Examining Gender Identity ideology and its impact on Women's Sex based rights and Gay Rights. Exploring how this has taken such firm root in Western societies (Cognitive & Regulatory Capture).
This paper seeks to critically evaluate treatments for Gender Dysphoria and the field of transgender health. As they point out there has been a rapid rise in referrals to gender clinics over the last decade. After some lobbying the condition was no longer to be considered a mental health condition but despite this medical interventions are frequently sought.
For more on the changes to the the manual for diagnosis (DSM-5) see my post which covers the response from Dr Ann Lawrence; self described transsexual.
The medical profession is littered with mistakes and many of them relate to the psychiatry profession, homosexuality and their involvement in Gay Conversion Therapy. I could also point out that the man who introduced Lobotomies was given a Nobel Prize before he was discredited. It behoves us well not to be arrogant about our contemporary medical practice. As I have long argued, what if we are actually practicing Gay Conversion Therapy in our rush to affirm the “transgender child”?
It is because of Alan Turing that I use the phrase “Turing Treatment” for what is happening to my own, gay, son. I had imagined Turing was a tortured soul who hid his sexuality. I recently read a biography that dispelled this notion. Apparently he would drop broad hints about his sexuality to screen out those who were not accepting. He was not fired after the court case for “gross obsenity” , the crime of being gay. His suicide seems likely to be related to the, court mandated, enforced, chemical castration. The same drugs, we gave Turing, are now doled out, by doctors, to gay teenagers, with no counselling.
The paper reminds us that although great advances have been made on the rights of homosexuals and bisexuals, in many countries, this is not the case across the globe. We now have former gay rights organisations expanding their remit to cover “Gender Identities” as illustrated by this diagram. This includes a whole range of identities which are now wider than the list below. Historically some of these identities would have been found on the fetish scene.
For the purposes of this piece we need to look at how the trans umbrella has expanded to cover gender incongruence. This is where there are legitimate concerns. I was a tree-climbing, den-making girl. This was not unusual in my working class circles, in the North of England. It was so ”normal” all my girlfriends were the same and we were not even labelled “tomboys”. We played with boys and were very competitive. I lost count of how many buildings I was the first person, of either sex, to jump off. I had very traditional parents, by the way, who didn’t bat an eyelid. So, how have we arrived at a place where I would be pathologised in 2021? Are we policing ”sex stereotypical” expectations more now than we were in the 1970’s? Are we inculcating a discomfort with biological sex by pathologising normal variations of behaviour in males /females?
How do we identify those who are deemed to be “failing” expectations for their sex and might be ascribed a ”transgender” identity? As stated above I met some of the criteria as a girl.
The paper covers statements by the Royal Society of Paediatric and Child health. (RCPCH) which conflate gay conversion therapy with any attempt to reconcile someone with their biological sex. They assume it is not the ideal outcome to avoid a lifetime of dependence on cross-sex hormones /surgical modifications to your body. In fact desistance, with no medical intervention, should be seen as the optimum outcome. Yet there are vociferous campaigns to remove /lessen gatekeeping for access to medical intervention. The paper points out that between 60-80% of children, who present with gender dysphoria, desist. They also cover the proliferation /explosion of gender identities in the last decade; including pangender, agender and non-binary.
The authors proceed to raise the lack of consensus around the exact nature of this condition. What if this is just a natural variation?
This paragraph packs a lot in. There are contested arguments about what causes gender identity incongruence. The “wrong” hormones in utero, wrongly ”sexed” brains or just an internal, and disprovable, claim one simply ”feels” like a woman/man which leads to a circular argument. What does a woman/man feel like?
It is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. It posits the existence of a ”gendered soul”. This is a belief system. It may be a fervently, sincerely, held belief but when you ask society to participate in that belief system, to the extent of shaping laws based on it, we require a firmer foundation.
The idea we are not sexually dimorphic has spread like wildfire through academia to justify the concept of ”transgender”. In order to validate this category inconvenient facts must be cast aside to reshape reality. Here is the reality we must defend.
Most societies across the globe adopt a hierarchy based on sex, enforced by social rules enforcing expected behaviours for both sexes with varying degrees of coercion or cajoling. People expressing a severe discomfort with their biological sex are compared to the condition of bodily integrity disorder or apotemnophilia. The latest crop of recruits to gender clinic are a very different demographic to those we say ten or twenty years ago. Since 2009 there have been a 25 fold increase in referrals to the U.Ks main Gender Clinic, most strikingly in natal girls; illustrates in the graph below.
Here is some research on co-morbidities in the referrals to a Finnish Gender Clinic.
Note the high incidence among foster kids. I wrote about that phenomenon in a series on this blog. 13% of referrals to the U.K Gender Clinics are fostered or adopted. Eating disorders and a background of bullying also feature prominently in the stories of detransitioners.
Another common feature is how many are same sex attracted. Over 40% of natal males and nearly 70% of females. This graph is from the Tavistock clinic, in the U.K.
It seems warranted to question whether this is a new form of conversion therapy for those struggling with internalised homophobia. Is this a new catch-all diagnosis that is being applied to children/adolescents wrestling with other issues that are going untreated?
The paper continues to question the use of puberty halting drugs which are promoted as a ”pause” when in reality near 100% proceed to cross-sex hormones. Moreover long term follow up, where it exists, do not support the current pathway.
Warnings are given about the current belief that encouraging reconciliation with biological sex is a form of conversion therapy. This is dangerous and ignores the role of therapeutic approaches to resolve more complex issues underlying the identification as “transgender”. Some of these issues include homosexuality but also autism and lack of secure emotional attachment, in those from unstable family backgrounds.
The authors also touch on feminist concerns in promulgating the idea there is a right way to be a woman or man. We are in danger of reifying sex stereotypes rather than challenging them. We are also assuming a treatment pathway developed for adult men is appropriate for adolescent girls and female children. In conclusion, they warn that Psychiatry runs the risk of colluding with, or being silent about, an uncontrolled medical experiment.
We simply do not know how many will regret these medical interventions, some of which are irreversible.
I would recommend reading the entire paper for more on the use of suicide statistics in this area and the lack of accountability for a treatment pathway that may involve therapeutic professionals, endocrinologists, parents, surgeons and the patient themselves. Legal accountability may be difficult to determine but I know who I hold morally responsible for doing this to my son.
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This is part two of a series looking at a document produced, with their input, on prisoners with a transgender identity. No women’s groups were included in discussions about making prisons mixed sex. You can read part one here. 👇
I am not going to cover all the details in the document, in this post, because they are repetitive and the arguments are familiar. Notable are the absence of any women’s rights voices Three trans-identified prisoners were consulted. The transgender community are portrayed as a vulnerable group, despite the massive institutional power they have attained in the past decade. The report relies, heavily, on U.S. data to accentuate the theme of vulnerability. The U.S Prison system is far more brutal, than that of the U.K., which lends more credence to arguments about the vulnerability of trans-identified males. The report also makes good use of research covering the whole of the LGBTQ + “community” without disaggregating the data to reveal how much is based on gay males or Lesbians. {I will return to this document to cover some of the issues about access to medication and competing mental health diagnoses, within the transgender population. That needs a post in itself and is the one area where I think claims of vulnerability stand up to scrutiny for *some* of those with a transgender identity.}
There are lots of claims about ”transphobia”, in the U.K. Prison estate which turns out to mainly focus on not using preferred pronouns or lack of access to make-up or wigs.
High rates of participation in prostitution are blamed on family rejection or employment discrimination. Mental health issues are blamed on ”minority stress” rather than considering if vulnerable individuals are latching onto a transgender identity. There’s also a note of nervousness in the foreword as if the authors sense the tripwires built in to the, ever evolving, transgender ideology.
In this post I am going to look at whether any contributors considered the impact on female prisoners. Note that the document itself refers to trans-identified males as ”females” and vice versa. Who was it that said the word ”woman” would never be enough?
Quite early in the report the authors make the extraordinary claim that modern medicine is too pre-occupied with treating health issues as if they only relate to men or women.
The truth is that medicine treats men as the default human and women’s health is much neglected. This topic has been covered by many feminists including by Caroline Criado-Perez in her book ”Invisible Women”.
The consultation is also intended to provide insight into the health needs of imprisoned trans-identified males /females and some of the contributors express frustration at the level of attention afforded to the sexual (“genderal”) politics of prison allocation. I am old enough to remember when changing female only prisons to mixed sex would have resulted in a rather robust, public, debate. Instead much of this has been achieved by consultations, such as this one, which excluded women’s groups.
The guidance put out in 2016 advised prisons that transgender offenders should be accommodated in the estate that accords with their “gender identity”. Those with a Gender Recognition Certificate already must be housed according to their ”legal gender”. This new instruction allowed for males, without a GRC, to be located in the female estate.
Many of the commentators welcomed this clarity. I will spare you the comments about non-binary prisoners and how to accommodate ”gender fluid” people. Some of the more activist contributors were critical of the binary nature of the prison system. 🤷♂️. One brave soul raised a question about transvestites, unaware, presumably, that we can no longer talk about sex offenders with a history of transvestic fetishism.
This was typical of the published responses. Staff welcome the move away from requiring a GRC, to a policy of self-identification, and think we should be less preoccupied with female penises.
The report betrays some inconsistency about the index offences for the majority of trans-identified males. The use of ”female” applied to male prisoners is, no doubt, strategic. Who was it that said the word ”woman” would not be enough for the trans-language grab. They have also appropriated ”female”. It does mean you have to remember we are talking about males; who are responsible for 99% of sex offences and whose victims are 88% female. Here is one quote based on research from the United States which is immediately contradicted. So which is it? Are they more likely to be sex offenders or not?
Attempts to get data, disaggregated, to demonstrate the offending pattern of trans-identified males are hampered by the practice of recording male crimes as if they were committed by females. Women’s rights groups have been forced to put in endless freedom of information requests to try to assess the risk. A task that should not have fallen on women, most of whom are unpaid.
Here is the outcome from an FOI response. The MOJ seem to have changed to a different software format which I had to download. The data released is here 👇. For comparison the figure for sex offenders, held in the male estate, is 18%. This figure is approaching 50%. All the more alarming if you consider that men with a GRC will have their crimes recorded as ”female” crimes. Either we have a problem of sex offending in this demographic or sex offenders are using the loopholes allowed by self-identification. Which ever it is, and I suspect it is a bit of both, we have a problem.
Source for the above 👇. I had to go to some lengths to access this and download new, open source, software. I am sure this is motivated by egalitarian principles and not to make it more awkward.
Now we have some context let us return to our focus group. Some of the contributors did raise concerns about male sex offenders in the female estate. I had not even thought about men trying to avail themselves of anti-libidinal medication, to deal with their sex drive, while in prison. Apparently it’s a thing!
Another interviewee raised a similar concern, only to be immediately undercut by the next commentator, in what I imagine was intended to be a reassuring comment. Men don’t need a penis to sexually offend is not allaying my fears for these, vulnerable, women.
One would have thought the research should have been done before inflicting men in female prisons but hey that’s just me! Next we get some revealing statements about why so many thought it was a solution to place trans-identifying males in with women.
There is a breathtaking lack of awareness about the sexism involved in projecting stereotypical expectations on women. They are treating women as validation aids /support humans. As if we are the universal mother!
Some did express reservations, however, once again it is the concerns of the ”trans female” that are centred and lack of a warm reception is not framed within the context of women’s safety or dignity.
All of which reminds me of this statement, by James Barratt, a gender identity specialist. This was revealed in a court transcript, involving a male prisoner who won a legal challenge to be moved to the female estate. Before I tell you what his index offences were this is how women who object are described:
Yes! You read that right he anticpates any woman who objects will be ”The sort of women who enjoy conflict” 😳. So let us look at ”Karen’s” index offences and parole assessments. Manslaughter, released on licence (to a female bail hostel, by the way) and within five days had attempted to rape a woman. (It was a vicious assault).
Just in case you think it could not have got any worse. Here’s the ”mitigation” for the attempted rape put forward. Whilst Mr Spurr did advocate for detention in the male estate his explanation for the rape beggars belief. Personally I think the motives outlined here point to a specific type of risk which may present from these prisoners. He was jealous of her being a woman.
After all this the reason a male (attempted) rapist was moved to the female estate was because he needed to ne with his ”peers” and the women were needed to act as therapeutic aids. If this does not make your blood boil what will it take? 🤦♀️.
My digression to cover this case is because the above prisoner, Karen Jones, was invited to the House of Lords, by Lord Patel, to advise on the treatment of transgender prisoners. I have no idea if he was one of the prisoners who were allowed to input to Lord Patel’s work, developing policy which directly affects female prisoners.
I will look at this document to cover some of the issues raised about competing mental health issues, in this demographic, in another post.
Researching Gender Identity Ideology and it’s impact on women and gay rights. I do this full-time and am unwaged. Any help to keep me going is gratefully received. Only if you can spare it and , irrespective, I will keep my content free.
This document was produced, in December 2017, to look at the needs of those identifying as transgender. In particular the focus is on how these ”identities” could be accommodated in a prison system that separates the estate by sex. This practice originated for reasons of dignity and privacy and because approaching 99% of sex offenders are male and their victims, overwhelmingly, female.
These are the authors :
Lord Patel authored the forward and talks a lot about how the transgender community are poorly understood and ill-served by a prison system based on binary ideas about sex and the way the prison allocates inmates. This document is underpinned by a belief system that accepts the notion there is an appropriate way to behave dependent on your biological sex. This is biological essentialist thinking; which is an accusation frequently levelled at feminists who reject the ideology surrounding “Gender Identity”.
Lord Patel is, therefore, a fully paid up believer in the idea someone can be born in the wrong body.
In the long list of acknowledgments he includes a trans-identified male who has also given evidence to the House of Commons. This is he speaking to a select committee for the transgender equality inquiry. This is what Megan had to say about housing male sex offenders with women: “we would not exclude male to female people from the female estate because they have committed a sexual offence”. Not one of the women challenged this statement.
Here are the list of acknowledgements. Spot the women’s organisations who were consulted? Thats right there are none but they did manage to talk to many trans lobby groups including one for transgender children (Mermaids) who seem an odd choice to input to adult, prison policy.
Of course other key trans activists were consulted, including Stephen Whittle who is never far away when there is an opportunity to dismantle women’s rights and prove they are not one of us.
Press for change are another trans lobby group who have been working to change laws since 1992. They specifically do not like laws which allow for discrimination on the basis of sex. This would be those permitted discriminations that cater for women only spaces and services. They therefore work against the rights of women.
Gender Ideology: Terminology
There follows a long section on terminology which has been rammed down our throats by these lobby groups and completely captured our political elites. The total surrender to this nonsensical ideology seems near complete. A sample below:
First up is an attempt to problematise the recognition of biological sex and public records. It is rarely necessary to resort to chromosomal checks and, as I have noted many times, those with chromosomal abnormalities are not a feature of referrals to gender clinics. This was researched and resulted in the abandonment of karyotype tests for those at odds with their biological sex.
Here we are also being manipulated to accept that fully intact, biological males, can identify as women. Lord Patel knows some of these ”women” don’t take any medical steps. For the record I don’t think any policy should be linked to whether or not anyone is pre or post-operative. {Prisons should simply base allocation on biological sex with appropriate provision in the female estate for the tiny number of women who have XY chromosomes but have an oestrogen led puberty because they have conditions like complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) }
Lord Patel doesn’t even see a problem with accepting men, with a sexual fetish, under the trans umbrella. This is a paraphilia. It includes men who wish to publicly parade in women’s clothing and force women to participate in their sexual practices. This goes against principles of consent.
To which I object!
Next up the ridiculous notion that we should accept the nonsensical idea of people who claim not to have a biological sex or those with a fluid identity. Naturally there is the offensive repurposing of the word “queer” which Lord Patel advises has been reclaimed. Tell that to the gay men who actually were on the receiving end of the ”queer-bashing” which, let me remind you, is not a historical phenomenon but a contemporary occurrence. I can think of racist terms that have also not been rehabilitated. I am sure he would, quite rightly, object if I , a white woman, started to lecture him on how they had been ”reclaimed”.
Finally it is outrageous to tell those of us who own our biological sex that we are, simultaneously, accepting of the sex stereotypes projected onto our bodies/personalities. I know I am a woman. I am not a fecking stepford wife/cisgender. I find the term offensive.
Finally we are told who the report is aimed at. Turns out it was to inform the Prison Service, Probation Service, the Criminal Justice system and NHS England. It is intended to influence policy across all these sectors.
In part two I will look at what the document recommends.
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Researching Gender Identity Ideology and it’s negative impact on women’s rights and gay rights. It especially hurts vulnerable youths who are being medically transitioned.
Some more research about Scottish Prisons; who employed a researcher to draft reports justifying, I would argue, their policy of allowing self-identifying males to be housed in the female estate. This researcher had also undertaken research into the females forced into mixed sex spaces. You can read about their experiences here:
This research paper covers his work with trans-identifying prisoners. They were overwhelmingly male. The first paper he published, on this group, can be read here 👇
He followed this up with another paper on the same subjects so I will cover that next. Matthew begins by referencing the paper, linked below, covering female experiences in the prison system.
This paper focuses on sex differences in prison experiences. The researchers reported that the experiences of the female prisoners were so harrowing those conducting the interviews were left ”reeling”.
It is well worth reading the entire paper to get a sense the ways in which the female experience of prison is materially different to that of male prisoners. One of the key deprivations the women highlight is loss of privacy.This makes it all the more astounding women have been forced into mixed sex spaces. Here is another quote from that paper:
Matthew references this paper but his comment concentrates on the fact it is not inclusive of self-proclaimed ”women”.
Wrong Hall. Wrong Clothes.
The contrast between the experiences of female prisononers and the travails of the transgender prisoners is stark. The incidents considered ”transphobic abuse” were linked to the need for validation in an opposite sex identity. The title of the study gives a flavour of the sources of pain for these prisoners. These were being housed according to their biological sex and not having access to opportunities to ”perform” a new gender identity.
The sample interviewed is set out below:
The females, who identify as men, are held in the female estate. The Scottish Prison Service claims Gender Identity takes primacy, in terms of prison location, but recognises the vulnerability of females to sexual assault, in the male estate. It is also significant that of the males there are 5 held in the female estate, 5 were assessed as too high risk and a further prisoner was segregated. This is very much a pattern reflective of biological sex not ”identity”. Notice also that the SPS operate on a self-identified basis and include ”social transition” as valid. Here’s what the paper had to say about the risk assessed males: This was also described as a source of ”pain”.
Here is a summary of the kind of pain unique to the experience of transgender prisoners:
The key issues identified are not having access to the estate housing the opposite sex, misgendering, misnaming and transphobia. Since we already know, from the women’s accounts, some of these men were fully intact, bearded males, who re-identified with their sex on release, is it any wonder that some were ”misgendered”?
The author makes much of the concept of “authenticity” or the ”real deal”. Some of the pain attributed to the community centres on a lack of available opportunity to display your ”gender” and have it recognised by others. Here one prisoner outlines their experience and the role of the prison staff. Assessing motivations for transition would seem to be an essential part of any risk assessment but here it is approached as insensitivity on the part of the prison staff. A healthy degree of suspicion would seem to be an essential attribute when dealing with incarcerated criminals. 🤷♂️
This prisoner is half right. Your personal identity is your own business right up to the point when you demand we participate in your identity and that the world be reorganised to validate your self-perception. Then it becomes a societal issue.
Here the author raises the issue of disparity of treatment between the women and the females with a male identity. He is avoiding the issue here. The trans-identified males are held in the female estate because of the danger of sexual assault from males. The rest of the women were given no such consideration when they were allocated to mixed sex spaces.
I am struggling to muster up the prescribed amount of empathy for the deprivations described here. Maybe I am non-binary? Why is the prison service pandering to this level of entitlement and narcissism?
There are quite a few quotes in a similar vein. What strikes me is how much is bound up with a performance with all the stereotypical expectations of what makes a woman. Clothes, hair and make-up do not a woman make!
The prison is described as undermining the transition journey by not supplying the accoutrements, deemed necessary, to perform femininity. Maycock frames this as an abuse of prison power. This is what we call ”transperbole”.
Many of the quotes relate to lack of progress in their transition because they are unable to access hormones on line, as they had done outside. Appointments at Gender Clinics are difficult to arrange and one even complains he didn’t get enough notice to ”get ready”.
A number of the prisoners raise the issue of lack of role models for their social transition because they are not able to mix with their target sex. This makes it clear that the women are being treated as validation aids and expected to behave as support humans.
Here is another quote from a female. How are you really a ”man” if you have to copy men to learn how to do it? How is any of this authentic? What is a ”proper man”?
Here an inmate claims they can’t learn to perform their ”gender” from prison officers of their target sex. It has to be prisoners. Why? Are the female prison officers not performing their gender accurately?
The study then covers issues of social isolation, lack of support from families, some of whom are unaware of the new gender identity, and missing LGBT support groups from the outside. There are mixed feelings about ”Transgender” wings which don’t provide sufficient opportunities to mix with the target sex.
There are also mixed views about how safe it is to be transgender whilst in custody. One male shares an in incident where he was subject to sexualised comments about his “breasts” and penis. Another shared an anecdote about an aggressive female:
It is noticeable that these incidents are taken at face value. This in marked contrast to any tales of aggressive or sexually inappropriate behaviour shared by the females, in Maycock’s previous paper. In that paper he was skeptical often juxtaposing another women’s comment which undercut the testimony. The author says these tales are typical of the transphobic abuse meted out to the prisoners but does note an absence of transphobic violence or sexual abuse. Note that some females have actually been raped/sexually assaulted by male prisoners who were allocated to the female estate.
The report suggests that the lack of transphobic abuse is because the prison authorities respond to reports of transphobia and report any prisoner found to have indulged in this. These reports can result in time added onto sentences. I suspect Maycock sees this as positive but I find it deeply sinister, especially if correctly sexing someone comes under that heading. And it clearly does: 👇
Maycock then ties himself in knots about the issue of reporting other prisoners. Snitching is seen as something bound up with femininity so the trans-identified males don’t mind reporting because it validated their “identity”. I find the logic here quite torturous. The transgender person here would appear to be able to unleash the prison authorities on other prisoners. This looks more like an act of male dominance to me.
The author does not report all his findings in this paper as he is intending to publish another one. He does manage to throw in a reference to biological essentialism which none of these queer theorists appear to understand.
We are not saying that women have to be nurturing, emotional support humans who demonstrate their maternal instincts at every opportunity. We are just saying sex matters and is a reliable indicator for male pattern violence and sex offending. The amount of time Maycock uses the word ”support” in relation to what he expects of women, vis a vis transgender prisoners, is very revealing. He seems to have very stereotypical expectations about women and how men need make-up, hair and clothes to perform their authentic self.
I will leave you with this observation by Frances Crook of the Prison reform organisation , the Howard League.
Researching the impact of Gender Identity Ideology on women’s rights, gay rights and hoping to stop the Gender Industrial Complex before we have any more detransitioners.
The guidance was a collaboration with Trans Lobby group:Scottish Trans Alliance. The document references James Morton in the appendix. Here is what Morton had to say about the collaboration. {From the book Trans Britain by Christine Burns}. The decision to implement mixed sex spaces in the most challenging of environments was a strategic tactic. If they could persuade Prison’s to pilot this, on the most vulnerable women in our society, they could extend it to other single sex spaces. James even has the gall to use the word ”ethically” about this live experiment!
The document opens with a high minded statement about making sure the prison is free from homophobia and transphobia. The stated aim is to ensure everyone is treated with fairness and respect. Judge for yourself if any of this is fair to the women prisoners or the female staff.
Geneva Convention
The first thing that struck me is the claim that the guidance is evidence based. Their own research, which I covered in my previous blog, demonstrates they did NO research on the impact this would have on female prisoners. Even the, very biased, research project the SPS commissioned, showed 50% of the women had serious misgivings about the enforcement of, mixed sex, custodial facilities. It is worth noting that if these women were prisoners of war the Geneva Convention would protect these women. The Geneva convention repeatedly emphasises the need for women to be accommodated away from male prisoners. Here is article 25.
This principle is repeatedly emphasised to cover circumstances where women were subject to disciplinary proceedings
The Scottish Prison Service seems to be under the misapprehension that ”Gender Identity” is a legally protected characteristic. It is not. Gender Reassignment is the legally protected characteristic so is SEX. The Gender Recognition Act does not over-ride the legally protected characteristic of sex. Single sex spaces could be retained providing it is ”a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”.
Stonewall
The Scottish Prison service made an ideological decision to make custodial facilities mixed sex. As the policy is endorsed by Stonewall it is worth a reminder of Stonewall policy about single sex spaces. They campaigned to remove them!
Scottish Prison Policy
The SPS mandate pronoun use according to Gender Identity, not sex. Many of us may have been relaxed about maintaining a “polite fiction” prior to the onset of compelled speech. However, mandating pronouns signals an allegiance to an ideology that has had a deleterious impact on women’s rights and this has made me a pronoun refusenik.
Pronouns, however, are the least of my concerns re this policy. First of all, for the female staff, they are being forced to perform ”rub downs” and even full body searches according a self-declared ”Gender Identity” .
Staff are also told not to react discourteously when presented with a ”physical variation” they were not expecting. Such as, I imagine, a penis. 😳. The staff are taught to treat a surprise penis like a disability! Anyone raising any concerns should be dealt with by staff training or “re-educated”.
The document is keen to emphasise the fact that it is not a requirement of the Gender Recognition Act that any bodily modification have taken place; which is why we have the concept of the “female penis”.
Staff are instructed that prisoners should be located in the estate that matches their “Gender Identity”, not their sex and irrespective of their anatomy. Here is what they say about the male prisoners. Notice staff are told to discount the possibility there could be a nefarious motive for wishing to access the female estate. Furthermore the male is described as living as a ”woman” but the females having this policy imposed upon them are described as “people”.
The hypocrisy of the policy is exposed by the differential treatment meted out to females, who claim a male identity. This is not EQUAL treatment. A female with a trans-identity is to be given every consideration if they are fearful of sexual assault, in the male estate. A female in the female estate has NO voice in terms of forcible co-location with males.
The policy also makes a special mention of a category of ”non-reassigned trans people” which, we are told, includes the following groups:
The policy mandated that these groups should also be allowed certain items not traditionally associated with their ”Gender”. This can include a prosthetic penis or breasts.
The policy also makes it clear that information about someone’s ”Gender Identity ” should not be disclosed to other prisoners. In practice this means a female prisoner could be presented with an obvious male and the staff would not be able to confirm this. For those who have a Gender Recognition Certificate any disclosure would be treated as a crime.
It is also emphasised that a person who acquires a different gender identity on reaching the prison system should be accepted as the gender they now declare. There is also a rather sinister sentence about what questions the Prison Officer should ask following this disclosure:
All in all this policy is unfair to women. Its discriminatory and, frankly, a bit bonkers. How could a profession, dealing with people who have broken the law, endorse a policy that presumes people are who they say they are? Criminals lie. #JustSaying.
Research the harms of Gender Identity Ideology which has negative consequences for women’s rights, gay rights and children/teens undergoing unnecessary medical /surgical interventions.
Some research about female inmates and their reactions to being housed with males who have a ”transgender” identity. Since Claire Fox quoted it in the House of Lords I decided to seek it out.
Dr Matthew Maycock has also done research into what transgender prisoners want from the prison system. I will cover that paper in another blog post. He was employed by the Scottish Prison service for this research. The Scottish Prison service has worked closely with Transgender Lobby groups on their Prison policy. As evidenced by this statement, by James Morton, of Scottish Trans Alliance. This was published in Christine Burn’s book: ”TransBritain”
This lobby group ”strategised” that if they could make this “work”, for which I read ”get away with it”, they could then move on to eradicate all single sex spaces. Note their aim was to dispense with the requirement for a Gender Recognition Certificate. Admission to the female estate would be on the basis of self-declaration.
Dr Maycock now works at Dundee University. Here is his biography.
His starting point accepts the central tenets of transgender identity ideology; mainly that sex is “assigned” at birth and women need a new qualifier to our existence as females;”cis”. Matthew would do well to consider that many, maybe even most, women have issues with ”gender” (stereotypes) being imposed upon us because of our biology. Accepting the reality of our biological sex does not mean our sex allies with a mythical “gendered soul”.
I find these assumptions irksome, to say the least, but let us move on to consider whether he has tackled this issue fairly.
Here is the abstract: Notice the quote chosen to head-up the report. That gave me a clue about his perspective.
The abstract sets out Maycock’s aim. He will offer a ”corrective” to those feminists who ”claim” to speak for female inmates. Because Matthew works for the Scottish Prison service he has unique access to the female prison population housed with transgender inmates, of both sexes. If only there had been a requirement for ethical approval before the SPS unleashed males on incarcerated women. Their consent was either taken for granted or deemed irrelevant.
Maycock begins by claiming his research will be groundbreaking because it is the first time “cis-women” prisoners have been asked for their view. Let me repeat that. Only now is the Scottish Prison service even considering the views of females in custody. Since the SPS are also funding this research and surveying existing prisoners, in their custody, we need to bear the context in mind. The women are literal hostages to this policy. As becomes clear the “people”, referred to below, affected by this policy are the female kind. The females remain in the women’s estate irrespective of a transgender identity. 🤔. It would have been interesting had Maycock explained why this is the case.
At least Dr Maycock acknowledges that women have been marginalised in the wider debate about transgender issues. We will get on to what the good Doctor thinks about these ”feminist elements” who, against instructions, attempted to have some dialogue about prison policy. The language here is also revealing. If a male is excluded from single sex spaces we do not normally talk about it in the language of ”acceptance” and ”rejection”.
He continues with an outline of Prison Policy around the care and management of transgender prisoners. He claims England and Wales house persons in line with their sex unless they have attained the legal status as “women”. This is certainly not true. Males have been housed in the female estate without being “legally female” for some time. A little social justice speak creeps in here 👇 with the talk of the ”gender binary”. He means prison policy that recognises Humans are sexually dimorphic. Heaven forfend!
The situation in Scotland is because of the, afore-mentioned, involvement of Scottish Trans Alliance. {If you feel so inclined you could look up Gordon Pike who was also involved in drafting this policy. Pike is now subject to the judicial system himself. He was caught with thousands of indecent images of children}. The policy outlines its ethos of fairness to transgender prisoners. They interpreted fairness, to these males, as housing them in the female estate. 🤷♂️
The usual claims about risk profiles are made. Since we have been putting males in the female estate with criminal profiles, which include sex offences against women, I would be wary of claims about risk assessments. One such advisor on prison policy made it clear sex offences, against women, were not a bar to being placed in the female estate. This is a quote from Hansard, taken during an oral session of the Transgender Equality Inquiry. Chaired by Maria Miller and attended by Jess Phillips nobody in attendance objected to this statement. 👇. Megan is a trans-identified male.
Before Maycock gets onto the meat of his report he takes a couple of quite inaccurate side swipes against two groups who have undertaken research on the erosion of single sex spaces, in Scotland. On Women and Girls Scotland’s work he makes much of the fact that he doesn’t know the background of the women who undertook their research. He also casts doubt on their ability to speak for female women prisoners. He makes much of their lack of access to women in prison; something the authors at W&Gs Scotland are open about. {I doubt the Scottish Prison service would have been amenable to this organisation accessing women prisoners}. I will just point out that they did in fact state the background of the researchers. One of them was a “transwoman”, two were working class and all reside in Scotland. They also sent the survey out quite widely. The list below includes three organisations pushing trans-inclusive policies; Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland and the Women’s Equality Party.
W & Gs Scotland are also transparent about their lack of access to prisoners. This only comprised one chapter of their research. They did, nevertheless get responses from women with prison experience. 👇
They also make it clear that they regard this research very much as a beginning and much more is needed. They did get over 2000 responses to their survey. I will cover this research in more detail on another blog.
Maycock outlines the methodology for his research. It consisted of a survey and unstructured interviews. He spoke to 15 prisoners. He also makes quite a revealing statement about how the survey participants were selected. They were recruited by ”gatekeeper prison officers”. It would have been important, at this point, to clarify the recruitment process. It would have been helpful if we could be certain all the women impacted by this policy got an opportunity to participate. Even if the participants were a representative sample there is a risk that a female prisoner’s responses would simply toe the line; considering they are commenting on policy instituted by their prison over lords.
It takes a brave woman to express hostility to existing prison policy while incarcerated. Thankfully there were some prepared to be honest about their objections.
First Doctor Maycock gives a broad overview of the sample. All had been placed on a wing with a trans-identified male. They have varying length sentences to serve. Some are middle-class and educated others are described as working class with no formal education. They claim varying sexual orientations. Matthew then outlines his own identity as a white, cis, heterosexual male. (Of course he is!)
This is how he badges his findings. Prisoners who toe the prison authority line are labelled ”accepting” and those who raise objections or concerns are labelled ”rejecting”. Quite emotionally loaded terms.
The “accepting” women.
He begins with the ”accepting” women. Notice there are a lot of examples of the women as emotional support humans for the males. They are accepting, supportive, encouraging and recognise the authenticity of the males identifying as women, even the ones with a penis. They are all behaving in a compliant manner.
Lucy is fully on board with the prison agenda. Lucy is a newly minted lesbian who compares her journey to the “daily struggles” of the transgender inmates.
Another prisoner, Isla, is very supportive of the transgender inmates and repeats the narrative of the women nurturing the transgender inmates on their difficult journey. This is a recurrent theme. The author sees this as positive reinforcement for the policy, I see it as women pressed into service as validation aids. The women are providing, free, emotional labour.
In another revealing statement we find that the women are also supporting females who identify as transgender. Why are they not in the male estate living their authentic truth? 🤔
Next up Emily who is fully supportive, even to the trans-identified males who, she coyly observes, have their ”bottom bits” . Emily makes it clear the penis is not dangerous as it has been rendered impotent by the hormones. Apart from the penis ”she was just like a lassie”. Notice the author takes at face value statements like ”She didn’t act like a man. He has observations when some women question transgender males who didn’t ”act like women”. It seems it is perfectly possible to accept sex stereotypes if they align with a proclaimed gender identity but not if you question a man’s authenticity.
Matthew proceeds to talk about the wide acceptance of transgender women and the women who do not see them as a risk. He is particularly keen to hear from women who, despite a history of abuse by violent males, do not see the transgender males as “manly” or feel intimidated by them. Jessica tells him she sees the transgender inmates as women.
There are a couple of women who are heterosexual and claim it is the Lesbians who cause more problems. One of them, Ella, claims she has been exposed to Lesbians having sex. Matthew does not question this anecdotal evidence. Later in the report he does undermine testimony when women allege transgender prisoners have been caught having sex with women. The bias is evident throughout the report. The statements from women who accept Maycock’s agenda are accepted without question. The women who don’t accept men in women’s prisons are referred to as ”prejudiced” and accused of using ”Terf” talking points,
Maycock quotes another prisoner uncomfortable with Lesbians as a result of being straight and returns to Ella who is positively gushing about the opportunity to watch the journey of a transgender woman up close. Seems some of the glitter has rubbed off on Ella.
Here it is not clear what prompted this reply, from Jessica, questioning the work of Murray, Black, Mackenzie. They are another feminist group Maycock criticises. Whatever promoted Jessica’s response It does give the researcher a good quote. Jessica rejects the idea that female prisoners have any specific vulnerabilities. This runs counter to the many reports on the female prison demographic who demonstrate other wise.
Here is a quote from some research done by the Howard League, Scotland.
One of the ”accepting” women, Emily, who earlier waxed lyrical about a particular transgender women, qualifies her acceptance to limit it to the ”genuine” transgender inmates. The issue here is that the prison service is accepting men based on a self-declaration and leaving the untrained women to do their own risk assessments, on a case by case basis. As he does throughout Maycock quickly follows this critical comment with prisoner statements that there are “cis” women who are more of a risk to women than a transgender woman. This is a common tactic of trans activists. The Howard League report, quoted above, found less than 2% of Scottish, female, prisoners were held for violent offences.
Another prisoner, Alison, goes further to prioritise the vulnerability of the transgender inmates who, she feels, are the more vulnerable demographic. Alison is quoted at length stating that there is no evidence of violent trans prisoners. This is followed up by Matthew gushing about the acceptance, empathy and support the women display. He seems to like women who display maternal instincts to his brethren. This is a reflection of the way females are socialised to be accepting and kind. I think this can be a positive attribute so it is quite sickening to see how it is, here, being used against women.
The “rejecting” women
No we turn to the ”rejecting” women and what they have to say. Not all the women followed the script.
50% of a selected sample did not see the transgender women as women and believed they should be housed in accommodation appropriate for their actual sex.
As Rhona Hotchkiss (retired Prison Governor) points out the research showed 80% objected and only 3 had no reservations at all.
For Matthew this makes those women ”prejudiced”. The Curtice report, referenced below, contrasts with other reports which had quite different results when people realised some of those ”women” demanding access to female only facilities retained a penis.
Here Matthew uses a slur (Terf); which is often accompanied by threats of rape and violence. These women’s comments are being delegitimised in the way the preceding statements were not. One of the prisoners even inserts the, thought terminating, cliche ”Trans Women are Women”. Maycock is losing more credibility by the sentence and is hardly helped by referencing Sally Hines. 😳
How on earth can an intelligent man be shocked that females associate the possession of a penis with a man? Notice the women are having these secret conversations between themselves about the men they are forced to live among. Maycock attempts to extract some positives about a 50% rejection rate for the prison policy. He quotes a lot of women, somewhat apologetically, explaining how women who have histories of abuse associate a penis with a man. 🤷♂️
The women are clearly talking privately about their worries because they are being forced to pretend fully intact men are women. This is using a, literally, captured audience and forcing them to participate in this, ideologically driven, social experiment.
Here a prisoner expresses concern that she may be saying the unsayable to a prison employee which indicates she knows her views have become verboten. Clearly some women, with backgrounds of child abuse know a man when they see one. Matthew feels this complicates the issue. It doesn’t though. Taking advantage of female socialisation to encourage compliance with the idea men can become women is cruel. Looking for a loophole because some women are, or profess to be, OK with penis bearing women is unethical.
Ellie and all the other women are being forced to judge authenticity of motivation, to make their own risk assessments. We know that trained prison staff have allowed dangerous males to enter the female estate and the women’s fears are being dismissed /downplayed by this academic. What these women are being forced into by this prison policy is nothing short of a human rights violation.
The gaslighting here. Ella sees a man because he is a man. Yet, the researcher is writing her up as if her perception is problematic. The fact that this man 👇 starts an inappropriate conversation about porn is no surprise. She clearly finds him intimidating and points out that he has a man’s build.
He quotes Ellie at length and I suspect he finds her comments outrageous. I find her plain speaking utterly refreshing. Bravo Ellie!
Maycock, of course, intends to paint a picture which suggests Ellie is a conspiracy theorist. It is, however, naive to believe men are not plotting to escape the fate of being incarcerated with other males. Whether for nefarious motives, to access vulnerable women, or just to have easier jail time. Of course it is happening.
This is simply not true. Sex offenders, who are male, have been allowed into the female estate since at least 2009. I have covered more than one case on this blog.
Why didn’t Matthew produce some actual statement from the Scottish Prison Service that this doesnt happen; rather than using Freya’s faith in the system to undermine Ellie’s account? Why is he putting (wo) in brackets when Ellie is saying ”man”?
I was quite furious whilst reading this document. The version you are reading is significantly reduced in length. My first version included a lot more clips from the women. There is plenty more to be enraged about. Sadly.
Again Freya is used to undermine the testimony of Ellie. Since the staff are implemeting the policy and Matthew is funded by the SPS I am not surprised the prison officers did not corroborate Ellie’s story. Below the framing is also changed so that the fear of a penis bearing male is presented as a cross the trans-identifying male has to bear!
Some of the women then talk about transgender males who they had accepted and supported only to find those same men had re-identified with their birth sex as soon as they were released. Who’d have thunk it? The women talk about zero-effort males who enter the female estate and make no effort to pass as ”transgender” but, in fact behaved like controlling males.
Here a prisoner lists her experiences with men who she feels gamed the system.
Maycock, to his credit, perhaps, includes the statements but then interprets them as the women having stereotypical expectations of how a woman should behave. This is despite the women reporting men who made no effort to cover their genitalia which means the women have been subject to indecent exposure. I mean nothing says ”lady” like getting your dick out!
The prison service should protect vulnerable males. There are vulnerable wings for ex-police officers and paedophiles who are at elevated risk in the male estate. As it stands my trans-identified, and gay, son would be vulnerable on both those counts. He would only be protected for his ”trans-identity”. What the prison service have done is mask their own failures by making the problem a ”woman’s” problem. This is unacceptable.
Matthew’s conclusion is somewhat different to mine. He seems to be of the view that more exposure to transgender people will eradicate these transphobic views. In fact this policy has pitted two protected characteristics against one another. This is a dangerous, rash and insensitive way to treat women. Ironically this sex denying policy is 100% SEXist.
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Many years ago I did my dissertation on the European witch-hunts of the 1500s-1600’s, in a module on religion and society during a period of social upheaval. I have never forgotten this book, the author of which died at only 49.
The politics of popular belief.
The book’s mainly focus is on Scotland and England but Larner also covers continental Europe. She explores the distinctive nature of the English witch-hunts and how Scotland took more from the European model than the English did. Notice the subtitle is about the politics of popular belief. This was a popular belief system in the same way Gender Identity Ideology is a quasi-religious belief system. The approach Larner takes to the witch-hunts has much to teach us about the belief that people can be born in the wrong body, or have ”gendered souls”.
A study of this phenomenon is important because it can explain so much about contemporary issues. A belief in witchcraft became a regime enabled ideology. Laws were enacted to prosecute “witches”; in much the same way we are having a new State Religion, “Gender Identity Ideology”, imposed upon society. This has been accompanied by #HateCrime laws, to root out unbelievers, and public shunning of naysayers.
The belief in a “demonic pact” took particular hold in Scotland. This meant all those recognised as witches were now evil, a continental belief system King James I imported to Scotland. As you can see the result was the, subsequent, witch-hunts swept up the local ”scold” along with the ”villagehealers”
England retained the distinction between “Black” and “white” magic so the pattern of prosecutions and punishments somewhat differed from Scotland.
Dried up old women.
On ascending to the English throne, King James tried to introduce the notion of Satanic influence to his new subjects. A record of an exchange, with a courtier, survives, here James asks about the prevalence of witches among the ”ancient” women. He was met with a ribald joke about “dried up old women”.
Witch-Finder Generals.
In England the 17th century equivalent of Dr Haddock/Man at a bus stop, Matthew Hopkins, was responsible for one outbreak of testeria that saw 19 women hanged. Then, as now, there were men who particularly enjoyed their licence to demonise women.
Common-Prickers
Here’s a fun fact from another book. Men who were enthusiastic witch-hunters, came to be regarded as a nuisance and they were afforded the moniker ”Common-Prickers”. As in this quote some of those men sought to distract from their own sins. Here a man distracts from his own indecent exposure to attack an honest woman. 🤔
The above quote comes from this book which I have covered in a twitter thread but will add a blog for this series.
Torture was deemed necessary to extract confessions. The law was also amended to allow women to testify, especially to facilitate denunciations of other women. Usually women were not considered competent to be accepted as reliable witnesses. Naturally when women turned against other women the patriarchy was keen to hear from them. Plus ça change. (The more things change, the more things stay the same). Also children, convicted felons and interested parties were similarly upgraded to allow their testimony.
Trials of witches were considered more noteworthy than trials for theft, slaughter, cattle raising or for sex offences! Of course they were!
Scapegoating and group solidarity.
The execution of a witch marked her as deviant and fostered group solidarity in the ”in-group” By general agreement the witch was marked as a deviant to be cast out of normal society. This was the 17th century version of #VirtueSignalling whereby denouncing other women, as witches, signals a desire for membership of the protected class of “virtuous” women. This functions in much the same way as ”Terf” does in modern day Britain, by adopting this language women are signalling their membership of (oxy) moronic version ”feminism” branded ”inclusive”.
English witches were old, poor and , of course, female. They were also often economically dependent on those who accused them.
Their poverty, and dependence, was an important feature of the ”witch class” because of economic shifts and changes to the “poor laws”. A bureaucratic system of relief had divested, in theory, the charitable responsibilities of the individual but, perhaps, left a residual guilt when not discharging traditional social obligations? Hence the resulting SocialTension.
State promotion of dysfunctional beliefs
Here Larner looks at the nature of belief in society and whether they have an autonomous existence. Why do beliefs exist that are visibly dysfunctional to society and why do states, new leaders and revolutionaries go to such lengths to convince their populations of their “correctness”? Consider the parallels with the 21st Century state mandated belief in “Gender Identity”. The resulting sterilising of children, male rapists in female prisons, men in women’s sports are all manifestly damaging societal cohesion; yet the majority of our political class are falling over themselves to convince the population these are unmitigated goods. 🤷♂️
Moral Panics & Darvo
It is of note that women, campaigning for sex based rights, are being accused of generating a moral panic. (See my series on Moral Panics). This is a classic example of D.A.R.V.O. This stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. A step by step description of Gaslighting techniques. First you deny the truth; See #ThisNeverHappens about male rapists in female prisons. When that fails, due to mounting evidence, you attack. See #WomenRapeToo. Then you reverse Victim and Offender. See propaganda about the murder of trans-identified males and the accusations that ”Terfs” create the climate that allows these crimes against the trans community to flourish. Of course this also comes under Deny because those murders, the relatively small number that exist, are invariably committed by men.
During this time we see the emergence of the criminalisation of women which necessitated a new category of offences. Witches for the old and infanticide for the young, crimes very much rooted in being part of the reproductive sex class; either because you are currently fecund or you are no longer.
There is also an interesting aside here about the assumption women’s crimes were always as a result of ”male coercion”. Males are still more likely to be part of the criminal class and females in the prison system, for violent offences, especially those of a sexual nature, are significantly less likely to independently from a male. I think this is one area where we can be comfortably repudiate the, otherwise powerful rallying call, of “Sisters doing it for ourselves!”
Why were researchers into witch-hunts so oblivious to the sex question? Note the tautological answers. #WitchyWomenAreWomen….because the stereotype of witches was a women. Despite the obvious correlation between being female and demonised as a witch (much starker in England than Scotland or on the continent) some historians *still* disregard sex as an important variable.
Witches are Women & TWAW.
This 👆 is a precurser to many of the answers you receive to the mantra ”Trans Women are Women”. The answers are in variably reflective of a circular logic. We are told someone “feels like a woman” with no coherent way to define ”woman” without reference to sex stereotypes. The obvious definition is Adult Human Female but this cannot be allowed to stand because it excludes males.
Thank goodness the definition of woman was more stable in the period we are investigating. Look at the stats.😳. In England 92% of the accused were women. In twelfth century Russia they just rounded up all women! Note it was a “sex-specific” crime. No gender bollocks when working out who to hang or burn!
The few male witches tended to be swept up in trials as a result of guilt by association.
Witches are women who don’t conform.
Women singled out, as witches, were the kind that departed from sex stereotypical behaviour. A standard set by men. 👇
We have learnt nothing!
These deviant women generate hostility. The persecution of witches (ter*s in 2021) is a warning to other women to get in line to conform, in short to #BeCompliant. Thank you to twitter user @georgiaxcross for this perspective on #BeKind feminism. This is it in a nutshell, it is not a request. It is a demand.
The next quote illustrates the overlap in motivations for the Jewish persecution, in York, in the twelfth century. Because of a historic, religious, prohibition of ”usury” the money lenders were mainly Jewish who did not have such a taboo. The men of York were in debt to the Jewish money-lenders had an added incentive to initiate their, violent, expulsion, from the city. We see the same playing out below with the women they defined as witches in Nupe witch- hunting. The women also violated social norms for women by taking lovers and not providing children.
In Scotland there is a also suggestive correlation with the new ability to make accusations of sexual impropriety to the landlord class. Is it not also interesting that this modern day #Backlash has emerged on the back of the #MeToo movement?
Another factor was the rise of the male medical profession. This generated backlash to the traditional role of women as “healers”. Men now coveted this role in the community.
Eventually as the witch-hunts spread they ran out of Scolds and turned on the “honest” women.
First they came for the Scolds/Ter*s and I did not speak out…Your silence /complicity will not protect you #Handmaidens.
This is a rather magnificent aside on the (1980’s) phenomenon of popular witchcraft. The idea that Standard Witchcraft magazines look like a cross between penthouse and a PhD thesis has delicious application to the world of #GenderStudies. Bravo! I .😂✊️
Labour! From witch to bitch to terf.
Oh and this quote too!. Absolutely one that should have served as a warning to we left-wing women. From #DitchTheWitch (that’s a bit sexist) To. Ok you have a point we will use …wait for it..
DitchTheBitch
😳
Women with the power of words are a distinct threat. I am sure we all have some particular women in mind re this quote.
And look at this! Margaret Lister (Fife) was also identified as a “libber”. A liberated women who insists on making an issue of it. I had no idea women’s libber dated back to 1662! How very dare she and how delicious she is called Lister the same as Gentleman Jack!
Was the State consciously seeking to terrorise and intimidate women?
Are the State doing this in 2021 by seeking to criminalise women for saying we exist? That sex is real and we are not an “identity”?
Bravo to whoever did this. Note that Witch-Hunters were called #CommonPrickers in Scotland. I prefer just to call them pricks. The Male Feminists are the worst. Ironically.
You can access Christina’s book here: Open Library is free but they do need donations.
I have published this piece also on my new substack. Subscriptions are free. I am working out how too make substack distinctive from my wordpress. My thinking is that I will post long form pieces to wordpress and try to make substack a daily roundup of the key stories with links to wordpress for anyone who wants to read ling form pieces with links to original sources.
There’s an option to pay but content will be free with the exception of any pieces I have been asked to do for media outlets, for payment.
This is a resource via the NSPCC on addressing gender stereotypes, allegedly. This is for Stage 3 pupils so those 11 to 14 years old. Like much of this material it has aspects that, superficially, seek to challenge regressive, sexist stereotypes.
The document was produced in conjunction with the PHSE association who provide resources for schools; to teach Personal, Heath and Sexuality Education.
They also worked with a range of other partners, I have scoured their website and cannot find a list of the charities they regard as partners.
They are also involved in a Home Office funded project working with the National Police Chiefs Council.
Naturally enough they have a subject specialist who has an LGBT a agenda.
The PSHE Association as supposed to oversee the material produced by the above groups. Promoting Gender Identity Ideology to schools, undermining girl’s rights to single sex facilities, allowing a child to conceal their sex.
The NSPCC/PSHE Guidance.
So here is the training. It starts out well enough.
Soon it leads on to a number of contested issues. Sex and Gender are a spectrum. Sex is assigned at birth. Then some word salad about your gender identity as distinct from and your “gender expression” is a public display of your “Gender Identity”. This ideology doesn’t dismantle sex stereotypes, it reifies them. Adolescents are at their most vulnerable between the ages of 11 and 14. This is precisely the age at which kids explore their “identity” and try on different styles of hair and clothing. This is perfectly normal behaviour!
Of course they also include the notorious genderbread person. What this fosters, in vulnerable kids, is a bodily disassociative disorder; by teaching young teenagers that there is a distinction between your biological sex and your gender. Notice they also offer a competing definition of sexual orientation. Instead of it simply being whether your orientation is driven by your prospective partners’, biological sex, they add attraction to the “feminine”. This grooms young Lesbians to accept men who present with the aesthetics associated with females, a.k.a. sex stereotypes. Notice they also have a separate category for “intersex” 👇. The term “intersex” is not favoured by the people who had disorders/differences in sexual development. They are not a third category, we are sexually dimorphic.
This lesson plan them asks the children to select sterotyped terms and asks them to participate in an exercise to allocate them along the “gender identity and gender expression spectrum”. Quite a list of offensive terms here.
What exactly is “Gender Expression if it’s not performing “feminine” or “masculine” which buys into sexist ideas?
Of course the lesson plan involves showing some of the most egregious childline YouTubes.
You can read more about these ChildLine youtube’s on my wordpress series.
They end by directing the children to those charities with a deep investment in Gender Identity Ideology: Stonewall, Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence.
What the government have done is to outsource our children’s education to Lobby groups. Check your schools and make it clear that you wish to see any materials they are using in sex education. If you are not happy you can contact Safe Schools Alliance and suggest alternative materials from Transgender Trend.
This episode will focus on a documentary about a french, male, child called Sasha. Sasha identifies as a girl and the film covers Sasha’s story and that of her mother, Karine, who is portrayed as ”fiercely protective”. The documentary was called Petit Filles and was aired on the BBC.
The film begins with Karine explaining to Sasha’s father that he is not just a boy who thinks he is a girl. He is a girl.
She proceeds to explain that Sasha hates his ”peepee” and has known since he was two or three that he is not a boy. She is not, yet, using female pronouns for Sasha.
This is a familiar script so of course she also believes a girl can be born in a boys body.
There follows an interesting exchange while the father asks if Karine had unconsciously wished for a girl when she was pregnant. She gives a rather candid response. She explains she consciously wished for a girl. This will crop up later when Sasha is taken to a child psychiatrist, at the Gender Clinic. I anticipated this might warrant some exploring but it was not.
Karine talks about how Sasha was heartbroken they were not a girl and ”cried tears of real pain”. She then casts doubt on the birth registration process and how the recording of Sasha’s male sex has robbed Sasha of a future. {Trans activists such as Martine Rothblatt argue that we should not record sex, anywhere. In the U.K. a tax payer funded research project actually explores the “Future of Legal Sex” to explore abolishing it, in law. Alex Sharpe, trans-identifying male, was part of the project team}.
Soon we are in the psychiatrists office and Karine is being reassured that this is not her fault. A parent can’t will a child to be of one sex or the other, though, of course, she doesn’t say sex but ”gender”.
Karine does most of the talking while it is explained that nobody knows why some children feel like this it is ”just the way it is”. Sasha is asked if anything upsets them and shakes his head until his mum brings up that ”time in the bathroom”. They don’t manage to coax much more out of Sasha and his mum speculates about the reason for Sasha’s silence.
The thought did occur to me! Could it be that Sasha knows his role he is, consciously or otherwise, fulfilling his mother’s needs? This deserved some sensitive exploration, not just for Sasha but with Karine. We all project our desires onto our children not all of them healthy.
I won’t enumerate every time someone in the film repeated the propaganda about kids being born in the wrong body but it was frequent. It seemed like a deliberate incantation designed to hypnotise the audience.
I was also struck by his sister’s appearance 👆above. This was a perfectly acceptable presentation, for a girl, but it did make me wonder if Karine had hoped for a more overtly ”girly” daughter and was projecting that desire onto Sasha? Or perhaps they were going through a tumultous period in their relationship, as is often the way with teenage girls and their mums. I saw no curiosity about the dynamics, potentially, at play in this documentary.
Next we see an exchange about medical steps for Sasha. One would hope there had been some off screen exploration not included but looking at Sasha’s appearance this discussion seems to have happened quite quickly. The therapist discusses putting Sasha on puberty blockers. At least she does admit there are some gaps in the knowledge base around puberty blockers but it is quite shocking to see someone as young as this making decisions that could render them sterile.
There were two interesting asides about Sasha’s relationship with other girls. Here the therapist asks Sasha how the other girls relate to him.
The more interesting question is how does Sasha relate to other girls. We see him playing with a bespectabled friend at his house. They are playing princesses. For some reason Sasha decides its a beauty competition and there follows this exchange with his little friend. He seems to be unpleasantly competitive with his friend.
Obviously he is just a child but I wonder if this reflects an insecurity about the role he is being asked to play?
Now we are back to his mum recounting an episode where Sasha was ejected from his ballet class. Apparently the teacher was not happy to have him in the class with other little girls.
Karine recounts this tale to the psychiatrist as an ugly, humiliating episode and explains the teacher is Russian.
The response from the therapist sounds like vengeful activist speak rather than a measured response from a clinician. Bearing in mind Sasha is in the room, at this point.
Before I leave this I read an interview with the documentary maker. Its clear he admires Karine battling on behalf of their child and facing opposition from all quarters. He admires how the family have rallied round to provide a protective bubble for Sasha. He even notes a tender moment where the other son tells his mum he understands why Sasha has to be the focus of her attention. A good therapist would explore whether Sasha’s situation is filling an unmet need for his mum. A need to be admired as a champion for her son and a good mum. This quote might provide some insight into one aspect of her motivation:
I will leave the final word to the documentary maker who opens up about what compelled him to cover this issue. It turned out he had covered a famous, French, transsexual called Bambi. Bambi had told him he knew he was a girl aged three. He decided he wanted to cover trans children. It also had some personal significance based on his own childhood, as we learn.
Becoming school marble champion seems like a healthy way to affirm your worth; as a boy who has a variant way of expressing your masculinity. Going on medication that sterilises you and becoming a life long medical patient seems like a mal-adaptive coping mechanism and not one that should be rushed into. How many ”feminine” boys are simply gay?
The jury is still out on what happens to these children who are socially /medically transitioned by a Tiger Mummy.
This is the third in a series on transgender kids. I will add to this but will also look at the promotion of transgender teens. Especially interesting are the older trans-identified males, who promote child transition, and seem to be driven by a type of retrospective wish fulfilment.
This is from a video promoted by the ACLU, an organisation that has morphed from a respected civil rights organisation into a trans lobby group. This is promoted on YouTube. You can watch it here:
Kai is born to a Texas mum who is of a Christian Evangelic persuasion who, by her own admission spent years saying homosexuals should go to hell. Well, to be accurate, she now says she spent years condemning ”LGBTQ” people but judge for yourself what seemed to be her major preoccupation.
Kai was not interested in the pursuits favoured by his older brothers. He showed a preference for pursuits which led his mum to fear he would be gay. Here she is saying this in an interview:
In the video she is explicit about these fears and the lengths the family went to discourage Kai from his atypical male behaviours; which are not unheard of for a boy who will grow up to be a gay male. Kai was scolded, given time-outs and slapped, slapped hard for not conforming: “I thought this kid might be gay and I thought that could not happen. It would not happen”.,
It gets worse. She then started praying and googling Gay Conversion therapy and working out how she could deploy these strategies at home.
Could it be that Kai saying he was a girl is the answer to her prayers?
The mum gets a lot of media attention when she accepts Kai as a girl. Predictably this is accompanied by her son begging Jesus to take him if he can’t be a girl and a reference to the dodgy suicide statistics which are a feature of cult tactics.
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We are then treated to some plaintive entreaties from sweet Kai about a school policy which insists on sex based toilet facilities. Alternative arrangements are made for Kai, but, of course, now he is being told he is really a girl this must feel stigmatising. The problem is social transition not girl’s need for privacy but you would have to have a heart of stone to resist young Kai, or do you? Feels like emotional manipulation of Kai’s likely real distress by his mum and, likely the transgender lobby groups that are prepared to use a gender non-conforming potential gay boy, to push their agenda.
If I had any lingering doubts about the agenda here let us return to his mum. Here she is attending a, filmed, speaking engagement apologising for hurting the LGBTQ community. In order to atone for her sin she makes the ridiculous claim that her child would be forced into the ”mens”. In reality mums take their little boys in to the female toilets at Kai’s age.
In conclusion. How certain are we that we are not witnessing an Evangelical Christian who is using ”Better a live daughter, than a dead son“ in public while really, consciously, or otherwise, the phrase ”Better a daughter than a gay son” is more appropriate for what she is doing.
