Notes for June 2025
News, notes, prayers, etc.
Paying subscribers recently received a bagatelle on spear and distaff, a reflection on René Girard’s theory of the single-victim mechanism, and a list of security measures for writers, particularly those expecting a mobbing.
Before that came an appreciation of Hildegard von Bingen, an overview of the process of pitching and publishing a nonfiction book, and a genealogy of theories of mass behavior running from Gustave Le Bon through Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman to Byung-Chul Han.
Thanks to the seventeenth paid subscriber, joining in June, for the encouraging words, and to the eighteenth as well. Thanks to the other sixteen for reading this far and putting up with the typos that I missed.
Twenty-odd people bought paperback copies of On Fragile Waves after witnessing a fraction of the abuse directed at me, which was a kind and unexpected act. I hope you enjoy it. (Mind you, I deliberately make no money from that particular book.) I’m also grateful to the two or three people who bought copies of Jewel Box and Break, Blow, Burn, and Make. It means more than you know.
I don’t intend to make a habit of mentioning current events, since my aim for The Paper Airplane has always been to write what is useful and lasting,1 but occasionally the present has pedagogical value. This week’s unsurprising U.S. v. Skrmetti decision caused the NYT to finally report accurately and thoroughly, though years late, on the broadening global consensus that what is commonly called pediatric gender medicine has little evidence in its favor. They still fail to mention the Dentons report and the billionaires bankrolling the activism, however.
NYT:
Systematic reviews commissioned by international health bodies have consistently found that the evidence of the benefits of the treatments is weak, as is the evidence on the potential harms.
After seeing an early copy of SOC-8, Levine and [his] staff began pressuring WPATH to drop the new age minimums, arguing that “specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,” as the group’s president relayed to colleagues in July 2022. That September, the American Academy of Pediatrics—which had also been provided a preview—followed suit, threatening to publicly oppose SOC-8 if the age minimums were not deleted….
“Everyone was like, holy cow—did Rachel Levine really go out and lobby for 9-year-olds to get surgery?” one former Biden aide told me…..
Cass’s report sent shock waves across the Atlantic. There was “no evidence” that gender-affirming treatments reduced the risk that trans teenagers would die by suicide, her review found. SOC-8’s adolescent chapter lacked “developmental rigor.” And the much-cited consensus of medical associations was a mirage. Few of the groups endorsing gender-affirming care had actually conducted their own in-depth evidence reviews, her team found; instead, nearly all had relied on older Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines as the basis for their own recommendations.
There was now a dawning awareness within the administration, another Biden aide told me, that its allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care.
Apart from the commentary by Biden aides, there’s nothing new in the reporting for anyone who has been paying attention, but for those who refuse to consider any evidence contrary to accepted opinion unless it has been printed in the NYT, the articles will be useful.
The trouble—and it is a small, private trouble, for sure, not worth anyone’s notice—is that this leaves me in a quandary.
Do I believe the reviewer(s) who blacklisted me, the friends who turned on me for the sake of party invitations, and the colleagues that denounced me for social clout, will have the decency to apologize for their false accusations and the damage they have done, now that the so-called paper of record has repeated what I said? Now that it has become obvious even to the inattentive that I have, all along, been telling the truth, while my thousands of accusers have been lying?
No is the easy answer, the answer of long experience and observation. I am not the first person to be thrown to the wolves, and have seen no human decency in other cases and expect none in mine. I think now and then of Nina Paley’s “The Banality of Stupid” (2017), which has proven quite accurate in its predictions.
However, the severe and necessary constraint of faith is that I am not permitted to say no. I can grieve, and have been grieving, for those I know who sold their integrity for a spot on a bestseller list, for those who embraced lying for personal advantage, for those who destroyed themselves and others for public approval, for the well-known writer with a reputation for kindness who wrote to me privately: I’m white; I’m never going to prison. Why should I care about women in prison being raped by male inmates?2
But I have to hope that the people I know who threw away their decency, intelligence, and sense for a passing fad will one day have these things restored to them, and know their worth, and never lose them again. I have to pray for this. And I have to believe that it could happen, even if it takes decades—even if I never live to see it.
Job, accused by his friends in the depths of his suffering, in the very next moment had to intercede with God on behalf of those friends. Suso, that gentle Dominican friar, weighed down by slander, embraced and adopted the orphaned infant he was accused of fathering.3 Madeleine L’Engle, accused of betraying a friend, struggled to follow the command in Matt 5:44 and Luke 6:28 to pray for her unknown accuser. At last she was able to say: God bless the bastard.4
God, give guts and gorms to the gutless and gormless. God, forgive them, although they knew what they were doing. Bless the bastards and have mercy on them.
As another writer taught me to pray last week: Bless them. Change me.
Stories
“A Shell in the Desert” will appear in the anthology Revolution in the Heart, out from Titan Books in October.
“Down the Interstate” will appear in the anthology The Book of the Dead, expected from Harper Voyager in October.
For the record, since people have been slinging rocks at innocents that should have been aimed at me, stories for anthologies are solicited years in advance of publication. The editor has committed no thoughtcrimes. Leave him alone.
Which is how I managed to construct a bear trap, set it, and step in it. With the benefit of hindsight, I have to advise against writing essays on courage. The universe will promptly schedule an exam.
The Quaker minister Elizabeth Fry, one of dozens of Quaker women involved in prison reform, spent decades pushing for the passage and enforcement of the 1823 Gaols Act in England, which mandated single-sex prisons to protect female inmates from the rape that was occurring in the mixed-sex prisons of the time. From the mid-nineteenth century to approximately the 1960s, when men sued to become guards at female prisons on the basis of “equality,” and won, prisons in the U.K. and U.S. were entirely single-sex. Only in 2020 in the U.S. did the ACLU lawsuits forcing women’s prisons to house any male inmate who demanded a transfer begin to succeed. (Their activist counterparts in the U.K. succeeded earlier, I think.)
Which of course made things worse. Poor sensitive Suso, that friar who wished to be a knight:
“…and whilst he suffered thus, several times something which came from God said within his soul, ‘Where then is your resignation? Where is that equal humour in joy and in tribulation which you have so lightly taught other men to love? In what manner is it, then, that one should rest in God and have confidence only in Him?’ He replied weeping, ‘You ask where is my resignation? But tell me first, where is the infinite pity of God for His friends?’”
From Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (1911), Book 9.
Somewhere in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Stone for a Pillow. I don’t have the page number, but:
“I received angry phone calls from people condemning me for telling that terrible secret I had not told. All I could say was that I had not breathed a word. Some people believed me. Some did not. It is a taint in human nature to like to see someone else do wrong so that we can affirm our own righteousness.”
I did find my bookmark in L’Engle’s Sold Into Egypt (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1989) 112-114:
“One night when I had received a gratuitous attack on one of my books by a woman concerned with smelling out books she considered unChristian—and her tools for condemnation did not include either reading the book or knowing what it was about—I turned to Scripture for comfort and perspective…and read, suddenly in a completely new and different way, ‘Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake….’
Then I came upon these words of Brother Andrew, an Episcopal monk:
…fear can lead us to a compulsion to try to convert others to our point of view. We feel threatened by the possibility of our being wrong. Or we dread the possible changes that might enter our lives if we changed our minds about an important issue.
So I must be very careful not to fear the stinging accusations, but to look at them objectively and compassionately without imposing moral judgments.”