American Transpeople Joining Gun Clubs Against the Coming ‘Trans Genocide’

This is both weird and alarming. Karen Davis is a gender critical Black American woman, who gives her critique of the trans cult and its excesses on her vlog, ‘You’re Kidding, Right?’ on YouTube. She’s a musician and a music teacher. I think she teaches special children. She’s also been a care worker in a social club for schizophrenics. She has an excellent grasp of the medical literature and frequently cites relevant papers on the damaging side-effects of puberty blockers, gender transition surgery and the mental and physical differences between the sexes that persist despite the surgery and hormone treatment. She’s an important voice in the debate, but I deliberately haven’t posted her here. This is because she has very strong and uncompromising views, expressed in similarly strong language. And I don’t want to offend any of my readers unnecessarily.

Yesterday, however, she made a couple of posts reporting a very alarming development. It seems some American transpeople have worked themselves up into such a state of fear over an imagined coming genocide that they’re joining a set of gun clubs, ‘The Pink Pistols’, set up by gay people in the early 2000s in order to teach them to shoot in order to protect themselves. This came out when she was talking about the reaction among some trans people to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ passage of a law in Florida banning gender treatment for minors. This forbade doctors and clinicians from putting trans-identifying children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgery. This is important, as gender surgeons have been performing mastectomies on girls as young as 12. DeSantis is a Republican, and while I generally despise the Republican party, I think he’s done the right thing about this. Children are way too young to be able to make responsible decisions about such life-changing medical treatment. After all, we don’t allow kids of 12 to buy tobacco or alcohol, and over here they can’t buy glue at that age. It’s also the case that 65-85 per cent of children with gender confusion actually grow out of it, usually settling down as gay men or women. There’s real concern among part of the gay community that gender reassignment surgery is being used by homophobic parents as a kind of gay conversion therapy. If this is the case, then it’s as nasty as the historic gay conversion techniques involving electric shocks, isolation, starvation, sleep deprivation and other sadistic tortures. I don’t doubt that there are some people who really need trans therapy and medical treatment, but there are also very many who don’t and for whom it is inappropriate and damaging.

The people on one of the trans chatrooms visited by Davies, however, interpreted DeSantis’ legislation as the first steps towards the trans holocaust. One poster, InnocenceClaire, said that she was having fantasies of killing people. Her partner was in the navy, and she was concerned about having to shoot members of the US military when the state openly began killing trans people. She was also thinking of emigrating to Canada. Someone then suggested she join Pink Pistols, which is the subject of a further vlog post by Davies.

Okay, I’m very definitely someone who believes very strongly in gun licensing and restrictions on firearms possession. But I honestly don’t blame gay Americans for setting up their own gun clubs considering the violent persecution gays have suffered and still do in some quarters. Western society is much more tolerant now than it was when I was growing up. But I’ve been told by American friends that even though homosexuality has been legalised at the federal level, many individual states continue to have laws against homosexuality. And I don’t doubt either that transpeople get their share of abuse and violence. While drag has been part of British pantomime and the Music Hall tradition since the 19th century, it was illegal for ‘men to walk about in the clothes of the opposite sex for immoral purposes’, as the act put it. I don’t know when it was legalised. One of the gobbets we had to read in a book intended to help young people navigate their way into adulthood in RE when I was at school was about a young transvestite bloke in prison. In the 90s Private Eye in its ‘Funny Old World’ column published the obituary of an older transvestite, who had been frequently up before the beak. And the violence and abuse against trans people was covered in the small press magazine Aeon – the Magazine of Transkind. One of the great commenters here has posted a link to a BBC report on the abuse a transwoman received from a mob after an ambulance arrived to take her to hospital in this country.

But from what I can tell, most of the violence, abuse and threats of violence in this controversy come from trans rights activists, who may not be trans themselves, against gender critical feminists. Maria Maclachlan of the ‘Peak Trans’ vlog was the victim of one assault. A feminist protest in Spain against that country’s new gender identification laws had to be abandoned because of the menacing mood of the trans counterprotesters. There has been a lot of argy-bargy from the trans activists at the rallies Kelly-Jay Keen has held in Britain, including Bristol and Brighton. One of the trans rights activists there set off a smoke bomb and another was arrested with a bag of knives. Keen is on a campaign tour of America. She wanted to speak in Portland, but received hostile, threatening messages and was told by the cops that they wouldn’t be able to protest her. She wisely called it off. Now there have been social media posts smearing her as a member of the Proud Boys. Similar threats and attacks have happened to others. There was outrage a couple of weeks ago when Fred Sargent, a senior member of the American gay community and a veteran of the Stonewall riots, was knocked to the ground at a Pride march and had coffee poured on him because he was carrying a banner stating that transwomen weren’t women. And there were any number of posts on Twitter by people posting about how TERFs – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists – were fascists and Nazis and should be killed.

In fact, the violence actually suffered by transpeople in Britain in America is small. I think in Britain three trans people were killed a couple of years ago, and there have fortunately been no more murdered since. According to Davis, 36 trans people have been killed in the Land of the Free this year. That’s obviously 36 too many, but it’s a tiny number compared to the 1,800 women murdered by their parents, often after they’ve given birth. Gender critical feminists aren’t fascists and there no trans holocaust.

I am not saying this to vilify transpeople, only to make the point that there are parts of that milieu that is violent and abusive. My fear is that this section of the trans community will tool itself up with firearms and bring them to demonstrations, like other armed groups. I can remember a couple of years ago when a militia group turned up to face down Black Lives Matter protesters. There was a stand-off, but mercifully no-one was shot. My fear is that some trans protesters equipped with firearms won’t exercise similar restraint, not if they really believe that TERFs are Nazis. And that would be a catastrophe. Apart from the loss of the life, many gays and transpeople are afraid that the militancy and extremism of the trans rights movement will provoke a backlash against all of them. That could very well come true if someone is shot at a rally. I really hope cooler heads prevail.

For further information, see the posts ‘MTFs ARM IN RESPONSE TO FLORIDA MOVE TO PROTECT KIDS’ and ‘FEMALE IMPERSONATORS GET GUNS WHILE REAL WOMEN GET KILLED’

Andrew Marr Praises Steven Pinker’s Book on Science, Rationality and Free Markets

Mike has posted a number of pieces on his blog commenting on the right-wing bias displayed by Andrew Marr on his Sunday morning show. One recent example of this was his comment to a Tory guest, who came on immediately after he had given a hard interview to someone from the Labour Party. His interview of the Tory was softer, and at the end of it he leaned over to tell her that she had done ‘very well’. Or something like it.

I’m not surprised by this bias. Marr is a fan of the free market, the sacred ideology at the heart of Thatcherism, against which no-one is allowed to blaspheme or question. He was in the I newspaper a few weeks ago praising Steven Pinker’s new book, which argues that the world has got immensely better due to science, reason and markets. Pinker’s a neuroscientist and atheist polemicist. The book’s a successor to his previous work, The Better Angels of Our Nature. This was written to refute the claim that the 20th century was the bloodiest period in human history. This argument has been made in defence of religion, as much atheist polemic is based on the violence and bloodshed that has been generated by religion. But the 20th century is a problem, as the massacres and genocides there took place within an increasingly secular world, and in the case of the horrors committed by Communist regimes, were perpetrated by aggressively atheist regimes. And in the case of the Fascist regimes, it’s questionable how religious they were. General Franco in Spain believed that he was defending Christianity from secularism and materialism when he launched his attack on the Republican government, and horrifically many Christians did support the Fascist regimes against the supposed threats of Communism and Socialism. I’m well aware that Hitler claimed that he was doing ‘the Lord’s work’ in persecuting the Jews in Mein Kampf, but in his Table Talk he has nothing but contempt for Christianity, and wants astronomical observatories set up near schools as part of a scientific campaign against the religion. Hitler’s own religious beliefs seem to have been a kind of monistic pantheism, possibly not that far removed from those of the Monist League, who also sported the swastika as their symbol. As for Mussolini, the Italian dictated signed the Lateran Accords with the papacy, in which the Pope finally recognised Italy’s existence as a state in return for Roman Catholic religious education in schools. But il Duce had started out as a radical socialist, and many members of the Fascist party still were vehemently atheist. Much depended on the religious opinions of the local Fascist ras whether Roman Catholic religious education was taught in the schools in his area. I don’t wish to go into this argument now, whether these regimes were really atheist or not, or if the 20th century really was the bloodiest period in human history. I just wish to make the point that this was the issue at the heart of Pinker’s previous book.

Pinker’s new book apparently tells us that everything’s getting better, including the environment, and Pinker marshals an impressive arrays of facts. But all this said to me was that people and governments have become more ecologically conscious. It does not mean that we aren’t facing the devastating loss of an extraordinary number of this planet’s animal and plant species, or that we face catastrophic global warming which may make the Middle East uninhabitable.

But even more questionable is Pinker’s and Marr’s assertion that modern, post-Enlightenment society has been immensely improved thanks to the science, reason and markets. In the case of science and reason, at one level the statement is obviously true. Human life has benefited immensely from scientific advance, particularly in medicine. But the view that science and reason didn’t exist before then is one that many Medieval scholars would strenuously reject. In contrast to the stereotypes, the Middle Ages actually wasn’t anti-science. There are poems from the 12th-13th centuries celebrating it, and the new knowledge that was flooding into Europe from the Islamic world. The 15th century English poem, The Court of Sapience, lists the various branches of knowledge known to the medieval world, and celebrates them as the area of ‘Dame Sapience’, an idealised personification of wisdom. As for superstition and the occult, historians have also pointed out that the Middle Ages were also an age of scepticism as well as faith. Medieval theologians wrote texts arguing that visions of demons were more likely caused by a full stomach interfering with the correct functioning of the nerves, and so causing bad dreams. Others doubted whether the seers, who claimed to be able to identify thieves through peering in bowls of water or other reflecting surfaces, had any such powers, and were simply using common knowledge to put the blame on notorious thieves. And in contrast to what Marr apparently thinks, free market capitalism did not suddenly emerge in the 18th century with the French Physiocrats and then Adam Smith. In fact, some Christian theologians were arguing for free trade as far back as the thirteenth century.

As for free market capitalism benefiting humanity, the evidence today is that it really doesn’t. The neoliberalism ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan has done nothing but make the lives of the poor much poorer across the world, and in so doing has increased international tension and political violence. The Korean economist, Ha-Joon Chang in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, shows how the strong economies of the world’s developed nations were all created, not by free trade, but by protectionism.

This is very clearly not something any true-blue Thatcherite wants to hear. But it also shows the strange, cult-like nature of the ideology of free trade capitalism. A number of writers have pointed out the apparently illogical, absolute belief its supporters have, even when they are shown the plentiful evidence to the contrary. They still go on believing and demanding free market solutions, even when it is abundantly clear to everyone else that not only do they not work, they are even causing immense harm. And Marr is clearly one of these true believers. He also seems to have uncritically accepted the view that science, reason and free market capitalism were all products of the Enlightenment, when academic historians have been pushing the origins of science and capitalism further back to the Middle Ages, and demonstrated that the Age of Faith was also one of Reason, however irrational it now seems to us.

Marr’s praise of the book and its promotion of the free market also gives more than an indication of his own political beliefs, and why he is much less sympathetic to left-wing guests on his show than those from the right. He’s another member of the cult of neoliberal market capitalism, and this has to be protected at all costs from unbelievers. Even when he and the Beeb swear impartiality.

RT Video of Teachers’ Demonstration in Washington against Betsy DeVos

Betsy DeVos is Trump’s education secretary. She’s a multimillionaire member of the family behind the Amway pyramid scheme, who has never attended a public, that is, state school in her life, and as a bright red corporate Republican, hates them with a passion. She, like her master, Trump, wants to privatise them, and turn them into charter schools. This means that they will be able to circumvent the state legislation regulating teaching standards, the pay and conditions of teaching staff, just like Academies in the UK. And in the case of America, they will also be outside the legislation outlawing the teaching of religion in schools.

Teachers in America, like those in Britain, are extremely worried and angry. This is a video by RT America of a demonstration by public school teachers outside the Hyatt Regency Bellevue Hotel in the state of Washington last Friday, 13th October 2017. The assembled educators have placards proclaiming ‘Stop Fascism’, protesting the privatisation of the American school system, and demanding an end to the road from school to prison. I don’t know the particular symbolism, but some of the female demonstrators lined up to wear 17th/18th century dress with red capes, holding placards, which read out ‘This nightmare will end’.

Mike and I both went to Anglican church school in Bristol, and I have absolutely nothing against the teaching of religion in schools nor the state supporting faith schools. I’m not a secularist. Religious education in British schools hasn’t prevented the increasing secularisation of society. Religion, and more recently the attempts of secular philosophy to grasp with the deep issues of humanity’s existence, morality and meaning, have been part of human culture and identity for centuries, if not millennia. It can also be argued that we need proper teaching about each others’ religious beliefs as society has become more plural and multicultural, so that children do not get distorted or bigoted pictures of our fellow citizens and their religious beliefs or secular philosophies.

But I’m also aware that American society and educational tradition is different, and that there are quite legitimate concerns that what these schools will push is not education, but indoctrination. Just as there are concerns over here about the extremist agenda pursued by some of the new faith schools established in the UK.

Mine and Mike’s mother was a junior school teacher for many years, and I did my first degree at an Anglican teacher training college, and so have some understanding from the inside of what teachers face. Contrary to what the Republicans and Conservatives would have us all believe, teachers as a rule don’t want to indoctrinate children with lesbian feminist cultural Marxist propaganda, although they do want to make sure that girls as well as boys reach their academic potential, and they do have a statutory duty tackle prejudice, including homophobia. But most of all, teachers want to stand in front of a White board and teach. And those I know, who’ve done it state that it’s immensely rewarding. They want to see their pupils do well, and become bright, inquiring members of society. They want to pass on the interest and passion they have for the subjects they teach, whether English, maths, science, history, whatever to the children in their care.

I’m perfectly aware that there are some terrible teachers. But the good far outnumber the bad. Teachers in this country have been appallingly treated by successive governments ever since Margaret Thatcher, and the attempts to privatise, or part-privatise schools through their transformation into academies and charter schools threaten educational standards, as well as the pay and conditions of the teaching staff themselves. This country has suffered from wave after wave of qualified teachers leaving the profession as conditions have become worse, demands increased, and in some cases even dangerous. There have been cases where teachers are assaulted. At the same time, like other public sectors workers, pay has been cut or frozen. They have not been given the support they need by the authorities, and in the case of the Republicans in America and Conservatives over here, they’ve actually been demonised and vilified. Over the decades newspapers like the Scum, the Heil and even the Torygraph have run article after article trying to scare the British public with stories about how left-wing teachers are indoctrinating Britain’s children. Under Cameron, we had Michael Gove whining about history wasn’t being taught properly. It should be more patriotic, with children taught the approved Tory version of the First World War, rather than Blackadder. As Mike pointed out in a series of articles he put up about it, this would be to distort history for the Tories’ own benefit. As well as mistaking a comedy, based on history, with history itself.

In the 1980s, my mother felt so strongly about the threat to British education that she and the other teachers in her union took industrial action. As did very many others. This was not done selfishly to maintain their own privileges at the expense of their children. It was also because they were very much concerned that unless strike action was taken, the Tories would continue to run down the British education system. As they have, and Blairite New Labour as well.

The transformation of America’s public schools into charter schools is undemocratic, and hasn’t just been done by the Republicans. Obama also pushed for it. And like Blair in England, schools were often taken out of the state sector and made charter schools against the wishes of the community, parents, teachers, community groups, pastors and clergy. The Black community in particular has been threatened by the fall in educational standards that they represent. A year or so ago the veteran civil rights organisation, the NAACP, came out against them. There are books over here about the failings of academy schools. One of the pamphlets I’ve written is against them. If you want a copy, just let me know in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

But DeVos and the corporatists want a privatised school system both as a source of profit and because they would transform the school system from proper education, to a system of creating a passive workforce, who have enough knowledge to work for their corporate masters, but not enough to question, think for themselves, or even to be able to participate fully in art and culture. Art and music along with other humanities are being dropped from the curriculum in Britain as schools concentrate on the STEM subjects. And this is harming our children’s education.

C.P. Snow talked of the ‘two cultures’. He felt that there was a real gap between the arts and the sciences, so that the two formed distinct, separate cultures with little contact between each other. I think his fears, however true they were when he was writing, are somewhat exaggerated now. Science and mathematics has inspired much art down the centuries, as you can see from the weird paradoxes of Max Escher or the new scientific experiments that were painted during the 18th century by Wright of Derby. And scientists and science educators like the late Carl Sagan and even Richard Dawkins have expressed an extensive knowledge and keen appreciation of art.

This is why teachers are protesting against academies and charter schools: they want to preserve proper educational standards. They want to make sure that the poorest children have the same opportunity to achieve as the wealthiest. They want education to receive its proper status as a public good, not the preserve of the affluent, or simply another revenue stream for a grotty multinational like Murdoch’s. And although in Britain religion is taught, or supposed to be taught, in schools, there are safeguards and legislation against indoctrination. And teachers wish to preserve those as well.

So stand with your community teachers and teaching unions, and don’t let the Republicans in America or the Tories in Britain turn your school into an academy.

Donald Trump’s Horrendous Contempt for Family Values

The Republican party are very big on ‘family values’. They’ve been so ever since Ronald Reagan brought the Christian fundamentalists in from the political cold in the 1980s. Before then, many of what is now the Religious Right did not vote on the grounds that American society and politics were too decadent and fallen for good Christians to become involved with. Reagan and his party machine changed all that by explicitly appealing to them and campaigning on politically and morally Conservative Christian issues. These are now so much a feature of the Republican political landscape, that they’re practically stereotypical of the American Right-wing mindset – abortion, homosexuality, and the family.

Most Christians, and in fact probably most people, regardless of their religious beliefs or absence thereof, were alarmed by the massive growth in divorce and the apparent collapse of the traditional family in the ’70s and ’80s. I can remember the various grim children’s books and adult dramas on the TV dealing with the issue of family break up. In RE at school, one of the subjects covered was ‘relationships’. The textbook for this part of the curriculum included discussions of burgeoning teenage sexuality as well as divorce. This depressed me no end. Instead of the ‘happy ever after’ myth of traditional marriage, it presented a grim world of broken homes where confused children wondered why their mummies and daddies weren’t living together any more. It was a prospect almost calculated to put any romantic or vaguely idealistic young person off the idea of getting hitched altogether by showing them the terrifying prospect of the lifelong-relationship burning out after a few years into a domestic hell of hatred and despair.

Modern Britain has since come somewhat to terms with this. The divorce statistics still cause some concern, especially amongst Tories, but they’re much less in the news than they were. Most children in this country are born outside of marriage, but the ideal is still some kind of committed relationship. Where once neighbours dropped their voices when it came to mentioning ‘cohabiting’ couples, now hardly anyone takes any notice whatsoever. Instead of referring to them as ‘spouse’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, those in a committed relationship not blessed by either the church or the Record Office are simply referred to as ‘partners’.

But family values remain very big in America. There’s a hilarious video by one of the current Republican candidates – I think it might be Ted Cruz- in which the politico steps forward to declare that he believes that the bedrock of American society is a solid family. It’s so stereotypical of Conservative rhetoric that it’s almost unintentionally hysterically funny. Trump, however, will probably not be pursuing that approach to appeal to Conservative American voters. I’ve no doubt that Trump would probably like to appeal on that point, but his own family values and relationships are horrendous.

Mike over on Vox Political has posted up an obituary by Thomas P. Trump, The Donald’s cousin. This Trump, who passed away aged 88, is described as a brilliant chemist and philanthropist. He also insisted that the obituary included a plea for people not to vote for his ‘mucus bag’ cousin. The older Trump was afraid that if The Donald became president, he’d be responsible for a ‘holocaust-level’ atrocity. See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/08/obituary-leaves-mucus-bag-donald-trumped-by-his-own-late-cousin/.

The Young Turks also reported on a feud in the Trump family over the in heritance left by Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump snr. When Trump pere died in the 1990s, he cut one of his sons, Fred Trump jnr, out of his will on the grounds that the man was an alcoholic. This was done at the instigation of his other son, yes, you guessed it, Donald. Fred junior’s children therefore took the issue to court to contest the will. At which point, the Tyrant of Trump tower really wigged out and decided he wasn’t going to play ball any more. One of his nephews was a small boy, who suffered from seizures. Trump had generously been paying for the child’s treatment. Once the lad’s parents and their siblings decided to defy him about the inheritance, he decided that he wouldn’t pay for the lad’s medical care any more.

In the video below, the Turks’ anchor, John Iadarola, discusses this family affair, and comes to the final judgement that Trump’s family values are horrible. Most people would probably agree that it is horrendous for him to withdrawal vital medical care from an innocent child, simply because he couldn’t get his own way with the parents.

And if you take the rhetoric about family values seriously – that a man’s private affairs are also a good indication of whether he’s morally suitable for the high office for which he’s campaigning, then Trump is manifestly unsuited for something as absolutely important as the presidency. Not that anybody needed to know the details of Trump’s family affairs to realise this. He could have had an absolutely model relationship of perfect harmony with his siblings, and it still wouldn’t change the fact that he’s a walking monster, who shouldn’t be let anywhere near high office. This just confirms what many people know, or have guessed already.

But if Trump has absolutely no scruples about so effectively screwing his own family over for money, including a terribly vulnerable little boy, it also shows that he will have absolutely no remorse about destroying the lives, families and children of others if he becomes president. And certainly not if they’re Hispanic, Muslim, or indeed, ordinary blue-collar American worker.