I looked it up just to be sure and, it turns out, I’ve been using the word wrong all these years. In my online dictionary I find, “farce: mixture of ground raw chicken and mushrooms with pistachios and truffles and onions and parsley and lots of butter and bound with eggs.” The verb? “To fill with a stuffing while cooking.” Imagine my surprise to read those words! But of course that is not all. I’m told that it refers to “a comedy characterized by broad satire and improbable situation,” and was originally (1530) the “comic interlude in a mystery play,” and later, “was extended to the impromptu buffoonery among actors that was a feature of religious stage plays.” Webster says, “Such farces—which included clowning, acrobatics, reversal of social roles, and indecency—soon developed into a distinct dramatic genre and spread rapidly in various forms throughout Europe.” It is Websters list of synonyms and example usages that helps me to recognize the word again, “caricature, cartoon, joke, mockery, parody, sham, travesty.” Something so exaggerated and obviously not true, so as to be ridiculous and something one could laugh about knowing that no one would ever mistake it for a reality. Something so far fetched as saying that the bread, celery, onions, butter, and sage, which you put inside the turkey, is the turkey.

Perhaps this is just the prompt word I’ve been waiting for to get me to open up about something which I haven’t yet felt ready to talk about publicly. Something that, had you suggested to me four years ago that this was happening, or even could happen, I would have assumed you were a Christian conservative on a routine mission to smear feminists by exaggerating the impact of their efforts to distinguish between gender (sex-roles) and sex (anatomy + biology), which they did in the hope of loosening the extremely confining grip that the one has historically had on the other. I would have been baffled at the enormous cognitive-leap that person would have had to make to hold feminism’s claim, which holds that gender is a (mostly) mutable social construct and sex (our body) is an immutable reality with real world consequence, for creating a paradigm that would insist the exact opposite view. I would have assumed that tossing such an outrageous extrapolation into a discussion about the correlation between the doctrine of male headship and the violence and oppression that women face the world over was a last ditch attempt to avoid taking responsibility for an endless and suffocating list of woes that women face because of male dominance, by diverting attention instead to a non-issue.

I know I would have thought this, because four years ago just such a young, conservative, self-identifying-christian, trump supporter tried to divert my feminist arguments in exactly this way right in my very own living room, and that is precisely what I thought. With no little side dish of condescension, I dismissed his objection -that academics and a growing number of people were denying the reality of dimorphic sexed bodies- as an ignorant parroting of a straw-man argument that reeked of paranoia. I told him then that not a single person had ever made such a claim to me, which was not untrue at the time, but that, in contrast, over a lifetime that spanned more than half a century, I had been privy to, had witnessed, and had experienced first hand, a maelstrom of male violence, sexual predation, exclusion, exploitation, silencing, discrimination, stalking, lewd propositioning and voyeurism. Those were the problems that concerned me greatly, for myself, for my daughters, and for women the world over, and the reason I was, and still am, devoted to challenging this pernicious doctrine of male headship within the church.

That was four years ago.

I don’t enjoy eating my own words, especially when they were served with such a spicy sauce, but I have since had to chew and swallow at least my assumption that my young cousin’s last ditch argument was a “non-issue.” Since that day, my little Homemaker-in-Bavaria-Bubble has burst wide open, and I am… I am so many, many strong emotions that I cannot even find enough synonyms to adequately describe the tumult inside of me, and it feels dangerous even to try to express it. Dangerous not because I fear losing the favor of a whole swath of on-and-offline family and acquaintances, which I am sure to, nor, as my daughter warns me, because I will most likely ruin any chance I might have still had at a successful anything-career, though those things and worse are happening to women with more convincing Liberal track-records than myself. I have survived that kind of relational proscription before, and I will survive it again. Nor has it been a matter of incertitude, the fear of getting this one wrong, the fear I could be hoarding privileges and excluding anyone from some good thing, or of causing unnecessary harm. My eyes are wide open, my ears are listening, my heart remains empathetic, curious, and generous toward people who are truly suffering, and yet, in all the ways that we know what we know, I know the Emperor being paraded here is actually naked.

No, the danger I fear, which has kept me social-media-silent these last couple of years about the aggressive Queer Theory that has captured the institutional West, comes from my own inner storm of feelings. They are like wild and angry bulls, which once let out of their pen, will trample and buck off any living thing in their path. Even now, writing this piece feels like riding all of these bulls at once, every word an enormous effort to bridle the fury, incredulity, and bafflement I feel. Sarcasm and searing remarks are chomping at the bit, ready to tear into the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, the cowardice, and the cognitive dissonance of those aggressively pushing and those so easily buying into this novel and, I believe, harmful Queer cult. I am afraid that this herd of emotions will stampede me headlong off the cliff and into the black abyss of online outrage. I fear I could be lost in endless caves of discourse following the hollow sound of my own echo chambers. And I fear that there is a good chance that I could be swallowed whole by the quicksand of my own self-righteousness. It is not the ire and contempt of others I fear, but my own ire and contempt. So I’ve stayed silent.

But the cauldron of emotions has not dissipated. Worse, my silence has not protected me from any of these outcomes toward which they harry me, and yet all the while, the number of those who think that this is what everyone believes grows and grows. I realize also, the longer I wait to speak out, the more the inner pressure builds to reconcile my online perception with what is actually going on inside of me. Having written long letters pleading with my conservative christian relatives to speak out against the farce of the Trump presidency, and openly chastising Evangelicals for having supported him, I can no longer say nothing about the farce of this current administration pushing the queer agenda and remain in my integrity.

I will simply have to learn to ride the bull, bridle and saddle the stallions, and do my part to steer people away from this harmful ideology: a deep pocketed agenda which is enticing an ever younger, ever greater number, and ever more female population into invasive, permanent, and detrimental medical and pharmaceutical interventions and life time care, is sowing identity confusion even among the very young, is creating an environment of egregious safe-guarding violations, is robbing women of medals, titles, platforms, their sex-based rights, and our very nomenclature, and is promoting a general culture of social-upheaval and division – all based on a premise that is both unscientific and counterintuitive. A textbook case of gaslighting.

And therein lies the fountain of this flood of negative emotions churning inside of me. Here is the source of the loud and frantic, “How Dare You!” that wells up in me when I see the New York Times and the Washington post headlines declaring Rachel Levine, a man, to be the first female four star general; when I see male athletes holding gold medals in women’s competitions; when I read about male sexual predators being housed in women’s prisons; parents being denied their duty of care; lesbians being bullied into dating “women with penises;” Doctors and therapists being bullied into “Affirmative Care” only practices, when I see that children who do not fit the extreme gender stereo types that our culture pushes (and from and into which the trans-movement, ironically enough, feeds like a parasite) are told they are in the wrong body.

IN THE WRONG BODY!!

Just say that out-loud once to shatter the myth of a benevolent ideology.

And to object to these things makes me the unkind one?

Has everyone gone completely mad?

The sheer gall of anyone at all to believe they have the right to tell me, or any of us, to discount, distrust, and outright deny what I see, hear, feel, and discern in order to cushion those with fragile identities from facing their own reality. To assume that I will so cheaply abandon almost sixty years of experience, of learning to trust my own wisdom about the world, of hard-won relational acumen, and a radar for predators that has served me well since I was a very young girl, and simply trade it in for another’s “inner-feeling” as if I were a blind, deaf, and dumb headless turkey, is the height of impudence. And to legislate and mandate that girls and the most vulnerable women (victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse survivors, the institutionalized and incarcerated) should immediately drop their guard and suppress their instinct for danger the moment some man chooses a new pronoun, is not only utterly hypocritical, but also downright misogynistic.

Four years ago, when I was presented a picture of a Liberal Dystopia that denied the reality of our sexed biology, it sounded so outrageous and exaggerated and obviously not true, that I believed only the Extreme Right could come up with something so ridiculous with which to smear the Left. I laughed it off as a farce, thinking that no one could ever mistake gender (the cultural and ever changing sex-roles) for sex (our biological bodies). That would be as far fetched as saying that the bread, celery, onions, butter, and sage, which you put inside the turkey, is the turkey.

Four years later, and I believe that Queer Theory will go down in history as the Great Gaslighting of the Twenty First Century.

(For a calmer, comprehensive, informed, and factual picture of the havoc this ideology is wreaking, please read Helen Joyce’s book, Trans, or listen to the podcast Transparency, hosted by two trans-men, who are having the conversations I wish I could be having with my trans-sibling. I so appreciate their wisdom, self-awareness, vulnerability, and courage to speak truth in such a hostile culture.)