Also Sprach Barbour-Evans

In the late 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche published a work entitled, Also Sprach Zarathustra—in English “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. Zarathustra (more commonly known as “Zoroaster”) was the founder of Zoroastrianism, a dualistic Persian religion which posited that the world was the site of the battleground between good and evil. In the words of the oracular Wikipedia, “Nietzsche is clearly portraying a ‘new’ or ‘different’ Zarathustra, one who turns traditional morality on its head…[As Nietzsche himself explained], ‘What constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil as the very wheel in the machinery of things…Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently he must also be the first to recognize it’”. Nietzsche’s new Zarathustra thus becomes the mouthpiece for Nietzsche’s own immoralism, one which turns traditional morality on its head.

The LGBQT community has seemingly found its own prophet, a mouthpiece for its own kind of immoralism—Scout Barbour-Evans. Ms. Barbour-Evans of New Zealand is a female who had a double mastectomy and took testosterone to transition to a male. She stopped taking the hormones long enough to become pregnant from a sperm donor. After giving birth, she intends to have a hysterectomy. She claims to be the father of the child, and says that the child is to refer to her as “papa”. When asked if the child will be a boy or a girl, she replies, “I hope it’s human”. She is planning to “chest feed” the child after it is born. Ms. Barbour-Evans is avoiding the available prenatal groups because they refer to their participants as “ladies” and “mothers”. In her words, the group “is strongly gendered, and I understand why, but I don’t feel safe”. Thus spoke Barbour-Evans.

Barbour-Evans is mentally ill. This is not simply my long-distance opinion; it is official up-close diagnosis of physicians—a diagnosis which she herself acknowledges and celebrates. She was admitted to a psychiatric ward and was diagnosed as mentally ill. As she wrote: “I didn’t want to keep my mental illness a secret. I never liked how society treats mental illnesses so different from physical illnesses. I was diagnosed with Bipolar II, Social Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Anorexia Nervosa. I moved back to New Zealand and since then, I’ve been rediagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, then re-rediagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an ‘unknown mood or personality disorder’, and Gender Dysphoria”. Despite her radical mastectomy which left her without breasts, she believes that through the use of chemicals she will still be able to nurse her newborn child.

Barbour-Evans could be the perfect representative and prophet for the future of gender in the crumbling West. In this brave new world, to quote Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” One might protest with Alice and ask “whether you can make words mean so many different things”, but the answer comes back from Barbour-Evans and Humpty Dumpty, “The question is which is to be master—that’s all.” In this new world, every individual is his, her, or their own master, and words mean exactly what one chooses them to mean—neither more nor less. If I choose to say that “female” means “male” and “mother” means “father”, that is what those words mean. The fact that effective protest against such insanity has collapsed and that the media connives at such tyranny shows that our culture has collectively tumbled down the rabbit hole. Soon enough we can expect to hear the Queen of Hearts shouting, “Off with their heads!”

That is because in the Wonderland into which we are entering, public dissent will not be allowed. Barbour-Evans, like other such individuals, may protest that she doesn’t feel safe in a prenatal group because it is presupposed there that expectant mothers are female and she cannot bear anyone challenging her insane choices, but in this emerging world she is entirely safe, being supported by the draconian apparatus of the media and those in power. The people who should really feel unsafe are those who choose to challenge her.

What does all this mean? I offer completely unsolicited advice to three groups of people.

First of all, to those sitting by the levers of power in government: please recognize that the transgender issue is not about rights, but about truth. Taking a page from the homosexual community’s playbook, the transgender lobby is keen to define the issue in terms of human rights, invoking the dubious parallel with the struggle for such rights on the part of African-Americans in the civil rights era. But shouting alone does not make something true—one wants arguments, not just volume—and their declaration that the issue as one of human rights is unsound. More than that, it is dangerous, for each generation is completely at the mercy of the previous one, as children inherit all that their parents have done. Families are the factories in which healthy children are grown, and a large part of human health depends upon our knowing how men and women should interact. It is just this crucial piece which is lacking in transgender families, and the children growing up in such places begin life with a severe handicap—one which can only increase when it is time for them to start families. Politicians and law-makers must recognize transgenderism as the threat to our future cultural health that it is.

Secondly, a word to the doctors and physicians, the ones able to give or withhold such mastectomies, hysterectomies, and hormone therapies aimed at turning one gender into the other—as if any amount of surgery or drugs could alter one’s “x” and “y” chromosomes. Each generation of physicians faces its own challenges and temptations. As the keepers and guardians of health they have the responsibility to make life and death decisions, and take actions which can radically and permanently help or harm another human being. The importance of such power has always been recognized by thoughtful societies, which is why physicians have been asked to bind themselves with oaths not to use their power to do harm. Sometimes movements within our society tempt one to use that power wrongly—such as during the famous “T4” programme in Germany to eliminate those deemed unworthy of life. Now is another such time which brings another such temptation. Doctors must refuse to do such medical procedures, regardless of the pressure placed upon them. The Queen of Hearts may shout loudly that they have no choice. Those who took part in the T4 programme would now respond that, whatever the pressure, one always has a choice.

Finally, a word to the rest of us who lament our society’s fall down the rabbit-hole. It remains to be seen whether the law-makers and physicians will rise to the challenge in sufficient numbers to save us. If the record of our immediate past provides any indication, those in power will capitulate as quickly and completely to the transgender lobby as they did to the homosexual lobby. We must therefore take the responsibility to teach our children and grandchildren well, and immunize them against the coming plague. This immunization requires not just counter-teaching from moms and dads, but also the reinforcement of this teaching from a counter-cultural community—i.e. from the church. The church must become a place of radical rejection of the current insanity, a place where unpopular truth is spoken often and plainly, a place where words do not mean whatever we choose. There is no time to lose. Zarathustra/ Barbour-Evans has spoken in New Zealand. Soon enough the lies of the prophets of immoralism will also sound in every land throughout the West.