The Enemy Within the Wound
My name is Simon Esler. I am a filmmaker who recently released the film CUT - Daughters of the West and given the chaos and confusion of the war we’re in, I want to share some words.
I want to invite you into an unfinished story, and then ask some questions. A lot of questions.
Take a moment to see through the eyes of a parent.
One day your child tells you they are in pain and they are deeply confused. They tell you:
"Mom and dad something is wrong. I need my body changed, and I need it right away."
You take your child to the doctor, hoping, praying that the doctor sees a simple and loving solution to help your child to heal, to rise out of this distress.
Instead the doctor sides with the child. Something is wrong with your child's body, it’s the wrong body and their body needs to be changed, forever, they tell you.
As a mother you're told that the body that you grew, cell by cell, breath by breath, inside of you, is somehow the wrong body.
As a father you're told that that body, that you protected and surrounded with all your strength...is somehow the wrong body.
You try to seek dissent, an alternative opinion. But all the most popular doctors in your newsfeed are echoing the same talking points, and you can't find any discussion. You can't find anything outside of political debates, both sides screaming:
“hate!”
and:
“child abuse!”
The algorithm continues to serve up repetition:
“Your child's body is wrong.”
“Your child's body is WRONG.”
“Disagreement is hate.”
And in the face of your open, heavy heart you are told by your doctor that:
"If you do not accept this new normal, your child will end their own life and this will be YOUR FAULT."
Exhausted...you give in.
You accept, that the body you fed and nourished and loved, the body you tickled and dressed and undressed when it was so little... that it has been wrong all along. You were loving the wrong body.
You send your child to be changed, forever.
You're told this is love, and you do your best to believe it.
It is done now. You're told everything will get better now.
But one day your child comes back to you and says:
“Mom...Dad...I made a mistake...I want my body back...it was beautiful and I was wrong...can I get my body back?”
What do you do?
What do you do when you later find out that your search for alternative information had been censored?
You find out that the model of medicine you were told was the only way is being rolled back in the UK, in Norway, in Sweden, in Finland.
One entire side of the discussion was kept from you by a system of information control you could not fathom... and now your child is begging for their body back and you are powerless...
You want to SPEAK OUT....but you are told:
“This is transphobia!”
...you are attacked.
Now you are surrounded by battle cries.
“This is the fault of your neighbour!”
“This is the fault of your political opponent!”
Both sides scream a warning at you:
“DO NOT ALIGN WITH THE WRONG SIDE OF POLITICS. THEY ARE EVIL.”
You stand a fork in the road…
I cannot finish this story, because we are living in it right now. We have not lived it through to the end. We are together at the fork in the road.
So now I have questions.
Was this the fault of one wing of politics? Or both? Or neither?
What of the media/medical machine that willfully sought to remove informed consent for both parents and children? That curated one side of the argument and told them to stop all discussion and ACCEPT?
This media machine seems to be pushing a left wing agenda, now, but is that the whole picture?
Isn’t this the same media machine that, not long ago, had a track record of manipulating the right wing to foment wars abroad, only to turn around and manipulate the left wing to do the same today?
Is our cultural amnesia so severe that we forget being told:
“It’s the gun loving conservatives who are pushing us into wars we have no right to support! WAR MONGERS!”
And now, the same “gun loving conservatives” are overwhelmingly against going to war with Ukraine and the script has flipped:
“These gun loving conservatives refuse to push us into a war we HAVE to support! PUTIN LOVERS!”
When did it invert?
Did we all miss a slight of hand?
Isn’t that same media machine now using the same tactics they used to justify wars around the world... to foment a psychological war at home?
Is this politics?
Or is it warfare, that uses politics as a means to an end?
Is this all the fault of blue haired college students or the gun toting conservatives?
Is it only the media?
What about the medical industry that, before gender ideology, was willing to use trends and medical disinformation to increase to the number of girls and women seeking cosmetic genital surgery and breast augmentations?
Why is the same medical-media complex that is telling some girls they are boys telling others that their labia are deformed or that their breasts are too small?
Are the girls lead into cosmetic surgery so different from those girls being lead into double mastectomies?
Do they share a common enemy?
Is the message that our bodies are wrong new?
Or have we accepted the message that our bodies are wrong...over and over again...for generations?
Was it politics that allowed lies about our bodies to become the norm?
Why and when did we accept cultural norms pumped out by a medical industrial complex and a centralized media conglomerate demanding that we turn against our own bodies?
Pain KILLERS?
ANTI-Inflamatory?
ANTI-Biotics?
What does this language say about the fundamental way our culture has caused us to look at the language of the body?
Why did we accept the message that we need to overmedicate these bodies and cut them up?
Why did we comply?
Are we all now living through the wounds we have normalized?
Are both sides of a hyper partisan media landscape amplifying a common enemy's instruction to take our wounds, our pain, and our trauma and turn them against each other?
Is this a tactic being used as a means of keeping our common enemy covert?
Is there a common enemy that will not stop until the left and the right have slit each other's throats?
Is there an enemy counting on the fact that you will not see the pattern?
Are they relying on all of us accepting the abuse that has been built into the fabric of our society for generations?
Are they desperate to have you confuse political cycles with what has been there all along?
What might happen if you find the same wound that you carry inside the person you're being told is your enemy? What if they have been turned against their body just like you?
What if this wound is there...bleeding like yours...crying like yours...screaming like yours?
What if the source of your shared wounds are obscured by a fog of war so thick that we forgot how we even got here?
What if our true enemy is operating inside of us, hoping we will not look inside and see the puppet strings at play?
What if the wounds you share with the person you're being told is evil...are the fuel powering these same, age old manipulations until we all wake up, one by one?
Help me fight the war so many cannot yet see.
Go to www.daughtersofthewestfilm.com and see a film that seeks to expose these larger cultural norms. Help me wake people who cannot yet see the forest for the trees.
A lot of great questions. As an older person of 73 it saddens me that social media is feeding a bunch of garbage to people while the classics of the great minds collect dust in the background. We have far too many “influencers” of the worst kind. The blind leading the blind. Most lacking in any kind of moral or spiritual development at all. I saw an artsy film in the late 70’s about how technology would be our destruction. Wish I had paid better attention. It was hard for me to wrap my brain around that idea at the time. I just read M. Scott Peck’s book People of the Lie. It’s about evil. In my opinion we are fighting evil at a level never seen before. But those of us of faith already know the ending. Life is a gift though and we were given talents and free will to reach for the stars. And we need to keep doing that even now. I think you are.