Aggressive, Shrieking, Drowning Us Out

The Gender Cult Reveals Its True Colors Yet Again, This Time in Port Townsend, Washington.

One of the signs held by an aggressive mob denying women the chance to speak about men in women’s locker rooms. (Port Townsend, WA, Aug. 15, 2022)

Those who have concerns about Gender Identity Ideology attempted to speak yesterday in the picturesque little town of Port Townsend, on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.  Within minutes of commencing our news conference and Speaker’s Corner, a sprawling mob of self-appointed guardians against “Nazis”, “TERFs” and other evils of the world, descended to make sure we could not be heard.  The ironic thing is that the obnoxious self-righteous mob that treated our free speech rights and our personal space like things to be crushed had absolutely no clue that they themselves exemplify the evils they claim to fight.  Or that the people they attacked stand for the rights of gays and lesbians, freedom from oppressive gender roles, freedom of expression, and other human rights, and have been doing so all our lives.  Or that the Gender Identity Ideology they espouse is decidedly misogynistic, homophobic, appropriative of indigenous cultures, and destructive of lives.

The impetus for our event was the local YMCA banning Julie Jaman from its pool, after she told a man (who identifies as a woman) to leave the women’s locker room.  Jaman is  80 years old and had been swimming at the Y regularly for decades.

Julie Jaman speaking over the din.

Amy Sousa holds back the mob as Julie speaks a couple of feet away from her.

As I said at the event in a statement that few could hear over the din, neither the Y nor the City are trying to get rid of sex-segregated spaces.  They agree that it’s fine to have separate locker rooms for men and women.  In their minds, they do have sex-segregated locker rooms, and no men are going into the women’s locker room.

They make that claim through the magic of Gender Identity Ideology.  A core tenet of that Ideology is that we should redefine vital words like “man” and “woman.”  We’re supposed to toss away objective consistent science-based definitions, replacing them with shifting subjective ones based in individual feelings and declarations.  In the Gender Identity faith, a woman becomes “anyone who identifies as a woman.”  This is absurd.  That definition is obviously circular, and it renders the term “woman” absolutely meaningless.

Nonetheless I staunchly defend the right of every individual to believe whatever they want, including believing in “gender identities” and irrational definitions for themselves.

But there is another core tenet of Gender Identity Ideology:  everyone must share their beliefs.  Everyone has to be part of the Gender faith.  We must accept insane new definitions for vital words, and the erasure of sex-based rights that flow from those.  Anyone who doesn’t comply will be labeled hateful, violent, a bigot or worse.  We will be canceled:  fired from our jobs, banned from the pool, denied the ability to publish and to give speeches, and much more. (See Part IV of my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy for a sobering list of punishments meted out with links to the stories of people enduring those punishments.)

At its core, Gender Identity Ideology is deeply coercive.  And what happened in Port Townsend last night could not have illustrated that more clearly.  One after another we stood at the mic, attempting to share our thoughts, only to be drowned out by very loud non-stop yelling, music played on boom-boxes, honking, and other noise.

With the veins on their foreheads standing out and intense hatred in their eyes, the mob members chanted in unison at the top of their lungs things like “No hate here.”  Many gave us the middle finger as they screamed.  The mob surrounded us and pushed inward, forcing themselves closer and closer to the speakers.  Numerous mob members aggressively wormed there way forward to hold banners and signs right in front of the speakers, and to be able to yell loudly within feet of them.  A couple of men squirmed their way forward on the ground like snakes among us, periodically laying still or kneeling with heads down –which created a major tripping hazard.  I nearly fell to the ground over one of these young men and I bent down to calmly ask him to stop, pointing out that he was putting people at risk of serious injury, but he didn’t care.  Some mob members grabbed at things we were holding, attempted to run off with our Women’s Suffrage banners, and engaged in similar attempted thefts.  Some reports indicate that some of us were assaulted, but I did not witness that. (Addendum Aug 17th: Assaults against us did happen. By no means the only example, see video footage here of a man pushing non-stop into a man, and grabbing at a woman behind him, eventually pulling off her shoe. Others are compiling data on the assaults and thefts. Follow Amy Sousa at @KnownHeretic for more on this.)

The sign holder made sure to give the author the finger as I passed by him. (Port Townsend, August 15, 2022)

The goal of the obnoxious self-righteous mob that surrounded and hounded us last night was to make sure we could not be heard.  Gender Identity ideologues rely on this as a main tactic because they are incapable of responding in an informed and persuasive manner to what we have to say.  Their ideology is incoherent and nonsensical.  The so-called evidentiary basis for their claims is easily dismantled.  To keep their Ideology afloat, they stifle any dissenting voices.

The crowd made raucous noise non-stop to prevent speakers from being heard. Others like this man forced their way forward and held things in front to the speakers to keep people from seeing them.

My latest encounter with the Gender Identity Mob redoubles my commitment to fight this oppressive regressive Ideology.  But it also frightens and saddens me.

It really is quite something to witness scores upon scores of people, many quite young, mindlessly shrieking irrational mantras in unison.  And eagerly doing everything in their power to suppress the free speech rights of people they don’t know whom they dutifully believe to be the enemy.  Gender Identity Ideology is a Cult.  Last night we were surrounded by large numbers of people who have been thoroughly brainwashed.  What happened in Port Townsend is a sad commentary on the state of our world.

It is heart-wrenching to see how easily people can be persuaded to hate and attack individuals who are actually their friends.  Women whose words were drowned out last night have fought for human rights and freedom from sexist oppression their whole lives.  They helped to establish freedoms the shrieking mob members take for granted.

It is equally heart-wrenching to see how readily people can be convinced to fight for something that is 100% at odds with what they think they’re supporting.  The mob members last night had no idea that they’re supporting homophobia-on-steroids, that they’re reinstating the most vile of sexist stereotypes, and that they’re directly undercutting children’s ability to live full true healthy lives.

Perhaps saddest of all is the fact that the mob members in Port Townsend last night believe that their unconscionable actions illustrate how to make the world a better place.  Their idea of “solidarity” is organizing with others in the Cult to demonize and cancel people with different perspectives. 

Can you imagine if the energy they spend on things like their shenanigans last night went instead to organizing for much-needed changes in our world, like getting beyond capitalism, for example.  Tragically, many in the mob that attacked us likely think that they are fighting capitalism by “rejecting the gender binary”, i.e. that their rejection of the reality of binary sex in humans somehow destabilizes the oligarchs that rule the world.  They are completely unaware of the Big Pharma- and Big Tech-enriched billionaires who have bankrolled Gender Ideology’s rapid rise.  They don’t grasp that encouraging body dissociation and the purchase of bodies that “align with gender identities” feeds into mega profits for corporations that will sell all sorts of other “better” body parts and “augmentations” in the future.

It was no fun being attacked by a mob of Gender Cultists.  The whole experience was disheartening and at times downright frightening.  It was frustrating to be undercut in sharing our perspectives and thoughts on an important issue.  We wanted to speak about why banning Julie Jaman from the YMCA pool is an outrage.  We wanted to share information about the damage to women that flows from imposing Gender Identity Ideology’s beliefs on everyone.  Many women wanted to tell their own painful stories about why women-only spaces are important to them. 

A teeming mob of self-righteous Gender Cult members who don’t understand the first thing about civil rights and justice harassed and attempted to silence us.  And in their minds, they succeeded.

But while it is true that the mob drowned out our voices at the park in Port Townsend, we will be heard.  Through Amy Sousa’s live stream of the event, other recordings, and articles like this, we will share not only what we wanted to say, but also the despicable actions of the Port Townsend Gender Identity mob.  Those actions illustrate extremely well the coercive regressive nature of the Ideology they espouse. 

Here is a link to Amy Sousa’s livestream video:

Please share it widely.  And watch Amy’s twitter handle (@KnownHeretic )

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