Michael Gryboski @crossnation - Tumblr Blog

The Second Greatest Inevitability

With thanks to God and my publisher, my latest novel "The Second Greatest Inevitability" is now available!

The plot centers on a wealthy socialite who, on a given winter's evening, is visited by a friend he thought had died ten years ago.

Below is a link where you can purchase a digital or paperback version of my book. All support is welcomed.

Happy reading!

Amazon.com: The Second Greatest Inevitability: 9781649606181: Gryboski, Michael: Books

#fiction #novel #books #bookworm #author #newrelease #gryboski #newbook #readmore

Hello loyal followers! Just wanted to let everyone know about an event that my employer The Christian Post is helping to put together later this month in Texas.

Here is a link with more information:

2024 is shaping up to be a monumental year for elections in the U.S. With this pivotal moment in mind, we invite you to join us for 'Politic

#Christian #Post #Election #Trump #politics #Texas #Church

MMXXIV.

#happynewyear#hello2024#nyd #January1#newyear#glorytoGod

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."

Isaiah 9:6

#Christmas

All of my novels that are currently in print.

#bookstagram #bookseries #carla #shelfie #shelfiesaturday #booklove #enigma #thoughtreal #jcp #aiauthors #gryboski #michaelgryboski #booklovers #marvelous #light #writerscommunity #writerslift

#bookstagram #gryboski #novel #books

Today marks 18 years since I had my first work published. Specifically, it was an opinion column for George Mason University's student newspaper, Broadside.

In honor of the anniversary, here is a group photo of the novels I have written that are currently in print. This includes "Carla: The Dark Cycle," which was released just last month.

The journey continues.

#books #novel #bookstagram #gryboski #this day in history #otd

Had a great time at the @fredbookfest selling books, handing out bookmarks with my author info, meeting fellow authors, and getting a crash course in how to setup a canopy. Glory to God for this victory. #bookstagram #fredericksburg #writingcommunity #gryboski #authorshelpingauthors #booklove #booklovers #michaelgryboski #booksbooksbooks #fredbookfest #bookfestival

Transgender Ideology’s Voltaire Moment

On Monday, March 27, AD 2023, a 28-year-old shooter named Audrey Hale entered The Covenant School of Nashville, Tennessee, which is affiliated with a theologically conservative Presbyterian denomination, and opened fire. In less than 20 minutes, Hale had killed three children and three adults before being shot dead by police.

At first report, it was an all too familiar situation in the United States. Yet another mentally ill, angry young person was able to legally purchase an assault weapon and went after a vulnerable target. Once again, the nation was reminded about the cost that the gun rights lobby is willing to make others pay in the name of their interpretation of the Second Amendment.

And yet, there was something unique about this instance.

The shooter turned out to be transgender (specifically, a biological female who was transitioning to male) and had reportedly chosen the school intentionally, rather than as a crime of opportunity. As Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake told Lester Holt of NBC News, Hale apparently had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Hale had a manifesto that state and federal authorities are looking at, but have not yet released in full. While it is possible that there were other reasons for the attack, it appears that the likely cause of the mass shooting was a hatred of Christians who opposed transgender ideology.

Even if the motive turns out to be something else, some online have already taken to sympathizing with the idea of murdering people who disagree with transgenderism.

Josselyn Berry, the press secretary for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, was forced to resign after she posted a tweet around the time of the tragedy that called for the shooting of “transphobes.”

Shortly after the mass shooting, Wyoming state Rep. Karlee Provenza shared a meme on social media depicting an armed elderly woman with a caption reading, "Auntie Fa says, Protect Trans Folks Against Fascists & Bigots!"

To her credit, Provenza later issued an apology for "failing to recognize the potential impact of my actions on social media, which have contributed to inflammatory and distracting online discourse."

“I do not wish violence on anyone, but I believe that Americans have the right to defend themselves and their communities — and that right extends to all of us,” she added.

This is a new and frightening phase for the transgender rights movement.

Up until now, the worst that most disagreeable people experienced was virtually nonviolent. Screws were being turned, as some governments meted out punishments to employees who refuse to use the “correct pronouns,” certain entities were threatened with losing federal funding, and girl athletes found themselves being forced to compete against biological males.

Up until now, the closest thing transgender activists came to endorsing or propagating violence was the glorified body mutilation that trans-identified people endured in failed efforts to fully convert from one sex to the other.

The much quoted (and misquoted) French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire once famously wrote that “whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Voltaire being Voltaire, his comments were directed at the organized religions of his day, as he stated shortly after that remark that “from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.”

Nevertheless, in an America where many have supplanted their religious beliefs with their political views, this quote seems all too appropriate in describing what the transgender rights movement has become.

Clarifications

Granted, just about every group gets the allegation of being inherently evil at some point in their existence, with think pieces abounding on how the occasional bad actor is proof that a whole community or ideology is prone to atrocity, even when the vast majority of its numbers actually live in peace with others.

There are those who believe that all Muslims are violent, and they will point to the occasional terrorist or terrorist group as proof. There are those who believe that all Catholic priests are pedophiles, and they will point to the occasional confirmed abuser or Church abuse coverup as proof. There are those who believe that all undocumented immigrants are dangerous, and they will point to the occasional convicted murderer who entered the nation illegally as proof.

So, what makes the transgender rights movement fundamentally in line with the absurdities-atrocities saying of Voltaire, while other identity groups like the ones mentioned above simply have some rotten apples?

Well, before venturing onward, it must be stressed that this critique is not aimed at the transgender community. As with the other aforementioned identity groups, the vast majority of trans-identified people are nonviolent, and are just as horrified at what happened at The Covenant School as everyone else.

Also, stating what should be obvious, not all transgender individuals think the same way about public policy and social issues. Former Olympian and high-profile transgender public figure Caitlyn Jenner is a prime example, as he opposes allowing biological males who identify as female to play in women’s sports. There is also Scott Newgent, a biological female who identifies as male, who heads an organization called TReVoices that strongly opposes the gender transitioning of minors.

Rather, it is the advocacy movement that has reached a Voltaire Moment. It is the ideology, the activists, the cause that champions itself as the protector of transgendered individuals. Many—possibly most—of this subsection of people are likely not experiencing anything resembling gender dysphoria. These are “cisgender” folks who identify as “allies,” and since they feel a need to prove their loyalty, they are willing to be more hardline and intolerant.

My charges are against the ideologues, the activists, the professors, and any other group that has generated a culture that would fill a mind with absurdities that lead to atrocities.

The Biological Absurdities

We begin with the most obvious of absurdities that undergirds transgender ideology, which is the notion that men can become women and women can become men. While it is true that modern procedures can do much to change a human body, an exact switching of the sexes is still impossible.

Sex differences are a part of our nature as a species. To quote one 2015 study: “Almost universally, animals have two sexes: male and female. In most cases, the genetic basis of sexual differences can be traced to the sex chromosomes. In humans, fruit flies, and many other animals, females have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y.”

Granted, there are those identified as “intersex,” also known as those with “Disorders of sex development,” or DSD. This group has irregularities in their chromosomal makeup when it comes to their gender, as they can develop biological traits of both male and female.

However, the intersex population is estimated to constitute only around 0.018% of the population, and is very much the exception to the rule.

Put simply, the intersex community no more undermines the gender binary than the existence of infertile individuals undermines the idea that human beings are designed for reproduction.

Transgender ideology proponents may invoke intersex individuals to justify their cause, but ultimately their cause is focused on people without chromosomal or genetic abnormalities who nevertheless consider themselves male even when their biological makeup says they are female, and vice versa.

Surgical alterations like removing private parts or pumping oneself full of chemicals do not change chromosomes, nor do they alter the more fundamental features of each sex. The most effective sex change operations in the world cannot make a biological male capable of becoming pregnant, nor can they give a biological female the ability to produce sperm and semen.

Even Healthline admits this when they insisted that “it’s possible for men to become pregnant and give birth to children of their own.” Here is how they justified such an unscientific claim:

“In order to explain, we’ll need to break down some common misconceptions about how we understand the term ‘man.’ Not all people who were assigned male at birth (AMAB) identify as men. Those who do are ‘cisgender’ men. Conversely, some people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) identify as men. … Many AFAB folks who identify as men or who don’t identify as women have the reproductive organs necessary to carry a child.”

To put it more simply, women who claim to be men can get pregnant, but men who claim to be women cannot. Which means that, whether the popular website wants to admit it or not, men cannot in fact get pregnant.

Apart from chromosomes and reproductive organs, transgender ideology fails to grasp the concept of innate and pervasive physical differences between men and women.

Even when men and women are of comparable body size, as one 2004 study put it, “differences in bone mass and geometry confer greater skeletal integrity in males, which may contribute to the lower incidence of stress and osteoporotic fractures in males.”

A 2018 study reported that “Body composition differs between men and women, with women having proportionally more fat mass and men more muscle mass,” adding that although “men and women are both susceptible to obesity, health consequences differ between the sexes.”

And then there is testosterone. While produced by both men and women, testosterone is present in way higher amounts in normal healthy men than in normal healthy women.

“In the healthy, normal males and females, there was a clear bimodal distribution of testosterone levels, with the lower end of the male range being four- to fivefold higher than the upper end of the female range (males 8.8-30.9 nmol/L, females 0.4-2.0 nmol/L),” noted one study from 2019.

Although there are clear and well-documented biological differences, which are so fundamental to an individual as to be virtually unchangeable, the transgender movement insists that to simply identify as the opposite sex and maybe undergo some treatments actually changes someone.

With this reasoning in tow, the movement supports the idea of men who identify as women competing in women’s sports, even with the aforementioned physical advantages among men being obvious.

As a result, in recent times, male athletes who have been allowed to compete in sports designated for female athletes found themselves excelling in ways they never did when previously restricted to men’s sports.

William Thomas, a trans-identified collegiate swimmer who now goes by the name “Lia,” went from being ranked 554th in men’s freestyle to becoming one of the top female swimmers in the nation.

Jamaican runner Craig Telfer, who in 2017 ranked 390th among college aged men, went on to win the women’s 400-meter hurdles national title at the 2019 NCAA Division II Outdoor Track & Field Championships as “Cece.”

And it is an advantage that persists even with extensive treatments, as a December 2020 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that the unfair advantages last for at least a year, if not longer.

“The 15–31% athletic advantage that transwomen displayed over their female counterparts prior to starting gender affirming hormones declined with feminising therapy. However, transwomen still had a 9% faster mean run speed after the 1 year period of testosterone suppression that is recommended by World Athletics for inclusion in women’s events,” noted the study.

“This study suggests that more than 12 months of testosterone suppression may be needed to ensure that transgender women do not have an unfair competitive advantage when participating in elite level athletic competition.”

Small wonder that, in an announcement made last month, The World Athletics Council decided to outright ban “male-to-female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty from female World Rankings competition.”

The Linguistic Absurdities

Despite all the biological evidence against their cause, activists still insist that we refer to transwomen as women and transmen as men. And to say otherwise is so wrong as to be tantamount to violence.

This was the conclusion reached by Khiara Bridges, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley at a Senate hearing held in July of last year.

When Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri argued that only women could get pregnant, Bridges declared that Hawley’s remark was “transphobic” and “opens up trans people to violence.”

Hawley critically asked how it was that he was “opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?”

“Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous,” Bridges responded.

Bridges is not alone in this coupling of criticism of transgender ideology with violence, as GLSEN Executive Director Melanie Willingham-Jaggers has done likewise.

Last November, when a mass shooting took place at Club Q, an LGBT nightclub in Colorado, Willingham-Jaggers was quick to blame nonviolent dissenters for the tragedy.

“This weekend’s violence in Colorado Springs is the latest tragic consequence of the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric that ring-wing politicians and figures are pushing across the country. We’ve seen it time and again: hate speech, especially hate speech enshrined in state bills, fuels hate crimes,” stated Willingham-Jaggers.

Laverne Cox, a prominent transgender actor and public figure, has often declared that “misgendering a trans person is an act of violence,” or “cultural and structural violence.”

According to far too many transgender movement figureheads and intellectuals, simply using the “wrong” pronouns or referring to someone by their pretransition name (“deadnaming”) is the same as physically attacking them.

In the name of this belief, some government powers make it a punishable offense to “misgender,” “deadname,” or, in the case of Maya Forstater, take to Twitter and say something as scientifically accurate as "men cannot change into women.”

Forstater ended up being fired from her job as a senior researcher at the London office of the think-tank Centre for Global Development as a result of that tweet.

In 2019, an employment tribunal upheld her firing, with Judge James Tayler coming to the chilling conclusion that Forstater’s views are “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Sasha White, a former literary agency assistant at The Tobias Literary Agency, was fired from her position in 2020 because she had the audacity to publicly say that transwomen were not women.

Peter Vlaming, who taught French at West Point High School in Virginia, was placed on administrative leave in 2018 for refusing to comply with the superintendent’s order to refer to a female student with male pronouns.

The University of Michigan Health fired physician assistant Valerie Kloosterman in 2021 because she refused to affirm a transgender policy that included using preferred pronouns and personally take part in gender transition treatments.

School officials in Vermont suspended a middle school coach because last year due to his alleged “misgendering” of a biological boy who was allowed to play on the girls volleyball team solely because he identified as female.

These are just a few of the growing number of examples of people being punished for using saying things that are not actually wrong. And the transgender rights movement overwhelmingly approves of such persecutions.

The Voltaire Moment

Voltaire once wrote that “whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

In a nation whose political climate has become especially toxic in recent years, there are multiple causes that have seen some of their adherents turn to violence due to a medley of believing clearly false ideas, ideological isolation, and dehumanizing opponents.

Trump supporters who believed the absurdity that the 2020 presidential election was rigged violently attacked Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 in a quixotic attempt to “stop the steal”; Pro-choicers who believed the absurdity that the overturning of Roe v. Wade meant the end of women’s rights launched a wave of vandalism against pro-life groups and pregnancy care centers in 2022.

Consider this another tragic example of a cause having its Voltaire Moment.

Before the Covenant School shooting, the transgender movement had already demanded that its adherents believe demonstrably absurd ideas, that any words against their views constituted violence against a vulnerable community, and that social institutions from government on down should punish those who oppose them.

Justifying violence against people and institutions who disagree with their worldview is a very short distance from where the current transgender ideology mindset already stands.

Hale was undoubtedly indoctrinated to believe that women could become men, that non-threatening verbal criticism was basically violence or possibly even “erasure,” and that critics of her identity were unworthy of basic respect.

All the steps leading to violence were already built by the intellectuals of the movement; it was only a matter of time before someone decided to walk them up to the heights of destruction.

Possible Solutions

Does this mean that we should arrest every adherent to the transgender movement, every intellectual or activist who has advanced the absurdities listed above, as accessories to murder? Obviously, no. Former Secretary of State John Kerry made a great assessment when he once declared that “in America, you have a right to be stupid.”

Nevertheless, for things to get better, the many social institutions who blindly believe everything that this arm of the overall LGBT movement says must reconsider their perpetual devotion.

Mainstream news organizations should be more critical of claims made by transgender advocacy groups, more willing to publicize the harms associated with experimental puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgeries, and far less willing to stigmatize those who object to a cause that literally cannot even properly define the word “woman.”

There is already some progress on this front, as the New York Times recently published a lengthy piece featuring several medical professionals and formerly trans-identified individuals expressing concerns about kids with gender dysphoria taking puberty blockers.

Politicians should be more willing to enact legislation aimed at reigning in the moral excesses of this cause and stop presuming that every claim an LGBT advocacy organization makes is true.

Educators should stop telling their students that rational objection to any ideology is tantamount to violence. Even when a critic is wrong, they still can and do form nonviolent arguments. To claim that objectionable rhetoric is the same as horrid violence is to provide a very convenient excuse to be closed-minded, and dangerously so.

These are just a few starting points for holding a cause with unchecked power in society to account. Hopefully, pursuing these efforts will, at the least, prevent this Voltaire Moment from becoming a Voltaire Era.

Happy Easter!

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Yours truly will be selling books at the West Virginia Book Festival on October 21. Here's a link with more information: http://www.wvbookfestival.org/ #Authors #bookstagram #booklove #writerslift #writerslife #westvirginia #authorsofinstagram #gryboski #wvbookfestival #michaelgryboski

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

Yours truly will be selling books at the Fredericksburg Independent Book Festival on June 17, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

I will be selling copies of my suspense/mystery book series “Carla” and also a couple of standalone drama novels, “A Spiral Into Marvelous Light” and “The Enigma of Father Vera Daniel.”

So if you’re in the area and are into reading books from independent authors, please stop by and support the arts!

So, I took the plunge and now have a Mastodon account. If you have an account, feel free to connect here: https://mastodonbooks.net/@michaelgryboski #mastodon #newaccount #authorslife #writerslife #authorsofinstagram #gryboski #bookstagram #writerscommunity #michaelgryboski

As the year draws to a close, I would like to highlight the two of my novels that were released in 2022. THE ENIGMA OF FATHER VERA DANIEL: An 18th century Catholic priest tries to survive under an absolutist monarchy that is on the eve of revolution. CARLA: A DEATH IN PARIS: The latest episode of the Carla series finds Carla dealing with a possible international incident when she kills the wrong man. Photo courtesy Vanessa Cruz.

A family photo of sorts. Here are all five entries in my suspense/thriller book series "Carla." Interested in learning more? Then check out the link below ... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09GPYQC53 #Carla #bookseries #suspense #mystery #jancarolpublishing #gryboski #booklove #bookstagram #michaelgryboski #wcw #thriller #womancrushwednesday #womenslit #writerslife #authorsofinstagram

Today marks 21 years since I started writing in my free time, with the intention of serving God and man through literature. Seems like only yesterday that I sat down at a table in the back room of my childhood home to begin writing by hand a manuscript titled "Ravings of a Sane Man." And yet, people born around that time are now old enough to drink. Also seems like only yesterday that I had my first novel published, titled "The Man With Ruby Eyes." And yet, people born around that time are now in elementary school. And it seems like only yesterday that my latest novel, "Carla: A Death in Paris," was released. And yet ... well, actually, that milestone was only a couple of weeks ago, so never mind. Lord-willing, there are still more milestones and tangible victories to come in this literary career of mine. Here's to 21 years of writing, and hopefully many more to come.

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Michael Gryboski