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By Jason Michael
IN A RECENT ARTICLE discussing the trial of Marion Millar we touched on the idea, common among many gender critical feminists in Scotland, that there exists a shady government conspiracy the intention of which is to undermine and weaken the fabric of society to the harm of women and girls in particular. In fact, we find this same idea everywhere we find gender critical feminism. This is, essentially, a conspiracy theory — which is not to say that it is necessarily untrue, only that it is the belief or theory that there is a conspiracy somewhere up in the higher echelons of government to implement policies conforming to a ‘gender ideology.’ Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. In this article, the third in a series on gender critical feminism, we will take a closer look at this notion of a conspiracy. What is hoped is that we can better understand the nature of the conspiracy — as described by gender critical feminists — and attempt to discover whether or not this is real or imagined. More importantly, we will try to discover what this conspiracy, as a central myth of the anti-gender movement, means.
Across social media we find a number of iterations of the conspiracy hypothesis. Most often we find it repeated on Twitter, by far the most favoured platform of the anti-gender movement. Any search including keywords such as ‘trans,’ ‘SNP,’ and ‘cabal’ will produce a number of tweets outlining the basic premise of the belief. This one from user ‘Wings2RevStu’ (13 May 2020) provides a fairly typical description:
The SNP has failed on everything important: Scotland has been ‘dragged out of the EU’ without a choice (indyref). At the heart of the SNP is a nasty, abusive entryist cabal focusing on trans issues to the detriment of women and girls.
The proposition is that the Scottish National Party — the party in government in Scotland, headed by Nicola Sturgeon — has been captured by an ‘entryist cabal’ which aims to push through policies which advance the objectives of a gender or trans ideology, and that the Scottish government is doing this in full knowledge that such legislation will be detrimental to the health and wellbeing — and to the lives — of women and girls. We see, especially on social media, a preponderance of this particular vocabulary (which we discussed in the last article). The ‘entryist cabal’ describes a clandestine group of plotters within the leadership of the SNP made up of transgender people or ‘trans activists’ who have infiltrated the party (entryism) in order to achieve their social and political goals by stealth.
At this point we must concede that the SNP, as a liberal and socially progressive political party, has marketed itself as an LGBTQ+ positive and inclusive party. There are visible gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in every part of the aparatus of the SNP, and, as some have suggested, in its efforts to be sexuality and gender positive these people may be over represented. But, and in fairness, it was not so very long ago that white straight men were over represented in the politics of, well, everywhere. Yet, we mention this because it at least appears to support the claim the party has been ‘captured’ by trans rights activists (again, entryism).
What this observational analysis fails to consider, however, is that this increase in visibility of women and LGBTQ+ people in politics is a trend right now being replicated in almost every liberal democratic country around the world. So, we are left with two possibilities: i. Either what we are seeing is a levelling of the playing field in what has forever been a male environment and a progressive swing towards more inclusivity, or ii. evidence that the transgender conspiracy is gloabl — that this is a secret plot aimed at world domination. Most people, following Ockham’s razor, assume the simplest explanation to be the real explanation and so assume the first possibility to be the truth. Gender critical feminists, as the evidence suggests, tend to go with the second; seeing what is happening in Scotland as a symptom of what is happening globally.
Interestingly, the anti-gender movement is not the only populaist movement coming to the same conclusion. QAnon in the United States, for example, is built up around the conspiracy theory that rich and powerful people are kidnapping and murdering children so as to rejuvenate themselves by drinking the adrenochrome found in their blood. QAnon also believes that this ‘cabal’ of vampires — which includes advocates of trans ideology — has captured the US government and governments around the world. The belief that a global elite of bankers and financiers (code for ‘the Jews’) is plotting to take over the world and institute a one-world government is central to the mythology of white supremacist far-right and neo-Nazi movements and has a long history in the far-right.
While it may seem far-fetched to link this thinking to members of the anti-gender movement, it has not been absent. In 2015, ‘Mr Malky,’ an outspoken gender critical feminist, shared an image on Twitter that was problematic to say the least. This was a cartoon of six piglets suckling from a large sow. The piglets were labelled ‘MI6,’ ‘Mossad, ISIS,’ ‘Al-Qaeda,’ ‘CIA,’ ‘Israel,’ and ‘Boko Haram,’ and on the fat mother pig, in bold red type, the word ‘Rothschild’ surmounted with a picture of a flaming bank and a red Star of David. In this overtly anti-Semitic and conspiracist tweet she asked: ‘How is this anti semitic?’ There has always been an overlap of the conspiracy theories of the anti-gender movement and those of anti-Semites and the racist far-right. The same is true of QAnon and the far-right. These are overlapping and interconnected movements.
It is in the earliest occurrence of this conspiracy theory that we find all of its elements together, and from this that we can trace their journey and mutation through right-wing racist movements to the present. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first serialised in a Russian newspaper in 1903 and was later collected and published in book form. These twenty-four ‘protocols’ purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of highly influential Jews — called the ‘Elders of Zion’ — in which they set out their plan to destroy civilisation by corrupting morals, to take over the markets and the news media, and to create the conditions for Jews to take over the government of the world. Almost immediately this work was discovered to be a fraud, likely the production of the Russian secret police operating in France, and Czar Nicholas II ordered its suppression. But it had escaped Russia and was widely read across Europe, influencing fascists like Adolf Hitler.
All the conspiracy theories about the global take over by a ‘cabal’ (from the Hebrew ‘Kabbalah’) we now see in the far-right, QAnon, and the anti-gender movement find their origin in this anti-Semitic fiction. The anti-gender movement shares this belief in a global take over with the racist far-right and it shares it with QAnon. What it also shares with QAnon is the Blood Libel myth (also found in The Protocols); the belief that this cabal is murdering children. In QAnon, as we have discussed, this takes the form of an insane vampire story, but in the anti-gender movement’s version it is about the harm done to children by medical experimentation by the global elite-controlled ‘Big Pharma.’ Here we must be careful. It is true that there are serious medical ethical questions around the treatment of children — around the treatment of anyone — but this simply cannot be equated with the medical experiments conducted on children in Auschwitz by men like Josef Mengele.
Absolutely, there is room for discussion around the appropriateness of puberty blockers and other medical interventions involving children. No one is suggesting there shouldn’t be. Yet still, the anxiety surrounding the ‘medicalisation of children’ has become a fixation of gender critical feminism, and here again we see the shady influence of ‘money,’ of ‘globalists,’ and of course ‘Big Pharma.’ The details may differ, but the themes of these two myths are the same; a powerful cabal feeding off the blood of children — a perfect reiteration of the Blood Libel myth from The Protocols.
Now, this is not to say that Big Pharma isn’t real. Of course it is. We live in an age of multinational — globalised — corporations with which state governments are struggling to content and regulate. This is a serious problem. We live in an age of the super-rich, where billionaires are able to use vast sums of money when the planet is quite literally melting to take pleasure trips to space. This too is a problem. And yes, liberal democracies are becoming more inclusive. But none of this adds up to a totality, to a global conspiracy. Critique is required, for sure. But perhaps we should focus on the real causes of our social and economic problems rather than on fin de siècle anti-Semitic fantasies. Capitalism and its political form, neoliberalism, are the driving forces behind the exploitation of people and the environment, and it is these that are behind ‘Big Pharma’ — not trans people (or Jews).
What we find everywhere, far beyond any connections between the far-right and the anti-gender movement, is the primal connection between the billionaire class and the political right. By funding right-wing movements, think tanks, and organisations — like the Heritage Foundation, where we get all this anti-trans nonsense and conversion therapy — the rich keep us looking in the wrong direction and blaming the wrong people; usually the weakest and most vulnerable. This — this — is the real conspiracy. This is the great conspiracy.
The Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory in the World
Random Public Journal 
Jeggit: is it not possible that far right organizations/religious interests, etc. have nothing in common with women’s groups who are fighting the imposition of trans gender males on their sex-based spaces and rights?
The history of why these sex-based spaces came into being is crucial to understanding where these GC women’s groups are coming from. No need to go into all that. What has changed suddenly that women and girls no longer need these sex-based spaces? Has rape ceased? Sexual assaults? Do women and girls no longer need bodily privacy and dignity?
If you define controlling women’s movements, educational opportunities, access to birth control, etc. as a conspiracy against females, then, yes, logically, there must be one because that is what we see right across the globe. If, however, you view it as a gene and evolution driven phenomenon that has led to this state of affairs, then, no, there can, logically, be no conspiracy. Does that make it right, though? Does the control of women and girls issue directly and logically from males being desperate to ensure their own gene line? Does the sex-based discrimination against women and girls flow directly from their sex? These questions are crucial to the gender non-debate. To be absolutely honest, this blog is one of the few that have approached the issue at all.
The issue is not whether there are trans people or whether those trans people should not enjoy the same civil and human rights as the rest of us: the issue is, should trans people gain access to the sex-based spaces and rights of the opposite sex because they say they are the opposite sex without a shred of unbiased evidence to back it up? The trans men part of the equation is almost irrelevant here because they offer no threat, physical or otherwise, to males, although their massive numbers are deeply relevant to the overall issue of women’s and girls’ treatment throughout history and certainly in our porn-soaked Western culture at this time. I wish Santa would grant women and girls six months in which all males had to experience what females have to experience as the other half of the human race. Who has ever said or proved that women and girls cannot live their lives as fully functioning, autonomous human beings? Someone must have, someone must have decided that females were a lesser sub species of humanity because that is how, historically, we have been treated. Does anyone have an explanation other than the control one?
Just as we have started to actually move forward as people in our own right, this trans issue comes along and men in frocks are demanding that we let them into our sex-based spaces. In order to qualify for entry, of course, they have – absolutely have – to BE women. No use being like a woman. That wouldn’t be enough to be handed the key. No, they must BE women, then the b*****s can’t complain. Since there are trans women who do not want to enter female spaces and rights, who do not demand that we call them ‘women’, who acknowledge that they will always be men, no matter how much they try to conform, there must, logically, be different strata of trans women, no? So, who are the ones who are demanding access to our spaces and rights, who throw a hissy fit when we say, no?
Who are the ones who enter female shower rooms and changing rooms with erections – the recent WiSpa chap was one. Now, why would he have had an erection if he was a woman among other women? Why would he, or any male, have to transition if he had always been a woman, as so many claim they are? If they have always been women – and remember, the brain carries the same gene sequence and chromosomes as the rest of the body – why have they developed as males? Because something went wrong in utero? Perhaps. But why did that affect only the brain and turned it female? Why not every cell in the body, too?
These trans women also appear to have something in common: they invariably display all the characteristics of what psychologists and sexologists call ‘autogynephilia’, a sexual predilection for the self as a woman; as a submissive woman. Not as a strong, autonomous woman. There are many more questions that need to be answered, Jeggit, and the Scottish government, while not being wholly malign, has not asked them; has not even bothered to question the Stonewall orthodoxy. That is why many women are angry – very, very, very angry. None of our very pertinent questions are being answered by the trans lobby, by the salivating politicians, by the virtue-signallers.
It is not enough for any man to say: I am a woman; not without some kind of substantive proof that he is. He is entitled to dress as one if he chooses; he is entitled to all the civil and human rights that the rest of us; he is entitled to live as he chooses with whomsoever he chooses as a consenting partner. He is not entitled to take away the human and civil rights of another group. He is not entitled to say: I am a woman; and we are all compelled to believe him. It is in the area of law, however, that the struts supporting this stuff will start to founder, as the laws that protect and prohibit many sex-based and age-based offences come under pressure for repeal by this lobby. They will not stop until they are stopped.
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Everything is possible. But when this is a minority feminist view and has always been far-right opinion, the weight would be on it being a far-right influence. That the far-right turned up to support the demonstration only serves to back this up. Do you think that too could be possible?
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Jeggit: who says it is a minority feminist view. Have you asked the 52% of the population who are female? You might also find that a good proportion of males are also in opposition to this stuff being forced on women and girls. The problem is that because the trans lobby activists have routinely closed down any debate in the public arena, most people haven’t a clue about that it would entail. I rather think that is the point of closing down all debate with the howl of ‘transphobe’, don’t you?
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Polls
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Really? I have noticed, I must admit, that young people seem to be happy with this stuff. I would that most young women and girls will go on supporting it until they have children. That’s when it all changes for adult human females. That’s why I said that I expect this stuff to go through, but, when the backlash comes, as it will, it will change forever the power balance (unequal at best) between women and men. Women will see this treacherous overturning of the rights they managed to amass over a hundred years or, going from being unable to vote at all, from being debarred from higher education, from being shunted into low-paid work, kept out of opportunities, and so on, as being down to many men’s inability to see them as adult human females. Next time they decide that enough is enough, it won’t be a long, slow progress; it will be a mass overturning of all existing societal structures that will strip men of their hegemony forever. You have been warned. You men who give your backing to what you must know in your cells and genes is wrong must decide whether the price will be worth it. Women who back it, without as much as a glance backwards to women’s history, will have the dubious pleasure of discovering for themselves what their mammies have been telling them all along.
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Lorncal,
Thank you for your comment on this, very calmly and clearly stated. I decided to try and read through the article to see if it made a point, after only getting through half of the first one in the ‘series’, and it was a bit painful doing so (sorry Jeggit), so your comment made it worthwhile in the end.
Jeggit,
I am not a feminist – I never have been, and I never will be – and I support everything Lorncal says here. I would like to say; please take on board her points, and try and see what the issues really are, and what the so-called “gender-critical” people are actually saying. But from what you say, the immediate launch into stating it as a right-wing conspiracy – somewhat ironic given the article title – I think means your beliefs are firmly against any criticism of the gender ideology.
A couple of things: the most frequently used words used by the so-called “gender-critical”, are things like: gate-keeping, sex-based rights in law, the right to debate, consultation, checks-and-balances (to be fair, you may have mentioned these in your last article, but I won’t be reading it). I have trouble equating those to ‘right wing’.
The SNP are a hard right neoliberal party (now); however much they pretend otherwise; the clues are all there; in the things they do (take the board of the new reserve bank for instance), and in the things they don’t say. It will take a while for the general public to catch on, but when all the “socially progressive” things the SNP promised don’t come to pass, there will be a dawning realisation. It doesn’t matter if they are “socially progressive” on gender or not, it’s a fact (that they are neoliberal), and I find it hard to equate your anti right wing stance with your positive take on the SNP.
I don’t normally comment on a blog that I disagree with so fundamentally, so apologies for doing so now; I just wanted to add my support to Lorncal, and thought I’d add a couple of things.
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Thank you, nallyanders. I offer this initial paragraph, the opening to the piece of work that Jeggit cites to steelwires, above:
“… The Reform of the Gender Recognition Act: Government Consultation (2018) catalyzed a heated debate on transgender rights and trans inclusion in the United Kingdom. I start by explaining what the reforms to the U.K. system of gender recognition propose, why gender-critical feminists oppose them, and how other feminist academics have responded to their arguments. I then offer a more detailed philosophical critique of gender-critical trans-exclusionary feminist arguments. I argue that the gender-critical feminist case against trans women’s access to women-only (or sex-segregated, or single-sex) spaces suffers from a number of fallacies, and introduces modes of argument that are at odds with well-established and sound uses of practical reason. I try to make sense of these problems with gender-critical feminist thought by appealing to the idea of presupposed paranoid structuralism. I also argue that gender-critical feminists’ enthusiastic use of social media and allied online platforms may be implicated in generating some of these problems… ”
You would be hard-pushed to find a more patronizing piece of supposed intellectual prose anywhere. You would also be forgiven for believing that women academics and intellectuals had never tried to publish and/or speak about the issue. They have consistently been hounded and closed down when they have attempted to speak or to put forward intellectually coherent arguments. Now, why would that be when their arguments are “at odds with well-established and sound uses of practical reason and are “paranoid”? Why would you need to close them down? Let’s use well-established and sound uses of practical reason, shall we, that are not particulary, or even at all, paranoid, shall we? How about this one: it is profoundly against all well-established and sound use of reasoned thought that men can be women. This one: women have suffered ill-treatment, rape, sexual assault, violent behaviour, discrimination, silencing, control and so on at the hands of males for ever, it seems, and that has been well-documented. How does that equate to paranoia when it actually happens and is the very reason that separate female spaces and rights exist as sex-based spaces and rights?
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The most infuriating aspect of these matters is the impossibility of engaging without becoming drawn into a tedious dialectic between polarised sects, neither of which is in command of reason.
If I have questions and doubts about many of the ideas expressed during this chaos I cannot now in good faith articulate these. Discussion is closed down. Barriers are erected. Silence is the only sensible strategy.
I always enjoy reading your blogs, the last three have surprised me though and your responses to my interventions have been disappointing.
I hope nevertheless that you do not lose readers and continue to share your thoughts.
Om mane peme hoong.
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Duncan: it has become polarised because the two sides cannot accommodate each other. I’m afraid that is the truth of it, has been since this all started, so one must lose out. To date, historically, socially, economically and in every other way, women have lost out. I fully expect this stuff to pass. I also fully expect women and girls to be harmed, and probably in my lifetime. I also fully expect this lobby to start pushing immediately thereafter for the lowering of the age of consent, for consent itself to become legally dubious, for a number of protective and prohibitive laws to be repealed. After that, I fully expect to see all jobs and positions held by women to be taken over by trans women. Probably, neither of us will live long enough to see those latter things happen, but they are the logical and only conclusion that can be reached if/when this stuff passes. It normally take some years, even a decade or two, for the really malign and vicious fall-out of bad decisions to be seen by the majority, by which time, it is often too late to alter the situation except by extreme means.
If women are forced into adopting extreme measures to climb back out of the pit of hell to which the trans lobby intends to consign us, then the human race will never be the same again, and all men will live to regret the day they let this happen. I’m not making baseless threats because I’m angry – I am angry – but the whole overturning of the social order between males and females will become unstoppable if femaleness is to survive, and, this time, women won’t be cowed and forced into subservience. All men have always been safe as long as all women revert to type through fear or willingness – and, crucially, remain in fear or willingness. I reiterate the examples of Russian, Kurdish and Eritrean women – there will be others (the Amazons of Ancient Greek ‘myth’?). This will not just have been a set-back; it will have been an attempt at eradication of femaleness, of womanhood, and Mother Nature cannot allow that to happen. Will not allow it to happen. Of course, the planet might actually die first, which, again, I doubt that Mother Nature will allow to happen either. Mother Nature is female. Looking through the wrong end of the telescope is a cul de sac. Queer theory is a cul de sac.
Jeggit: the hierarchy and structure of the Catholic Church is one of the most right-wing institutions on the planet, with plenty of evidence to support that allegation yet you adhere to it? All religions are inherently conservative, all religions have, or still do, discriminate against females in some form or another, and actively seek to control them. There is no evidence to suggest that Women Won’t Wheesht, For Women Scotland, etc, have any links whatsoever with right-wing organizations. If there is, you have a duty to publicize those links.
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Sometimes it seems that we are being taken over by members of the Culture (Iain M Banks) able to switch sex by consciously adjusting their own hormone levels, to enjoy many varieties of reality and pleasure by secreting the right neurotransmitters and to hold back the processes of ageing.
But despite any feelings I have, it should be possible to examine this alleged debate within an historical context and to tease out the material strands that have made it possible for such polarisation to have come about. This strikes me as an eminently sensible intellectual position to take, one which should, I feel, be somewhere evident with academia. It seems nevertheless that anything said on the matter is pulled immediately into a morbid dialectic, thereby reproducing more of the same, unconnected with any material reality. I imagine Derrida both facepalming and falling about in gales of hilarity.
The material reality of many things is utterly absent from quite a lot of intellectual and academic discourse, but the absence and erasure of both woman and women is deeply embedded into history. I have been immersing myself in the politics of this for over forty years and continue to believe that this asymmetry is one of the most fundamental power relations there is. And I continue to confront it as best I can.
But if in doing so, my words are pulled into some moronic dialectic, or interpreted by those who really should know better as bordering on, mingling with or influenced by some right wing conspiracy ….. I can only smile politely and move on while dealing with my disdain and disappointment in another way.
I find carpentry quite soothing and of course walking in the great outdoors.
Thank you for your response. The offer is still open. Perhaps something collaborative?
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Duncan: I did contact you through your website, but my email must have gone astray. It wasn’t on your usual blog, but one with a beautiful nature photograph. I am working on something at the moment, but have hit the doldrums and need to rethink a lot of it.
“… I have been immersing myself in the politics of this for over forty years and continue to believe that this asymmetry is one of the most fundamental power relations there is. And I continue to confront it as best I can… ”
I have been doing the same, and the only explanation I have been able to come up with that covers all the bases, as our American cousins would say, is that of biology, ironically. I believe it started with men’s need to control our biology because of their desperate need to pass on their own genes. I think that women sometimes forget that men can have no real guarantees that the children they raise are actually theirs, while all women who bear and raise children pass on their genes. This passing on of genes is probably the most powerful instinct in nature, where you are flora or fauna, and it is the driving force of basic sexual activity, which some men and women elevate to proportions that it cannot sustain in reality. This, I believe is what we are seeing right now: the elevation of a men’s sexual rights group to mainstream and public exhibition. That is why I also believe that paraphilia is at the heart of it. I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade.
Sex can be a wonderful sideshow (outwith reproduction) in all its manifestations, and is the reward for reproduction, too. It is not difficult to understand why it should play such a huge part in human interaction. However, when it becomes the be all and the end all, it can become an addiction that may be hard to sustain without ever-growing experimentation and pushing of boundaries, with most boundaries protecting females and young children. What some trans women want is to have the public participate in what is a paraphilic desire, and, in order to enhance it even more, they need to elevate the ‘woman’ aspect of it to heights that can bear no real scrutiny in order to enhance the paraphilic desire that accompanies it. This places women and girls uniquely at odds with this essentially male autogynephilia. How can anyone claim that women and girls should accommodate this?
If anyone has read about the WISpa incident in America, the protests were about boundaries, but also about erect/semi erect penises in female and female child spaces. If men are in women’s spaces with their full tackle, and they have an erection, is that not indicative that they are: a) heterosexual, intact males; b) aroused by proximity to women and female children? This is what the trans lobby does not want people to hear about, so they pretend it never actually happened, that it was a hoax. Yet, this man, allegedly, is a known sex offender. You really couldn’t make this up, and we don’t. We are already under the enormous burden of still not being fully autonomous human beings who have to be grateful for even having sex-based spaces and rights, so why expect us to bear this extra burden of masculine sexual paraphilia? I despair!
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Thank you. I checked my junk mail. Nothing. Maybe it will turn up, dncnspnc at gmail dot com if you want to try again. There’s plenty time.
There is perhaps an analogy with Brexit here. After the vote, all sorts of right wing nutters with a grudge emerged from beneath stones to claim victory for their prejudices. Those who voted to leave the EU for other reasons got terribly upset and defensive when those who didn’t pointed out that the right wing nutter lobby had been given a great big thumbs up. A fairly ordinary confusion of intention and effect.
Perhaps the social policies favoured by the identity ideologues is intended simply to include trans identifiers. In practice, it enables all manner of perverts and toxic males to invade women only spaces. Again, a confusion between purpose and consequence.
I continue to make efforts to understand how this situation has come to pass There must be something seriously wrong if a chap with a boner can expose himself to women and girls because he thinks he is a woman. This is of course just one case. This is not representative of all trans woman. Of course not, but it happened because policies have been enacted on the basis that women can have penises. Which, however absurd it may seem to us old dinosaurs, is the new thinking.
I despair too:
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Duncan: thank you, I will try again. I always think that well-meaning people can create the most catastrophic consequences by not thinking things through, or seeing far enough ahead. Personally, I see patterns in human behaviour just as there are patterns in all things, and sometimes, there is nothing you can do to stop something hellish from happening, but let it take its course until it becomes unbearable and it is overthrown – usually, with another set of dire consequences. I think this may be one of those cases, or, alternatively, we might, collectively, get a dose of cold water thrown in our faces in time. If it is not the latter, I think that all men are going to regret that they did not stop this.
For some, often the movers and shakers of these things, it is quite deliberate, and people are sacrificed deliberately, coldly, cruelly to achieve an end. As far as women, and working-class people and the disabled and children, they are always the first to be sacrificed. I always think of Vercingetorix and his Gauls expelling their women and children, to die of hunger, trapped between the Romans and their hilltop fort, so that they could make their food last longer under the Roman seige, and so that they would fight all the harder without having to waste precious energy on worrying about their families – the greater good, you might call it, if you were being cynical. They lost. They were all killed or taken as slaves. I think some men in the independence movement see this as a stepping-stone to independence: get it out of the way and the way is clear for independence. It won’t be, of course. It is a grave miscalculation which will lose women’s votes – if we haven’t all been divested of them by then – and finish the movement.
I do have empathy for trans people – even for those who have paraphilias, because none of this can be easy to live with, but the answer is not to eliminate women’s sex-based spaces and rights and reduce them to a sub set of their own sex. It is a cruel and viciously unthinking thing to do.
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I look forward to hearing from you. My comments are not welcome at this site.
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Your comments are always welcome here, Duncan.
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I’m sorry I must have misunderstood the disappearance of two very similar remarks on your post about Mohamed, one of which was mine.
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I certainly haven’t deleted anything. As a regular commenter, you are automatically approved. The only filter is the link spam block. If your post has a number of links it will get sided for moderation. But all said, your comments are welcome (maybe not as a discussion board though).
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My apologies. Two remarks making a similar point have disappeared from your post about Mohamed. It is not that I made one of them, but that this point has not been made.
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Contrary: thank you. Anyone with a logical, reasoning mind – that is, all of us, actually – should be able to see that there are two sides to this non-debate. One side is doing all the shouting and the other is not allowed to speak. The silencing of women has a long tradition – especially in the churches. At least Jeggit is allowing us a voice and for that I think him. I have read his blogs for a long time now, have commented occasionally, but this series is a departure, I think, from his usual erudite and balanced views. If the trans lobby had powerful arguments to support its case, it would not be afraid to face debate – and it is afraid to face debate – so we must assume that its arguments are cul de sacs like so much that is spouted on this issue and the philosophy that surrounds it.
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I hesitate to discuss a man in the third person at his own blog, particularly a man of faith committed to compassion towards others. I do however have fewer problems referring only to the texts of blogposts without being in the slightest bit interested in the character of whoever wrote them. I agree that the last three posts at this blog are a distinct departure from previous posts. This fact alone gives me pause. But I have no desire to speculate in public why this might be.
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Nor I, Duncan. I have no such hesitation in the case of the trans lobby, to which I was referring, and I feel free to use salient arguments for and against its behaviour and its rhetoric in order to arrive at a balanced view. If we all to be silenced, there can never be any debate on anything and we all must accept that debate s pointless and, per se, a cul de sac in its own right. I fully understand Jeggit’s faith, and I would never denigrate anyone faith because I, myself, do not share it. However, pointing out a widely-held interpretation of all religions’ attitude to female existence as an autonomous half of the human species, and pointing out the inherent conservatism of the various churches and religions were not intended as any kind of slight against Jeggit or his faith. If I didn’t have respect for Jeggit and his views, however much I disagree/agree with them, I wouldn’t waste my time commenting. I have said, and will say it again, I, personally, do not believe that there can possibly be a meeting of minds on this issue. The two sides are utterly poles apart, and I would just point out that it is not women who are putting manhood in jeopardy.
I’m not accusing you of putting womanhood in jeopardy, Duncan, just trying to point out that women, in their fight to establish their own space and right to exist have never claimed to be men in ways that put all men and boys in danger or in ways that take all rights away from men. All that women have ever asked for is around half of the resources that should have been ours without asking (and without destroying the planet). Basically, if trans women occupy all women’s spaces and rights, that will eventually equate to all natal men occupying all women’s spaces and rights, because even trans men (women) would never dream of eliminating men. That some men do actually dream of eliminating women entirely (and you have to read what some of these people who intend to occupy our spaces and rights have written and said to understand that that particular theme is extremely prevalent among them) is essentially what is being resisted. To my mind, a belief, no matter who holds it, that any group or class should not resist its own elimination, is terrifying in its utter lack of humanity and can qualify only as a hate belief. Remember, no woman or womens group has ever stated that trans people should not exist.
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Indeed.
BTW I rarely take anything personally. Even personal attacks, which are obviously more a reflection of the attacker than the attacked 🙂
I think you are right that neither side here is able to comprehend the other. What then of those of us who can see both sides or who are trying to set the debate in some context? All opinions on the matter appear to get sucked into a pit where things are one thing or the other and nothing else.
Trans women have to BE women and anything else is transphobic. This does not make sense to me. Why should I even engage with such nonsense?
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So debate. Make your case.
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Circular argument again, Jeggit. That is what I have been doing all along on this thread and others. It is out there that the the non-debate is being lauded. Just because you refuse to see that I, and others, have a case, or have been arguing the case, does not mean that the case is non-existent. What about asking for some evidence from the trans lobby? Why must I, my sex not having been in dispute for millennia, have to justify its existence now – which, basically, is what I have been doing. Let’s hear real trans people on this issue, although most that I would term ‘transsexual’ do not wish to eliminate adult human females and take over all their spaces and rights. Rather, they appear to wish to exist alongside us, which is fine by most of us, and, indeed, has always been the case anyway. Instead of occupying women’s spaces and rights, create third spaces and third rights specific to trans people without taking anything away from adult human females in the way of safety, dignity, privacy and sex-based rights, and where human rights, and others overlap, that’s fine. We had to do that, after all. We didn’t take away adult human male human rights to do it. What is so precious and special about trans people that they can’t articulate and fight for their own spaces and rights?
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