World War Three has been much talked about in the seven decades since World War Two ended. At that time, almost all of Europe and large parts of Asia were in ruins, scourged by years of brutal, mechanised, industrial war. Since the beginning of that peace, war has raged incessantly throughout the world. It has … Continue reading
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The UK’s official Opposition is the Labour Party, though on present showing you might not guess that. On one hand it has at once been utterly and indefensibly useless at challenging the Government over the EU referendum. On the other, internecine fighting and political blood-letting over its own leadership has gone out of control. These … Continue reading Labour’s moral authority
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The Brexit mirror cracked from side to side under the weight of simple, sheer reality this week. The fissure in the Brexit mirror began to appear when Norway’s Foreign Minister told the world that no, the UK could not re-enter the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) just because it fancied the idea. The UK was … Continue reading The Brexit Mirror — cracked from side to side
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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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We wake to a morning of black tragedy in Europe as it has, again, been scourged by a Muslim terror attack. This great continent with its myriad and vibrant culture, that has given so much to the world, is on the long march to its final Calvary. And all I can say, my heart breaking, … Continue reading
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When is a referendum not a referendum? Answer — when it is a politically convenient device used by a slippery Prime Minister in trouble with half his MPs. The EU Referendum held on the 23rd of June was phony. It has no legal consequences. That in turn means that it has no effect. Whoever becomes … Continue reading Cameron’s Phony Referendum
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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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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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The issue is not between a Christian majority and a Muslim minority, it is between a society founded on democratic principles and reason, an arch crowned by the keystone that we can change the laws that govern us by electoral mandate, and a religious minority that refuses to accept this, and instead insists that no part of the law, as expressed through shari’aa — because it is ‘god’s’ law — can ever be altered, even in one word.
As a lifelong liberal, inclusionist, respecter and promoter of minority and other human rights, I am thoroughly weary of the complaint of those who consider that our secular democracy does not do enough for them, while themselves refusing to recognise that all religions, whatever their individual merits and demerits, within a multicultural environment, must defer to secular democracy and secular law.
To do so does not require that people give up their culture, merely that they 
Across the Internet there are countless poison-pen articles from Islamic fundamentalists who condemn the Quilliam Foundation, but the core of their criticism is that Quilliam promotes secularism amongst Muslims. It wants the Muslim community to become like the Christian one in the UK — British, democratic and secularist first, Muslim, religious and faithful second. The Islamists who condemn it want the exact opposite, and their path can lead only to disaster.
It is only by becoming secularist and placing democracy and the rule of secular law above religion and religious ‘law’ that the Muslim community can actually integrate into the broader UK one. Failure will inevitably lead to further polarisation, extremism, and ultimately violence.
Nobody should care whether Islamic texts render the cult ‘inherently peaceful’ or ‘inherently violent’. We could make the same observation about Christianity or Judaism — that their texts are ambiguous and open to being read in diametrically-opposed ways. What we should be focusing on is how people are expressing their religion. Are they denying science? Are they denying Evolution? Are they against secular law? Are they in favour of millennia-old creeds, without a jot of relevance to the way we live today, being the basis upon which we are judged and governed — not by ‘god’ or ‘allah’ but by other humans? Do they suggest that their particular cult is somehow ‘more correct’ than any other? Do they believe that their adherence to a set of cult beliefs should afford them better treatment than others? Do they believe that their code should allow them to decide how other people should behave?
If the answer to any of these is ‘yes’, whether you are a Christian, a Jew, a Baha’i, a Mormon, a Muslim or of any other religious persuasion, then your views are not compatible with secular democracy and you will have to find ways to resolve this, by changing your ideas to be more aligned with the culture you live in. It is not for secular culture to change to accommodate religious ideas, because secularism is the compromise, thrashed out in the Enlightenment, that allows people, of any religious persuasion as well as those of none, to live alongside each other in peace, and it therefore must stand above all and any of them.
If you cannot do this, then you cannot integrate, and you cannot expect the secular society you live in to protect you. It cannot respect you until you respect it, and that means accepting that secular ideas and laws come before religious ones. Secularism will guarantee you the right to worship as you will, as long as you harm no one, nor impede in any way their right to live as they choose under secular law — including those who may, notionally or otherwise, share your faith. But the bargain is strict: you must accept the primacy of secularism before it can afford its protection to you.
Religious fundamentalism, whether that be expressed by Islamists or Southern Baptists, is incompatible with secular democracy. Yet without secularism, it is inevitable that conflict and violence will occur. We see, right now, how, in America’s infamous ‘Bible Belt’ the horrible undercurrent of hatred persists. In the last month or so we have seen a toll of death that has but one cause — religious intolerance.
We should, rightly, be horrified at the depraved mindset of these Christians — yet the very same mindset is at work in Islam and no notions of ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘tolerance’ should allow us to avoid confronting it.
You cannot plead for fair and equal treatment by a secular society unless you are prepared to accept the core principles of that society, and to demonstrate this publicly. Muslims in the UK will have to follow people like Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation and reject the arguments of their enemies. They will have to not just accept, but embrace secularism and the primacy of secular law. They will have to accept that science is the proper way to understand the universe, not creation mythology. They will have to accept the fact and Theory of Evolution. They will have to accept that secular law, agreed by democratic mandates, must always hold sway over religious ‘law’. They will have to accept that their religion is but one of many and since all of them cannot be right, then they all must be regarded as equally wrong, and it is only through secularism that all can be treated as equals.
Muslims in the UK must accept that the culture they live in cannot make exceptions to its secularism for them or any other religious minority. The outlook for us all, if this cannot be achieved, is grim in the extreme.
This was written in response to a piece by Siema Iqbal in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free.’
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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.
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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.
We should all congratulate and thank Greece. It has set itself up as a beacon of hope and democracy against the unelected suprastate that would crush it and further enslave it to the failed model of ‘austerity’.
The economic competency of the Germans and the French, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund has been shown, by far better economists than I, to have been about the level of a bunch of schoolchildren. Greece was forced into unnecessary recession and at the same time expected to make huge loan repayments in order to serve the political ends of Germany and France. The consequence has been an even greater Depression than that which afflicted the USA in the 1930s, with over 25% unemployment and hardship that no-one else in Europe would put up with.
And that is why it has been so important for the lenders to break tiny Greece. Because when they come for you, they don’t want you to think that there’s any way out. They don’t want you to realise that states are sovereign and can just tear up debts. At the moment their targets are Italy and Spain; they dread the consequences if these two states were to tear up their loans and tell their lenders to raffle themselves — which they are perfectly entitled to do. But make no mistake, these people, Merkel, Hollande, Juncker and Lagarde are out to destroy democracy and the sovereignty of the people, and concentrate power in the hands of oligarchs, bureaucrats, and completely unaccountable quangos and corporations.
Iceland proved them wrong and they have been very quiet about that. But they won’t be able to keep quiet about Greece.
The Greek economy is actually in surplus, by about 2%, if we discount the loan repayments. It is not Greece’s economy or its economic management that is at fault, but the slavish insistence of the European anti-democratic hegemony on ‘austerity’.
Well, it looks like Greece has given these economic bullies a kick in the testicles that they will remember.
It should now declare that all the debt is suspended. It should declare a repayment holiday with no interest increment. It should invite China to invest hugely in its infrastructure and tourism economy. It should print drachmas and float them. And it should continue to tell the anti-democratic hegemony that governs Europe that its day is done.
And then we should all do the same.
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