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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Part 3: From high heels to warped ideals
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Last month a video circulated on social media of male Canadian politicians staggering around in pink-coloured high heels in Parliament. It was apparently part of an effort to raise awareness about violence against women through the “Hope In High Heels” campaign.

“This was originally created as an avenue for men and boys to show support for women experiencing domestic violence by wearing hot pink heels,” according to the sponsor, Halton Women’s Place. “Now, Hope in High Heels has evolved and grown to include EVERYONE, of all ages and ability levels!”

This outfit appears to be a high-stepping variant of the US-based organization “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” which organizes “The International Men's March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence.” The men march in high heels, of course.

All very laudable and progressive, no?

However, it seems a bit odd that for awareness-raising purposes both organizations employ the visual prop of high heels: a form of footwear designed to accentuate female sexual anatomy that’s physically detrimental to boot (pun intended). Although heels are considered a part of a professional women’s ensemble, it’s fair to say they’re the western world’s near-equivalent to Chinese female foot binding.

And of course these chiropractic nightmares aren’t much help for a woman dealing with a male stalker or abuser, as noted by a sharp female friend. “You can’t run away in them! And they are very uncomfortable - one of the most common foot surgeries is for bunions caused by tight high shoes. Those wacky long pointed ones in the 90’s were ridiculous! Women squeeze their feet into a smaller shoe - big feet are still considered unattractive.”

My point here while it’s socially responsible to raise awareness about violence - whether it’s racial, gender-based, or otherwise - the semiotics go sideways when its performed in footwear that is arguably sexist and harmful.

Author J.K. Rowling asked a pertinent question of this colourful public relations exercise in Ottawa:

There’s another odd angle involved. To raise awareness on this issue, men and boys are being encouraged to ritually adopt the cross-dressing habit of drag queens.

How about that!

The 11th Hour

We’re living in a time of blurred boundaries: between men and women, boys and girls, and even between the sexually mature and immature. This is being done under the banner of human rights and freedoms, and the casting off of oppressive norms of the past.

Jennifer Bilek has a different viewpoint. The feminist scholar behind the blog The 11th Hour believes there’s a highly profitable attack underway on the very concept of womanhood itself. And she has the receipts.

Even prior to the explosion of gender reassignment surgeries, the medical implant industry dwarfed big pharma by many billions of dollars. The overall project of encouraging gender transition is a big win for the medical-industrial complex and its allies, says Bilek in a recent interview for Bigpicture.watch.

“This project has, you know, is backed by big finance, big pharma, big tech and, and all the corporations, international corporations, international finance houses, international law firms, they’re all driving the same narrative. And you have to ask yourself, why would this happen in the span of ten years?”

The activist insists female sex isn’t just “being deconstructed as well as ideologically and legally and linguistically in the culture,” but medically as well, by removing young women’s organs at major hospitals.

If you convince a whole generation of children that they can choose their sex, they’re not going to know where they come from. They’re not going to know who or what they are, because we as a species are connected to the real world, to the natural world, by sex. That’s how we’re tethered to everything else, everything in the universe, you know, in all the, you know, in the world, in the biological world, is reproduction. Regeneration, death; regeneration, death; regeneration, death. Right? 

This is where Bilek makes a plausible connection between transgender ideology and the tranhumanist agenda.

She believes that dissolving the boundary between the sexes, with youth and age defined as lifestyle choices, perfectly dovetails with the technocratic wet dream of the “Singularity,” in which the distinction between humans and machines collapses.

The “disembodiment” attached to virtual living is shading into literal meaning with bumpf about transferring human reproduction from women to machines. Yes, that’s right: human babies bred in laboratories. This is already the stuff of headlines.


Although the technology is still - ahem - in embryo, it’s being positioned as future saviour of critically preterm infants. All well and good if that’s the sole intention behind it. Curious that in the Guardian story above the reporter noted, “this isn’t a replacement for pregnancy yet, but it is certainly the beginning.”

Why would there be any pressing need for such a Frankenstein-like birthing technology, assuming it’s even workable? Who would want a child delivered in this manner? Perhaps a woman who wants a baby but can no longer give birth due to a prepubescent decision to transition as a man? Perhaps a man who identifies as a woman but is sadly without a womb serviced by a working placenta? Or perhaps simply a healthy biological woman who has been convinced by marketers that there’s a ‘safe and effective’ alternative to faulty mammalian pregancy, which is challenging, complicated, messy, painful and sometimes dangerous?

(If you had told me five years ago I would one day seriously write a paragraph like that, I wouldn’t have had a clue what the future me was on about.)

“If you sterilise a whole generation of children, they’re going to need reproductive services, right? You can’t just go and make a baby in your backyard with your partner, right?” notes Bilek.

There’s an even darker possibility here, with recent pharmaceutical documentation of negative effects of mRNA vaccines on human fertility and pregnancy. Will we see growing numbers of infertile woman due to the long-term consequences of a gene therapy rushed out under emergency use authorization?

In any case, if the medical-industrial complex promises something to infertile couples and single parents that is more convenient than turkey basters aimed at surrogate mothers, there will surely be customers willing to gamble. It might be hard to get the ‘Matrix hesitant’ on board, though.

(“Ectolife” isn’t real and only a concept, but incredibly, it wasn’t conceived as a dystopic scenario. Story behind the video here.)


Bilek considers this dark fantasy an “occupation of womanhood,” and the “pinnacle of objectification.” It represents a scheme for the final erasure of women and womanhood, she insists.

“‘We’re going to take your biology. We’re going to wear it as a costume, first of all. And second of all, we’re going to transfer this reproductive capacity that you have to the tech sector.’ 

And this is why women are being legally erased in language in law. They just took ‘woman’, the word ‘woman’, out of the dictionary, in the Cambridge Dictionary, and they replaced it with ‘anybody that feels like a woman’. And the way that they do that, to transfer the, you know, human reproduction to the tech sector is through all the big fertility treatments that are out there now, you know, freezing your eggs and freezing your sperm and surrogacy. And they’re talking, you know, they’re researching womb implants, womb transplants. It’s profiteering, and it’s social control in the sense that they really, literally, want to break sex apart, the boundary between the males and females of our species…They perceive this as progress. You will be unburdened by sexual stereotypes, by sexual inequalities. Mothers and women won’t have to have children.

Catherine Austin Fitts sees another possible win-win for the corporate state in the blurring of sexual/biological boundaries: it helps gut its traditional enemy, labour. The former US Undersecretary of Housing predicts that lawmakers will eventually legalize a third gender so that robots can be given personhood, citizenship, and taxpayer status.

“They’re not going to stand up and say, ‘Look, we want robots to have the rights of humans so we can put you out of work without hiccupping the state and local cash flows,’”she said in a recent interview.

I can imagine an additional possible angle: those who heavily augment themselves with implants, including neural chips, might be able to claim third gender personhood as cyborgs. They would have an employment leg up over the un-augmented ‘truebloods,’ in terms of mental processing power and interoperability with AI systems.

All of this, from lab-grown babies to robots and cyborgs punching the clock, is conceivable - but is any of it actually possible? There are certainly people out there invested in finding out. (Even the Canadian government is all in on a transhumanist future.)

Back to Bilek:

So women are being erased in language and law. And mostly women are having their biology deconstructed. You know, young women are getting the double mastectomies. You know, they’re having their ovaries removed. They’re having their wombs removed. You know, it’s way, way top heavy with young women having their bodies, their sex bodies medically attacked. 

So this isn’t just some ideological thing going around of female erasure. This is actually happening. And you have to ask the question, well, why is this happening? Why would they do that? And when you follow the money, like I do, you find the answers. It’s all going to the tech sector…they want to take over human reproduction with technology… It’s absolute madness out there…you can’t talk about reality without bringing the law down upon you. Women are being arrested. Arrested. Legally arrested for saying that, you know, men can’t be women.

So where it’s going, you know, the money points to them sort of overlaying a virtual reality over the natural world and subjugating the natural world. All the big techie guys, they’re all talking about it. They don’t hide it. Metaverse for Zuckerberg, Singularity for Ray Kurzweil…he says we’re, you know, in very short order, we’re going to be living as a different species. We’re going to be post-human. 

Trans people certainly deserve their respect and rights. But how is it that corporate culture pivoted so quickly to massively support and advance a minority representing approximately 0.4 percent of the population? How did every social justice movement in the 20th century, from the suffragettes to Occupy Wall Street, first encounter stiff establishment resistance…but not this one?

Could it be the transhumanism tail is wagging the transgender dog? And is it not curiously convenient that transhuman and transgender share the same prefix?

I recommend readers check out Bilek’s 11th Hour blog, where she names names and follows the money.

A dance with women at the centre

In the PBS series “The Power of Myth,” anthropologist Joseph Campbell alluded to a ritual by the Kalahari tribes of Africa, in which the women sit in a circle and the men dance around them. The dance acknowledges that “the woman is life and the man is the servant of life,” said Campbell.

So-called ‘primitive’ people have always understood the centrality of female fertility in society and nature. The story of western civilization can largely be read as a retreat from this understanding, beginning with the erasure of the ancient goddess religions and matriarchal systems of the Near East. In this regard, the 21st century transhumanist distaste for messy female embodiment and autonomy is a new whine in an old battle. It’s just a more sophisticated form of men occupying women’s spaces - but in this latest riff it’s not just their washrooms. It’s their wombs.

It’s all well and good for politicians to stagger about in high heels for photo ops against male violence, even if it fails to stop a single femicide. But what about the transhumanist trial balloons for occupying female fertility, and the violence perpetrated against children by the male-dominated medical-industrial complex? Doesn’t this warrant men and women marching together in solidarity for families present and future? And forget those crimson and pink high heels, how about people donning those mothballed pink pussy hats to protest something far more dangerous than Donald J. Trump?

“The woman is life and the man is the servant of life.” Which also means men protecting women from harm. You don’t have to put on painful, candy-coloured sexist footwear to figure that one out.

(Bilek’s complete interview below.)

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Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. - Karl Marx, 1848.



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