Are you confused and trying to make sense of gender dysphoria’s sudden rise among young people and the medical transitioning of teens? Me too. I knew things had gone too far when I learned of a Canadian father’s arrest and conviction of family violence in 2021 for referring to his transgender child, who identifies as male, with female pronouns. The 11-year-old’s transition started at school after being exposed to pro-transgender educational materials. The school began referring to her by a male name, even placing that new name in her seventh-grade yearbook without informing her parents. School officials received input from a psychologist who encouraged the young girl to take testosterone, referring her to an endocrinology unit at a nearby hospital, where she began taking testosterone injections without her parent’s consent. The devastated father felt like he was watching a perfectly healthy child’s body destroyed after learning what had happened to his daughter. He could only affirm or get thrown in jail. He is not alone.
Perhaps there is no subject today more complicated or disturbing than gender identity. Kids are being indoctrinated into gender politics through the schools, and in my opinion, encouraged to talk about sex in inappropriate ways at too early and vulnerable of an age. And that makes me wonder if I’m too old school to think that an 11-year-old should just be allowed to be a kid. What happened to the days when most kids didn’t even start liking the opposite sex until puberty? I remember when boys before puberty thought girls were “yucky” and vice versa. Kids approaching puberty are still trying to find a sense of self and discover who their tribe is. Gender-distressed kids are turning to drugs in the form of sex hormones, which has produced a gender identity revolution on a fast track to medical transition. Why aren’t we talking about what is causing that distress rather than encouraging transition and bodily mutilation? The U.S. sex reassignment surgery market was estimated at 2.1 billion in 2022 and is growing.
I cannot imagine the distress of these children, and my heart goes out to the parents of children who announce a transgender identity. While I may have been a tomboy who preferred wearing men’s clothes on occasion, I never questioned my gender or felt sexually attracted to the same sex. I rode horses and bikes and enjoyed water sports, unlike kids today glued to their 2-D devices. I became sexually active with boys at fourteen, and I fooled around with both boys and girls before that because I was curious. I liked hanging out with boys through grade school because I found them more fun than the girls. Competitive sports interested me more than learning how to apply makeup. But thanks to transgender women being allowed to compete against cisgender women in athletic competitions, you can kiss women’s sports goodbye. I am not opposed to transgender athletes competing in sports events – as long as they are competing against each other. Perhaps they could form their own sports teams.
In cultures worldwide throughout history, more than two genders have long been documented. Therapists and medical professionals recognized in 2023 somewhere between 70 and 100 genders. If that’s not confusing, I don’t know what is. I understand that someone may identify as a two-spirit or some other expression of gender; however, in my way of thinking, this represents the kind of split I am not interested in normalizing. Gilberto A. Quintero, in his article published in the Journal of Anthropological Research, Gender, Discord, and Illness: Navajo Philosophy and Healing in the Native American Church, shows that traditional Navajo philosophy recognizes discord between the sexes as a fundamental component of disease.
Overly identifying with anything can be a problem. The ego says, “I am this” or “I am that.” It builds its identity on a perceived separation from others – me vs. them. We always tell a story about ourselves and others to make sense of and give meaning to our world. But the story isn’t written in stone. The story is constantly changing. We can’t be attached to our stories. I share the following to raise awareness around this delicate issue.
My first experience with someone who underwent a sex change operation was in 1975. I met Jake because we followed the same East Indian guru. Jake experienced extreme distress about being in a male body, the cause unknown to me. After Jake became Jackie, she had sex with one of my former lovers. Jake’s transformation was impressive. Curious about how all that worked long before it became a mainstream topic, I asked my former lover how he and Jackie had managed to have intercourse. He confirmed that some issues made penetration difficult due to Jackie’s pain resulting from recent surgeries. Still, according to him, they achieved intercourse. I’m pretty sure the pleasure was all his. Back then, it was rare to hear of someone having a sex change operation. Today, I have multiple friends whose kids are gender non-confirming and seek transition.
And that brings up the question, “What is a Woman?” Political commentator Matt Walsh brilliantly explores the changing concepts of sex and gender in his 2022 documentary What is a Woman? He interviewed dozens of people, including medical professionals and therapists, who, in their confusion, were unable to answer the question. But when Matt interviewed members of an indigenous tribe in Africa, they had no confusion about what a woman is, nor had they ever heard of or encountered gender dysphoria. When he asked his wife, Alissa, “What is a Woman?” Without confusion or hesitancy, she answered, “An adult human female,” a simple answer that eluded many in their effort to be politically correct. This answer might also lead us into the emerging AI world and the question, What is a human?
There can be no doubt that the tension of the opposites is loosening. We live in a three-dimensional world defined by duality, and the tension of the opposites is what holds it all together. How do we reconcile these opposites? Are we conflicted by the masculine and feminine that each of us carries within because we have not done the hard inner work of marrying the inner divine masculine with the sacred feminine? Could we be projecting rather than integrating?
The discussion of gender identity, gender dysphoria, and transgender rights is a difficult one. The social and cultural influences that determine our attitudes, values, beliefs, and interactions have drastically changed since I was a kid in the 60s. When we assess the degree of heart-mind disconnect, mental illness, suicide, system collapse, and emerging totalitarian control, it becomes apparent that we are heading in an unsustainable direction. There have even been reports of transgender women convicted of sex crimes as men who, after being transferred into women’s prisons, raped and violated the women.
The confusion around this issue should have been enough of a red flag. Confusion keeps us paralyzed, disempowered, unable to make decisions, and susceptible to suggestion (hypnosis and brainwashing), reinforcing self-doubt. Could the rise in confusion around gender identity, at least in part, be the result of a human need to belong and the need to shed skin and transform into something beyond what we previously knew ourselves to be? It seems to me that we have forgotten the importance of puberty rites and other rites of passage where one dies to their past to become something more. Confused about who we are or might become, the transformation may remain incomplete, like a butterfly unable to emerge from the chrysalis. Potential remains just that – unfulfilled.
Be curious about sex. Sexual curiosity is healthy and desirable. It is what guides you to the center of your being as the electrical circuit is completed between polarities. Be curious about the world of nature, for everything you eat and breathe is sex. Creation itself would not exist were it not for the masculine and feminine principles at work. The very wheel of life is based on these principles in their various forms.
– Wisdom of the Plant Devas: Herbal Medicine for a New Earth
There are some badasses out there fighting for gender equality, and I can’t help but admire them. There is nothing more fundamental to creation than the positive and negative polarities that meet and join one another to spark, conceive, and give birth to a sacred third. It is Law. And I’m not talking about the laws of man. We are not only creators; we are also destroyers. It is how we learn how powerful we are. I could never have imagined that the destruction would look like deprogramming heterosexuality. Destroying this fundamental principle of creation has left us vulnerable to dangerous reproductive technologies, which threaten women’s liberation, as midwife Mary Lou Singleton so eloquently describes in her presentation at the Women’s Declaration International USA’s 2023 National Convention. All of mainstream medicine has fallen for the “transwomen are women” lie. Many doctors view males who assert they are female as no different from women born without a uterus and vagina.
I understand that we are evolving into something wholly new, into our light bodies and a dimension beyond duality. But how are we to ascend if we do not fully integrate the masculine and feminine within ourselves? I do not wish to be in judgment of any human expression. And even though I wrote about these things in my book, Wisdom of the Plant Devas: Herbal Medicine for a New Earth, I am still learning. The old ways must undoubtedly die, but I never thought it would look like this.
You are male and female within the one. Do not judge the sexual explorations of your kin. It is through this exploration that you will discover new parts of yourselves in each other. It is necessary for your evolution. Practices that are not sustainable to your species will fall away; it is the Law of Nature. Let yourselves be guided, drawn to the light that calls you, and all of your expressions will become sacred.
– Wisdom of the Plant Devas: Herbal Medicine for a New Earth, Calendula speaks
My problem lies with gender self-identification that holds the rest of us hostage with pronouns and punitive laws that force the masses to comply with the few. It keeps us fighting among ourselves. It gives the Devouring Mother, in the form of the state, the power to make decisions for and about our children before they are of an age to know their mind and without parental permission or input.
“The government has taken over my parental rights. They’re using my daughter like she’s a guinea pig in an experiment… Is BC Children’s Hospital going to be there in 5 years when she rejects her male identity? No they’re not. They don’t care. They want numbers.” – Father of a 14-year-old daughter destroyed by court-ordered trans hormones
You can’t drink before age 21, and you can’t vote before age 18. Still, you can cut off your breasts and take toxic hormones before the age of 16 without your parent’s permission, thanks to the for-profit, medical-industrial complex that uses propaganda to promote dangerous ideologies through the universities that it has captured along with regulatory agencies and mainstream media that control the narrative. They don’t have our children’s best interests at heart.
Then there is the issue of xenoestrogens in the environment wreaking havoc on our hormonal system. We are swimming in an environmentally toxic stew. One example would be the herbicide atrazine, one of the most commonly applied pesticides in the world, shown to demasculinize male frogs and turn them into feminized adults. They are the canary in the coal mine. What other endocrine disruptors are wreaking havoc on our hormones and our children’s sexual development?
While the Western mechanistic view promotes sickness and disease through its captured media propaganda machine at breakneck speed, there is another lens through which we may gain a different perspective: the Eastern view. In Chinese medicine, all mental illness is the result of a heart-mind disconnect resulting from trauma. The gender dysphoria discussion is itself trauma-inducing. For a person to feel or believe that they were not born in the right body is traumatic. Trauma begets trauma. Our minds may be confused, but our body is not. Let me give you an example:
When a woman is pregnant, her body knows whether it is growing a boy or a girl – it is not confused. If the body is growing cancer, it knows what type and where it is growing before we may become consciously aware of it. The body is not confused. The body knows. There is a process by which we can learn to become more fully embodied, and it does not involve toxic hormones, surgical mutilation, or pushing one’s ideology onto others. It requires a deeper relationship with ourselves while honoring what is sacred and being in the divine acceptance of what is. Sexuality is sacred and private, and just like medical information privacy, which is under attack, it should remain private and be protected. Sex sells, and we have been sold an ideology by a small minority that has disrupted the majority.
There is a bigger picture and another lens to view our current impasse. What was once in shadow comes to the surface as it dies. In the age of Pisces, which is presently ending, love turned to dependency, compassion into pity, forgiveness into defensiveness, and spirituality into religion. But the time has come to mature into compassionate, loving, and spiritual beings while releasing our attachment to the outcome. It is time to come home: Time to be at peace with this earth and our bodies made of this very self-same earth. I pray that we can express and identify in whatever manner helps us to feel like we belong and gives meaning to our lives. As an adult, you may be flexible in your gender roles or decide to mutilate your body in some manner. Still, please don’t force your ideology on others out of a need to belong to an idealized gender, support the mutilation of children, or spread propaganda to rally a movement around your victimhood. I pray that we may become the beautiful men and women we were given life to be by whatever name we call ourselves, whatever role we choose to play, and in whatever garment we may wear.
May it be so that we reawaken to a sacred sexuality that preserves the human spirit in the body it inhabits. Be a tomboy, a drag queen, gay or trans, dress however you like, fall in love and have sex with whomever you choose, and identify in whatever manner helps you feel like you belong or gives meaning to your life. And yet, still, the difficult conversation about transitioning teens before puberty needs to happen between all of us.
With special thanks to Chuck Willhide, aka The GreenMan, for his editorial input. Please visit us at Thea & the GreenMan.com
Thank you for your bravery in putting this out there, Thea. It MUST be said, and we must not go along with a followers' mentality in order not to offend some crazy political ideology. Those who set this in motion obviously have a deeper hidden agenda, and it goes right along with separating families and continuing to program our children in unhealthy ways. My heart breaks for this father!
Thank you Thea for bringing Light into a very complex discussion~ It has given me insights that I would not have found pulled together so compassionately elsewhere. Indeed, may we each Awaken & Integrate the Sacred in Who & What we Are.. Male AND Female 🕊🌈🙏