Girls are always punished, and they are supposed to like it
By Karen Hunt Photo credit: Thom Quine copyright
"Me, Jerry and Marisol were outside a friend’s house when my friend was talking and Jerry got mad and was telling her to shut up but she was so dingy, she just kept on talking. So he took a knife and Marisol was sitting on the sidewalk and he threw the knife at her and she screamed so he kept throwing the knife at her. Then he saw me standing by the tree and he threw the knife at me and I got scared but I didn’t say nothing.
"There was this lady who sells corn passing by and she asked me what my boyfriend was doing and I told her he was playing. She looked at me like I was crazy. But everyone thought I was. So she was just another person thinking I was crazy to be playing with a man who plays with knives." — Silvia Sanchez, Central Juvenile Hall, 1996
Knives and men. They’ve been cutting girls up for a long time, shutting our mouths, demanding we change our attitude, our appearance. Slicing us apart piece by piece.
Submit or be punished.
Not a lot has changed since the mid-1990s when I started a creative writing program for incarcerated girls.
Not a lot has changed since the early 2000s when I raised my kids as a single mother on the mean streets of the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles.
Not a lot has changed since I started the first boxing club for girls in Luxor, Egypt.
Girls from Luxor to Los Angeles are still taught to be compliant, to be embarrassed by their sex, and to give in to authorities so they can be molded into what society expects them to be. And out of that has grown a multi-billion-dollar industry, where girls are now literally, not just figuratively, being cut to pieces and erased.
Some of the wealthiest men in the world are pushing this agenda. To find out more about the men institutionalizing Transgender Ideology, you can read Jennifer Bilek’s Federalist article which includes but are not limited to:
Jennifer Pritzker (a male who identifies as transgender); George Soros; Martine Rothblatt (a male who identifies as transgender and transhumanist); Tim Gill (a gay man); Drummond Pike; Warren and Peter Buffett; Jon Stryker (a gay man); Mark Bonham (a gay man); and Ric Weiland (a deceased gay man whose philanthropy is still LGBT-oriented).
It’s about power, that’s obvious, but maybe they remember what it was like being the awkward kid on the schoolyard bullied by the cool kids. Maybe this is their way of getting even. To emasculate men and take everything away from women.
In a Los Angeles Times article, Erica Anderson, a “transgender” doctor who has "helped" hundreds of teens with what is being termed “gender dysphoria” transition, has warned that it has gone too far — and fears many are making life-changing decisions because it’s trendy and pushed on social media. Anderson might have developed a conscience at last, but it is too late for all the youth who were, and continue to be, manipulated and even coerced into making life-altering decisions about their young, healthy bodies.
The pressure to conform to what these “experts” say is intense on parents, not to mention on girls going through puberty who are naturally confused and easily swayed.
In a New York Post article, single mom Bri was visiting the pediatrician’s office with her 15-year-old, a child struggling with anxiety when the doctor said: “If you don’t affirm your daughter’s ‘gender identity,’ or get her the help she needs, and she kills herself, you’re going to feel awfully guilty.”
It's unconscionable for a medical doctor to say such a thing to a parent—and with her daughter in the room, but this is what is happening.
The minute the words “gender dysphoria” are uttered by an “expert” to the parent they must agree, or risk being branded a “bigot and doxxed by ‘transgender’-rights activists. Even suggesting that it might be a body-image problem is unacceptable, making parents a part of the problem and in need of silencing and punishing, too.
This is the ultimate drugging and cutting of our children; despite a 2011 study spanning three decades by the respected Karolinska Institute in Sweden finding that people who underwent "sex reassignment" were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. In the US, a year-long survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality concluded that those who had transitioned were more likely to have attempted suicide than ‘trans’ people who had not had medical or surgical treatments.
Medically brutalizing girls didn't become normalized overnight. We’ve been drugging and punishing our girls if they dared resist for decades. I learned the bitter truth of this when, in 1996, I started a creative writing program for incarcerated youth in Central Juvenile Hall, Los Angeles. You can read more about it in this Los Angeles Times article.
Most of the girls I taught hadn’t committed the crimes they were accused of but had been in relationships with older, abusive men who influenced them to go along with their plans.
One of my students was Silvia Sanchez. Her writing journey has been told in an A&E documentary, Gangsta Girls. At age 16, Silvia was facing a life sentence for being at the scene of a murder committed by her older, abusive boyfriend.
Silvia in Central Juvenile Hall, 1996
Abusers the world over like to brand their victims to prove ownership. Silvia’s boyfriend was no different. He proudly branded her with tattoos of his name and area code. Most of Silvia’s writings dealt with her struggle to understand how she had allowed him to control her mind and take such horrendous advantage of her body.
While in the juvenile hall she got into a tattoo removal program. I went with her to one session and saw how they burned the skin in order to remove the ink that went deep inside of her. “Little by little his poison is going out of my body,” she said.
I sat through Silvia’s trial, took 45 pages of notes, and spoke at her sentencing. I thought that if I could just find the right words, the jury would understand. But the wheels of “justice” had been set in motion long before the trial ever started. Silvia was a bad girl and nothing I said could change that. Despite proof she had refused to participate in the crime, she was sentenced to 25 years to life. It happened on her 18th birthday.
The judge demanded that she thank him. “I could have given you life without parole,” he said.
And like the good girl Silvia actually was, because she always obeyed whichever man had power over her, she thanked him.
Girls are supposed to obey. When they don’t, they are generally punished more harshly than boys. This was confirmed by what I saw time after time in juvenile hall, and by what the staff told me.
During the almost 25 years Silvia spent in prison I continued to visit her. I will never forget when she was released. It was on election day, November 2016, the day Donald Trump was voted president of the United States.
Silvia’s story has a happy ending. She returned home to a family that had stood by her for all those prison years. And she entered into a relationship with a wonderful woman she had met while incarcerated. They have been together ever since.
During my sons’ teenage years, my home was always open to their artistic friends who, like my sons, didn’t fit into the school system. I didn’t see much difference between the incarcerated girls I had met, like Silvia, and the girls who came into my home. They all went through phases where they hated their bodies in one way or another. Most of them suffered from abuse at home or in relationships with men. Many inflicted harms upon themselves.
Once, I heard one teenage girl telling another, “I don’t wanna be an ‘ad kid.’” I asked what she meant. “Oh, you know, those kids who go around school saying ‘I’m on Zoloft, I’m so happy…I’m on Zoloft, I’m so happy.’ I don’t wanna be an ad for a drug company.” Her friend responded, “Oh yeah, I tried Zoloft. It turned everything gray. The world went gray. I was sick for two days, puking.”
Another girl, Andrea, told me, “I take Wellbutrin for depression and Trazodone for anxiety and anger. I’ve been hospitalized twice, once because I tried to commit suicide. I saved up and took 23 pills at once. They said when they got to me I was two minutes away from being dead.”
If you look up Wellbutrin, it warns that it is approved only for adults 18 years and over. No trials have been conducted on younger children. Andrea was 15. But who cares? Drugs are now administered to children in such a cavalier manner, and the brainwashing of their parents has been going on for so long, that it is just accepted as “the right thing.” “So, what do you think of the way you are being treated?” I asked. “I hate it. I feel like a rat in a cage, an experiment. They put me on something and then if it doesn’t work, they put me on something else. They don’t know what they’re doing. My adoptive mom had her leg amputated last year and my dad has hepatitis C, so I know I have issues. You can see I’m overweight—hello! I get made fun of. Kids throw food at me; I can’t describe how bad every day of my life is at school. I got anger issues. But nobody helps me deal with it. They just put me on meds.”
Not long after speaking with Andrea, I heard she had again attempted suicide and was institutionalized. No doubt the experts mixed yet another cocktail of meds to try and “fix her.”
In 2019, I went to live in Luxor, Egypt, naively thinking Egypt was more progressive than other Arab countries. When I discovered that the 12- to 13-year-old girls I was training in my boxing club were right at the age when FGM was about to be inflicted upon them, I was sickened. How could they still be mutilating girls in this modern era?
To the girls, to their mothers and grandmothers, this wasn’t mutilation. It was necessary. It made them clean and pure and acceptable to their future husbands. Taking away their pleasure meant they would not stray, they would not be sex-crazed, and they would be good, obedient wives.
The fathers didn’t really want to protect their daughters. I managed to get them into my boxing class by paying their fathers a fee. They sold their daughters because they weren’t worth anything except as commodities. And once they were cut, they would take them out of the boxing class and sell them into marriage.
Girls everywhere are taught to comply, to submit. No, don’t you cut yourself, we will do it for you. We will decide what is good for you. This is how it has always been and how it still is.
While in juvenile hall Silvia wrote this powerful piece:
To Be a Girl
To be born a girl, I see it as a punishment. As a little girl, they’d dress me up in a nice, beautiful dress and show me off. As I started to grow older it was, let’s do her hair, show her how to talk and dress her up in a tank top and some short shorts. Now she’s ready to go out.
All you have to do is ask him for a cigarette, smile, thank him and walk away. As a girl, you could walk into any club you want without showing an I.D. You could get away without paying for your meal. That’s what I learned. But then it wasn’t fun anymore. Sure, as a girl I liked the attention but now I was getting attention from the wrong people. Now my uncle looked at me like a piece of meat. His friends would whisper and say, let’s take her out, you know what she wants, just look at her, they all want the same thing.
I was no longer considered a cute little girl. It was my fault that a guy did that to me. I shouldn’t have dressed like that. It was my fault he hit me. I should have said, yes, you could do whatever you want to me because I’m a girl and it’s a man’s world. Then, one time I decided to act stronger than a girl should, I stood up for what I believed and told him no. But still, as a girl, I got punished. I got punished for saying “no” to a man and I’ll continue being punished for the rest of my life. As a girl, I feel I will always be punished.
Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi wrote of Western society:
“Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take the female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.”
This has been a slow slide of abuse over the years of drugging, cutting and silencing our girls until now there is an entire industry run by powerful men, built around the agenda of erasing girls completely. Physicians are administering untested medical treatments to children and adolescents suffering from body dysphoria (not gender dysphoria) and no one is stopping them. Such treatments include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and so-called "sex-reassignment" surgery.
Citing guidelines issued by the political advocacy group World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), these physicians admit that the effects of cross-sex hormones are generally irreversible. Thus, vulnerable girls who might easily change their minds later, are “crossing the Rubicon into permanent bodily impairment.”
We must fight for our girls. From Egypt to the streets of Los Angeles, and everywhere in-between. We must stand up to the monsters who seek to erase and punish them. We must extract the poison. And we must not allow our girls to be rats in cages, experimented on by the powerful men in Bilek’s article who are hellbent on branding, cutting, and drugging our girls into oblivion.
****************************************************************
Karen Hunt aka KHMezek is a writer, artist, fighter, and renegade. From founding a creative writing program for incarcerated youth in Los Angeles to starting the first boxing club for girls in Luxor, Egypt, Karen chooses to live a life outside the box. She writes from a personal lens.
Karen writes on Substack: Break Free with Karen Hunt
Recently banned from Twitter, you can find Karen on Gab, GETTR, Telegram @karenalainehunt
