And in sports news:

An adult biological male who identifies as a woman edged out a 13-year-old girl to take first place in a women’s skateboarding contest held in New York Saturday.

Sometimes reality is a little too on-the-nose.

Update, via the comments, where Melofon adds,

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire takes a brave stand in favour of … the tradition and competitive integrity of the sport of women’s skateboarding. Opening itself up to the (correct) rebuttal that it has no interest in skateboarding or women in skateboarding, and is only covering it to pick on the tranny.

Well, I doubt that ladies’ skateboarding is a regular topic of conversation at the Daily Wire, or among its readers, but the particulars of the sport are not the thing that’s most interesting. There is a wider context, of which the above is very much part. I would guess that readers are more likely to be interested in the pretence that unwell men can become women, seemingly by dint of wishing, and are therefore to be admitted, unopposed, into women’s sports and women’s intimate spaces. The Daily Wire’s readers may even regard this trend, correctly, as pretentious, unrealistic, and unhappy in its implications.

To register this phenomenon – and its wide and rapid spread – as noteworthy is rather more than, as Melofon puts it, picking on the tranny.

More details of the skateboarding saga can be found here.

Readers will note that several wins by dysmorphic men have occurred in women’s skateboarding, and that female players who aren’t entirely happy with this arrangement find themselves assailed by trans activists for daring to complain. Again, the issue isn’t ladies’ skateboarding as such, but rather the ongoing and widespread efforts to normalise something that’s quite odd, one might say surreal, and often unjust.

If another example is required, one that shows, quite vividly, just how awry things can get…

Christopher Rufo mingles with the dysmorphics of “Decolonizing Gender”: 

The panellists represented a wide range of idiosyncratic identities, expressed in a mixture of New Age and intersectional language—the more obscure and oppressed, the greater the status within the community. The main presenter, trans activist Malcolm Shanks, said he was a descendant of black slaves and Taíno tribesmen and “used to identify as gender fluid,” but has been “identifying more recently as a little bit more gaseous or plasma-like.”

Needless to say, the educational content is somewhat outlandish, often farcical and stupefying – essentially, a shit test for the neurotic, the credulous and the chronically pretentious. Mr Ganesha Gold Buffalo, for instance, a trans activist and prostitute, tells us that his expertise is rooted in “Waking up at four in the morning, five in the morning, every morning, to sounds of my ancestors screaming from outside my window, coming from the ground, coming from the earth.” His mind, we learn, “was decolonised” in nearby woods by howling “nature spirits.” Mr Buffalo, who identifies as many things, bemoans his “constant struggle under colonialism,” and his need for affirmation as a woman with a penis:

I one-hundred percent want to still be able to look in the mirror and see every part of myself as a woman, see every part of myself as a two-spirit trans woman, a beautiful being: my moustache, all of my facial hair, my untrimmed brows, my fat ass, my belly, my big dick, everything.

Other participants – again, self-styled educators – air equally challenging demands, including a belief that they should be addressed with seemingly random words, depending on whim and state of mind at any given time. “I want you to call me ‘Mommy,’ ‘Queen,’ ‘Daddy,’ if I want you to,” says Randy Ford, a transgender activist for the Lavender Rights Project, and whose pronouns are she, her, and goddess. Other terms of address include cyborg, unicorn, and Wakanda.

Along with the lists of stipulated pronouns and honorifics, and repeated demands for cash “reparations,” and tales of ghostly visitations by long-dead ancestors, the decolonisers of gender also share their extensive scientific knowledge. Specifically, that “There’s no such thing as male genes or female hormones or a male body.” You see, these things, which don’t exist, are merely diabolical constructs of the white devil. Hence the reparations, of course.

Videos of the bedlamites and their teachings can be found here.

The organisations mentioned in the piece all receive taxpayer funding, and all have programmes aimed at children.

A tearful tale, care of Kelsey Smoot, “a cultural and gender theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet”:

As a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them/theirs pronouns as my terms of address, I suppose I should be celebrating this influx of discourse on the proper usage of pronouns. Truthfully, I’m exhausted.

Exhausted. Because of course them is. And issuing all those terms of address can really take it out of a girl, even one with chin fluff.

Within several of my closest relationships, the fact that I require ungendered pronouns when referring to me in the third person has become the source of deep strain and disappointment.

Specifically,

I feel duped by some of the positive reactions from my friends and loved ones when I initially came out as transmasc/nonbinary. In retrospect, that was the easy part. I was the only one changing.

More specifically,

In the years since, I have come to find that I am in constant competition with my past. For a while, I flinched when I was misgendered but said nothing. Then, I began giving gentle reminders, followed by long-winded overtures of understanding. I felt guilty and embarrassed and made sure to emphasize that effort was all that mattered to me. Recently, though, I’ve begun pushing back: “You’ll have to do better” is my new refrain.

And who wouldn’t want a friendship based on an ultimatum? A demand that you will perceive what you are told to perceive. The issue, it seems, is that friends and relatives who have known Ms Smoot for some time, as a young woman and a girl, aren’t finding it easy to pretend or to forget what they know. And what they know necessarily casts some doubt on the whole themness business.

In diverse-identity news,

Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public.

If you detect dissonance in the headline, you’re a very bad person, obviously.

Chloe Thompson, 42, was caught rubbing herself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself in an alley in Middlesbrough, Teesside, on August 13 last year. A couple shouted at her and she ran away. On the same day, she exposed herself on the street where she lives and thrust her hips into a fence. A witness said Thompson looked at her and the group she was with “as if Thompson wanted them to notice her.” Once she was inside her house, she exposed her bum and thrust against her window.

And remember to steer clear of the words mental health issues. These are merely “challenges,” according to Judge Stephen Carroll.

Update:

In the comments, Mags highlights the woke dishonesties in the quoted paragraph:

Chloe Thompson, 42, was caught rubbing herself himself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself himself in an alley in Middlesbrough, Teesside, on August 13 last year. A couple shouted at her him and she he ran away. On the same day, she he exposed herself himself on the street where she he lives and thrust her his hips into a fence. A witness said Thompson looked at her and the group she was with “as if Thompson wanted them to notice her him.” Once she he was inside her his house, she he exposed her his bum and thrust against her his window.

FTFY

It is faintly surreal, even setting aside the novel use of a wheelie bin. And Thompson’s history of indecency and molesting children.

I can understand the reluctance to appear indelicate or to cause needless offence, and in some situations there may be scope for polite fudging. But pretending-as-default, or worse, pretending-as-law, can lead to unhappy farce and a kind of collective derangement. And the media presenting the reader with an obvious distortion of reality, and seemingly an expectation that we should all pretend too, is also rather offensive.

Also, open thread.

Further to the previous post, Charles Cooke on transgender activism and the price of indulging it:

That “as a mother” claim is utterly astonishing — a true jump-the-shark moment. Even if one were to agree with every single biological idea that is offered up by the transgender movement, there is simply no way of looking at history that could turn Don Ellis into the “mother” of the children he fathered. That Ellis is not his children’s mother is a fact, a certitude, a cosmic verity. It is true now, it was true then, it will be true forever.

I have two children. They were carried — and then delivered — by my wife. If I were to decide tomorrow that I identify as a woman, I daresay that some people would believe (or, at least, indulge me in) my fantasy. But that toleration wouldn’t — and couldn’t — change the historical fact that I did not give birth to my kids, and that I am, in fact, their dad. Perhaps, in such a strange circumstance, I would want to be my children’s mother. But I would not be so, and to say otherwise would be to tell a preposterous, revisionist lie.

The rather lively exchange mentioned by Mr Cooke can be found here, along with additional information:

Ennis (a biological male) was married to a woman and fathered three children. At the age of 49, he split with his wife of 17 years and publicly declared himself to be a woman. Ennis later went back to identifying as a man, then switched again for the third time, and currently presents as a woman.

At which point, readers may wish to ponder the assumption that Mr Ennis’ transition to an approximation of womanhood is something to applaud, and applaud wholeheartedly, as if brave but never selfish, as if such behaviour could have no hurtful consequences for others. One wonders, for instance, how the actual mother of his children feels about her erasure, her usurpation. Likewise, have his children not lost a father? Have his parents and siblings not lost someone who is, or was, as real to them as any professed identity?

Also by Mr Cooke and very much related:

I would like to know who is fooled by this. My suspicion is that almost nobody is fooled by this, but that almost everybody is scared to admit that in public.

The cost of indulging transgender activism has been illustrated here before, quite vividly.

Via Darleen.