I’ve recorded this essay should anyone prefer to listen to their media rather than read.
If you’ve just peaked, welcome. Was it Dylan Mulvaney or the bearded dude in the gym locker room? Was it that creep Jeffry Marsh? Maybe it’s closer to home. Maybe you’re worried about a friend's trans identified daughter, whose mental health seems to be spiralling out of control? No matter how you came to the fight, welcome.
It’s likely you’re a lefty who is either same sex attracted or a lifelong ally. You’re shocked and disappointed in the reactions of many, including life long friends who you thought may have extended you a little more grace before cutting you out of their lives.
You’ve probably heard from transexuals like Buck Angel and learned there is disagreement even amongst the trans identified community. You may think you’ve got it all figured it out. The political union that will defeat the LGBTQI juggernaut. You can have your cake and eat it too. You’re not hateful and you’re not anti-trans.
If gender criticals team up with rational trans identified folk we can show the world the third way out of this mess. We can put a stop to child transition. We can ensure women's rights are respected and balanced with the rights of genuine transsexuals. Not these johnny come lately fakers. The trans trenders. Or the rapists using it as a get out of jail free card. The actual transexuals who go the whole way. The ones suffering crippling gender dysphoria.
You’re horrified to learn of a shadowy group of extremists. Ultras. They’re the actual transphobes. The ones who seem to hate the gays just the same as the trans. They’re the alt right handmaidens. The trad wives who would otherwise see women barefoot and naked in the kitchen. Farage Shire wives if you will. You’ve been warned to block them and think you might. You’ve had a few run in’s with them on Twitter. They’re just as bad as the TRA’s trying to compel your speech and demand you use their language. They drove Andrew Doyle off Twitter for Gods sake! This to you is a salutary lesson in the truth of the horseshoe theory; the notion that those at the far ends of a political position are a mirror of one another, their dark and ugly shadow.
Well I have a message for you, my sweet summer child. We are you in a few years, if you have the stomach to stick around. Most of us started out in your position. We spoke with transexuals, invited them into our groups. We tried to support them as they set up their own advocacy organizations. Groups like Trans Rational, of trans identified males like Kenisis. We tried to work together, we really did. What we received in return, was a real time lesson in the perils of forced teaming. Of attempting to create a political union of groups who have diametrically opposing aims. It turns out women’s rights campaigners and very sexist people don’t really get along.
The ultra position is that of a gender atheist. Gender doesn’t exist therefore trans doesn’t exist. Nobody is trans therefore the civil rights claims of trans identified individuals are null and void. We fight to legally reverse all the privileges that have been afforded to them, essentially on the basis of self declaration. We don’t want to amend the Equality Act to clarify that women are female only in certain circumstances. We don’t think womanhood can be partitioned this way. Don’t believe me ask India (no not that one.) We want to repeal the GRA and remove the protected characteristic of gender reassignment from the Equality Act. As long as the notion that trans exists in law, we must be eternally vigilant. An amendment by its nature can be overturned at any point. It may seem like the path of least resistance but it’s really just a loop which at any point could take us back to square one. The civil rights of those who identify as trans could be protected via the other strands of the Equality act; those of sexual orientation, sex, belief and disability.
We want to severely limit if not ban transgender ‘medicine’, not just for children but for adults as well. If the WPATH files proved anything: it was that vulnerable adults can be just as much at risk from predation by this movement as vulnerable children. To learn that clinicians argued patients in a psychotic state could consent to castration seems to fly in the face of all medical ethics. The failure of safeguarding is systemic and medical regulators are not exempt. We have no faith in their ability to properly safeguard the vulnerable. Trans is at the vanguard of a medical revolution which is fundamentally re-writing the social contract between clinician and patients. We are moving to a model in which the paying customer is always right; even if he identifies as both a woman and Napoleon Bonaparte.
A ban on child transition is essentially a pause button. It will do nothing to help the thousands of young women chopping off their healthy breasts because they’ve been convinced they’re not like other girls. The butch lesbians who have been groomed by the LGBT organizations they founded to believe their love of women and flannel shirts means they should take wrong sex hormones. Medication which will eventually destroy their sexual function, along with their mental and physical health. Neither will it dissuade big pharma from profiting from an industry in which each trans identified patient is said to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds over a lifetime.
Furthermore we want it to be known that the majority of men with a trans identity have a paraphilic disorder and are performing a dangerous fetish which is nearly always correlated with others. Paraphilic disorders like voyeurism, exhibitionism and paedophilia. It is an uncomfortable truth to face. The truth that dare you not to speak its name. That once spoken allows us to be dismissed; and confirms in the mind of the ill informed the truth that we view the LGBT community as groomers and perverts. It’s just that in this case, transvestic men actually are. Literally textbook perverts.
As long as trans exists as a legal entity gay rights and women’s rights will be forfeit. As long as the law protects men in their performance of womanhood, safeguarding will be undermined, perhaps fatally.
It is the ultras position that language has been central to this endeavour. Pronouns are a linguistic magic trick that turn males into females. As the interim Cass Report notes they are not a neutral act. They solidify trans identities in the minds of the vulnerable and work as rohypnol , lowering women’s boundaries around men who would otherwise be seen as the dangerous sexual predators they quite clearly are.
If they weren’t important, trans rights activists wouldn’t have worked so hard to create hate speech laws which effectively criminalize those who say men aren’t women. To punish those who say the emperor is naked and what’s more he seems to quite like showing us his penis. Look there he is, playing the piano with it on Channel 4.
We are the veterans. Those who have been involved in the movement since its inception. You may think you have peaked but I can assure you that you haven’t. It’s a process. Just as you think it can’t get any worse it does. We’ve been down so many rabbit holes at this point we’re on first name terms with Alice, the Mad Hatter and the entire court of the Queen of Hearts.
Have you learned yet about autogynephilia? About the men who created the transgender movement? Do you yet appreciate the extent of the institutional capture? The funding that has been invested globally in this movement? The money to be made, the markets opened up? Have you learned yet about PIE and the dark history of the struggle for paedophile acceptance? What about queer theory? Transhumanism? Have you met Mika yet?
But but but I may hear you say, I’m not a feminist, why would I adopt their position? I have my own views on the world. Adherence to ideology is what got us into this mess in the first place.
The truth of the matter is the majority of those labelled Ultra are not actually feminists, let alone radical ones. You should question how it is that we can be compared to Mussolini by those on the left; and man hating shrews by those on the right.
Might it be the case that we are being slurred left, right and centre because of our political position? Might there be a financial incentive to shut down ideas which challenge the profit margins of a market worth half a billion pounds annually? Might some sexist men be using this as an excuse to punish disobedient women and exert their dominance in what is predominantly a women's right’s movement? To isolate the Bad Women and remove our ability to speak with those charged with our protection? Does this behaviour sound familiar, TERF?
Because this isn’t a reverse engineered position. It’s one which many individuals have coalesced around because they believe it is the best reflection of reality; and the best path out of the mad house. You cannot compromise with irrationality; to sit down and negotiate with the Mad Hatter and his best mate Humpty Dumpty.
The position at heart is those who approach this issue from a safeguarding position and those who conceptualize it as a clash of right between opposing groups of civil rights claimants. From our position many of those who claim a trans identity are dangerous fetishists who have been given license by the state to force everyone else to play a part in their sex lives. Is it any wonder we refuse to sit down and negotiate our rights with them?
It also seems to be a split that has a class element. Working class women often have roles in which safeguarding is central; in women’s work. We wipe the bums of your babies and also your elders. Meanwhile it is those who work in academia or media, who tend to take a more ‘moderate’ position. They may take passing glances at their workplace safeguarding policies but it’s unlikely to form a central pillar of their practice. They likely wouldn’t risk their job or receive a custodial sentence for failure to properly understand their duties or maintain professional boundaries.
It is those at the bottom of the social hierarchy who are less likely to trust those in authority. Who have been failed too many times by those who identify as their saviour. It is working people who live in a world of systemic safeguarding failures which are putting us and our communities in danger. As a woman raised in the borough of Oldham, right next door to Rochdale I can tell you my trust in the authorities is less than nothing.
I hope I am not just preaching to the choir. That if you disagree with me you have at least managed to make it through to the end of the essay without throwing your phone out of the window. I am sure I have straw manned your viewpoint in an attempt to draw out some common threads between our respective positions. Thank you for sticking around. I am sorry if you feel patronized or that I am teaching you how to suck eggs.
It can feel uncomfortable to read information which challenges your world view or sense of self. I am sure you think of yourself as an intelligent, kind and tolerant person. I am sure that you are. It’s just that I don’t think you have spent enough time thinking on this matter. You likely haven’t had the time. If you’re a woman you’ll likely be juggling an impossible set of priorities and this probably isn’t your main one.
My concern is that it is your best qualities which are being weaponized now, just as they were when you were a trans ally. Weaponized empathy so that you are inadvertently working to uphold the ideology we are all ostensibly united in fighting against.
In my Substack over the coming weeks and months I will be laying out this position in greater detail, providing important context and evidence for many of the arguments laid out in this essay.
It may seem unkind to be so blunt about trans-identified individuals but that is because we live in a world where boundaries are framed as hateful and where telling the truth has become a revolutionary act. Or to put it in the immortal words of Magdelen Berns, maybe it’s that we’d rather be rude than a fucking liar.
The woman who peaked me was the much-missed Gallus Mag of GenderTrender, circa 2015. At first I thought she was too harsh. Then I continued paying attention.
Too fucking right, hen. Just got to scrap Humza’s insane hate speech law as well. I’m definitely going to be reported for “hate” with this transanity. I’m hoping Queen Rowling will twat them in the courts. I’m worried my wee dug will turn me in for a biscuit.