Failed Heroes of the Left: John Money (of Johns Hopkins University) - The 4 Freedoms Library2024-03-29T11:26:02Zhttp://4freedoms.com/forum/topics/failed-heroes-of-the-left-john-money?groupUrl=argumentation&commentId=3766518%3AComment%3A273648&groupId=3766518%3AGroup%3A1677&feed=yes&xn_auth=noTal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-10-17:3766518:Comment:2740322021-10-17T20:16:15.435ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XXIV</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman <i>The Bachman Beat </i>October 15, 2021</b></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>So, yeah: <a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11748/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xxiii" rel="noopener" target="_blank">I officially wonder about the Enlightenment</a>. Heresy, I know. A…</p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XXIV</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman <i>The Bachman Beat </i>October 15, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><img src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4828.jpg" width="400" height="240" border="0"/></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>So, yeah: <a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11748/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xxiii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">I officially wonder about the Enlightenment</a>. Heresy, I know. A few folks are already upset from last time, and I reckon the internet flamethrowing will only increase as this series goes on. (By the time this "wait—was that my out-loud voice?"-style series ends [presuming it ever <i>does</i> end], there'll probably be something in it to outrage everyone).</p>
<p>Why wonder about the Enlightenment? Well, for one thing, the nations today which most boldly profess allegiance to, and at least ostensibly pursue, Enlightenment ideals, are precisely those in which Wokism has made the most gains.</p>
<p>How can that be? Don't Enlightenment ideals conflict with Wokist dogma?</p>
<p>They seem to, yes.</p>
<p>So how did we go from one thing to its opposite? That's the big question. A few possible answers spring to mind:</p>
<p>Possibility #1.) Nothing framed by mortal hands can last, no matter how great it is. Everything dies in the end. It's just what happens, and there's no way around it. No point wasting time trying to figure this out.</p>
<p>Possibility #2.) Saboteurs, foreign and domestic, have ruined everything. As Christ said in the <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+13%3A24-30&version=KJV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Parable of the Tares</a>, "an enemy hath done this".</p>
<p>Possibility #3.) Focusing just on America for a moment, there was something amiss in the original Enlightenment ideals, and the Lockean liberalism through which they found expression, which informed America's founding. Something in Enlightenment liberalism all but guarantees we—and maybe the West in general—were always going to wind up where we are now.</p>
<p>As for that first possibility, surely we can all accept that mortals can't create immortal objects and institutions. It's just that to dismiss any investigation into how we got here on grounds nothing lasts forever feels pretty silly. By that standard, no autopsies should ever be performed to find out how someone died, or whether they died needlessly or prematurely, since everyone's going to die in the end anyway. That doesn't make much sense.</p>
<p>So while Possibility #1 might be strictly true, I vote for setting it aside for right now.</p>
<p>As for Possibility #2, of course there have been saboteurs. How much damage has Joe Biden done to America in just nine months? That damage is as heartbreaking as it is infuriating and incalculable. It might actually be irreparable. This might be Humpty-Dumpty-level.</p>
<p>And of course, any adequate Enemies List would have to include hundreds of thousands of people, even millions. The politicians list would be long enough. What about all the academics? The media propagandists? The <i>corporatistas</i>? The social media censors? The intelligence agency sociopaths who tried to remove a duly-elected president by framing him? The Milley types among military brass? A huge number of people have wilfully, maliciously damaged American government and society—of late, particularly in the name of Wokism. Obviously, they're still succeeding.</p>
<p>But in a way, Answer #2 seems to beg the ultimate question of, "Why is Wokism so popular in the first place?" (a question we touched on <a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11195/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a few months ago</a>).</p>
<p>That leads us to Answer #3: the possibility that there is something within Enlightenment liberalism itself that all but guaranteed we were going to wind up here—that is, that all but guaranteed the eventual arrival and domination of Wokism as an <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/america-fast-becoming-woke-theocracy-opinion-1518938" target="_blank" rel="noopener">official state ideology</a>.</p>
<p>This is a difficult thing to consider, especially for conservatives. After all, to be a modern American conservative is to love America. To love America is to love its foundational precepts and goals. To love its foundational precepts and goals is to actually <i>be</i> an Enlightenment (or to say the same thing, a Lockean) liberal. To be an America-loving Enlightenment liberal is to be someone who wants America to return to its Lockean roots and stay there. And to be someone like that is to view with horror the possibility of a causal connection between the Enlightenment liberalism of the American founding and the Wokism now destroying America. In fact, such a discovery might be so painful, one might just reject the possibility out of hand.</p>
<p>But on the presumption we have unusually brave readers here at SteynOnline, I propose we start to wade into this and see what we find. After all, maybe we'll discover something to help us beat back the Wokist lunatics and get the country back on track, even if it takes twenty years.</p>
<hr/><p>I guess, before I go on, I should clarify my terms.</p>
<p>When I use the word "liberalism" in this context, I'm not referring to whatever the DNC is supporting right now. I'm using the word in its original, much broader sense—the sense in which liberalism denotes a political program rooted in conceptions of freedom; equality; human rights (a phrase essentially synonymous with "natural rights" and "inalienable rights"); natural law; individualism (including expansive individual autonomy and choice); self-government via representative democracy; optimism about the power of human reason; optimism about human nature and innate human goodness; a live-and-let-live ethos tolerating many different forms of behavior and belief; separation between the religious and political; expansive private property rights; expansive economic rights; antipathy toward institutionalized irrationalism and superstition; limited government focused primarily or even solely on securing individual rights; and, well, you get the picture. (It was in light of this original sense of the word "liberal" that Friedrich von Hayek once wrote an essay called <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2011/hayek_constitution.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"Why I Am Not a Conservative"</a>). In any case, by this broad meaning of the word, both American liberals and conservatives—Dershowitz and Hannity, say—fall under the category heading of <i>liberalism</i>.</p>
<p>Now what is most striking to me in that list is that it all sounds great. It certainly sounds infinitely better than what is commonly described as the only alternative to Enlightenment liberalism—namely, a return to inbred drooling absolute monarchs, Torquemada frying infidels at the stake, witch trials, slavery, torture, peasants working fourteen hours a day in freezing mud, lice, disease, filth, darkness, lunatic superstitions about werewolves, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/changeling-folklore" target="_blank" rel="noopener">changelings</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">succubi</a>, and a thousand other offputting things. I also want to make clear that when I say I wonder about the Enlightenment (or the liberalism it championed), I'm not saying I'm thinking of rejecting these things <i>in toto.</i> Something is generating Wokism, and I want to know what it is. I don't think just saying "evil" or "insanity" is an adequate explanation. Maybe there's some generally unnoticed dynamic at play in our foundational ideas causing this. So as we look, anything which passes scrutiny, we can keep. Anything which doesn't, we can consider attenuating, or surgically deleting. We don't necessarily have to throw any babies out with the bathwater. We just might have to throw away an old clump of hair and a bobby pin caught in the drain. So to speak. Maybe that would make all the difference. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from as I try to figure out the source of our present difficulties.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11778/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xxiv">https://www.steynonline.com/11778/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy...</a></p>
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</div> Tal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-10-11:3766518:Comment:2739172021-10-11T04:03:41.872ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XXII</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman <i>The Bachman Beat </i>October 1, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="article_body"><p>Somehow or other, we have come to live in a world in which science—or maybe I should say, "something called 'science'", or "anything at all labelled 'science'"—has gained the status of Ultimate Unquestionable Authority over human life.</p>
<p>This raises the question…</p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XXII</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman <i>The Bachman Beat </i>October 1, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="article_body"><p>Somehow or other, we have come to live in a world in which science—or maybe I should say, "something called 'science'", or "anything at all labelled 'science'"—has gained the status of Ultimate Unquestionable Authority over human life.</p>
<p>This raises the question of what science<span> </span><i>is</i>, or what it means—or<span> </span><i>ought</i><span> </span>to mean—at any given moment, and how we might ever come to know the answer.</p>
<p>In the real world, from what I can tell, the answer seems to be that<span> </span><i>science only means whatever the most influential human beings called "scientists" tell us it means at any given moment, particularly if government force backs them up.</i></p>
<p>But that in turn raises the question of what causes scientists to make the pronouncements they do.</p>
<p>Most of us, earlier on in life, might have said, "the best evidence". But that seems to be rarer than most of us thought. I'm not saying "the best evidence" is never the criterion. I'm saying it's quite often not the sole criterion, as most of us used to think, nor does it even seem to be the most important criterion in many cases. In some cases—including highly influential cases—it isn't a criterion at all.</p>
<p>John Money's famous<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11493/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xiii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">twins experiment</a><span> </span>is like that. So is pretty much every idea he ever promoted. None of it had any empirical warrant. Even worse, as Milton Diamond and others showed, Money's ideas blatantly conflicted with the best evidence. Yet in the battle for the hearts and minds of the scientific establishment over decades, who won: John Money, or the best evidence?</p>
<p>John Money won. In fact, he is still winning today, seven decades after he began his career, six decades after Milton Diamond's<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11558/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xv" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1965 article</a><span> </span>exposed him as an ideologue and charlatan, and 24 years after Diamond's<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11695/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">follow-up article</a><span> </span>exposed his famous "scientific experiment" as a devastatingly harmful hoax. Biological denialism, sex reassignments, hormone treatments, the conceit that science can turn men into women and vice versa, Gender Identity Disorder, transgenderism even among children—all this is more popular than ever. And no wonder, since the state now enforces it all. Our world is a world Money helped create.</p>
<p>So to my critics who say, "You can't question science based on a single case", I respond, "First of all, it wasn't really a 'single case'. It is now many hundreds of thousands of cases, and there is no end in sight". The entire "scientific" establishment now preaches and practices a perverse, harmful dogma, the falsity of which<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11437/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xi" target="_blank" rel="noopener">can be easily shown</a>.</p>
<p>But it is not only in the realm of sexual identity that "science" shows indifference to "the best evidence". Just ask our friend Mark Steyn about the so-called "science" of climate change. Not even Lewis Carroll trapped in an opium-fueled fever dream could imagine the amount of<span> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deliberate-Corruption-Climate-Science/dp/0988877740" target="_blank" rel="noopener">corruption</a>,<span> </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-change-tort-racket-1528499384" target="_blank" rel="noopener">racketeering</a>,<span> </span><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/11/03/blood-and-gore-making-a-killing-on-anti-carbon-investment-hype/?sh=73b961232dc9" target="_blank" rel="noopener">profiteering</a>,<span> </span><a href="https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cynical emotional extortion</a>, and<span> </span><a href="https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/category/climate" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fraud</a><span> </span>which has saturated the "science of climate change" industry for decades.</p>
<p>What about Covid science over the past eighteen months? From<span> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1420092482327621640?fbclid=IwAR0ZyvDWyI91MkUjMUmf77kk9t-Jqk_nEVwSHJ_XdnlgW_wm3Gp-fsCKsQ8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anthony Fauci</a><span> </span>on down, public health authorities around the Anglosphere have lied—or at least, been starkly wrong about—almost everything to do with this virus. That includes everything from<span> </span><a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/04/tucker_carlson_why_did_scientists_lie_about_covid_origins_they_were_scared_to_lose_taxpayer_funding.html#!" target="_blank" rel="noopener">how the virus originated</a>, to<span> </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2021/09/07/wuhan-lab-documents-show-fauci-untruthful-about-research-critics/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">how its home lab was funded</a>, to the public health benefits of<span> </span><a href="https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-china-travel-ban-health-experts-warn-coronavirus-response-would-suffer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">restricting travel from Wuhan</a>, the<span> </span><a href="https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/coronavirus-deadly-they-say" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lethality of the virus</a>, the<span> </span><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence#.YRSMsaJRXXk.twitter" target="_blank" rel="noopener">efficacy of masks</a>, the<span> </span><a href="https://basicrulesoflife.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/covid-19-vaccines-dont-really-work-as-hoped/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">efficacy of the vaccines</a>, whether<span> </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002100161X?utm_source=pocket_mylist" target="_blank" rel="noopener">children and adolescents need vaccines</a>, the efficacy of<span> </span><a href="https://culturalhusbandry.substack.com/p/big-pharma-versus-ivermectin?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web" target="_blank" rel="noopener">various non-vaccine treatment and therapy options</a><span> </span>(see also<span> </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-ivermectin-covid-19-coronavirus-masks-anti-science-11627482393?mod=flipboard" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>), the<span> </span><a href="https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/covid-19-lockdowns-dont-work-9a6facd54390" target="_blank" rel="noopener">efficacy of lockdowns</a>, the<span> </span><a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/24/new-study-finds-lockdowns-didnt-save-any-lives-and-may-have-killed-more-people-than-doing-nothing/?utm_source=pocket_mylist" target="_blank" rel="noopener">human costs of lockdowns</a><span> </span>(see also<span> </span><a href="https://mises.org/wire/do-lockdowns-work-mounting-evidence-says-no?utm_source=pocket_mylist" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>), the accuracy of the Covid<span> </span><a href="https://ktrh.iheart.com/content/2021-09-20-data-suggests-covid-hospitalizations-are-overreported/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hospitalization</a><span> </span>and<span> </span><a href="https://cf5e727d-d02d-4d71-89ff-9fe2d3ad957f.filesusr.com/ugd/adf864_165a103206974fdbb14ada6bf8af1541.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">death numbers</a>, the possibilities of<span> </span><a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/04/06/fauci-says-federal-government-wont-mandate-vaccine-passports_partner/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">vaccine passports and mandates</a>, the<span> </span><a href="https://leohohmann.com/2021/04/30/highly-cited-covid-doctor-comes-to-stunning-conclusion-govt-scrubbing-unprecedented-numbers-of-injection-related-deaths/?utm_source=pocket_mylist" target="_blank" rel="noopener">risks of the vaccines</a>, and pretty much everything else you can think of.</p>
<p>Also disturbing is the fact that, to this day, science—at least throughout the Anglosphere—still has no substantive standard treatment protocol for anyone who contracts Covid. Test positive, and odds are your doctor will only say, "<a href="https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/COVIDcasepositive.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Go home and quarantine</a>. Call us if you start losing your ability to breathe"—after which they'll put you on a hospital ventilator, which will<span> </span><a href="https://www.endalldisease.com/covid-19-death-mechanical-ventilators-hh-inhalator/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">probably finish you off</a><span> </span>(see also<span> </span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/why-some-doctors-are-moving-away-ventilators-virus-patients-n1179986" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>). You probably won't hear a single word about the well-established antiviral effects of medicines like<span> </span><a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/09/hydroxychloroquine-study-n2590700" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hydroxychloroquine</a><span> </span>or<span> </span><a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-pradesh-government-says-ivermectin-helped-to-keep-deaths-low-7311786/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ivermectin</a>. You might even hear them maligned, even though they are two of the safests, and most effective, medicines ever developed.</p>
<p>In fact, you'd win money if you bet that the entire "scientific" establishment would declare war on every non-vaccine Covid treatment and therapy which ever emerges. After all, that's no more than they've done so far with hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, and various antioxidants, all of which aid recovery if administered early enough. But no—for most in the scientific establishment, only a vaccine will do, the end. And perhaps not so coincidentally, "vaccines only" is precisely the position which<span> </span><a href="https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/551651-pfizer-earned-35-billion-on-covid-vaccine-in-first-quarter" target="_blank" rel="noopener">most financially benefits vaccine manufacturers</a>. Hm.</p>
<p>What about decades of science's nearly-unanimous recommendation of a high-carbohydrate, low fat diet? You know, the diet which told you that<span> </span><a href="https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/butter-vs-margarine" target="_blank" rel="noopener">margarine</a><span> </span>was better for you than<span> </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/health/dairy-cardiovascular-disease-intl-scli-wellness-scn/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">butter</a>;<span> </span><a href="https://www.eatthis.com/cool-whip-ingredients/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cool Whip</a><span> </span>was better for you than<span> </span><a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/milk-cheese-yogurt-how-dairy-fat-may-help-lower-heart-disease-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">whipped cream</a>; and that everyday, you should eat up to<span> </span><i><a href="https://sites.psu.edu/millet/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/07/food-pyramid.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">eleven</a></i><span> </span><a href="https://sites.psu.edu/millet/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/07/food-pyramid.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">servings of "bread, cereal, rice, and pasta"</a>?</p>
<p>Nearly every doctor, nutritionist, and researcher recommended that diet for years. The American Heart Association even published a<span> </span><a href="https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+American+Heart+Association+Diet%3A+an+eating+plan+for+healthy...-a016151318" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pamphlet in 1995</a><span> </span>asserting you could eat anything you wanted—including "hard candy, gum drops, sugar, jam, carbonated soft drinks", etc.—as long as it was low in fat. This authoritative, but lethally erroneous, scientific advice created the obesity epidemic, and by extension, the explosion of diseases like Type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, severe sleep apnea, kidney disease, and even certain varieties of cancer. It literally killed thousands. Yet that whole time, ample evidence suggested the diet was wrong. That didn't matter. Only other factors did.</p>
<p>One of those factors was money. By now, you might not be surprised to learn that the influential Harvard scientists who, starting in the late 1960s, began shaping scientific orthodoxy by downplaying the risks of sugar, pushing a high-carb diet, and eventually helping write the government's (malnutritious) Food Guide Pyramid—all contrary to the best nutritional evidence, even then—were<span> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the secretly paid shills of the sugar lobby</a>. Those were the guys who set "scientific policy" on how we should best nourish our bodies. And we believed them.</p>
<p>The point is this:</p>
<p>I increasingly wonder to what extent science exists, as opposed to just scientists. That's not to say nothing can ever be known. Of course it can. The problem is that (estabishment) science seems, at best, far less a reliable source of knowledge and virtue than any of us would like to believe, and for that reason, its superiority as a guide to human life over the guides it has displaced—venerated tradition, religious teaching, common sense, scripture, and even "the best evidence available"—now seems genuinely doubtful. This feels especially true given that science doesn't seem to have any kind of reliable internal safeguard against its own hive mind acquiescence, indifference to truth, inhumane excess, saleability, or misuse of science to impose ideology.</p>
<p>I appreciate beneficent scientific breakthroughs as much as the next guy. At the same time, I've come to wonder about Enlightenment optimism regarding knowledge, human rationality, science, and moral progress. I wonder about the Enlightenment elevation of scientists to the status of ultimate epistemic and moral authorities. And I wonder if having scientists serve as our culture's high caste of epistemic and moral authority, rather than some other type of person, is really optimal. They seem very co-optable. That's a danger when imperial Wokeness is on the march.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11725/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xxii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.steynonline.com/11725/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy...</a></p>
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</div> Tal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-09-27:3766518:Comment:2740072021-09-27T23:04:50.301ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XXI</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman <i>The Bachman Beat </i>September 24, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><img class="align-left" src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4772.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400"></img></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>The end of the<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11695/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xx">David Reimer story</a><span> </span>is a sad one. I didn't begin this story to…</p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XXI</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman <i>The Bachman Beat </i>September 24, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><img src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4772.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400" class="align-left"/></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>The end of the<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11695/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xx">David Reimer story</a><span> </span>is a sad one. I didn't begin this story to depress anyone. I began it so as to be able to eventually highlight a certain characteristic of our culture, in hopes we could trace back to find some ultimate cause—and therefore, a solution.</p>
<p>But since I've come this far, I suppose I need to tell the end of the story, sad as it is, then trace back from there.</p>
<p>No sooner had Diamond and Sigmundson's<span> </span><a href="https://ur.booksc.eu/book/40848436/991604" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exposé</a><span> </span><a href="https://ur.booksc.eu/book/40848436/991604" target="_blank" rel="noopener">of John Money's failed experiment</a><span> </span>appeared in the March 1997 issue of<span> </span><i>Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine</i>, than media picked up the story<i>.</i><span> </span>The New York Times published a report on the piece with the headline,<span> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/14/us/sexual-identity-not-pliable-after-all-report-says.html?" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"Sexual Identity Not Pliable After All, Report Says"</a>. Time magazine—which had gleefully trumpeted Money's "success" 24 year earlier—followed suit, now announcing<span> </span><a href="http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,986085-2,00.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"the experts had it all wrong"</a><span> </span>and describing the story as "a lesson in scientific hubris".</p>
<p>You'll recall from<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11695/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">last time</a><span> </span>Reimer's shock at hearing that Money had spent years describing his case as a success, and that because of Money's lies, surgeons around the world now routinely did to babies what Money's team had done to him. Determined to stop Money and his unconscionable medical malpractice, Reimer decided to keep sharing his story with the world.</p>
<p>Using an alias, Reimer first granted an extended interview to Canadian journalist John Colapinto. The result was arguably the most important article<span> </span><i>Rolling Stone</i><span> </span>has ever published—a<span> </span><a href="https://www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">20,000 word piece</a><span> </span>called<span> </span><a href="https://www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"The True Story of John/Joan"</a>. (Colapinto later turned his article into a book called<span> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/As-Nature-Made-Him-Raised-ebook/dp/B00AXXUB2G" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl</i></a>).</p>
<p>Reimer then decided to appear with his mother, using his own name, on the<span> </span><i>The Oprah Winfrey Show</i><span> </span>(a few minutes of which<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQJHPQpf6mI" target="_blank" rel="noopener">you can see here</a>). Now feeling more confident, he appeared on various radio and TV shows, including<span> </span><i>Dateline NBC</i><span> </span>and<span> </span><i>Good Morning America.</i><span> </span>He next sat for an extended interview for the CBC show "The Fifth Estate", footage from which was afterward used in several documentaries. One was a BBC documentary which<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTcwqR4Q4Y" target="_blank" rel="noopener">you can watch here</a>, and whose narrator concludes by saying, "<i>Nature, as far as gender identity is concerned, cannot be overridden by nurture</i>...This (story) is what can happen when science pursues a 'beautiful' theory with scant regard for the human cost". Another was a Learning Channel documentary, whose four parts you can watch here:<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GhbVFjIaN0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1</a>,<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noqRhuE8_XA" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2</a>,<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ctg3poxT9g" target="_blank" rel="noopener">3</a>, and<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnb3EwJtsDs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">4</a>). Reimer even convinced his reluctant twin brother Brian to appear. Among other benefits of Brian appearing, David believed a second testimony would lend force to his own. That would help convince the medical establishment to reject Money's claims and cease the surgeries. At least, that's what David Reimer thought.</p>
<p>What happened next wasn't what David (or his brother) expected. Yes, Oprah, the BBC, Colapinto, and various other reporters and medical experts believed David and acknowledged Money's fraud. But to the brothers' distress, rather than widespread professional repudiation of Money and the surgeries he inspired...nothing much changed. The medical establishment just kept on doing what it had been doing for years: following Money's recommendations to turn boys into girls whenever boys had underdeveloped, damaged, or intersex genitals. Adding to their distress was that a parade of Money's cult-groupies in academia began publicly defending their guru, praising him as a visionary, endorsing his past practices, conveying his messages to the media, blaming the Reimer parents for the experiment's failure, and most woundingly of all, suggesting the Reimer brothers had hallucinated their memories of Money's abuse.</p>
<p>For example, starting at<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ctg3poxT9g" target="_blank" rel="noopener">:37 of this video</a>, you can watch lifelong Money acolyte<span> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Green_(sexologist)" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Green</a>—then a research director at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic in London—convey Money's denial of the abuse, and then suggest the Reimer twins' memories were false. (Elsewhere in one of the documentaries, Green proclaims Money a "genius").</p>
<p>Another Money cult groupie, Kenneth Zucker of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto,<span> </span><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13634241_Experiment_of_Nurture_Ablatio_Penis_at_2_Months_Sex_Reassignment_at_7_Months_and_a_Psychosexual_Follow-up_in_Young_Adulthood" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published an article</a><span> </span>in<span> </span><i>Pediatrics</i><span> </span>suggesting that Money's experiment only<i><span> </span>appeared</i><span> </span>to be a failure. The jury was actually still out. The reason, Zucker implied, was that no one could 10000% absolutely prove beyond any doubt why exactly it had failed—and therefore, it was possible that Reimer's parents had ruined the experiment by not following Money's child rearing instructions strictly enough. Consequently, everyone should assume Money's theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth remained viable.</p>
<p>(Where did Zucker get the idea for this absurd "sleight of mind" attempt? Most likely, from John Money himself. As Zucker later admitted to<span> </span><i>Rolling Stone</i><span> </span>journalist Colapinto,<span> </span><i>Money had essentially masterminded his article</i>. Money had even provided Zucker with the article's main story about<span> </span><i>another</i><span> </span>little boy who'd received the surgery and the Money-style childrearing, but who—unlike David Reimer—was now living happily as a woman (meaning, of course, that Money's theory was true). But when Colapinto pressed Zucker for details on the fake sounding case, Zucker admitted he'd never met the person and hardly knew anything about him. The unverifiable story was obviously another Money fabrication—yet Zucker's article had already appeared in the high status, peer-reviewed,<span> </span><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/journal/PEDIATRICS-1098-4275" target="_blank" rel="noopener">official journal</a><span> </span>of<span> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Academy_of_Pediatrics" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The American Academy of Pediatrics</a>.)</p>
<p>In the few comments Money himself made about his now-exposed failed experiment, he blamed the media controversy on "right wing forces" with an "anti-feminist agenda" bent on "sending women back into the kitchen". He claimed his academic enemies had targeted him because of personal vendettas. He claimed he wasn't responsible for the failure since David Reimer never returned to see him after fourteen and Money didn't know how to contact him (which was not true) and a dozen other pathetic excuses. But most relevant to the Reimer twins was Money's accusation that the twins were making up their abuse claims, and that their motive was wealth and fame.</p>
<p>The accusations of lying from Money and his academic goon squad stung the Reimers. So did what looked like indifference on the part of the medical establishment. An exasperated David would later tell an interviewer: "I'm living proof...if you're not going to take my word as gospel, because I have lived through it, who else are you going to listen to? Who else is there?...<i>Is it going to take somebody to wind up killing themselves, shooting themselves in the head for people to listen?</i>" David's brother Brian, in particular, took the reaction hard. He'd never fully recovered from the bitter shock of finding out his parents had lied to him for fourteen years about his twin brother. Nor had he been able to reconcile himself to the incestous (and now, he realized, homosexual) sexual behavior John Money had forced him and "Brenda" to simulate on each other as kids, at times disrobed, as Money took photos. For years before his appearance with David on TV, he had struggled to overcome his feelings of revulsion, mistrust, resentment, dissociation, and humiliation. At times, these inner challenges, as well self-medicating alcohol and drug use, pushed him into schizophrenic states.</p>
<p>David had hoped their appearance on TV might help them find peace. Together, they would destroy John Money. They would save thousands of other boys from unnecessary castration and penectomy. They would come together as brother and brother, something which Brian had struggled with since the day he first discovered "Brenda" wasn't a girl at all.</p>
<p>Instead, Brian's despair grew after the TV show he appeared in aired in 2002. It's not clear to what extent it was the accusations from Money's cheerleaders, or despair brought on by renewed focus on the memories, or even some inherited predisposition to depression. But whatever the reasons, it wasn't too long after the world saw this<span> </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnb3EwJtsDs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">short scene (start at 5:06)</a>, that Brian ended his life with an overdose of antidepressants.</p>
<p>A devastated David Reimer, no doubt feeling partly responsible for his brother's slide, visited his grave four or five times a week. Vowing to rise above this latest tragedy in his life, he threw himself into living up to his promise to be a good husband and father. For some years, he had worked clean-up at the local slaughterhouse to pay the bills. But recently, David had found himself a bit more financial security after the hospital agreed to pay him damages for his injury, John Colapinto shared royalties from<span> </span><i>As Nature Made Him</i><span> </span>with him, and a movie studio paid him an advance for the rights to his story.</p>
<p>Eager to increase his family wealth even further, David decided to invest his new money with someone he'd met at the local golf course, where he often worked. This turned out to be a terrible mistake. He lost everything. Now in his late thirties, qualified only for, at best, semi-skilled labor, he found himself broke, unable to find a steady job, and unable to fulfill the role of breadwinner. Angry at himself, desperate to keep his promise to be a good husband and father, afraid his wife Jane might leave him, and unable to please her sexually the way other men could, David felt unnerved, dumb, and inadequate. Financial stresses led to more and more tiffs with his wife—a woman he believed God had sent to him. As each day of 2004 unfolded, David Reimer felt more and more like a failure—and even worse, a failure with no chance of ever becoming a success again. He had once felt faith. He had once believed God had sent him a miracle and answered his prayers. But when I try to put myself in his place in that moment, I can imagine him wondering if he'd just been imagining all the God stuff. He has to have felt entirely alone, and consumed by a feeling of total life failure—a cold, dark, deeply nauseating feeling unrelieved by any hope at all.</p>
<p>Unsure of how else to get out of their marital rut, David's wife met with him on May 2, 2004, and told him she believed they needed to take a break. Separate for a little while. Re-set. Jane says she never mentioned divorce. She just felt they needed some time apart to reflect and refocus.</p>
<p>But in his vulnerable state, David found this crushing. He went home to see his mom. He burst into tears, saying repeatedly he couldn't make Jane happy. And that meant that he'd failed to be a good husband and father; he'd failed to be the kind of man he had believed he was destined to be, and wanted to be. Out of money, out of work, out of hope, out of faith, and fearing he was out of love, 39 year old David Reimer took his own life two nights later with a single shotgun blast to the head. It was in the early nighttime hours of May 4, 2004. David Reimer's tragic life stands as testament of all sorts of things, and raises all sorts of questions. So does the career of John Money. So do the careers of all Money's cheerleaders. So does the plucky impudence of Milton Diamond. And so does the fact that now, seventeen years later, the insidious lunacy Money championed is even worse than when he was around: the surgeries, the denials of biology and reality, the pedophilia, the cynical invocation of science as a means to terminate all debate and practice the most outrageous forms of misrule and abuse, and a hundred other things, all of which now make up part of the sick, totalitarian ideology of Wokism. How exactly did our culture ever come to this, and how do we get out? Somehow or other, we must find light again. More thoughts on that in the weeks to follow.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11711/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xxi" target="_blank">https://www.steynonline.com/11711/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xxi</a></p>
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</div> Tal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-09-20:3766518:Comment:2735642021-09-20T01:44:01.956ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XX</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman, September 17, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11680/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xix">Over several interviews</a> that summer of 1994, the 29 year old David Reimer told Dr. Diamond and Dr. Sigmundson everything.</p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>He hadn't wanted to…</p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XX</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman, September 17, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11680/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xix">Over several interviews</a> that summer of 1994, the 29 year old David Reimer told Dr. Diamond and Dr. Sigmundson everything.</p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>He hadn't wanted to at first. The past hurt. He wanted to forget it, not talk about it or help spawn a research paper about it. Besides, how embarrassing would it be if someone read the research paper Milton Diamond would write up and figured out his true identity?</p>
<p>But Reimer's reluctance to speak vanished after Dr. Diamond detailed what John Money had been saying about his surgery and treatment for the past twenty plus years. Reimer listened in shock. Until that moment, he had no clue Money had made him famous (albeit as an anonymous test subject), or that his tormentor had labeled the twins case an "outstanding success", or that millions believed, as per Money's claim, that Reimer was now happily living the life of a woman, unaware he'd been born male.</p>
<p>Most upsetting of all for Reimer was discovering that Money's false claims had come to form the basis of the standard worldwide protocol for treating small boys with damaged, underdeveloped, or intersexed genitals. By 1994, hundreds of doctors around the world were following the prescriptions Money made based on his "successful" Reimer case. They had surgically "reassigned" around<span> </span><i>15,000</i><span> </span>young boys to being "girls" only because the boys were born with unusually small penises, or had suffered injury, or some other such dubious basis. And in addition, in each case the doctors instructed the parents, as per Money's recommended treatment protocol, to raise their boy as a girl, never reveal his actual sex, and then put him on estrogen before puberty. Very little follow-up had ever been conducted on these cases, but Diamond suspected—based on his own years of research into prenatally determined sexual dispositions—that all the boys so treated had experienced something like David Reimer had.</p>
<p>"There are people going through what you're going through every day", Diamond said to Reimer. "We're trying to stop that".</p>
<p>"I figured I was the only one", Reimer later said. "And here Diamond tells me they're doing all these surgeries based on<i><span> </span>me</i>. That's why I decided to cooperate".</p>
<p>And so, Reimer wound up telling Diamond and Sigmundson everything. He told them he'd never felt like a girl. He told them that immediately after his father told him the truth at age fourteen, he announced he wanted to surgically restore himself to manhood. He told them about his several subsequent<span> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalloplasty" target="_blank" rel="noopener">phalloplastic surgeries</a>, his testosterone therapy, Money's abuse during his childhood "therapy" sessions, his struggles with resentment and revenge fantasies, and his sometimes suicidal loneliness and depression. He also described his difficulty in finding romantic love, given that his sex organs were mostly cosmetic, at best semi-functional reconstructions. He even encouraged his parents and twin brother to also speak with the doctors. He didn't want any other boy to go through what he'd gone through.</p>
<p>Reimer even confided to the doctors an experience of life-changing spiritual importance for him. Although he knew some Bible stories (hence his choice of the new name<span> </span><i>David</i>), he hadn't grown up in a religious home. Prayer had never played a role in his life.</p>
<p>But as he entered his twenties, a desire grew within him to become a husband and father. He felt filling those roles was part of who he really was, deep down.</p>
<p>There were two obstacles, of course. One was that, due to his castration at the hands of John Money's surgeon two decades earlier, he would never be able to father a child. The other was finding a woman to marry in the first place, given that he'd never be able to fully satisfy her sexually.</p>
<p>That Reimer could fathom, there was simply no way around these obstacles. Yet eventually, the instinct within him grew so strong that he began wondering seriously about the existence of God for the first time. After all, if there really was a God, maybe he could perform a miracle. Maybe God could find a way, against all the odds, to make David a husband and father, and give him his very own family to watch over, lead, and serve.</p>
<p>And so, David revealed, he had prayed for the first time. Speaking directly to a God he wasn't even sure was there, he asked for a woman to love and cherish, who would love and cherish him in return. He asked to experience the miracle of fatherhood. His exact words, as he remembered them later, were, "I could be a good husband if I was given the chance...I could be a good father if I was given a chance". It was as much a promise as a plea.</p>
<p>And so, you can imagine David's amazement and gratitude when, only two months later, he met a 25 year old single mother named Jane, who had three children and seemed interested in him. They began dating. David fell in love with what he called "her true heart". Jane fell in love with his courage and dedication. They married two years later, and David adopted Jane's children. God, David reported, had performed a miracle for him he had never thought possible. Keeping his promise to God to be a good husband and father in return was now the most important thing in his life.</p>
<p>A moved Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson now had the true story. With Reimer's encouragement, they began to write up a journal article about the case. By winter of that year (1994), it was ready.</p>
<p>Entitled "Sex Reassignment at Birth: Long-Term Review and Clinical Implications", the article described itself as "a long-term follow-up to a classic case reported in pediatric, psychiatric, and sexological literature". Anchored by extensive quotes from Reimer himself, as well as supplementary quotes from Reimer's wife and parents, the article exposed Money's famous 1972 experiment for the total failure it was. As Diamond and Sigmundson summarized it, "this update to a case originally accepted as a 'classic' in fields ranging from medicine to the humanities<span> </span><i>completely reverses the conclusions and theory behind the original reports"</i>. It also showed Money's experiment to be inhumane, traumatizing, and proof that Money's own theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth was false.</p>
<p>Diamond and Sigmundson also skewered the entire psychological, sociological, women's studies, and medical communities for accepting Money's dubious claim at face value for the previous two decades. That mindless acceptance was especially disturbing given that Diamond's exhaustive 1965 article, and several articles by other researchers in the years since, had provided abundant reason to doubt Money's later claims of a successful twins experiment. Simply put, said the authors, three decades' worth of irrefutable proof against Money's biology denialism "does not seem to have been accepted or integrated by most pediatricians or surgeons". And that was true even though "the last decade has offered much support for a biological substrate for sexual behavior", such that "the evidence seems overwhelming that normal humans are<span> </span><i>not</i><span> </span>psychosexually neutral at birth".</p>
<p>In so many words, what Diamond and Sigmundson deftly, gently pointed out was that on a basic, but vitally important issue, and one with profound implications for thousands of infants, almost every scientist and academic out there had shown utter indifference to overwhelming scientific evidence for decades. Instead, they'd simply followed John Money as a cult guru, performing penis amputations and castrations all the way. Despite still claiming the supreme authority of science, they amounted to Jonestowners in lab coats. Fifteen thousand irresponsibly genitally-mutilated males could attest to that. John Money was a sick, dangerous fraud—but so were the hundreds, thousands, of professionals who followed him without verifying his claims, in defiance of all the evidence.</p>
<p>Of course, Diamond and Sigmundson used much softer language than I'm using here, and only included a couple of sentences saying as much. However, their language wasn't so soft and sparse as to obscure the point. As a result, you might be able to guess what happened when the two co-authors sent their paper in to be published by<span> </span><i>The New England Journal of Medicine</i>: nothing. The journal rejected the paper.</p>
<p>And you might also be able to guess what happened when the surprised truth-tellers then sent their piece into<span> </span><i>The Journal of the American Medical Association</i>: again, nothing. Another rejection.</p>
<p>Diamond and Sigmundson next sent it to a third journal, then a fourth, then a fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth. No one would publish it.</p>
<p>The problem wasn't that anything in the article was wrong. The problem was that it<span> </span><i>wasn't</i><span> </span>wrong. It was right. That was the problem. It stung, it embarrassed, it exposed. Finally, after two years of rejections, Diamond and Sigmundson found a publisher:<span> </span><i>Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine</i>. It wasn't<span> </span><i>The Lancet</i><span> </span>or<span> </span><i>Nature</i>, but it was pretty good. And<span> </span><i>surely</i>, the article—which you can<span> </span><a href="https://ur.booksc.eu/book/40848436/991604" target="_blank" rel="noopener">download and read right here</a>—would trigger the kind of scientific establishment soul-searching Milton Diamond's first takedown of Money, thirty years earlier, should have triggered, but didn't. The article even recommended "new guidelines" for treating boys with genital problems: "We believe that any 46-chromosome, XY individual born normal and with a normal nervous system, in keeping with the psychosexual bias thus prenatally imposed, should be raised as a male."</p>
<p>Back in Winnipeg, David Reimer hoped the academic exposé would stop the increasingly popular, Money-inspired surgical reassignments of infant boys. To push the matter further, he even agreed to be interviewed for a special television documentary, an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show", and a feature article in<span> </span><i>Rolling Stone</i><span> </span>magazine. After thirty years in the shadows, David Reimer was about to step out into the public to speak. It was the least he could do to convince the health care establishment to stop doing what it had once done to him. Once they all heard his true story, he figured, they would all change their ways, and very quickly, too. Of course they would. Wouldn't they?</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11695/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xx" target="_blank">https://www.steynonline.com/11695/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xx</a></p>
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</div> Tal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-09-06:3766518:Comment:2736482021-09-06T01:22:51.045ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XVIII</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman<br></br>September 3, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4731.jpg" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4731.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400"></img></a></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>Picking up from<span> …</span></p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XVIII</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman<br/>September 3, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4731.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4731.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400" class="align-right"/></a></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>Picking up from<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11616/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xvii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Part XVII</a><span> </span>of "We Have Met the Enemy":</p>
<p>By 1973,<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11493/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xiii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">John Money</a><span> </span>was what we now call an "influencer", and a heavyweight influencer at that. Cited and celebrated now not only by academics, but by Western intellectuals, activists, counselors, journalists, and legislators, Money had performed a history-changing feat of alchemy: he had turned a boy into a girl. Or so he (falsely) claimed. And in doing so, he claimed to have demonstrated that virtually all differences in male-female thought, feeling, and behavior result from environment, not biology. That meant, potentially, that through choice and a changed environment, anyone could become anything. For a West whose sexual mores had already been in freefall for a decade (not least thanks to Money's efforts within academia), his "scientific discovery" was exhilarating news.</p>
<p>Money, now viewed as a scientific miracle-worker, began pushing the rest of his agenda. In his telling, because anyone<span> </span><i>could</i><span> </span>become anything, everyone<span> </span><i>should</i><span> </span>become anything. Transcending biology—changing one's own sex—was the ultimate symbol of human power. For Money, it was the ultimate "f*** you" to God himself. As he put it in an article called<span> </span><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15374418009532970" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"The Future of Sex and Gender"</a><span> </span>published in<span> </span><i>The Journal of Clinical Child Psychology,</i><span> </span>"the very idea of sex reversal runs counter to one of the eternal verities we live by, namely, that male and female were ordained by God to live in sacred apposition"—and according to Money, that was exactly why we should do it. Our assault on, our erasure of, sexual dimorphism—our full embrace of sex-identity fluidity—constituted "the fulfillment of being human".</p>
<p>Remember when I<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11392/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-viii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">brought up Aristotle, back in June</a>? For Aristotle, true fulfilment meant achieving the full fruition of one's innate essence or nature. For an acorn, the best thing is to grow into a strong, healthy oak. For human beings, it is to live a life of<span> </span><i>eudaimonia</i>, within a<span> </span><i>polis</i><span> </span>dedicated to that end, together with cherished others.</p>
<p>A similar idea pervades Jewish and Christian thought. True fulfilment means achieving one's full potential, and what that potential looks like depends not only on our choices, but on the nature God gives us in the first place.</p>
<p>As God says to<span> </span><a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+1&version=KJV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jeremiah</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p><b>"</b>Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations...See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant."</p>
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<p>David expresses something similar in<span> </span><a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%201&version=KJV" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Psalm 1</a>, in which he writes that the godly man "shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season".</p>
<p>But for Money, true fulfilment didn't mean bringing something natural to its full fruition. It meant<span> </span><i>declaring war</i><span> </span>on nature. That is, it meant obliterating all constraints imposed by nature. Why? Because God is the author of nature. Given that our sexual identity is a manifestation of nature, to destroy it is to score a huge victory against God, the author and embodiment of nature (something I alluded to in<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11465/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">an earlier piece</a>). And so, for Money, who repeatedly expressed his contempt for God in his "scientific" articles, attempting to change one's sex was an act of righteous, spiteful defiance.</p>
<p>But there were other ways to score points against God beyond warring against sexual dimorphism, according to Money. There were all sorts of sexual taboos, codes, laws, customs, which you could—and should—violate.</p>
<p>One of them was the legal and moral prohibition on pedophilia. As he once told an interviewer from<span> </span><a href="https://www.brongersma.info/images/Paidika7.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pro-pedophilia Dutch journal<span> </span><i>Paidika</i></a>, "If I were to see the case of a boy aged ten or eleven who's intensely erotically attracted toward a man in his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way."</p>
<p>In that same interview, Money criticizes "value judgments" of homosexual pedophilic relationships where the child consents. (How an innocent ten year old boy could meaningfully "consent" to that sort of thing in the same way his 60 year old pursuer might, Money does not attempt to explain.) Money also reveals he had long ago vowed to never report a pedophile to the police, and that he has "no doubt" most incarcerated pedophiles don't deserve to be in prison. "Consensual" pedophilic relationships, he says, are often "fatherly", "positive", "affectionate", and "powerfully important for the younger boy". (And given his language, you begin to wonder if Money himself indulged in such activities).</p>
<p>How young is too young to give sexual consent, according to the Johns Hopkins "scientific expert" John Money? In the article, he doesn't give an age. And he doesn't give an age because, as he reveals in the last exchange of the interview, he "wishes to attack the whole basis from which age-of-consent laws are constructed". That is, for Money, there shouldn't be any age-of-consent laws at all. "Consensual" pedophilia should be perfectly legal, no matter how young a child is.</p>
<p>Now, bear in mind that as John Money was out stumping for pedophilia, he was still employed by Johns Hopkins. He was still "counseling" young boys alone in his office. He was still shaping the entire thought-world of thousands of doctors, psychologists, and counselors around the world. He was still shaping the treatment protocols they used. He remained a superstar of the scientific establishment.</p>
<p>As you might imagine, Money didn't stop at promoting the legalization of pedophilia. In his 1976 article,<span> </span><a href="https://ur.booksc.eu/book/47362711/b1fddd" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"Sex, Love, and Commitment",</a><span> </span>published in<span> </span><i>The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy</i>, he took aim at romantic commitment itself. The word "commitment", said Money, was "word garbage" meant to mask a risible "Judeo-Christian ideal of monogamous marriage". He then revealed his scientific conclusion that love does not actually exist. Instead, "we all fall in love not with a partner, but with a fantasy superimposed or projected on to a partner". And for anyone still interested in monogamous marriage, he wrote in his 1975<span> </span><i>Sexual Signatures,</i><span> </span>they really need to get with it: the regular practice of bisexual group sex, he wrote, is at least as "personally satisfying as a paired partnership".</p>
<p>In other articles, Money promoted the most violent and extreme forms of sadomasochism. In an article entitled "Sexual Dictatorship, Dissidence, and Democracy", published in<span> </span><i>The International Journal of Medicine and Law</i><span> </span>(an article, by the way, which has been entirely scrubbed from the internet, and which I was only able to obtain, prepping for this piece, through James Bond-like maneuvers and string-pulling), Money begins by smearing all traditional sexual customs and laws as constituting a "sexual dictatorship" based on a mixture of church and state. Any societal or legal restraints on sexual behavior between consenting partners (including children) amount to intolerable reflections of McCarthyism, Nazi Germany, and the Spanish Inquisition. He then goes on to express his support for voluntary "lust murder", in which one lover kills another during violent sex, providing the murdered person previously consented. He follows that by advocating for certain behaviors during sex too disgusting for me to even print here. And this was published in a<span> </span><i>top scientific journal.</i></p>
<p>The more lurid, bizarre, dark, and grotesque Money's pronouncements, the more of an academic rockstar he became. And the more of an academic rockstar he became, the more professionals adopted his ideas. He made the most of his status and influence in his personal life, too, regularly obscenely propositioning his young patients and colleagues (of both sexes), as well as regularly participating in orgies with fellow "scholars" in an academic association called the<span> </span><a href="https://www.sexscience.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality</a>.</p>
<p>Thrilled with his success in destroying bourgeois sexual morality as the seventies unfolded, Money increasingly laced his speech with sexual profanities around patients and colleagues alike. He believed this would break down lingering sensitivities about sex organs and sex acts. He also began telling his colleagues his real field of study was "f**kology". He hoped to popularize the term. It never quite caught on, but a trio of academic admirers did use the word as the title of their<span> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fuckology-Critical-Essays-Diagnostic-Concepts/dp/022618661X/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=fuckology&qid=1630578142&sr=8-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2014 compilation tribute to John Money</a>.</p>
<p>But what did catch on was a wide range of Money's other ideas. They form the backbone of the barbarous sexual lunacy plaguing us now.<span> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/us/drag-queen-story-hour.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Drag queen hour at the local children's library</a>;<span> </span><a href="https://getpocket.com/read/3421877412" target="_blank" rel="noopener">public sex acts during Pride parades</a>; the growing normalization of<span> </span><a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/17/video-emerges-of-drag-kid-desmond-is-amazing-pretending-to-snort-ketamine/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">child sexualization</a><span> </span>and<span> </span><a href="https://www.opindia.com/2019/06/virtuous-pedophiles-another-sickening-step-towards-the-normalisation-of-pedophilia-by-enlightened-liberals/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pedophilia</a>; the growth of<span> </span><a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-tv-characters-of-old-transwomen-really-influence-the-gender-of-young-girls-" target="_blank" rel="noopener">gender dysphoria diagnoses</a>, transgender claims<span> </span><a href="https://www.newsweek.com/kids-young-four-can-now-change-gender-scotland-schools-without-parental-consent-1618942" target="_blank" rel="noopener">even among small children</a>, and<span> </span><a href="https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/the-world-market-for-sex-reassignment-surgery-is-growing/13458" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sex reassignment surgeries</a>; the dissolution of obscenity laws;<span> </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2015/02/consent-isnt-enough-in-fifty-shades-of-grey/385267/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the mainstreaming of sadomasochism</a>;<span> </span><a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-07-vw-3298-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the erosion of laws inhibiting divorces</a>; the rejection of monogamous heterosexual marriage as the sole legal form of marriage; the disparagement of traditional marriage roles between husband and wife; the diminution of parental rights over their children<span> </span><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/transgender-identifying-adolescents-threats-to-parental-rights" target="_blank" rel="noopener">when it comes to transgender issues</a>; all these and dozens more changes can all be traced back to a sexual radicalism John Money—perhaps more than any other single person—began successfully insinuating into society and law as far back as the 1950s.</p>
<p>And that's why, I confess, I'm sick of writing about this demonic sicko. And so, next week, I want to finish up the story of Bruce Reimer, and move into a discussion of what the Money case, and others, really tell us about science, authority, liberalism, Wokism, and the West.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11663/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xviii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.steynonline.com/11663/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy...</a></p>
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</div> Tal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-09-06:3766518:Comment:2733602021-09-06T01:21:13.943ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XVII</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman<br></br><i>The Bachman Beat</i><br></br>August 20, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4697.jpg" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4697.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400"></img></a></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>Let's start wrapping up our investigation into one of the modern world's most destructive (albeit…</p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XVII</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman<br/><i>The Bachman Beat</i><br/>August 20, 2021</b></p>
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<div id="print_content_3"><div class="media"><div class="photo"><p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4697.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4697.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400" class="align-left"/></a></p>
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<div class="article_body"><p>Let's start wrapping up our investigation into one of the modern world's most destructive (albeit largely unknown) forces: the Johns Hopkins psychologist and sexologist John Money. As we saw<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11587/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xvi" target="_blank" rel="noopener">last time</a>, no sooner had John Money announced his spectacular "success" in transforming a boy into a girl through social conditioning alone, than the whole world—at least, Western intellectuals—believed him. And cheered. (Well, the whole world except one dogged skeptic, about whom more later).</p>
<p>But behind Money's triumphant announcement, and all the public fanfare, lay the truth.</p>
<p>The truth was that Money's "groundbreaking experiment" looked to be a failure. The now six year old Bruce (now "Brenda") Reimer had never exhibited interest in being a girl at all. Years of Money's extreme conditioning tactics just hadn't worked.</p>
<p>The good news for Money was, barring a stroke of bad luck, the public was never going to find out: even if someone had wanted to, no one could fact-check his claims because no one knew the boy's identity. Money was never going to reveal it. Nor were his team members. Nor were the boy's parents, who wouldn't want to embarrass "Brenda", or admit they'd consented to what increasingly looked like a terrible mistake (particularly the castration), or dare disobey a domineering, world famous, "scientific expert" they held in awe.</p>
<p>But the experiment's failure must have still rankled Money. Besides, what if, one day, the boy's identity somehow leaked, and someone actually decided to fact-check his claims? Money couldn't have that. That would ruin his credibility, his status, his ability to promote his personal sexual ideology, everything.</p>
<p>And so, Money decided to ramp up his own efforts to condition young Bruce into full-blown girlhood. Maybe the right kind of pressure could still make the experiment work. The Reimer twins' annual visits to his clinic at Johns Hopkins provided him with the perfect opportunity—not least because Money didn't permit the Reimer parents into the room while he was conducting his "scientific research" on the boys.</p>
<p>Two decades later, Money's academic admirers would deny, on their hero's behalf, that he would ever behave in the way the Reimer twins later reported. He was a paragon of science, they said. His methods, like his motives, were pure. The Reimers must have hallucinated their memories. Money's admirers even now repeat this same denial.</p>
<p>But it is difficult to take this denial seriously. By the '70's, Money was very open about his views. His own words, as recorded in various interviews, articles, and books up until the '90s, lend ample plausibility to the twins' later reports about Money's behavior during their "therapy" sessions. No one familiar with Money's writing could have expected anything else.</p>
<p>Consider Money's 1976 article,<span> </span><a href="https://ur.booksc.eu/book/58949181/013bfa" target="_blank" rel="noopener">"Childhood: The Last Frontier in Sex Research"</a>. Appearing in<span> </span><i>The Sciences</i><span> </span>(a journal published by the New York Academy of Sciences), the article featured a frontal photograph of a nude four year old girl preparing to touch her vagina. In the article, Money laments our societal taboo against adults "playing with children's genitals"—that is,<span> </span><i>he laments the taboo against child molesting</i><span> </span>(see page 14, paragraph 5). He endorses nursery school children simulating sex acts with each other in class. He speaks glowingly about certain Australian aborigines who celebrate what he calls "infantile sexuality". And he repeatedly casts those who disagree with him as the benighted, prudish dupes of ancient "ruler-priests" who invented the taboo against sexualizing children only "as a lever to control all sorts of behavior".</p>
<p>Or consider this quote, from Money's 1975 book<span> </span><i>Sexual Signatures</i>: "Explicit sexual pictures can and should be used as part of a child's sex education".</p>
<p>Or another quote from Money, as reported by journalist John Colapinto: "All young primates explore their own and each others' genitals...and that includes human children everywhere...The only thing wrong about these activities is not to enjoy them".</p>
<p>These quotes, and dozens more, make it easy to believe John Money put these very ideas, or ideas similar enough to them, into practice during his annual private visits with the Reimer twins. It's even easier to imagine once you consider the ego incentives Money might have felt to rescue his failing experiment.</p>
<p>According to Bruce, Money tried to feminize his six year old psyche by repeatedly showing him hardcore pornographic photos of men and women having sex. Money would then repeatedly ask him, at that young age, explicit questions about his desire to participate in such acts in the future. Bruce also reported that Money once ordered him to undress and explore his (surgically-made) vulva as Money watched. After Bruce refused this demand, Money exploded in angry shouting. Terrified, Bruce obeyed and pulled down his trousers to explore himself as Money looked on.</p>
<p>Two other things in particular would leave Bruce Reimer with lasting trauma.</p>
<p>One was that Money, while conducting his "scientific research" in these sessions, several times ordered "Brenda" and his brother Brian to<span> </span><i>simulate sexual intercourse with each other as man and woman</i>. This simulation, according to both brothers, included physical contact and thrusting motions. Bruce also later implied that Money had ordered them to handle each other's genitals in order to help Bruce understand just how different he was from a boy.</p>
<p>In addition, both later reported that Money sometimes invited some of his Johns Hopkins colleagues in to observe these sex simulations. On one occasion, they said, Money took photographs of the simulation. (When investigative journalist John Colapinto tried to verify this specific claim later, he discovered that the Kinsey Institute now owned many of Money's records from this time period, and refused to make them public).</p>
<p>Another traumatizing incident occurred after Money began insisting Bruce submit to a full sex change operation (during which the surgeon on Money's team would fashion a vagina where his testicles used to be). The twelve year old Bruce flatly refused. Money couldn't accept the refusal. It amounted to an unambiguous sign his experiment was indeed a titanic failure. And so, in the attempt to salvage it, Money—unbeknownst to Bruce—invited a fully made-up transsexual to crash the next therapy session and persuade the reluctant boy to get the surgery. The surprise, heavy-handed pressure from the Money/transsexual tag team terrified the young boy. Panicking and feeling boxed in, he bolted from the room. With no idea where he was going, the frantic boy wound up running up a staircase and out on to the roof of the building. After this incident, Bruce told his parents that if they ever planned to take him back to see John Money...<i>he would commit suicide.</i></p>
<p>Moreover, after this incident, Bruce told Money and his parents he never wanted to visit Money again, he didn't want estrogen, he didn't want surgery, and he didn't want a vagina. As he would later reveal, he had realized on his own some years earlier, without anyone ever telling him so, that he was a boy. He emphasized his earnestness with a credible threat of suicide if forced to return. It's not possible to get clearer than that. The experiment had failed, and the point is that even if we could imagine an essentially impossible scenario in which John Money hadn't quite realized how badly his experiment was failing before this...he<span> </span><i>has</i><span> </span>to have known after this.</p>
<p>And<span> </span><i>yet</i>...Money (unbeknownst to the Reimers in a non-internet world) continued trumpeting his "successful experiment" to the world in his professional speeches, articles, and books as if nothing at all had happened. And the entire medical science community still took his lie at face value. And continued cheering. And began fully aligning their own beliefs and treatment recommendations with John Money's, whose public pronouncements on human sexuality now began to grow increasingly dark and destructive—and mainstream.</p>
<p>Details on that next week, and on what it all means for understanding Wokism.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11616/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xvii" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.steynonline.com/11616/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy...</a></p>
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</div> Tal Bachman: We Have Met the…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-09-06:3766518:Comment:2733572021-09-06T01:20:33.628ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XVI</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman<br></br><i>The Bachman Beat</i><br></br>August 13, 2021</b></p>
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<p><br></br>"Brenda" Reimer and family.<a href="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4678.jpg" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4678.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400"></img></a></p>
<div id="print_content_3"><div class="article_body"><p>The<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11558/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xv">humble young…</a></p>
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<div id="print_content"><h1>Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy, part XVI</h1>
<p class="sans-serif"><b>by Tal Bachman<br/><i>The Bachman Beat</i><br/>August 13, 2021</b></p>
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<p><br/>"Brenda" Reimer and family.<a href="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4678.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://www.steynonline.com/pics/large/4678.jpg?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="400" class="align-right"/></a></p>
<div id="print_content_3"><div class="article_body"><p>The<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11558/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xv">humble young couple</a><span> </span>had driven halfway across North America—over 1500 miles, from Winnipeg to Baltimore—to meet the great man in person. Based on what they had recently seen on a television program, he was the one man on earth who might be able to help their seventeen month old son, Bruce.</p>
<p>Bruce's trouble had started a year earlier. Along with his identical twin brother, Brian, he had developed difficulty urinating due to foreskin closure (<a href="https://urology.ucsf.edu/patient-care/children/phimosis">phimosis</a>). The twins's mother—barely out of her teens—took them to the doctor. His recommendation? Circumcision. A quick snip, the boys would heal up in a few days, and then, no more trouble.</p>
<p>But what should have been a routine procedure turned into something much different. For reasons never made clear, the Winnipeg doctor on duty that February day in 1966 decided to use a new electric cauterizing device rather than the standard scalpel. Whether from user error, device malfunction, or both, the doctor's circumcision attempt damaged—actually, destroyed—the six month old boy's penis.</p>
<p>The boy's distraught parents, Ron and Janet Reimer, sought help from local plastic surgeons. Yes, the surgeons said, some crude facsimile of a penis could be fashioned. But it would require multiple surgeries, and the facsimile would never look like a real penis. It would also never work like a real penis.</p>
<p>Desperate, the parents then took their son down to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. But the experts there only repeated what the doctors in Winnipeg had said. The tragic accident, it seemed, had condemned their young son to a lifetime of disfigurement, embarrassment, sexual non-function, and probably bachelorhood. As far as the Reimers could discover, there was just nothing they could do for their poor little boy.</p>
<p>And then one evening, a few months later, everything changed. The heartsick couple happened to catch a TV show featuring a Johns Hopkins expert discussing the brand new science of "sex change". The expert's name? John Money.</p>
<p>Money was good on camera: smooth, supremely confident, clipped accent, and clever. He declared, as though it were a matter of unchallengeable fact, that modern science allowed him and his team to fully transform males into females, and vice versa. He even produced, right then and there, a dazzling blonde transexual named Diane who had once been a man named Richard. Diane purred that she was happier than ever before.</p>
<p>The Reimers watched with cautious hope. Maybe this amazing scientist could help their disfigured son. If he and his team could do surgeries to transform a male into a female, and vice versa, maybe he could help reconstruct their son's genitals. Failing that, if science could turn boys into girls as easily as John Money asserted...and their little boy could grow up to be a woman just as happy as the purring Diane was, and avoid a life of shame and loneliness as a defective male...why not consider that option, too? The professor had just said it was possible, after all—and he sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Janet sent a letter off to<i><span> </span>Professor John Money, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland</i>, the very next day.</p>
<p>Of course, the Reimers didn't know anything about Money other than what they'd just seen on TV. They didn't know that a young teacher named Milton Diamond had<span> </span><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11558/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xv">obliterated Money's claims</a><span> </span>about psychosexual malleability only the year before. They didn't know Money had deliberately hidden that fact during his television presentation. They didn't know Money's unflappable public persona masked a hateful, angry megalomaniac who regularly terrorized his underlings by screaming at them, sexually harassing them, throwing tantrums, and issuing credible career threats. They didn't know Money was a sexual psychopath bent on destroying all traditional sexual standards, and replacing them with some of the darkest sexual behaviors imaginable, including pedophilia.</p>
<p>They also didn't know Money felt hostile toward males and masculinity in general. They didn't know Money had never forgiven the boys who teased him back in school. They didn't know Money still hated his deceased father for once spanking him unjustly. They didn't know Money had grown up absorbing the regular anti-male rants of his widowed mother and her embittered spinster sisters. They didn't know Money believed male genitalia were the mark of a "vile sexuality" (Money's words). They didn't know Money often wondered "if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals, but<span> </span><i>human males</i><span> </span>were also gelded at birth" (also Money's words). All they knew was, the ultra-confident man on TV—the embodiment of cutting-edge science—seemed like he might be able to help.</p>
<p>For John Money, the tragic situation Janet Reimer described in her letter was a dream come true. Here, out of the blue, an opportunity had fallen into his lap to verify his theory of infinite sexual malleability, shut the impudent Milton Diamond up forever, and reassert his standing as the world's greatest scientific expert on human sexuality. Play this right, and no one would ever dare challenge him again. And maybe, just maybe, his ultimate agenda really would prevail.</p>
<p>Money's plan was simple. Meet with the parents and win them over. Leave the undamaged identical twin alone to be the control subject. Then turn the damaged boy into the test subject<span> </span><i>by doing everything possible to turn him into a girl</i>.</p>
<p>That meant castrate him; fashion what would look like a vulva for now; instruct the parents to raise him as a girl, never telling him the circumstances of his birth; perform a complete sex change operation before puberty; flood the boy with estrogen during puberty; and then, when the boy accepts being a girl,<span> </span><i>declare victory over Milton Diamond.</i></p>
<p>And even more, declare victory for his own theory of full psychosexual malleability—that is, for himself. Declare to the world that science had now proved every traditional notion about the sexes is a fiction. Declare it now established that every sex difference in behavior, inclination, thought, feeling, is all the result of social environment. Declare that humans are blank slates. Declare that nature imposes no constraints on what is possible regarding sexual identity and behavior, and offers no guidance on what is optimal. Declare global liberation from all sexual constraints suggested by religion, tradition, and law thanks to science (and himself). Declare invalid any concern about a new era of sexual anarchy on grounds the concern is unscientific. Demonize reluctance as a vestige of traditionalist brainwashing or a revelation of sexist bigotry. Declare that science has now established that the only real sexual commandment is:<span> </span><i>anything goes</i>. (And if you think this is an exaggerated characterization of Money's agenda, stay tuned for future installments).</p>
<p>Of course, the Reimers didn't hear anything about this agenda, or the backstory with Milton Diamond, during their first meeting with John Money in early 1967 (nor would they for another three decades). Rather, what they heard was the world's top scientific expert affirm, with absolute certainty, that the best option for their son was to turn him into a girl. Bruce would never even know he'd once been a male. He would just be a happy girl who would grow up to live a happy life as a woman. Although he would never be able to bear children, he would experience pleasure—and even sexual climax—from the vagina surgeons would construct for him before puberty. That's how wonderful science was.</p>
<p>At the time, neither Ron nor Janet Reimer had more than a sixth grade education. Before them, in that Baltimore office, sat one of the world's most (formally) educated men. Behind him, illustrious degrees and awards hung on the wall. Hundreds, thousands, of other medical scientists viewed Money as a top authority—actually,<span> </span><i>the</i><span> </span>top authority—in the field of human sexuality. He spoke with absolute certainty, and he offered them hope.</p>
<p>You add that all up, and the Reimers were never going to suspect they were in the presence of a fraud, who, in that very moment, was misleading and using them. As they later confirmed, it just never occurred to them John Money might be wrong, let alone disingenuous. "I looked up to him like a god", said Janet, years later. "I accepted whatever he said".</p>
<p>And so, after some thought, Ron and Janet allowed Money and his team to castrate ("geld", to reprise the word Money used in the quote above) their son and create what looked like a vulva. Bruce would now be Brenda. Following Money's instructions, they would buy Brenda dolls, bake sets, and dresses. They would encourage Brenda to help his mother cook dinner, wash dishes, and iron laundry, while encouraging Brenda's identical twin brother, Brian, to help his father fix the car, paint the garage, and do carpentry projects.</p>
<p>Back home in Winnipeg, Ron and Janet Reimer followed every single one of Money's recommendations—and every single one of them failed. Brenda didn't want to wear dresses. He wanted to shave like his dad. He wanted to play with trucks, BB guns, and hammers. He had no interest in the small sewing machine his parents had bought him.</p>
<p>Janet told herself Brenda was just a tomboy. Underneath, she feared the castration and the whole course of action was a mistake. But when she expressed her doubts to Money, he replied that her doubts themselves would disrupt Brenda's psychological progress. She and her husband, he said, needed to remove all doubts from their minds. They needed to do whatever it took to convince themselves they hadn't made a mistake. The Reimers vowed to keep trying.</p>
<p>But staving off doubt became harder and harder once the twins started school. Brenda showed no interest in hopscotch, skipping rope, or any other girl games. He only wanted to roughhouse with the boys. Uninterested in the girls but rejected by the boys, Brenda wound up friendless, teased, confused, miserable, and struggling to succeed academically, even though tests revealed he had a normal IQ.</p>
<p>Brenda was severely struggling. Each year, the Reimers would take Brenda (and Brian) to visit Dr. Money in Baltimore. And each year, it became clearer things weren't going to plan. By 1972, after five years after intense social conditioning (not to mention the removal of all Bruce's male sex organs), Brenda was still running around acting just like a boy. The experiment wasn't working, and Money knew it.</p>
<p>And yet, despite this, it was in that very year that Money decided to unveil his experiment to the public (without disclosing the twins's identity)<i>...and proclaim it a huge, unqualified success</i>. He did so for the first time at a Washington, DC meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of (um) Science (no irony there or anything). Time Magazine covered Money's triumphant announcement in their next issue, running an adulatory full-page story on the great man's thrilling scientific discovery.</p>
<p>That same week, Money's new book came out. Entitled<span> </span><i>Man Woman Boy Girl</i>, it also reported the "successful" experiment on Brenda. The book also included Money's first public response to Milton Diamond. Diamond was wrong, Money wrote. His "successful" twins experiment proved it. In fact, Diamond was more than wrong; he had been "instrumental in wrecking the lives of unknown numbers of hermaphroditic youngsters". In short, Money was Good, Diamond was Evil. Everyone should follow John Money. Everyone should reject Milton Diamond.</p>
<p>The buzz over Money's book and his breakthrough discovery was everywhere. Even the New York Times Book Review weighed in, proclaiming Money's new book "the most important volume in the social sciences to appear since the Kinsey reports". For their part, feminists hailed Money's successful experiment as vindication of everything they'd been saying for years.</p>
<p>The verdict was in, the science was settled: sexual identity and sex roles essentially had no basis in biology. Social environment was what mattered. John Money, the embodiment of science, had proved it.</p>
<p>At least, John Money<span> </span><i>said</i><span> </span>he had proved biology didn't matter. Depressingly, merely him saying he had proved it was all it took for society's most influential people to believe he had. Seven years prior, Milton Diamond had indirectly chastised the scientific community for uncritically accepting John Money's preposterous claims of psychosexual neutrality at birth. Diamond had shown Money's claims to be not just false, but absurd, and the precise opposite of what the scientific data showed. Yet now, seven years later, that same scientific community was still uncritically accepting Money's claims. For hundreds, even thousands, of scientists and doctors and therapists around the world, the evidence didn't matter. Only following the leader mattered. And their leader was John Money.</p>
<p>As 1973 unfolded, Money's future looked bright. His report of his "successful" experiment had neutralized Milton Diamond as a rival, and relegated him to effectual irrelevance. Money could see no other challengers on the horizon. As a result, his ideas—many of which he had not yet revealed—could soon impact society more than he'd ever dreamed. A strain of proto-Wokist ideology was, even in that moment, assembling itself upon Money's claims, and linking itself to sibling strains in other fields.</p>
<p>But first, Money needed to deal with the little matter of the uncooperative Brenda. If the Reimers would not or could not socially condition the boy into behaving like a girl, Money would have to do so himself. The Reimers' annual visit was coming up. It was time for Money to get his "successful" experiment back on track, no matter what it took.</p>
<p>(Note: Much of the information I have presented here has come from John Colapinto's definitive account,<span> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/As-Nature-Made-Him-Raised/dp/0061120561/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">"As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl"</a>).</p>
<p><a href="https://www.steynonline.com/11587/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy-part-xvi" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.steynonline.com/11587/tal-bachman-we-have-met-the-enemy...</a></p>
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