Friday 27 November 2015

Why are transgenders so evident in Asia?

transgender-dancer

A transgirl performing a traditional Sinulog dance in the Philippines. Pic: Rod Fleming

Almost all credible authorities, according to GIRES in the UK, now agree that the baseline minimum for gender non-conformity as ‘at least 1%’ and this has been borne out, again according to GIRES, by recent studies in New Zealand, The Netherlands and Belgium.

Now ‘gender non-conformity’ is a broad church and by no means all of these would identify as transgender. However, research carried out by Professor Lynn Conway and also by the Williams Institute for Law, part of the UCLA, suggests about half of these are, for a prevalence of around 1:200. This is supported by census results from Malaysia, which put the incidence there — a country that is officially very hostile towards transgender — at 1:170 of male-born individuals.

This should tell us two things: transgender is innate and appears in all populations at roughly the same rate; and that as such it is a part of normal human variation.

Of these transgender populations, the vast majority are what is called by science ‘Blanchard HSTS’, ‘Early Onset Androphile’ or ‘transkids.’ These are almost always, uniquely, attracted to men. They appear as transgender very young and frequently begin dressing as girls, wearing their hair long and, in recent decades, taking feminising hormones in their early teens. They should not be confused with another, much less frequent type of MtF transgender, known as ‘autogynephiles’. These latter are fetishistic transvestite men, for whom dressing and pretending to be a woman is a sexual thrill: think Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner. (We will deal with these elsewhere; they are almost entirely restricted to white, middle-class Western men and globally are a tiny population.)

But why are MtF transgenders so obvious, and so open, outside the West?

While we were researching ‘Why Men Made God’ I spent much time in the Philippines and was lucky enough to be invited into the company of Filipino families. I was fascinated to observe the ‘two-group’ social model, which we described in the book, in full operation, and indeed I incorporated some of my observationst. This model was particularly obvious at large family gatherings. Here, the men would congregate around one or more tables — often drinking heavily — while the women and children socialised completely separately. There were never any women or children at the men’s tables. Because I am obviously a man, I was directed to the men’s group and observed from there, as the rising tide of alcohol — in the form of ‘Empi’ or Emperador brandy — rose to my gills.

This separation of two groups, however, was not to do with alcohol. As a foreigner and a guest — a person of important status in a Filipina household — I was also invited to join women’s drinking parties on several occasions and I can attest that Filipina women party just as hard as the men do.

One of the things that I did notice, in the large, mixed parties as well as in the women-only ones, was that while the men’s group was made up exclusively of adult men presenting as straight, the other group was of women, children and gays. When women socialised independently of men, there were always a number of gays or transgenders there too; they never, ever appeared in the ‘men’ group activities.

(The term ‘gay’ in Filipino culture does not mean quite what it purports to mean in the West. There, it signifies a person born male who identifies internally as a woman and who desires men romantically and sexually. The notion of the ‘egalitarian gay’ where manly manly men lust after other manly manly men, is regarded as risible throughout Asia and while there are some implantations of this Western model, they are reviled by the vast majority of gays there.)

So this leads us back to ‘what makes a woman?’ The simple answer ‘chromosomes’ will not work, since a small minority of women, who have a condition called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or CAIS, are actually XY karotype. Similarly, he argument ‘possession of a female reproductive system’ would cause a problem with CAIS women, who have vaginas, but none of the other female reproductive system. In any case, this explanation does not satisfactorily answer why it is that women and men are so markedly different in so many non-physical ways, such as how they socialise.

At the same time, a purely essentialist approach — it’s down to chromosomes or genitalia at birth — does not allow for what we now know to be between half to one percent of the born-male population, who are to all intents and purposes, women. These are the HSTS transgenders I referred to earlier, the transkids.

Gender itself is a construct of behaviours and expectations, almost none of which are fixed. Other than motherhood and the necessity to nurse and care for children, there is nothing that we associate with the gender construct ‘woman’ that is innately so. Other cultures, where there are more than two genders, demonstrate this too. Gender is fluid because, unlike being air skinned or blue eyed, it is a social, not a biological construct. It is a function of culture.

So ‘what makes a woman’ must be more than the possession of a vagina or XX chromosomes. Since gender is constructed and not innate, then it follows that it must be learned. And where and when is it learned? In childhood, through socialisation.

This is where the observation of social interaction in Asia becomes so important. Remember, one group contains only adult men; the other, everyone else. So there is a group of ‘men’ and a group of ‘not-men’. Gays fall into the latter group. They are never part of the ‘men’ group, because they are ‘not-men’. This is not just a function of orientation as a somewhat skewed Western perspective has it. Rather, a gay’s orientation is a function of her gender — which is, no matter what she looks like, always ‘not man’.

Blanchard demonstrated that HSTS transgenders are on a scale of variation with gay men (as they are called in the West; in Asia that would be an oxymoron). This close association, within the Asian model, means that all gays, whether transgender or not, are related and are, in social terms, part of the ‘not-men’ group: in other words, in terms of socialisation, they are women. These individuals grow up socialising with girls and woman and adopt the gender expressions that are naturally found within this group as their own.

That is why HSTS are so feminine: their childhood socialisation was within the ‘not-men’ group, within which the authority figures are all women. When the women, children and gays congregate together, separately from the ‘men’ group, at the centre of the group is the matriarch, usually a grandmother or great-grandmother, but perhaps the eldest sister or some other woman identified by a mysterious ranking system that exists within the matriarchy. Gays and transgenders grow up within this group and learn, and maintain throughout their lives, the gender construct that is their badge of membership.

matriarch-in-the-philippines

‘Lola’ surveys her domain.

What Westerners may not realise, because of the vicious misogyny of the Western patriarchy, is that to remain part of the ‘not-men’ group is an honour. Boyish boys are excluded from it when they become adult, because men are inferior to women. Why are they inferior? Because they are brutish and violent and they cannot make babies. They lack the most important power of all. They can kill, but they cannot create.

While they may be sexually desired by those in the ‘not-men’ group, they are not part of it. The ‘men’ group is made up of outsiders looking in. The real action takes place in the ‘not-men’ group, presided over by the matriarch, who disposes her beneficence in the form of loving smiles and words and, frequently, gifts. She is ‘Mother Christmas’ and indeed, is an incarnation of the Goddess herself.

Gays, which group includes transgenders, have an honorary right to remain in the privileged ‘not-men’ group, because they have learned how to be women. They behave like women and this gives them the gender ‘woman'; they are tolerated within the group even though they lack the power to make life, because they do not offend those who do.

Following on from this they may adopt other behaviours consistent with being a woman: growing their hair long, wearing make-up, adopting ‘feminine’ body-language and so on. This gives them the right to remain a part of the ‘not-men’ group as they get older, and not to have to become part of the ‘men’ group. These actions symbolise a desire: to remain a ‘not-man’. This reinforces their adoption of gender roles and behaviours that they associate positively, in their culture, with women. This is why they are often so feminine and strive to be as beautiful as they can be — it is only in part to attract male partners: it is also a badge of affirmation, a sign of their membership of the honoured group, of being ‘not-men’ themselves.

When Western feminists point to socialisation as how it is that a ‘woman’ can be, they are right. What they fail to recognise is that, especially outwith the white, Anglo-Saxon, Western patriarchy, gays and transgenders share exactly the same socialisation patterns as women. Furthermore, once outside the protection of the ‘not-men’ group, gays and transgenders become targets for aggressive men. The patriarchy is very strong in Asian culture, but its compass is limited in one crucial regard; its authority does not obtain within the home or the family. So, while within that home, and the ‘not-men’ group that dominates it, gays and transgenders are generally safe, as soon as they step outside they are at risk from men who resent their very existence.

This resentment is because, by choosing not to be part of the ‘men’ group, gays and transgenders question its foundation. They are saying ‘what’s great about being a part of the ‘men’ group? I’d rather be a girl with my sisters in the ‘not-men’ group.’ That, of course, is an existential menace and the male patriarchy responds, as it always does to such challenges, with a narcissistic rage response.

This male resentment is very similar to the resentment that natal women feel everywhere. Asian gays are told in no uncertain manner that unless they join the ‘men’ group — which would mean undoing all their socialisation and changing their sexual orientation — then men will make their lives as miserable as they can — as men do to women. They are denied jobs, discriminated against and, if they can get work, obliged to accept worse terms and conditions than men would be expected to. They are insulted in the street. However it is not possible to unlearn one’s social conditioning, even if one might want to.

In the end, women, transgenders and gays are hated by the patriarchy for the very simple reason that women refuse to let men socialise with them, because they regard them as inferior.

This is the crux and it is outwith men’s power to control, something which men of course, utterly hate. That hatred is the foundation of the patriarchy, which is like a spiteful little boy’s response to being told he can’t play with the girls because he’s too rough. It is an entire social system founded on petulance, on men’s hurt feelings at being told that, no matter how much their mothers and sisters love them, they’re just not part of the club.

The ‘not-men’ group self-selects for inclusion. One is not part of the ‘men’ group by choice, but because one is put there by the ‘not-men’ group, essentially the women. This is a real power that women in these cultures — and it is seen all over the world — have over men. Gays and transgenders, in this model, are actually privileged. They have no desire to be part of the ‘men’ group. They want to remain outside it and within the group of women, children and gays. They reject manhood, masculinity and being part of the ‘men’ group. This is what men find offensive; and this offence may, when the power of women to suppress it is diminished, result in violence, even deadly violence.

Thus, in many senses, albeit not including motherhood, Asian HSTS MtF transgender have a very strong claim to be called a ‘second type of woman’ which is what they usually do refer to themselves as. They often look extremely feminine, they act like women and sound like them; but perhaps most of all, they are hated by the patriarchy in a very similar way to the way that women are hated. Gays and transgenders — they are essentially the same, with only detail differences of dress and hairstyle being different — are indeed women in terms of their gender, a social construct which they have learned from birth and through childhood.

Unfortunately, in the Western patriarchy, HSTS transgender women, who were until recently called ‘True’ transsexuals, have found their identity parasitised, colonised and erased by another group who claim to be transgender but who are in fact simply cross-dressing, sexually fetishistic men with a severe paraphilia: autogynephiles.

We shall discuss those in a future piece.

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Monday 16 November 2015

Je suis Paris

je-suis-paris

Je suis Paris

I was out on my Ducati on Friday; you know, Friday the 13th. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and mild, and I was thinking how nice it was for what would probably be the last time I venture out on a motorcycle this year. The sun struck low across the landscape and the trees, which are already mostly bare of leaves, filtered its rays. But they were still strong and sometimes it was hard to see, even though I had cleaned my visor before venturing out.

The contrast in light between the sunny parts of the road and those under the trees, especially those grouped together where they still have their leaved, was huge. It was like switching the lights off as I passed onto the shade.

I’ve been riding motorcycles for four decades now and you don’t do that without learning a thing or two. I was  reminded of one  on Friday: watch it! It may be beautiful and sunny with perfect dry tarmac out in the open, but under the trees the road will be wet.

This happens because the dew that forms overnight does not evaporate off as it would where there are no trees to insulate it from the sun’s warmth. And Friday was a very good example of the case in point; under the trees it was not only so dark it was difficult for my eyes to adjust, but also it was lethally slippery with damp, and to make matters worse, there were many fallen leaves on the road, just waiting to catch a careless back tyre and flip me over.

I reflected on this and thought it might make a nice philosophical post, you know, Reverend Rod, the atheist minister, droning on somewhere forgotten in cyberspace. But I just noted the headline idea and got on with the day’s work.

The next morning, Saturday, I was wakened by a stack of messages on my phone from my girlfriend, Crissy. It’s quite usual to find one or two, which is sweet, but this time there were many and they were urgent. ‘Are you all right?’ Half asleep, I wondered what she was on about, and messaged back a generic ‘What up?’ To which she responded. ‘Paris. Have you seen the news?’

Well I don’t do television, so no, but I was quickly enough apprised of the situation through Reuters and AP. A terrible black horror born of hatred and intolerance had reached out and stabbed at the heart of this great country. Over a hundred already confirmed killed; now we know it’s much more.

There will be time later to talk about the evil that caused this to happen; how relentless Western interference in the Middle East has turned it into a poisoned sore; how our ambivalence has sent the wrong signals and made us appear weak; how our continual to do business with the appalling state of Saudi Arabia allows them to fund terrorists whose only desire it to kill all non-Muslims; and how our own policy of bombing, then walking away to let the locals repair the damage, time and again, has provided recruits by the tens of thousands for a Dark Age cult of killing and revenge.

But we shall come to that; meantime I wanted to think about the aftermath for those who have lost loved ones. My own son’s 25th birthday is today and I think of all the other young people, those who were there, gathered to watch a metal band thrash.

Sunny days, sunny days, warm dry roads…yet so so slippery under the trees.

Could we have foreseen the tragedy of Paris? Yes of course. We have, once again, been guilty of that favourite European pastime, fence-sitting. We have seen how the streams of immigrants coming from the Middle East are mostly men and we know that amongst them are large numbers of fighters. Are they all now peaceful? We know that as well as a group of radical Islamists who came to Europe specifically to carry out this outrage, there were sleeper cells already here who supported them. We should have known. We should have acted. Instead we did nothing.

As a result we have this. And there will be more violence. And more.

There is an old Thai saying: you are responsible for that which you tame. Our policy of hit and run, of avoiding entanglement, has been a disaster and it is this that caused Friday the 13th in Paris. When we meddled in Afghanistan and then walked away, we turned it into a running sore. When we invaded Iraq, left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced, and then walked away, we left the devastated nation open for the evil ones. Why did we do this? Because the United States had had enough of Saddam Hussein. How had he become so powerful? Because the United States armed him to fight Iran. But rather than be responsible for the untold mess it had created, the United States walked away, and the rest of us did too.

The West, led by the United States, did not like Bashar al-Assad of Syria. So when the opportunity came, we armed those who rebelled against him. And the most powerful amongst them was Daesh, otherwise known as ISIS or ISIL. This unalloyed evil is the direct result of Western political intervention. The United States, through the CIA, funded, armed and trained Daesh, and now sits back, happily distant, while Europe bears the fury of the war that America began.

People — many Muslims — who point to Western hypocrisy — are right. We are responsible for killings on an unimaginable sale and, like cowards, we have run away from the mess we created. The Middle East and the Arab world are rich — yet have hardly a functioning state left. Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya — all failed states and the cause of this failure is not Islam — appalling though it may be — it is US-led Western policy. We have relentlessly and remorselessly interfered in these states, killing an untold number of people, since before World War Two and we continue, in cowardice and irresponsibility, to refuse to stay behind and clean up the mess that we ourselves created.

From the very first day we began to interfere — as long ago as Suez, or when we propped up the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran, through to vaporised babies under retaliatory French bombs today, we have been running up an account of misery that we have simply not paid. Well, now comes the bill.

Enjoy the carefree times as you ride along in sun and warmth; under the trees it is dark and slippery.

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Wednesday 4 November 2015

Are the sexes unequal?

Mother and Child. Pic: Rod Fleming

Mother and Child. Pic: Rod Fleming

There is a difference between sex and gender; I am going to begin with sex (you’ll see why.) Sex refers to our physical, biological bodies. Usually, it’s how we are identified as babies, by the sex of our genitalia.

So are the sexes unequal? Yes, absolutely. Women are many many times more important than men. This is because the success, indeed the survival, of any population is dependent on the number, not of men, but of fertile mothers.

In China right now, a disaster is unfolding because of decades of legal restriction of family size to one, and a cultural misogyny which has seen female foetuses routinely aborted. This means that China simply doesn’t have enough women and it is facing financial — and possibly existential — collapse as its population ages. Doubtless the Chinese will soon be seeking net immigration on a huge scale; whether they’ll be able to persuade anyone is less sure.

One man can father hundreds or thousands of babies, but a woman can only carry perhaps 20 or so children in her lifetime and very few do that. Most women have far fewer children, which makes each individual mother more important. We explain how human society developed around core groups of women and children in Why Men Made God. Without children, humans cannot survive and the key to this is not men but women. This is why we developed a ‘two-group’ social structure, based around the mothers and children, with the men in a peripheral role.

Further and, as we discovered while researching, in most traditional (i.e. ‘hunter-gatherer’ or ‘forager’ cultures, it is the women who feed the tribe, not the men. For example, the amongst the !Kung San bush people, the women spend around three hours a day foraging and collecting food. They plant small gardens also. This is enough to feed the tribe.

The men hunt, but hunts are only successful 5% – 10% of the time, so actually, it’s a pastime and the people survive by the efforts of the women. Yes, the sexes are unequal: women are worth more than men.

Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct of behaviours, appearance and gendered roles. It is independent of sex, as transgender people prove. It is entirely possible to be born male, for example, and still have a feminine gender; indeed, this happens in about 1% of mail births, everywhere, according to GIRES.

We discovered that in traditional societies there are some gender markers. These include divisions of tasks by gender. The habit of women dressing their hair and wearing some sort of make-up appears universal, even in such traditional peoples as the ZoƩ, who wear no clothes.

As above, the efforts of the women in traditional societies actually tend to be more important. (This is not always the case, although it is so generally; in extreme regions, for example the Arctic, where foraging is more difficult, the hunt becomes more important. However, even there it is never all-important; that it is presented so is a function of patriarchal academia.) Gender in traditional cultures, which are frequently matriarchal, does not suggest that men are ‘worth more’ than women; if anything the opposite, as these cultures, we discovered, are frequently matriarchal.*

Gender within the patriarchy is different: it is a social construct designed specifically to disempower women and to reinforce the cultural understanding that women are the property of men, and their bodies may be bought and sold though a system called ‘marriage’. This is a contract in which a man gains proprietary rights over a woman’s body and fertility. In the older versions of the patriarchy a woman always ‘belongs’ to a man, either her father, her male relatives or her husband. (A few hours reading the Bible — Patriarchy 101 — will soon demonstrate this.)

In the modern versions this right of property is partially transferred to an external body called an ’employer’, and those exceptional women who learn to play the role of men well enough may be afforded some illusory patriarchal privilege — which ends at the ‘glass ceiling’. The patriarchy’s structures are designed to give the illusion of fairness while actually being the opposite. That is why so few women sit in legislatures: after all, they should be a majority, if ‘democracy’ actually had any meaning.

One way or the other, the woman’s freedom is removed altogether. That is the point of the gender construct. This being the case, the only way to make the genders equal (which I hope by now you understand that I would like to see, although I doubt if I shall live long enough) would be to completely destroy the patriarchy root and branch. That will require the destruction of its economic system, capitalism, at the same time.

The problem, of course, is that men use violence, particularly sexualised violence like rape but also homophobic attacks, and, as we see al over the world, concerted military attacks and other acts of the most obscene cruelty to maintain control. Just today I read of a 19-year old girl being stoned to death in Afghanistan for running away from the much older man she had been forcibly married to. (Western men need not point the finger: their patriarchy is quite as evil and wrong as the Islamic one, it’s just more media-savvy. It does its dirty work in the dark, not in front of cameras.)

At low level you can see it all over the stinking swamp that is YouTube comments; at a more serious level in the fact that a woman is raped in the US every six minutes. The patriarchy will fight tooth and nail to preserve its privilege and men, being the idiots we are, will largely go along with it.

Ending the patriarchy and replacing it with a modern matriarchy will be very difficult. But it must be done.

*We use Peggy Reeves Sanday’s definition of the matriarchy. This is not the patriarchy in reverse, as is sometimes claimed. That’s because women socially organise differently from men. It is rather a culture where women, especially mothers, are central. We discuss this at length in Why Men Made God.

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Monday 26 October 2015

Jenner: not the face of trans women

bruce-caitlyn-jenner-not-trans

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. Not the face of trans women

If you’ve been anywhere near a media outlet over the last few months you won’t ave been able to avoid noticing that transgender women are getting a lot of attention. If you have seen images of Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner, and then Paris Lees, Janet Mock, Laverne Cox or Jai Dara Latto, who was  crowned Miss Transgender UK 2015, you might be forgiven for being a bit confused. You might be struggling to figure out what the connection is between an ageing sports jock who looks like a man in a dress, and a glamorous woman who looks like — a glamorous woman. If you’re at all liberal or PC, you might have just accepted that these are the same, but, you know, because time and stuff.

But you’d be dead wrong. There are two completely distinct types of transgender woman and there is no connection between them at all. The conflation that is going on is wrong and potentially lethal.

Keisha-jenkins

Keisha Jenkins, 22, an HSTS recently murdered. All of the trans women killed in the US (that we know of) in the recent spate were HSTS like her.

This is important because one type — which comprises the overwhelming majority of trans women in the world today — is the  subject of deadly and repeated violence, while the other colludes in it. Now I will show my cards here: my girlfriend is transgender. But she’s not like Jenner. And because she is — being of the other type — a potential victim of violence, I have to stand to the wire. Political Correctness is all very well until people start dying because of it; and that is what is happening. So let me explain.

The two types of MtF transgender are called, using the terminology of the man who first described them, ending nearly a hundred years of unsuccessful attempts, ‘homosexual transsexual, or ‘HSTS’ and ‘autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. The scientist who established this is called Dr Ray Blanchard. Prior to his work, these types were called, respectively, ‘True transsexual’ or ‘Type One’ and ‘Pseudo transsexual’ or ‘Type Two.’

For examples, Janet Mock, Kevin Balot, Laverne Cox and Paris Lees are all HSTS and Caitlyn Jenner is AGP. It is important to understand that HSTS are not homosexual men; as women they are straight, attracted to men. But they were born as male and are sexually and romantically attracted to men, which makes Blanchard’s term intelligible at least.

HSTS  feel and act irrepressibly girly as children and are often remarked and bullied for being ‘sissy’ (read Laverne Cox’s comments on this for an illustration.) Most will wear girl’s clothes as children if they can, play with feminine-gendered toys and socialise better with girls than boys. (By no means all boy children who do this are trans; gender exploration is a normal part of growing up and most will switch back after a while. Some, however, will not. These are HSTS.)

In clinical terms they tend to present younger than AGPs although there is a crossover in the late teens and twenties. Janet Mock’s book ‘Redefining Realness’ is a good recent personal history of an HSTS growing up.

HSTS see their femininity in terms of their sexuality, romantic objectives and socialisation. They act like girls, they sound like girls and they look like girls. Put bluntly, they are girls. Sexually and romantically they desire a straight relationship with a straight man. Although they almost always have many gay male friends and indeed, many will have self-identified as gay at some stage, they are not interested in gay relationships at all. They are girls and completely hetero-normative girls at that.

Wherever there is a social space that these individuals can be themselves in, they will exploit it and transition. Life is just easier for an HSTS as a woman. Nobody takes them seriously as men anyway and they are useless at it. They have no hope of succeeding in the patriarchal status rat-race as men, but as women, their beauty is their ally. A good-looking HSTS like transpinay Kevin Balot (a Philippine celebrity) will have no difficulty attracting male partners and for a young woman like her, the dream may indeed come true — to find a straight man who really loves her.

transpinay-trans-kevin-balot

Transpinay model Kevin Balot

For Kevin, being a woman is just who she is. She doesn’t have to learn it; she just is. When she was little she was a little girl and when she grew up she became a woman. That’s it. Kevin suffered a great deal as a child, like many HSTS, but she could not change herself. She is what she is. It’s not really a matter of feeling, just of being.  She was always Kevin and there is only one Kevin Balot; she describes her name as the most precious thing her parents gave to her and she wears it with obvious and great pride. Being a woman is not an act for her, nor is she conflicted in her personality.

HSTS has been described for millennia and has always been more associated with matriarchal or matrifocal cultures. ( I have seen one fascinating reference to an 11th century Islamic scholar describing what might be AGP, but Islam is a patriarchy every bit as repressive as the modern Western one, so hey, no surprise; but I will pursue that.)

AGPs could not be more different. They show no femininity as children, though they may be detached and sensitive boys. They almost always succeed in masculine areas — sport (Caitlyn Jenner) academia (Julia Serrano and Lynn Conway); many join the armed forces. They usually marry and have children. Their awareness of themselves as women always appears later and never in childhood. (Their personal ‘recalled histories’ may assert childhood feelings of transgender but these are never independently verifiable and are in fact a product of their condition.)

Autogynephilia is a far more complicated profile than HSTS, in which the subject becomes consumed with the idea of self as a woman, and consequentially a desire to be a woman, along with the adoption of female characteristics and the removal of male ones. AGP, like all biological conditions, is a scale of variation, so some individuals feel the dysphoria it causes much more intensely than others. For some, dressing as women is enough; for others, surgical removal of the offending parts is the only relief. However, a majority of AGPs retain their assigned birth gender sexual normativity: they remain attracted to women.

The reason I mentioned Kevin Balot earlier is that names are a useful guide in distinguishing the types. For an HSTS, she is who she’s always been and most will just feminise their given names. Chris will become Crissy, Alan becomes Alana, Peter Petra and so on. Some, like Kevin, refuse to change at all, seeing no need. They are who they are and always have been. There is only one personality inside an HSTS’ head and that is feminine, from early childhood. (There is an exception, where HSTS working in the sex business adopt fancy names appropriate to that; but they do not usually use those names in private life, and in any case, cis men and women do this too.)

However, within the AGP profile, a second, pseudo-feminine personality develops around the fixation with self as a woman. This appears at puberty or soon after. It is quite distinct from the masculine personality that originally conceives it.  As this second personality develops, it acquires a name. This is usually very  different from the given name of the masculine personality — ‘Bruce’ becomes ‘Caitlyn’ for example.( For inexplicable reasons, there appears to be a tendency towards using exotic or foreign names — often misspelled.)

This second personality may become so dominant and aggressive that it overwhelms the masculine host personality and at this point — usually after years of cross-dressing, first in private, then with forays in public, to ‘cross-dressing clubs’ etc — the subject is fully consumed by the feminine personality. Then all the masculine physical characteristics of the subject’s body have to be re-aligned in concordance with it.

At the same time, the new personality has to have a history, which will be an adaptation of the truth in which feelings of ‘femininity’ were suppressed in childhood and so on. AGPs are not lying when they relate these, but they are still invented: they are a part of the second ‘feminine’ personality, which is destroying all remnant of the original masculine one. The subject is unable to know which memories are true (part of their masculine personality) and which are not.

It is at this point that a masculine (paradoxically) aggression response kicks in to counter any suggestion that the AGP’s ‘recalled history’ or feminine identity might not be real. This is frequently expressed as a narcissistic rage attack, such as has been directed at scientists and academics like J Michael Bailey, Anne Lawrence, Ray Blanchard himself, Alice Dreger (famed for her fairness and academic integrity) and anyone else who dares to challenge the assertions of AGPs.

These attacks should be seen as a defence response by the ‘feminine’ personality that has overtaken the host. In addition to personal insult and character assassination, these attacks also include the routine falsification and distortion of statistics and other evidence, and the insistence that AGPs are the only ‘true women’. This leads directly to the blatant attempt to erase HSTS trans women, who, just by existing, prove the illusory nature of the AGP personality.

AGPs, through this attempt to erase or devalue HSTS identities, in order to colonise them, are one component of the social problem that sees HSTS abused, harmed and killed. They deliberately present HSTS as a minority (which they are not) and as incapable of speaking for themselves, which is about as offensive as it gets. For an AGP, only his own personality matters; everything about him is only about him and he is focussed exclusively on the parasitic ‘feminine’ personality that is consuming him. It is narcissism gone made, with the subject totally obsessed with himself to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.

Gender dysphoria — universally accepted as the specific provocation of transgender — for an AGP is, therefore about detestation of actual physical body parts, since these symbolise the remnants of the masculine personality that has been destroyed. (Although sometimes not entirely, and this is why re-transition occurs.) Its social aspect is the relentless aggression of AGPs against anyone who questions their ‘narratives’, demands to be allowed to use women’s safe spaces and access to their bodies as well as, of course, the incessant attempt to harm HSTS.

(Incredibly, I recently saw, on an AGP’s site, the exhortation that women should just ‘stay out of spaces that [AGP MtFs] frequent.’ It is rare that I am rendered speechless, but I was that day.)

On the other hand, dysphoria for an HSTS — who does not have this internal conflict and is really a girl — is simply about social roles: a horror of having to socialise as a man and being more comfortable socialising as a woman since, in fact, that is what she is. Genital surgery for AGP is like the removal of a malignant tumour, the second personality’s final moment of triumph; for HSTS it’s more like having a boob job — it makes a more convincing woman, who can then socialise more easily as one. This is why so many AGPs do not use their neo-vaginas for sex, whereas HSTS always do: I mean what would be the point otherwise?

AGPs have no notion of what being a woman is, of course; theirs is a fantasy, possibly provoked by the repression they experienced as children. Unlike HSTS, who are in no doubt whatsoever about their feminine identity from their early lives and indeed are quite unable to prevent themselves from being girls, AGPs have to learn and, frequently, fail.

The AGP awareness of self as feminine is rather like a ‘negative shape': once you remove all the masculine parts, what is left is taken to be feminine. That this assumption could not be further from the truth is just ignored by AGPs, though it is the source of much of the conflict between them and natal women feminists.

AGP is a cultural by-product of the Western patriarchy; this is supported by the fact that in other parts of the world, it is extremely rare, to the point of ‘zero percent’ (of trans women) according to one study. Worse however, it acts for the patriarchy in erasing and silencing HSTS trans women, who are far more numerous. In this, AGPs are not alone: we shall deal with their allies in another post.

 

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Thursday 8 October 2015

Keisha Jenkins: Say Her Name

Keisha-jenkins

Keisha Jenkins, 22. RIP

Say Her Name. Go on. Say it. Keisha Jenkins.

According to Philadelphia Police, Keisha Jenkins, 22, was ambushed by about five men who began to pummel her moments after she exited a car around 2:30 a.m. She was then shot twice in the back and later died in a hospital. Keisha is the most recent in a wave of killings of trans women in the United States.

Keisha’s brutal death brings the total of trans women murdered in the USA — that we know of — to 21 this year. While the USA is not the most dangerous place in the world for trans women — that’s Brazil — the US  has undercurrents of racism and sexism that are not apparent elsewhere and which are conspiring to make matters worse.

The underlying cause of these killings is the patriarchy’s misogynistic premise that women are worth less than men. This powers the killing of both trans women and trans men as well as rape and ‘honour’ killings of women. These phenomena are all closely related and a symptom of the patriarchy, which is not an organisation but a parasitic disease that feeds on people.
The patriarchy only needs women to supply it with sons that bear their fathers’ names; since trans women cannot do this the patriarchy encourages men to kill them. This is what causes ‘passer-by’ killings, where there appears to have been no social interaction between the victim and her killers. They just killed her because the patriarchy made them believe they should. We don’t yet know if this was what happened to Keisha and, sadly, we probably never will: the history of the investigation of the murder of trans women suggests that their killers are rarely brought to justice.

A second issue is that the patriarchy attempts to control how and with whom men have sex. (It doesn’t really care what women do in bed as long as they make babies for men and do as they are told by them.) This is because human sex is our most powerful drive. It bonds societies together, and to do so, humans are evolved, like our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan paniscus, to be both pansexual and gender-fluid.

I cover this in Why Men Made God and blogged about it at Pansexual: the human norm.

For our two species, same-sex bonding is part of our group dynamic. It ties, through sexualised bonds of love, the groups we are evolved to live in together, and so helps the individuals in them survive. Because the same-sex sexual bonding occurs alongside opposite-sex intercourse, and these two species, left to their own devices, have a lot of sex, there is always enough reproductive sex to ensure future generations.

The patriarchy put an end to that. For it, sex had only to be about procreation and not about shared pleasure. Women, indeed, were not expected to find sex pleasant; this was ‘unbecoming’. (A view still held by Christians and Muslims; for example; clitorectomy is specifically designed to prevent women enjoying sex.) This is because the patriarchy wants its control systems, principally religions but not exclusively, to be the ‘authority’ that governs us.

It is central to the patriarchal desire for control that men stop having sex with other males, so it teaches young men that such an attraction is demeaning and forbidden or even ‘unnatural’. This allows the patriarchy, through supplying sexual partners sanctioned by its contract of ownership of women, called ‘marriage’, to control men by regulating the supply of baby-factories to ensure their lineage is preserved. To enforce this it trains them to beat, bully and kill (as we see in ISIS and elsewhere in the Islamic world) men who express willingness to have sex with other men. At very least it is tantamount to a surrender of all the man’s status.

After all, why would any man jump through the hoops the patriarchy sets just for a little bit of sex if he could do otherwise? Men being creative, that is exactly what they do, and why the patriarchy so hates that they do, and why their ex-cathedra condemnation is so vitriolic.

Since the patriarchy sees trans women as men prepared to have sex with other men, it wants them dead.
At the same time the patriarchy teaches young men that women are sexual targets and that they have a right to penetrate them. (See here: Why America is the World’s Rape Capital ) It turns sex into a competition, with the highest status going to the man who penetrates the most women. (Religious sanctions like marriage are only intended to control women; men are not bound by them but in name.) This is an utter perversion of the way humans have evolved, but the patriarchy is supported in its blatant lying by religion, politicians, and, to its great shame, the academy.

The above two factors are catastrophically dangerous for one kind of transwomen, who are the majority. These women are sexually attracted to men and probably highly desirable, as Keisha was. They frequently find themselves alone with men, in the interest of having sex.

When the man, having succeeded in the challenge the patriarchy set him and penetrated the girl, finds out she has a penis, all hell breaks loose. Because he has been taught that all possessors of penises are men, to his mind he has just had sex with a man, and his patriarchal status has been totally destroyed. An episode of narcissistic rage (which men are very prone to) occurs and he beats the girl to death. This is EXACTLY what happened to Jennifer Laude, Gwen Araujo and countless others.
Frequently these murders do not happen immediately and the killer goes off to find some male friends who will help him recover his ‘honour’ by killing her. Is this what happened to Keisha? We don’t know.

The situation is even worse than it seems, however. There are two completely different types of male-to-female transsexual. The first, which used to be called ‘true’ transsexual, is now known as ‘Blanchard HSTS’ or ‘transkid’. They realise they are girls in childhood, may go through a phase of thinking they are gay boys (when they are vulnerable to quack psychologists) and most importantly, they are sexually attracted to men. Think Janet Mock, Geena Rocero, Kevin Balot, Jamie Clayton. Keisha and at least 17 of the other trans women murdered (that we know of) in the US this year, were of this type; they probably all were. These are the overwhelming majority of trans women.

The second type used to be called ‘pseudo’ transsexual, but is now known by the more accurate name ‘Blanchard autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. These are all the MtF ‘transsexuals’ who are not principally attracted to men. Instead they are sexually attracted to themselves, as women. (Some do become attracted to men after they transition, but that’s for another day.) Autogynephilia is popularly known as male fetishistic cross-dressing, although it is actually somewhat more complex. Think ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner.
These latter are, definitively, not women. They are men with a paraphilia, a sexual fetish. They are heterosexual and prey on women. They are the most perfect expression of the patriarchy’s contempt for women: men with fake vaginas and boob jobs, gaining admission to women’s private spaces to rape them with their minds.
Although actually a minority, in the West autogynephiles claim they are the majority, but in order to do this, they have to pretend that the overall prevalence of MtF transgender is much lower than it is. They use out-of-date, debunked and plain old deliberately falsified statistics to try to shore their claim up, and suggest that the prevalence is of the order of 1:10,000.

However the true prevalence, as demonstrated in censuses and surveys all over the world, and in the US by prestigious organisations for such as the Williams Institute for Law of the University of California, and by Professor Lynn Conway, is around 1:250 or higher. There are at least 700,000 MtF transgender people in the USA and well over 90% of them are not AGP, but HSTS. (Williams; Conway’s total is higher.)*

However, were autogynephiles to recognise the actual prevalence they would immediately lose credibility for the status they have arrogated to themselves, of being the spokesmen for all trans women. By doing this, autogynephiles encourage under-reporting and contribute to the killing of real trans women. These are white middle-class, middle-aged men with good careers and money in the bank, presuming to speak for principally of colour, poor, largely under-educated trans women.
Although it is possible that one or two of the trans women murdered in the USA today are AGP, it is most unlikely. The majority of the dead were trans women of colour and AGP is almost exclusively a phenomenon of white, middle-class males.

Racism pervades US culture in a way that no European can really understand. Racism does exist here, but it is completely different. I saw a person of colour approach the school across the road yesterday. I didn’t know him, never seen him before. In the US, what would a white person have done? Be honest. You’d have called the police or maybe just got a gun and shot him. That is what you’d have done. I assumed he was a newcomer to the village come to pick up his kid from school and guess what? So he was. Next time I see him I’ll say hi and welcome to the community.

This racism in the US fuels the conflict between AGPs and the majority HSTS. Because AGPs are actually patriarchal white men, they will not tolerate women of colour speaking for them. It is essential to them that they maintain the illusion of their numerical superiority, in order to remain the spokesmen for the ‘transgender community’.

Did you really think it was coincidence that Bruce Jenner, an admitted lifelong cross-dressing fetishist, suddenly decided, at the age of 65, to ‘come out as a woman’? Open your eyes: the high ground has been taken by trans women of colour like Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Geena Rocero and many others. Jenner ‘came out’ to steal that limelight back for white cross-dressing men.

These people are parasitic male opportunists; ghastly succubi created by the patriarchy to feed off the identities of women while having sex with them. To them, HSTS are the enemies and they are unconcerned by their killings. This is why Jenner has been so strangely quiet on the subject.

Bad enough to be so betrayed by a competing group of transsexuals, but HSTS trans women of colour get it from another source too: gay men. The modern gay movement has banned femininity and smothered its expression. Why? Because it wants to be part of the patriarchy. Only people with a profoundly patriarchal mindset would spend so much time and effort to actually allow themselves to be bound by the patriarchy’s contract of ownership, marriage. But HSTS trans women flout that authority too. Since gay men actually see HSTS trans women as …well, gay men, they expect them to wear slacks and have pecs. When trans women refuse, gay men get nasty.

Amongst the most aggressive critics of trans women, alongside Bible-thumping preachers and others suffering from the delusion of religion, have been gay movement leaders like Jim Fourrat. The history of the gay male movement — led by squeaky white men — in the last three decades is of betraying and abusing HSTS trans women, mainly of colour, while sucking up to the patriarchy and also to AGPs — who are also white men.

Keisha Jenkins will not be the last to die. Many more will, HSTS trans women, mainly of colour. While they do, white gays and lesbians continue to congratulate themselves on at last getting their merit badges from the patriarchy and at the same time white cross-dressing men pontificate on how hard life is while getting sexually aroused at the thought of knitting, wearing frilly knickers or using women’s toilets.

I grieve for Keisha’s parents and for the loved ones of all the trans women who have been murdered. But we will not end this carnage until we see through the lies and propaganda that sustain their killing, and recognise that two of the most sinister accessories are gay men and cross-dressing fetishists. **

 

* The issue of prevalence and the blatant lies being promulgated by AGPs and their front organisations deserves a blog post of its own, which I will work up.

** A draft of this article was accidentally published yesterday. I have rewritten it in the light of the sad news about Keisha Jenkins.

The post Keisha Jenkins: Say Her Name appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

Wednesday 7 October 2015

The patriarchy is a parasitic disease

Every year, over a hundred trans women are killed in Brazil. In the USA, an epidemic of killing of trans women appears to be under way, and a woman is raped every 6 minutes. In other parts of the Americas, things are no better. In the UK and across Europe, trans killings are less frequent but beating and intimidation are commonplace, and rape is at an all-time high. In India, rape is epidemic. Why is this happening? Why the hate?

The underlying cause is the patriarchy, which is based on a misogynistic premise that women are worth less than men. The central plank of the patriarchy’s evil creed is ‘man=superior, woman=inferior’. This powers rape and ‘honour’ killings of women as well as the killing of both trans women and trans men. These phenomena are all closely related and a symptom of the patriarchy, which is not an organisation but a parasitic disease that feeds on people.

We’ve looked at rape before, so let’s look at trans killings here. Why does the patriarchy hate trans people so much? After all, they do share certain characteristics with men.

Well, we’ll come to the specific reasons later, but first you have to understand that there are two completely different types of male-to-female transsexual. The first, which used to be called ‘true’ transsexual, is now known by a range of more politically correct names, including ‘Blanchard HSTS’ and ‘transkid’. They realise they are girls in childhood, may go through a phase of thinking they are gay boys (when they are vulnerable to quack psychologists) and most importantly, they are sexually attracted to men. This puts them in harms way, because men are rapists and killers.

The second type used to be called ‘pseudo’ transsexual, but is now known as ‘Blanchard autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. These are all the MtF transsexuals who are not principally attracted to men. They are sexually attracted to themselves, as women. (Some do become attracted to men after they transition, but that’s for another day.) Autogynephilia is popularly known as male fetishistic cross-dressing.  Think ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner.

Because trans women have the physical ability to be men but are not, both types offend the patriarchy’s hierarchy of status. This is just the first of its reasons for eradicating them.

The patriarchy only needs women to supply it with sons that bear their fathers’ names; since trans women cannot do this the patriarchy encourages men to kill them. This is what causes the ‘passer-by’ killings, where there appears to have been no social interaction between the victim and her killer. He just killed her because the patriarchy told him he should. Although AGPs are very rarely killed, when they are, it tend to be in these situations.

A second issue is that the patriarchy attempts to control how and with whom men have sex. (It doesn’t really care what women do in bed as long as they make babies for men and do as they are told by it.) This is because human sex is our most powerful drive. It bonds societies together, and to do so, humans are evolved, like our nearest relatives the bonobos, Pan paniscus, to be both pansexual and gender-fluid.

(I cover this in Why Men Made God and blogged about it yesterday at Pansexual: the human norm which may also cast light.)

For our two species, same-sex bonding is part of our group dynamic. It helps bond the groups we are evolved to live in together, and so helps the individuals in them survive. Because the same-sex sexual bonding occurs alongside opposite-sex intercourse, and these two species, left to their own devices, have a lot of sex, there is always enough reproductive sex to ensure future generations.

The patriarchy put an end to that. For it, sex had only to be about procreation and not about shared pleasure. Women, indeed, were not expected to find sex pleasant; this was ‘unbecoming’. (A view still held by Christians and Muslims; for example; clitorectomy is specifically designed to prevent women enjoying sex.) This is because the patriarchy wants its control systems, principally religions, to be the ‘glue’ that holds society together.

In order to do this, it is central to the patriarchal cults that men stop having sex with other males, so it teaches young men that such an attraction is demeaning and forbidden or even ‘unnatural’. It trains them to beat, bully and kill (as we see in ISIS and elsewhere in the Islamic world) men who express this. At very least it is tantamount to a surrender of all the man’s status.

At the same time the patriarchy teaches young men that women are sexual targets and that they have a right to penetrate them. (See here: Why America is the World’s Rape Capital ) It turns sex into a competition, with the most status going to the man who penetrates the most women. (Religious sanctions like marriage are only to control women; men are not bound by them.)

The above two factors are catastrophically dangerous for  transkids, who are the majority of trans women.* These women are sexually attracted to men and probably highly desirable. They frequently find themselves alone with men, in the interest of having sex. The man, having succeeded in the challenge the patriarchy set him and penetrated the girl, then finds out she has a penis. Because he has been taught that all possessors of penises are men, to his mind he has just had sex with a man, and his patriarchal status has been totally destroyed. An episode of narcissistic rage (which men are very prone to) occurs and he beats the girl to death. This is EXACTLY what happened to Jennifer Laude, Gwen Araujo and countless others.

As far as trans men are concerned, their numbers are smaller, but they are still victims. Here the issue is less sexualised. They are killed because they are seen by the patriarchy as usurping the status it reserves for men. To the patriarchy, women are ALWAYS inferior and must never be allowed to set themselves up as equals. Since for a woman to present as a man challenges the very foundation of the patriarchy, and trans men are a minority, the patriarchy thinks it can kill them with impunity and encourages the men who are its tools to do so.

 

*In the West autogynephiles claim they are the majority, but in order to do this, they have to pretend that the overall prevalence is much lower than it is. They use out-of-date,  debunked and plain old deliberately falsified statistics to try to shore their bogus claim up.

(One source of this misinformation is WPATH, formerly the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, an organisation run by and in the interests of autogynephiles.)

The true prevalence, as demonstrated in censuses and surveys all over the world, and in the US by prestigious organisations for such as the Williams Institute for Law of the University of California, and by Professor Lynn Conway, is around 1:250 or higher. There are at least 700,000 MtF transgender peopl in the USA and over 90% of them are not AGP, but HSTS. (Williams; Conway’s total is higher.)

However,  were autogynephiles to recognise the actual prevalence they would immediately lose credibility for the status they have arrogated to themselves, of being the spokesmen for all trans women. By doing this, autogynephiles encourage under-reporting and contribute to the killing of real trans women. These are white middle-class, middle-aged men with good careers and money in the bank, presuming to speak for principally of colour, poor, largely under-educated trans women. Nice.

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Tuesday 6 October 2015

Pansexual: the human norm

bonobos-chilling

Bonobos chilling to the beat — as well as being pansexual and gender-fluid, bonobos like music. How cool is that?

When we did the research for Why Men Made God we spent a lot of time looking at how societies might have been structured in the era before the development of agriculture and the establishment of the patriarchy (I will be calling these ‘traditional’ societies.) Clearly, we can’t directly study the human groups that existed outside Africa between 50,000 and 5,000 years ago, because they no longer exist.

They left very little evidence. Although they did use stone and bone, a great deal of their artefacts were made of wood or leather and were perishable. The few that we do have are somewhat mysterious.

To try to shed light on this, we reviewed a wide range of anthropological literature. We especially concentrated on extant traditional societies, of which there are a surprising number, despite the attempts by the patriarchy, especially the Christian and Muslim ones, to eradicate them. (As a matter of fact, Islam has been less damaging to many traditional societies than Christianity, as we see from the number of traditional groups still living, and respected, in Indonesia.)

We reviewed the mythology that was recorded soon after the invention of writing in the culture that leads to the Western Patriarchy, which appeared in Sumer in the 5th Millennium BCE. We then compared this to modern mythologies which form part of traditional cultures.

We also looked at close relatives of humans, particularly our closest, the Dwarf Chimpanzee or bonobo, Pan paniscus.

Bonobos bonding

Bonobos bonding

Bonobos have a fascinating social model. They are pansexual and gender-fluid. Males are not dominant and rape has never been observed in bonobo society, either in the wild or in captivity. Generally speaking, they have very relaxed, cool societies with notably low levels of aggression and stress.

In fact, bonobos use sex as the antidote to aggression and stress. Instead of fighting, they love each other, to be blunt. What is interesting is that when they do this, there is no dominance imperative: partners in bonobo sexual relations are equals. Females and males are equally likely to initiate sex. Furthermore, they have no defined preferences — they will as happily have sex with same-sex partners as with opposite.

Sex is a powerful bonding agent in bonobo society. It holds groups together and prevents division. This protects the group from falling apart and thus the individuals within it are more likely to survive. So sex has an evolutionary imperative alongside the reproductive one. In fact, bonobos don’t have sex to make babies, they have sex with their friends and for fun, because they like it. However, they have so much sex that there is no shortage of bonobo babies. Bonobos are evolved to be pansexual and gender-fluid, and we argue that this is the case for humans too.

It should be clear how this torpedoes the ‘homosexuality is an evolutionary dead-end’ argument. It might be, as far as individuals are concerned, but when everyone is having sex with everyone else, this is not the case. Being exclusively homosexual does mean an end to the individual’s genetic line, but this is not how same-sex sex works in either bonobo or traditional societies. The individual male only has to impregnate one female to reproduce his genes; and given the amount of sex in bonobo society, and the variety of it, this is easily achieved. The same, of course, holds true for females — if they give up having sex with each other occasionally to have it with a male, job done. Bonobos are naturally pansexual, to accommodate this, and we argue that the same is true of humans, and back it up with examples.

Further, bonobos are gender-fluid. This does not mean what some people think it does; it is not about wearing a miniskirt and sporting a beard. It means being happy to play either the penetrating or receiving role in sex. Bonobo males are routinely observed having sex, in which one penetrates and the other receives, and immediately after, having sex again and swapping roles. Then they will go off and have sex with females, who probably were having sex with each other in the meantime. Bonobo children are brought up by the group.

bonobo-female-sex

Bonobo females having fun sex.

We share over 98% of our DNA with bonobos and our traditional social models are almost identical. We wondered if we would find something in traditional societies that pointed to similar behaviours in humans and we found it.

All over the world, traditional societies exist that do not follow the patriarchal model, which is, men appropriate women as their mates for life; women in the patriarchy are the literal possessions, the property of men, initially their father, then their husband and brothers. Yet in traditional societies, this is not the case.

In many such cultures, same-sex activity is normal; frequently this is observed between adult men and boys. (Unfortunately, and probably due to the fact that the anthropologists doing the research were men, there is far less information about the women’s sexuality.) The adult men in these relations have women partners too. We cite quite a few examples and refer to over 400 sources in Why Men Made God that develop this.

We know of the Spartans that not only the men but the women had normalised same-sex relations, and while Sparta was a matriarchy, this appears also to have happened in more patriarchal pre-Abrahamic cultures too, which surprised me, frankly.

In fact, being gender fluid (in a sexual sense) and pansexual appears to be as normal for humans as it is for bonobos. However, bonobos have had to do without the curse of organised patriarchal religions, so are still happily having sex with anyone they like, while we invented a whole raft of ridiculous rules and conventions about it.

So in a way, this question is the wrong way round; it should be ‘When and why did strict monogamy and heterosexuality become enforced?’ and the answer to that we give in the book.

Now a caveat: we are talking about sex. The modern idea, that one is only ever attracted to a specific gender, is a modern idea, a by-product of the artificial sexual model imposed by the patriarchy. In fact, we should be having sex with all our friends and developing stronger bonds with them; instead we invented golf. However the patriarchy doesn’t want people being relaxed and loving each other; it wants people to compete, so they miss how it’s shafting them. Again, we explain this in far greater detail in the book than I can go into here.

Gender in the patriarchy is a construct which was developed and is used to suppress women. Gender, in fact, is how you are having sex at one specific moment in time. That’s all. In five minutes you might swap. It confers no advantage or superiority, and one gender is not intrinsically more attractive than the other. Most of what you have read or heard about this is a patriarchal lie.

With that in mind, it is disappointing to see how the modern gay ‘accommodationist’ movement has modelled itself on the patriarchy and imposes rules of behaviour on those whom is sees as being under its aegis. There is nothing that says ‘once gay always gay’ or that a man may not enjoy sex with other men, and also with women and vice versa. These are pseudo-patriarchal rules of behaviour invented by white gay male academics and activists who seek access to patriarchal privilege. I never thought that would happen; but then, the patriarchy is devious and good at perverting people to its ends.

People will not be happy and at peace until the patriarchy, and all its ridiculous rules and conventions, is utterly destroyed. Can’t come quick enough for me.

bonobo4

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Thursday 1 October 2015

Gay is square and trans is hip

 

Jai-Latto-transgender-2015

Scottish trans woman Jai Dara Latto crowned Miss Transgender UK 2015. Congratulations and may the Zeitgeist go with you!

When I was at art school in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, there was only one place to be: the Hoochie-Koochie Club. Why? Because it was the only gay nightclub. Straight women liked it because there was an unspoken rule: straights are welcome, but no hitting on the women. Straight men liked it because we were much less likely to get battered in the face there than in any of the regular meat-markets in the city. There was no pressure; you could just chill, dance, have a drink.

But more than that, it was culturally cool. The gays always had the best music. They were the best-dressed cats in town and if somebody said ‘you’re looking a bit gay today’ you knew you had your fashion statement bang on. It was the era of the New Romantics and everybody was wearing eye-liner and bleaching their hair. Gender signals were profoundly mixed. Straight women wore sports jackets and top hats over jeans and men wore earrings and chiffon. The gay zeitgeist was as hip as it could be.

Miss-transgender-UK

Contestants at the 2015 Miss Transgender UK Finals

After I graduated I became Sabbatical President of my Alma Mater’s Student Representative Council. One of my responsibilities was to listen to the pleas of destitute and often homeless students who had spent the grant, that was meant to last twelve weeks, in four of solid, flat out partying. Having also burnt the £50 overdraft facility that Barclays Bank would give anyone who walked in with a matriculation card, they ended up in front of me, begging for a bail out from the hardship fund; which I always gave them. I remember one, Alan we shall call him, sitting on my desk, holding one of my hands in his and supplicating me for help, despite the fact that I’d already said ‘yes’. And when he left he flounced out in style, blowing me kisses and wiggling his bum.

Another of my roles was to oversee the opening of the new Student Bar, which had been years in the development. Pulling a political fast one on the hard left, who apparently wanted old bentwood chairs and sacking, I persuaded the Governors to give me enough money to turn it into the most gay-attractive place in Edinburgh — and so it became, the legendary Wee Red Bar.  (Yup, that was me.) Why did I do this? Because gay was hip. Gay was cool. Gay meant bums on seats and cocktails being drunk, great music, colour, women not being harassed by neds and NO HASSLE.

Everybody interesting was gay. Freddie Mercury was gay, George Michael and Jimmy Somerville were gay, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were gay and Marc Almond was even more dangerously sexy than Debbie Harry. ‘YMCA’, ‘Relax’ and ‘Tainted Love’ were the soundtrack. Gay was the zeitgeist, the iconography to follow. Straights had to infer some sort of a kink just to be taken seriously — just look at Phil Oakey. Gay was cool.

That was before AIDS. I remember the tragedy all too clearly. But I could not have foreseen, then, working as a freelance photographer and documenting this horror, through the tears I cried for friends taken — what was to come.

Gay isn’t cool any more. Gay isn’t dangerous or cutting edge. Gay people are surely as lovely as they ever were, but they lost the zeitgeist. Instead of sparkling young things with multicoloured hair, full make-up and the most provocative clothes anyone approximating masculine gender could possibly wear, we have…two near-identical, balding, inclined to sedentary spread, IT technicians getting married. Did someone say ‘After the Lord Mayor’s Show?’

Now don’t get me wrong. I am really happy that Marriage Equality is now legal in so many countries, even if marriage itself is a questionable institution, both an instrument and an award of the patriarchy. And of course it goes without saying that everyone should be treated equally under the law. I celebrate this, the culmination of decades of activism.

But you know what? It’s dull. It’s grey. It’s what I never would have believed gays could be, boring and conventional. Square.

What happened to the rampant mĆ©nages a trois, quatre, cinq or more that the Art School models used to tell us about during their tea-breaks? What happened to the flaming boys with their tongues so far down each other’s throats they could have retuned their vocal cords? What happened to the fashion statements? I think Stephen Fry is very sweet and avuncular but iconic? Are you kidding? Marc Almond was iconic. Stephen is…comfortable. And he is about the most dangerous gay man still left out there. The rest have been swallowed up in a tide of grey, the favourite colour of the patriarchy. What happened to the zeitgeist, dammit?

Gone. All lost. The leaders of the gay movement today belong to a group called the ‘accommodationists’ and no, it’s not a synth band. This group’s philosophy was articulated by Jim Fouratt, a New-York based activist. It may be summed up as: ‘please accept us; we’re just like you but we love other men.’

Which is a lovely sentiment, don’t you think? Except it is one of submission. The accommodationists believed they could never beat the patriarchy and they would have to join it. They thought that if they conformed to the patriarchy’s notions of gender, they might sneak under its radar. And they had a great stroke of political fortune when the AIDS epidemic wiped out most of the opposition.

So they erased and banished the real leaders, like Harry Hay, the ‘Radical Faerie’ a cross-dressing imp who founded the Mattachine Society, the forerunner of the modern gay movement. They erased the trans women and drag queens of colour who really led the Stonewall Riots, like Marsha P. King and Sylvia Rivera; so successful were they that the director of this year’s film ‘Stonewall’, (Roland P. Emmerich, as badly-dressed an accommodationist as one could wish for) actually rewrote history to give these non-white women’s roles to white men, and worse, wrote them out of the story completely. For shame. Who would have thought a proud and out gay man would be both transphobic and racist?

Could I ever have believed, remembering Alan, sitting on my desk in his cowboy boots and hot pants, his hair pink and blue and his nails painted, reeking of patchouli, that such would be the end of something so colourful and provocative — that the face of 21st century gayness would be two middle-aged IT technicians in bad suits taking the patriarchal pledge of monogamy and commitment to perpetuate it?

Gay and lesbian has become boring. It’s dull. It’s unattractive. It’s conventional. It’s Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell. It’s square, man. The patriarchy has bought it, drawn its teeth and clipped its wings. Face it: you can’t be a part of the patriarchy and be interesting.

Oh the Bisexuals are still out there having fun, but you should hear what the L and G have to say about them, darling. Conformity — that sad expression of social conservatism that is nowhere more at home than in the US — has sold out all the individuals in the name of patriarchal acceptance and capitalist economics. Square square square.

And then again.

Suddenly Laverne Cox. Suddenly Janet Mock. Suddenly Paris Lees. Suddenly Sass Rogando Sasot and Geena Rocero. And trans men too: suddenly Fox Fisher, Chas Bono. Suddenly smart, stylish, articulate and beautiful trans people are everywhere.

Gays and lesbians gave up the zeitgeist. They — or at least the mainstream — didn’t really want to be cutting edge, not once they were over twenty-five and got decent jobs anyway. They wanted to be part of the patriarchal club and that meant accepting their position within it, the status the patriarchy allocated to them. So they abandoned all the dangerous people and settled for conformity; a safe marriage, a mortgage and maybe kids. How sweet.

One flaming femboy, her bubble-butt stretching the velour of her lethally short pants, her bag slung on her shoulder, mincing along the street in ludicrously high pumps, does more damage to the patriarchy in ten paces than all the clone, accommodationist gays and lesbians will in their entire lives. They don’t want to damage the patriarchy: they support it and want access to its system of privilege. Our mincing poppet doesn’t give two hoots for the patriarchy. She throws its privilege system back in its face and laughs at it. She just wants to be drop-dead gorgeous and have lots of sex and most of all, she wants it on her terms.

The effect of that is cataclysmic. Thirty-five years ago, before the onset of the AIDs epidemic and the triumph of the accommodationists, the patriarchy was equally challenged. White gay men and lesbians stole the initiative and settled for second best; acceptance on the patriarchy’s terms. Now all that is changing. Trans people are appearing everywhere; they’re on catwalks, on television, on magazine covers, all over the Internet. They have grabbed back the zeitgeist and are running with it. They have the excitement, the danger and the attractiveness and they know it; they always knew it, but now they have articulate voices too, voices that are being listened to, voices that won’t be shouted down by privileged white cis-men and women, the way Johnson and Rivera’s were, or for that matter are being, by older trans people.

In 2004, Fouratt, in a speech that shocked many, claimed that trans women were ‘crazy queens’ who threatened ‘the way we live our lives’. What he meant was that feminine gay men should stop being feminine, that they should instead assert their masculinity and thus fit into his accommodationist model, which was less menacing to the patriarchy. This was not how it was read, at least by many trans activists, who threw the kind of storm in a latte cup they are famous for; but these were all so-called ‘late onset non-androphilic’ or ‘Blanchard autogynephile’ trans women. They definitely are not an extension of gay maleness; many in fact see themselves as lesbian. In the last two decades, however, they have been the ones who made the noise. Fouratt was torpedoed and sank from view.

But there is another type of trans women. These do like men. They are the ‘early onset androphile’, ‘Blanchard HSTS’, or more informally, ‘transkids’ (because they identify as trans while still children). They are the nieces of Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and the daughters of a line of trans women reaching back into history, far beyond the invention of writing.

They are cousins to the hijra and thirunangai of India, the kathoey of Thailand, the transpinays of the Philippines, the waria of Indonesia, the North American ‘Two Spirit’ people and the travestis of Latin America and Southern Europe, as well as myriad other populations all over the world. Once, they were priestesses to the goddesses Inanna, Ishtar and Astarte. The Roman writer Livy tells how devotees of Cybele distilled pregnant mare urine to extract the oestrogen, which they used to feminise themselves — and would secretly give to their enemies to emasculate them. In Rome they were the galli, boys who ritually self-castrated to become priestesses — a procedure we might find shocking but which is carried on to this day by the hijra. The ancient Vedic texts, the foundation of Hinduism, describe these women in detail. They have always been among us.

Nisamanee-Lertvorapong

Thai transgender model Nisamanee Lertvorapong in make-up

Overwhelmingly, they are a world majority of trans women. In Thailand they are estimated to be one percent of born-male population. Thailand is famously trans and gay friendly, but in Malaysia, which is anything but, one study put the prevalence only slightly lower at 1:170. The latest census in India, the first to try to count them, put the numbers of hijra close to half a million, but due to high rates of illiteracy and deep mistrust of patriarchal authority, most did not register. Support workers estimate that there may be as many as four million.

Anyone who has spent time in Asia knows that there is a continuum between feminine gay men and trans women. Traditionally, gay men in these societies identify as women ‘on the inside’ and they will express this if the circumstances are right. This depends on the level of social tolerance they experience, the cultural confirmation of their feminine identity — Asian societies have long-established traditions venerating trans people and indeed, may be more tolerant of trans women than of gay men — and, bluntly, how attractive they are as women.

There is little reason why this should not happen in the West. If you are a naturally feminine boy attracted to men, do you really want to become the image of the accommodationist gay man, an IT technician in a bad suit? It’s the last thing you’d do, if you could be a glamorous woman instead. This is what actually does happen, in most of the world.

In a way, the accommodationist gay movement and its counterpart lesbian one, have come to the end of their shelf-life. We should not be sad about this; they have achieved much. There will always be a place for gay men whose masculinity is too central to their personalities to let go of. But gender is a construct and its expression can be reshaped; the zeitgeist, furthermore, is a freight train coming. Best not be in the way.

Trans people’s star is rising. They have taken up the torch that was dropped by the gays and lesbians — of being stylish, of being shocking, of being iconoclastic, of being dangerously sexy but most of all, of waving the bold red rag of refusal to conform in the face of the patriarchy.

Trans is the new hip. Get ready.

The post Gay is square and trans is hip appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

Wednesday 19 August 2015

Only Corbyn can save Labour’s ass

che-jeremy-corbynYou can’t steal the Tories’ political clothes.

Future historians will see the 2010 UK General Election as the moment the ‘British’ Labour Party died, poisoned to its core by the ‘New Labour’ experiment. Gordon’s Brown’s catastrophic loss may not have translated immediately into a Tory majority, but that was only a matter of time.

The poison had been slow but nobody in Labour seemed to recognise what was happening as the gangrene turned black and pussy. Tony Blair didn’t win the 1997 General Election; the Tories connived and corrupted their way out of power, and an electorate, utterly sick of almost two decades of self-serving lies and destruction of the fabric of the ‘nation’ threw them out. Quite honestly they’d as likely have voted in the Three Amigos, complete with embroidered chaps and ten-gallon hats, as a triad of Tory-Liters led by Blair, all with uniform suits that cost even more than the real Tories’ ones.

Gordon Brown’s catastrophe was just the moment when everyone realised the awful truth: there was no further point to Labour at all. Ed Milliband spent years trying to persuade everyone that he could win a General Election, but he was doomed to ignominious failure. Not because he was an awful leader, or at least, not only because of that; but because Labour is now unelectable.

It’s easy to see why. The relentless sliming of Tony Blair and his incessant push towards the right disembowelled any notion of principle or purpose the party ever had. Labour always struggled to be elected, but its strongest suit was its social conscience. In the past, when people suffered, the British electorate (as it was then) voted Labour to put an end to Tories helping themselves. That’s how we got the National Health Service.

che-guevara-flag-651-pYou can’t beat the Tories at their own game. They wrote the rule book. Well, actually, they didn’t, it was Niccolo Machiavelli and it’s called ‘The Prince’. Read it some time. It will explain everything you need to know about how the Tory mind works: grab and hold on to power any way we can, to make ourselves rich. That’s what Toryism is. It’s not hindered by baggage such as principles.

And because of that, trying to steal its clothes is a total waste of time. All you end up with is a bunch of worn out rags from Oxfam when you thought you’d just blagged some Savile Row.  And the next thing you know, here’s the Tories, elbowing their way to the trough again, wearing brand new suits that look remarkably like the ones you just bought.

Yet that is what Labour, under the surpassingly short-sighted leadership of Blair, Brown and Mandelson, tried to do, aided and abetted by hired help like Alistair Campbell and John McTernan, the orchestrator of ‘Scottish’ Labour’s defenestration this year. You can’t help but think these goons were being paid too much — and still are, in McTernan’s case.

You can’t out-Tory the Tories. You either wait for them to make themselves unelectable, or you come up with that anathema to Blairism, a principled position to challenge them. There’s no point in trying to challenge them on the right; everybody knows it’s a con. New Labour can chatter on as much as it likes about fiscal responsibility and you know what? It won’t make a damn bit of difference, because no Labour voter wants austerity in the first place, and the Tories know it’s a ruse. And the consequence of all this Tory-Lite centrism, designed to pick up Tory voters, is that Labour voters have stopped going to the polls.

Why should they? Labour — in any meaningful sense — no longer exists. Blairite UK Labour made the exact same mistake in England as it did in Scotland: it just assumed its ‘core vote’ would put up with anything. It was wrong in Scotland and it is wrong in England. Unless Labour is radical, it is unelectable. It’s that simple. It has to actually appeal to its natural voters, and the more it woos blimps and blue-rinses, the more it repels the core vote.

You have to enthuse a popular support and, when the Tories control all of the mainstream media, that is a tough job. It takes dedication, hard work and passion but absolutely most of all, it demands that you have something to enthuse people about, and a leader capable of doing it..

Labour has to abandon the blimps and blue rinses, the get-rich-quick barrow boys and self-serving bankers, and stand up what it was invented to stand up for — ordinary people and their rights.

Whatever happens now, Labour will not win a majority in 2020. That’s a given. We know that already.

But here’s a thing: the UK electoral system automatically favours two large parties. So the non-Tory vote will not fracture into a multiplicity of parties if Labour should collapse; it will remain essentially a two-party system. The only two parties (leaving aside Scotland) that these could be are the Tories and Labour.

Absent the SNP deciding to contest seats in England (which they could; and that would put the cat in with the doos) Labour still has a choice: to be a perpetual party of opposition, drained of any life, like Banquo’s ghost, providing spurious legitimacy for a permanent Tory dictatorship, or it must reinvent itself as a populist and popular party of the Left, committed to radical reform of the economy, a reversal of privatisation, abolition of the Lords, constitutional reform, protection for workers and so much more that it has abandoned in its rush to become the new Tories.

This is the tactic that the SNP in Scotland, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and may others have used and are using to upset the comfortable political status quo. The quicker Labour realises it must abandon its Tory-Lite fantasy and get back to the hard work of real politics, the quicker it will have a chance of breaking out of an otherwise vicious cycle of collapse.

The only person who can save Labour’s sorry ass now, is Jeremy Corbyn. And you only have to look at the reaction from the Tory-Lite wing to see that he might actually get the chance. Bookmakers have already begun paying out on bets that he will become leader, a whole month before the election. That is unprecedented.

So much the better. Labour needs to understand right now that no matter who it puts in the driving seat it will not win a majority in 2020. But only under Corbyn might it possibly hope to repeat the trick the SNP pulled off in Scotland (and which the Labour Scottish Branch so miserably failed and fails to replicate) and build a mass party of grass-roots enthusiasts. The only way it can do this is by enthusing the Left and the young. Only Corbyn can do this.

Furthermore, only under Corbyn could a deal be worked out with the SNP to maintain a Labour Government long enough to push through the necessary constitutional reform that will ensure that never again will a bunch of Etonite yobs hold absolute power on a third of the votes cast.

And, should it be elected, Labour must actually deliver: this will be a one-time only chance to save the party and if they go back to the old ways of promising the Earth and delivering a barrow load of infill, there won’t be another. Electors are savvy now and they have the Internet in their pockets. The old certainties are gone, and lies and broken promises will be remembered.

The almost certain immediate result of Corbyn’s election result will be that a number of high-profile Tory-Liters will try to mount a palace coup and when that fails, go off in a huff and start their own party, as did the so-called SDP over thirty years ago. And just like their utterly failed predecessor, this new breakaway group will, after a year or two of abject failure, join forces with the Liberals, who have no principles to worry about; they’ll suck any anyone’s cock if they think it might get them a Cabinet position or two. (Not that I have any objection to fellatio, you understand; but it’s an activity better suited to the bedroom than public life.)

And that will be the epitaph of Blairism; soon it will be forgotten, just like the names of the Gang of Four that led the breakaway SDP split. I’m not even going to look them up; and that is what is going to happen to the Tory-Lite, New Labour Blairites.

Jeremy Corbyn will likely even gain a seat or two back in Scotland, though the wind has changed too far to reverse the SNP’s domination for a long while yet. But even though I am an SNP supporter, I have in the past voted for Labour and, were I living in England and had to, I might consider voting for the party again, under Corbyn. Otherwise I’d just vote Green in protest.

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