Balsam gourd

 

Last week Marie Laing, the doyenne of Great Hills Park, tipped me off to a balsam gourd vine (Ibervillea lindheimeri) there, so on July 16th I went and took pictures of it. You’re looking at one of its ripe balloon-like fruits, each of which grows to between 1 and 2 inches in diameter.

 

 

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This spring I brought you a first, a second, and a third excerpt from mathematician and journalist Helen Joyce’s book Trans. Here’s a capsule description of the issue:

 

This is a faith-based movement, and the faith is that we have inner selves, and those inner selves are sexed, and the sex can be different from the body…. But then I keep coming back to the fact that it’s a very linguistic movement, and it requires the policing of other people’s language. That’s why they don’t want debate, and that’s why they’re angry with somebody like me.

 

Those words are from Helen Joyce’s Parallax Views dialogue in late 2022 with Marc Glendenning of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Some people have used the term “sexed souls” for what she referred to there as sexed inner selves. In May last year I compared such “sexed souls” to the nine kinds of angelic beings medieval Christian theologians believed really exist. I went on to list over three dozen of the more than a hundred genders that current ideologues have invented, and which are no more real than the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, and principalities of medieval Christian theology. As Helen Joyce noted, the trans movement is faith-based, not scientific. In other words, it’s a religion.

You’re welcome to watch Marc Glendenning’s 50-minute interview with Helen Joyce.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman