Dear Bari
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am cancelling my subscription to your newsletter. When you founded Common Sense following your resignation from the New York Times, I eagerly joined other like-minded citizens, who were sick of right and left wing extremes in a mass media that long ago became unhinged from reality. We joined you with “optimism and gratitude” at the birth of your offspring–a new medium that we could trust to tell us the truth.
Much to my disappointment, however, I have discovered, as Voltaire put it, that “common sense is not so common.” In your resignation letter to the New York Times you lamented how a “new consensus has emerged in the press...that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
Some truths are a “process of discovery” and hard work. Other truths are as plain and simple as the nose on your face–well established facts that we all know are true, correct, and right. You could and should have begun the March 6, 2022 “Honestly“ podcast episode (and your Common Sense newsletter article), “Watching Lia Thomas,” with the truth. Instead, you incredibly chose to state an outrageous lie: “Lia Thomas is a transgender woman, who is now the star of the women’s swim team at Penn…”
I know that you know what everyone else–the whole world–knows: Lia Thomas is not a woman. Lia Thomas is a man. A male (equipped with a penis, to boot, which he likes to swing around the women’s locker room, according to his teammates). Saying that Lia Thomas is a “transgender woman” is both a false statement and an asinine one, because the word “transgender” has no coherent meaning.
“Transgender” does not denote some extra category of humans for whom sex is irrelevant. The word “transgender” is gibberish. It’s meaningless genderjargon, made out of whole cloth and used to justify all manner of monstrosities and injustices. According to Webster, “transgender” means “relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth.” Webster further confirms that “gender identity” is meaningless, describing it as a “person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female.” In other words: nothing. No one has ever described what an “internal sense of sex”–or not sex–is like, because it cannot be described. I can’t describe what “female” feels like, because I don’t know what female feels like. I just am a female.
Why would you lead your podcast story with a sentence containing both an outright lie and incoherent poppycock? Why would you tell a blatant lie? Were you trying to be “nice” to someone? Many people claim to use the neologisms, the non sequiturs and pas prequiturs of gender religion, to be polite or “kind.” “I’m just trying to be respectful. Why can’t you?” This response, one of many cognitotoxic byproducts of gender ideology, is akin to Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims/hostages develop a positive, psychological bond with their abusers/captors while developing negative feelings toward anyone trying to set them free.
Words matter. Although you can’t give someone a shiner with a sentence, as aspiring victims claim, “words are weapons for all causes, good or bad.” An ideology based on lies that forces and manipulates others to tell lies is dangerous and evil. Spouting nonsensical poppycock you know to be false is not only harmful; it’s insulting. Why would you treat your subscribers and audience with such disrespect? Do you think we don’t know that Lia Thomas is a man? Do you think we are stupid? Do you think we signed up for this when we left the NYT and NPR monoculture for you?
Most Americans do not understand the real threat that this neo-religious “gender identity” ideology poses to all of us—especially women and girls. We’ve been told that "transgender" rights are a battle for civil rights, the “new gay rights battle.” That is another lie. There’s a big difference between asking people to accept you for who you are and demanding they accept you for who you are not. The average American has no civil rights that “trans” identified people don’t have. In fact, according to my definition of “trans,” I’m the one holding the short stick: “Trans” is a deluxe class citizenship that entitles you to unlimited taxpayer-funded cosmetic surgery, to force your neologisms on lesser-class citizens and to have them punished for insults, real or imagined, to your hallowed trans feelings. I’m sick of it all. I don’t want other people’s identity crises–deviously dressed up as a virtuous civil rights cause–forced on me everywhere I go. There is literally no place to hide from the Newspeak, rainbow debris, and unicorn farts of the public mental health menace called “trans.”
All of our civic institutions—government, law, media, academia, arts, and business—have been completely captured by the the pernicious cult of “gender identity” and a very wealthy and powerful “gender industry” which seeks to abolish sex from life as we know it. Most Americans* are completely ignorant of how firmly the tentacles of the gender cult have suckered in U.S. society and law, because the mainstream media are engaged in a calculated and coordinated effort to hide that fact from us. We–and especially you, Bari–should all be asking why.
*PS: If you believe that “the most vulnerable people on the planet” aka the “transgender population” can have big business, academia, medicine, law, and government crawling on all fours doing its bidding, you have been suckered.
Thankyou for your plain speaking. We have all been around long enough to know what a load of illogical, gaslighting, harmful, propagandist horseshit gender identity ideology is.
I love your anger. The passage "We’ve been told that "transgender" rights are a battle for civil rights, the “new gay rights battle.” That is another lie. There’s a big difference between asking people to accept you for who you are and demanding they accept you for who you are not." is now forever burned into my brain. And I agree that from this point on only straight talking is going to defeat this Emperor's New Clothes garbage of pretending to see what you don't see in case admitting you can't see it might hurt someone's feelings. So yeah it's got to stop because that's how it progressed so far, by no-one wanting to be the party pooper by saying the obvious, because after all there's no harm in it is there - why not just let them be? Yeah I too, when JK Rowling made us all aware of this 2 or 3 years ago, in my defense of Rowling for all the flack she was getting, was guilty of using incorrect pronouns calling a woman who wanted to be a man "he" to be "respectful". But now I see as more and more of us are doing just how harmful the ideology of transgenderism is, and how acceding to its language distortions and contortions helps its cause even while you believe yourself to be arguing against it.
But maybe you're a little hard on Bari Weiss. She has perhaps not yet got as far as this in her critical thinking. I don't think we need to doubt her motives. She's not on the trans train and there was no doubt as far as I could see in her 'Lia' Thomas article where she stands on the issue in spite of using an incredibly long winded route to get there. But one of the good things about the article was it gave valuable insights into the suffocating mechanical details about how all this repression works at the micro level. Weiss has a lot of followers it seems and out of nearly 900 replies at least half of them were scolding her as you do for not using correct pronouns. (Correct here meaning according to sex and correct English.) I think she'll eventually get real as the rest of us are doing. It's not an easy process, and just a little slip will expose you to vitriolic backlash. I noticed recently that Jennifer Bilek who has done more than most to expose the lies and what's behind them managed to get herself cancelled to the point where even someone like Helen Joyce disassociated herself from her, for so-called 'anti-semitic' comments. When I investigated this accusation I found it rested on nothing more than a single clumsy pondering about whether ancient judaic religious codexes might have some inbuilt predilection toward body denying trans human idealism and that she wrote positively about a video where this theory was elaborated whose author was already consigned to the anti-semitic trash heap. And this is how it all works. Anti-semitic or not (and I have my doubts) that doesn't preclude an author from having something intelligent or useful to say on other topics and in any case you don't yourself become anti-semitic just by admitting you listened to what he had to say. But in a world which has grown intolerant suddenly any association at any level with anyone already tarred can be deadly. Arthur Miller's brilliant play The Crucible demonstrated how it all works. That's the reason Helen Joyce dared not admit she would be listening to Jennifer Bilek in future. Bilek was rightly furious about the betrayal, but that's the price of getting cancelled. Divide and rule. Being cut off from those you counted on. That's the reason the people Weiss spoke to at the swim meet wouldn't say what they really felt and thought about what was going on. At least they spoke to Weiss, and that's what Weiss probably has to weigh up everytime she puts pen to paper. Because the day she gets cancelled for using "incorrect" (i.e. correct) pronouns nobody except us who are already off the fence and firmly rooted in the campaign to uphold reality and biology, will talk to her for fear of cancellation because of guilt by association.
Horrible times we're living in but I'll not be cancelling Bari Weiss for her pronoun misdemeanour.