By
David Gottfried
Today, I am going to tell you how a lesbian Mother cured her son of what today may be called male to female transgenderism.
First, I must provide two prefaces: My first prefatory comment explains why I am talking about transgenderism, why a thinker or writer should not be compelled to delve into only one area of study, and why thought and scholarship may be impoverished by specialization. My second preface relates my biases regarding current discourses on sexuality. We are all biased, whether we admit it or not, and I will freely reveal my own prejudices. A word to the wise: I am not using the word “prejudice” in a pejorative sense. We may be prejudiced against eating rat poison, but I think we can all agree that not consuming rat poison is a good thing. Finally, I will tell you about a Lesbian Mother I knew and how she saved her son from transgenderism.
If you find the prefaces dull, skip ahead to the section about the Mother and Son I knew.
PREFACE ONE: In Defense of Interdisciplinary Inquiry:
Some people will say that this essay constitutes a sort of academic or literary crime. They will say that one should specialize in one discipline or area of inquiry and refrain from discussing different phenomena. I have been told that since I have talked about political disputes I should stick to politics and not talk about economics. (Of course, those academic simpletons are, I suppose, unmindful that politics and economics are so inextricably linked that prior to the 20th century one never studied political science or economics; instead, one studied a discipline known as “political economy.”)
These critics of inter-disciplinary thought will say that since my essays, for the past couple of months, have spoken of the conflict in Ukraine, I should continue to talk about Ukraine and speak of nothing else. Of course, the people who host shows on MSNBC or Fox news say the same thing every night, and are as beholden to their respective dogmas as Catholics once were wedded to the Latin mass, but I think one can safely miss 90 percent of the shows hosted by either Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson and still know what those disciples of their respective narrowminded orthodoxies bow down to.
I have held that critics of Russia are unmindful of Russia’s legitimate fears of NATO’s expansion. I fail to see the merits of saying the same thing, again and again, ad nauseum. More prolific writers are not always more creative; sometimes, they simply show no shame in repeating themselves incessantly.
Moreover, if we want to truly understand the Ukraine, we have to talk about sexuality because so much of the Eastern contempt for the contemporary West is grounded in a distaste for the new Western love affair with misandry, feminism and transgenderism.
(Incidentally, many Westerners who swoon before the temples of feminism and transgenderism are so intellectually impoverished that they don’t realize that feminism, which rightfully believes that a woman can like football and that a man can like knitting, is a refutation of transgenderism which believes that if a boy likes ballet and beautiful clothing, he may be a candidate for testosterone blockers to prevent the development of his male sexuality.)
I believe in interdisciplinary inquiry as it enriches thought. For example. Norman Podhoretz, in “Breaking Ranks” (1979), said that political scientists underestimated the political power of men like Eugene Mc Carthy (He mounted a surprisingly strong presidential race in 1968) because they only studied politics and were oblivious to the dramatic effect of rock music and the youth culture in subverting and dethroning traditional ways of looking at government and patriotism. Similarly, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which held that it was hard to predict the future because the moment we measure a thing we change that thing (When we get on a scale to measure our weight, we burn up energy by mounting the scale and lose weight), was a boon to existentialist philosophy which was anti-deterministic and perceived the possibility of freedom where others saw only stasis and rigidity. Hence, Heisenberg, who was a physicist, had an impact on disciplines normally perceived as thoroughly divorced from physics.
PREFACE TWO:
My personal biases re sexuality and how they may have affected this essay.
A couple of years ago, I went to a Passover Sedar that endeavored to be relevant, provocative, progressive, left of center, multicultural, yada yada yada.
Among other things, the women who ran this Sedar changed the Sedar plate. To explain what they did, I must identity the Sedar plate.
The Sedar plate contains foods which remind us of slavery (Passover commemorates the liberation of the Jews from bondage in Egypt). For example, the Sedar plate contains, among other things, bitter herbs, to remind us of the bitterness of slavery; Charoses, a food stuff designed to have the color and consistency of the building materials used to build the pyramids (The ingredients vary across the world: Central and Eastern European Jews mash together apples, walnuts and red wine to create a delectable mush that looks like the mortar or the ancient variety of cement that was used in those days; in Iraq, the color and consistency of the building matter is achieved with a sweet concoction of more than a dozen exotic fruits.); and a hard boiled egg, which represents the Jewish people because when the egg suffers the hardship of boiling water, its will to live and thrive is stiffened as the egg hardens.
The feminist Jews who ran this post-modernist Sedar were of the view that commemorating freedom from slavery was not enough and that the Sedar had to provide a political commentary on sexual oppression and other trendy topics. And so they decided to place an Orange on the Sedar plate. The stout and severe female Rabbi told us that the orange was there to honor women and gay people and their suffering from the evil of patriarchy. (This reminds me that in the late 60’s some leftist Jews opted to replace the traditional Sedar refrain, “Next year in Jerusalem,” with the au courant line “Next year let us be in the Third World,” overlooking the possibility that residents of the third world might think this smacked on neo-colonialism. Where did people get the idea that we Jews were somehow exceptionally brilliant ?)
As a man, as a gay man, and as a Jew, I was thoroughly sickened. First, it seemed to presuppose that gay men and women were two peas sitting comfortably together in the same faggotty pea pod. Let me educate you, Herr Professor of dowdy, derelict “feminism”: Gay men, as they exist in academia, and gay men, as they exist in real life, are two entirely different species.
In academia, gay men are portrayed as an adorable throng of giddy, dancing boys, veritable half-men, curtsying before a castrating goddess. (If this seems extreme, please remember that Camille Paglia, in her first and most famous work, discussed what she saw as a gay male worship of bitchy divas.) In real life, gay men – at least until a few years ago when the Ru Pauls and similar urban, mental midgets gravitated to a religion of arch, imbecilic faggotry -- were hungering for primitive, authoritarian maleness, and they were sexually and spiritually aroused by jock straps, leather, levis jeans, white T shirts, and the way the guys in the “The Godfather” talked. Shortly after I graduated from college summa cum laude, and my car broke down, and I fixed my car by replacing my car’s starter all by myself, I was so impressed with my feat of grease-monkey, traditional, macho maleness that I considered this achievement more admirable than my uninterrupted succession of A’s in my undergraduate years.
But the feminists at the “Sedar” were telling me that I was supposed to identify with an orange. I suppose they wanted to pin orange blossoms to my clothing. (I don’t know what orange blossoms are, but I know from old movies that brides used to wear something that was related to orange blossoms). An orange is a fruit. Gay men used to be called fruits. Aren’t these progressives so delightfully advanced.
I was utterly appalled. And I am appalled by about 99.8 percent of the chic and trendy horseshit promulgated by the Lords and Ladies of supposedly erudite, and utterly effete, academic sexual “scholarship.”
AND NOW FOR THE MEAT AND POTATOS OF THIS ESSAY: HOW A LESBIAN MOTHER CURED HER SON OF TRANSGENDERISM:
When I was about 6 years old, my Mother befriended another single Mother who had one son and no other children.
The woman in question was Pearl Steinbeck (the names have been changed to preserve the characters’ privacy). She had been married to a very dynamic and soon to be famous New York labor leader, one Johnathan Steinbeck. Their son’s first name was Karl, and his second name was Eugene; he was named after Karl Marx and Eugene V Debbs. (These two names are not pseudonyms.)
(In the late 60’s and through much of the Seventies, the labor leader Father, Johnathan Steinbeck, was decried as a racist and right-winger. If that Marxist had ever moved to the right, it was only because of the ferocious and idiotic antisemitic attacks hurled at him by black “militants” and associated political hoodlums)
Pearl and Johnathan had a very bitter divorce and they split up around the time that Karl Eugene was born.
In any event, Pearl and my Mother used to plan various events to amuse and educate their respective sons, Karl Eugene and myself. When I met Karl, it was obvious that he was quite an atypical boy. Whenever we came to their home, Karl would urge me to join him in dressing up like women. Although I found this very strange, it did not unnerve me. I knew that I had found, in Karl, someone who made me seem very normal.
I did not join him in his makeover escapades, but I was struck at how excited he was when he applied crayons and paint and whatever he had managed to steal from his mother’s supply of cosmetics. As he made a mess of himself, he seemed to be getting turned-on. Many years later, I read an account, by Israeli doctors, which said that the male to female transgender patient is not really interested in being a female; rather, he is sexually aroused at the thought of being a woman. When I read this account, I immediately thought of Karl, and I also thought of Jazz, the star of the reality television show “I Am Jazz,” who is a male to female transgender patient who spoke of her desire to have a vagina with an incessant, frantic, energy, saying that she wanted to have a “very, very pretty” vagina, that seemed to be propelled by some strange and permutated libidinous desire.
Karl’s Mother was most probably a lesbian (Shortly before my 8th birthday, my Mother stopped associating herself with Karl’s Mother, and we stopped seeing both the Mother and Karl, because my Mother’s therapist feared that Pearl would hinder my Mother’s efforts to remarry by “scaring all the men away.” I guess the shrink was too thick to know that a lot of guys love to get in on with lesbians).
In any event, we had intermittent contacts with them over the next 20 years, and we noticed a great change.
Pearl had tired of her son’s desire to dress up like a lady. Pearl, like a stereotypical lesbian, was a first-class jock. Name any rough and tumble sport. She knew how to play it. Football, soccer, baseball and basketball were as familiar to her as crocheting and catty carping were to a dyspeptic dowager in a prim Victorian novel.
Pearl may have intuited that Karl’s “transgenderism” had something to do with her bitter divorce, her denunciation of her husband as someone who had deserted the family when she was giving birth and he was most sorely needed, and that Karl’s identification with her extended to an identification with her female sexuality.
She may have shrewdly opined that since Karl identified with her, he could also identify with her love of manly sports. She soon taught Karl all of the sports boys love to excel in, and he eagerly imbibed all of what Mommy had to teach him. Soon enough, he was a star in sports and beloved by all the little boys in his school.
Had a man taught him sports, he may have rebuffed the tutorials because he had antipathy to men because his mother had been hurt by a man. However, he was ready and able to learn about being a guy when those lessons in manhood came from his beloved Mother.
Years later I found that he was married, with children, and quite prosperous. (Even though he was bright, I am sure he would have made money even if he had been dull. His Father, owing to his prowess as a labor leader, was a mover and shaker in Democratic Party Politics, and Karl was seated at the 1976 Democratic Party Convention and more conventions since then.)
Of course, his transformation from a “transgendered” little boy may have had something to do with his natural biology as well. His Father was big and strong. His Mother was big and strong. When Karl was sixteen, he was already a classical Mediterranean Jew with a rather hairy body and much more than peach fuzz on his chin.
The rush of male hormones, thanks to puberty, may have played a part in masculinizing his mind. Had he been born today, in this benighted era in which narrow-minded ideologues think they are brilliant because they have imbibed the ascendant “progressive” conventional wisdom through judicious viewings of “The View” and always turn on the boob tube when Caitlain Jenner is scheduled to dazzle the commoners with her spectral sexual spookiness, “social justice warrior” teachers and social workers would have eaten him for lunch, or as they say, luncheon. He would never have benefited from the masculinizing impact of puberty. The social justice warriors would have convinced some doctor to put him on testosterone blockers, and they would have dressed him in panties.
Turns out that the Florida family of Jazz Jennings is Jewish. Poor Jazz didn't decide on his own to become a circus reality-TV sideshow. The mother encouraged/forced/coerced her son from the beginning. The mother is an epic, flaming dumpster-fire. She should've been locked up. Tragic for Jazz. Heartbreaking. [I'm Jewish. I was watching a Youtube clip of a recent 'Jazz" show a few months ago and unhappily realized the family is Jewish. I was only watching because I'm involved peripherally in the politics of my region, and the trans issue has become inescapable. You need to do a few deep dives to understand the landscape.]