Identity Politics (IP) is a development of the thinking that gave us Political Correctness, which operates by denying an opponent the language needed to present a case, and thus preventing that person from doing so. It is intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt, because it is directly contradictory to free speech. You cannot speak freely if … Continue reading Identity Politics — the secret oppression
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‘Islamic extremism is a danger to society and a threat to public safety. It must be defeated wherever it is found’. Well it should be no secret that I think this is wholly true. Anyone who reads my posts on Islam knows that I consider it to be a sick, depraved cult based on male … Continue reading Islam: a danger to society
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The Hadith constitute the third pillar of Islam, on which the ‘religion of peace’ is based. They are the ‘commentaries on the life of the Prophet.’ They are second in authority only to the Qur’an itself. The other pillars are the Qur’an and Sharia. Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal word of Allah. … Continue reading The Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari
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The internationally known UK law firm of Mishcon de Reya has moved to block any unconstitutional attempt to trigger the UK’s early departure from the EU. In a piece by Owen Bowbott, The Guardian newspaper today reports that Mishcon de Reya ‘has retained the services of senior constitutional barristers, including Lord Pannick QC and Rhodri … Continue reading Mishcon de Reya moves against early Brexit
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In the UK, Parliament is the ultimate authority. All power is held by it. While technically, sovereignty resides with the people, in the UK this is ceded to and implemented by a group of elected representatives called Members of Parliament. The UK is NOT a plebiscitary democracy; it is a representational one. Elected Members of … Continue reading Parliament is Sovereign in the UK
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The British Project was — and is — simply this: to make the world England. To profit from it and get rich on the military colonisation of other, weaker people, yes, that was its stimulus. But its philosophical motivation was to make the world England. When I was at school, we had maps on the … Continue reading The British Project: the sun goes down
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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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The Qur’an is the base text of Islam, which is today followed by approximately 1.2 billion people.Most people know about the activities of so-called Islamic extremists, operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and, most prominently and gaining the most attention, in the Levant conflict zone, principally Syria and Iraq. But how extreme are they? Do they have justification for their behaviour from the Qur’an, as they repeatedly claim to?
Just this week, new reports arrived of how the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) murdered 19 Yazidi women by burning them to death in steel cages because they refused to become sex slaves. In Pakistan a mother burned her daughter to death for marrying without consent. These are but the tiniest tip of an iceberg of atrocities that never stop.
Naturally, any thinking person must be repulsed by such evil; but not a week goes by now without some example of completely intolerable behaviour, carried out by Muslims, frequently on women, somewhere in the world. In fact, hardly a day passes.
Yazidi women captured as sex slaves under Qur’anic authority
Saudi Arabia, which has gained for itself the reputation of being the most sadistic and barbarous legally constituted state on the planet, routinely carries out ‘punishments’ — better described as tortures, many ending in death — all the time. We now know that at least 14 million Africans are held as slaves by Muslims. 14 million. In 2016.
But many of us in the West know Muslims; we eat in their restaurants, shop in their convenience stores. Clearly, these Muslims are good, decent people. So the bombers, the beheaders, the immolators, the lapidators, the slavers and kidnappers must be misunderstanding Islam, right? They must be misreading the Qur’an?
Wrong. They are doing EXACTLY as the Qur’an insists they must, to be good Muslims. If they do not do so, then they will receive no reward in the afterlife. This is why the poison of Salafism — which advocates strictly following the letter of the Qur’an — is so effective and why moderate Muslim states so quickly collapse before it. Salafism — founded in and exported and funded by Saudi Arabia — perverts decent people into monsters by persuading them that if they do not follow the letter of the Qur’an, they are not ‘true Muslims’.
Unlike other Abrahamic faiths, there is no contradiction in Islam, although there appears to be. However, once you understand the Qur’an’s structure and the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation‘, which states, with Qur’anic authority, that only the last verse on any given subject has authority, the apparent contradictions disappear. Unfortunately what is left is the most savage and violent creed amongst the major religions.
On June the 8th 2016, a Christian blogger called Dom the Conservative posted on her site an analysis of ISIL’s behaviour which showed, again, that the vile acts they perpetrated are absolutely in line with the Qur’an’s instructions. Every single atrocity that comes to light, carried out by groups like ISIL, Boku Harum and many others, is mandated in the Qur’an and not only that, the specific method of killing to be used is described, in detail.
Dom and I would surely disagree about many things; she is a Christian and I am an atheist. But she is an excellent and erudite scholar and she makes her case with passion and rigorous fairness. There is no disagreement between us that the fundamentals of Islam are contained in the Qur’an, along with the Hadith and Sharia, and that so-called ‘extremists’ — whose behaviour is indeed extreme — are just doing as the Qur’an tells them.
Yet in the comments to her post I saw the usual depressing litany of apology and dissembly from Muslims and their helpful idiots. ‘Oh, Islam is not like that.’ ‘Islam means peace.’ (It doesn’t; it means ‘submission’.) Well, all I can say is these people have never studied the Qur’an, have been misinformed about what it says or are lying. (Taqqiya.)
There is only one answer to this; you have to read the Qur’an. So I have uploaded translations of it, in English. I have placed links to these below. Please download, my apologies for their size, and distribute them widely.
Before you read the Qur’an, there are a few things you should know. In the first place, it at first appears resolutely self-contradictory. On any topic, there are peaceful verses and those of appalling violence. It is almost as if there were two writers, hopelessly at odds with each other.
It is entirely possible that there was never a living Mohamed and that the Qur’an was indeed made up by several authors. It wasn’t written down until 80 years after his putative death in any case; but that debate is for another day.
If we go with the standard narrative, Mohamed spent the first part of his life in Mecca, where he was weak and subject to the authorities, and so his preachings were peaceful and calm. After he and his followers had finally caused so much trouble that they were evicted, they fled to Medina, where they discovered highway robbery as a profession and soon moved on to large-scale banditry and genocide. The verses from this period are much more violent than the earlier ones.
Islamic scholars call these the ‘Meccan’ and the ‘Medinan’ verses respectively, for obvious reasons.
(Now you should read this post about the Doctrine of Abrogation, if you have not already.)
Briefly, Mohamed’s followers were aware of the inconsistencies so the Prophet (allegedly) asked Allah, who explained that when he gave a verse that contradicted an earlier one, he ‘took back’ the original so that he could substitute it with ‘something better’. The earlier verses were not to be forgotten, but they no longer had authority. So only the later verses of the Qur’an remain ‘in force’ — which means, these are the ones that ‘true Muslims’ must follow. This is called the Doctrine of Abrogation, and its effects, when understood in the context of what the Qur’an actually says, are chilling.
But how do you know which is which? The books (Suras) of the Qur’an are not ordered chronologically, but by length. Well, there are clues. The Medinan (violent) Suras are longer than the Meccan ones. The explanation is that the Prophet had more time by then. Secondly, while there are some peaceful verses in the later Suras, there are almost no violent ones in the earlier; so, if you are reading a fair few horrific verses, it’s likely to be later. Then there is geography. If the verses discuss Medina or areas close to it, then they are Medinan.
Many Islamic Scholars believe that Sura 9, which is the most violent, ‘abrogates’ or overrides all earlier Suras. It would do no harm to begin your reading there, in view of this.
Quran – Saheeh International Translation (‘Saheeh’ or ‘Sahih’ just mean ‘reliable.’) This is an approved translation.
Quran by M.M.Pickthall (A solid version made hard to read by the use of archaic English.)
The Koran translated by N J Dawood (This is the most readable version, by one of the greatest Orientalists of his era; but it is rejected by Islamic scholars because Dawood was not himself a Muslim.)
Quran by Yusuf Ali (Another authorised version.)
Word by Word Quran (Relates the Arabic text to specific English words; not really a readable translation but useful for those learning Arabic.)
Quran Transliteration (This is not a translation but an attempt to let the non-Arabic speaking reader have some idea of the sound of the words.)
Finally, you should read this appraisal of the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation’. This doctrine is essential to understanding Islam and how it behaves in the context of the Qur’an. PIG_abrogration_naskh
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The stupid regards the stupider. Pic: Rod Fleming
Balls: why ‘Gay Marriage’ is as dumb as it gets.
I have had the dubious privilege of being exposed to some really stupid ideas in my near six decades on this dear planet. Some of these came when I was engaged as a Media Consultant to a quango that helped new entrepreneurs, which, to avoid embarrassment, shall remain nameless.
Consider, a propos of this, the Glow in the Dark Golf Ball. This thoroughly spiffing notion was — yes, a golf ball that was luminous and so emitted a faint, ghoulish green glow in darkness. Don’t believe me? Here’s a picture of a well-known Scottish idiot. ‘Lord’ Peter Fraser with one of these balls at the launch ‘Media Event’. (And people wonder why journalists are prone to drink.)
No matter that to have any purpose, this technological miracle had to be used in complete darkness, meaning that players could not see the pin, the green, the bunkers, the trees in the way, the fairway or the fucking golf course, because — it was totally dark. I never followed up on the sales of this piece of unadulterated brilliance.
Then, thanks to the same organisation, a belter that had me so choking with suppressed laughter that I had to invent a prior engagement and leave. What was it this time? A top secret, eyes-only, breakthrough development that could help address water shortages the world over. Or so I was told. You know what it was? It was a little white plastic wall about 20cm or so tall that had suckers fitted all round. The idea was — wait for it — that you stuck this in your bathtub and then you could have a bath using only half the water.
Have you any idea how hard it is not to collapse on the floor laughing when confronted with noodle-headedness like this? And, you know, I am not known for suffering fools gladly.
2015 had its crop of the blindingly stupid, but few matched the moment when millions all over the world cheered the US Supreme Court’s decision that same sex marriages were indeed constitutional. Now I have no argument with the decision, which was a weighty one pondered over by the best legal minds in that most litigious of nations; I am confident that the judges’ decision was a reasonable and realistic interpretation of the letter of the US Constitution. Well done them.
What was just agonisingly stupid was the reaction. And I admit, I got carried along, for a while, till I actually thought it through and realised how boneheadedly dumb all this is. Not, I hasten to add, because I have an intrinsic objection to two individuals with willies — or for that matter fannies — setting up home together and desiring the same privileges (they’re not rights) as a couple possessed of a willy and a fanny might enjoy.
No, what was so utterly, exasperatingly stupid about all this is that marriage is a contract of property ownership which places a woman’s fertility under the control of a man. It is the very keystone of the patriarchy, the leaden weight that suppresses us all. We should be doing everything we possibly can to utterly eradicate the patriarchy, to crush and destroy it, to tear up its ridiculous rules and conventions and to throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.
And you’d think that LGBT (if the term has any meaning today) people would be the very first in line to smash the patriarchy, their mattocks and pickaxes at the ready. But no, there they all are, straining at the leash to jump on the patriarchal bandwagon, to access the privilege that they know the patriarchy will give them for being its poodles. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas? This is worse. Let’s be quite clear: the patriarchy cares not a fig for the concerns of gays or lesbians. If it can shut them up and turn them into fully mind-controlled drones, it’s happy. That’s all the patriarchy ever wants — your soul, your mind and your body. Just be its obedient poodle and accept the place it gives you, work out your life and die. It’s happy. You fed it. You succoured it. You nourished it. And what did it give you in return?
A little bit of ephemeral status. It’s not even yours, it’s just on loan, like a worn and tattered library book. Yet you suck it up, denying yourself, lying to the world, lying to your friends, your lovers and yourself. All so the patriarchy will stop hating you. But it never will. The patriarchy is hate. It’s nothing more. It can’t give any more because that is all it is: hatred. Hatred, destruction and enslavement; and you, my LGBT friends are now enslaved to it, by the simple process of taking its shilling, of accepting the horrible contract of slavery that it offers, of surrendering yourself to it for an illusion.
You should have seen by now that the patriarchy has not changed its attitude towards you. It still hates you. It might have given you this fig but it is a poisoned chalice and you are its victim, not the victor.
You died years ago, of course; your death went unremarked. You stopped being important, you stopped being cutting edge. You gave all that up for a suburban house and a bad suit, a middle-management job that will wear you out, watching the partner you once found so beautiful age, hair and teeth fall out, as you are both worked to your graves. Well done. Your achievement is incredible. You have become the tool of the patriarchy, its latest set of fangs with which to rend those who oppose it. I applaud you.
But now, with your soul ripped out and sold to the patriarchy for an illusion of acceptance — because do you really think it accepts how you have sex? Really? If you do, you are either delusional or you don’t understand the patriarchy. So its acceptance of you, two balding men in bad suits taking turns to bugger each other, is entirely bogus. It just lets you think you’re accepted so it can exploit you more. That’s all.
And you, the proud lesbian ‘married’ couple — do you really imagine that you are accepted? The only condition that the patriarchy accepts for a woman is her enslavement to a man. You know that; you always knew that. This honeymoon of dreams is just that — a dream. The patriarchy has sold you the mother of all stitch-ups — look like a couple of nice schoolteachers and don’t say too much about that cunnilingus thing — and as long as you throw the butch lesbians, transmen, actual transsexuals (as opposed to those autogynephilic cross-dressing men, who, because they are men, retain all their male privilege; that’s how they get away with regularly browbeating and bullying women — or had you not noticed?) and feminine gays to the wolves, nay, assist the patriarchy in their defenestrations — literal or metaphorical — go to work every day and be a good girl, no rocking the boat now, it will shut up and accept the terms of your bondage to it. As if it would ever do anything else.
I’m not against love and I don’t care a monkey’s who expresses it to whom and how. I have been in love many times and there is not one of those that I would erase, not one that I would deny. Love comes in all forms from the powerful sexual love we feel with a lover to the slowburn of the love for a child that, perhaps is really the only love that lasts; from the bittersweet love for a parent to the undemanding love of a true friend, one that will never deny you; even to the love for those we tame, our animals and the places we grew up in and put our evanescent marks upon, I have known and know now all of them. Every one and I would not deny a single one.
But why should we accept love on the patriarchy’s terms? Why should we buy into its ersatz fakery, a mockery indeed of love, in the ridiculous farce of a ceremony that has served, these last 6000 years or so, to enslave one partner to the other, to make a man possessor of a woman. Does it make this offence against human dignity any less galling that both parties happen to have the same sort of genitalia? How does that work? How do we end up slavering in ecstasy over a condition of enslavement to new groups of people?
If we want to be free, we begin by destroying the patriarchy, extirpating it root and branch, together with all its horrible social codes and contracts of servitude. We begin by getting rid of formal marriage and understanding that people are free to make whatever interpersonal arrangements they desire, when they desire. That is the definition of a free society, or a major part of it at least.
‘Gay marriage’, ‘marriage equality’, call it what you will, is the nastiest and most successful con-trick the patriarchy has turned in decades. It’s about time we got our heads out of the trough of swill it feeds us and recognise that we have been duped.
The post Balls. appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
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, 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 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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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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They are Pot, Porn and Prostitution. Why have I chosen these three? Well, it’s not a recent thing, and I have thought about it for years.
I could use transgender rights, since, as readers will be aware, this is an area that concerns me deeply; but while we will certainly discuss these, the issue is too specific. I could use women’s rights but that’s the opposite: too vague — and in any case the 3Ps allow us to consider this question. I could use taxation but goodness me, everyone has a different view.
Separation of Church and State? Yeah, but again, too vague. Children’s rights? The same. Treatment of ethnic minorities — which ones? And how?
I wanted a small number, not more than three, of very specific measures that had certain things in common.
The first was that they had to be, or have been until recently, illegal. You can’t measure whether a culture is open by measuring what it permits; you measure it by the things it does not.
At the same time, the measures had either be things that caused no harm or only caused harm to those who, in full knowledge, took part or indulged in the activity in review. It is no part of government’s remit to save us from ourselves.
I can, quite legally, go into my garage right now and start up a motorcycle capable of 170 mph (272kph), and then go out and burn serious rubber. This is a lethal machine. Killing myself on it would be a lot easier than by smoking pot, masturbating or having sex. Trust me.
I can go off into the woods around here with no supplies or emergency kit — nobody would stop me. I can do the same in the Scottish Highlands or the Alps, where there is a very good chance of getting in serious trouble, maybe even dying. I could — and did — sail my yacht round Scotland, through treacherous, open seas. Nobody would even think of trying to prevent me and these things are all more dangerous than the measures I have chosen.
I can freely use alcohol, which is proven to be addictive and causes liver disease. I can stand on a ladder and prune my climbing rose. I can use a chainsaw to cut up fuel — have you any idea what a chainsaw can do to a person?
Government does not ordinarily attempt to protect us from our own stupidity. So the measures chosen must ask the question ‘Why is government involved with this at all?’
Finally, the measures had to be controversial. There’s no point in a measure that doesn’t inspire debate, or in one that doesn’t divide society, between those who believe in regulation for its own sake, and those who believe in freedom as long as it harms no-one. This is the balance, you see, and this is the question we must ask: are the powers of the State, through law, being used to prohibit activities that either harm no-one, or are no more dangerous or harmful than other activities that it does permit?
I think the 3 Ps, Pot, Porn and Prostitution, address this. They are a reliable barometer. They afford us a good measure of how authoritarian our elected representatives, who, after all, are meant to be working for us, are being, and they allow us to ask which forces are they actually acting for. They are a good measure of how the will of the minority is being forced on the majority. There are others, certainly, but the 3Ps are clear and concise and they produce interesting results.
Some of the argument will be controversial. People might be offended.
Stand by for the first, Pot.
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According to the national newspaper Le Monde, under the headline ‘Emotions and hasty conclusions’ the woman who was attacked is Angélique Slosse. Three of her alleged attackers have been named, Inès Nouri, Zohra Karim and Hadoune Tadjouri. The other two are minors and their names have not been released. All five are Muslim.
The newspaper says that one of the alleged attackers was slightly injured and was signed off work for three days. One of Slosse’s friends was also given hospital treatment for injuries received.
Buzzfeed France claims to have contacted one of the alleged attackers, who was not identified by name, but only by her age, 19. She confirmed that she and her friends were Muslims, but that she ‘was tolerant’. According to her, she had, on seeing the victim dressed in shorts and a bikini top, said that she ‘wouldn’t dare dress like that’, to which she claims Slosse retorted ‘If I had a body like yours, I wouldn’t either.’
Buzzfeed’s contact then went on to say that she ‘approached (Slosse) to slap her, when she started fighting with my friend.’ The person, according to her lights, then tried to break up the fight before bystanders and a policeman intervened.
Certainly, this was petty. Probably, there was over-reaction. But one must ask, is it okay for a young woman, minding her own business, sunbathing in a bikini and shorts, to be harassed by passers-by and then when she retorts — and let’s face it, her response was funny — to be physically attacked by five people?
Furthermore, the attacker’s suggestion that she was not being aggressive is clearly false: her remarks were made loud enough for Slosse to hear them and respond. Her statement is also at odds with earlier reports, confirmed in l’Express by Commissar Julie Galisson, which claimed she had told Slosse to ‘Go home and dress, it’s not summer.’ Then, she clearly states that her intention was to physically attack Slosse, ‘to slap her’.
If you’ve observed as many Sheriff Courts as I have — the joys of being a photographer — then you know how to interpret statements like these: play down the culpability and make like innocent. But there is no denial that the attackers first harassed Slosse and then assaulted her. The only question is whether the motivation religious and again, it’s hard to see how it could have been otherwise.
There have been numerous incidents where Muslims in France have caused problems already because they think that French customs are unacceptable to their religion. Butchers have been threatened for cooking sausages on Fridays and shops have been forced to close. Restaurant chains have been coerced into taking pork off their menus and supermarkets into stocking ‘halal’ meats; anyone familiar with the obscene cruelty involved in the slaughter of animals to produce this, should find that offensive. I know I do.
The authorities and the Media are terrified that a reaction might occur. It’s been a hot summer, always good for riots, and there is a lot of anger in France just now, at Hollande, at the austerity measures forced on the country by Germany and by high unemployment, a low Euro and falling house prices. The Establishment does not want the extreme right of the Front National to profit from more stories of Muslim misbehaviour and intimidation, and one may sympathise.
It’s all very well to try to play down a problem to stop it developing. The trouble is, it looks as if it might be too late for that.
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Poaching is essentially a romanticised memoir; Warm Pink is nothing like that. It is far deeper and more introspective and writing it, along with the later Why Men Made God, was what shaped my current world view.
My ideas about gender in particular were formed by the research and writing of Warm Pink. Although it is a breathlessly-paced romantic adventure, it required me to dig deep into the natures of gender and sexuality, something I had never done before.
I spent hours that amounted to weeks on forums where the subject of transgender was discussed and even invented a doppelgänger, MacShreach, to do this. (MacShreach, by the way, just means ‘Son of Shrek,’ which I thought rather fitted the character.)
But I did a great deal of conventional research too. There were precious few books and papers available but I read them all. I think the most useful was Don Kulick’s Travesti, which is a must-read, partly for the insight it gives and partly just because it’s a great book.
I learned Spanish (thanks to the lovely Fabi Pinilla, my longsuffering teacher, who became a real and lasting friend) and enough Portuguese to read interviews in those languages. This was because at the time, there were practically no such resources featuring young transgender women in English. But there were and remain, many published in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and elsewhere in South America, as well as in Spain itself, where there is a long history of transgender cultural integration. The artists Picasso and Dali associated with transgender women, as did the film-makers Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar.
Bruna Geneve
There is a dichotomy between the culture in these Latin countries and that in North America and the UK. In the former, nearly all the trans women appeared to have transitioned young, often at or before puberty. They typically began taking feminising hormones around the age of 12 or 13. This information fed directly into the construction of Rafy, Warm Pink’s female lead; she tells a story typical of Brazilian trans women.
However, in the Anglo-Saxon world, the majority — by far — of trans women then transitioned over the age of forty. This misled a number of American psychologists into thinking that there were actually two types of trans women, and ultimately to Ray Blanchard’s bizarre and now discredited typology.
We now know that Blanchard was wrong, and that the cause of the anomaly in the Anglo-Saxon world was the extreme, violent and pernicious repression against young trans people. This was a time, only ten years ago, when ‘reparative’ therapies, now totally discredited for use against gay men, were being strongly advocated for use against young trans women, in order to turn them into gay men.
This is a level of misogyny that can only be wondered at: it was literally saying that any future, for someone born with a penis and testicles, was preferable to being a woman. At the same time, women who escaped their clutches were beaten, discriminated against and murdered.
I was horrified by this, and by the smug, academic self assurance with which these monsters — I can think of no other word — perpetrated their tortures, akin to water-boarding, on completely defenceless young people. It both made me angry on behalf of their victims and further hostile to the cosy, self-congratulatory club of academia, where such vile ideas are given platform.
The consequence of the repression they suffered was that trans women were bottling up their true natures, often for decades; this is why they presented late. We have just seen, in Caitlyn Jenner, a classic example of this. As repression is reduced we should see many more girls transitioning young and the demographic should align with that which is seen elsewhere.
But in 2005 and 2006, when I was writing Warm Pink, none of the recent developments had yet happened. Blanchard’s typology still had traction, even though a reaction had already begun against it, led by transwomen who were rightly offended to their cores by its gross misrepresentations of them. Perhaps the single most powerful catalyst had been the publication of Michael Bailey’s egregious work of populist pseudo-science, The Man Who Would Be Queen in 2003. Trans women were being erased by society, by health professionals and in the media. In some ways Warm Pink was my reaction against Blanchard and Bailey’s attempt to erase the identity of an oppressed group altogether.
Karol Bonkar
The book was an attempt to publicise the fact that not only do young trans women exist, they have established, valid, lived histories which are consistent throughout the world. They know they are trans from before puberty. Their gender dysphoria is such that they simply cannot live as boys. They are almost exclusively attracted to men, and generally prefer the submissive role in sex, though there are notable exceptions.
I explored these alternative sexualities through AnnaMaria’s relationship to Rafy — there was never any doubt in my mind that this was a case of unrequited desire — and Rafy’s with her prior mentor, Marina.
Perhaps the mos fascinating thing I discovered in researching the book was the extensive support network that exists for young trans women. Brazil is a conundrum: the culture is viciously macho and repressive, yet there are huge numbers of trans women. Murder rates against them are the highest reported in the world, yet Brazilian transgender beauty is iconic and has been celebrated for decades; witness Roberta Close.
Roberta Close
I struggled at first to see how this could be, but it seems that the support network is the key. Young trans girls are adopted by older trans women and then educated — in being transgender– and supported though their journey of transition, which they fund — certainly in Brazil — almost exclusively by sex work.
(I just read Janet Mock’s excellent Redefining Realness in which she describes a very similar support network and how she, too, funded her transition through sex work. I think it shows great courage and integrity that she should be so open about this and I highly recommend her book.)
This support network allows young transwomen to survive in these repressive cultures, which I was able to confirm when I began to visit the Philippines. Here, there is severe prejudice and discrimination against trans people because of the generally malignant influence of Christianity, yet trans women are everywhere. This is explained at night, when you discover an entire subculture that sustains them.
So Warm Pink is about the nature of young transgender, something that was then being largely ignored both by patriarchal academics like Blanchard and his followers Bailey and Zucker, and the hegemony of late-transitioning women who had adopted a privileged position. Young trans women’s narratives and lived histories were being suppressed and I wanted to redress that.
At the same time, of course, the book is an exploration of my own relationship to trans women, as a man.
Through Brian, the book’s male lead, I explored the nature of the relationship between a trans woman and a straight man who loves her. I put him in a position he could never have believed he would be in, and let him find his fate. There was no predetermined narrative and the end was by no means a foregone conclusion. It was just the way it worked out.
I gave Brian a real test, to find out what he was made of; and in the end, I think he came through with flying colours.
However, Brian and Rafy’s relationship reveals something else: trans women feel affirmed by their relationships with men. This is part of the attraction that not only sex work, but also cabaret dancing, modelling, beauty pageants and a range of other activities have for them.
This offends some radical feminists who have reacted in a fashion that shows the profound intolerance of their philosophy. The vicious damage that they do, deliberately, out of spite against the most discriminated-against group in society, is both a scandal and pure hypocrisy. People like Julie Bindell, Catherine Brennan and their fellow travellers have no right to claim they support ‘human rights’ when they seek to deny them to others, to eradicate those others and erase their very identity. Happily these are a minority even amongst feminists.
I had always supported the equality of women, but I had never really felt the bitter sense of oppression that many women experience, until I saw it through trans women’s eyes. Nobody would ever choose to be trans; it leads, for most, to a life of poverty, discrimination, violence and often murder.
Through the extreme hostility of the patriarchy, for which radical feminists are but agents, towards trans women, I realised the oppression of the patriarchy against all women. It made me a feminist, if I am one. (Something I leave to others to judge.)
Writing The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train was a voyage of discovery for me, and I tried very hard to be true to that. The new edition, which contains many revisions, reflects discoveries I have made since it was first published, but no substantive areas have been changed.
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Protesters today expressing solidarity with the woman who was attacked.
It’s a case of double-speak gone mad.
On Wednesday lunchtime, at the Léo-Lagrange Park near the town centre of Reims, France, a 21-year old woman was sunbathing with two of her friends, dressed in a bikini. This is perfectly normal and if you visit any park in France in summer, especially a hot one like this, you will see plenty of women wearing swimsuits getting a tan. It’s a French passion.
However, the woman, whose name has not been disclosed, was spotted by a ‘group of five girls’. One of the came over and told her to ‘Get dressed, it’s not summer.’
The sunbather replied that the newcomer was not ‘the religious police’ and at that point all five of the girls attacked the woman, requiring her to be hospitalised. She was signed off work for four days.
All five of the attackers were detained. The three oldest, aged 18, 19 and 24, will appear before the court on September 24 to answer charges. The two others are minors and will be dealt with by the French juvenile correction system.
French law, like that in Scotland, considers all subjects of criminal legal action ‘sub judice’ which means that to publish the names or addresses of the accused is itself a criminal offence. The name of the victim has also not been publicised, probably for the same reason, since she will be a witness, but also likely for her own safety.
The city authorities have been very coy about discussing whether this was a race or religiously based attack, again, likely due to French criminal law.
However, there is other evidence. A French organisation called SOS Racisme organised a mass protest at the park in question for noon today, of people dressed in swimming costumes. If this could not be seen as a racist attack, why would this organisation be involved? And note: they were not trying to defuse anti-Muslim sentiment, but to express solidarity with the victim.
On Twitter, the deputy Mayor of Reims, Arnaud Robinet, described the assault as ‘intolerable in our country’ although he was later to state, in an interview on TF1, that there was ‘no proof of a religious motive for the attack.’ Why would he bother to say that if there were no reason to assume that it might be?
The French Twittosphere in general has been alive with allegations of a religious background to the attack while everyone official is, as usual, standing with their hands behind their backs whistling.
The newspaper that reported the attack, l’Union, checked and verified that anyone can walk down the high street in a bikini without breaking the law, unless a local bye-law prevents it. The city authorities in Reims confirmed that no such local ordinance was in place, so the victim of the attack was behaving legally, dressed in a manner that she had a perfect right to be. Are we to imagine that she was attacked by a group of militant nuns? Or a stray pack of radical feminists? Don’t be silly.
The nonsense of attempting to keep the religious or cultural background of the attackers secret is a joke. As soon as they have appeared in court, their names will be revealed and their religious affiliation quickly inferred anyway. Presumably the authorities hope that by then, everyone will have forgotten.
But that is not good enough. France is a secular state and if people of particular religious persuasions are acting outside the law in promoting the ideas of these religions, then that should be exposed and challenged publicly. It’s not as if this would be the first time Muslims had behaved in an unacceptable manner, especially in Reims and the surrounding areas.
If indeed the attackers are Muslims — and let’s not kid ourselves here, if there were no possibility of that, this would have been made known; the official coyness is proof enough — then very firm action needs to be taken, by the authorities, to stamp out the culture that is promoting violence. If that means closing mosques and other places where this poison is being disseminated, better sooner than later.
It’s curious though, that only yesterday I was writing about how Muslims need to understand and accept the principle of secularism and here they are, it would appear, doing the exact opposite.
There is no doubt that many shadows are looming large over Europe today. One of them just got bigger. Every time things like this happen, moderates are squeezed between religious fascism and common or garden fascism from the extreme right. Europe is in trouble, and its leaders do nothing.
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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.
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