(LifeSiteNews) — The annual Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, once described by Bill Clinton as “The Woodstock of the mind,” was held from May 23 to June 2 this year. So: what did the intellectual elites of the West at twilight have to say?
Well, this headline in the Guardian summed it up nicely: “Men and other mammals live longer if they are castrated, says researcher.”
The researcher in question is Cat Bohannon, a Ph.D. from Columbia University who penned the bestseller Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution and has stated, firmly and bizarrely, that “trans women are women” – which makes one wonder what Bohannon means when she says “the female body.”
During her talk at the Hay Festival, Bohannon referred to testicles as “two little death nuggets” and suggested that an “orchiectomy” – the surgical removal of the testicles – could make men live longer. According to the research, she said, castrated men live longer than their “regularly balled peers.” There is much we don’t know about all this, she added, although “a lot of good science is being done in this space.”
That, of course, leads to a question: What exactly is “this space”? Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan nailed it with a brutal, one-line analysis of Bohannon’s comments on X: “Castrating children is Good Actually”:
Castrating children is Good Actually pic.twitter.com/cGt1HXEiM0
— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) June 1, 2024
Linehan is right. If you’ve read the term “orchiectomy” recently, it is either in an article or paper about testicular cancer – or, more likely, in a description of “gender affirming surgery” being pushed by transgender activists. The horrors being perpetrated by the transgender medical industry on gender dysphoric boys were described in a recent documentary by Jennifer Lahl titled Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood.
One young man talks about his castration, which he says he regretted “straight away.” Another described waking up from the surgery feeling as if his genitals were still there – a “ghost limb” – and then the nurses showed him his testicles in a plastic bag. Two times a day, he said sadly, he has to dilate his “neovagina” for 30 minutes. Another noted: “I’m a lifelong patient. I’m sick to death of hospitals.” The five young men, who represent legions more, are trying to find ways to live the rest of their lives, knowing that medical issues will dog them until they die.
But, according to the research unveiled with great fanfare and crude language by Bohannon at the Hay Festival, perhaps they’ll live a bit longer.
The rest of Bohannon’s speech was equally disturbing. She announced that “someday we’re going to have an artificial womb,” and this would raise ethical questions – although not the ethical questions you might hope. We need to know “a hell of a lot more about female bodies to try and build a fake one,” she said.
“Let’s be really utopian about this s**t, OK,” she told the audience. “Let’s say it’s available to everyone, it’s not just a rich woman thing, it’s not just a white woman thing – whatever that means hundreds of years out – does it then become ever ethical to ask a person with a womb to become pregnant if it can be done outside of a body?”
The elite definition of “utopia” sounds remarkably like a dystopia to me.
This highlights something that journalist Jennifer Bilek has been saying for several years now – that transgenderism and transhumanism are two sides of the same coin. These idealogues do not believe that you are your body. Both of these “trans” ideologies are premised in the belief that we can transcend our body; that we can amend it to suit our internal identities; or that ultimately, we can merge with machines and become a hybrid species. If you believe that, castration, or artificial wombs, or 72 genders might just make sense. It might even sound like utopia to you.
It’s easy to look at the Hay Festival and laugh it off as a bunch of out of touch intellectuals descending from their ivory towers to pitch bizarre ideas. But if the last five years have taught us anything, it should be that their ideas are no laughing matter.
