There Are No Witches

Dusty's One Offs. Number 4.

These one offs will normally only be available to paid subscribers but I am making this one available to all subscribers. This is more of a discussion paper than a finalised piece, so … get discussing 😊

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The Salem Witch Trials

Andrew Doyle starts his book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World with the Salem Witch Trials 0f 1692 - 1693. He writes:

By the time the trials came to an end, more than two hundred people had been accused, nineteen had been hanged, five others had perished in jail, and the farmer Giles Corey had been pressed to death with large boulders for refusing to enter a plea. In the throes of victimhood, these children [who made the allegations] had found the means to become the most powerful members of the community. They could see their fellow citizens executed on the basis of ‘spectral evidence’ alone, what we might today refer to as ‘lived experience.’ Those who attempted to apply reason and logic to the events as they unfolded were liable to find themselves accused, and so for the sake of self-preservation most left their doubts unuttered. The fantasies of the few were propagated by the elites: judges and ministers who had lost sight of reality, or had no inclination to see it restored (pp8-9).

He concludes:

The screams of the children of Salem never really stopped; they simply found other ways to reverberate (p10).

Sex Is Immutable

You cannot change sex. This is a simple biological and scientific fact. It seems crazy to have to back this up…but here we go.

I could quote from many sources but I’ll stick to just one. In her seminal book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, Kathleen Stock dedicates a whole chapter ( chapter 2) to the question: What is Sex?

An organism’s reproductive cells are called its gametes. …males, by definition, are those organisms on a developmental pathway to produce small gametes [sperm ] for the purposes of sexual reproduction. Females, meanwhile, are those organisms on a developmental pathway to produce larger gametes [ eggs] for the purposes of sexual reproduction (p46).

A human male is a human with a Y chromosome. A human female is a human without a Y chromosome (p47).

In case it is required (!) there is also a third model which Kathleen calls the ‘cluster account’ (p49).

‘Gender Identity’ and ‘Transition.’

In this context, ‘gender identity’ is meaningless unless it is just referring to ‘personality’. Since you cannot change sex, ‘transition’ is also meaningless.

Andrew Doyle writes on this on his substack:

The chemical and surgical mutilation of children is almost over

Many children’s lives have been ruined by gender ideology, but Donald Trump’s latest executive order is an important step towards restoring sanity.

Jan 29, 2025

A society that harms its children cannot be said to be civilised. For all that we in the west pride ourselves on our liberal consensus, we have nonetheless enabled the rise of an ideology that has been responsible for the sterilisation and mutilation of children on the basis of a pseudoscientific and cultish faith in ‘gender identity’. Young people who desperately required therapeutic support were instead fast-tracked into medicalisation. Countless lives have been ruined, and all because the so-called ‘adults in the room’ allowed themselves to be cowed by the demands of the high priests of a dangerous new religion.

Donald Trump has now signed an executive order – ‘Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation’ – which seeks to halt this barbaric state-sanctioned practice. It bans federal agencies from promoting ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ for minors. This is long overdue, and it should be celebrated irrespective of one’s political affiliation. After years of word games and euphemism, the phrasing of this executive order is refreshingly frank.

‘Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.

Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.

Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.’

In a section entitled ‘Ending Reliance on Junk Science’ – again, the candour is wonderful to read – the government specifically blames the influence of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). It orders agencies to ‘rescind or amend all policies that rely on WPATH guidance, including WPATH’s “Standards of Care Version 8”’.

For those who don’t know – and this will be many who rely solely on the mainstream media – WPATH is a US-based activist body that has been regarded as the leading global authority on ‘gender medicine’, influencing policy decisions in various countries, including here in the UK via the NHS. Files leaked from WPATH in March 2024 revealed a shocking flouting of basic ethical standards. Internal memos and video recordings of leading WPATH members showed that they were fully aware that many patients were unable to give informed consent to these life-altering procedures, either because they were too young or suffering from psychological disorders.

There is a completely comprehensive dissection and demolition of the trans madness by Arty Morty on his substack. There are no ‘trans kids’, just distressed and confused children and autogynephile adult males. I provide a few excerpts below but highly recommend the whole piece.

There are no trans kids, only kids confused about sex

The unscientific beliefs at the heart of the transgender movement must not be ignored by journalists, clinicians, and trans allies

Oct 25, 2024

Extremists within the trans movement — I call them transgender fundamentalists or just gender fundamentalists — are not only seeking to replace the biological underpinnings of sex with their “gender identity” model, they’re also misappropriating and swapping out the conceptual underpinnings of homosexuality for transgender: they wrongly claim that homosexuality is a mere social construct — supposedly not “invented” until the word came about in the 1800s, despite widespread evidence of homosexuals’ presence and consistent characteristics throughout history. And they simultaneously insist that the opposite is true with respect to trans: they claim that when the term “transgender” came into broad cultural usage via social media, it revealed a natural category of people who have always been present, but who have up until now been inexplicably unaccounted-for throughout history.

If true, this would be a radical, civilization-upending discovery — that since the dawn of humankind none of us has ever known one another’s true sex; we’ve only been interacting with each other’s “gender identities” this whole time — or at least, we should have been, if our oppressive culture hadn’t inhibited them. If it’s not true, then the transgender fundamentalist movement is headed for an iceberg: it will soon go down as one of the biggest cultural disasters in history.

All evidence points to the latter case.

And later:

The central doctrine of the “gender identity” belief system, and the idea that is spreading like a virus through the culture, is that we as a society aren’t supposed to be noticing and reacting to each other's actual, physical biological sex, but to each other’s stated ideas about our sex instead. It’s an emperor’s-new-clothes gambit: if we can get all of society to profess belief in invisible “gender identities” it will finally make them real, and our lying eyes will be condemned for their blasphemy, having misled us all this time about the naked reality of everyone’s biology. This is of course impossible, but what’s worse: the very idea has the effect of turning vulnerable people’s minds against their own bodies. It makes them conceptualize the visible evidence of their own sex as taboo, and when they look in the mirror, every pang of recognition in this or that body characteristic, that it exposes their true biological sex to all who see it, becomes a source of shame. It turns their bodies into a psychological target that they direct their anxieties and hostilities at.

Arty concludes:

In the existential tug-of-war between the material world and the conceptual world, between the hardware of our bodies and the software of ideas that animate us, only our software can be truly reprogrammed. While we can improve our bodies in many ways, we are each stuck for life with the one we were born with. That’s a fact we cannot ever fully transcend. And that’s a good thing. Our imperfect bodies are what make us human, and learning to value and love ourselves for who we are is the great project that gives meaning to each of our lives. The great project of civilization is our collective attempt to help each other in that regard. Transgender fundamentalism has been a detour from civilization’s path to progress, a lurch toward the false promise that we can each opt out of the challenges that society collectively faces — that every man is an island, where we can satisfy our desires and overcome our fears by imagining reality away, lured down a false path of personal enlightenment by medical shamans who sold us lies. But in the end — spoiler alert — you’ll find it was all just a dream. Sorry, Neo and Morpheus, we are not trapped in the Matrix after all. The real world is all there is, and all of us men and women must work together to make it better.

https://artymorty.substack.com/p/there-are-no-trans-kids-only-kids?publication_id=1017112&post_id=150492593&isFreemail=false&r=20xc5g&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Gender Dysphoria

Some people (eg. EDI Jester, Kat Highsmith) argue that ‘gender dysphoria’ doesn’t exist at all. I prefer the opinion of Dr Miriam Grossman presented in her book Lost in Trans Nation that gender dysphoria is a symptom not a condition in itself and that you don’t treat a symptom. You don’t treat a ‘fever’. You find out what is causing the fever and then treat that cause.

But firstly, how did this new concept of ‘gender dysphoria’ get into the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in the first place?

Miriam Grossman writes with regard to the drafting of DSM-5:

When it was being drafted, Dr Allen Frances and Dr Robert Spitzer - two leaders in the field of psychiatry who directed the drafting of earlier versions of the DSM - issued a letter of condemnation: the leadership group writing the update was “sealing itself off from advice and criticism.” (pp 25-26).

She continues:

I’m not telling you about DSM-5 and clashes between psychiatrists because it’s colorful history. The point is that with the normalization of gender distress, my profession caved to ideology or, if you prefer, caved to compassion. And that capitulation set the stage for the disasters that I see daily (p26).

She states further:

To speak of this matter with accuracy, we must make distinctions. The eighteen patients at Tavistock in London from 2000 to 2005 are not the same as the hordes of adolescents in gender clinics today. If your child complains of gender distress now or in the future, you must know to which group he or she belongs.

Gender Dysphoria is a symptom, and symptoms can be caused by a variety of conditions. A fever, for example, can be caused by the flu, infection, heat exhaustion, cancer, and other ailments. Some fevers don’t need much attention; they resolve by themselves. Others require investigation and treatment. Fevers cannot be lumped together as one entity (p37).

Let’s take an example from a recent case I have mentioned, that of Clementine Breen.

At 6 she was subject to abuse ( rape by an older child). She didn’t inform anyone about this. At 11 she started expressing distress about her body. She was referred to Johanna Olson-Kennedy, am American physician. At 12 she was put on puberty blockers. At 13 she was put on testosterone. At 14 she had a double mastectomy.

Her distress did not go away. At 17 she was referred to a different therapist after she told her parents about what had happened when she was 6. This therapist helped her come to terms with that traumatic event and this realisation resolved her distress.

Here she is interviewed by Jordan Peterson.

Conclusion

You cannot provide medical treatment to a witch because witches don’t exist ( even though there are a few people still who think they are witches).

You cannot provide medical treatment for gender dysphoria because it is a symptom. It does not exist as a separate condition. It may be that psychiatric or therapeutic help for the underlying cause ( see Clementine Breen’s case) is required.

So beyond the (one might say obvious!) fact that ‘gender affirming care’ is ineffective and, indeed, harmful as Dr Cass concluded, the idea that a clinical trial is required is totally illogical and abusive in any event - see the discussion in this previous update:

https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/sky-west-and-crooked-part-2?utm_source=publication-search

All thoughts gratefully received.

Addendum

I have not entered into here the case of those men who have autogynephilia - a fetish for dressing as women and presenting as women. I would say that I do not feel that so called gender affirming care should be given to adults either on the basis of the Hippocratic principle of Do No Harm - certainly I think it should at least not be provided by publicly funded health services.

For an interesting discussion on this issue see Peter Boghossian’s second interview with Mia Hughes:

#BeMorePorcupine

#EndGenderAffirmingCare

#AdultHumanFemale

#LetWomenSpeak

#GrassrootsArmy

#FightForFreeSpeech

#ByeByeStonewall

#NoMenInWomensSport

#LiveNotByLies

Now that I have struggled to the end of this one off piece, I hope that I can return to my usual updates on Tuesday or Wednesday, Terven.

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