression towards a utopian end and that progress through history comes through the engine of revolution, which is built around an idea manifesting itself in the [...] political state in particular.

"Then that [moment of progress] will have contradictions and those contradictions have to be worked out and worked through. You get a new state and then that state has its own contradictions. You keep cycling and synthesizing in history until you reach utopia. Marx was captivated by this new thing in philosophy called the dialectic. 

But he was a strict materialist whereas Hegel was thinking that this is a rational movement. Marx said no, there is nothing beyond the material, the material world is all that is. So there is this dialectic, this engine throughout time reaching a utopia but it's a utopia built purely on economic terms with every person being defined as either an oppressor or an oppressed, working class proletariat or ruling class, and that this is where the revolution would happen and that the revolution was inevitable. 

Then came post-modernism, which basically identified language as being an avenue for power and, therefore, we [are] able to manipulate words. In manipulating our language we can manipulate the interior life of a community because once we no longer can communicate clearly and understand that our words are connected to reality, then they become tools that we can wound each other with or that we can just destabilize our community with them.

Then intersectionality came and further [turned] attention on 'oppressive identity'. With this, we really had the birth of identity politics. [This] was late 80s early 90s and it crystallized [as a] movement. 

The presuppositions are all built on Hegel, Marx, Freudianism and the Frankfurt School [of philosophers]."

For Freud, reality lies off stage or out of consciousness and that each person was on a continuum of sanity and madness.  As for the Frankfurt School, Britannica.com states:

The members of the Frankfurt School tried to develop a theory of society that was based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy but which also utilized the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. They used basic Marxist concepts to analyze the social relations within capitalist economic systems. This approach, which became known as “critical theory,” yielded influential critiques of large corporations and monopolies, the role of technology, the industrialization of culture, and the decline of the individual within capitalist society.

Mering continues: 

This is what we see now. This is Marx's march through history, the progression into a future utopia that is constantly supposed to be working itself out in time with rejection of everything that came before. It is the culmination of all of those presuppositions until now.

Marx said that the greatest obstacles to revolution are the faith [in God] and the family. Why this is, I think, is because the faith gives people a context for their suffering rather than marinate in the inequality or the cross of our life.

We're actually told to embrace that cross, that we can find real meaning and real nobility in suffering. No revolution is born out of people suffering well in dire circumstances. A revolution is born out of people who are enraged by their circumstances and feel inadequate and helpless to transcend them.

So once you are weakened to the point where you feel that you have no power, no possibility, then the only answer left logically is to fight the system, destroy the system, [...] and hope that some new utopia will come from that.

I think the average student at a college, university, or even your nice woke Aunt Susan or your neighbor, they are not steeped in Hegel; they don't consider themselves Marxists, and this is part of where the confusion lies.

[Wokeism] is ostensibly a movement just for justice, and who doesn't want justice? It's a movement to fight racism... Every person of good will, every normal reasonable person wants to fight racism.

All of these are deeply Christian claims. Christians are supposed to be people of justice, supposed to be people fighting against injustice. The fact, the reality that most people would not consider themselves Marxist but have adopted so many of the conclusions of this movement is just a sign of how pervasive and how ubiquitous the movement has become.

It's the water in which we swim, it's the air that we breathe, it's in our movies, it's in the way we frame narratives, it's in media, it's in politics, it's in the academy - rampantly so - and so all of these things coalesce to create a default way of thinking, a filter upon which we see the world without even realizing that we're necessarily looking through a filter at it all.

In some ways it's a sort of spinoff the C.S. Lewis book, The Screwtape Letters,  where [there is] that famous line that the greatest power of the devil is that he can convince you he doesn't exist and, therefore, you're at his mercy, beholden to his power in a way that you might not have been had you been able to identify what was happening.

The woke movement is similar to that with regard to its presuppositions, and that the greatest power this ideological filter has over us is that we don't realize that we're looking through a filter at all. We just think that this is the way that you see reality.

A lot of Catholics and Christians feel that Christ would have fought side by side with people for racial justice or he would have fought against lecherous men, and for women who want to feel that they have true dignity and aren't instruments of someone else's pleasure.

Those are true Christian precepts and Christ would have been on the side of justice in those matters, but the thing that this ideology does is... it's a truly deformed ideology in that it takes partial truths and totalizes them and in that totalization it presents something that is a lie because it creates the [view that] the only way to look at the world is through this lens of power and domination.

It defines a human person differently than what the Christian vision of what a human person is. The Christian vision of the human person is that we're defined on universals. We're rational animals just based on Aristotelian logic, but also through revelation we know that we are called to be sons and daughters of a loving Father; that we are defined in relationship to God; we're defined by love itself, love himself.

Defined by the hatred of man and society 

The woke could define a person very differently and incompatibly, so for the woke, the person is not defined by the love of God but by the hatred of man or hatred of society.

For example, to be a woman is not just to be a woman in any sort of  traditional sense. There's a bodily meaning there, and there's certain spiritual symbolism.

But to be a woman for the woke is to be fundamentally fighting the oppression that's at the core of your being. For example, in 2017 there was the first women's march and there was a group of pro-life feminists who were co-sponsoring the march. But when the organizers got wind that they were pro-life they said, "Oh, well, you can march with us but you cannot have any official affiliation with us."[The pro-life women] were confused and they said, "But we support the dignity of women. We want to fight for similar goals. We overlap in certain areas, and this is not just a pro-abortion march, it's a pro-women's march..."

But the thing we have to understand about the ideology is that it's not about supporting the person in the oppressed group, it's about supporting the person in the pressure group who supports the ideology. So it's really empowering the ideology not empowering the human being. So it's not enough to be a woman, you have to be an ideological woman, you have to be a politicized woman.

We hear the same thing echoed with Nicole Hannah Jones, the author of the [New York Times'] "1619 project" who famously said, "We all know there's a difference between being racially black and being politically black". That [means] it's simply not enough to be a black person you have to be supporting our agenda in order to be considered.

So it's not actually about diversity it's about uniformity of thought, but with different people, representatives of different groups, embracing and affirming that uniformity.

One important thing we need to pay attention to is the way in which words can sound innocuous to our ears because most people translate them into something reasonable, but for the movement it's far more radical.

A good example of that is the word "equity", which sounds like something that's oriented around justice and equality. But equity for the movement means equity of outcome, that all outcomes should be equal, despite effort, despite merit, despite any other factor that might weigh in on disparate outcomes.

So, according to the ideology, if you see that there is an inequitable outcome you can attribute it to only one thing, either racism or sexism or some other type of social oppression.

What this does is it eliminates the possibility of any sort of measure, any sort of metric. So, for example, [in] the new woke math, they'll say two plus two can equal five if it equals five in someone's lived experience. 

It seems like it can't be a serious proposition but the ideological reason for that is that all standards have to be eradicated, even the ones that are as undeniable as a simple mathematic equation that every person understands.

The reason is because we have to attribute all outcomes, all of our successes, all of our failures to systemic forces outside of ourselves. Our failures are not ours to own and learn from, our successes are not ours to claim and grow with.

There's a truth to that because people do have disadvantages and people do have advantages over others. But there's no state power or force that can equalize all those things. This is the human situation.

Our successes do not originate completely in us. Obviously anything good that comes out of us is first and foremost attributable to God, and it's just our cooperation with him that brings any good in the world from us.

So there's a truth that they're speaking to, but rather than using it to point to the love of God and the power of God, rather it is only an indication of the evil of society.

The fact that some people might merit something that others don't is attributed to the systemic forces and the systemic forces have to be eradicated.

Other people have spoken on this, notably Jordan Peterson, [on this view that] all of humankind, in any society, is going to end up with some sort of hierarchical structure.

Every Marxist country that has tried to establish a society based on those principles ends up becoming tyrannical and that's inevitable based on the presuppositions.

But if you're going to end up in some sort of hierarchical system no matter what, the most fair way to establish that is through merit. I know it's easy to make merit into a cartoon where people say "Oh just pull your yourselves up by the bootstraps", without any recognition that people do start life in situations that they need help.

They're vulnerable, they're at risk, there are incredible hardships, and we can't just give them a good pep talk and say get on your way.

We really need to have solidarity [with people] as Catholics. But the problem is that if you read any biography of any person who was born into incredibly difficult circumstances and somehow was able to transcend those circumstances, what it was it that made the difference, it was someone in their life telling them to control what was within their control, to take responsibility, to not marinate in the injustices that they're born into but rather to see what they can do that can pull themselves out.

You see this in the biography of Ben Carson [eminent surgeon, presidential candidate, Afro-American]. His grandmother used to recite a poem to him called "Mr Nobody", and it was something along the lines of—when something's gone wrong and you've got no one to blame, you can blame Mr Nobody.

The point of this lesson was just that blame is going to get you nowhere [when] you've been dealt a hard hand. But that mindset [of blame] is going to exacerbate your circumstances and we would never tell someone that in any type of other situation. 

Mering points out that in leadership, if you're mentoring someone,  you would never tell someone to point their finger at everyone else in when something goes wrong.

You want the person who's going to say, "The buck stops with me. I'm going to take some initiative and I'm going to grow and I'm going to change. I'm going to see what I can do to make things better and be positive."

But for some reason we've decided that we can tell a whole generation that the way they move through life is the exact opposite way to that which is going to lead to their actual flourishing in life.

Is dialogue possible? 

Knowing how to engage with someone who is woke can be challenging because in some ways the movement is not oriented around dialogue. It's sort of oriented around intimidation.

There's a lot of manipulation that happens with language and I think it's important to know when it's not going to be a fruitful conversation and you want to just say, "I love you. Let's not go down this road."

So there's a certain amount of prudence that comes into the equation: Is this a person that I can actually have a dialogue with, and if it's not then it can only create more division and more tension to try to do something that this combination of people are up for.

But there will be other people who are more open to having a real conversation with whom we might feel that this is something worthwhile to talk about.

I talk to parents a lot who are saying, "My kids came home and they are woke now, and they're challenging me".

It's important to know that this is, in some ways, a phase. It might not be something they adopt lifelong.

There are real woke ideologues out there who have fully embraced the movement but there's also a lot of people who are just parroting a script they've been handed. It hasn't really penetrated into their soul and that's when we have to realize that there is a deeper human longing that people have.

It's a longing that won't be satisfied by a thin ideology that has to be propped up by coercion, by silencing, by fear and by manipulation. It's a longing that can only be fulfilled by the fullness of truth, a willingness to embrace the truth no matter where it leads you: scientific truth, philosophical truth, theological truth, and most of all, the truth of who we are in relationship to a loving God and loving Father.

What the human heart longs for, and it's something that cannot be fulfilled by ideology... and we have to feel confidence in the fact that every human person is longing for the exact same thing.

Every revolutionary wants to target the father, and there's something deeply spiritual happening, because when we think of authority now, right authority or or even fatherhood, the role of the father our minds immediately go to is tyrannical domination.

It's been such an effective demonization of the image of a father ,but if you talk to someone they know what a good father should be, they know, even if they didn't experience it, that a good father is not there to control them but actually to empower them to lead their lives independently.

They know a good father is gentle, but also strong. We have so corrupted the image of the father in a way to corrupt our understanding of who God is because God is the father, and he's not a father because he's like a human father. Human fathers are more fatherly in so far as they're more like him.

Women become vulnerable 

Fatherhood really is a window into who God is, so the revolutionaries were correct in that by targeting the father you really dismantle society from the inside out.

They wrote about men needing to become licentious, to become slaves to their desires. That was part of our "liberation". However, our true liberation is through combating groups outside of ourselves, but our liberation is also through combating our own internal desire or instinct, to repress our desires.

[For revolutionaries] our liberation was in part of our embracing every desire, particularly ones that were transgressive [of moral boundaries], and this was a real target with regards men.

What happens once a man's moral authority is eroded is that women become vulnerable because there is a way in which men are called to be providers and protectors, and once women become vulnerable they tend to become calloused. The sexual revolution targeted them and it encouraged them to engage in all sorts of relationships and in activities that women really have to callous themselves to engage in.

It's hardened a lot of women because they have felt used and have felt they weren't cared for. The deeper part of what's happening is that the revolution manipulated this societal pathology.

It encouraged men to become licentious, to become weak,  and then it pointed to the abuse, the inevitable abuse, and disruption that happened between men and women, and said, "You see, this is further evidence that we need to smash the patriarchy. Men are bad, so let's condemn men as a whole as being bad." 

It's suggesting that the cure is the exact thing that caused the problem, that [going further in] rejecting true masculinity is the way that we're going to get out of this whole thing of having eradicated what real masculinity is.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says that to be emasculated is to be a slave to pleasure to the point where you're no longer willing to suffer to be a real man. There is some connection between suffering and the true masculinity that society needs and families need.

We're going to have to fight this movement on multiple levels and it's already happening far more than we often realize. There are people building up new institutions, there are more and more parents seeing through this, and we see on our school boards there's a resistance happening that's very grassroots and hopeful.

There's a thinness to the ideology that is becoming transparent now people are seeing it affect their kids in such bad ways.

It seems fundamentally like a justice movement that's actually more unjust than it is just.

But we have to fundamentally see this as a spiritual battle and and fight it on that level. This is a spiritual battle and we have to be arming ourselves for that fight.

The first thing I usually suggest to people is to [...] get some clarity about what is happening because there's a shape-shifting of how the movement presents itself, and there's a manipulation of language that happens that can be really confusing.

The movement really tries to operate on that sort of confusion and capitalize on it and exploit it with those good Christian precepts [of justice, care for the weak and minorities] and then supplanting them with a bunch of ideology that you have to accept.

So the more clarity that we have then the more we will feel confident in resisting it and not falling for these types of tricks.

Fundamentally, we have to have courage. It's a movement that can't be resisted on the fringes. One person resisting or two people or a handful of people —that's a fringe group. But galvanizing whole coalitions of people to resist it, that's something to contend with and that's the way we find it within companies and within counties and even within our country as a whole.

That type of clarity can imbue us with a sort of courage that can really give us the confidence to simply and plainly call out a lie. The greatest threat to a lie is some people, someone, simply and plainly saying the truth.

It feels like it's Goliath at the moment, but Goliath can be brought to his knees far more easily than we might think, and that thought can give us a lot of hope in this fight.

Ω Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of the book,  Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (2021)  She is an editor for the website Theology of Home and a coauthor of the books Theology of Home and Theology of Home II .  She writes on culture, politics, and religion. Mering has an MA in philosophy and is a wife and mother of six children in Southern California. 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

Why Lia Thomas can't re-invent reality

Lia Thomas, who wants a place in the Olympic women's team

A few days ago the New York Times published an article by Michael Powell, "a national reporter covering issues around free speech and expression, and stories capturing intellectual and campus debate", on the impact on women's sports of Lia Thomas, a swimmer who identifies as a woman, and who been allowed to compete against biological females.  

Powell has done us a valuable service by bringing together voices who are largely ignored by the mainstream media, including the NY Times, on how men who have transitioned can affect the lives, including the sporting lives, of women. However, credit where it is due, as in Powell's article. 

The issue is contentious because of the different perspectives — the scientific reality of biology versus the wish to fulfil what has come to be taken as a  personal right based on hopes and dreams, largely by men who identify as women. The Times article reports the opposing stances:

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of World Athletics, which governs international track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

The American Civil Liberties Union offers a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”

The ACLU has had an illustrious history of activism in pursuit of human rights, but it has become just one more example of an organisation being captured by proponents of the transgender ideology that ignores scientific evidence and, in doing so, thrusts women's rights into the background. It has become so extreme in its stance that it has had to declare that it still upholds free speech. See this article by David Cole, ACLU national legal director. And see this NY Times article on its attempts to limit free speech

The British equivalent, the Stonewall organisation, once much respected as being in the vanguard of gay rights activism, has likewise been captured by trans ideologists, and has been disowned by one of its founders after it was mocked after statements by one of its principal officers that there is no such thing as a woman.

The key matter that points to the danger of taking an absolute view of self-invention that Lia Thomas embraces, as seen in the interview with ABC News earlier this month, is what she told Sports Illustrated: “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.” She wants to compete in the Olympics on the women's team.

Credit...

This where the NY Times article is valuable—it highlights the views of  others affected by the transgender absolutism. We come to understand why Thomas should not expect other people to comply with her wish to identify as a woman when it is a male body, and a male's achievement's, that they see.

For example, "Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis legend, a champion of liberal and lesbian causes [...] Navratilova argues that transgender female athletes possess insurmountable biological advantages." The Times quotes her as saying:

“I played against taller women, I played against stronger women, and I beat them all. But if I faced the male equivalent of Lia in tennis, that’s biology. I would have had no shot. And I would have been livid.”

As to the reasons why males who transition to a woman's identity should not expect to be accepted in girls' or women's sport without complaint, the Times reports: 

Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., studies the physiology of male and female athletes. He sees in competitive swimming a petri dish. It is a century old, and the sexes follow similar practice and nutrition regimens.

Since prepubescent girls grow faster than boys, they have a competitive advantage early on. Puberty washes away that advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”

The records for elite adult male swimmers are on average 10 percent to 12 percent faster than the records of elite female swimmers, an advantage that has held for decades.

Little mystery attends to this. Beginning in the womb, men are bathed in testosterone and puberty accelerates that. Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.

“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Joyner noted. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”

When a male athlete transitions to female, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, requires a year of hormone-suppressing therapy to bring down testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. put this in place to diminish the inherent biological advantage held by those born male.

Ms. Thomas followed this regimen.

But peer reviewed studies show that even after testosterone suppression, top trans women retain a substantial edge when racing against top biological women.

For example, Thomas ranked 65th in the men’s 500-yard freestyle but when performing as a woman, Thomas won the title.

“Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ross Tucker, a sports physiologist who consults on world athletics. “The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage.”

It's worth noting his corroboration of Dr Joyner's findings. Elsewhere, he says it's a "travesty" that women are expected to bow to the demands of  athletes who, after treatment, retain enough of the male physiology to outperform women. 

"But I'm now a woman!" won't hack it. The Times continues:

Most scientists, however, view performance differences between elite male and female athletes as near immutable. The Israeli physicist Ira S. Hammerman in 2010 examined 82 events across six sports and found women’s world record times were 10 percent slower than those of men’s records.

“Activists conflate sex and gender in a way that is really confusing,” noted Dr. Carole Hooven, lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. She wrote the book T: The Story of Testosterone. “There is a large performance gap between healthy normal populations of males and females, and that is driven by testosterone.”

The sprinter Allyson Felix won the most world championship medals in history. Her lifetime best in the 400 meters was 49.26 seconds; in 2018, 275 high school boys ran faster.

Renée Richards was a pioneer among transgender athletes. An ophthalmologist and accomplished amateur tennis player — she played in the U.S. Open and ranked 13th in the men’s 35-and-over division — she transitioned in 1975 at age 41. She joined the women’s pro tennis tour at age 43, ancient in athletic terms. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47.

Ms. Richards has said she no longer believes it is fair for transgender women to compete at the elite level.

“I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me,” she said in an interview. “I’ve reconsidered my opinion.” 

Joanna Harper, a competitive transgender female runner and Ph.D. student studying elite transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in Britain, agreed that testosterone gives transgender female athletes some advantage.

But she spoke of inexorable emotional and psychological pressures on transgender athletes.

“Is it so horrible,” she said, “if a handful of us are more successful than they were in men’s sports?”

Reka Gyorgy, a 2016 Olympian and a swimmer at Virginia Tech, offered a response of sort. She placed 17th in the preliminaries for the 500-yard freestyle in the N.C.A.A. championships — a slot short of making the finals. She wrote an open letter, affirming her respect for Ms. Thomas’s work ethic.

She was less forgiving of the N.C.A.A.

“This was my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the N.C.A.A.’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”

That decision prevented her from qualifying for All-America honors.

Powell talked to families of female swimmers. They emphasised "that transgender people should have the same right to housing, jobs, marriage and happiness as any American".

But they talked of the thousands of hours the young women put into their sport. From early childhood, they swam hundreds of laps daily, nursing injuries and watching nutrition. Why, having reached the pinnacle, should they race against a swimmer who retains many biological advantages of a male athlete?

It potentially places biology and gender identity on the same footing in sport. Dr. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and former top track runner, supports legal protections for transgender people but foresees havoc in the arena of sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.” 

Of course, some who have absorbed transgender ideology advocate for no sex segregation in sport, saying athletes should learn to live with the "discomfort” such a change would prompt. The Times continues:

This strikes some feminists and scientists as a walk into strange territory. Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher whose work is often grounded in her feminist and lesbian identity, has carved out positions on transgender rights that have made her a lightning rod. She has written “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” and argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. That is to miss, she said, the profound importance of the lived experience of being born a biological female.

“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?

“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”

In all, a valuable piece of reporting from Michael Powell. 

To close, I want to offer a powerful statement from Rod Dreher, a writer who is a saddened observer of the cultural strife the Western world finds itself in because of the misguided directions committed to by the social, intellectual and political elites, continuing into the present. He writes:   

The metaphysical aspect of all this, though — the trans stuff, I mean — is that the culture in which we swim is teaching us to despise the givenness of our bodies, and to think that we can change Nature with a sufficient application of technology, law, and cultural command (including persecuting dissenters). You think this stuff is only about happy-clappy affirmation? Think about what you are affirming: the erasure of masculinity and femininity as biological facts. And we wonder why so many young people in our culture are so psychologically distressed. They are born into an unreal world, and told by the gatekeepers of this culture that they must deny among the most fundamental truths that we can know: the facts of our maleness and femaleness.

💢 The battle over trans ideology in schools

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.