Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll wonders: HOW DID YOU KNOW YOUR GENDER? She writes:

It is hard not to conclude when listening to leftists discuss “gender” that a mass insanity has befallen our nation. From one loon who speculates that we all “know in the womb” what our “authentic” gender is, we skipped merrily to the notion that all those X and Y chromosomes count for spit and biological sex itself is just a social construct. And then it follows that our biological sex is just “assigned.”

Yup. Doctors with decades of medical experience are givin’ it their best guess. Probably a conspiracy with Big Cigars that used to produce the “It’s a BOY!” and “It’s a GIRL!” cigars proud daddies gave out to their friends. Haven’t had a baby in half a century so don’t know if that is still a thing.

It’s particularly galling – isn’t it? – that the same people who claim that an unborn baby, who doesn’t even know it’s a human, “knows” it’s a male or a female, but yet every woman should have the unfettered right to kill this sentient creature anyway, up to and including, the moment of birth.

The spokes-cretins for the “trans-community,” many of whom still have their original factory parts, are nuts. Never forget that. Nobody should take biological advice from them any more than you would take agricultural advice from the “farmers” in the short-lived commune called CHAZ. And yet about 15 minutes after we were assured that sex was “assigned,” the AMA called for Birth Certificates to make no mention of the sex of a newborn. Everyone fell in line like a long row of upright dominoes knocked over by a cat. How in the WORLD did that happen with such breakneck speed?

So let me ask YOU ALL: WHEN and HOW did you know whether you were a boy or girl? (Which is not AT ALL “when did you know what sex you were attracted to?” I know several gay people of both sexes and, while they are attracted to others of the same sex, had no doubt that they were male or female!)

My speculation is that ONE way you learned what sex you were was when you were repeatedly told that you were a “good little girl.” Or a “naughty little boy.” Or vice versa. You might have been dressed differently. You may have been offered different toys. But it is an outright lie to assert as the ’60s feminists did that girls were physically PREVENTED from playing with trucks and blocks in kindergarten and mercilessly herded into the doll corner where we stared wistfully at the verboten blocks. What I remember most about kindergarten was napping. And one creepy little boy named Keith who ate library paste.

Then there’s peer exploration. Soon enough every little girl and boy — siblings, cousins or playmates — at age 3, 4, 5 or so, come up with the idea of comparing innies and outies. It’s almost always a bit of a letdown — “Huh! THAT’S weird!” — but it definitely confirms that boys and girls are “different.”

As for parents, if you were lucky enough to have two, traditionally one was of each sex and you resembled one of them more. My parents had very defined roles. Daddy went out to work and hunted, fished, and golfed in his spare time, at least until we got television.

Mama kept a spotless house and nurtured three children. She cooked and baked pretty much continuously. She could whip up a Butterscotch or Pecan Pie in about 10 minutes, including the flaky homemade crust (the secret is lard, more’s the pity). You could count on one hand the number of times we ate in a restaurant in a given year and even then, Mama calculated what SHE could have made the meal for – and without a crazy 10 percent tip!

You can take the girl out of the Depression, but you can’t take the Depression out of the girl. She worked all day and then in late afternoon bathed, fixed her hair, and put on a nice “housedress” and makeup for Daddy when he came home. She was a lady to her core.

But only an aggrieved ideologue would claim this was the whole story. Or assert that the gender roles are so rigid that a little boy could not enjoy a movie like Frozen and a little girl couldn’t long for a pair of cowboy boots without concluding that the only obvious solution was to mutilate and sterilize the nonconforming children. No, life is and PEOPLE are far more nuanced and complicated.

To wit: My mother was a tough old farm girl who could break an apple in half with just her bare hands. She was proud that I was also strong physically. Until puberty when The Evil Toxic Testosterone tipped the scales every time, I could challenge most of the guys in the neighborhood and at least wrestle to a tie. Oddly, after puberty, the wrestling offers continued…but by then I had retired.

Mother played catcher on the Ladies Church League softball team. When we had neighborhood games, the teenage boys vied to have her on their team – “We get Mrs. Baumbach,” they would yell, “You guys get Susan.” Arggh.

I learned my love of sports from HER, not from Daddy. She was a diehard Twins, Vikings, and Timberwolves fan, win, lose or lose some more, and rarely missed a game on TV or radio. She adored broadcaster Bert Blyleven and wrote him a supportive note when he got in a spot of trouble for accidentally blurting the “F” word when he didn’t know he was on the air. NOBODY in the wide world hated the “F” word more than my mother, but she was a loyalist to the max. Oh, by the way, classy Bert wrote her a handwritten thank-you note back.

At the same time, she was famously known as a “Baby Whisperer” who could calm any crying child, whether at Walmart, church, or the DQ. I had seen her many times approach a crying child of any race or gender, speak softly to him or her, and the child would put out its little arms and go to her with complete trust. I worried that some parent might freak out and she might get in trouble, but the little ones loved her, and the parents were in too much shock to object.

Daddy was somewhere to the right of Barry Goldwater, but he clearly expected every bit of academic effort and competitive spirit from me as he would have from any son. He never said there was a single thing I couldn’t do “because I was a girl.” So there would have been no NEED for me to “become” a faux boy. In fact, I don’t recall hearing that from ANYBODY growing up, and I am very old! The single exception was my maternal grandmother, who thought little girls should sit on a couch (she called it a davenport) and embroider and look pretty. She was born in 1888, for God’s sake! My other granny was more “modern.”

Various entities might have TRIED to make gender into a rigid confine. In 1958 for the musical, Flower Drum Song, Oscar Hammerstein wrote these (abbreviated) insipid lyrics to “I Enjoy Being A Girl.” I was 12 years old and I thought the song was so stupid it had to be a parody:

I’m a girl and by me that’s only great
I am proud that my silhouette is curvy
That I walk with a sweet and girlish gait
With my hips kind of swivelly and swervy
I adore being dressed in something frilly
When my date comes to get me at my place
Out I go with my Joe or John or Billy
Like a filly who is ready for the race
I flip when a fellow sends me flowers
I drool over dresses made of lace
I talk on the telephone for hours
With a pound and a half of cream upon my face

That description of a girl bore no relationship to my life or to the life of any girl I knew. It is, in fact, the perfect description of an over-the-top drag queen. But when I failed to live up to the behavior of the “girl” in this song, did this make me think I must be a BOY and should rush out and get a double mastectomy? It did not.

I think the whole concept of a diagnosable medical condition called “dysphoria” is wildly overblown. I believe it affects a tiny number of the trans faddists. The rest are sadistic and mediocre male athletes who enjoy crushing females, criminals trying to get out of men’s prisons, people vying to be an entitled victim, deeply disturbed individuals who think maybe THIS will fix everything, and hundreds, if not thousands, of female teenage hysterics who got bored with Salem witches, eating disorders, and cutting themselves.

But that is not to say it could never happen. So I want to take a moment to talk about ONE transsexual whom I knew about personally, though I never met her. I will call her “her” out of respect and tell you why in a moment. (Short answer: I think she earned it.)

A young man named Bob Sylvester was a married, well-connected political Democrat in Minnesota, at one point President of the St. Paul City Council. For whatever reason I neither understand nor need to, way back in 1983, 40 years before the current fad, he desperately chose to become a woman. As far as I know, he didn’t want to convince anyone else to do so, nor did he expect any special privileges. He aspired to be a WOMAN, not a trans person.

He became Susan Kimberly and continued to work in politics for both Mayor Latimer of St. Paul, MN, a Democrat, and, eventually, for Norm Coleman, a Republican. (I know both men well and wrote campaign speeches for Norm.) Neither man would have been looking to check a diversity box back then – they would have been looking for competence and intelligence.

Susan Kimberly has lived as a woman for decades, quietly and with dignity. She is not flamboyant, but rather a sweet-looking, modestly dressed middle-aged woman. Neither does she insist that “Bob Sylvester” is her “dead” name. She acknowledges her history but has said she thinks she would have killed herself had she not transitioned. It’s hard not to take that as good coin even if I can’t get my head around it.

Susan Kimberly said two striking things in an interview. One, — unlike the hysterics who charge that anything short of full-throated approval is tantamount to “genocide” – she said that transitioning, “…was one of the most amazingly positive experiences in my life and I was expecting the worst.” She was not a victim of “genocide.” She was not “hated.” Then she added that she “lost more friends when she became a Republican than when she became a woman.” Isn’t that rich? Haters gotta hate.