The news item serving as 2016’s identity politics casus belli is the outrage caused by plans by Mississippi and North Carolina legislators to insist that members of the transgender community use toilets which accord with the gender recorded on their birth certificates. This has led to a number of wrinkly rockers cancelling concerts in the offending states (probably a relief to everyone who was wondering how the hell they'd wound up with tickets to a Ringo Starr gig). A news report yesterday featuring a transgender American teenager made me wonder just how vigorously the BBC had conducted its campaign for transgenderism since the start of this year. I decided to repeat last year’s experiment. Even discounting direct reports of events in the American South, it’s clear that the campaign has now really taken off. Here’s a selection of BBC news and programme headlines since the start of the year:
Anthony Isaacs: Transgender Jesus
Swansea Sparkle: A Transgender Story
Newsbeat Documentaries: Transgender: Back to Jamaica
Miss Transgender: Britain's New Beauty Queens
Single-sex schools 'must adapt for transgender pupils'
The Health Show with Louisa Peacock and Nana Akua: Cold Allergy And Help For Transgender People
Mapping safe toilets for transgender Americans
China human rights: Trailblazing in the LGBT community [transgender man claims unfair dismissal]
Viewpoint: Why bathrooms matter to trans rights
The Inquiry: Do We Have Enough Genders?
Nicola Sturgeon makes gender recognition pledge
Transgender Action Plan to tackle barriers to equality
The Arts Show: Marie-Louise Muir is joined by transgender author Liam Klenk
Eye on Wales: Transgender Stories
Vietnamese transgender people celebrate win
'The first surgical procedure is key moment in a trans male's life'
Transgender woman crowdfunding for £20,000 treatment
Free Madrid metro passes for transgender people
Transgender baptisms offered at Greater Manchester church
Ireland leads the way on transgender rights legislation
'Contorted' route to get transgender help in Wales
Brighton College scraps uniform code for transgender pupils
and my favourite:
Transgender moths could save your clothes
….and on and on and on. We’ve recently entered Phase 3 of the five-part left-liberal, cultural Marxist media mind-bending process - the “Acceptance” phase.
Phase 1 - “Priming” - involves increasingly dropping a controversial subject (mass immigration, gay marriage, transvestism, assisted suicide etc.) into the national consciousness so that we no longer automatically shudder, laugh, groan, roll our eyes or fall into a deep sleep whenever it’s mentioned.
Phase 2 - “Normalisation” - involves a barrage of positive, feelgood stories, news items and programmes about the subject, designed to make us accept it as a perfectly normal part of life.
Phase 3 - “Acceptance” - is when anyone who dares to raise concerns about the concept is treated as if they’re part of a tiny, pathetic, narrow-minded, emotionally-retarded, reactionary minority standing in the way of Progress.
Phase 4 - the “Sanctification” - means it’s no longer enough to accept transgenderism, gay marriage, assisted suicide etc: you must constantly and loudly signal your belief that those who have undergone same-sex marriage or a sex-change operation or have decided to opt for assisted suicide are morally superior to the rest of us.
Phase 5 - “Coercion” - involves the punishment of “deniers” through ostracism, job loss, and, in extreme instances, imprisonment.
The fact that we’re currently well into Phase 3 - “Acceptance” - is evident from the self-righteous outrage which greeted Germaine Greer’s insistence that a man doesn’t become a woman simply by having his genitalia surgically removed (for once, I find myself in agreement with the old trout). Since then, activists have accused Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard of being transphobic for supporting free speech in universities (what were they thinking?). When such former darlings of the Liberal Left find themselves publicly shamed for stating the bleeding obvious, you know that the Sanctification phase is about to kick off.
I suspect most of us would accept that there are cases where Nature has “got it wrong” and sex-change surgery might indeed be appropriate. But I also sense a widespread suspicion that in many instances the desire to change one’s gender because of a feeling that one has been born “in the wrong body” may be a symptom of mental illness. But even if we’re dealing with what is mainly a psychiatric problem (which, after all, wouldn’t make it any less of a problem), just how vast is Britain’s transgender community? Despite the recent tsunami of publicity, figures are hard to come by. A report by the Gender Identity Research and Education Society in 2011 estimated that around 650,000 people in the UK “experience some degree of gender nonconformity”. But, of course, that’s utterly meaningless. Let’s get down to the real nitty-gritty - in how many cases are those feelings sufficiently pronounced to make the professed gender nonconformist undergo the expense and discomfort of an operation? The most recent official government figures came from the Interdepartmental Working Group on Transsexual People in 2000, which estimated that there were 1,300-2,000 male-to-female and 250-400 female-to-male transsexuals in the UK. All this bloody fuss for a paltry maximum of 2,500 “gender dysphorics”? Pah!
I suspect the paucity of genuine, real-life transsexuals will soon see the cultural Marxists moving on to another spurious cause with which to épater la bourgeoisie - trans-species marriage or an insistence on devoting an episode of Songs of Praise to Satanists or whatever. Morally-deranged creeps began "priming" us to accept paedophilia as normal in the 1970s, but met their Waterloo on that particular issue. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually returned to the battlefield, probably just after the BBC has introduced quotas for transgender staff (for all I know, they may already have done so).
My own bet on the next 'cause' is that they will try to normalise incest. Indeed, a story appeared a few weeks ago about a mother/son couple (I do apologise if you're eating while reading this) in the USA and it was clear from the subtext that we were meant to feel some sympathy for them.
ReplyDeleteNecrophilia can't be far away, which will be good news for supporters of the LibDems.
That's all right - I finished lunch a while back.
DeleteThe Germans seem to be leading on the incest front, according to this from The Independent in 2014:
"Germany’s national ethics council has called for an end to the criminalisation of incest between siblings after examining the case of a man who had four children with his sister."
The germans are having one of their "turns" again, aren't they?
And just to reinforce your hypothesis, here is the billing for a Radio 4 afternoon play on Wednesday next week:
ReplyDelete"Rock Me Amadeus
Afternoon Drama, Original British Dramatists Episode 1 of 10
By Simon Topping
Charlie was born a boy but has always known that she's really a girl. What's to be done?
The arrival of a German exchange student prompts Charlie to take action."
Thus the work is done - dripped into the ear'oles of an audience unaware it is being preached at.
Still, makes nice change from all those afternoon plays about the suffering of Indians at the hands of their British rulers, and the suffering of 3rd. world immigrants to England at the hands of the derangedly racist English, and the suffering of the Irish under the yoke of British rule, and... well, the only things that really change are the accents and the incidental music.
DeleteThe Office for National Statistics estimated that there were 790,575 19 year-olds in the UK in 2014, 405,326 of them male and 385,249 female.
ReplyDeleteThey predict that by 2039 there will be 864,872 19 year-olds, split 444,658 and 420,214.
They're going to have to buck their ideas up, aren't they.
15 May 2015, the ONS said someone had submitted a Freedom of Information request asking how many transgender people there are in the UK, how many have undergone surgery and how many have committed suicide.
ReplyDeleteTheir response includes "ONS do not produce estimates of the number of transgender people living in the UK. ONS published a position paper in 2009".
The 2009 position paper linked to identifies the relevant legislation and lists a number of academic studies and interested organisations.
It also identifies a number of scoping problems. What is the definition of "transgender"?
And a number of practical problems. How do you conduct a survey to gather the data? Is a male-to-female person transgender or female? How do you stop some respondents "messing around" (their technical term) with their answers?
In view of the problems, the ONS has decided that discretion is the better part of valour.
The civil service, on the other hand, has transgender champions for each department. And, as the blogmeister reports, the BBC are becoming ever more vociferous on the subject.
With no accepted definitions and with little knowledge of the scale of the issue, it's hard to know whether the civil service are doing their championing job well and whether the BBC know what they're talking about.
But then, solving an actual problem or alleviating genuine suffering is hardly the point, Mr. Moss. What matters is that civil servants and BBC staff get to feel morally superior to the unenlightened troglodytes who pay their salaries (i.e. you and me). It must be as much fun as riding in a London taxi at someone else's expense..
DeleteYou refer, I believe, to my pride and joy, paid for out of after-tax income, special rates for OKs.
DeleteToday's Times newspaper, None of the above? Next census will ask about sexuality and gender:
ReplyDeleteNew questions on sexual and gender identity are to be included in the national survey under plans to help the authorities to provide better services for those with non-binary identities.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) disclosed the move yesterday as it published the results of a public consultation, saying that evidence showed a “clear need” for improved information on sexual identity in the 2021 census.