A Guest Post by Lecturer and Film Maker, Deirdre O’Neill.
Under Thatcher and then Blair and continuing up until our contemporary moment, the working class has seen its culture slowly and progressively destroyed. The change from an industrial society to a service society produced a marked shift in focus from the working class as the backbone of the country to the image of a feral underclass responsible for their own poverty. Correspondingly their collective struggle has been eroded and its place filled by the middle class adherence to the politics of identity –a concentration on single issues that celebrate difference and refuses to recognize or engage with the continuing injuries of class.
One of the consequences of the massive changes that have taken place in working class life over the last forty years of neo-liberalism has been the erasure of class-consciousness and the loss of the language of class as an analytical framework within which to articulate and make sense of those changes.
The working class has been cut adrift from any political party who would speak on their behalf and have been abandoned by academia, one of their traditional intermediaries. The middle class, who prefer the comfort of individualistic identity politics, has rushed into a public sphere that has systematically and strategically excluded the working class and which has narrowed to include only those who share an establishment view – even if their voices are ‘dissenting’ ones. As a consequence radical struggle has been reformulated and the working class rendered invisible as a political category increasingly known only through their appearances on reality TV shows or game shows where they are represented bereft of any history or agency. They serve the purpose of providing a spectacle and reinforcing middle class prejudices while at the same time the political agenda of derision and irrelevance is smuggled in under the guise of entertainment.
This degradation of the public sphere which is now almost exclusively dominated by a privately-educated Oxbridge elite who publish each other, podcast each other, interview each other and share each others’ views, is nowhere more blatant than in this exclusion of the working class. What we now have is a public culture of self-serving careerists whose obsession with their own status, individual concerns, personal anxieties and multiple claims to oppressed identities, make it ideologically impossible for them to connect with wider political issues.
The growth of idealism and the denial of material reality have offered for some on the middle class left a pseudo-version of political radicalism. For them the struggle for change is no longer grounded in the politics of class nor do they acknowledge the working class as the potential initiators of change. Demands for equality are not rooted in an understanding of how the system operates structurally to deny any meaningful opposition to the current brutal society in which we live. If the people who are considered to be the ‘left’ in public life are mostly privileged Russell group graduates who have never experienced struggle, it is imperative we consider the impact that this will have on the fight for a different world and what that different world might look like.
There is evidence of an increasing accommodation to a narrow neo-liberalism intent on monetizing all aspects of our lives within a public sphere constantly undermined by a marketing-led ethos concentrated on creating groups of consumers and where declaring your ‘communism’ on television programmes is just another marketing opportunity, destined to become a slogan on a tee-shirt to be sold via your website.
In the light of this it’s difficult not to consider the rapid rise of transgender ideology, and its concomitant activism enthusiastically embraced by the middle class left, to be connected to the dismantling of radical politics over the last 40 years and the demoralization and feelings of defeat it has engendered.
Transgender activism has presented the privileged with an opportunity to ignore questions of class inequality while at the same time allowing some the opportunity to perform a superficial radicalism and progressiveness. As a result we have recently witnessed the spectacle of working class women in prison being assaulted by a person with a penis (ie a man) being ignored and, in some cases, his behavior excused so that the man’s status as a trans woman can be defended. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-44877856. In the process there has been a normalizing of the unequal treatment of working class women and an entrenchment of their marginalisation. There is no starker example of the absolute disdain in which middle class social justice warriors hold the working class.
Rather than discuss the injustice of imprisoning some of the most damaged and vulnerable people in our society whose ‘crimes’ are mostly related to their poverty, we have the ‘left’ clammoring for the right of men to be housed alongside them in prison. As for the consequences — working class women are just collateral damage. The callous indifference to the needs of, in this case, working class women is exactly in line with the neo-liberal strategy of demonizing and ignoring the unemployed, the disabled, food bank users, those on zero-hour contracts, etc.
The transgender movement demands a rejection of biological reality. Any attempt to discuss the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is met with social media bullying, attempts to prevent women meeting to discuss the issue and threats of violence both from those men who demand to be accepted as women and the people who support them in this demand.
It is not the women who toil in the sweatshops of ‘developing’ countries that the transgender activists wish to ‘transition’ to; rather it is the objectified successful bourgeois women that they aim to be. The reality for working class women of negotiating the institutional and personal power struggles in which their lives are embedded is not part of the appeal for men who claim to be women. On the contrary, as in all other areas of life, working class women are treated as unimportant or ignored as the example of the prison makes clear.
There is something very terrifyingly fragile about our commitment to reasoned debate if we can so nonchalantly cast aside facts such as our biological constitution. There is something hopelessly naïve if we think we can cast off deep socialization processes by a simple declaration such as ‘I’m a women’ by a man. There is something suspiciously familiar, the definite whiff of misogyny, in the determination to deny the violence that men perpetuate against men and against women, and the safeguards that women therefore need against men (who, after all, is doing the ‘upskirting’?).
If anyone can be anything they want just by saying it, where does that leave us? What kind of foundation is there to build on? If you #arewhatyousayyouare where does that leave those of us fighting for a better world? It leaves us nowhere – social, historical knowledge, institutional struggle and cultural experience becomes meaningless. The way in which our lives are shaped by structures over which we often have little control cannot be articulated or resisted. The propagation of the notion of a female essence renders at a stroke unnecessary the history of the struggles women have been involved in for their right to live independent autonomous lives –there’s no ‘wrong side of history’ when you can just ignore its existence.
There has been a glaring refusal on the part of the left to come to terms with the question of transgenderism and its impact on women – and by women I mean people who belong to the sex-class that has ovaries and is able to give birth. The levels of groupthink necessary to keep this ship afloat, the self-censorship, the intimidation, the blatant dishonesty, the denial of debate with howls of ‘transphobia’ point to a left in deep crisis. The middle class-dominated left has abandoned its obligation to critically engage, to clarify and to lead on the political issues of the day. Instead it has simply accepted the terms of the debate put forward by the trans militants (including their really basic conflation of sex and gender).
This failure is rooted in the left’s acceptance of identity politics with its assumption that how a group (or the primary definers within a group) articulates its oppression is the last word on the matter. Yet it is clear that one group’s identity and its claims may easily clash with the claims and identity of another group. Identity politics has no way of negotiating these conflicting claims. In the end the group that can mobilise the most power is the group that will have its claims prevail. In its catastrophic alignment with what is clearly a men’s rights movement, the left has chosen to side with the powerful over the less powerful, men over women, and the middle class over working class women – and it is they in particular who will bear the brunt of trans rights as currently formulated.
The closing down of the complexities of this discussion with the mantra ‘transwomen are women’ is profoundly undemocratic. In a properly functioning democracy the concerns of everyone would be included in an open and transparent discussion. Instead, critical thinking is relabeled ‘transphobia’, even basic facts are now apparently a sign of Trump-leaning tendencies (thereby ensuring that the Right will own this issue, because the left cannot sensibly discuss it).
Rather than fighting for us all to transition to a fairer, more equal society, the social justice warriors focus on the right of men to adopt the stereotypes that most women have long ago rejected. Rather than fight to create something new, trans ideology recycles old tropes of femininity (‘lady brains’ -really?) and claims them as progressive. Rather than considering ways of radically changing the roles of both men and women, we are being told that the stereotypes women have fought against are actually real and can be appropriated by men to ‘prove’ they are women.
The proposed Gender Recognition Act currently under consultation would allow a system of self-identification where changing ‘gender’ is simply a case of signing a form, so that biological males will be legally allowed to identify as women. Even the very title of the proposed Act demonstrates how our policy-makers have made a fundamental conflation between gender (socially-constructed characteristics of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’) and biological sex. This in itself shows how deeply controversial the central tenets of trans ideology are and that it is absolutely legitimate and necessary for these ideas to be open to contestation and debate. Unless the left recognizes this, it risks making a historic political mistake.
Deirdre is a lecturer and radical film-maker. Her latest Film Adult Human Female banned by Tra activists at Edinburgh Uni. also Radical Pedagogic Tool (2017) explores the way in which a radical pedagogy of film, grounded in the experiences, class location and everyday realities of the working class, can provide a starting point for a critical engagement with, and a materialist understanding of, how society is organised. She is also co-editor (with Mike Wayne) of Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century (2017). The essay above originally appeared last year on Medium; we thank her for agreeing to us re-blogging it on Redline.
Great piece highlighting the dangers in the government’s proposals.
What a great post. Men who can’t make it in a ‘man’s world ‘ have to pretend to be a woman to win races, to get on the woman’s list for jobs etc. Deirdre, is correct and brave to stand up for us. I do not understand how or why the likes of Sturgeon do not stand up for Women and Women’s rights, but of course she’s following WEF line of thinking!
Excellent article that hits the nail on the head. When I hear of appeals to help refugees fleeing from war zones I often wonder who is going to help the refuges of the class war. Unfortunately, they aren’t a “sexy” cause.
An extremely powerful essay. All I can add is the suggestion that the bourgeois, pseudo left didn’t necessarily blunder into the efficacy of Identity politics all on their lonesome.
The CIA has a classification of associate called “Change agent”. Rather than direct employees these are ostensibly independent individuals who receive covert funding to push a specific agenda approved by the CIA. The general agenda the Change agent concerns themselves with may be approved of or disapproved of by the CIA, the important thing is that the Change agent maintains their specific agenda within the bounds of acceptable thought defined by the CIA.
In 2010, Wikileaks disclosed that long time, prominent, American feminist Gloria Steinem was registered by the CIA as a Change agent. That Steinem was pushing a feminist agenda was a matter of indifference to the CIA, the crucial thing was that Steinem’s feminism remained with limits set by the CIA. It is to be presumed that had Steinem started to draw links between sexual inequality and systemic, class income inequality or the dramatic wealth inequality between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, her funding would have been withdrawn.
Steinem was a pioneer in the post-war wave of feminism. In the context of the time, feminism could be considered “identity politics”.
Identity politics is the Permanent State’s preferred instrument of Distraction, Diversion and Division.
Feminism has since passed rightly into orthodox social discourse. Similarly, LGB has more recently, passed rightly into accepted social constructs.
The Permanent State would wring the last drops of usefulness out of “weaponised” LGB identity politics by the enforced celebration of the Rainbow cult. Rather than allow LGB to pass quietly into accepted normalcy, the Rainbow Unicorn is to be worshiped on pain of social ostracism. Heaven help the Civil Servant that eschews a rainbow lanyard.
Recognising the passing utility of LGB identity politics, the Permanent State had to conjure up from a near nonexistent reality, a new IDENTITY. And so, we have seemingly from nowhere, ubiquitous Trans identity. Ubiquitous because the spectrum of Trans has been purposefully and disingenuously set to include all and sundry.
That resistance to the “T” adjunct should come from long time activists within LGB (eg. Cherry and Hanvey) is something I suspect the Permanent State had not anticipated. Nonetheless, some of those with genuine history within the LGB community as opposed to those duplicitously riding and abusing the bandwagon (Sturgeon) can separate the few, genuine cases of gender dysphoria from the avalanche comprising the broadband definition of Trans. This all encompassing spectrum includes bad faith actors, sexual deviants, the mentally ill, victims of social contagion, immature individuals in thrall to the cult of Woko Haram and children seduced by the odd, seemingly spontaneous trend within msm to declare Trans as somehow “special”, “brave”, nebulously “virtuous”.
The Permanent State cares not a jot for the welfare of individuals caught up in its Machiavellian, social engineering. If LGB and genuine T individuals suffer from the inevitable backlash resultant from compulsory, public supplication to the Rainbow Unicorn Totem, then “tuff luck” (says they).
Identity politics is the means by which the Permanent State ensures Power remains unalterably in the grasp of the self perpetuating, elite, managerial caste.
Vivian: “… Rather than allow LGB to pass quietly into accepted normalcy, the Rainbow Unicorn is to be worshiped on pain of social ostracism. Heaven help the Civil Servant that eschews a rainbow lanyard… ”
I do not doubt for a moment that the Permanent State as you call it, is glorying in this, as the Permanent State is invariably capitalist (and neoliberal these days). However, there may be more at play because this dangerous tripe has the seeds for destruction of the whole of Western society contained within it, and that seems to be more of a psychotic feel to it. Add to that, psychopathy, narcissism, sociopathy, real mental illness, deviance brought into full flowering by unlimited access to porn, a desperate need to escape sexual stereotyping, social contagion, et al, and we have the perfect storm. Paedophilia has been clamouring for a very long time to be re classed as a sexual orientation rather than as a perversion. It is not hard to understand that all the above would be attracted to an ideology that lets you do exactly what you want with whom, to whom, when you feel like it. After LGB, there is only the perversions egged on by mental illness and psychopathy.
It is, indeed, social engineering from above (Sturgeon, Slater, Harvie) but I believe its ultimate goal, the queering of society (Queer Marxism) must first remove females from the equation. That is essential if the project is to work. There never has been a human endeavour that did not so-opt those it was to destroy into its embrace, which is why young women who mutilate themselves are lauded (the sadism comes in here, too, as it does with the castration cult that has latched on to this ideology). That is what has happened: so many other unspeakable perversions have latched on, parasitically, to the original parasite, that the original is almost buried under the latched-on. The original parasite was the ‘trans’ gender lobby that infiltrated every government, every public body, every school, the police, the legal system, the judiciary, the civil service, on behalf of the neoliberal capitalists, and whose aim was to queer society, but even it cannot now control what it has unleashed.
Women will fight back and it will get ugly, very dangerous even, but, as I believe, the seeds of its own destruction are now firmly planted and will begin to grow. Females will strengthen and toughen along the way, which was not part of the plan, but Mother Nature or evolution if you like, also has other plans. Neither females nor the working-class, both of which will always remain the engine of change will be allowed to be removed. If you look for it, you will see the pattern beginning to emerge, the pattern that has been sustained throughout all human evolution. The planet itself is in dire straits, and, contrary to Greta’s stance on ‘trans’, it will not be allowed to die at the hands of those neoliberal capitalists who have put it on life-support through the auspices of the equivalent of the Orcs. I believe we are witnessing, close up and personal, a rapid evolutionary leap forward that will change the old order all over the world.
Brilliant piece by Deirdre. As Jen Isaakson(sp?) said Patriarchy is when a society believes the man who says he’s a woman over the women who say he isn’t. We’ve reached a point where people captured by this ideology claim with a straight face that middle-aged middle-class men with a fetish are the most vulnerable in society. And you are castigated for disagreeing.
By undermining class as a structural determinant, you can push the blame for lack of success on the individual rather than the society that sets them up for failure. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to state that transgender ideology will hurt working class women more than anyone else and it’s the middle class liberal feminists in the Scottish third sector and politics that are helping to throw them under a bus.
I’ve not seen the film yet but it is absolutely on my to do list.
Women Won’t Wheesht.
Wow. That article really hit the spot in framing what has been done to the working-class — mainly through middle-class agents — and all that follows from that. I was, quite literally, near in tears when I read what has been done to my class. I was in a profound state of real grief as I read it — it is all true.
I’m old now and doubt I have very much longer to go and in some ways I am thankful of that: I won’t have to live through what is to be visited on the young and upcoming generations of the working-class of this county. I do so very much grieve for them.
Thank you for your very, very insightful and clearly expressed view Deirdre O’Neill. And thankyou, Barrheadboy, for printing it here.
What a briĺliant critique.
Too bad it’s not valid or even worthy of engagement with by the chancers,money grabbers and control freaks who have slimed their way to the top of the political dungheap.
As this insightful article implies, and as Postcolonial theory tells us, intellectuals on the Left tend to misunderstand nationalism, even in instances like ours where a people only become ‘nationalists’ in order to free their nation from colonial and cultural exploitation and oppression. Colonialism, however, also leaves an oppressed people subject to external neo-liberal (or rather neo-colonial) ideologies and influences.
Every culture is national in that “culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns” (Fanon). It is our national culture (and Scots language) that gives us our national identity/national consciousness and which also naturally rejects imposed or alien ideologies, much as we see.
What we are witnessing is the imposition of a Western neo-colonial cultural and political ideology which is alien to all national cultures, and is also opposed to national identities. Like any form of cultural assimilation the process ends up ‘manufacturing’ the colonized mindset, and giving a people a ‘false persona’, which is based on the promoted ‘cultural illusion’ reflecting a supposedly ‘superior’ order/culture.
Hence the route out of (neo)colonialism to independence and liberation always involves “a fight for a national culture”, mainly because: “In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state” (Fanon).
Scots today arguably face two levels of colonial oppression: 1. Westminster and the British state, its ongoing socio-economic exploitation and (Anglophone) cultural assimilation reflecting classical and/or internal colonialism imposing on Scottish people a ‘one-nation’ British identity, and; 2. Holyrood’s colonial administration (‘an instrument of coercion’) now facilitating/enacting neo-colonialism ideals based on adoption of other Western cultural assimilation ideologies.
In short, independence is about (Scottish) ‘national identity’, whereas promotion of ‘gender identity’ and/or ‘British identity’ is not. The latter are anti-independence (i.e. neo/colonial) policies while the former remains the essential basis of any independence movement.
Intellectuals on the left generally eschew nationalism, Alf, because their ‘vision’ is ‘bigger’. This would be understandable if they ever actually supported working-class people across the board, but they don’t. They have neither empathy for nor understanding of people they would never cross paths with. Not all intellectuals of the left fit into that category, but, unfortunately, too many do. Like the ‘trans’ lobby, they live in a bubble, and, like them, get very angry when their incomprehension is pointed out to them. Left-wing intellectuals see this utopian coming together of the working-class in perfect Marxist harmony all over the world – and forget that people here need help now. The ‘trans’ lobby see the same utopia except that theirs is Queer Marxism – and equally unobtainable because the left-wing intellectuals would never be able to actually tolerate real Marxism – or real female freedom, for that matter. Even Marx himself, albeit he and Engels proclaimed the worth of women and their rights, they had a very low opinion of them in reality, especially Marx, who treated them rather like dogsbodies. Quelle surprise!
As a working-class male, I entirely endorse Deirdre O’Neill’s analysis! It, therefore, comes as no surprise to me that a decadent and ‘mysterious’ colonial administration, such as ours, has so enthusiastically aligned itself with metaphysical, left-fascism and its programme of linguistic re-categorization and axiomatic denial of the defiantly material fact that there are but two sexes i.e. male and female. How, future historians will laugh.
Brilliant. The left, at least, the hard left, has long since deserted the working-class, and even the left, represented by Labour, is no longer working-class either. We are living through a period of extensive banality, superficiality and virtue-signalling, with no depth or width to it. The whole ‘trans’ nonsense is, indeed, bankrolled by men – all men – who have sunk massive investment in American corporate Big Tech, Bog Pharma, Big Prosthetics, etc. A few of them are ‘trans’ identified, and their families work for this ideology.
Further down the ladder are the ‘Gauleiters’ – the sadistic and probably psychopathic enforcers of this stuff, well-aware of the harm they and their masters are doing to females and to society at large. Females stand in their way because they are coming for our children. Not all – Susie Green? – but most women will defend their young, and these sadists know it, so they have been bankrolled to push this stuff through into society at every level.
At the lower end are the ‘trans’ activists – almost all men’s rights activists, misogyny seeping out of their pores – and those who claim a ‘trans’ identity. Girls have been encouraged through social media to adopt this identity, encouraged to mutilate themselves (and, if anything proves this is a men’s movement in its entirety, the fact that men are discouraged from the same, except for the cult of castration which some of the sexual sadists enjoy) while children are the target of the movement, both for purposes of paedophilia and for validation. If you were born in the wrong body, you need to have been a child in the wrong body, then a teenager in the wrong body, then an adult in the wrong body.
Many of these men are sexual deviants of all kinds, but wholly unwilling to admit they are, hence the aggression and bullying. The aim is to make all perversions acceptable or, if not acceptable, certainly permissible. Those who sought GRCs in the past were transsexuals, fully transitioned males, who, truth to tell, are no physical threat to females, but they led the vanguard for the breaching of female boundaries which has opened the door to self-ID and a huge influx of deviants determined to gain access to female spaces, men’s rights activists determined to wipe out all female gains and take all our rights for themselves.
This is about so much more than toilets: it is about the removal of all of women’s rights, all of them. It will come to be that women’s representation on everything will be take by men in frocks, pretending to be female and woman-facing. Never have I heard a ‘trans’ identified man (apart from transsexuals) ever say that he will not breach female boundaries. Of course not, because that is the whole point. I must say that, personally, I have been disappointed in the number of men in the independence movement (apart from the bloggers and commentators on the blogs, plus a number of Unionists) who have been willing to back women on this issue. They have been willing, on the contrary, to sacrifice females and throw them under the bus for the sake of munching on more dangly carrots. They are despicable, as are the handmaidens, the Vichy women, who go along with this betrayal of their sisters – and themselves, the barmy bints.
As a working-class male, I fully endorse Deirdre O’Neill’s trenchant analysis! What a refreshing change.
Do you think Owen Jones is Working class ? or Alyn Smith ,John Nicolson, Fergus Ewing and even Mhiari Black who comes from a proper upper middle class family who wanted for nothing, Isn’t Her Father a GP ? Working Class my Ass and none of them never had real jobs in their lives . They certainly mostly have something in common though.
Fergus Ewing?
No, Christine, I certainly don’t think any of them is working-class. What made you think I did? Like so many others, I was born into the working-class, and know what it is like to have little. Unlike some others, I have not forgotten my roots, though I suppose I might be classed now as middle-class. I see people struggling all around me, and they are mainly single mothers doing their best for their children, or wives and mothers of men on low wages, and they are being hit harder than anyone right now, along with pensioners, of which I am one, so, basically, I have come full circle, as I have no extra pension and had to wait for my state pension when it was decided – by Tory and Lib Dem men – that I didn’t need it for a few years.
A brilliant, top-class piece of writing by Deidre O’Neill. Thank you.
Josef: it will be, largely, working-class women who will be worst affected by this. It is inevitably females, and their children, who bear the brunt of poverty, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, low wages, poor working conditions, etc.
In other countries, females are denied education when everyone knows that educating women is a major step to improve family circumstances, then social circumstances for working-class families. Some Taliban believe in education, but only for boys, and, even then, they prefer stone-age living conditions, all the better to retain their religious grip.
In Iran, the clergy seek to stamp out dissent from women by incarcerating them and killing them, terrorising them into staying in the home. In China, right now, women are out on the streets demanding more freedom and being beaten; also in China, Uygur women are being beaten and raped and prevented from attending schools and colleges. In a number of Arab countries, in Pakistan, and elsewhere, women are uneducated and are discouraged from stepping out of the home without a male escort.
In India, rural females, in particular, are raped in horrendous numbers, and blamed for their own assaults. The list goes on. This is not just a Western problem. Poor and working-class women all over the world are being raped, beaten, killed because they challenge male authority. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly not all men, but it is men who do this; it is men who do not want to lose the privileges that being male affords them, even when they are in the poorest circles.
In some countries, when famine sets in, only men and boys are fed. In India and China, a million female foetuses annually are aborted because they are female. Something is terribly out of kilter in humanity, and it has led, probably, to climate change and the destruction of the planet on massive scale, with loss of species, habitat, and so on. I’m not saying it is all men, because women are consumers, too.
However, it is invariably men who are raking in the profits and who push for ever greater exploitation of the world around them, and, by default, the subjugation of women because, I think, we would do things differently and they know it. They would no longer be the cock on top of the midden. I may be very wrong and will live to regret saying it, but I do believe we are witnessing a very rapid evolutionary change that is necessary to save our species, other species, and our planet.
That involves women having a greater impact, not a lesser one, and this is the acid test in the short term for what will prove to be a very tough existence in the long-term future. It is, after all, MOTHER Nature, and she will tolerate just so much before she bites back.
@Lorna Campbell
Hi Lorna. First, let me say: I never went out of my way to be working-class, I simply am working-class. I can also say with certainty: power doesn’t shoot working-class, political dissidents in this country, it saves the bullets and starves them to death instead. “Male-power”, I’ll argue, if simplistically, has always known the collective strength of women to be a mortal threat to its fragile hegemony. Given that “male-power” in any age, is actually held by a minuscule number of men, it has always been necessary to inculcate a toxic, misogynistic narrative amongst boys and men in order to maintain imperial hegemony. You don’t have to be a Marxist to know that history is driven by constant change, and in that vein many men and boys today, have discarded much of the ancient male-supremacist narrative. A phenomenon that, perhaps sooner rather than later, will produce seismic change and consequences for all concerned.
I quite agree, Josef. I believe that men and boys are damaged by the daft misunderstandings that exist between men and women, and I do not absolve my sex of misunderstanding what most males are about. I was a daughter, I am a wife, mother and grandmother, and I have always had a very high regard and love for the men in my family, and, as I have said, often, I was very lucky in the friendships I had with male school friends and university friends.
No, I don’t suppose any of us chooses the class into which we are born, but it does behove us all to try and walk a mile in the shoes of others. I think that this is what is missing these days: entitled infants who have never heard the word, no, who have no base on which to build maturity, have taken over, except for a form of narcissism, have no comprehension of how others live. We can only pray that they do grow up and out of their delusions.
I look back, though, and think we had the best of human decency in the post-war UK till Thatcher’s era, when it was all dismantled. We were not well-off, but we knew we were a society, and that we owed ordinary working-class people a decent standard of living in a welfare state. Individualism is not a bad thing per se, but it has been taken to dangerous extremes because, perversely, it leads to social contagion and collusion even in class terms, disintegrating all that holds us together.
Deirdre’s film – Adult Human Female – is a MUST watch for all.
Excellent article and some great comments.
Despite the overwhelming number of the general public who do not support the GRR, our politicians are not listening.
All along, we have been told that there is no intention to change the EA 2010, Even though we know they cannot, it is reserved to WM.
Instead as we all forecast, the Scotgov has changed the definition of sex via the GR Public Boards Act. Lady Haldane’s recent judgement says “For the purposes of the 2010 Act” sex is not limited to biological or birth sex but also includes those with a GRC.
There can be no protecting ‘Single Sex spaces’ for women, if that ‘sex’ includes GRC holders and with 100% of the population eligible to obtain one, simply on the basis of self declaration.
All that matters now is ‘boots on the ground’. Please come along to Holyrood on the 21st @ 1pm.
https://twitter.com/ForWomenScot/status/1601504036569894913?t=MDu47dqPiV5ipTTTUXceaQ&s=19
Lady Haldane’s judgement goes even further, Nally, because all the other protected characteristics, except gender reassignment are under threat, too, for the simple reason that the sex class of women can belong to all of them. In effect, her ruling has left gender reassignment as the only protected characteristic. For Women Scotland were perfectly right in their challenge that the very definition of woman in relation to the Acts has been changed. The SNP lies about this being a mere administration clear-up are absolutely clear now. Several changes have been made, including an actual extension to trans rights that did not exist before in law, plus 16/17 year olds will be included for the first time. Are these bloody politicians so thick, or have they even bothered to read the proposed legislation?
Superb editorial in the Observer today on GRRB. Though the Guardian is very captured, the Observer takes a more nuanced stance.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/18/scotland-controversial-proposed-gender-reforms
Wham Bam F*** O** ” Mam ”
This is an absolutely brilliant essay , like watching a series of protruding nails being smacked dead centre and driven through the superficially-veneered * Progressive * surface into the cheap MDF structure of the lunatic * Trans * ideology .
Every objection – formed & half-formed – I’ve had ( and have ) is addressed and piercingly articulated here , every deserving target bulls-eyed with great precision . Nothing to add , other than that this essay should be nailed to the door of Bute House and the occupant/s of that hermetically sealed ( from legitimate criticism ) fortress be compelled to answer her critics and the concerns of – in particular – the W.O.M.E.N who put her there .
She wont of course : having been fully , willingly captured by this utter mind and society poisoning garbage and with one eye on her future elevation to the Globalist ” WE have plans for YOU ( Plebs ) ” Elite/s , the other eye swivelling to possible legal consequences should she lose the protection her current position affords her , she’ll entrench herself deeper in her mental bunker . Apres moi , le deluge ? Non , madame , apres toi , le retour de la Raison . Hopefully .
Trigger alert
Surely if you think you are in the wrong body, and there is nothing physically wrong with you, then that is a form of body dysmorphic disorder, and therefore a mental disorder requiring counselling and psychiatric treatment?
Well, yes, it would if it were only women who were claiming this, but it’s led by men, so it must be true. Gendered souls, it is.
Are there any figures that back up your claims – are you saying there are more men that identify as women, than there are vice versa, and that men are driving this? I would expect the numbers to be roughly the same, if it were not a fad or ‘trendy’.
BP: There are far more men than women, as we will find out when the GRA reform goes through. Yes, it appears that there are more females going through transition, and I think that is right, but most of the men do not change themselves in any way. I think we are all going to be shocked at just how many will now apply for a GRC or simply come out as ‘trans’. The female transitioners are very likely to be followers of fashion, as was discovered with anorexia, cutting and so on. This is because, it is believed, they tend to follow their peer group much more closely than males.
The ones at the top, the multi billionaires, pushing this stuff are all men – without exception. Lower down, it is a mix of male and female, albeit the activists are male by a majority. While it may well be a ‘fad’, in the main, for females, if the research is right on the vast array of fetishes and paraphilias which mostly males display, then the numbers are likely to increase a great deal once the legislation passes.
This is another reason why the 2010 Equality Act is not fit for purpose. In Norway, a man identified as both a woman and as a disabled person, so he is displaying two paraphilias at once, and this is why I have said that no other protected category apart from gender reassignment is now protected. Men have fetishes about old women, very young girls, about black women, about ethnic women, about women with religious beliefs. Anything at all that you can think of, there will be a fetish/paraphilia to match it. These used to be kept out of sight, but, now, the opposite is the case.