3 Ps One: Pot; marijuana

The first of our 3 Ps is Pot.

Pot — marijuana, cannabis, grass, weed, call it what you like, has been used by humans since the beginning of recorded history. It is likely that we have been using it for tens of thousands of years.

While there are risks associated with the use of pot, these are vastly overstated and much less than those of using alcohol or tobacco, both of which cause huge numbers of deaths and human suffering and by the way, cost society a vast amount of money. Marijuana prohibition is one of the greatest misuses of state resources and taxpayers’ money in the world today.

Until the 1930s pot use was legal and largely unremarked. William Randolph Hearst, the American media tycoon, changed that. Hearst was the inventor of ‘yellow journalism’ the sensationalising of factually incorrect and often invented stories for political purposes. He was a fanatical right-winger and a friend of Adolph Hitler. Up until the engagement of the United Sates in World War 2, Hearst remained in close contact with Nazi authorities in Germany regularly had his newspapers run anti-Russian, anti-Communist and pro-German articles, which were provided by the Gestapo’s propaganda services.

Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941

Hearst was anti-British and a fervent ‘isolationist’ who used his media to discourage American entry into the European war. He repeatedly attacked Roosevelt’s attempts to help European states, especially the UK, against the Nazis through schemes like lend-lease and severely restricted the President’s ability to assist in the disaster. Amongst his other crimes, therefore, Hearst may be indicted for being accessory to the murders of millions of Europeans, especially Jews and other minorities like homosexuals. It was only at the point of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that he was forced to backtrack.

At home, Hearst had invested hugely in forestry and other resources to produce wood-based paper. However, making wood-based paper is very damaging to the environment and relatively expensive. Paper made from hemp (the male pot plant) is cheaper, a better product and less damaging. Hearst risked being undercut.

Hearst (centre) with high-ranking Nazis

Hearst, as well as being a Nazi and fascist sympathiser and more, was a virulent racist who particularly detested Mexicans. Marijuana use was popular amongst them and, never being one to waste an effort, Hearst saw a way to make sure his investment in wood-based paper production paid off, and to make as many Mexicans as miserable as he could: he used his media to persuade the US government to make hemp illegal either for paper production or for consumption.

He was greatly assisted in this by Henry J. Anslinger, a career civil servant in the recently-formed Bureau of Narcotics, who was also a white supremacist racist. Like Hearst, Anslinger despised blacks, Mexicans, Asians and Filipinos. He also hated Jazz and Blues music, which, here revealing his profound misogyny, he thought caused white women to become ‘immoral’. Since marijuana was popular amongst Jazz and Blues musicians, Anslinger was presented with another easy target, which Hearst lost no time in demonising.

The sick mentality at the heart of the American right was revealed in the attitudes of these two evil men: racism, white supremacy, misogyny and the appropriation of women’s bodies

Using its usual combination of threats and bullying, the US, again motivated by Hearst’s media empire, ‘persuaded’ its trading partners to do the same. So the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that smoking pot is illegal because it suited the business ends of a Nazi-sympathising media tycoon with no respect for truth, and the career of a bureaucrat. That is why countless billions have been wasted and innumerable lives lost and ruined in the entirely specious ‘War on Drugs’. There is no other reason.

Smoking pot is a victimless crime. Even if it were proven that it was as damaging as other, legal, recreational drugs, the only person being harmed is the person consuming it. Any other harm comes simply from the fact of its prohibition. As country star Willie Nelson said. ‘the most dangerous thing you can do with marijuana is get caught with it.’

A little personal history. I began smoking pot when I was 15, while I was a young musician playing in bands. I loved it. I didn’t drink alcohol. I smoked pretty much every day for the next six years, and then toned it down, only because my life changed a bit. When I did so, I had no difficulty. I didn’t become an addict. I took my degree and entered journalism as a photographer. I was headhunted for the launch of Scotland on Sunday, and soon became the youngest, ever, Executive Picture Editor in Scotland. I ran a very successful photography business for decades, I have beautiful children who all took or are taking degrees, I took my own Master’s degree and I own my home outright. Does it sound like pot ruined my life? Don’t be a blithering idiot. And I still enjoy a blast, believe me.

And it’s not just me. I know countless people who would say the same — who run good little businesses, some good big businesses, who, for years, every time you saw them, had smoke coming out of their ears. Doctors, lawyers, university professors (a lot of them, actually) journalists, you name it. Reeking for years and you’re telling me it hurt them? Away, what utter garbage.

Did any of us succumb to the draw of stronger drugs? No. We just looked at that and said, ‘that shit ain’t for me bud, don’t bogart that joint.’

And while I was smoking a lot I hardly ever drank. My friends and I would go weeks at a time without even a pint. Can you believe that?

Which should tell you why pot is still illegal, so long after Hearst’s death. Yes folks, it has nothing to do with the paltry harm it can do. It has nothing to do with the (now discredited) suggestion that it can cause mental instability. It has nothing to do with utter nonsense about ‘gateway drugs’ or non-existent ‘social consequences.’

The main reason pot is still so widely illegal is that the alcohol producing companies spend fortunes hiring sharp-suited little shits to persuade politicians to keep it so, because they think that way, we’ll buy more alcohol. They are aided and abetted by career bean-pushers like Anslinger who populate police and regulatory bureaux across the globe, whose only interest is their next pay cheque.

A wise man once told me, ‘When you see people doing something there’s no reasonable explanation for, the answer is always money.’ Case in point.

Pot is important and it’s the first of the 3Ps because in the first place, its use is a crime that is in itself utterly victimless. Its victims stem from a specious attempt to prohibit it, either through lives and livelihoods lost to government agencies like the American DEA, or amongst the criminals to whom the business has been ceded by politicians. The persecution of consumers has ruined the lives of countless otherwise hardworking, ordinary people. They were victimised for smoking a plant that will happily grow in your garden. Is that a fair use of the power of the state?

Criminalising the use of pot criminalises pot consumers. Even if you are never caught, criminalising a relatively harmless natural substance makes consumers reconsider the relationship of individual to state. Now while most pot consumers are probably by nature non-conformists, knowing that the state holds you to be criminal for doing something that does you no harm, makes you rethink your perspective on the law. It makes you ask, ‘How many other laws are as absurd as this one?’

It tells you that obeying the law is a matter of choice, because if the law is wrong about pot, then what else is it wrong about? It means we have to look at each and every law and decide, one by one, whether or not we think it should be obeyed.

In the absence of moral authority, which law abandons the instance it criminalises people for doing something that harms no-one else, why should we obey any law? Out of fear. Is that the relationship we want to have between state and people, one of obedience enforced by fear? I don’t want a society like that.

I do not think it is helpful for the law to be considered an ass, but for the law not to be considered so, all the ass-like laws — and this is one — have to be repealed.

Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol in the 1920s in America, and it hasn’t worked with pot. The so-called ‘war on drugs’ has been an unmitigated disaster. It has destabilised large parts of the world and led to untold death and suffering; yet it has not impacted one iota on the availability of pot. Face it, that war is lost. It’s over. If you want to do some good, maybe — just maybe — you could divert resources from the failed attempt to prohibit a substance that dos no harm to really working on one that does, like meth — and not through prohibition, but rehabilitation. Hell, give them pot instead — it might work.

Prohibition of pot has poured billions directly into the pockets of organised crime families all over the world. Not only is that money then used to fund far more nefarious operations, it has other consequences. Today, in the UK, thousands of Vietnamese have been smuggled in to work inn marijuana-growing factories — as SLAVES. That is right, prohibition of marijuana has directly led to the re-establishment of a slave economy actually inside the UK. And the same is true across Europe.

Does anyone imagine for one second that this atrocity would be permitted in a legal business? Are you nuts? There would be inspections, Health and Safety, minimum wage, working hours… the people who now are working as slaves would actually be making a living. And they would be PAYING TAX. Just as the business owners would.

The alcohol business generates huge amounts of revenue that goes directly to the exchequers of the countries where it exists. This comes through duty, through point of sale taxes, through income tax paid by workers and corporation tax paid by the companies.

Not ONE PENNY of this potential fortune goes to any government where marijuana is prohibited and instead ALL of it goes into the pockets of the crime bosses and, further back the chain, is used to fund terrorism, killing, extortion, people trafficking, smuggling and the panoply of criminal activities.

The only way to stop this is to legalise the consumption, trade and sale of marijuana and control its production — which is exactly what we do with alcohol, so we have the mechanisms and the personnel already in place.

In the UK, according to a 2014 survey, 29% of the population had used an illegal substance — and so are criminalised under this absurd law — while 52% of voters favour legalisation. In the light of that, is continuing with a failed attempt to outlaw something that almost a third of the population has used — with no ill effect — an intelligent use of the power of the state? Is that a reasonable use of taxpayers’ money? Yet the politicians, ever in the pockets of business, continue to throw taxpayers money at prohibition, when simple legalisation would save all that, put an end to the crime barons and their slave trade and raise huge amounts of revenue for the Exchequer.

In recent years, chinks of light have begun to appear. At time of writing, just under half (24) of all American states have either decriminalised or fully legalised pot, with absolutely no ill effects to public health and, in some case, considerable benefit to their exchequers. Colorado, with a population the size of Scotland, 5 million, raised $76m (£48m) in marijuana tax revenues during its first year of legalisation.

In Europe, improvement is slow but only today we read that several English police forces have decided to stop prosecuting for growing or consuming the plant. In Spain, you can both grow and smoke in your own home. The Czech Republic has legalised cannabis, one more reason to go there. And despite pressure from France and Germany, the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, remains a toker’s refuge.

Nevertheless we would have to consider that, on this measure of our freedom, we are not doing well. Government authority is being used in an unreasonable way, damaging the lives of huge numbers of otherwise law-abiding, taxpaying citizens and turning them into criminals. Doing so debases both the notion of criminality and the justice system itself. It makes legislatures a laughing-stock and plays into the hands of crime barons. On this ‘P’ we need to do much better.

I think imma smoke me a spliff now.

Rod Fleming on Google+

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Pot, Porn and Prostitution – 3 Ps

There are three parameters that I think define the level of freedom we actually enjoy. I call them the ‘3 Ps’.

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.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Pot, Porn and Prostitution – 3 Ps appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Europe’s immigration crisis erupts

A man was killed yesterday during a mass attack as at least 1500 people attempted to board trucks entering the Eurotunnel in Calais. This brings the death toll in the ongoing crisis, which began in June, to nine.

Eurotunnel, the operator, has invested heavily in security fences and personnel at the French end of the Tunnel but it is clearly not enough and they are swamped, daily, as would-be immigrants try to get into the UK.

The crisis has caused reduction in the frequency of freight trains through the Tunnel. Around Dover, the UK terminal, motorways have been closed for weeks as trucks waiting to depart for Europe are parked on them in what is called ‘Operation Stack’.

With the motorways closed, small towns and villages, whose roads are not designed for this weight of traffic, are jammed with cars seeking a way round the blockage. Businesses are reporting a catastrophic drop in revenue.

On the French side, large numbers of extra police and security have been drafted in to the Pas de Calais area to try to secure it, but they are manifestly failing.

While closure of the Tunnel is a drastic option, it may be the only one left. The situation, already catastrophic, can only get worse.

Placing the burden of cross-channel travel on the ferries would overload them, leading to severe delays and grave economic damage. It would also mean that the ferry terminals, unquestionably, would themselves come under siege. There is no easy answer to this.

The Tunnel is a magnet for illegal immigrants, most of whom do not understand its nature and think they can just walk through. Groups of up to a hundred have already been apprehended, on many occasions, trying to do this.

Most, however, attempt to secrete themselves on freight vehicles. This was the cause of yesterday’s death, as the man, believed to be Sudanese, was crushed under a truck.

Across Europe now, the immigration crisis is in full fury. A significant number of immigrants may be refugees from war, but the vast majority also have economic intentions. It’s not possible to separate these out. If you have been forced off your land by military action and seek to go somewhere you think you can find work, does that make you a refugee or an economic migrant or both?

Added to the refugees from Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East and Asia, there are huge problems in Sudan, Ethiopia and across Africa. As Climate Change devastates this area with drought and famine, further territorial and ethnic warfare must inevitably break out, leading to exponentially-increasing levels of migration.

Europe is the target. Its soft underbelly, the long southern coastline, has already been ripped open, and this will get markedly worse. Italy is already submerging under the pressure, Greece can no longer police its islands and rows are breaking out between the other Balkan states because of the flow of migrants passing through them.

Europe is not a federal state. It is a loose confederation of independent states, bound together by treaty. There is no administration that could raise or divert resources that might deal with this. There is no centralised military command that could plan strategies and execute them. There is no unitary political control.

Yet while Greece is a frontline state in this crisis, Germany has deliberately pauperised it in order to teach a ‘lesson’ to Spain, Italy and France. How is it going to pay for its own defence now? And as for the other states on the front line, Italy is under similar economic pressure to cut spending when in fact, Europe needs it to spend on its defences. The same is true of Spain and even France.

This is a problem that needs to be addressed: Germany is guilty of arranging the Euro to suit its own ends; it can’t be allowed to manipulate this crisis to its advantage as well. It is fundamentally illogical and unfair to suggest that the southern European states, already burdened because of the Euro, should foot the astronomical bill that defending northern states from migration will cost. Make no mistake: the migrants are not coming to enjoy Florentine culture, see the Parthenon or sunbathe on the Costa Brava, but to travel to Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and the UK to get jobs.

The solution is manifold: vastly increased security forces in the frontline states to turn back or arrest illegal immigrants; detention and holding camps located near the point of entry; repatriation programmes and huge aid budgets to help the repatriated to live decent lives in their home territories, which in turn will probably require the deployment of military forces to secure these areas. This engagement would necessarily be open-ended.

The whole of Europe will have to bear the economic burden of this, which will be vast, but the greatest net contributors must be the wealthy northern states. Germany, along with the others, will have to cough up.

The freedom that Europeans enjoy is now under threat from events distant from its shores. Fortress Europe will have to be built, quickly, and it will cost a great deal of money. We are all going to be less free. This is inevitable. The Channel Tunnel crisis is not an isolated shower, it is the presage of a coming storm. The only way we can soften its impact is to take action now.

The UK and Ireland, with their semi-detached status, might have some hope of holding on for longer, but that must mean the closure of the Channel Tunnel as well ass the imposition of severe restrictions and much increased security on other forms of transport. This will impact the south of England heavily.

The people who live in these islands cannot escape the storm that has already begun; the question for them is whether they think that they can weather it better with their European partners or alone. Either way is going to be expensive and painful.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Europe’s immigration crisis erupts appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Reims Bikini Attack: Suspects named

The broader media gave the story of how a young woman was set upon by five other women for sunbathing in a bikini in a park in Reims, France, some attention today and a few new titbits have come out. (I covered this yesterday.)

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.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Reims Bikini Attack: Suspects named appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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An exploration of transgender lives

The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train was a very difficult book to write. Compared to my previous one, Poaching the River, it required profound reflection and much research.

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.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post An exploration of transgender lives appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Girl attacked for wearing bikini

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.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Girl attacked for wearing bikini appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Why Islam must embrace Secularism

The only way for the Muslim community, insofar as it can be referred to by such a homogeneous term, to resolve the problems caused by the rise of Islamic extremism and the predictable reaction to it, is at once to accept secularism and to reject shari’aa and the primacy of Islam over other cults.

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 change it to be in line with the one they live in — something that Britain’s first waves of Muslim immigrants did, but which has now been replaced by a culture of confrontation, that leads only to extremism on both sides.

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.

In the United States this has its roots in the very psyche of the nation itself and the fundamentalist refusal of the South to defer to secularism and secular law, even after a civil war of staggering brutality, which it comprehensively lost a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet the hatred lives on, surviving and evolving, and now exports itself to other parts of the world. In the last month or so we have seen a mass murder of black people by a white Christian supremacist, and an ongoing campaign of killing against transgender people, sparked by the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to uphold all citizens’ right to marry. (This right confers but little benefit on trans people, but they pay the price for it by being more obvious than white, middle-class cis-men, and thus easier targets for those fed hatred from the pulpit.)

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.’

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Why Islam must embrace Secularism appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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