Gender Trouble

The Movie Playing In Everyone's Head

Warning signs in Normandy, France.

It’s been a busy few weeks on the UK gender battlefront. Yes, the country that once proclaimed, ‘No sex please, we’re British,’ now can’t stop talking about it, in newspapers, television, on-line, on the campaign trail and in the conference rooms of the corporate skyscrapers that dominate old London town. France we’ll get to in a moment.

Late last month, the Cass Review calmly, quietly and thoroughly eviscerated the English medical establishment and its ‘gender affirming’ care. Earlier this week, the director of one of Scotland’s rape crisis centers, Mridul Wadhwa, was taken to the cleaners in employment court. Wadhwa, trans, who told rape victims they should ‘reframe their trauma’ and accept the presence of men, hounded a female employee from her job. The phrase about trauma is now legend. While several board members – all women, all trans allies – have resigned, Wadha hangs on, reporting to work in sari and face paint. A very important person indeed.

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Live your life. No one is stopping you. But if you believe yourself a revolutionary because you wear a dress, if you demand society’s mores and legal code change to suit you, you’re putting the rest of us in a tough spot. We’re not blind. We see the campaign being carried out on your behalf by the most powerful forces in society, and so we wonder. We notice that transfolk are rather lacking in humor about the whole thing… soyez raisonnable is the true French religion.

The Vandals have arrived….in France.

So let’s throw a thousand words or so at the curious phenomenon of the public devotion by some males, some of them maybe burned at the altar of out-of-my-way feminism, all of them vocal and accusatory, defending their conversion to our new fixation, the transwomen. It’s easy to observe when we dive into the bathysphere to trawl around the web; it’s definitely arrived in France, where Dora Moutot, author of Transmania, is harassed on the street and receives death threats whenever she logs on. Public speaking engagements for Moutot and others are routinely cancelled at the last moment, to make finding another venue that much more difficult. Look her up, see if you find her ‘hateful.’

The ability to say, He’s a man, is now a legally protected right in the UK, mainly because a few brave women fought for it, some of them actual, living, breathing lesbians. Legal protection was necessary because people were losing jobs, careers and public reputations without it.

The pharma industry makes billions off the transgender business, politicians in Malta, D.C. and everywhere else gleefully pose for photos with the latest new woman, the medical establishment goes medieval, organizations like the ACLU defend men in heels as an oppressed class, NGOs happily accept pharma-cash, and their acolytes, the young interns — I’ve met a few of these newly minted puritans — go to work at news organizations, where they spread the not-so joyous truth of transgenderism.

Meanwhile the gents in the shadows make their final bitter ripostes to the women who spurned them. Take that! It’s easy to be a woman, if being female means a loose bundle of characteristics that you pile on until you get the arrangement right. Gay men use women as surrogates, their right to do so applauded by the NYTimes and other gatekeepers at legacy media. Are we going backwards, forwards or sideways in this new Revelation of the Sexes ? Men and women-in-the-cause appear to have had their bullshit-detectors surgically removed.

Society polices the good and the bad, leaving only the indifferent at ease. If it feels like we’re living in a mental institution, where inmates accuse each other in order to receive special privileges, it’s because we are. People are outraged when others refuse to lie about sex. Society is even more perverse than we suspected. Strange things are floating up from the bottom of the reservoir right now.

If you could tolerate the anonymous denunciations which wrecked people’s lives in the teens of this century, you’re all set to go with this decade’s enthusiasm. Victims have changed from male to female but that’s hardly worth the coin of comment. You’re afraid for your skin, even if you’re down with the program. The All Isms sensitivity workshop starts at ten. Attendance required. Your colleagues will be there, and some will discretely roll their eyes, but they can’t do a thing about it. HR, once of the basketcase of corporate employment, is now in the driver’s seat. Fasten your seatbelts and prepare to lie through your teeth. All over soon. Who’s next for the guillotine?

As the English essayist Kathleen Stock observed, corporate and government worlds are full of women making new rules about what we can say and do while tenured male professors dream up ever new sexual configurations, with lust for minors their not-so-secret specialty. Maybe because they never talk to women ? Are they afraid they’ll be reported for an infraction if they do ? Stock was cashiered from an English uni in what amounts to a public burning but since she writes well, has found refuge at a few journals with brass necks. You can look her up, too.

My sense is that men and women who argue over something for which there is no definition — gender — and who insist society must accommodate their illusions, are angry about something else, something they can’t put their finger on. Maybe it’s their career path, maybe it’s the need to feel special in cubicle 24B — these are what is now referred to as luxury beliefs — but it may just be the survival instinct in a ruthless hierarchy. Maybe it’s the crushing aloneness we now experience day to day, hour to hour, deep and wide, on-line endlessly with little human contact, lost in a wasteland of smiley-faced phantoms. So it goes in an era obsessed with digital dreams, where ethics and ideas are off topic.

Online journals like unHerd are a good place to observe the phenomenon. Running anguished essays by former enthusiasts for the New Sexual Correctness under titles like When Did Physical Approach Become Taboo ?, it stirs the pot — as a magazine ought to, and few do — but those cri de cœurs pale beside this week’s revelation, a journalist in love with his AI girlfriend, a data bot he casually flipped from being a male correspondent to an insatiable female hottie with a single click. Read it if you’re brave. It’s a maddening piece, science fiction present tense, the writer so cheerfully lost as he hikes an ancient Italian forest, missing everything around him except the prompts from his digital sweetie. This is the inevitable endgame of the Gender Wars, the lonely winner who gets an actual robot to take home, something the author dreams about out loud at the end of his article. The real end of the world, mes cheris, is your neighbor fucking a robot with the curtains drawn in the last house on the suburban cul de sac. Life-like skin on the beast, say what !

When and how did men and women develop such a distaste for one another ? Human beings that we are, we’ll adjust; the great sleepy majority, who liked lockdown and just want to watch the series from their sofa, already have. It’s unstoppable as long as Big Pharma can legally deliver wheelbarrows of cash to media, academia and politicians alike.

The French are rude, abrasive, tend to say what’s on their mind but the Gender Cat has caught their tongue. Adults, especially Parisians, fear being cast out as phobic. If the country typically resists the Anglomanias of the day and goes about life heedless and traditional, the influence of the American business model is now too great to resist. The young are busy studying sociology, marketing and tourism. More boxes. Ask anyone, you’ll just hear the usual jumble of complaints, without any clear idea what they want from society, where we’re going, what we should preserve from the past. No debate! There’s a huckster on every corner selling a Miracle Cure, a safe way out of the Apocalypse.

Revenge on liberals and the Woke is coming, promise conservatives in the run-up to the June European elections. But no politico of any stripe or shade has the temerity to tell the collective bourreaux, the executioner who lifts the latch that holds the blade, to stop ruining people’s lives, that it’s time for him to go back to his cave. Au contraire, liberals, woke and conservatives have been bullied into silence. Only a small cadre of women and their allies persist, shouting in the street, trying to wake the dead.

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link: https://unherd.com/2024/05/im-in-love-with-my-ai-girlfriend/

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Luxury beliefs ? Damn straight. The issue doesn’t impact me directly. I’m not a woman; I live in France; my career has already been destroyed; I see transpeople on the street but don’t come into direct contact. Maybe they’ll demonstrate during Pride Month. I’d attend a Gender Critical event here in Paris, except they have the maddening habit of being shut down. The gas has been released into the air around us. Some wear masks even if everyone knows they don’t work.   

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Style can inhibit exchange: mine is ornery and ornate, subtle and stubborn in equal measure, as befits a Taurus. Don’t let it cow you. Jump in the ring anyway ! Half the subscribers to Riffs are anonymous (ha ha, that’s telling) so let fly. I can take being called hateful, but svp, whom is it I hate ? I disagree with almost everybody.

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