Karen Davies on Feminist Article Debunking Claims that Africans and Other Non-White Peoples Didn’t Know about Biological Sex before European Colonisation

I felt I had to put this up, because the fact that activists and feminist scholars like Karen Davies and Jennifer Seiland, the author of magazine article Davies discusses, have to refute this nonsense show how far the ideological fantasies of Queer Theory have poisoned genuine political, feminist and ethnological discourse. Davies is a Black American lady, who’s a sharp, trenchant critic of the transgender ideology and its supporters. She’s a musician, schoolteacher teaching young children, and has also worked in the care sector with the mentally ill. She has very strong, uncompromising views on both the transgender ideology and transwomen which has led to disputes with other gender critical campaigners, like Graham Linehan. However, her views and criticisms are informed by medical scholarship, and she cites the appropriate medical and psychiatric literature to support her case.

In this video she approvingly discusses a piece in the feminist magazine Reduxx by Jennifer Seiland ‘Black Women Are Women. Men Are Not’, concentrating particularly on Seiland’s attack on a frankly weird and bonkers idea going around Trans supporters and ideologues. This is that Africans did not understand biological sex and the gender binary before it was imposed on them by White, Christian Europeans. Davies herself makes good, and sometimes glaringly obvious points against this nonsense. Like Africans obviously knew about the gender binary and the biological differences between the sexes, like everyone else. It would have partly been a survival issue. You wouldn’t let heavily pregnant women go hunting where they were particularly vulnerable to animal attack. Rather, you’d give them other, lighter work to do and leave them with other people in attendance to help them when the baby arrived. She points to great African civilisations like ancient Egypt and asks how anybody could build such a great culture and its monuments, if they were too thick to know the difference between men and women. She also raises the point that people in the ancient world travelled widely long before European colonisation, and that the Vikings probably got to Africa. She also makes the feminist point that not only were Black women frequently denied their humanity, but so were women generally. She compares the attitude that African’s didn’t understand the difference between men and women to nonsense she was taught at Roman Catholic school that Africans didn’t have language until the Europeans arrived.

This all seems to be a development of one of the arguments used by the supporters of the transgender ideology that non-western cultures have a third gender, and that White westerners, as racist colonialists, have imposed their narrow view that there are only two sexes on them. Now some cultures do have a third gender category for people, usually gay men, who are seen as somehow neither male nor female. A few years ago the Indian hijras – eunuchs – were campaigning for official recognition as a third gender. One book I read years ago about Polynesian society described the gay men in those societies, who grew their hair long, dressed as women and took up feminine occupations like laundry. Going further back, Herodotus in his Histories describes how the men of the Scythian aristocracy often dressed as women and did feminine tasks.

Not all cultures outside Europe have such ideas, however, and in many African cultures the sex roles can be very marked. For example, among the Dowayo of Cameroon the smiths are men but their wives are potters. Basket-weaving is also feminine occupation,. The British anthropologist, Dr. Nigel Barley, in his book The Innocent Anthropologist, describes the general hilarity he caused among his hosts when he tried his hand at basked making. To me the statement that Africans didn’t know about biological sex seems to be a new mutation of the old, and thoroughly discredited anthropological belief that primitive peoples, like those of Papua New Guinea, didn’t understand the father’s role in conception. They believed instead that a god or spirit had entered the woman’s womb. In fact later research showed that primitive peoples know very well that you need a biological man as well as a women to make the next generation.

I also wonder how anyone can make such a ludicrous statement that it needs to be refuted by a feminist scholar like Seiland, when there’s a wealth of popular literature about Africa and its peoples that would easily show otherwise. All you have to do is look for the books on Africa in the local library or good bookstore. And there’s some excellent LGBTQ+ literature which discusses homosexuality and related issues around the world. One of these is A Gay History of the World. This describes the case of an African queen, who overthrew her husband, took on male dress and ruled as king. She also had a harem of male wives, who wore women’s clothes. It’s definitely queer, but it seems to me to be a result of very strong traditional ideas about the sex roles. Only men can rule as kings. Therefore, any woman that tries to rule, has to make herself culturally a man, which means dressing in masculine clothes and having a harem of wives. Though as it seems the queen was heterosexual, these were men rather than women.

As for what Davies was taught in Catholic school about Africans not possessing language until it was brought to them by Whites, I honestly have no idea where that notion came from. It’s the kind of rubbish Fascist groups like the National Front used to say. But European explorers and linguists from the 19th century, and no doubt well before, knew that Africans had their own tongues. The Victorian explorer Richard Burton gives a complete description of the language of the east African city of Harar with grammar and extensive vocabulary in his account of his journeys in that part of the continent. In Wanderings in West Africa he talks approvingly of the Mandinko people and the language of the Kru, asking why Brits dealing with them can’t use their own, perfectly good indigenous names rather than give them nicknames like ‘Three-Fingered Jack’. I’m not saying such attitudes towards African languages is common in the church. I know it isn’t. One of the other voluntary workers at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum told me once how he’d heard mass in Swahili when in Africa. It seems pretty clear that this bizarre idea that African’s didn’t have their own languages isn’t general to Roman Catholics, but just held by those particular teachers in Davies’ old school.

I do wonder at the intellectual damage assertions like the idea that Africans had no notion of biological sex are doing. At the moment they’re held by a small, highly ideologically driven elite, but it seems to be an attempt to deny biological reality for ideological reasons. And I fear that it will be enforced by the same people that protest against and sack academics like Kathleen Stock, who simply assert that sex and gender are based in biological reality, rather than mental or cultural constructs.

Rose of Dawn Attacks the Mythology of the Trans Genocide

Rose of Dawn is a transwoman, who uses her YouTube channels, one of which has the provocative title ‘Trans Stupid’ to attack and debunk some of the malign and violent parts of the trans rights movement. She is, unfortunately, something of a controversial figure among some gender critical feminists, such as Karen Davies. Davies does not want transwomen speaking for women because she considers them to be still men, and so are encroaching on women’s proper territory, even when transwomen like Debbie Hayton and Blair White share much the same views and are welcomed by other gender critical types, such as Graham Linehan, as true allies.

In this video RoD attacks the mythology of the trans genocide. Some trans activists unfortunately believe that there is a mass holocaust of transpeople going on in Britain and America comparable to the Nazi murder of the Jews, gay men and the disabled, and that Britain’s NHS is actively involved. This is monstrously grotesque. RoD has obviously faced prejudiced herself as a transwoman. But she states that society is far more accepting of transwomen now than it was ten years ago. She also believes that the rights of transpeople to compete in sport isn’t a human right. To be fair, the gender critical feminists don’t believe in stopping transwomen from competing in sport. They just don’t want them competing with born women, because of the advantage they have in possessing bodies that were previously male. They feel that they should either compete with men, or in a special category for themselves.

I am very much aware that trans people haven’t had it easy, and that there are large parts of British society that are definitely not as welcoming as white metropolitan liberals. Grayson Perry, the Turner Award-winning potter and presenter of the excellent Channel 4 series, Grayson Perry’s Art Club, had a play broadcast on the Beeb. Entitled ‘Mr. Msunderstood’, it was about his own struggle to come to terms with his transvestism. Going back to the ’90s, I remember how Jenny Randles, one of Britain’s leading investigators of the UFO phenomenon, was deeply upset when one of the tabloids – I think it may have been the Scum or News of the Screws outed her as a transwoman. I am also aware that transvestism, at least in public, was considered gross indecency under the law, punishable by arrest and prison sentences.

However the murder stats for transpeople in the UK are very low. I think only one transperson has been murdered, thankfully, in the past few years. The murder rates in America are still higher, but still comparatively small. And I think that the country has a higher murder than Europe anyway. This has made the calls for a ‘trans day of remembrance’ in Britain rather ridiculous. The stats frequently used to show that transpeople are facing a wave of murder largely come from South America. These countries, beset by grinding poverty, have a massive murder rate anyway. But very man of the victims are sex workers, so it’s unclear whether they were murdered because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.

It seems to me that the myth of a trans genocide has arisen because some militantly, and in my view mentally unbalanced trans rights activists, have read extensively about the Nazi Holocaust and the murder of the disabled under Aktion T4, and mistakenly applied it to themselves. One trans mixed martial arts fighter or boxer appeared wearing a shirt bearing the slogan, ‘Stop the Trans Genocide’. This is not only profoundly mistaken but offensively so. As offensive and wrong as the various ‘D’ list celebs a few years ago promoting the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, blithely joking with each other over whether 1938 had returned.

If there was a trans genocide comparative to the Holocaust, it would be very obvious. Transpeople would not be allowed on social murder to make the claim, there would be organised pogroms against them. And the BBC would very definitely not be allowed to show programmes or items presenting positive views of trans people and those fighting for their rights. Instead they would be rounded up by the police and security forces and sent to real concentration. There may be propaganda films, such as those made by the Nazis, suggesting that they were doing well in their new homes or successfully responding to treatment. There would also be propaganda campaigns against them as well as very public humiliation and ridicule promoted by the state. The statement ‘transwomen are not women’ or ‘Scots women won’t wheesht’ are in no way comparable to Nazi anti-Semitic slogans like ‘Die Jude is Euer Ungluck’ – ‘The Jews is your misfortune’, if understand it properly and the viciously anti-Semitic content of Nazi rags like Der Sturmer. There are no special ambulances operating under the NHS, like those operated by the SS, which gassed the congenitally disabled, or took them to the clinics and hospitals where they were. This part of the mythology seems to me related to the obnoxious nonsense former Republican American presidential candidate Sarah ‘Failin” Palin was spouting about single-payer healthcare. She didn’t want Americans to have an NHS like Britain’s because the elderly and severely disabled would have to face ‘death panels’ to decide whether or not they should live and have state funding spent on them. It’s a monstrously grotesque lie which unfortunately some ‘low information voters’ in the Land of the Free were deceived by. It also seems extremely similar to what these trans rights fanatics are saying when they make the claim that the NHS is similarly involved in the organised murder of transpeople.

And RoD is clearly right to state that it is dangerous nonsense. It’s clearly very harmful to tell genuinely vunerable people struggling with their gender identity and who may well suffer from a number of other mental conditions, to tell them that there is an organised campaign by the state and society to murder them.

Some of the comments to RoD’s video are also well worth reading, such as this comment from Kaien Shiriyaku, a gay Polish man, who grew up in the shadow of the real Holocaust as well as the prejudice and persecution Polish gays faced.

‘I was late for the premiere. Comparisons to holocaust are RI-DI-CU-LO-US! Since I’m from Poland, I wanna share something – when I was growing up I’ve met some people who survived the camps. It was a part of my school (the school was in the name of the victims from the area) and we had meetings once a year, when we were told how horrific those times were. People from the premiere chat already know – I grew up openly gay in the 90s. In Poland of all places. UK and US in the 90s were much more progressive than Poland at the same time. I’ve got my jaw dislocated once for being gay. Bullied constantly. My father kicked me out of the house once I was legal of age. I bet my acrylic nails those snowflakes wouldn’t survive 5 min in Poland, even today. Yes, we have it better now, times had change, however if you meet someone who is homophobic – be prepared to fight. You’re met with either acceptance, or vicious attacks here. All you need for the second one is to exit from a gay club during a football night at the wrong time.’

To be fair, this has occurred in Britain and America. Gays have been beaten up, and gay young people thrown out of their parental homes to live on the streets after coming out to their parents. But it isn’t like Poland, where increasingly strict anti-LGBT legislation is being passed and several areas have declared themselves to be ‘No LGBTQ’ zones.

Society isn’t perfect, but there is no trans holocaust in Britain and America, and such claims are actively harmful not liberating. They have to be stopped.

Starmer’s Wrong: Transpeople Are Not Marginalised and Self-ID Is a Danger to Women

It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for Stonewall. Having put their whole weight behind the campaign for trans rights, they now find themselves facing serious opposition and questioning at last. Various universities and organisations have found that the advice Stonewall has given them is misleading and may actually be illegal. The gay rights activist group was informing its clients that certain types of criticism, which are actually legal and protected, constituted hate speech and was illegal. An increasing number of gays and lesbians are also upset with the organisation’s almost exclusive focus on trans issues. Many lesbians resent the intrusion of biological men into their exclusive spaces – there have been complaints that the majority of lesbian pubs and clubs, at least in Canada, have closed down. There is pressure upon lesbians to have sexual relationships with trans identified men, and if the lesbians turn them down, then they are accused of being ‘transphobic’. There is also particular concern that butch lesbians, and feminine gay men, are being wrongly put under pressure to identify as trans and transition, while in reality they are simply butch lesbians and feminine gay men. As a result, a number of gays and lesbians have left Stonewall and similar organisations for organisations like the LGB Alliance, which concentrates solely on gay rights and excludes trans issues.

Earlier this week Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, was interviewed by Radio 4’s Simon Fanshawe about trans rights. He faced polite, but difficult questioning, something Cohen clearly wasn’t used to. All he could do in response was flail about flinging accusations that somehow Fanshawe was homophobic or transphobic or something, and point to his own minority position as a gay, disabled Jew. Which really isn’t relevant to the topic in hand.

The day after, Starmer came out to support trans rights and said he would support self-ID. Trans people were the most discriminated people in the UK, according to him. This is simply wrong. I doubt very much that trans people are any more discriminated against than the rest of the population. A year or so ago the trans lobby was agitating for a ‘trans day of remembrance’ in respect of all the trans people that have been killed. Except no trans people, or nearly no trans people, have been killed in Britain. They stats they use to support the claim of hundreds of trans people being massacred come from Latin America, where most of the victims are sex workers. Furthermore, transpeople, at least in America, aren’t poor and marginalised. Karen Davies, a Black anti-trans activist, posted a video citing a sociological study of the American trans community, which found them to be overwhelmingly White, extremely affluent, and very well educated. 13 per cent of them have Ph.Ds, as compared to one per cent of the general American population.

Where they are arguably discriminated against, there are very good reasons for doing so. Most transwomen – about 70% – 90% – retain their male genitalia, which is clearly an issue when it comes to transwomen being given access to women-only spaces, like toilets, changing rooms, rape crisis centres, women’s shelters and prisons. This issue is exacerbated further by research showing that sexual fetishes, like transvestism, tend to cluster. Transwomen don’t conform to female patterns of criminality, but male, and convicted transwomen may have a number of other paraphilias such as exhibitionism, sado-masochism and paedophilia. There are therefore extremely good scientific, criminological reasons why transwomen should not be housed in women’s prisons. They may constitute a danger to the female inmates. And indeed, despite the lies utter by Stonewall that nothing of the type has happened, women prisoners have been raped by biologically male sex offenders, who have been sent to women’s prisons because they have claimed to identify as women.

Here’s a couple of videos from Karen Davies again as she cites the sociological research into the transwomen and paraphilias/sexual fetishes.

More disturbing is the evidence from psychiatrists and law-enforcers that certain trans identified men have been getting sexual jollies from being in women’s spaces for a very long time. Be warned – this is sexually explicit.

I realise that this will upset some of the readers and commenters on this blog, who will feel that I am spreading hate and prejudice.

This is very definitely not my intention. I am certainly not trying to smear transwomen as a whole as dangerous sexual predators and I condemn utterly any attack or abuse of them simply for being trans. I believe totally that they should have the same respect, employment and educational rights and opportunities as everyone else.

What I don’t believe in is allowing trans ideology to prevail over fact when it comes to the safety of women and girls. And unfortunately this is the case, and will be the case, if self-ID is accepted and predatory and extremely dangerous trans-identified men are allowed into women’s spaces.

Starmer is here, quite simply, wrong. His promotion of self-ID has led many gender-critical women to leave the Labour party and tear up their membership cards. Yes, transpeople should have a place in the Labour party, and their rights should otherwise be guarded and promoted.

But they are not marginalised, they are not poor, and the promotion of the trans ideology is harming women, and vulnerable gays and lesbians.

Richard Dawkins Stripped of Atheist Award for Questioning the Trans Ideology

This story was over a number of right-wing and gender critical websites last week, and it’s interesting as it shows the comparative power of the trans rights lobby against both organised religion and one of atheism’s fiercest polemicists. Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and anti-theist activist, was stripped of his Humanist of the Year Award because he’d posted a comment on Twitter comparing trans people to Rachel Dolezal.

Dolezal had been kicked out of the White chapter of NAACP – the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – because she’d declared she considered herself ‘transracial’. Although White, she identified as Black. This obviously left many people very offended, and so she was expelled. Dawkins followed this with the comment ‘Now we have men identifying as women and women identifying as men. Discuss.’ As commenters like Graham Linehan and Sargon’s and his fellow Lotus Eaters said, it’s a very mild criticism, couched as an invitation for discussion. And indeed Dawkins tried to excuse it as just that – an invitation to discuss the issue. But it was enough to bring down on him the wrath of the trans rights activists and their supporters in the various atheist and sceptic groups. American Atheists accused him of minimising the persecution of marginalised groups, and the British Humanist Society stripped him of his Humanist of the Year Award, which he’d been given in 1996. Dawkins then made an apology, saying that he had no wish to minimise the suffering of trans people, and did not want to ally himself with ‘Republican bigots’.

This is the man, who has a deep, bitter hatred of organised religion and its supporters. Dawkins is the author of the God Delusion, which was published with the explicit aim of destroying people’s belief in the Almighty and converting them to atheism. He was the leader of the ‘New Atheists’, who were notorious for their bitter invective. Dawkins has described raising a child as a member of a particular religion as ‘child abuse’ and called religious people ‘faithheads’. He has also been accused of islamophobia because of comments he has made about that religion’s traditional attitude towards women and the practice among many Muslims of Female Genital Mutilation. HIs attitude towards religion is so bitter and intolerant, that it has actually alienated many more traditional, tolerant atheists. See for example Kim Sterelny’s foreword for his book, Darwin Wars, about the feud between Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould over their differing interpretations of Darwinian evolution. But Dawkins has carried on undaunted with the same bitter polemic. But when faced with attacks for simply questioning trans ideology, he automatically caved in.

This shows the comparative power of organised religion compared to the trans rights lobby, at least within the sphere of progressive politics. Critics of the ideology have described how the trans lobby has captured a plethora of organisations, including the gay rights organisation Stonewall, various, mostly left-wing political parties and have advised organisations like the police and feminist organisations. The only political parties resisting them are those of the conservative right, which explains why Dawkins didn’t want to be seen supporting the Republicans. The problem is, however, that there is a feminist dimension to Republican opposition to trans rights, and that Dawkins asked a perfectly reasonable question.

Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters made a video about this last week, pointing out that the academic magazine Hypatia had published an article defending trans-racialism. Hypatia describes itself as a journal of feminist philosophy. It had asked why it should be acceptable for people of one sex to identify as members of the other, but not people of one race to identify as members of a different ethnic group. Historically, there have been other Whites, whose admiration of Black America and its culture has led them to try to live as much as possible as Blacks. Years ago in the 1940s, I believe, one man went so far as to paint himself with melanin in order to live as a Black man. He then published a book about his experiences with the deliberate intention of challenging racism and bringing Whites and Blacks together. The Hypatia article stated that the arguments for transgenderism and trans-racialism are exactly the same, and there is no logical reason why one should be acceptable and the other not.

One of the objections to the transgender movement is the feminist concern that it will disadvantage natural, born women in sports. On average, men are stronger and more powerful than women. Hence there is the entirely justifiable fear that if biological men and boys are allowed to compete in female sports it will put biological females at a disadvantage. Natural women are at risk of being pushed out of their own sports. This has implications for university careers, as it means that sports scholarships to universities will go to transwomen rather than natural women. Hence Republican politicians in Maine and New Hampshire have put forward a bill banning biological men competing as women in women’s sports as a deliberate defence of the latter.

These are issues that at the very least need to be discussed calmly and logically, without accusations of bigotry and persecution. In my opinion, those attacking the trans ideology are right and are actually on the side of traditional feminism, and no amount of abuse will change this.

For all his deeply unpleasant intolerance towards religion, Dawkins was perfectly right in wanting it discussed.

Here’s the Lotus Eater’s video on the issue.

Here’s Black American feminist Karen Davies on the bill in Maine to protect women’s sports.