As many regular readers of this blog will by now know, I used to take a much more liberal view of the gender issue than I do now. As far as I was concerned in the past I took the view that each individual should be able to fully express who they are and be themselves. I know that gender confusion is a terrible and sometimes debilitating mental illness and that those suffering form it should be counselled to ideally come to terms with their biological sex, or in those rare and complex cases where this tactic does not work, then adults should be allowed to transition and become a simulacrum of the opposite sex.
However as time has gone on and I’ve dug into the science-light and intellectually dishonest and confused ideology of gender as promoted by trans activists, I’ve had to change my mind on this issue. Whilst I still believe that for a miniscule number of people transition may help, transition doesn’t help everyone suffering from gender self image confusion or delusion.
Because of the incoherence of the gender identity cult and the behaviour of those who promote it, behaviour that all too often involves threatening violence or actual violent acts, a lot of people who have looked into the cult of trans have been what’s called ‘Peaked’ into standing against this cult. What gets each person to say that this is ‘Peak Trans’ and therefore I can’t support this cult any more varies from person to person. For some it’s the destruction of women’s sports by allowing men to compete against women for others it is males in women’s spaces or the compelled speech of demanded pronoun use. For me the point where I hit ‘Peak Trans’ and where I became Peaked by it all was the targeting of children by trans activists with the intention of pushing children to identify as trans or to be unhappy with their own bodies.
For the Reverend Giles Fraser, a long time liberal aligned cleric of the Church of England the point of peaking came when he visited one of his favourite restaurants only to find that it had been attacked by trans activists because the restaurant had allowed the author JK Rowling and the former Guardian writer and gender critical feminist Suzanne Moore to have a meal and a meeting there.
The Reverend Fraser talked in his piece in The Critic magazine about the violent trans activists who attacked the restaurant after Ms Rowling, Ms Moore and other ladies of similar gender critical opinion met and ate there. The Reverend Fraser said that a few days after the meeting with Ms Rowling the restaurant owned by his friend James was attacked. Reverend Fraser said:
James had his restaurant windows smashed in. Then he starts to get a succession of one-star online reviews, complaining that the restaurant is not welcoming to trans people. “A supporter of transphobia and the food is dry to boot,” says one. Then, when these are taken down by Google, a load more reviews appear saying the food is rubbish and the place is dirty. Google won’t take these down because, who knows, they might be genuine reviews. Trust me, the food is delicious and the place is spotless. But the people who want to bring down James’s restaurant have worked out how to play the game. All this because J.K. Rowling sat at one of his tables and ate his pasta.
This is yet another of the increasing number of disproportionate and disproportionally violent reactions by trans activists to having their ideology either critiqued or challenge. However the sort of vandalism and attempts to destroy this restaurant owner’s reputation has achieved the exact opposite of what the trans activists intended. It has peaked a previously very liberal minded churchman.
The Reverend Fraser said:
Because some transactivists now behave as though anything they can do for the cause is justified, however cruel: get people sacked, ruin their businesses, be vile to others online. The public sphere is becoming so unpleasant, so full of vitriol and accusation, that many of us just put on our tin hats and retreat from the conversation. To be honest, I have been quite content that my privilege has, until now, encouraged me to think that the best thing for me to do is to sit this one out and say nothing. I have been hiding behind this terribly convenient self-denying ordinance, leaving the likes of J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Moore to take all the heat, my courage being a few pathetic “likes” on Twitter.
It’s indicative of how bad things are and how out of touch with reality the trans activists and their ideology are that as well as peaking millions of ordinary people, including myself, into recognising the lunacy of the cult of trans, that this cult has managed to peak one of Britain’s most liberal high profile churchmen. Maybe the trans cultists and their hangers on should realise that if you lost the liberal vicar types then you might be going more than a little too far.
I appear to have gone in the opposite direction, partly through following this blog and seeking more clarification on the apparent Trans Cult rhetoric.
I don’t usually do ‘whataboutery’, but I was reminded of the militant actions of a section of the womens’ suffrage movement prior to WW1, usually called the suffragettes. They smashed shop windows, set fire to MPs’ houses, and there was the tragic death of Emily Davidson. It’s interesting how they are viewed with hindsight, Edwardian ladies who had gone bonkers or violence justifiable sometimes in pursuit of a cause against considerable opposition?
The suffragette violence was not justified. It alienated the very men who might have been sympathetic to their cause. The aim of the game when campaigning for women’s sufferage was to get the men who had all the political power to share it with women, that required the men to voluntarily give up political power to women, something I believe was the correct thing to do. In the UK at least the Suffragists were less militant and violent than the Suffragettes and from what I can gather it was the suffragists who did a lot of the more positive behind the scenes work for universal suffrage. My own personal understanding was that it was becoming increasingly politically untenable to deny women the vote in the UK and the involvement of women in the workplace during WWI did a lot to advance the cause of political equality.
History has viewed the suffragettes in a possible overly favourable light and has ignored the more quiet and maybe more effective campaigners for universal sufferage who operated in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
As for the trans cult then just look how quickly and without that much challenge have managed to gain an immense amount of control over various public and private sector entities and push their views onto others whilst silencing opposition. There’s an awful lot of religiousity around the trans movement with people holding to positions that they believe should not be questioned and that those who question their ideas are ‘evil’, in a similar way to how an extremist religious cult behaves.
If you want clarification on why some of us ask awkward questions of the gender ideology and why we call it a cult then you and others who are wondering why the word ‘cult’ is used might be interested in this article,linked below, by Eliza Mondegreen. In one part of the article she she highlights how there are trans activists who do not want any of their ideology challenged and that good decent and classically liberal types who only want to do good have been hoodwinked into accepting the package of gender ideology without examining the contents.
She said that even those who are inclined to act as allies to trans people are only allowed to be allies as long as they accept without question the code of conduct for allies designed by trans activists. This looks incredibly cult like to me.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-the-awkward-silence?s=r
Yes, but Transexualism is still not fully understood. Academics and scientists are researching it all the time. There is some tentative evidence that biology could play a part, interuterine development of sex hormones and brain activity for instance. If this is true practioniers promoting only a therapeutic talking approach are wrong.
If it is not properly understood then it’s quite possible that current surgical and medical treatments are also being done blind so to speak. They might be the wrong treatments for the condition? We’ve got a situation where there is a lot of conjecture about transsexualism and where it comes from as although the numbers of others in the gender world such as transvestites, autogynephiles and assorted festishists who fixate on certain types of clothing or who are part of the BDSM scene, the number of genuine transsexuals those for whom escape from their feelings is all but impossible, is quite small. The evidence is indeed tentative with regards TS. Like a lot of people I wanted that miniscule number of people who had transitioned because it was for them a last resort, to not be shat upon. Many of us expected that recognising TS people would involve a tiny number of people. We were not to know that a whole ideology based around denial of biology would coalesce and exploit what were expected to be minor societal and legal adjustments for a small number of TS people.
Transition is so drastic an action, so damaging to the body and the mind of the person who goes through and with such poor outcomes that it is morally correct in my view for the psychiatric profession to do everything in its power to try to get the person with gender confusion to accept the reality of their bodies, before even approaching or considering social or medical gender changes. A good analogy for the whole transitioning idea is to think of a person with body dysphoria who believes that his right foot is ‘wrong’ and ‘offensive’ and ‘should be removed’. Would it be ethical or moral to cut off that person’s leg merely because they have a delusion about it? It would not and I believe that in the vast majority of cases where people have gender confusion more should be done to lead to outcomes that do not involve surgery or drugs.