GC 'Coming out . . .'

sane ways forward

Today is the 19th December and in the Western world we're all very busy no doubt getting Christmas prepared, but it's a day which also has been (very unofficially) allocated as a 'coming out' day for people who, for some while, have been following the hysterical debate in the anglophone world around the new gender identity ideology, which sprung up originally somewhere in the US sometime in the first decade of this millennium; that is, people who have become sceptical of this ideology, yet for fear of reprisals, have not yet found the courage to declare openly where they stand on the matter.

The idea of a gender 'identity' itself is somewhat older than the ideology now sweeping the Western world, most especially the Anglophone world. There has been a psychiatric diagnosis called gender identity disorder in the DSM from 1980 and in the ICD from 1990. Political lobbying has resulted in an attempt at destigmatising via depathologizing of GID in the new DSM, which now calls it simply Gender Dysphoria. ICD 11 is expected to follow suit. Some form of diagnosis will however always be necessary in order make clinical decisions about materially/bodily transitioning by means of surgical deconstruction and reconstruction of body parts and prescription of hormone therapies aimed at altering endocrinological bodily functions more to resemble those of the opposite sex; decisions as to if, when and how such treatments might be deemed medically appropriate and life enhancing, and made available to some or other extent by funding from the public purse.

The campaign to make these treatments more easily available to more people than ever before lies behind the ideological reinvention of gender dysphoria as a fundamental crisis of an existential human identity condition. Instead of being a social construct, as conceived by classical feminism, used to maintain and reproduce social conditions where men and women, through their upbringing, were subtly assigned differing roles (which inevitably involved the subjugation of those of the female sex to those of the dominant male sex) gender identity now is posited as something basic, intrinsic and indeed biologically conditioned in the individual, making it supposedly possible to be born with an identity which does not match your physical sex. The human soul it now seems is a gendered soul, and somehow or other Nature can botch things up by putting a female gendered soul in a male sexed body or vice versa. There is of course no science which can demonstrate how this could happen, despite endless appeals to "educating ourselves", - not surprisingly of course because it is in truth a metaphysical question and thus beyond the boundaries of science.

The debate has become toxic because the ideology now wants to transcribe the metaphysical to the material, and make gender a legally upheld category overruling the category of sex, for the purpose of letting individuals identify literally as a particular sex of their own choosing, which opens a floodgate to the transgression of boundaries specifically set up in the course of history to protect the dignity and safety of women as a sex based social and political class. The issue in reality barely affects men, since trans men's activism is nowhere near so aggressive and demanding as its trans women's counterpart, and even if it were, men are not nearly so vulnerable as women in that they never need to fear the danger of becoming victims of opposite sex sexual predators, a fear women have to live with the whole of their lives, and this is why we heard so little of the problem in mainstream media outlets until a couple years ago. Indeed I myself only first became aware of the issue in 2020 when JK Rowling wrote a piece about why she was concerned about the Scottish government’s plans to introduce self identification as the primary vehicle to a legally sanctioned sex 'change' for social purposes rather than as previously via ratification from a gender clinic or specialised therapist and a contractual period under supervision living as one's desired gender, before attaining one’s gender recognition certificate. The piece was mild and empathic towards the struggles of people with gender dysphoria, in no way expressing hatred of anyone on account of their gender identity, but instead raising genuine concerns of the possible negative consequences of such legislation for women as individuals and as a political class in society.

Only now I see in retrospect what JKR obviously long before had calculated to be necessary. If the issues ever were to reach mainstream attention it would require someone of her stature and fame to stand up in opposition to what was happening, knowing full well the violently abusive reaction it would provoke, not because of her opinions and certainly not because she is in the least transphobic, but because she is famous and listened to by many, and it would therefore be necessary for the activists to attempt to silence her to prevent her setting an example other women might be tempted to follow if it seemed she could do so with impunity. The risk for the activists - just as JKR calculated - was that their methods no longer could be kept clandestinely under the radar but would instead be exposed for the world to see, involving the probability of a massive backlash as the general public began to cotton on to what had been going on previously in dark corners of the Internet and behind closed doors in board rooms and public institutions. It was thus only because of the venomous and ferociously hateful reaction to JKRs contributions to the debate, that people such as myself were able to see for themselves how far below the belt the tactics of trans rights activists are, and how untypical for a true civil rights campaign. Trans rights activists themselves have thus made ordinary people aware that there is something amiss with this political movement, being so unlike other civil rights movements before it, so well organised with the backing of copious financial resources apparently, and able to target and isolate individuals and organisations effectively at will, and impose on them real hardships for any refusal to play the game or at least just keep out of the debate. Such power has never before in history been within the grasp of grass roots civil rights movements struggling to defend the weak and oppressed in society, neither has it been a prerogative of such groups to punish non supporters in such a foul and vindictive fashion. Something sets this particular movement apart from other movements and it is something distinctly unwholesome. It’s intolerance for dissent suggests features of a totalitarianism we do not normally associate with past movements for gay rights and racial equality, but more ordinarily with the iniquities of Islamic extremist states, fascism, communist Chinese repression of Hong Kong dissidents, the McCarthian persecution of communists in the 1950’s USA and history’s treatment of heretics of all kinds everywhere.

For these and many other reasons I therefore reject this ideology, and it's many bizarre constructs like the “undebatable” mantra “trans women are women” and the nonsense that sex is a spectrum of biological hues and shades. Nor can human beings change sex, however much they change their gender. Society must develop towards men and women becoming social equals but that doesn't mean they ever can be the same or interchangeable. It is blatantly unsporting to give men identifying themselves as women a “right” to compete in women's sport, insulting and disrespectful to womankind to suggest that a woman can have a penis, monstrous to even suggest rapists should or could be housed in women's prisons, even if they have a gender certificate, and politically and socially regressive to seek to prevent women as a sexed group determining for themselves, without external veto or interference, how their womanhood should be defined, and where they wish to place the conceptual and practical boundaries separating themselves from men.

Most critically I find the gender industry lobby’s interest in children horrifying and evil. The programs and the ideological manipulations of how interest groups such as GLAAD, Stonewall, and Mermaids think we should be talking to children and monitoring their development in schools and families is insidious and decidedly harmful. Parents are being indoctrinated to consider their kids potentially trans at absurdly young ages right down to the pre-verbal, and teachers are co-opted to introduce 'educational' programs which instil in kids an unhealthily morbid preoccupation with their relation to their own bodies which cannot but amplify the completely ordinary vulnerabilities and insecurities we all have about this relation at this period in our lives. Standing behind these front groups is a cynical commercial enterprise aiming to maximize profits, a raw, speculative and quintessentially patriarchal (for the benefit of the Woke who love that word) capitalist industry, trading on the vulnerabilities of children, the gullibility of their parents, and the quiescence of professions which ought to be safeguarding children from such diabolical forms of industrial exploitation. The ease with which the gender industry initially managed to sell the nefarious and scientifically unfounded narrative of the 'harmlessness' and 'reversibility' of so-called “puberty blockers” to a naive public is profoundly disturbing. A “pause button” is how they often have disingenuously been described. In truth there is no such thing as “puberty blockers” - these are gonadotropin hormone releasing inhibitors, originally manufactured for use in prostate cancer treatments, and also used in chemical castration of sex offenders. Women suffering endometriosis have also been prescribed gonadotropin hormone releasing inhibitors and some have reported horrendous side effects. Evidence is slowly beginning to emerge of just how harmful these medicines can be to children and their natural development, and medical authorities around the world are beginning to back out for fear of huge and damaging lawsuits possibly awaiting them further down the road. The Keira Bell judgement issued a moratorium on the use of these medicines for the under sixteens until more solid research has determined just how safely they may be used for this purpose, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has banned prescription of them for all minors, Finland is going the same way, whilst two leading Californian pioneers of transgendering of children, now have written articles distancing themselves from use of puberty blockers.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

It is contentious as to whether Joseph Goebbels used the above citation as a declared mode of practice for his own propaganda machine or whether he was using it to cast aspersions on the supposed methods of a supposed Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Either way, that is not the way we want to be heading, and I salute as the quote of the year for me, that of a Glaswegian midwife who, upon being admonished by the Health Authority in her communications with mothers to substitute "chest feeding" for "breast feeding", retorted drily, "You do not feed a baby from your chest, the chest is a bodily cavity. Breasts are another organ entirely." That is how I like to hear the truth told. Let us resolve in the New Year to put an end to these devious, unsubtle and disingenuous manipulations with the truth in the service of a bogus ideology, which we can do simply by refusing to use them, and instead learn once again to take a pride in speaking the truth simply, clearly, calmly and unambiguously wherever we find it necessary.

I find I neither have nor need any gender identity and nor do I in any capacity sit in possession of any pronouns - it is an anathema to speak of 'my' and 'your' pronouns, as these are functional elements of a language which attain meaning only in the context of the correct use of the language in accordance with its pre-determined structure. They are not something we 'choose' like wallpaper, the language chooses them for us and a single person cannot meaningfully adopt a pronoun intended to refer to a plurality of persons. That way madness and nihilism lies.

In the interests of sanity, sobriety and sanctity of the human body and soul I hereby declare myself to be wilfully and conscientiously gender-identity-ideology sceptical, and will work to liberate my fellow humans from the cognitively dissonant clutches of this specious nonsense.