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What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. - JD SalingerTaylor Swift’s concerts have become cultural phenomenons, religious-like experiences for so many people worldwide, especially little girls. Happy moms post videos of their flushed, excited faces and near-hysteria at the first sight of their idol.It’s girl world, to be sure. But it’s also become, like so many other things in American culture, LGBTQIA world too, like the upcoming Barbie movie is sure to be. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere left that belongs only to girls. From locker rooms to sports to clothes and makeup, girls are vanishing. Recently, Taylor Swift “got political,” and was no doubt backed into a corner by activists demanding she take a loud public side against what they believe are “harmful” laws hurting their community. Which laws? They don’t say, and you aren’t allowed to ask. They’re all bad, they insist. You’re with us, or you’re against us. There is one law growing in prominence not just here but in other countries too, and that’s to put the breaks on “gender-affirming care” for minors. But if you support gay marriage or you want to be a good ally, you have to go along with that too, you have to be part of a movement that is sterilizing children legally, in the United States in 2023. Most people, including Taylor Swift, have no idea just how bad things have gotten. I too was mostly unaware of what “gender-affirming care” actually means. I also didn’t know how bad things had gotten for women in sports. Denying biological reality seems to be something fundamentalist religions do, not educated liberal societies, yet here we are, insisting trans women are women. They can believe that if they want to but it doesn’t make it true. The media does such an expert job of pandering to activists, pretending like it’s a small percentage of athletes. But the truth is that there is widespread suppression of dissent and a climate of fear that keeps so many from speaking out about how this is not just a tiny movement anymore. It’s the core identity and belief of the Democratic Party. They can’t see this as a social contagion because that news never enters their feedback loop. All they hear, over and over again, is “protect trans kids.” Does protecting them include making them infertile? Does it include surgery that creates a false opening that must be dilated several times a day, or it closes up? Does it mean eliminating their sexual function? For life?Standing up to any of it is hard. We all saw what happened to JK Rowling. The activists are out in force, patrolling reading lists, science labs, school libraries, and all media outlets. Just in writing this, I run the risk of losing everything. But so what? I’ll take my talking points from exiled scientists - the new heretics of our time, like evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein:As long as we still have a First Amendment, there is no justifiable reason to stay silent on something so urgent. Controlling speech has been the only reason this madness has gone as far as it has. But thankfully, the voices of dissent are getting louder, and there is strength in numbers. When Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, struck a deal with the Daily Wire to stream What is a Woman on the first day of Pride, they got spooked enough to pull the deal unless they removed two scenes they labeled “hate speech.” One of those scenes included a desperate father who had been charged with child abuse for misgendering his own daughter, as he fought to stop her from life-altering medical intervention.Thankfully, Musk stepped in and put the kibosh on Twitter censorship, even tweeting out the film to his followers. By the end of the weekend, it had been viewed close to 200 million times. Because of Matt Walsh standing up and speaking out, and because Elon Musk bought Twitter, more people know about what goes on behind closed doors at gender clinics, at universities, and in the minds of so many well-meaning politicians. How is it we have arrived in 2023 and the people sticking up for truth, science, and reason are the Conservative Christians?Here are some of the film’s best scenes:The activists have pushed the American public too far. While most everyone was accepting of gay rights and gay marriage, they kept moving the line. Now, elementary schools are making Pride somehow part of their curriculum. But Pride isn’t what it used to be. It’s not the many gay parents I got to know while I was raising my daughter. It’s now expanded like a mushroom cloud to include this unforgivable abuse of minor children under the Orwellian term “medical care.” At this point, I know beyond any doubt that there is no fixing the Left. There is only leaving - leave the schools, leave the therapists, leave the online bubbles, vote them out. Here is Ben Shapiro on the growing backlash:Too many moms now are finding their march toward progress nothing but feet getting stuck in the mud, unable to move, trapped in a movement that seeks to erase them and minimize their power as mothers. Some moms found out all too well, and all too late. “America is Wrong” but Heather was RightDooce, aka Heather Armstrong, came up alongside Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman as mommy bloggers with great cameras who recorded their daily struggles raising their kids. But Dooce would never get a cooking show on the Food Network nor sell merch like an air fryer with her personal design on it. But she was a great writer who was funny and brilliant, and there is no doubt she loved her kids. Much to the shock of her longtime readers like me, she killed herself last month after a long battle with depression and a relapse into alcoholism.Dooce had two daughters. The younger daughter was Marlo (pictured above), the absolute girly girl. Dooce described this aspect of Marlo’s personality often. She loved tea parties, pink dresses, makeup, and princess costumes but had emerged in our post-2020 dystopia as a “non-binary they.” When I saw this on Dooce’s Instagram, I immediately thought, oh, there she goes again. Surfing the latest trend, so of course, one of her kids would be trans. She’ll get much mileage out of this online with all of those Good Liberal White Women clucking about, using the correct pronouns, and settling into the only activism they have left. But something wasn’t adding up in my mind. I wasn’t sure why. Something made me think more deeply about Dooce, her kids, and her suicide. Was there a story there? Then I saw this from NBC news:Armstrong’s impulse to put her most private feelings on display occasionally forced her readers to reckon with sentiments they might have found troubling. In a lengthy blog post published in August 2022, most notably, she expressed views some deemed transphobic.The post in which she wrote "Biological gender is scientific" and "we are tossing around these pronouns like goddamn candy" was later removed. But some fans remained disappointed; some said they stopped reading her blog.And even after her suicide, a tweet by Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter (she/her/hers) says: “After almost 20 years, I stopped reading @dooce after her terrible TERF moment last year, but I always hoped she would come out of that so I could delight in her singular voice again. I hope she has found peace, and I ache for her loved ones.”No matter what else Dooce was, no matter how “delightful” her voice, women like Rosenleaf Ritter drew the line at her opinion on trans issues, even when trying to save her daughter’s future. That is why there is no saving the Left. Fanaticism has obliterated objective truth and humanity itself. Heather was, more than anything else, a good mother. She knew both of her daughters well, and had tracked their lives for years on her blog, with loving, hilarious, tender detail. What came flooding back when I unlocked my memories of reading Dooce all of these years — her daughter Marlo was a girly girl!Does the above photo, Princess in the Garden, look like gender dysphoria in any way, shape or form? Or does that look like an adorable girly girl? If there was a textbook definition of what the Gender Cult thinks defines a girl early on, Marlo would be it. I don’t go along with the idea that there are such well-defined gender stereotypes. I know this isn’t true from my own experience and watching my daughter grow up. Neither of us fit what they would call upon to decide what gender we were. But never in that time did any of us even consider, for one second, whether we were girls or not. So what exactly was so offensive as to make so many of Dooce’s readers turn on her? While her post, America is Wrong, has been deleted, it’s still available on the Wayback Machine. It is a long, rambling, desperately sad depression spiral that was a clear sign she was in trouble mentally, emotionally, and physically. In it, she already confesses to having attempted suicide. But just as she heads for the edge of the cliff, with nothing to lose, she lays it out, all of it, the whole ugly truth of what she and every honest mother knows, otherwise known as “Her Terrible TERF moment.” She wrote:For the kids who are still with me — and you’re still with me, right? You can trust me, and I need you to believe that. It will become very clear why. I may be a little scary because no one in your life is allowed to talk to you about gender dysphoria.Those words are super loud and clarion clear to all of you, aren’t they.Gender dysphoria. There. I said it again.Every adult in your life has been told by the government to AFFIRM AFFIRM AFFIRM your gender dysphoria because you are out there co-opting suicidal ideation. You are throwing that phrase around as if you own it, as if you have any f*****g idea what it means.Yes. I am calling you out, too. All of you. And I will calm down a little bit, maybe, because you need to be able to trust someone who loves you. And I love you more than you will ever comprehend because I am you.And she continued:White progressive moms, I am talking to you now. And I have no f*cks to give should any of this hurt your feelings. I feel your pain, too, because when my they/them told me they wanted to change their pronouns I believed they were riding this massive cultural shift in acceptance and inclusion.But I was wrong. America is f*cking wrong.During my recovery process I began to realize that I was not asking the right questions about what we think is a radical new way of celebrating diversity.White progressive moms, are you asking yourselves the right questions? Maybe you should so that I don’t have to do the work for you. But since none of you are doing the work, lean in close and let me give you the answers to the questions you won’t ask.Gender dysphoria is social contagion.Should your theys and thems be afraid to read this or disinterested in the manic rambling spiral of some looney white anorexic on the internet, this part is for you and your kids together. Read this part together calling upon the pain of your childhood that in hindsight might have made you realize that your girls are experiencing normal human sadness. They are teenagers. They were once your precious baby girls.They are experiencing the same sadness you experienced when you were their age.Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.Let me say it again, and you need to repeat this over and over again to your girls. Every single day for the rest of their lives because WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE:Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.This was her Marlo - the textbook “girl” by their own definition of what defines a girl. How does a gender clinician talk their way around this?Heather posted this photo of her own withering body, to emphasize the damage caused by a lifetime of body dysmorphia. You’d think, given that, a little bit of sympathy would be on offer for all of her pain. But no. She has broken the sacred trust of the Ordnung and for that, she must pay.And a Tweet from Fatemeh Khatibloo that says:So. Heather Armstrong (aka as Dooce) has, in one utterly unhinged post:1) Outed herself as a TERF parent to a non-binary child2) Demeaned neurodiverse adults everywhere3) Co-opted the pain and lives of Black women4) Disappeared Black trans women entirelyThis poem on Heather’s Instagram, and the accompanying photo, reveals how hard it was for her and what it would mean to abandon everything she knew about her child. She might have seen Marlo’s transition as her mental health issues visited upon her youngest, despite the therapy, despite the self-help, despite being a “good liberal” and doing everything right. But that isn’t true. Like so many young girls, Marlo has been taken in by a movement that looks a lot like a cult that gives her the acceptance every adolescent needs. Does any of this mean her daughter, the gender clinics, the internet or any external forces are responsible for Heather’s suicide? Absolutely not. That was her decision to end her life, just as it was her decision as one of the mommy bloggers to put that life, and the lives of her children, online. But Heather left her daughter, and countless other girls a precious gift: a trail of breadcrumbs back to the real Marlo. It’s all there. The photos, the smiles, the stories, years and years of history - once a mommy blog, now an archaeological dig, a historical record of what really happened in the life of a young girly girl with curls, dimples, and a lisp. I can’t know what happened with Marlo, whether she was in the process of taking “T” or not, but Dooce’s desperation in America is Wrong is a warning. And that tells me that she was likely worried this was her daughter’s future, defined only by the drugs she would have to take for the rest of her life.Heather was not a TERF, which is a hateful slur to punish and control women to shut them up. She was a worried mother like so many worried mothers going up against such insurmountable forces, from Taylor Swift to the President of the United States.It shouldn’t be surprising that to gain control of our youth, they must first gain control of women by driving a wedge between them and their kids or co-opting them as happy cult members sending their kids into the lion’s den. But if there is one thing everyone knows to fear in the wild, it’s the Mama Bear. We are ferocious when it comes to protecting our young.One such Mama Bear is Megyn Kelly, who has taken on the fight too. Her explanation of why she will no longer use pronouns has recently earned almost 1 million views. It should go without saying that standing up for women and girls doesn’t mean being abusive or cruel to trans people. What they do as adults, how they choose to live, is their business, as long as it doesn’t mean trampling the rights of others to live the way they choose to live, to have fair competition in sports, to feel safe in locker rooms, and to mature fully as biological women, or men, before they decide to alter their bodies permanently. And don’t force us to go along with your version of reality. Don’t force us to say something that isn’t true or force us to use pronouns because no one should be forced to believe anything. That’s fascism. Despite Dooce’s declining mental state and her withering physical form, she had enough Mama Bear to risk even her carefully cultivated reputation to go up against her own audience and perhaps lose everything. That, right there, is true grit. Dooce.com is Heather Armstrong’s legacy. They can call her whatever they want. Her beautiful words will remain.She wrote:Dooce wrote: July 17, 2014 - My Little MermaidMarlo is currently obsessed with mermaids and not because of Disney, no. Leta has been watching an Australian show on Netflix called H2O: Just Add Water with Marlo tucked in on the couch beside her. She got several mermaid Barbies for her birthday and has been requesting that I leave her hair down “like a mermaid” before I send her to camp. Before I left for Southeast Asia I bought a passport cover in faux pink crocodile that she calls my mermaid wallet, and when I returned she claimed it as her own. This is one of those adorable yet at times annoying phases (if I let her she would swim in the bathtub “like a mermaid” for hours and hours) that I’m glad I’m documenting so that I can remember it years from now. And remind her that she used to sleep with my passport cover.Rest in Peace, Heather BArmstrong, AKA Dooce. You were right. America is wrong. But don’t worry, I got you. They’ve awakened the Mama Bears now, and they better run. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sashastone.com/subscribe