Originally a comment by Artymorty on The reality.

I think this is why so many men kill themselves after the operation. They’re told that by changing their genitals, they will “truly” change sex, but that’s not how the dating world works. For the vast majority of humans, their partner’s sex is his or her most vital characteristic, for obvious evolutionary reasons. Some gay men might date a feminine-presenting man, but none would date a masculine-presenting woman. For most humans, when it comes to sexdrive, sex trumps gender.

The gay men who tend to date feminine-presenting men are more likely to be fairly feminine-presenting themselves, however. The more stereotypically masculine gay men generally go for other stereotypically masculine gay men. This is the notorious “masc-for-masc” problem, and it generates a lot of resentment among feminine gay men who are primarily attracted to stereotypically masculine men. The tension between their own instinct to present femininely while at the same time finding excessive feminine presentation in others unattractive can lead to self-hatred. They sometimes feel marginalized in the gay dating market (though that feeling is often exaggerated and distorted by their own self-hatred: in reality, feminine gays get fewer dates than the beefcake dreamboats — duh! — but they still do ok). Adopting a transgender identity for them is a way to try their luck in a different dating market — a brand new me in a brand new town, kind of thing.

And to an extent, some of them do find short term luck, so long as they remain young and thin, shave themselves completely, get breast implants or stuff a bra, and most importantly, retain their genitals. Anyone who remembers the old alt-weeklies (NY Village Voice, Seattle Stranger, LA Weekly, NOW Toronto, etc.) knows that they were largely funded by the back page ads, a substantial number of which were for “shemales” — a fetishistic fantasy for ostensibly straight men who want to try… er, other positions… with women, or the closest simulacrum of a woman for sexual purposes they can find.

These connections rarely become solid, long-lasting, psychologically healthy relationships, though. There’s money involved; there’s shame and secrecy involved. (Money, shame, and secrecy go both ways in these pairings: when the “straight” men aren’t covertly buying sex from “shemales,” the “shemales” are covertly bribing young “straight” deadbeat freeloaders to stay with them as lovers.)

I myself was a feminine-presenting gay man attracted to much more masculine men than myself, and for a time I felt guilt, shame, and confusion about the mismatch, so I can somewhat understand what these men are feeling. But in the late ’90s I worked at a trans bar, and what I saw there was profoundly sad, in a deep, fundamental way not easily remedied with flags and parades and campaigns for better “representation.” I came to suspect that there was a fundamental dysfunction at the heart of the transgender subculture.

Lately I’ve come to see that this whole thing is mostly driven by straight men with fetishes. They’re the johns perusing the back pages for “shemales,” who exploit and give false hope to confused feminine gay men; they’re the pimps who hang around the community centres and the seedy bars to coax vulnerable gay men into transgender identities. They’re the ones who pressure the medical profession to look the other way at the fact that gay men seldom do well with transgender identities in the long term.

So, speaking of the likely gap between the rah-rah rhetoric around trans idenniny and the realities of trans daily life, and the likelihood that that gap is why the rhetoric and bullying are so intense – here’s one snapshot of that reality of trans daily life.

The whole dirge:

Where are all the trans allies? Why aren’t they rushing to date and fall in love with and marry and have children with their trans beloved?

We know why, and they know why, and that could be the very reason they get so busy raging at feminist women for continuing to defend women’s rights. Displacement activity; shifting the blame; distraction; changing the subject; self-soothing. It’s our fault. If we weren’t such bitches they would simply love to marry a trans person but we keep getting in their way.

Updating to add: yesterday Labour MPs blocked voting on a women’s rights bill by talking about ferrets, and giggled about it on social media afterwards. Haha. End of update.

They think it’s funny. They wink at us.

Has the wave crested? Are the cool kids rolling their eyes?

In December, the Government finally published its Gender Questioning Children guidance. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan claimed this guidance “puts the best interests of all children first, removing any confusion about the protections that must be in place for biological sex and single-sex spaces”.

The parents of kids who, out of the blue, had announced they were “trans” thought this response was wholly inadequate. The new guidance still gave schools wiggle room to allow a child to socially transition (changing his/her birth name, demanding pronouns different to his/her biological sex). And social transitioning is not a harmless act, as Dr Hilary Cass pointed out in her interim 2022 Review into Gender Identity Services.

Of course it’s not, because there is no locked door between social “transitioning” and the physical kind.

Most children grow out of gender dysphoria given time and it is often symptomatic of something else; not least that standard condition of adolescence: feeling really rubbish about yourself.

That plus the allure of feeling Special, Different, Interesting. Trans ideology has been ruthlessly marketed as all that.

So on Friday, a group of claimants will apply to the High Court for a Judicial Review which will claim that Mrs Keegan and the Department for Education are, in effect, sending a message to schools that they can break the law with their soft stance. “The unlawful political indoctrination of children in gender identity ideology is now commonplace in schools and colleges,” one of the witnesses claims. “Over the last few years, the country has witnessed a surge in children who express dissatisfaction with their birth sex and choose to identify as ‘trans’ (or ‘non binary’). Trans and non binary are taught in Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) as ‘cool’ identities which must be embraced and celebrated at any cost.”

And this is where “diversity” and “inclusion” can become such a trap. They stop being about not bullying kids who are different, and become advertisements for being different and special and utterly fascinating instead. It’s no longer about “don’t persecute kids who are different” and is now about “don’t you wish you were as different and fabulous as your trans classmates?”

At this rate in a year or two most people will be LGBTQ+.

Elliot Page has taken aim at the notion that queer films only have a small audience.

What are “queer films”? Of course NBC News doesn’t say.

Speaking at the BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQ film festival, the actor said that “30% of young people identify as LGBTQ,” referring to a survey released earlier this year about Gen Z adults in the U.S. “So I’m sorry, but this is not niche.”

Oh I see, that kind of “queer.” The kind that just means “more interesting than you.” 99% of that 30% are that kind of queer, as opposed to lesbian or gay or bisexual. LGBTQ is just a shortcut for people who want to be less boring.

Reflecting on his current status as a working actor and filmmaker through his own Page Boy Productions banner, Page said he felt fortunate.

“I hate that I have to say this because it should not be the case, and we should have lots of trans actors,” he said. “But I feel really lucky that I’ve gone through what I’ve gone through and still get to be here and make things.”

Why? Why should we have lots of trans actors? It’s a tiny tiny tiny niche after all, so why should we have more of it? You might as well say we should have more stamp-collector actors, more flea-trainer actors, more allergic to marmalade actors.

A remark by Harry’s Place snagged my attention.

The million held?? I hadn’t realized it was that many. So let’s hear from Human Rights Watch [despite their credulity about trans ideology].

Break their lineage, break their roots

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, located in China’s northwest, is the only region in China with a majority Muslim population. The Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other communities in the region are ethnically Turkic. Unlike the majority Han Chinese, who are primarily Chinese speakers, the Turkic population is predominantly Muslim and have their own languages. According to the 2010 census, Uyghurs made up 46 percent and Kazakhs 7 percent of the Xinjiang population.

The Chinese government’s oppression of Turkic Muslims is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years has reached unprecedented levels. As many as a million people have been arbitrarily detained in 300 to 400 facilities,[3] which include “political education” camps, pretrial detention centers, and prisons.[4] Courts have handed down harsh prison sentences without due process, sentencing Turkic Muslims to years in prison merely for sending an Islamic religious recording to a family member or downloading e-books in Uyghur. Detainees and prisoners are subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor. The oppression continues outside the detention facilities: the Chinese authorities impose on Turkic Muslims a pervasive system of mass surveillance, controls on movement, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, cultural and religious erasure, and family separation.

There’s a slight ambiguity in “As many as a million people have been detained” – it’s ambiguous in that it’s not clear whether that’s the total over time or at one time. Still, a million people is a million people. It’s interesting what a lot of ink gets spilled about the tragedy of trans people in London and New York, and how little gets spilled about Turkic people in northwest China.

The United States State Department and the parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands have determined that China’s conduct also constitutes genocide under international law. Human Rights Watch has not documented the existence of the necessary genocidal intent at this time. Nonetheless, nothing in this report precludes such a finding and, if such evidence were to emerge, the acts being committed against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang—a group protected by the 1948 Genocide Convention—could also support a finding of genocide.

And by “genocide” HRW here clearly does not mean twanzfobeea, it means mass murder.

As part of regional authorities’ intrusive “Becoming Families” surveillance, development, and indoctrination campaign, officials impose themselves for overnight stays at the homes of Turkic Muslims, a practice that authorities say “promote[s] ethnic unity.” In another particularly chilling practice, some Turkic Muslim children whose parents have been arbitrarily detained are placed in state institutions such as orphanages and boarding schools, including boarding preschools.

That sounds familiar. Indigenous people in the US and Canada also had their children torn away from them and imprisoned in boarding schools.

Anyway, never mind all that, just focus on Roger here who really needs you to call him Florence.

Parents who give their children guns may find themselves in hot water if those children use the guns to shoot their classmates.

The father of a Michigan school shooter who killed four students has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The trial heard James Crumbley, 47, ignored his 15-year-old son Ethan’s mental health needs, buying him the gun he used in the November 2021 attack. He and his wife – who was convicted on the same charges – now both face a maximum of 15 years in prison.

Here’s a thought – don’t give guns to children.

Earlier this week in her closing arguments to the jury of six men and six women, prosecutor Karen McDonald called the attack “preventable and foreseeable”. She added that James Crumbley’s actions had been “rare and egregious”.

He did not take even the slightest measures to ensure his son was not a threat after giving him a semi-automatic pistol as a gift just days before the shooting, said the prosecutor.

Why do that? Why give a kid a semi-automatic pistol? Why not a bike or a leather jacket or even – dare I say it? – a book?

Sex Matters informed us about the bill a few days ago.

This Friday a private member’s bill in the House of Commons presents MPs with a chance to discuss changing the law to clarify the meaning of “sex” in the Equality Act, stop the social transitioning of children in schools, and ban healthcare providers from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to anyone under 18 years old. 

Most laws that are enacted start as bills that are put to the Houses of Parliament by the government. But backbench MPs can also introduce legislation through private members’ bills (PMBs) such as this one. 

While it’s not as common for a private member’s bill to make it through all the stages in Parliament required for a bill to become a law, it does happen. And even where a bill doesn’t progress to an Act of Parliament, it can still have a role to play – putting forward a potential legislative solution to important issues for Parliamentary scrutiny and raising awareness among both Parliamentarians and the public.

The Health & Equality Acts (Amendment) Bill put forward by Liz Truss MP is on the House of Commons agenda on Friday morning for what’s officially called a “second reading”, but is actually the first opportunity MPs will have to debate the proposals in the bill. 

But instead they listed the names of their pets and had a jolly good laugh.

This week, the government’s consultation on its draft guidance for schools and colleges on gender-questioning children closes, and the WPATH files have exposed serious issues with the guidance that underpins NHS provision of so-called gender affirmative care. This timely bill sets out a series of sensible measures to protect women’s rights, and to protect children from being socially and medically transitioned. 

Oh who cares about women’s rights and children’s health and wellbeing? What could be less important?

Apparently Labour MPs think women’s rights are a big joke.

Liz Truss has accused Labour MPs of “filibustering” to stop her proposed transgender law reforms from being debated in the House of Commons.  Ms Truss tabled the Health and Equality Acts (Amendment) Bill which aims to bar transgender women from female-only spaces such as changing rooms and toilets, along with preventing them from competing in women’s sport. 

It shouldn’t even need a law, really. Of course men should be barred from female-only spaces like changing rooms and toilets. That’s the point of the “female-only” bit. And of course they shouldn’t be competing in women’s sport, because it’s women’s sport.

It was third on the list of Private Members’ Bills to be debated today but time ran out before it could be discussed prompting Tory claims of Labour MPs trying to “talk out” and block the legislation. 

Oh gee, why would Tories claim that?

Omigod the shame and horror – I’ve only just realized.

You’re not going to believe this but all my blankets are binary. Every single one.

And now I think of it so are the chairs. So are the walls. So is the toaster.

I’m in it up to my eyeballs, aren’t I. Complicity. I might as well just turn myself in at the nearest police station.

Bless those Salisbury Beach people, they plaster photos of their damaged expensive houses that are a few feet from the ocean all over their Facebook group so that the whole world can see how entitled they are. Check it out:

The fucking ocean is right fucking there you fucking fools what did you think would happen?

How dumb can you get?

A group of wealthy US homeowners spent $565,000 (£441,000) to build protective sand dunes near their properties – only to have the barriers wash away in days.

Where were these properties? Why, on a beach. Hello: beaches have been disappearing from under beach houses for decades, far longer than anyone’s been talking about climate change. I have vivid memories of dangling halves of houses on the New Jersey shore back in the 60s. Why in hell would anyone think for a second that bringing in more sand to be washed away would be useful?

I mean even without the last few decades of experience, are people not aware of what sand is? Do they not remember building sand castles on the beach for the very purpose of watching the tide dissolve them?

The group in Salisbury, Massachusetts, trucked in about 14,000 tonnes of sand in hopes of protecting up to 15 homes. Those protections washed away, however, and residents now hope the state will help fund a more permanent solution to safeguard their seaside homes.

Pause for hilarity.

“Ok well that barrier made of cardboard didn’t work so now please give us the cash for a concrete wall.”

Hilarity aside, hello again: seaside houses are inherently vulnerable. They’re a risky luxury. They should never ever be subsidized by public funds.

Tom Saab, the head of Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, told the BBC that the group had “begged” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and the state to help re-fortify the beach after a particularly brutal storm in December 2022. He alleged that they had “refused to help” and had left their properties vulnerable to flooding and storm damage. Their inaction, he said, had forced the community to fund the short-term fix. “A project of this magnitude should have been done by an engineering company or the state and federal government,” Mr Saab added. “But our little volunteer group from Salisbury pulled off a minor miracle.”

The entitlement of some people. Sure, get it done by an engineering company, but at your expense, not the expense of everyone in New Hampshire.

This guy should be booted off Twitter for constantly lying about gender skeptics.

That’s just a lie. People who don’t believe in magic gender are not “working to remove” anyone’s rights, we’re working to protect women’s rights. Trans people don’t have a right to shove women aside and replace them with men in lipstick. Pinheads like Thomas Willett need to stop burbling about “trans rights” without ever defining them or explaining why they get to cancel women’s rights.

Or maybe it was a matter of influencers.

What is a “transfeminine jurist”?

What does it mean to “move through academia using a profoundly transdisciplinary approach”?

What is a “transfeminine law clerk”?

If Florence is a trans woman why does he call himself “they”?

You have GOT to be kidding.

The National Post [Canada]:

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”

In other words it’s “more appropriate” to call victims of sexual assault cunts.

In a decision published Friday, Justice Sheilah Martin wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.”

While “person with a vagina” would engender no confusion?

Martin does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing, but the next passage in her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.” Notably, not one person in the entire case is identified as transgender, and the complainant is referred to throughout as a “she.”

I wonder if Justice Sheilah Martin herself would like to be referred to as a person with a vagina. Maybe that should be a requirement – all women have to have “with a vagina” included in any mention of them. Justice with a vagina Sheilah Martin, novelist with a vagina Margaret Atwood, actress with a vagina Catherine O’Hara. Good?

To be fair, the judge’s ruling may have been more narrowly focused than the usual “women must stop calling themselves women” bullshit: it was in reference to testimony about the complainant waking up to find the accused penetrating her, and to arguments about whether or not she could tell. It was about the particular body part in question. But still…without a social background in which we’re constantly bullied to stop saying “women” would a judge have come up with “person with a vagina”?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on They simply memorized a rule.

when faced with a “gut” common-sense feeling that something’s amiss with transgender ideology, the “rote lesson” they’ve absorbed is to distrust their own “gut” sense that something’s wrong because there must be some kind of higher, intellectual, rational justification out there somewhere that they fear they just haven’t worked out yet.

Kind of like, All these other important people have figured it out already; why haven’t I?

On occasion, I’ve wondered how it is that this exact kind of argument never worked with regards to religious belief. There’ve been lots of important and brilliant people who’ve held devout religious belief, yet their own faith made no dent in my lack of belief (once I’d finally come to that position in my own thoughts and feelings about the matter). The faith of those smart people did not make me rethink my perception of the impossibility and ridiculousness of the supernatural aspects of their religions. For me, the supernatural bits get in the way of those few moral and ethical bits that are actually worthwhile.

Transgenderism rests upon a set of essentially religious, supernatural beliefs. An implicit Cartesian dualism, the primacy of the “gender identity” over the sexed body, the concept of being born into the “wrong” body, the belief that sex is a spectrum rather than a binary, and that humans can change sex. Like religion, there are all sorts of subsets of belief, many of which are mutually exclusive (is gender fixed or fluid; is it innate or can it arise later; how much , if any physical transition is required; etc.), all of which still, supposedly, fall within the trans “community” or under the trans “umbrella.”

I’m having an argument with Freddie deBoer over at Substack right this minute, over his insistence that there’s such a thing as a “trans child”, and he’s reacting very much like someon who’s been conditioned to believe that his own doubts about trans medicine are signs that he might secretly harbour some kind of hate for the “LGBTQ” somewhere deep down.

Well, this potential “hatred” may actually be partially true if he supports “trans medicine” because he’s supporting transing away the gay. Those who claim there are “trans kids” are starting with their conclusion by squeezing all disphoric children into a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of transness. “The awnswer is trans; what was the question?” Remember Dawkins invocation of the “Conservative child” or “Keynsian child” to point out the inappropriateness of talking about a “Muslim child” or a “Catholic child?” I’ve come to think that transess is more a belief than a condition. Talking about “trans children” is akin to pre-emptive recruitment into an ideology, a staking out of a political claim in the flesh and blood of children, rather than a medical diagnosis. Treatment then, is not so much an attempt at any sort of cure, but a sacrifice to faith, a pricey token of commitment. And this commitment must be made before they have a chance to desist.

You’ll not believe me but this is a real thing.

Here it is right here at Police Scotland here. The police, talking baby talk to the citizenry.

Have you met the Hate Monster?

The Hate Monster, represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.

The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry. He weighs you down till you end up targeting someone, just because they look or act different to you.

When you’re feeling insecure or angry, the Hate Monster feeds on that.

This is the language of picture books for small children, age 4 or 5. Children age 5 tend not to read police webpages.

Scotland, what did they do to you?

Cool, the Royal College of Midwives has invented a new way to gestate and push out babies.

Oh thank god, Amnesty International has found the way to fix everything.

I started re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last night (for the 5th time? 10th? 20th? I don’t know). Kept shrieking with laughter at the language jokes.

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them.

…

How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders.”

…

There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes.

…

…round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.

It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”

Well done Alice! If it’s not marked poison it can’t possibly be poison.

However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.

I’m pretty sure I missed the hilarity of that one the first x times I read. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t miss the hilarity of all of them.

First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.

Not so much hilarity as…what to call it…I guess inquiring.

…sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.

…She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing…

That got a real, noisy explosion of hilarity. I swear, I have not paid close enough attention to the jokes in this book in the past. I suppose I read it for the story, like a fool.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”

…

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall…As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself.

…

“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.

“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did you speak?”

“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.

“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”

“Found what?” said the Duck.

“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”

“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”

Genius.