Tag: Trans cult

Ignore this important book by Caroline Criado-Perez because she is, always please remember, a TERF. It doesn’t matter how important the book is, what matters is terfitude. Failure to center trans people in everything is worse than genocide. It’s the worst worst thing of all time, bar none.

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1143210088980598784

Also the subject couldn’t possibly be what the author says it is, it has to be a sinister (however invisible) point about trans people.

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1143293407147655168

That will happen because I, Arthur Chu, will do my best to make it happen by trying to alert everyone on Twitter to my claim that CCP is a TERF. Look at all the good I do.

Remember that dopy letter last week full of empty platitudes about being inclusive and supportive, and extra special vulnerability and respect for gender identity? The one by and for and to academics – people whose job it is (or should be) to say things clearly? Now there’s a followup article saying Y We Did It and you’ll be astonished to learn it’s the same empty platitudes all over again.

Opinion: Why we, as academics, created a letter in support of LGBT+ rights https://t.co/TCZdGYLjzA

— The Independent (@Independent) June 23, 2019

On 16 June, a letter from 34 academics to The Sunday Times argued that university policies to include trans and gender diverse people, in particular the Stonewall Diversity Champions programme, were in tension with “academic freedom of thought”. For us – as ordinary academics working in higher education – this felt like just the latest in a slew of media coverage on trans people which has ranged from the critical to the sensationalist. Setting out to write a response, we found that what we really wanted to do was something much greater: a manifesto, an affirmation of our LGBTQIA+ colleagues at all levels of higher education.

Or, maybe, not so much “much greater” as “much easier.” They set out to write a response and then realized that would require actually engaging with the arguments of the letter – and I’m guessing they didn’t want to do that because they don’t actually have any arguments in response. All they have is the same old boilerplate about being inclusive and supportive and extra special vulnerability and respect for gender identity. Non-responsive boilerplate wibble looks better in A Manifesto than it does in a response, because responses are supposed to, you know, respond.

In this new piece about Why They Did It they say it’s all gone swimmingly.

At the time of writing, our manifesto – our contribution to the debate – has attracted the signatures of more than 6,000 university staff from across the world. We have also received a vast number of personal responses expressing relief and gratitude that someone has taken a vocal stand in support of trans, gender-diverse and other queer students and colleagues, representing the views of what feels like the silent majority against the few critical voices in the media.

Relief and gratitude that someone has taken a vocal stand? Representing the views of what feels like the silent majority? There are people taking that vocal stand all over the place, complete with threats and images of guns, knives, baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. The silent majority is far from silent.

Amid these responses, too, have been many heartbreaking stories from trans and gender-diverse people: fear of what colleagues will think of them; an ever-present question of whether their identity (reflected through their pronouns and name) will be denied; fear for their physical safety. In short, fear for whether their dignity as individual human beings will be observed and respected.

Heartbreaking? Fear of what colleagues will think of them is kind of the human condition, isn’t it? Or at least occasional anxiety about it. Very few people are completely free of worry about how well they pass as not-weird not-wrong not-freakish to the rest of the world. The nonsense about whether their fantasy “identity” (the one that negates their actual literal identity) will be denied is not worth a second of attention. Fear for their physical safety is a bad thing, for sure, but then trans activism as a movement is causing a lot of women to have that fear too. As for “fear for whether their dignity as individual human beings will be observed and respected” – again, that’s the pious empty blather again. Nobody is attacking or threatening or belittling their dignity as individual human beings. They’re entitled to as much of that as everyone else is (and no more). The issue isn’t their dignity as individual human beings, it’s their campaign to force us all to agree that they are what they are not. What about our dignity as individual human beings? Eh?

By not recognising trans people within our universities as being who they are, we deny them the dignity of their own identities.

But it’s not who they are. It’s who they say they are, which is a different thing. Consider: they could say they are Rasputin returned from the dead. They could say anything. Anyone could; we all could. Just saying isn’t magic, and we don’t have any moral obligation to agree that people are who they say they are when that saying contradicts the material reality we can detect with our eyes and ears.

Trans, gender-diverse, and other queer people are not problems to be theorised and hypothesised. They are living, breathing human beings.

Well, yes, of course they are, but the point is that the “trans” bit is something that can and should be “theorised and hypothesised” – aka analyzed and discussed and thought about and puzzled over. They don’t get to sew the trans bit onto themselves like Peter Pan sewing his soul shadow onto himself so that they can treat it as inviolate. It’s a novel idea, it’s morphing and inflating every day, and it makes large claims on us; of course we have to be able to discuss and dispute it freely.

There’s more of the same pious gibberish but I’m sick of it now. Basta.

Susie Green of Mermaids accidentally posted a bunch of highly personal emails online.

Andrew Gilligan in the Times:

Many of the emails, written between 2016 and 2017, included the full names of the parents and children, pre- and post-transition, along with telephone numbers and intimate details of treatment and care. They were sent in confidence by the parents, or forwarded by other agencies, to Susie Green, chief executive of Mermaids, the high-profile transgender children’s support group.

…

The messages could be found through a simple online search until Friday, when Mermaids removed them after being contacted by this newspaper.

Alongside the client emails were hundreds of often revealing internal ones showing trustees’ concerns about Green’s leadership, accusations from parents that Mermaids felt like a “cult” and alcohol problems at residential weekends putting children “at risk”.

Green appears to have thought she had set up a private email group, using a common webmail platform, to share information with her trustees. But she, or Mermaids, had failed to read her group’s homepage which said that its “archives are visible to everyone”.

Oops.

But that’s ok, go ahead and trust her with struggling unhappy children anyway, all she wants to do is help them block puberty and then transition to the other sex.

[Mermaids] was given £500,000 by the national lottery, £128,000 by the BBC’s Children in Need and £35,000 by the government. It also has the support of Prince Harry, City banks and large parts of the media.

Green was series consultant on Butterfly, the recent ITV drama about a transgender child that gave a flattering portrait of Mermaids, with its logo visible in some scenes and a script reflecting the group’s talking points.

It all seems very hasty,  but hey, it’s only changing sex, sometimes with surgery but sometimes merely with a lifetime of hormone-fiddling drugs. What downside could there possibly be?

Green, who took her own son, aged 16, for a sex-change operation in Thailand, believes medical intervention is “absolutely vital” for children unhappy with their biological sex.

Mermaids wants more of it, much faster. It campaigns to end the NHS ban on children being given sex-change hormones that reduce fertility and require lifelong medical support. Most doctors believe that children, who may change their minds, are too young for this irreversible step.

Green claims the lack of such treatment is making children suicidal. She has said patients of the main NHS clinic that treats gender-dysphoric youngsters, the Tavistock Centre in north London, have a “48 per cent suicide attempt risk”. The true rate, says the clinic, is less than 1 per cent.

48 per cent, 1 per cent, whatever. Green is so well-meaning!

Green, an IT consultant, has no medical training. Responding on Twitter to an NHS psychiatrist who accused her of “making stuff up”, she wrote that “you need to f*** off. You know nothing.”

A Tavistock clinician said: “Mermaids push simplistic views, emotional blackmail and conscious misinformation at parents. They do so much harm.”

In evidence to MPs, Mermaids complained that the Tavistock spoke too much of the “uncertainty and complexity” of gender transition. It singled out a doctor at the clinic by name as “anti-trans” and demanded “a thorough audit of staff and their views”.

Yeah. It’s not uncertain and complex at all, it’s as simple and benign as getting a haircut. Susie Green, with no medical training, must know all about it, unlike those “science” types at the Tavistock.

Given this tension, one surprise of the private emails is the apparent closeness of the relationship. Perhaps the pressure was working. Sally Hodges, a senior Tavistock manager, promised to “co-ordinate” the text of the clinic’s website with Mermaids. “It would be valuable to think with you about the content going forward,” she wrote. The clinic’s director, Polly Carmichael, told Mermaids it was good to be working together.

“Perhaps the pressure was working” – Andrew Gilligan has a way with understatement.

It’s reminding me of Jonestown again. A whole bunch of people doing what this one narcissistic psychopath told them to do, even though many of them had doubts and would have preferred to leave…but the pressure was working.

The pressure is working; pressure does work. That’s one reason I despise this movement so intensely: it relies so very heavily on pressure instead of anything less coercive and more persuasive. There is far more slogan-flinging than reasoned argument, and far more bullying and ostracism than compassion and generosity. It’s becoming more and more difficult every day to think of it as a political rights-based movement like others as opposed to a cult that attracts every raging disordered narcissist on the planet. Even if I thought they were right in their confusion of “gender” with personality I still wouldn’t want anything to do with the movement, because their rhetoric and behavior are so repellent.