Protocols of the Elders of Genspect
An absurd comedy about lazy readers
This is called a ‘story.’ That means it is ‘fiction.’ The people in this story do not exist. If someone tells you that they are a character in this story, they are telling on themselves and you should believe them.
Once upon a time there was a thing called a ‘book.’ Everybody talked about the book. Everyone seemed to know what secrets were hidden inside its pages, though it was evident to anyone who had read the book that none of the people talking most about it had ever even picked up the book to read it.
‘Picked up’ has become a metaphor in the digital age, of course. Although its practical ancestors were printed on paper bound in cardboard, leather, parchment, and silk, this particular book could be printed in practical 8.5x11” paper format upon command using a standard consumer home printing device.
Or it could be read through the magic of the internet on a screen by clicking right here. Browser add-ons could read it to the blind. There were so many wonderful new options in the world for reading this book, which was so very controversial.
Upon opening the book, a person would encounter more than 330 ‘pages’ containing ‘words.’
Words have ‘meanings.’
The skill of comprehending words and their meanings from a page is called ‘reading.’
It is work. Work can be hard. For many people, reading is not happy work.
This particular book was supposed to be read by doctors, school staff, and therapists — people who work at the front lines of the gender craze and who do a lot of reading. The book in our story was not intended for a general audience, though it was not difficult for a high school-level reader to comprehend.
Nevertheless, many people in a kingdom that was reputed to be literate expressed opinions of the Corpus Ferneticum 1st Ed. that were at variance with the actual, real, not-imaginary contents of the book, which I stress again had been available for them all to read for several weeks before the story I am about to tell about some very stupid people took place.
You see, there were some people in the kingdom who did not like the High Physician that wrote the Corpus Ferneticum 1st Ed. They called her a Trojan Horse. They called her a selfish, terrible, no-good, very bad, evil person who should pay more attention to them whenever they screamed at her in the street.
“You want to medicalize children,” they sneered.
“You believe in tru-trans magic,” they accused.
“You harbor petalphiles,” they screeched.
“You invited that flower-man to speak on stage,” they all shouted, at once, in unison.
The flower-man basked in all of their attention, which was sunlight to him.
The High Physician had only just finished her conference introducing the Corpus Ferneticum 1st Ed. to the world. Produced by a large team of experts, this comprehensive document was aimed at educating the aforementioned school boards, counselors, nurses, specialists, &etc that ‘gender identity’ is a harmful ideology, and most harmful of all to children experiencing some sort of ‘gender distress.’
In other words, the Corpus Ferneticum 1st Ed. was supposed to stop people from cutting bits off their children and poisoning their children with Baal’s Hormone Remedy™ until they turned into flowers and ragweed.
Not cutting bits off children and poisoning them with patent medicine seemed the one thing everybody against this situation could agree on — until the High Physician emerged from the conference and encountered the rabble of angry peasants waving pitchforks and torches.
A dog panted on a chain, too. He was a very good boy.
The angry people all pointed to the flower-man, who had rooted himself on the embankment of the castle moat.
The flower-man basked in their attention, which to him was sunlight, and grew a little in stature.
“I don’t know where he came from,” the High Physician said. “He bought a ticket. He was not a speaker. His book looks interesting.” She showed them her copy. “I haven’t had time to read it yet beyond scanning the first leaf.”
“You find that ‘INTERESTING’??!” The mob hissed, rearing back as if from a vampire. “HE IS LURING OUR CHILDREN TO BECOME PLANTS!”
“He never had surgery. He never touched Baal’s Hormone Remedy™. Yet he exists,” the High Physician observed with a measure of surprise.
They regarded one another and pointed to the High Physician to accuse her all at once: “TRANSPLANTIST!”
“I have patients with sons like him,” the High Physician replied. “They are so desperate for help when they come to me. Some of my toughest cases, really.”
“YOU LOVE PETALPHILES!!! YOU WORK WITH THEM!” The mob roared, louder than ever.
They sucked in a breath all at once, exclaiming: “YOU EMPATHIZE WITH PETALPHILES!!!”
“It’s my job,” said the High Physician. “King’s writ. I was commissioned to solve the problem of flower-men and ragweed women. I have to work with all of them. Otherwise I cannot do my job.”
The sky seemed to darken a shade as the hubbub peaked again.
“What is your job?” The High Physician then asked the crowd, pointing out a muleskinner.
“I skin mules by day and rant into my seeing stone at the tavern all night,” he replied with a bit of embarrassment. Then he worked up his courage. “To tell the world about the flower-men and the PETALPHILES and the evil High Physician!”
“And you?” She asked the crowd, pointing out a cornmonger.
“I fix the price of corn every day and post my feelings about the evil High Physician and her black magic through public square broadsheets!” The cornmonger replied in huff. “I should like the whole kingdom to know what a …. PETALPHILE we have for a High Physician!”
“Who are you and what is your job?” The High Physician asked a third member of the mob.
“I am Benny Twillig, the famous engraver,” declared Benny Twillig, the famous engraver, with an affection of bored disdain. (He did not use the word ‘petalphile’ because he was above such words.)
“Ah,” replied the High Physician. “I’ve heard of you I think. Not much into fine arts I’m afraid. Too busy dealing with the plague of flower-men and ragweed-women upon the land, you know.”
“You are MAKING the flower-men and ragweeed-women,” sneered Benny Twillig, the famous engraver.
Among Twillig’s most famous works at that time was the 13th Hour Zine, an irregularly-published pamphlet in which Twillig re-wrote the very first edition anew each time. Based on ‘research’ suggested to him by other writers, Twillig had further built his own following by endlessly claiming that someone else with more talent had plagiarized this work to become famous.
“Transplantist,” Twillig spat. It was his favorite word.
“Prove it,” said the High Physician. And then, clapping her hands, she said: “Peedeeyeffum distributum!”
There was a flash of respectable blue, and the world seemed to shake, as though someone had bumped the projector in the middle of a packed conference, somewhere, and someone’s high-energy presentation had become unstable.
Then, just as suddenly, all the antagonists were holding copies of the Corpus Ferneticum 1st Ed.
“If it is as you say,” the High Priestess said, “show me where the transplantism is.”
“I don’t have to do anyth—”
A royal guard appeared at Twillig’s side. “Yes you do, sir. This time, you in fact do.”
A second guard volunteered advice from Twillig’s opposite flank. “You want to. Sir.”
Reluctantly, with no small protest, Twillig cracked open the supposed unholy necronomicon and went to the table of contents. He looked for an index. He searched in parts of the book that looked likely to hold the satanic secrets, but came up empty.
“Well?” Said the High Physician. “Where is the secret recipe for making boys into flower-men? And girls into ragweed-women? You seemed very sure it was in there.”
“It might not be in here,” said the famous engraver, “but you meant it!”
The High Physician was calm, like an experienced professional who knows how to ignore the provocations of children. A governess made of steel. It was the quality that her detractors hated most.
She pointed to the book in Twillig’s hands, which for some reason he was unable to put down. “These are meant to be protocols for people who must deal with the flower-men and ragweed-women and their families every day,” she said. “Do you work with flower-men and ragweed-women and their families every day?”
“No,” said the engraver, who was very famous, with a shudder. “Gross.”
“Yes. I see that you are disgusted. That is not uncommon, especially knowing what he is,” the High Physician said with empathy.
She regarded the flower-man with a side-eye glance to avoid making him grow any taller, for attention was his sunlight. He was visibly growing. The mob were still agitating against his existence among them, and that was his sunlight.
The High Physician turned to the cornmonger and the muleskinner. “Well? Did you find the magical formula for creating flower-men in there, yet?”
Both the cornmonger and the muleskinner were slower readers. They had given up already after flipping through their copies frantically in search of a magical formula.
Instead of dire symbols and arcane spells, the pages contained sound advice for stalling, halting, and hopefully preventing the spread of flower-men and ragweed-women across the land.
There was a model schools policy containing proven advice on stopping the social contagion causing young people to transform into plants. It included advice on preserving single-sex sports and spaces in scholastic environments.
Although the tome acknowledged the existence of petalphilia — for that phenomenon played a role in the spread of the plant-people plague across the land — it did not contain any instructions for making people into plants.
There was no language extolling the virtues of transplantation.
Where unholy rituals and sacrifices to dark gods were expected, there was instead a wholesale denunciation of Baal’s Hormone Remedy™ as well as the tree-trimming and weed-whacking methods of dealing with gender distress.
By now the torches and pitchforks had disappeared. So had the dog, who was a good boy. So had most of the crowd, copies of the Corpus Ferneticum 1st Ed. in their hands, somehow unable to put the book down until they had read every last word for themselves.
“Are you sorry at all?” Asked the High Physician.
“No!” Cried the three remaining miscreants: muleskinner, cornmonger, and engraver. “We will never cease telling people what a petalphile-enabling sicko you are!”
“They’re yours,” the High Physician said to the king’s men, and then she left the scene behind, for there was so much real work to do. Urgent work.
Accountability reigned. The king’s justice ground on slowly, but exceedingly fine.
The flower-man rose to the sky, spreading his leaves like wings, basking in all the attention, which was his sunlight.
Impressive hand-waving, but it doesn't distract from a few simple, obvious facts:
Many, even most of those people have had their lives, families and/or careers profoundly damaged by a cult led by these men in dresses. OF COURSE they were unhappy to see one there. OF COURSE they flipped out when they saw him promoted. All of the brilliant rebuttals are beside the point, and tone-deaf.
A little acknowledgment of that by Genspect will go a long way for them, credibility-wise. Ignore the drama, be humble for a moment, focus on that one simple truth, validate the very understandable pain, admit the oversight.
Until then it just looks like the place is run by out-of-control egos who are clueless about PR.
Good story but perhaps something other than "gender" would work? Maybe the few mentions of "gender" in the story would work with "botanical self-identity"?