On Billboard Chris and Circular Attacks

and how to responsibly trust your intuition

Leftist Feminists Are After Billboard Chris

Billboard Chris is a Canadian man, the father of two daughters, who is on a mission to stop medical transition of children. He travels north America having conversations while wearing a sandwich board, frequently heading onto college campuses and other “belly of the beast” locations where he faces intense pushback. He has been assaulted, including having his arm broken.

He is presently being attacked on Twitter with a smear campaign that uses words like “creep” and “extremely uncomfortable.” Chris brings receipts to include screenshots of the “very odd” messages. (They are utterly innocuous, but click the link and see for yourself.)

I have also seen more of the background, via screenshots he shared privately, and see nothing that gives me even the tiniest pause.

This is a type of victim posturing that enrages me for two reasons: one, because it causes problems for men who are not predators (and yes, this language is meant to imply that its target is a predator); two, because it makes being believed much more difficult for women who have been targeted by actual predators or subjected to behavior that is legitimately creepy and to which “extremely uncomfortable” is a reasonable response.

Awhile back, I asked a mutual friend for Chris’s contact information. He secured permission and then passed on Chris’s phone number. Chris has become a texting friend in the months since, and has never said even one thing that was remotely inappropriate. Nor has he even hinted at such topics.

Chris is one of my Substack readers, and let me tell you—when you are a woman writing about a traumatic background that includes sexual assault, you bring out the actual creeps. The messages I have received from men who want to be the one to show me that sex isn’t all rape and abuse (as if I don’t know that), among other, yes, creepy motives that make me, yes, extremely uncomfortable, number in the dozens, possibly over a hundred at this point.

Chris is not one of them. When we discuss personal topics, he mostly gets my advice about how to encourage his mathematically talented and interested daughter.

(Side note: Chris, if your daughter keeps it up, she will be able to secure a career and income that ensures she never needs to depend on any man for any reason. Dude, you really have to learn how to anti-feminist misogynist better. Because you kind of suck at it, no offense.)

The most recent round of attacks on Chris were started after a tweet got some traction wherein the tweeter wants someone other than Matt Walsh or Billboard Chris to be “the face of the Gender Critical movement” in the US, looking for an American woman. The bit that made me waste twenty minutes verifying it wasn’t a troll is that the tweeter actually tagged Rachel Maddow, implying she’s anything other than sympathetic to the Wokies on this.

The tweet mentions Matt Walsh, on whom my (complex) take is here.

The tweeter resenting Billboard Chris being “the face of” the movement is ridiculous. It is absurd. It is counter-productive. And it makes the feminist rhetoric on trans ideology seem like a lie—like they don’t actually care about the children and teens being harmed.

Either we are in an emergency with regard to stopping this stuff, or we are not. I believe that we are, and I am very grateful that Chris is so effective. In an emergency, nobody stops to do an ideological purity test. You get the most effective warrior on the front lines, and you support him/her as best you can.

Think, people. If your house is on fire and the first person who shows up with a fire hose and starts hooking it up to the hydrant were, to use absurd examples, wearing KKK regalia, a Nazi uniform, or otherwise advertising a hideous and abhorrent worldview—would you jump between him and your house and say “No! I will wait for someone to save my house who holds no views I find objectionable!”

Of course not.

The thread resulted in a lot of anti-Billboard-Chris criticism, mostly of his perceived “anti-feminism” and “misogyny” and “conservatism,” ideas that most of the critical responses seemed to be conflating, but the worst of it was several tweets calling him an “open misogynist” and citing the “several women have told me” line without receipts — unlike Chris, who posted the receipts immediately.

To reiterate for the record, I do not believe that Billboard Chris sent even one inappropriate message, nor that he sets off any reasonable person’s internal creep meter.

In the interest of good faith, I’m going to talk about responsible approaches if a man sets off a woman’s creep meter and truly makes her “extremely uncomfortable.” Plenty of men do give off predator vibes, and personal intuition is a powerful weapon of self-protection, particularly for women. So how can a responsible adult woman strike the correct balance? My take on that is below; keep reading.

Feminist Responsibility for Trans Bullshit

One of the attacks on Billboard Chris is that he lays some of the blame for transgender ideology at the feet of feminist philosophy. He is right. Feminist philosophy did indeed play a role. So did Alfred Kinsey and John Money. So does postmodernism, which mostly, in the form it takes today, originates from Michel Foucalt.

Both men and women are responsible for the current state of affairs, in different ways, particularly the social enforcement of this crap. Here is an example.

A couple of years ago, I ran into trouble on Twitter for my views on transgender issues. One day I will write a lot more about this, but here’s how the bad behavior broke down by sex:

Several males sent rape, death, and death-by-rape threats and caused me to file a police report.

Females conducted a bullying campaign that included regular messages consciously and deliberately intended to trigger my PTSD, reminders that my father had never loved me and being a “pick me” to conservative men by opposing transgender extremism would not change that fact, and otherwise doing their best to psychologically and emotionally punish me for daring to have a differing opinion on this issue.

The rape threats were scary. They resulted in a couple of sleepless nights, a couple of night terrors, changing my routes to and from campus, and somewhere in the neighborhood of five panic attacks.

The bullying campaign resulted in:

1. wasting several therapy sessions on why, though I have innumerable character defects, being an evil oppressor of the six-foot-three people with penises who used the girls’ bathroom on campus, smirking, was not one of them;

2. a serious setback in my efforts to believe that my father didn’t love me because something was wrong with him, not because there was something wrong with me;

3. enormously increased difficulty trusting other women enough to be honest with them about my views on any topic.

What the women did was worse, longer-lasting, and more damaging. I already knew that rapist men rape and that sick men use the threat of rape as a weapon. What the men did affected my daily life for about three weeks. What the women did took somewhere in the neighborhood of a year to fully recover from, and it is the threat of what women will do, not men, that is top of mind when I consider taking a stand in other ways.

A Stupid Argument, Refuted

Argument: Billboard Chris isn’t convincing anyone of anything! The people who agree with him would already agree with him. If you need to convince people, that takes leftists and women, not conservative white men!

Refutation: most people, the normies who are not Very Online, have no real understanding of this issue. At least once a week, I hear about someone who is enlightened for the very first time about informed consent clinics. Sometimes I am the one who enlightens them. Most recently, it was explaining to a friend: “I understand that you’re thinking of the transsexual you met when you were a kid, but no, it’s really not like that anymore. It’s not required to live as the other sex for any period of time. It’s not even required to get a formal diagnosis. Because I am over 18, I could go to Planned Parenthood, sign an informed consent waiver, and walk out with testosterone today. Even though I’ve been in therapy for a very long time, I could do this without my therapist’s agreement or approval.” Most people have no idea that minors can and do get surgery. In the real world, the non-Twitter universe, enlightening people about the reality of the situation is far and away the most desperate work that needs to be done.

Chris is extremely effective at doing this work. I for one am very, very grateful.

Getting Creep Vipes From A Guy?

How to Balance Self-Trust and Responsibility

I absolutely believe that my intuition for predators is good. Every time I’ve had a scary or traumatic experience as an adult, including the time that I was raped by a date, it occurred after I ignored my intuition. I knew Subway Jared was a monster from the first time I saw his picture. Similarly, other women have shared countless stories of trusting their intuition and finding out later that the guy they turned down or otherwise avoided was in fact a dangerous man.

Here is a key point: this particular intuition is not falsifiable. What does that mean? There is no way to prove it wrong, only right. If a guy that you worry is dangerous doesn’t commit a violent or predatory act, all you can ever know is that he hasn’t done so yet. There is no way for you or anyone else to prove that an intuition about a guy being a predator was wrong.

Thus, out of respect for the fact that a false allegation can be profoundly damaging and there is no way to prove innocence, these intuitions should be shared in a way that is as unlikely as humanly possible to create problems if they turn out to be wrong. What does that mean?

Here is my practice. If I think that a friend, of either sex, is going to get involved somehow with someone who sets off my intuition—and in particular, if I think that a female friend is going to be alone with a man who my intuition tells me is dangerous—I speak up. The key word there is “speak.” Speak. With my voice, to their ears. I do my best to never put these things in writing, as there is no foolproof way to do so. Signal messages can be screencapped, and even friends who would die before betraying a confidence can have their phones stolen or hacked.

If you absolutely must put an intuition of this sort into writing, it should be caveated six ways to Sunday, and that you are communicating an intuition and nothing more should be crystal clear. Something like: “I do not have a shred of evidence to support this; I am sharing only my personal intuition and the existence of my personal gut feeling that this guy is dangerous. I don’t have anything concrete to base this on. I am only telling you that my internal alarm goes off around this guy and, if it were me, I wouldn’t be alone with him, but I recognize that I could be wrong about this and my internal alarm could be giving me a false positive.”

I came to this principle after running across a digital diary I kept during the first year I was in therapy, scanning a few entries, and realizing how much I had changed. As my PTSD had gotten better and less severe, my intuition had gotten sharper—and I was having many fewer alarms than I used to.

This makes sense; PTSD is by definition a disorder of false positives. A trigger in the PTSD sense (not the “thing that makes a person mildly uncomfortable” 2022 Woke sense) is a stimulus that cause the nervous system to react as if danger is present when it is not.

Realizing this made me consider how much I had put in writing in the past—writing has always felt therapeutic for me—and vow to be more careful and responsible in the future, a vow I have kept to the best of my ability.

Trusting your intuition and respecting the gift of fear does not give license to make accusations willy-nilly. If you have evidence, cite it. If you do not, avoid writing and clarify that you are talking about gut feelings, not citing evidence.

This is how responsible adults behave.

Read The Gift of Fear for more on intuition.

And support Billboard Chris.

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