Guest post: Suddenly they all found that they could prevent it
Originally a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowden on Local misogyny.
Kaspar Zeta-Skeet said there was an “assumption” among some teenagers he taught “that women are things just to be observed”
I fear that that is indeed a common assumption of boys, made much worse by social media.
In France, we are experiencing a particularly nasty series of violent attacks on teenagers by other teenagers — three in three days, not all girls. The first concerned a young girl of 13 in Montpellier. She had been bullied for around 18 months, especially by a somewhat older girl who considered that she wasn’t a proper Muslim because she wore normal clothes and joined in regular school activities. This older girl, or one of her friends, sent a telephone message to many people at her school asking them to meet outside the school to teach the younger one a lesson. About 20 people, mostly or all teenagers, did exactly that, and gathered outside the entrance. Three of them (including the older girl) knocked the victim down and kicked her, on the head and elsewhere, until she was unconscious and had a brain haemorrhage. She was taken to hospital and fortunately her life is no longer in danger. What the other 17 were doing I don’t know, maybe just enjoying the spectacle, or taking videos on their telephones.
The second occurred in the outskirts of Paris the next day and concerned a boy on his way back from school. He was attacked by five older boys in balaclavas and left unconscious in the middle of the road. Tragically, the doctors weren’t able to save him, and he died. They’ve not revealed any information about the apparent motives. The boy was called Shemasedine, so maybe this also had a religious motive.
The third occurred in Tours the following day, but they haven’t revealed any details.
In the1990s and earlier hazing was a big problem in the cours préparatoires for preparing for the examinations for the Grandes Écoles. The then Minister of Education, Ségolène Royal, ended it in 1998 almost from one day to the next by announcing the principals of Lycées would be held personally responsible for any hazing that occurred and if they said that they couldn’t prevent it they would be relieved of their positions and replaced by someone who could. Suddenly they all found that they could prevent it. That was in 1998; in 1999, when our daughter went to the Lycée Thiers in Marseilles, which had had some of the worst cases, there was no hazing at all, and she loved the two years she there. I think something along the same lines with schools that today don’t prevent bullying and sometimes violence might have a good effect.
I like this line of thinking, holding those in power directly to account. A huge problem with the gender mess is that everybody passes responsibiilty on to everyone else. I’d like to see some direct personal responsibility placed on the counsellors who approve medicalization for their patients and the doctors who do the surgeries. I don’t know exactly how that would work, but something like, a ban on liability waivers across the industry, and mandatory follow-up with all patients for at least 5 years, with the possibility of civil or criminal malpractice liability, based on negative outcomes above a threshold of acceptability.
Like with the schools, I imagine the regret rates from patients who underwent the procedures would suddenly plummet once there’s actually someone in charge being held to account.
I imagine the counter-argument would be that this would make clinicians reluctant to greenlight the surgeries. To that I’d say, we’d be mostly just going back to the way things used to be in the past, when there was much stricter gatekeeping. And the thing is, the gatekeeping worked! The vast majority of people who sought “sex change” surgeries changed their minds on their own after a while. (This was quietly, among clinicians, a reason they deliberately kept waitlists so long: the patients needed cooling-off time above all else.)
Of the patients who didn’t change their minds all on their own, many were guided away from surgeries via psychiatric therapy.
Of the ones who still persisted in demanding surgeries after therapy, many were deemed unfit for it on psychological grounds, and refused clearance to go ahead.
Of the ones who ultimately gained approval for surgeries, it turned out many were lying their way through the assessment process with the help of an underground network of transsexuals all grooming each other about how to “work the system”.
This last factor is probably why, after all that gatekeeping, the post-operation regret and suicide rates still remained sky-high. A big part of the problem, then, was that the relationship of the patients towards the clinicians was oppositional (they wanted to get around the therapists, rather than listen to them), and the whole industry decided this was an excuse to throw their hands up and abandon all responsibility.
No point in gatekeeping; they’ll just find a way to get what they want anyways, and that means I can’t be held responsible for the outcomes anymore.
Like with the problem of student bullying, a big part of the problem with trans medicine is that it’s maintained though a subculture. Just as kids can get into gangs or social groups (or social media subcultures) which foster antisocial behaviour and can override the kids’ obedience to traditional authority figures (the law, the school principal, etc); trans people get immersed in subcultures where they learn to see themselves as intrinsically trans, that the surgeries are an inevitability, and the medical authorities are just obstacles.
This makes the jobs of the authorities harder, sure. But not impossible. They cannot be allowed to make excuses to abandon their responsibilities. (It doesn’t help that the “gender industry” has recently been taken over by people from inside the transgender subculture, the trans true believers who never wanted gatekeeping in the first place, who now actively work with the patients to circumvent the few medical safeguarding policies that remain.)
A Ségo style approach, both commonsense and hardline, sounds in order. Restoring direct responsibility to the clinics would both flush out the true believers who’ve taken over, and it would force the clinicians and the doctors who remain to stay focused on reality. As we’ve seen, they just don’t care unless they’ve got their own skin in the game.
I know it’s not going to happen, but I’d like to see some accountability too. I’d like to find out exactly who was pushing for, and agreed to any or all of the following:
Allowing men into women’s prisons, hospital wards, rape shelters, toilet and changing facilities, awards and prizes, sports teams, etc…..
None of those things just happened. Somewhere, they were proposed, discussed, approved, and turned into policy. Somehow, somebody thought these were good ideas to execute and enforce. I’d love to know who and why. I’d like to find out how it was that so many people in so many organizations threw reality and safeguarding out the window, how they were able to ignore or brush aside any predictions of the inevitable harm and abuse of forcing men into women’s facilities, all through the disregard of the simple, basic truth that humans can’t change sex. Who would have thought this level of ideologically motivated ignorance and self-deception was even possible? If you made it up, nobody would believe you.
There must be records and minutes somewhere, some paper trail of proposal, debate, and voting to push ahead against sense and decency, against the safety, health, and dignity of women. Heads should roll, but of course, they won’t. There won’t even be apologies.
The medical scandal is bad enough on its own. The destruction of women’s rights is bad enough on its own. Together, you’ve got terrible decisionmaking and an abdication of responsibility destroying lives of people on both sides of the “trans issue,” with far too many victims among patients and critics of gender ideology.
The Dentons Document is a good place to start when trying to understand who is driving the TRA agenda.
Something I perhaps should have mentioned is that the victim in Montpellier comes from an Harki family. If you’re not in France or Algeria, or you if are in France or Algeria but are less than 50 years old, you will be asking What the heck is an Harki? The Harkis were Arab (and mostly Muslim) Algerians who fought with the French army during the war of independence. After the war they were treated shamefully by successive French governments and only a few, around 90 000, were able to move to France, where they were crowded into camps. The rest had to stay in Algeria to be killed or beaten or tortured. There is still apparently a lot of hostility between them and more recent immigrants from Algeria.
That may be part of the motivation for the attack. Of course, we would all agree that what your greatgrandfather did in the 1950s is no justification for attacking you.
Jacques Chirac was not one of my favourite presidents, but he did one good thing, which was to recognize the contribution made by the Harkis.
@Athel
Interesting. I only recently learned the term Harki, from a new French/American co-produced TV series called Monsieur Spade, the compelling premise of which is that gumshoe Sam Spade (of Maltese Falcon fame) moves to France and retires in Bozouls in the 1960s. I loved the show. The plot revolves around the aftermath of the Algerian War, and there are some scenes that take place in Algeria. Many characters were Muslim Algerians living in France, or French soldiers who’d just returned from Algeria. I learned a lot from the show about the complex and bitter history between France and Algeria.
Bozouls: it looks like the place for which the expression “in the middle of nowhere” was invented.
Anyway, I may have given the impression that I thought the French and the Harkis were the good guys in the Algerian war. Not at all: the French had no right to be there in the first place and shouldn’t have resisted independence so violently. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t judge what people did in the 1950s by the standards of 2024. The pieds noirs that I have known (there were many visible in Marseilles 35 years ago — probably as many today, but less visible) seem to have genuinely regarded Algeria as part of France.
My understanding is that the original reason for the French to be in Algeria was to suppress the Barbary pirates in the 19th century. That seems reasonable to me. What they do *during* the occupation is another matter.