Check the label
The German federal government was responsible for funding a research project labeling “organized transphobia” a threat to democracy. The project, which was made in collaboration with a trans-identified male known for threatening violence against women he disagrees with, classifies those opposed to Germany’s radical gender self-identification laws as “enemies” of society.
Hm. Man who threatens violence against women labels disobedient women “a threat to democracy.” So democracy=men forcing women to lie about who is a woman? Weird definition.
Days ago, the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ Jena) published a brochure reporting the outcome of a research project it had undertaken on “Organized Transphobia: Concepts, Actors, Narratives, and Counter-Strategies.” In the 92-page release, it concluded that transphobia poses a danger to democratic co-existence and outlines strategies to tackle radical feminists who define biological sex as binary.
Reminds me of The Church. “Non-adherence to our belief system=danger to the communniny & scary radical badness.”
And while we’re on the subject, let’s pause for a second to ponder the danger to democratic co-existence that is trans ideology. Bullying, lying, manipulating, extorting, punishing – none of that is a boon to democratic co-existence.
The research project, published in collaboration with the Federal Association for Transgender People (BVT), was funded by the German government through the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, which provided it a total of 228,833 Euros.
The project portrays feminists critical of gender ideology as enemies of the state who, together with right-wing extremists, pursue a political agenda to maintain an “endo-cis-binary gender system” – something that is deemed incompatible with the “principles of liberal democracy.”
I don’t know what the “endo” means there, it may be a mistranslation of the German, but other than that the meaning is clear enough: knowing there are two sexes that can’t swap is incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy.
I beg to differ. Liberal democracy does not depend on silly lies about who can do what in the way of magic personal changes. People can’t think themselves into being leopards or houses or Brazil or Mars, and that fact does no harm to liberal democracy.
Aye, but there’s the rub. Germany is slowly (actually not-so-slowly) ceasing to recognise itself as a liberal democracy as you might understand that term; it sees itself, rather, as the world’s first “defensive democracy”. Its politicians regularly tar any opinions, statements, or policies which disagree with the ruling coalition as “anti-democratic”, regardless of how soundly those opinions, statements, and policies are founded in the principals of liberalism nor how widely they are to be found amongst the demos itself.
Anything that does not fit onto the tip of the spear of progressive thought as interpreted by the youth wings of the Greens and the SPD is classified as “right-wing extremism”, and things as banal as retweeting a meme that takes the piss out of a government minister are likely to have that minister personally file a complaint with the police under the law of “impeding a public officer in his duties”, which will get your house searched by the cops and see you with a hefty fine backed with the threat of jail time.
Now it appears that the German agency charged with “protecting the constitution” may well consider any public utterances in support of the “gender binary” to be statements against the German constitutional order, perhaps classifying them in the recently-invented category of “deligitimation of the state relevant to constitutional protection”, wherein the constitutional protectors give themselves the right to spy on German citizens who make suspect-but-not-illegal statements against the government until they find something they can prosecute for. (This extralegal category was invented in April 2021, largely in response to mass protests against anti-COVID measures, many of which were themselves unconstitutional and of dubious efficacy…but though the pandemic is over, the tools forged during it remain, and will take much longer to dismantle.)
“Liberal democracy” was a short lived experiment, between circa 1946 and 1986. It grew to be too much of a threat to the autocratic kleptocracy it briefly rose above, and has been slowly wound back ever since.
The Middle Class in which many of us grew up or aspired to join was a pleasant result of that short experiment, but the autocratic kleptocrats could not accept that so many people were suddenly joining in the common wealth and began a relentless campaign to turn worker against worker, to teach those outside the middle class to scorn them, to tell and thus began the class war that would only ever result in one victor, the kleptocrats.
Workers were told they now had the best of all possible worlds, that Unions were only there to take their money, and as people dropped out of Unions, Unions became weaker and either folded or merged. That set of a massive ‘land grab” by employers as wages and conditions were wound back, as people were sacked from full time jobs and replaced with part time, casual, or contract workers. Another few years and we will see all work return to the “pick up” system that once ruled the wharves where men seeking work would gather outside stevedore’s offices and wait to be called and given a back breaking job at bank breaking wages. The only Australian workers whose wages have kept pace with or exceeded inflation in the past decade are those in the few industries with strong and fearless union leadership.
What is happening in Germany is no different to elsewhere in Europe with Turkey and Hungary setting the tone while Italy, France, the UK et al fall into line.
Same here in Oz. Right now we have imprisoned a man who exposed how Australia’s ASIS (external security agency) bugged the East Timor cabinet rooms in aid of a corporation, Woodside getting a greater share of East Timor’s Oil, another for exposing malfeasance in the Australian Taxation Office, and a former military lawyer who blew the whistle on war crimes in Afghanistan. Each of these men are heroes and should have been feted as such.
And only moments after the government took the kudos for finally repatriating Julian Assange and saving him from America’s wrath for telling the truth, they have rolled over for a tummy tickle from Uncle Sam and are handing over a man whose only crime is to teach flying to the Chinese. Our entire economy is underpinned by China’s purchase of coal and iron ore and every year our Universities earn billions of dollars educating Chinese students, but apparently engineering, medicine, architecture, law, economics, and arts are all AOK, but not flying.
Liberal democracy? Don’t make me laugh.
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“Endo” might mean endogenous, perhaps? As opposed to exogenous?