We didn’t have gender dysphoria when I was a boy. We had to make do with ordinary puberty. I’m not saying it was better in those far-off days. Only that it’s how it was. It should be possible to note that we thought ‘darkie’ was the polite way to refer to people of colour without giving offence. That’s just the way it was. Homosexuals were ‘poofs’ and social outcasts at best. Girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were sluts who shamed their families and communities while the boys who got them pregnant were just sowing their wild oats because boys will be boys. Paedophiles didn’t exist. They were prevented from existing by the simple expedient of not talking about them. Not out loud, anyway. Not in public. It maybe wasn’t OK for a child to be molested. But it wasn’t anything like as bad as the neighbours knowing that your child had been molested.
Women had bruises. That’s just the way it was. Women had bruises the same way they had tits. How women came by those bruises wasn’t any more a polite topic of conversation than teenage pregnancy or child molestation. Men didn’t beat their wives. They chastised them. It’s what men did. That’s just the way it was. It was called the ‘war of the sexes’ and they made comedy movies about it.
Children had bruises too. Especially the boys. But that was just normal. Because boys will be boys and boys are wild and being wild gets you bruised. The bruises obtained through the natural wildness of boys were generally indistinguishable from those inflicted by one or both parents. Because hitting your children was also natural. You couldn’t bring them up without knocking them down a few times. Spare the rod and what else was there? That’s just the way it was.
Grief! That’s another thing we didn’t have when I was a child. Not like we have now. What we had when there was a death was silence. Not the same silence as we had when girls were incarcerated in what were then called insane asylums because they’d got themselves pregnant (Aye! They got themselves pregnant!). Not the same silence as when a woman came into the village shop with lips so swollen she could barely speak and blackened eyes that no strategically worn headscarf could conceal. Not the silence there was when a young laddie accidentally drowned or fell from a bridge or hanged himself the day before he was due to go camping with the scouts and that nice scoutmaster who was so good with the boys. The silence we had instead of the very public exhibitions of grief we have these days was a respectful silence. Really, it was a fearful silence pretending to be respectful. Maybe a hopeful silence. If silence could banish domestic violence, teenage sexuality and child molesters maybe it would work for death as well. Although, of course, nobody actually spoke about that fear/hope. That’s just the way it was.
Before there was gender dysphoria there was ‘gender identity disorder’. Before that, there was puberty. Before that, there was just growing up. We all did it. We all went through it. All of us were alone. We had to be. Because we were different. We didn’t fit. The world was the wrong world for us. We were in the wrong family. We were in the wrong body. Each of us dealt with this in our own way – this conviction that ether the life we were in was alien to us or we were the aliens in a life that everybody else thought was normal. We were told we’d grow out of it. We knew for a certain fact that we wouldn’t. Mostly, we did. We may have been damaged in the process or we might not or the damage might be trivial but it didn’t matter because we’d learned that by not talking about it we could patch up just about any damage.
That sense of being out of place – or everything and everyone else being out of place – is experienced by every child going through puberty. It’s only a question of degree. Other than birth and death, puberty is the most dramatic and potentially traumatic transition experienced by human beings. Some would argue that menopause should be on that list and I would not be keen to dispute this. But puberty can be a nightmare – both for the person undergoing it and those around them. It is a time of confusion. It is no contradiction to say that it is also a time of great certainty. It is a time when certainties change at random. Or at least according to no discernible pattern. The certainty that we are a grotesque oddity can be as unshakeable as the certainty that we are right and it’s everybody else who has got it wrong.
Puberty is a period of tumultuous change – physical, chemical and psychological. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. Metaphorically, the child melts down into a malleable mass which in principle could become anything. In practice, of course, it can’t become just anything. In practice, there are constraints. There are things which are not a matter of choice. There are things which are very much a matter of choice. There are things that we like to think we choose but which are actually pre-determined, and things we prefer to think we have no control over although we might. Gradually or rapidly or somewhere in between, the amorphous blob of melted child takes on a form. By nature, nurture and will it is shaped into an identity. But while it is undergoing this process it can be any of myriad identities from moment to moment.
All of these transient identities have features in common. Things that are fixed. Like sex. That leaves a lot that is subject to various moulding forces – peer groups, family, educators, community, society, the physical and social environment and the mind of the individual. These forces do not necessarily work in harmony. Quite frequently, they conflict. There is a period of testing and adjusting. Like someone trying on different outfits for a special occasion we experiment with different identities. And micro-identities. Identities that differ at a more granular level. Identities which are a distinctive combination of those myriad components relative to societal norms. Sometimes relative to species norms.
I don’t remember puberty being like this at the time. It just looks like that in hindsight. I don’t recall analysing the process as it was happening. I doubt very much that I was able to analyse it in any objective way. I was far too self-obsessed. Which is another trait commonly associated with puberty. Or growing up, as it was then.
I got through it. Everybody gets through it one way or another. I’m not saying it was better then. In many ways it certainly wasn’t. But it was simpler. It was simpler because there was less choice. Life was analogue. There was not the capacity for a proliferation of identities. Micro-identities couldn’t survive in that environment. They, and much else, succumbed to compromise. That’s how we got through the growing up process. We compromised. We couldn’t have it all. So we made the best of what we could have. Some of the compromises were painful to a greater or lesser extent. Some of those compromises we would later come to regret, while also regretting not having made other compromises. That’s just the way it was.
It’s different now. We’ve gone digital. Possibilities have expanded massively. Life now has the capacity to accommodate many more identities. Even micro-identities can persist. As possibilities have expanded so have expectations. As expectations become more easily met, they become demands. Demands come to be characterised as rights – first civil, then human. Without denying that gays and blacks and vegetarians and transvestites are subject to negative discrimination by those who have not adjusted well to this world of digital diversity, we can make the general point that it is easier to have a ‘non-standard’ identity now than it was when I was a boy. A person could actually live as a gay, black, vegetarian transvestite today. Maybe even vegan! They simply couldn’t fifty or sixty years ago. Life just didn’t have the capacity for such wide-ranging configurations of identity. Whatever else this implies in terms of personal choice, it sure as hell made life simpler.
It’s different now. A good impression of how different can be gleaned from reading Stephen Paton’s column in The National. It’s a decidedly ugly wee diatribe that epitomises much of the malaise of our time.
My initial reaction to reading this diatribe was to regard the author as doctrinaire, opinionated, dogmatic, inflexible, intolerant, uncompromising, unaccommodating, demanding, inconsiderate, lacking empathy and generally just a spoilt, petulant brat. Were I as bigoted as this young man I’d have settled for that opinion and taken it away with me to have and hold in perpetuity. Being more open-minded than he is I choose to take a more reflective approach. It doesn’t change my first impression very much. But it may add a soupçon of nuance.
Stephen takes the guise of the brave defender of a victimised minority. Which is fine. It’s fine even given his evident intolerance of other defenders of other victimised minorities. I’d say the guy has tunnel-vision, but the term ‘tunnel’ suggests something wide enough for stuff to pass through. This is more like catheter-vision. Which is appropriate given the pish that he dribbles. This pose is problematic for me because, in the first place, I’m not sure who comprises this supposedly downtrodden group other than that they seem to be people who cling to the micro-identities that were filtered out of my process of growing up by a reality every bit as inflexible and uncompromising as Stephen is. Good luck to them, I say! If they are victimised, it’s not by me. Nor is it ever likely to be. I have neither the time nor the inclination to hunt them down. If they are downtrodden, I’m not the one whose heel is stamping on their face forever. I lack the patience for such a venture.
Which is not to say these people – whoever they may be – are not victimised and/or downtrodden. There are all but certainly those who do have the necessary inclination and patience. But the same is true of pretty much any group into which human beings can be divided. whatever group an individual is in they are in somebody else’s outgroup. And some individuals are prone to treating members of outgroups in an appalling manner. Reading Stephen Paton’s column I get the distinct impression he considers the entire non-Stephen Paton section of humanity as an outgroup. Which strikes me as a bit unreasonable.
We have to be reasonable. We have to compromise. Society cannot function unless we do. Society cannot function if, having made it possible for micro-identities to persist, those micro-identities are afforded the same status as biological imperatives such as sex. No group should be victimised. No group should be downtrodden. That rather goes without saying. But not every characteristic of every group can be afforded the status of a right equivalent to that afforded for cause to some other group. If every characteristic and attribute of every conceivable gender micro-identity is afforded the same status as sex then sex ceases to be a functioning category and rights specified for that category become meaningless.
It’s analogy time, kiddies! Aren’t you excited?
Some people have red hair. It goes without saying that people with red hair have the same human rights as people with other hair colours. Red-heads can no more be made slaves than blondes. But people with red hair are more vulnerable to the rays of the sun. They are more prone to certain types of cancer as a result. So society decides that red-heads should be afforded a specific right to preference for seats in the shade. Places shaded from the sun are reserved for red-heads. They have a right to those spaces.
Now along comes somebody who has merely dyed their hair red. They demand the same right as other red-heads. If we deny them this right then we are victimising red-heads. The dyed redheads effectively hijack the red-headedness of people whose birth hair colour is red.
Dying hair is expensive and troublesome. So some bright spark has the idea of simply claiming to be a red-head. If we tell this individual to fuck off – as we would tend to do being sane and sober and sensible citizens – we are denounced as oppressors of all red-heads. It’s not the presumptuous individual we’re telling to fuck off. It is all read-heads everywhere. The person being told to fuck off is the hero representing the whole red-head race – despite being blonde.
Analogy ends! Hopefully without need for further explanation. The right of red-heads to preference for seats in the shade has been ‘defended’ out of existence by those who’ve found a way to get the entitlement without the inconvenience of being a ginger.
I realise that I will now be denounced as a ‘transphobe’. I’m not uncomfortable with that. Not because I am in any sense or measure ‘transphobic’. But because the term itself has been rendered meaningless by people like Stephen Paton who apply it to anybody who isn’t uncritical enough of their views – whatever those views happen to be at any given moment. One cannot be mildly irritated by the otherly gendered. One dare not even fail to declare one’s unconditional and unquestioning support far less express total disinterest without being labelled a ‘transphobe’ by the gender identity ideologues. There’s nothing in between absolute embrace of that ideology and virulent hatred of all the otherly gendered. No grey areas. Let us not point out that this is indistinguishable from other forms of bigotry because that too will have one branded a ‘transphobe’.
If you thought the Poppy Nazis were bad then wait until you fall foul of the Gender Fascists. As you inevitably shall. It is only a matter of time before we’ll all be required to wear a rainbow insignia to prove ourselves worthy of a normal existence.
Fuck that!
I have no desire to turn back the clock to the days of my youth. Life then was far from idyllic. I rather like a world where girls who ‘get themselves’ pregnant are given help rather than abuse. I prefer that the authorities now take domestic violence and bullying behaviour seriously. I am perfectly content that it should be at least theoretically possible for a black, gay, vegetarian transvestite to become First Minister. Although I reserve the right to criticise their performance as First Minister without being condemned as a black/gay/vegetarian/transvestite-phobe with no right of appeal.
Stephen Paton and his ilk are not making society more tolerant. They are inventing and adding new forms of intolerance. Virulent, vicious, vindictive intolerance. Paton’s article today undoubtedly has done more to provoke antipathy towards transgender people than anything Joanna Cherry has said. Or anything I’ve written here. People don’t like bullies. They don’t like being bullied. They especially don’t like being bullied by a doctrinaire, opinionated, dogmatic, inflexible, intolerant, uncompromising, unaccommodating, demanding, inconsiderate, spoilt, petulant brat.
Peter A Bell 
I thought you were keeping out of the trans issues ? Great post – I do like the “redhead” analogy – spot on
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I stayed out of it for a long time. But the harassment of Joanna Cherry was too much for me. These gender Fascists are out of control. If they were just another pressure group demanding and end to gravity or that the boiling point of water at sea level be reduced it would be possible to ignore them as we would ‘flat-earthers’. But this mob has acquired significant influence within the party of government. Influence out of all proportion to their numbers or their demented demands. Look at how Paton thinks he can threaten the entire SNP leadership into submission.
There’s a connection, too, between the attitude of these gender Fascists and the science-denying anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers and the rest. It’s the promotion of belief and ideology over science. All rational people must take a stand against that.
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Hear, hear. If the Scottish Enlightenment was anything, it was a huge step forward in understanding how we make decisions and why we make them in the ways we do. David Hume was foremost in articulating the overlay of sentiment with rationality. We are both beasts and prey to our early evolutionary origins, and rational beings who try to impose order on our world. Our greatest writer, Robert Louis Stevenson understood it, too, in his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The one without the other is disastrous as Mary Shelley, too, tells us in her clever Frankenstein novel. I think we are living through a very difficult age, Peter, when everyone has the means to disseminate so-called knowledge without the responsibility of imposing rationality upon it and themselves. Philosophers down through the ages have struggled to articulate that human fallibility, the tension between rights and obligations, freedom and responsibility. The SNP appears to be populated by many who have no inkling of Scottish (and the wider) philosophy, literature, culture, no comprehension of the need for boundaries, sexual, social or legal. They see all that as unnecessary constraint. Why wouldn’t they? Narcissism is the defining character of our age and Queer Theory plays into that. The SNP appears to be infected by it, as are all other parties, to such an extent that a backlash is inevitable.
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Agreed. I would add that there is absolutely no historical understanding whatsoever among these little ideologues.
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I was also just about to say how much I liked the redhead analogy.
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“… This is more like catheter-vision. Which is appropriate given the pish that he dribbles… ”
I choked on a Twirl bite there, Peter! Great piece – for the multi-faceted compromisers, that is. You are farting in the wind as far as the trans Puritans are concerned. Ms Kelly – is it? – was forced to admit in public that you cannot change sex. Keeping it simple, that means that you cannot expect the same concessions that women, for example have to their single-sex spaces and rights becaue they are based on biological sex for very strong reasons.
Nobody cares if you hunch over a spattered computer in your own bedroom and w**k yourself into a coma, but they do object when you venture out into public spaces and expect to do the same, even if only you’re only intending to mind-f**k. Many woman like panto and they don’t mind at all that (usually, well-known) comedians play the ugly sisters or the panto dame, just as no one really objects to that actress with her never-ending legs playing Peter Pan. Few women really have an issue with clubs where big, beefy blokes or wee, skinny strutting ones, mince around in frocks and big hair. To be honest, it does make a lot of us feel uncomfortable because we know it isn’t just fun, but we keep our heids about it. Live and let live.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 was intended to cater for all those who wanted same sex marriage and some small tweaks to other legal things. It was never – repeat never – intended to be a springboard for the trans lobby to bully, harass, threaten and generally make life intolerable for women and girls (trans men (FtM) simply do not count in the trans ideology to any great extent because this is primarily a men’s sexual/rights movement). That it has become the springboard for far-reaching reform that will bring the legal system and the health service to their knees in short shrift, not to mention, totally erase biological females from all public spaces and rights – and this is just the beginning – was never intended. Compliant, supine, self-serving politicians, the media in all its various forms, big businesses and public institutions have all been captured by this ideology which even a moment’s scrutiny would cause to crumble, have enabled the onward march of this fundamentally totalitarian ideology.
Stephen Paton is actually threatening the SNP in his article, the SNP whose core policy is independence which has been put on the back burner somewhere south of Watford, and not trans ideology, that trans supporters and their trans warrior activists will decamp. Hurrah! Let’s hope they all go, these interloping colonists of the rights of others. They have usurped a party because they thought they would get all they wanted here in Scotland and force Westminster to, then, comply. Fetishists and paraphilics – because the genuine body dysphoric (who, incidentally, are also paraphilic to a great extent) now lead this movement want it all. Make no mistake, though, every party is in thrall to this insanity which is on a par with believing the Earth is flat. It is time that we asked the question that is begging to be asked: would we elect politicians on the basis that they believe the Earth is flat? Then we should be asking: why has this colonisation of the party of independence been tolerated by those inside the leadership?
Do we want people who will have to find answers to climate change and clean energy, who will have to ensure that the poorest in our society are looked after, to be in thrall to an anti science, anti biology doctrine that has become an orthodoxy or do we want people whose remit is to look after the majority of people who just happen to be sexually dimorphic – and, more to the point, understand that they are – in keeping with science and biology? No trans person has been killed in Scotland, or, indeed, the UK, this year. Nary a one. Stephen Paton is gaslighting. The whole trans ideology is one big gaslighting movie and it’s time we all grew up and starting recognising again the line between fiction and reality. The reality is that we are further away from independence than ever, and the fiction is that you can change your sex or expect to get all the concessions that being of that sex brings by pretending that that you knew you were in the wrong body at two years old (when most people can’t recall anything, when being fed, watered and cared for are your prime concerns) thus enabling child transitioning without proper counselling or allowing children to mature naturally and grow out of their trans phase, possibly the most heinous cruelty imaginable.
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I think we all know the answer to the (rhetorical ?) question about why the party leadership has permitted, nay encouraged this colonisation
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Do we, geoffbush?
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I am sure there might be a few reasons –
leaders being blackmailed,
leaders avoiding indy,
leaders having other interests/plans
what is the common thread? I wonder.
a clear out is needed and I leave that with what remains of Independence supporters in the SNP, as ALL Indy parties CAN work together and had better pdq – otherwise Scotland is in doo-doo because of the gangsters in Westminster
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All independence parties CANNOT work together. If there was ever a possibility of some kind of cooperation between the SNP and Alba then the latter totally fucked that by the way it fought the election campaign. It would have been a very tenuous and precarious deal in any case. You’ll get Sturgeon and Salmond in the same postcode at gunpoint or not at all. I’m not sure even the threat of being shot would get them in the same room.
We really have to get away from the fantasy politics and deal with the reality that it is all about the SNP. The situation is sufficiently urgent that if it is not done by the present government under its current leadership then it’s not going to happen. There is never going to be another election to the Scottish Parliament as we know it.
Every resource at our disposal must be deployed to force a change of approach. It’s probably too late. But as there is literally nothing else of any use that we can do then we might as well do the one thing that at least has as much chance of working as I have of winning Euromillions tonight. I don’t buy a raffle ticket in the hope of winning the lottery. I by a lottery ticket. (Lest you didn’t get that, Alba is the raffle. OK?)
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I listened with great care as Emma Barnett eviscerated Ms Kelly, but I was disappointed that she did not press home the point after the latter had accepted that it is not possible to change sex.
Paton’s passive aggressive attitude to all things not Paton and the very fact that his (this is to misgender him for he prefers “they/them”, but I don’t give a toss) puerile diatribes are published in The National is a sign not only of the capture of the movement by wokeness, but the very low intellectual standards of the only daily newspaper allegedly supporting independence.
The whole ideology is obvious bollocks that does not stand up to rational scrutiny. So the fact that is still standing must suggest that its existence has little to do with reason, in which case there seems little point in offering reasonable arguments against it. It has furthermore declared that it will not debate with its detractors.
At least when Thatcher imposed her magic market ideology on the country, because this was material/economic it was possible collectively to resist at the same level. This gender stuff inhabits a world of fantasy and presents no obvious method of collective resistance. Only perpetual culture wars, which are grist to the mill of the powers that be. A very good way of keeping the herd happy.
On Twitter the GC chatter suggests that we have reached peak trans and that the whole thing is beginning to crumble. Perhaps. But I doubt it.
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You are right, Duncan, not one journalist ever actually asks: what are the rights that trans people do not have that the rest of us do? They always play the “we’re the most marginalised and victimised group that ever walked the Earth”. That claim alone earns them a thumbs down when you think of all the people who have been harmed, who are oppressed, who have been killed and who have been kept in a state of political suppression all over the world. Nothing that they says stands up to scrutiny. Oh, except: ‘we want all of women’s and girls’ spaces and rights”. That bit is true.
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The one about being the most oppressed group of the moment is the clearest evidence of complete delusion. More oppressed than Tibetans? Uighurs? Palestinians? Sweatshop labourers the world over?
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Spot on as ever. Had a look at the Stephen Paton article. He mentions Section 28. Am I right in thinking that Nicola Sturgeon voted against its removal when it was debated in the Scottish Parliament many moons ago?
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Well said.
People like Paton will always find a reason to be outraged, offended, upset, indignant and furious. It’s his, and their, raison d’etre.
His is an odious article and his views on the likes of Joanna Cherry are repugnant.
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Thank you Peter, a great read. Worth listening again to Holyrood’s Andy Wightman interview when he was effectively forced out of the Greens due to refusing to stop using his brain. A true loss for Scotland. Another article worth thinking about, familiar as we now are with the need to avoid using your opponent’s framing propaganda: https://www.karadansky.com/read/acknowledging-trans-as-a-coherent-concept-is-a-fatal-own-goal-for-feminists
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Yes, annie. That was the original mistake that many feminists, and I include myself in that number, unfortunately, who were trying to be placatory and ‘nice’. The ones that the original GRA 2004 was intended to help were a tiny number, usually fully transitioned. The movement has been taken over by fetishists and paraphilics whose aim is to take over all women’s spaces in order to indulge their fetishes and paraphilia, allied to men’s rights activists who are not even trans, and incels who treat females like a commodity. I’m afraid – though it might already be too late – that we need to block them all now. It was being willing to let even the ‘good’ guys in that has done for us, and, frankly, I will never forgive the stupid, pandering, braindead women who have enabled this sexual onslaught against the female of the species.
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Sorry, annie, should have said: by early 2015, I, like so many others, started to understand what was happening. I was not having a go at the women who supported the 2004 GRA, but, certainly since 2015, the agenda has been obvious to all but the most determinedly stupid that GRA reform has been enabled by the use of the 2004 Act as a springboard for more reform, especially self-ID. One thing that might just come out of this is that women – the majority – will cease to be ‘nice’ and become more unified as females. This is the oldest battle of all, and these men are men – and they want us to go back into the home and not peep out again. So many of them are beta males whose only hope of power and control lies in subjugating women and girls.
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Agree Lorna. Its the Aunt Lydias and Serena Waterfords facilitating our betrayal. I thought I was done with all this, but so long as you inhabit a female body you’re never done with it. So yes, lets talk about all the crap we experienced growing up (Peter’s article includes some of it) and make sure today’s girls and young women are free from the poisoning effects of a minority of predatory men. How much more bleedin obvious can it be that male prisoners suddenly identifying as women are highly likely to have dishonest motives? Consider what are they in jail for in the first place for a clue ffs.
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Agree, annie, but this is what this movement is doing: it is enabling all kinds of behaviour that cannot be tolerated by a civilised society. The number of men who say: well, couldn’t we just let the fully transitioned ones in to women’s spaces? Er, no. Stop deciding for women who we let in. Ask us, and we’ll say no. They probably have been accessing our private sex-based spaces for a long time, but we never agreed to that, and many of us have clocked them but been too polite to say anything. Now, it’s a flood of mainly autogynephilic men. We don’t want them in our spaces and rights. They can do their thing with stockings or thongs or whatever turns them on in the privacy of their own bedrooms but we emphatically do not want them in our spaces and rights. Making exceptions for fully transitioned men is not possible because, a) the movement has been hi-jacked by fetishists and paraphilics who want to flaunt their sexual preferences in public, and b) because we do not give permission. Men are men and they can’t change sex. Women are women and they can’t change sex. If you wouldn’t black-face to impersonate a black person, don’t woman-face either. Most of us will not validate you, most of us cringe when we see you, we actually feel threatened because of some latent biological and evolutionary reaction to males pretending to be females. You might not wish us any harm, but we don’t trust you because throughout our time on this Earth, a minority of men have behaved like savage predators. You make us feel uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, and we do not want to be blamed, in skewed and false statistics, for your excesses. If you insist that you have the right to enter our spaces and rights without our permission, you are a narcissistic individual who needs help. No decent man would do that. I heard a young trans man (female) say recently that we have to make more of an effort to understand male sexuality, and I think that’s true. We’ll start when men start trying to understand ours and how it is not at the beck and call, and for the exclusive use of males, but is a thing in and of itself, just as women are autonomous human beings in, and of their own right.
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That’s a timely and excellent one Peter. And the red head Analogy has just explained to me, at last, what the hell is going on. Very good. Everyone a bit cloudy about all this should read it.
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Great read and I agree with all of it, and as a septuagenarian I recognise the past was far from perfect. For the record, I am not against any person who is a transman or transwoman.
I am intrigued by the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance which is said “to reflect and mourn the lives of trans people around the world cut short by transphobic violence”. Confining statistics to the UK or just Scotland, does anyone have any idea of the number who have died?
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None in the past few years, Alin, and that’s verifiable, whereas several hundred women have been killed in the same time period. Some countries do have trans deaths, Brazil being one of the worst, but the deaths even there are not directly related in many cases to the victims being trans, but to the sex work they often do. I’m not trying minimise the deaths, and I daresay that some trans people are killed for being trans, but I don’t believe we are getting the facts.
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The answer to your question is NONE in Scotland. ” Since 2009, at least 129 women have been killed by men in Scotland. 17 women have been killed by men in Scotland since the last known murder of a trans person in the UK”. Taken from this article https://kareningalasmith.com/2021/04/21/counting-dead-trans-people/?fbclid=IwAR0BAnNjj_1cse-xjmM3TLiP1RoTXulRArT834X5FJfbdykA9rCm4wUYtFk I have read world wide statistics somewhere but I can’t remember where,
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The most extreme gender woowoos accuse all of us who do not follow the woowoo of contributing to a climate wherein trans people are forced to commit suicide. Any gender critical position is presented by the woowoo to the faithful as one which seeks the eradication of trans people. So the violence cannot be measured, according to this worldview, by counting assaults or murders.
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Indeed, Duncan. Heads, you win, tails, I lose scenario. They really are the most belligerent and gaslighting group ever. No compromise. Everything their way or you get cancelled. like tantrum-ing toddlers. They will overreach themselves, though, and when the backlash comes, it will shove to the back of the bus, and those they have harmed will not expend any energy in feeling sorry for them.
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zilch for at least 3 years -and I understood that most, if any, deaths are not caused by heterosexuals.
it was also World Children’s Day on Saturday
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Feels like you are drawing a line in the sand, Peter. This madness shows no sign of abating and dreams of independence and decades of slow progress are being strangled by a mendacious minority. The enablers ( they know who they are ) have allowed the SNP to be hijacked and not be forgiven at the ballot box. Unionists are loving it.
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They won’t be if this stuff is pushed through. Short-sightedness was ever their problem.
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Fantastic piece Peter. I just wish I could express myself like this 100% agree with every word
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Gulp, what an article! As others have commented, the redhead line is superb. I subscribe to the National print copy, and I’m dithering over should I continue, Paton in particular a reason to discontinue.I haven’t read the article referenced – I read just one of his articles, and then no more.
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Definitely up there with your best Peter. Had a smile on my face growing up in the sixties town of Dunfermline as a wee ginger haired cafflic. Brilliant
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Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
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Does anyone have a link to an open version of the Paton article? It’s locked behind the National’s paywall (Fortunately perhaps, from how it starts, though it does call into question how they decide which articles to allow for the limited number of free reads/month non-subscribers get)
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https://archive.md/Op4eS
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I had used a thought experiment effectively asking if the GRA principles were to be achieved universally, what was to stop e.g a Taliban style government declaring itself 50% women and thus gender balanced. If anyone objected, expressed doubts to the veracity etc or showed reluctance to allow them access to any women’s space they felt like, then the objector would be guilty of hate crime. The considered response was to call me a clown. That I may be, but it still didn’t really address the issue
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Brilliant!
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A superb article, Peter, you have manged to encapsulate so much of this ridiculous ideology. It is a nasty ideology, and a nasty Gender Recognition Act reform Bill which will cause harm to women, girls, children and gay people, if passed. I do not know what the outcome will be if the SNP government try to push it though Holyrood under the radar. By that time I hope that enough people will have started to protest about it sufficient to make the government stop, think and abandon it, before even attempting that.
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i really dislike the way language is being mangled likewise. The ugly term “Terf” is used merely an attempt at abuse whilst use of “Cis” not only reflects ideological capture by its user but is essentially a trojan horse.
Someone unfortunately referred to me as a “cis-male” recently. I objected that I certainly was not a cis- anything and in fact my birth certificate merely declares me “male”, upon which the other individual started to try to apparently enlighten me…
On that, the idea that someone is “cis-” because the proponents and users of the term claim we all have some other form of gender that might “align” with actual birth gender is merely an attempt to confuse a proposed subjective with the actual objective gender. This is generally used to pre-frame and preload load the debate with theoretical assumptions.
Birth gender is an observable empirical fact. It’s therefore objective. The other proposed “gender ” is about “feelings” and can be whatever your personal feelings or fantasies dictate. Its therefore subjective. Thus the various claims made that there are three, or four, or seven or fifty six or seventy two genders… In fact of this latter gender there can be as many or as few as you like. It’s a belief system somewhat like astrology but where you not only get to chose your own “star sign” but can make one up to suit.
Of course we all have elements or traits that might be seen as male female within us, but assigning a collective subjective “gender” to them is merely a whim or convenience: not a fact.
Unfortunately the road that we are not being asked but apparently being made to travel by means of law leads back not merely to pre-science but the pre-reformation.
Claiming someone is “Transphobic” meaning apparently that they should lose their job, not be seen fit for public office or somehow be punished because it seems they don’t accept the quite ideological notion that “Transwomen are women” (which is the crux of what is happening presently), brings our attention to a further term of abuse and yet another trojan phrase.
Accepting “Transwomen are women” as a truism is to accept nothing less than a belief in a form of transubstantiation. The historical analogies shouldn’t need to be pointed out: calling out “Heretics” and punishing them for refusing to believe that pre reformation belief that the wafer and wine of the mass becomes the “actual” physical body and blood of Christ is part of our historical burden and we all know how the consequences of enforcing that particular belief went in Scotland, and then its repercussions likewise, or at least we bloody well should: the results were not pretty.
Scottish history itself warns us that we simply should not and cannot go back to enforcing the doctrines of one set of believers over the population as a whole. The dangers of this are staring us in the face: It’s a recipe for disaster and I for one cannot understand how such dangerous ideas could even be considered by people who should know better.
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Ken: “… Unfortunately the road that we are not being asked but apparently being made to travel by means of law leads back not merely to pre-science but the pre-reformation… ”
It is certainly pre Enlightenment, as it dispenses totally with the very concept of reason and take us bak to a time of sentiment only, but, you are right in that it lends itself to deep-seated religious-like practices. Given their head, I’m not at all sure that the trans lobby wouldn’t be calling for people – particularly women – to be ducked, tortured and burned at the stake as heretics. It is terrifying. I can understand it up to a point: these people feel that we are calling into question their entire identity, their sense of self; and they get extremely angry. What is really being called into question is their belief that they know this identity, which is at odds with material reality – that is, the application of reason (science, if you like). Their doctrine means quite literally that anyone can claim to be anything and must be validated.
This manifests all the evidence of being a mental health issue and a dysphoria issue rolled into one, just as anorexia, in its heyday, was a mental health issue and a dysphoria. Both are symptomatic of peer hysteria, too. Both are extremely difficult to treat and cure, but no one was saying that anorexia had to be validated or that counselling and a cure could not be attempted. Some (mainly girls) died as a result of their anorexia, and some of these people who are convinced they are the opposite sex will have to be surgically altered to align them with the sex (gender) they believe they are because nothing else will work. However, the vast majority now are cross-dressing males, and their motivation is entirely driven by sexual feelings, and while we should not sneer and dismiss fetishes and paraphilia with which people might struggle, and while we should extend civil and human rights to all, that does not require us to give up our civil and human rights or to validate that which is a manifest danger to females and a contradiction of material reality. That way lies madness for us all.
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On transubstantiation:
https://4w.pub/trans-substantiation-gender-ideology/
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Jeez, the headline STILL says “Facists”?
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Not any more. That was a bad one. Thanks for the heads-up. I’m off to the naughty-step to think about what I’ve done.
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Nah, I’m with you, I hate people with faces as well. Bastards.
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Thanks for an incredibly provocative look at some historic prejudices most of held without a second thought. I don’t agree with you on every point but appreciate the clear-eyed analysis.
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