Woke weekly bullettin #2

by Enrico Petrucci and Emanuele Mastrangelo

In any case, we challenge you to milk a bull....

The woke gem of the week has already been relaunched by many news outlets and is about "male milk" for infants. Mind you, the definition is particularly ambiguous, but we are in the new world of woke ideology where everything is extremely slippery and more elusive than a traditional Turkish wrestler doused in oil.

There is no mention of "male milk" in the sense of milk from people who are born biological women but self-perceived and transitioned male (as the photo erroneously accompanies some of the articles relaying the news), thus the milk of women who take testosterone and perhaps have some beard. And that would still be "paternal milk" according to woke terminology, male milk in that it was, again according to woke terminology, a man who carried the pregnancy. As in the Italian case a few weeks ago and about which several jeremiads were raised for not having been treated with the appropriate propriety of language. Compare, for example, two articles complaining about the forms of language used and mutually clashing:

Why the story of Marco, a pregnant trans man, shows that Italy does not know how to handle diversity

Everything that went wrong with Marco's story, transitioning but pregnant

The woke news story of the week on "male milk" is really about milk produced by biological males more or less transitioned female and subjected to horsey (pardon, marey) dosages of a hormone, domperidone, which would normally be used to stimulate prolactin production and facilitate milk production under medical supervision. Despite the fact that as the Telegraph states, the drug's warning bugiardine precautionarily states:

Small amounts have been detected in breastmilk. Motilium may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby. [It] should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary

Despite this premise, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust stated that the milk of trans women was comparable to that produced by biological women after pregnancy. It also specified that testosterone percentages were below 1 percent and no side effects were noted in the monitoring.

The note from the university trust, which runs three hospitals in Sussex, came in response to those who advocated a preference for powdered milk in such cases. But the trust is one of those bodies that espoused the woke train from the outset: in its guidelines it was the first in the UK to retire the term "breastfeeding" with the Newspeak term "chestfeeding". And he also wanted to keep the point about "natural breastfeeding," albeit of "male" milk. Just find the right dosage of hormones, top of nature!

Other woke factions also dispute the definition of "breastfeeding as natural" altogether. See the case a few weeks ago of a statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics (the leading association in the field) that stated:

Promoting breastfeeding as ‘natural’ may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that ‘natural’ approaches are presumptively healthier. This may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination.

Germany – Stunningusaurus bravius

Moving on. Another wokeshit harbinger of memes and also much commented on is the affair related to paleontology, namely that paleontologists of the olden days when they found a fossil or a dinosaur skeleton tended to give names in style with the conceptions of the time, hence old white male. The prestigious Nature launches a preview of research (not yet published) that looked at some 1,500 names given to dinosaurs, and despite the fact that the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, ICZN, has been in operation for some time now, paleobiologist Emma Dunne and her colleagues at the University of Erlangen Nuremberg found that 3 percent of the names «emanating racism, sexism, named under (neo)colonial contexts or after controversial figures»

Male names (did you just assume dinosaur gender?), colonial place names, and when local names were used they were often poorly transliterated. And especially in the case of Western expeditions to distant lands almost never did the Westerners (old white males) pay homage or acknowledge the effort of local communities.

For the time being, it is just an acknowledgement, partly because renaming a species is not an immediate or easy thing. So for the moment, children around the world can continue to get excited about old-fashioned dinosaur names like Tyrannosaurus rex, without having liberal variants like Cittadinosaurus Democraticus. Stunning and brave!

United Kingdom - Corporate benefits? Manuals on how to raise trans children

Another news coming out of the UK, this time it's the content of a special issue of a corporate magazine for John Lewis & Partner department store. For LGBTQ+ History Month it has produced an Identity magazine chock-full of content on the theme. The magazine, aimed at 70,000 employees, is a sort of state-of-the-art almanac of queer-trans issues. But what angered many employees by igniting the controversy was the article "Raising trans and non-binary children" that gives a lot of space to the Mermaids association.

But beyond the controversy over the infamous chest-binders the bands to crush the breasts of sexually confused young girls about their identity, which net of gender propaganda have side effects anyway, the bone of contention is precisely the magazine's very reverent approach to the Mermaids association. Association always at the center of controversy for its unscrupulous way of doing things, and as the Daily Mail recalls under investigation by the Charity Commission «to establish if there had been any misconduct or mismanagement by trustees»

Italy /1 - Public money is always spent excellently

And in Italy? The Wokeist Newspeak revolution is not lying dormant and can rely on the latest in technology. The algorithm, or rather the artificial intelligence that corrects and cleans up acts and public communications from uninclusive language.

Italy \ 2 - If you're a good boy dad gives you a gift.

How long will it take to link such software to social credit apps like Chinese ones? Come on, in Italy? Who would introduce such apps in Italy? Well, breaking news has just come out that Guido Bertolaso, Lombardy Region's alderman for Health, would like to introduce a points-based health card to reward virtuous behavior. But getting from rewards for good children to punishments for bad ones will take time. About as long as it takes to say, "but do you think they will ever do that in Italy?"

Italy / 3 - Wokeists at the opera

However, wokeism is not only the magnificent fates of the brave new world and inclusive proofreading AIs. There is also the whole strand of cancel culture and the attempt to deconstruct by eraser. As we had mentioned in the nel previous bulletin, the new hot front would seem to be that of opera, which on Dec. 6 became a UNESCO non-material heritage site. And if opera seems to be holding out after Riccardo Muti's lunge on the n-word in the libretto of Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera," it is worth returning to the "serial predator" that is Mozart's Don Giovanni.

Apparently, if to hear too much Wagner you know what an end you're going to get (shooting Vietcongs from helicopters, what did you get?) an excess of "Don Giovanni" who knows what side effects it will elicit... And so writer and intellectual Viola Ardone from the pages of La Repubblica ventures a Don Giovanni trial. The object of contention is the list of the seducer's conquests, and one reads, "that that list of erotic prey turns out sinisterly similar to the one that enumerates the victims of feminicide?". Not any less.

Fortunately, for the moment the fate of Don Giovanni is safe, in the sense that it has already been making a bad end of itself for a few centuries, and so we are spared the modernist ending as with poor Carmen. However, Alberto Mattioli responds to Ms. Ardone from the pages of Il Foglio. So also for this week the opera front holds.

Although strangely, there was no occasion to dredge up the issue of Mozart's sister, who was probably better than he was, but who had to settle because of the patriarchy. And so we ended up with the very poor Wolfgang and his sexist piecés.

Until next week, wishing as always that we will have less to write and you less to read.

Enrico Petrucci

An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).