Just to go over some ground regarding the thorny subject of non-trans autogynephilia again, (AGP) I thought I’d illustrate it with this charming chappy. Let me introduce Dave Muscato. As you can see, Dave is a man, and a dapper one at that. But Dave wants us all to believe he is a woman and … Continue reading Dave Muscato: a non-trans autogynephile
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Outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando on the night of the Islamist shootings.
Islam is locked in a war with secular democracy and moderate Muslims themselves.
Ten days ago a Canadian, Robert Hall, had his head hacked from his body in a brutal public murder. Two days later, over 100 people were gunned down in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; forty-nine died. Two days after that a married couple, both police officers, were stabbed to death in their home outside Paris and their infant child held hostage until the killer was shot by police.
There is nothing whatsoever to connect these victims, on the face of it. Nothing. A middle-aged professional, young people in a nightclub, serving police officers. They died in equally unrelated
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his partner Jessica Schneider, murdered in the name of Islam. Pic: Reuters
locations — the Philippines, the USA, France.
But they are connected all the same: they were all murdered in the name of Islam.
These are but the tip of the iceberg; all over the Middle East, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in the same time, hundreds of innocent people were murdered — in the name of Islam. And most of them were Muslims.
Robert Hall (left) prior to being murdered in the name of Islam
These victims join the tens of thousands of others who have been murdered, raped, or enslaved in the name of Islam, just since 2000. If we go back to the 20th century, we find that millions were murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of Islam. When we call the roll of violent, murdering ideologies of that century, we always forget one; Nazism, Communism — and Islam.
Yet we may not speak a word against this. We may not name what we see, what is manifest, what is plain as day — that Islam perverts men into monsters who kill, rape and enslave in its name and expect a heavenly reward of unlimited, unending sex with 72 perpetual virgins for doing so. (The Orlando shooter was homosexual and we wonder what he imagined his reward might be; 72 Christians, perhaps — the porn star, not the religion.)
Despite the blindingly obvious truth about Islam, we are not allowed to say a word against it. Why? Because Islam is mainly practised by people who do not have white skin. And the intellectual fascism of ‘identity politics’ insists that no-one of non-white skin colour may ever be criticised for anything.
This of course reveals the excruciating irony that ‘identity politics’ is itself a form of racism; but then, you have to have some intelligence to divine that. Bill Maher calls it the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, and Bill is right on point.
Well, enough is enough. Identity politics is indeed a form of racism and fascism, and a spade should be called a spade.
This war began a long time ago and we ignored it. We misnamed it, pretended it might go away. We vacillated, imagining that our trinkets and compromises, our cavilling appeasement, might quench our enemy’s thirst for blood. But all that failed long ago.
We are not ‘at war with terrorism’ — or rather that is too tautological a euphemism to let pass. All states, everywhere, are perpetually at war with terrorism. That is why a state exists: to protect the people from terrorists. But nobody says ‘the King of France gave land at the mouth of the Seine to the Normans so that they could protect the country from terrorist attack’. They say, ‘from the Vikings.’
To be at war against terrorism is a permanent and necessary part of a state’s very reason to exist; to use this term to describe our current crisis is to deliberately deny the real name of the enemy.
We are not at war with a people, or a ‘race’. We are at war with a Dark Age socio-political ideology that promotes injustice and is based on a pack of barefaced lies. This war is no different from the war against Communism. It’s not about people. It’s about ideas.
Islam is just a religion; just a set of ideas. It is an ideology invented to make some men rich and powerful by controlling women, children and all the weaker men. It’s just our old enemy, the patriarchy; and it is no less hideous, oppressive or murderous for being a version mainly promoted by men with non-white skin.
Islam stands against literally every single value that Western democracy believes in. Every value that European democracy — and that includes the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, for better or worse — has fought for centuries to develop and preserve.
Islam hates women and gays, considers that children have no rights, animals have no rights. I insists that anyone who does not accept it as the literal truth should be killed. It hates art. It hates poetry. It hates music. It hates science. It hates secularism. It hates democracy.
Anything that could be considered civilised, Islam hates. It would rather turn the world back in to a desert nightmare of brutality and discrimination where warlords do as they like. Where women are personal chattels of men to be raped when they are nine, or burned alive when they break its rules about marriageor for refusing to be whores for jihadists. Where they have acid thrown in their faces for not covering them. Where homosexuals are thrown from rooftops then stoned till they die. Where the ‘crime’ of having an opinion is punished by death.
The last war that European civilisation fought against Islam — a defensive war, just as this one is –lasted for a thousand years. This time the enemy is ahead of us. We now can see that there was no victory before the Gates of Vienna in 1683; just an armistice and we did not seize the opportunity it afforded us to smash the enemy forever.
Instead of striking the head from the serpent, we took our boot from its neck and let it go. We allowed it compassion — which is a part of our culture. But it is not a part of the enemy’s and anyone who thinks that jihadists will spare the sword, should the world ever be unfortunate enough that they do seize the advantage, is barking mad.
Surely, if Islam is indeed a religion of peace, then no blasphemy could be greater than murdering, raping and enslaving in its name. Where, then, are the screaming hordes who protested against cartoons of Mohammed and called for the artist to be killed — for blasphemy? Those who called for the death of Salman Rushdie for the same? These men killed no-one, raped no-one, enslaved no-one; yet their ‘blasphemy’ was such that it merited death.
Why are the same people who called for this not out on the streets right now, demanding that the atrocities committed in the name of their religion must stop?
Such protesters are nowhere to be seen. One might even be forgiven for thinking that murder, rape and slavery are not ‘blasphemous’ at all, and that could only be because Islam — the religion of peace — actually condones them.
Do they, then, Muslims all support the jihadists? No, of course not, but the fact that the majority of Germans were not Nazis did not prevent the Holocaust; and the fact that the majority of Muslims are decent people, who do love peace, has not and will not prevent more killing.
If moderate Muslims are to neutralise the jihadist threat, then they need our assistance, because they too are under threat — indeed, they are under the greatest threat of any, since, after all, they live with the jihadists in their midst.
We need all the support we can get from moderate Muslims, yet this is confounded by Political Correctness. Partly, this is our own fault. We have allowed the Regressive Left to set a picket line around Islam, so that it may never be criticised, even by Muslims; just look at how they treat Maajid Nawaz, Ayan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie.
This very ring-fence helps to muzzle moderate Muslims and to deliver them up to the jihadists. It isolates them from their natural allies — non-Muslim moderates — and pretends that this is ‘defending a culture’. It is more important , for the ‘identity politics’ airheads, that This attitude — promulgated by the regressive left, those ‘useful idiots’ — is pure racism in itself. It is, as Maher says, the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. After all, how could we possibly imagine that people of brown skin could do better? And not only that, they must be allowed to do their worst without a word of protest.
Well if Islam, as a culture, has value, it is not in its ability to murder the innocent. Peaceable Muslim communities have already proven themselves to be rich recruiting grounds for jihadist murderers who have but rarely been turned over to the authorities and who, rather, are all too often hidden instead.
If there is a solution — other than massive ‘ethnic cleansing’, which nobody wants to see, even if it were possible — then it is in mobilising moderate Muslims to denounce extremism and violence. It is in standing with them against the jihadists. It is by funding their organisations and helping them to counter jihadism within their own communities. It is in protecting them from the threats they surely receive and ensuring that their voices be heard, by Muslims.
Furthermore, Islamic apostates — threatened with death by Islamists — must be protected and their voices must be heard. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, according to this article in the UK Guardian, assists about 350 people a year to leave Islam in the UK, ‘the majority of whom have faced threats…either by their families or by Islamists.’
The ghettoisation of Muslim communities turns them into pressure-cookers where violent extremists dominate. This is exacerbated, not hindered, by the politically correct Regressive Left.
In its towering conceit and racism, the Regressive Left considers it better that moderate Muslims be terrorised in their own communities by extremist Muslims, than that they be helped by non-Muslims. After all, goes Regressive thinking, they all have brown skin; they should be allowed to get on with killing each other undisturbed by white colonialists trying to enforce Western mores. Meantime, the Regressive Left gets on with really important things, like whether a man with a beard can legitimately ‘identify’ as a woman.
Why is it that public debate is always between an Islamic extremist, or a barefaced apologist for extremism, and someone of the political right, usually white? Because to expose the schisms within Muslim communities is to confuse the all-important message — white bad, non-white good. So what if moderates are sacrificial lambs? The Regressive Left couldn’t care less.
Our strategy must therefore be twofold: on the one hand to completely disgrace the Regressive Left and its intellectual fascism of ‘Identity Politics’. On the other we must massively support moderate Muslims, politically and financially, wherever they live, while denying any support or platform to Islamist extremists.
There is no certainty that we will win this war, even with the best of our efforts. What is certain is that if we continue to refuse to recognise what is happening and do not take immediate steps to counter it, then we shall lose it. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ may yet come true; and none of us will be the better for it.
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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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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.
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Francela Méndez, the tenth trans woman to be murdered in El Salvador this year
People do not ‘become’ transgender. They just are.
Trans people are assaulted, insulted, vilified, denied their existence and human rights, and murdered, every day, but that’s not what makes them transgender. Although trans people are disproportionally the victims of assault, we now know that Gender Identity is innate. Assaults cannot cause innate identities, by definition. And by the same definition, all the abuse the patriarchy throws at them will not unmake a trans person.
Rape, which is one form of assault, is not about sex, it is about subjugation and control. Women, trans people, gay men are raped by men because they don’t conform to the kind of stereotypes that ignorant men (by and large) think should apply to everyone. Trans people are raped because they are trans. It doesn’t ‘make them’ trans.
To put that another way, people are raped by the agents of the patriarchy because the patriarchy desires conformity, detests women and utterly loathes those whom it sees as rejecting it — which anyone of non-binary Gender Identity is, by definition, doing. These individuals destroy the very basis of the assumed binary that the patriarchy is based on: two sexes with two prescribed Gender Identities and two concomitant Gender Expressions. The whole of life decided by whether you have an ‘inny’ or an ‘outy’ at birth.
It is this that defines one’s status in the patriarchal pecking order: outy — highest status; inny, not so much. The patriarchy is predicated on insatiable misogyny and it expresses its anger at the challenge to that trans people represent by pathologising them, insulting, beating, raping and killing them, and by attempting to deny not only their right to exist but their very existence itself.
This anger is meted out on the victims in the most horrific ways imaginable: it goes way beyond rape, which is bad enough. Trans people are beaten, stoned, set on fire; they are shot, stabbed, beaten to death with shovels, drowned in toilet bowls. They are suffocated, scalped, have their eyes gouged out and are strangled. Their bodies are dumped in the desert, thrown in the trash, left on the street. These attacks do not ‘make people trans’. They are hate crimes that happen because people are trans.
Trans people are beaten, tortured and murdered by complete strangers, by the police, by the military, by religious authorities. If they run afoul of the law — even in the case of trans people seeking asylum in the US because their lives are in danger at home — they are incarcerated in male prisons where they are repeatedly, serially raped and may be killed. In 2012, in Dubai, a young trans woman, after being arrested for being trans, was raped not only by the other prisoners but the police themselves, was then hired out to other men to be raped, under the watchful eyes of her jailers. She escaped to tell her story; she was one of the very lucky ones.
Yet this year, when Jennicet Gutiérrez dared to heckle President Obama about the shocking abuse of trans people by the US government she was shouted down and. tellingly, amongst the most shrill voices in her denunciation were those of ‘gay’ men. The clear signal, now finally out in the open: the ‘gay’ movement couldn’t care less about trans people. It has achieved its end, now to hell with the rest.
Yet if anything, the success of ‘gay’ men in achieving the patriarchal recognition they have so long campaigned for, has seen an upsurge in transphobic hate crime, especially in the United States. The ongoing toll of transphobic murder — that is, for just being trans — worldwide, is hard to determine but it is known that it is at least 300 or so every year. One might have thought that, having had the support of the transgender community in their own struggle, ‘gay’ men might be ready to lend their shoulders to the wheel. Early indications are that we shall wait a long time to see that.
Francela Méndez. RIP. Almost certainly nothing will be done to find her killers. Trans people are murdered with impunity across the globe, with the approval of the patriarchy — and condoned by radfem extremists.
Trans lives are ended by those closest to them too: by their lovers, especially, by those they called their friends and perhaps most horrifically, by their immediate family: in 2014 in Rio de Janeiro an eight-year old girl called Alex confessed to her father that she was trans and he beat her to death. Can you imagine the terror of this poor, innocent little girl, savagely murdered by the man she had most right to expect would protect her? I can’t. But that is what transphobic violence does: it kills trans people, it doesn’t cause them to be.
.
One of the saddest things about the litany of hatred that is levelled at trans people by the patriarchy is the role cis-women play in it. In 2011 Teonna Brown, a cis-woman, pleaded guilty to assault and hate crime after savagely leading an attack on a transgender woman. The woman survived but was traumatised. Brown was convicted, the other attacker, also a cis-woman, 14, was sent to detention. In the murder of Gwen Araujo in 2002 in California, the court heard how the fatal attack was instigated by other women present, who were cis. Gwen’s murderers were convicted, but these women were never tried. I have personally seen cis-women deliberately and offensively misgender trans people — and misgendering is the first step towards violence.
But the insults of the ignorant, the bigoted and the uneducated is not the only expression of virulent transphobia from cis-women. There is a whole subculture of ‘feminists’ who make it their job to do as much damage as they can to trans women. Their leaders are people like Catherine Brennan, Julie Bindell, Suzanne Moore, Germaine Greer… people who adopt the mantle of liberalism, who claim to be ‘human rights activists’ — yet who would deny the very human rights they themselves demand to the most at risk and endangered group in society.
Their vile pronouncements, from behind a screen of academic faux-respectability, provide pseudo-philosophical justification for the torture, rape and murder of trans women. They are the agents of the patriarchy, abusing those weaker and less privileged than themselves in the hopes of being offered some scrap of privilege in return. Their hands may never have personally pulled a trigger that killed a trans woman, but they are as red as those that do.
If there is one light in this dark place it is that today, these so-called radical feminists — who are nothing more than the tools of the patriarchy — are rejected by mainstream feminism, which recognises that you cannot protest the lack of privilege the patriarchy awards you, while denying the same to a less privileged group. To do so would be — and is — sheer hypocrisy.
So if assault doesn’t ’cause’ transgender, what does? We know a lot more now than we did even a decade or so ago. The specific biological causes of transgender are still not fully understood but we now know that they are neurological in origin and that they are a normal part of human variation. Thus, listen up: being transgender is normal.
Whether the stimulus is genetic or environmental has not yet been established, but we can identify changes in brain structure that occur before birth, which rules out any notion of childhood conditioning; if environmental factors are the cause, then these happen in the womb. Trans people have been recorded in history since the invention of writing itself and a recent study in Thailand that showed that 20% of transwomen had one or more trans siblings. These, amongst other factors, strongly suggest a genetic cause which effects changes in the early development of the embryo. These cause the child to be born with the brain (not the mind) of one gender and the sexual organs of the other. Thus it is a form of transsex, a medical condition, and one that is very easily treated.
One does not ‘become’ transgender, any more than I ‘became’ white. One is born that way. Transgender is not made by domestic influence, parental behaviour, peer pressure, fashion or lifestyle. It’s just what some of us are. It’s innate.
How many other medical conditions lead to people being raped, burned, stoned, strangled, stabbed, shot, vilified, denied their human rights, imprisoned, executed and having their very existence questioned by bigoted academics and on-the make lawyers and scribblers?
I can’t think of a single one. Being attacked doesn’t make people trans, but not doing something about these attacks, or worse, condoning them, does make you transphobic, an abuser of the weakest in society and an agent of the patriarchy.
Shame on you.
The post People don’t ‘become’ transgender. They just are. appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Trans man Michael C. Hughes, who has been taking selfies in the toilets he is obliged to use
Clearly everyone should use the toilet they feel most comfortable in. That should be a given. No-one needs to know what’s in anyone else’s pants when they go to relieve themselves. Yet in the United States today, this has become a hotly contested issue, alongside that of marriage equality. While it now looks as if the latter will soon be resolved, the toilet issue has become more prominent as the forces of intolerance shift their focus.
This issue has been seized on by social conservatives, egged on by the religious right, in order to further their campaign of hate and discrimination against anyone who is not one of them. At root, it is a non-issue. There is no reason why all public toilets should not be unisex (or unigender, perhaps). And even if it might be argued that there is a case for gendered toilets, trans women are women and trans men are men. The problem is non-existent except as a tool for the most viciously conservative voices in society to promulgate hatred against those they think weak enough to attack.
In the USA, this issue has reached histrionic proportions unseen anywhere else. Why? In Germany, most toilets are gender-neutral already and elsewhere, most people are too decent to cause a fuss about something so personal. So what has caused it to become so prominent in the US?
To answer this, we have to look back to the unresolved issues of the American Civil War, which the nation has never brought itself to confront. This cathartic, catastrophic war, that famously divided families and set ‘brother against brother’ (and we presume, sister against sister) was fought over the issue of whether a black person could legally be a US citizen, and so fall under the protection of the Constitution — which would have meant the end of slavery, upon which the economy of the South was based.
In other words, the Civil War was fought to determine whether all humans were equal under the Constitution, or not. And this principle was positively, irrevocably established when the Confederate forces disparately surrendered in 1865.
The principle of equality, while initially established in response to the condition of African slaves in America, was extended, by implication, to everyone else. All ‘races’ were therefore equal — although it took over 100 years for the native Americans to be recognised. Women must, by definition, also be equal. A hundred and some years after the end of the Civil War, gay men and women, quite rightly, insisted that the right to equality under the Constitution, established by the Confederate surrender, applied to them too. Each and every one of these was vehemently opposed, and always by the same social conservatives, to the point that today it is hard to believe that it was the Republican Party that put an end to slavery, prosecuted and won the war against the South and established the principle in the first place.
Now, 150 years after the end of formal hostilities, the focus has shifted to trans people. All the debates over ‘restrooms’, toilets, changing facilities, call them what you will, in the USA, are part of the same campaign: to ensure that equality is not extended to this group, as it has been to all the others.
The reason is simple: if one is determined to think of oneself as superior to others, one must have people who are inferior. But the Constitution, rightly, wonderfully and proudly says that you can’t have that. The war may have been fought, by the South, to ensure the inferiority of black people and preserve ‘white supremacy’ but that was lost a long time ago and, despite the vicious and ongoing rearguard action that only last week claimed nine people’s lives in Charleston, the right knows, while it ‘nurses its wrath to keep it warm’, that this battle is lost.
The same is true of women’s equality, a battle, though still ongoing, which the right knows it will have to concede. Over the last fifty years the battleground has been over gay equality. Today, transgender equality is the conservative right’s next line in the sand; its next attempt to find a group in society that it might condemn to inferiority. Just as with blacks and gays and with women, who, after all, are actually a majority, its tactics are the same: lies, discrimination, suppression, violence and the manipulation of the legal system.
All because, in order to exist at all, the American social conservatives must have someone they can not only feel superior to, but against whom they can legally, if not legitimately, discriminate. After all, what is the point of ‘white supremacy’ unless there is someone whites can lord it over? And that is why this ridiculous toilets issue has moved centre-stage: the white conservative right is running out of people to feel superior to.
Make no mistake, the same people who are behind transphobic discrimination in the use of toilet facilities are the exact same people whose ideas are responsible for the killing of Gwen Araujo and, in this year alone, 15 reported murders of trans women, countless killings and beatings of gay people, ongoing violence and discrimination against ‘racial’ minorities and ultimately, the deaths of 9 people last week.
They are the same people who have insisted on flying a Confederate flag over the State House in Alabama for FIFTY YEARS. People whose goal in life is to insult others and why? So they can say, ‘See? We didn’t really lose after all. We’re still superior. That war changed nothing.’ It is this defiance, this denial of the truth, that gives them their identity.
That defiance is expressed in discrimination, violence and killing. From the Ku Klux Klan to the ‘Moral Majority’ (which was neither) to today’s ‘Male Rights Activists’ and the racist, transphobic and homophobic religious right, these are all the same people. They deny science, they deny the Holocaust, they deny evolution, they deny climate change, they even deny that the US, in an era when it was great, put men on the moon. What’s the denial of human rights after that? And all that denial is rooted in the primary denial of one simple, incontestable, historically demonstrable fact: the Confederacy and all it stood for, LOST. You deny one fact, you can deny them all. They’ve been doing it for a hundred and fifty years now.
Toilets are just the latest absurd non-issue they have seized on in order to promote hatred, division and discrimination. And this horrible litany, that regularly leads to violence and death, is being preached in churches all over the United States, but particularly in the South.
Don’t take my word for it: do the research and you’ll find an unbroken trail of hatred leading right back to Gettysburg and beyond, from the pulpits of ‘Southern Baptist’ preachers. And what is the root cause of that hatred? THEY LOST. These people are nothing more than sore losers with money and guns.
There is a sure way to cure this and America has to grasp the nettle. End the tax-free privileges of ALL religious organisations, now. That will fix it. These people will melt away like the snows of yesteryear.
The post Toilets aren’t just a storm in a urinal appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Interesting to see how much of the US is actually predominantly Catholic
A couple of yeas ago I wrote an article called ‘Why Americans Go to Church‘. At the time I was making a rather tongue-in-cheek observation about the amorality of American culture across all of its expressions. Since then I have expanded my reading into this phenomenon.
I think two events spurred me to do this. The first happened a long time ago; it was when US President Bill Clinton denied ‘having sex’ with Monica Lewitt, and was later caught in the lie. Clinton, I read then, was a ‘Southern Baptist’. In this cult only penetration counts as sex, apparently. While I thought it was serious ‘economy with the truth’, I did not dig into it deeply.
More recently, I had an online exchange with someone who insisted that Catholics ‘were not Christians’ and that they had come along ‘later’ and perverted the true meaning of the word. This person exhibited all the lack of education, and absence of any desire to gain some, that is typical of American Baptists.
Being a European, of course, I had no direct experience of Southern Baptism or any of the other so called ‘Evangelical’ cults until about five years ago, and even then it seemed relatively harmless. They were just a bunch of crackpot fringe-dwellers, somewhat like the Moonies or the Baha’i. Still, I was beginning to see pattern, as I read the writings of Baptist seminarians and ‘thinkers’. Was there any substance to this cult at all, or was it just anything anyone wanted it to be? Was it, indeed, actually dangerous?
Clearly, Baptists suffer from confusion, which devolves to two fundamental errors. The first is that Catholicism is not the first Christian church, and even that Catholics are not Christians. Well, Christianity as we know it was invented by the Apostle Paul, who wrote over half the books contained in the New Testament. The term ‘catholic’, meaning ‘universal’ is first recorded in the writing of Ignatius of Antioch, a follower of the Pauline church, in 110ce.
Admittedly, the church itself did not acquire its full political structure until it became the official religion of the Roman Empire three centuries later, yet even at this early date it exhibited the hallmarks of Roman organisation, being strictly pyramidal with defined levels of authority. It was modelled on the Roman military and bureaucratic structure from the start, probably because Paul had been a member of the Roman bureaucracy himself. The direct connection between the modern Roman Catholic Church and the inception of Christianity is well documented and quite irrefutable.
It is very likely that the eventual triumph of Catholic Christianity over the many competitor cults was a direct result of this organisational structure. There had been other versions of Christianity, but these were swept aside or suppressed. This does leave open the faint possibility that the Baptist claim–to be linked to an earlier form of Christianity–might have some grain of truth, but this stands no scrutiny.
We know a little about other early cults. The first, so-called ‘Adoptionist’ Christians did not, for example, believe that Jesus was born the son of Jahweh, but that he was adopted as such at the time of his baptism, something which, coincidentally, supports the suggestion that the Biblical Jesus may be based, at least in part, on a real man. A similar effect can be seen today in India, where Mahatma Ghandi is not only revered as a great leader of people, but worshipped as divine in his own right. There have been other similar cases, too. Could this be the source of the Baptists’ confusion?
Well, no, because Baptists insist that Jesus was born the son of God from the Virgin Mary, and completely reject the Adoptionist position. This appears to be because they are confused about the chronology of the New Testament texts and believe, erroneously, that the Gospels are the earliest writings; but they are not, the Pauline texts – which do not mention the ‘historical Jesus’ even once – are.
This has spurred many specious attempts to date the Gospels, or some forerunner text, to the early part of the first century. This is wrong; there is no plausible evidence that they were written before the second century, and the existence of a mythical original ‘source document’ remains unproven. The desperate attempt to conjure it into existence is a function of the necessity, on the part of this group, to show that the Gospels actually pre-date the Pauline texts. They don’t.
Furthermore, Baptists believe that ‘salvation’ comes from ‘faith in Jesus’ and not from Baptism itself, which is effectively just a rite of initiation. If they were actually closet Adoptionists, this would not be the case. In fact, across a range of theological issues, Baptists happily accept the Roman Catholic line and only differ on a small number, which are admittedly very important.
While many Baptists try to suggest that their church somehow originated prior to the development of the Catholic one, there is absolutely no evidence to support this. But it doesn’t end there. Baptist ‘theologians’ routinely trot out sects from before the Reformation and claim them as prior versions of themselves, when even cursory examination shows how false this it. Baptists are obsessed with the idea that they are not Protestants, because as Americans they seek to distance themselves from the Protestant Church of England, which they claim persecuted them.
None of this is true. Baptism is indeed one of the Protestant cults that was born out of the Reformation, which itself was a socio-political event consequential to the Renaissance. It features, like many Protestant sects, an intense focus on the literal word of the Bible, which, for Baptists substitutes for history, or indeed, any other form of knowledge. There is no connection between the historical early churches and modern Baptism or any other Protestant sect and instead, they are all derivatives of Catholicism.
Baptists reject what they see as the interposition of the Catholic command structure and bureaucracy, along with much doctrine that is part of Catholic dogma but not mentioned in the Bible.
But this, too, is skewed. Baptists believe in the idea of a triple-god or Trinity, which is a central tenet of Catholicism. The only verse in the Bible that directly alludes to this is Matthew 28:19: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’. Yet this is ambivalent and could as easily be interpreted as three different entities; it is only the assumption, required by the monotheistic underpinning of Christianity, that God is indivisible, that makes them appear as one–and which obliges the Baptists, along with everyone else, to adopt the Catholic interpretation, because it was the first.
Even more damning is the apparent failure to comprehend that the very Bible Baptists use was written and codified by the Catholic Church itself. In other words, they are disputing the Catholic understanding of its own core text, while wholeheartedly accepting as true elements of Catholic dogma that do not appear in the Bible.
It’s as absurd as arguing with Tolkien over the meaning of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. And in the final irony, even the version of the Bible they insist is the literal ‘word of God,’ was not written by a Baptist, but by a Protestant Scottish king, James VI, some fifteen centuries after the alleged death of Jesus. It seems remarkable, in the light of this, that they can still claim that their cult predated Catholicism; but Baptism, with no moral sanctions intrinsic to it, is very accommodating of untruthers.
The moral vacuum at the heart of Baptism comes from its approach to Salvation. To a Christian, this means that after death one is raised to Heaven to spend eternity with God. The Catholic version of this owes much to Egypt, where the doctrine of ‘judgement’ after death was very important. Briefly, only those who had lived their lives according to the religious rules enter paradise and those who did not, have to endure an eternity of suffering.
Catholic Christianity develops this into different levels of transgressions–’mortal’ and ‘venial’ sins. Venial sins may be atoned for by a spending a period in ‘Purgatory’ after death, while mortal sins must be confessed to and penance done in life. The only forgiveness for such sins comes through the church itself, via the Confessional.
This affirms an intrinsic morality. To behave outside the moral constraints of the church means eternal damnation, and to behave within, eternal ecstasy. Transgress slightly and you get a spiritual slap on the wrist. Thus Catholicism embodies the notion that morality devolves to obedience to its rules. This made it very attractive to the Romans, who sought to manage a whole Empire through it.
Most Protestant sects, while disputing the authority of the Papacy and the organised nature of the Catholic Church, and insisting that each believer must communicate directly with God, rather than through the intermediary of the church, still inherit the idea of judgement, and that sins on earth will be punished after death. This means that they too, embody a moral imperative.
Baptists, however, believe Salvation comes directly from an entirely personal ‘faith in Christ’ and not through the church, the Eucharist, ‘good works’, observation of morality or anything else. Faith alone allows the believer direct access to Heaven, no matter how he or she behaves.
Baptism insists instead that persons who ‘accept Christ’ are not only ‘saved’ but are ‘born again’ as better people who have no desire to act immorally, and therefore do not. Furthermore, since each individual believer is responsible for his or her own peace with God, no external sanction is available. This means that as long as Baptists profess their faith, they may do as they will.
Baptists who murder, for example, doctors who carry out abortions, believe they may do so without fear of eternal damnation, because their slick and convenient cult does not require them to consider the moral implications of their actions. The sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, is irrelevant to them since ‘faith in Jesus’ immediately absolves breaking it, alongside any of the other Commandments. On a lesser note, this moral vacuum explains why Baptists are apparently happy to tell blatant lies, both in matters of religion and politics; witness a succession of residents of the White House.
Since the only moral imperative is belief in Christ, and that alone is enough to forgive any sin, no matter how serious, and allow the believer access to an eternity of bliss, Southern Baptism is by definition completely amoral. No earthly act will be either punished or rewarded, so Baptism is perfect for those whose only purpose is the furtherance of their own ends, by any means, yet who seek religious sanction. This makes it a very good fit to an utterly ruthless, amoral, materialistic culture, based on an Imperialist land-grab and devoted only to the maximisation of profit.
Contemporary Southern Baptism is a uniquely American cultural phenomenon which derives from the establishment of the United States as a post-colonial Imperial power. The suggestion by its apologists that it is an ancient church is completely untrue. It evolved in the 20th century, particularly in the tele-evangelist ‘ministry’ of Billy Graham and his fellow travellers. Its real roots are in the events surrounding the American Civil War, and its contemporary expression is a phenomenon of the age of mass communication; it is the Fox News of religion. Just as Rome adopted Catholicism and used it to rule the world in the past, so Baptists hope that America will adopt their religion and use it to rule the world in the future.
We should do well to remember this in our dealings with American Baptists. It explains a great deal, from the deliberate lies of tobacco companies, the secret murders and torture carried out by the CIA, Big Oil’s wilful manipulation of the truth about Global Warming, down to Bill Clinton’s grubby little lie about Monica. Where the only moral imperative is ‘to be seen to believe’ then anything goes, from selling snake oil to political assassination, mass murder, and the deliberate destruction of the planet for pecuniary gain.
So although I wrote my blog piece about why Americans go to church as a tongue-in-cheek parody, it turns out to be completely true. For far too many Americans, religion is indeed simply a convenient, catch-all justification for the complete denial of moral responsibility.
The post Southern Baptism appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Giant Xmas Tree at SM MegaMall, Manila. Pic: Rod Fleming[/caption]
Witch-burning is out of fashion in the West these days. Fortunately. But the religious intolerance that caused it is still with us, and it's getting more strident. And in other parts of the world, religion is responsible for shameful acts of mutilation and murder on a daily basis. The Internet has given voice to some whose opinions, frankly, should never have a public platform, and 'multiculturalism' that shameful abrogation of the moral values of our secular society, makes it increasingly difficult for anyone to express legitimate criticism of some of the nasty ideas put forward by people of religion under the disguise of 'faith'.
Realpolitik: the Battle of Vienna[/caption]It is now over twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall; for many young people, the Cold War, of which it was the most compelling symbol, is no more than a history lesson. In my desk here I have a small piece of concrete, with paint on, which was recovered from that wall and sold as a tourist trinket. It is perhaps the most telling one I have.
Our children do not, as those of my generation did, live in daily fear of being blown to pieces by atomic bombs or dying an agonising death from radiation sickness. They do not walk into their schools to find posters saying “Better Dead Than Red” on the walls, nor do they crowd around flickering television sets alongside their anguished parents, watching as Kennedy drew his line in the ocean, and curled his finger around the trigger of nuclear Armageddon. And for this we should all be very, very thankful indeed. No child should have to live with nightmares like those.
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