A Streetcar Named Desire
Update 304 Terfy News To Your Door
Another long one, dear readers!
Stonewall and the anti-women activists, amongst many other ( negative) things, are a bunch of misogynists since they feel that women’s rights and women’s sports can be ignored and destroyed ( for more on misogyny, see Arty Morty’s piece below).
Back to the Brando season. We had to get to A Streetcar Named Desire didn’t we? Blanche DuBois ( Vivien Leigh) comes to live with her sister, Stella Kowalski ( Kim Hunter) and her husband, Stanley (Brando) in their New Orleans apartment. Ummm… well, there’s certainly a lot of desire knocking about but, despite the fact that he does look rather good in a sweaty T shirt, Stanley is ultimately a classic misogynist ( and worse!). The clip is the ( iconic) first meeting between Blanche and Stanley.
By the way, I have been to New Orleans (where I saw the gentleman I feature in the Endpiece live!) . I can vouch for the heat!!
There is one film left in the Brando season in the next update - you can probably see where this is going and where the culmination will be!!?? Any guesses?
I like the ‘season’ idea and will be moving on to Raymond Chandler and his detective, Philip Marlowe after the final Brando film in the next update.
Arty Morty
Great piece on Arty’s substack using wrestling as an analogy for gender ideology.
Trans Kayfabe: immersive fiction taken to the extreme
The First Rule of AGP Club is: you never talk about AGP Club ( 14 January).
Ophelia Benson said,
‘That’s Katheen Stock’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.’
What’s worse is that the kids don’t yet know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into. Some of the adults playing along with this fiction have their own agenda, and the kids aren’t being let in on it.
To many adult men, transgender identity is a special kind of immersive fiction, distinct from, say, the nerdy hobby of live-action role-playing (LARPing).
Larpers get together in groups, and enact their roleplaying personas only when they’re among their peers in the groups. They revert to their real selves when interacting with people outside the group, or when they’re not actively “in session.”
But trans is more like kayfabe. This is a word that came into use at the turn of the last century, when “professional” wrestling emerged among the travelling carnivals and sideshows that roved the American frontier. (Its etymology is unclear, but it’s probably derived from pig latin for “be fake.”)
Kayfabe is like the reverse of larping: you can let your guard down and be your true self only when you’re alone with your in-group peers. In the presence of outsiders you must always maintain the illusion that your roleplaying persona is real.
Wrestlers concocted elaborate fictional backstories and soap opera-like rivalries to generate excitement and draw crowds to their (rigged, performative) bouts. Their livelihoods came to depend on keeping up the illusion that these personas were real; if word got out that they were faking it, the whole profession could collapse for loss of an audience. So wrestling culture developed a strange alternate reality of its own, whose pretense was guarded with a solemn code of silence.
“Pro” wrestling continues to this day, and the omertà of kayfabe was strictly maintained for decades until as recently as 1989, when executives from the World Wrestling Federation, facing athletic regulation laws, testified to the New Jersey state senate and for the first time publicly admitted that wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan and André the Giant were, in fact, paid entertainers and not professional athletes. Up until then, many of wrestlers’ own relatives were kept in the dark about how fake the whole thing was. Today, it’s hard to imagine how seriously it used to be taken, but I can recall lively schoolyard arguments about “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and the Hulkster’s rivalry. Wrestling’s kayfabe was until the ‘90s genuinely, truly believed by many kids and adults alike.
Fetishistic, autogynephilic trans-identifying men are just like pro wrestlers in this regard. When they’re alone with each other they’re completely open about being fetishistic men, and they make and share pornographic videos with each other, etc. (I know this because they’re increasingly horning in on gay men’s dating and hookup apps — the ones that are seedier and more underground than Grindr — where they’re not shy about sharing their kinks.) But in the presence of outsiders, ma’am’s the word. The lie must be maintained or the whole enterprise could collapse: no more unfettered access to women’s spaces and no more power to force everyone else to play along with their fantasies.
A clear example of a trans person keeping his autogynephilic reality private while maintaining a public kayfabe is Lia Thomas. You can see it in his social media. His public Instagram account is full of the usual guff about protecting trans kids, trans women are women, bla bla bla… But he has a second, private Instagram account which he shares with his inner circle, where he apparently lets his kayfabe guard down and is much more candid about the fact that he’s a man with fetishistic sexual appetites. (A strange quirk of Instagram is that supposedly private accounts aren’t actually all that private: you can hide your posted pictures from the general public, but you can’t conceal your username, profile photo, profile details, which other accounts follow you, or the “likes” you apply to other people’s posts and photos. In Lia’s case, this information has shown that he apparently uses his “private” secondary account to share and interact with content about autogynephilia and fetishism.)
All of this is to say that the AGP Club members aren’t upfront that it’s all kayfabe when they’re targeting children and their families while “in character,” and the institutions that back them are at least partially complicit in the lie. (WPATH is notoriously riddled with “academics” who are privately involved in extreme fetish clubs — see, for example, the Eunuch Archives.) The wider public aren’t being let in on the scheme.
This can and will be devastating to a lot of children (and their families) when they grow up and realize that many of the people leading the “trans community” were conspiring all along in a lie to serve their personal, private sexual fantasies.
And here is Part 2 from Arty:
Kayfabe, Round 2: Misogynists take the fight into the locker rooms
Some people will promote the fiction even harder after they're let in on the secret if they've got something to gain from upholding it ( 15 January)
This is a continuation of my piece from yesterday about the immersive fiction roleplaying phenomenon of kayfabe.
Kayfabe is a strange thing, because it doesn’t need to convince everyone in order for the illusion to succeed. In fact, it doesn’t need to convince very many people at all. It only needs to persuade a critical mass of people to believe it in order to make it not worth anyone else’s while to speak up and voice dissent. Once the lie gets a little momentum going — a little emotional investment from the “laity” (as it were) — it’s hard to stop it.
In this sense, kayfabe is a lot like a religion. It’s especially like the religion of gender identity.
In the ’80s it was so obvious that WWF wrestling was fake, but there was a lot of motivated reasoning and willful disbelief among its fans — even grown adults — because they enjoyed it so much! Thus, they had something to gain from maintaining the illusion.
If anything, the phenomenon of kayfabe in pro wrestling has gotten even more interesting, psychologically, in the aftermath of its official “breaking” following the 1989 New Jersey Senate testimony.
Counterintuitively, pro wrestling only got more popular after kayfabe broke — wildly so. The “fake reality” of the wrestlers’ characters got more elaborate, the staged fights moved out of the ring and into the backstage areas, and the actual President & CEO of WWF (since renamed WWE — the E is for Entertainment, you see), Vince McMahon himself became a kind of kayfabe persona, even stepping into the ring in his business suit and getting into brawls from time to time. The fact that the fans were let in on the secret only heightened their sense of personal investment in kayfabe’s upkeep.
Nowadays, wrestling is just reality TV for man-boys — the guy-world mirror image of Real Housewives.
The phenomenon of lay people becoming more zealously protective about the fiction once they’re let in on it, a kind of vicarious keeping of kayfabe, has parallels with trans activism, too: for every true believer who’s been sold the lie that, say, their child can literally become the opposite sex if they follow the gender affirmation protocol prescribed by their local gender clinic, there’s a dudebro activist who knows full-well that transwomen are men but who gets a misogynistic thrill out of playing along, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt.
And just as wrestling’s immersive fiction has moved into the locker rooms, so, too, has gender identity roleplay.
Helen Staniland has keenly observed, and expertly exposed by deploying her famous question on Twitter, that many activist men who purport to be concerned about trans rights consistently demonstrate in their language and behaviour that their primary motivation is in fact resentment of women. They have solidarity with transwomen because they know that transwomen are men who are undermining women’s rights.
The vicarious thrill of misogyny in so many men is the fuel that has sustained the momentum of gender fundamentalism for so long.
Bin The Bill - Irish Hate Crime Bill
Those fighting this appalling Bill have gained a new supporter … Elon Musk!
I previously did a full analysis of the Bill here: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/thought-crime-irish-style
Mieka Smiles in The Daily Express ( Elon Musk blasts Leo Varadkar for 'destroying democracy' in Ireland with one law 15 January) reports:
Elon Musk has blasted Irish PM Leo Varadkar for 'destroying democracy'© Getty
Elon Musk has railed against Leo Varadkar's government over a controversial new bill tipped to "destroy" democracy in Ireland.
The new Hate Speech Bill is one of the most hotly-debated pieces of legislation set to be passed in Ireland and has attracted high-profile criticism from X CEO Elon Musk and other celebrities.
The proposed legislation will establish statutes for addressing incitement to violence or hatred.
But critics say the proposed legislation curtails freedom of expression as there is little clarity on what defines incitement to hatred.
Today Musk doubled down on his criticism of the controversial bill by sharing a campaign video by Free Speech Ireland.
His post read: "Destroying freedom of speech means destroying democracy."
Free Speech Ireland's post read: "The Irish government wants to pass a law that could see you or your loved ones jailed for possession of memes, cartoons or any content that could be deemed 'hateful'.
"The Bill includes no definition of hate and is wide open to abuse by bad actors."
It added: "Defend free speech - say no to this legislation."
The full article is here:
Meanwhile Free Speech Ireland have started a ‘Bin The Bill’ campaign and here is their excellent video:
Also a piece on Gript about this campaign and please have a look at this for some great comments attached to it:
And I segue seamlessly 😎 to the Irish Constitutional Referendum. I reported on Senator McDowell’s support for ‘No’ votes in the last update. Here is a follow up from Gript:
Ben Scallan ( UL ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ASKED TO LIST “INACCURACIES” IN MCDOWELL ARTICLE 15 January) reports:
A University of Limerick (UL) Associate Professor took aim at Michael McDowell last week, after the Independent Senator published an op-ed explaining why he was voting ‘no’ in Ireland’s two upcoming referendums.
The votes, which are both set to take place on March 8th this year, would amend the constitutionally-protected role of mothers as homemakers, and would also change the definition of the family under Irish law. Ahead of these referendums, Senator McDowell decided to write an Irish Times op-ed last Wednesday outlining his legal reasons for opposing the change.
Notably, Senator McDowell has an extensive background in law, and during his career has served as Tánaiste, Minister for Justice, and the Attorney General of Ireland.
Following the publication of his piece, however, Dr. Laura Cahillane of UL responded in a scathing but short tweet.
Cahillane is an Associate Professor at UL’s School of Law, as well as the editor of the Irish Judicial Studies Journal. According to the UL website, she has a special “research interest” in constitutional law and judicial politics, among other things.
On foot of this, Gript asked the Professor if she could enumerate the “inaccuracies” in McDowell’s article. Cahillane replied that she was “up the walls with a grading deadline” and as such wouldn’t be able to “get to it” within the allotted timeframe, but said “there were quite a few issues.”
Gript offered to extend the deadline further, but received no reply. The Professor was also given the option to simply give one or two main objections to the piece if that’s all time allowed for, but replied that she had been in a meeting “all morning” and had consequently missed the deadline.
A number of social media users commented on the original tweet also asking Dr. Cahillane for examples of “inaccuracies,” though she subsequently restricted comments.
The Professor’s tweet was also liked by Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman, Green Party Senator Pauline O’Reilly, and Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik, implying that they agree that McDowell’s article contained “many inaccuracies.”
However, when Gript asked these three legislators the same question – that is, could they name the specific inaccuracies they were referring to – Bacik and O’Reilly did not reply.
For Minister O’Gorman’s part, a spokesperson replied on his behalf:
“The change that the Government wants to see is not a jettisoning of value of care within families or home duties; that’s as important today as it was in 1937; but simply to ensure that this work is valued whoever undertakes them, mother or father.
It’s about recognising that women and men can and should be equally free to choose their paths in life, that they can decide between themselves how best to provide care for their families and how to balance that. This is exactly what the new text is designed to value, and creates a new obligation on the Government to always strive to support through its policies.
Almost half of all children born in Ireland today are born to parents who aren’t married to each other. Our constitution currently doesn’t hold them equal in status to those born within a marriage – should that continue? Instead of focusing on that, the Senator raises red herrings like polygamy.
A marriage is clearly a durable relationship – it’s a very strong expression of commitment and this referendum won’t dilute that. But unmarried couples and single parent families surely also have relationships that they would consider equal in commitment and strength to a family based on marriage – that is exactly what the word ‘durable’ is capturing – recognising that equal degree of commitment, a degree of stability and of durability to the relationships similar in consequence for society as the marital family is.”
Should any of the individuals in this article reach out to Gript with a response, we will update the piece to reflect as much.
Puberty Blockers
Thanks to a wonderful reader for this piece.
A new report reveals the detrimental effects of puberty blockers on brain development, the kind of information that the Amsterdam Gender Clinic, originators of ‘the Dutch Protocol’ have been ignoring for 17 years - see my report here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-young-lions
Sanchez Manning in The Mail Online ( Puberty blockers given to children who say they were born in the wrong body and want to 'change gender' may lower their' IQs 14 January) reports:
Powerful 'puberty blocker' drugs given to hundreds of young people who are confused about their gender significantly risks lowering their IQs, a leading scientific expert has warned.
In an alarming study, Sallie Baxendale, professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, called for 'urgent' research into the impact of the drugs on children's brain functions.
NHS England stopped routinely prescribing the drugs, which halt bodily changes in puberty, last year after a damning review found that the treatment could interrupt the process of the brain maturing.
But private gender clinics are still giving puberty suppressants to under 16s in the UK – and trans activists insist the drugs are safe.
Now Prof Baxendale has presented evidence about the 'detrimental impact' of the controversial drugs on young people's IQ levels.
Sallie Baxendale, professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London.
A study, which looked at 25 girls being treated with the puberty blockers, found there was an average drop of seven points in their IQs.
One patient experienced a 'significant loss' of 15 points or more, Prof Baxendale said. The girls all suffered from 'precocious puberty' leading to the early onset of adulthood.
'Young people and their families are unable to give truly informed consent for these treatments as their doctors cannot tell them what the long-term effects on their cognitive development will be,' said Prof Baxendale.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, of Transgender Trend, which has campaigned against the prescription of puberty blockers to young people, said: 'Proper long-term studies have never been done to prove they are safe.
It is a myth blockers are 'reversible' when given at the time of natural puberty. They prevent a critical period of growth and cognitive development.'
The full article is here:
Meanwhile an important report from Australia via wonderful Feminist Legal Clinic.
‘Confronting’ expert to give evidence in Family Court puberty blocker case ( 16 January)
A judge will allow a medical expert who believes “social contagion” has caused a spike in gender dysphoria and does not support endorsing a child’s chosen gender identity to give expert evidence in a Family Court matter, but says the evidence could be “confronting” and “difficult” for the child at the centre of the case.
A volunteer group that promotes “women’s gender-based rights” and is concerned about “medical interventions aimed at the “gender reassignment” of children by the use of puberty blockers and hormones” has been blocked from giving evidence at the court hearing.
The case regards two Australian parents who are divided over the gender transition of their eldest child, and are split over whether a variety of medical perspectives should be presented at trial.
The case comes as the Family Court of Australia continues to grapple with the complexities of gender identity, especially in the context of children, medication and surgery.
The Australian revealed last year that a Family Court judge determined a father’s refusal to conform with traditional gender norms left his three children “confused” and encouraged them to “question their gender identity” after they all began identifying as non-binary, ruling the two youngest children will not be permitted to see their father for an extended period.
On another occasion, the mother of a 13-year-old with gender dysphoria abruptly withdrew an application seeking a Family Court order to allow the child to take puberty blockers, after trying to have the independent children’s lawyer assigned to the matter thrown off the case. In May last year, Family Court judges were presented with a legal paper from a top barrister arguing the court must reassess how scientific advancements should apply to the family law system.
Justice Christie determined that the group’s intervention would not be “necessary or appropriate”, emphasising the “important role” of an Independent Children’s Lawyer in making an assessment as to what the best interest of the child is.
The matter is listed for hearing at the end of March.
Source: ‘Confronting’ expert to give evidence in Family Court puberty blocker case | The Australian
UK Universities
A very important report has been published by the Committee for Academic Freedom
Louisa Clarence-Smith in The Telegraph ( Revealed: the nine universities where gender-critical academics are labelled ‘transphobic’ 15 January) reports:
Prof Kathleen Stock who faced protests when speaking at Oxford University OXFORD UNION SOCIETY/PA
Gender-critical academics are considered “transphobic” at nine universities in the UK, it has been claimed.
A report by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), a group of academics worried about the erosion of free speech on campus, found that under definitions of transphobia in nine university policies, academics who believe that transgender women are not women are considered transphobic.
The universities named in the report include Imperial College London, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Huddersfield, Brunel University, Sheffield Hallam University, Leeds Beckett University, London Business School, Robert Gordon University and the University of Plymouth.
Sheffield Hallam University, for instance, uses a definition of transphobia that includes “denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it”.
The CAF report warned: “By defining gender-critical beliefs as transphobia, a university takes the view that gender-critical beliefs are wrong.
“The existence of such an official point of view must restrict freedom of thought among academics.”
The full article is here:
Women’s Sport
I reported recently on brave Lynne Pinches forfeiting a pool title because her opponent was a trans identifying man: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/viva-zapata
However, as the report below shows, there is a Catch 22 situation here where women and, more alarmingly perhaps, girls are going to not take part in sport at all because of this appalling scenario in certain sports. We need all men, however they identify, out of women’s sports pronto! Thanks to the same wonderful reader as above for referring this one to me.
Connor Stringer in The Mail Online ( EXCLUSIVE As alarming report reveals women and girls are quitting sports over fears they will be injured... It is revealed a 16st trans woman dislocated the shoulder of a female judo rival 14 January) reports:
Women and girls across the country are quitting sports after being injured and intimidated by transgender competitors, a worrying report reveals.
Testimonies from across 25 different disciplines detail how girls as young as 12 have been forced to share changing rooms with biological adult males who say they identify as women.
The 28-page report reveals how some women and girls have suffered dislocations and even broken bones from being forced to compete against much heavier and muscular transgender athletes.
Sharron Davies
Accounts in the dossier, released by campaign group Fair Play For Women, include:
A 6ft 16st trans woman who broke one woman's finger and dislocated the shoulder of another during a judo tournament
Female rugby players forced to share an open shower with a male-bodied teammate who identifies as a woman
An athlete who received death threats for raising concerns about competing against transgender women
A 13-year-old girl who lost her place as a goalkeeper on a girls' football team to a boy identifying as a girl
A university rower who says she was forced to share changing rooms with a transgender woman, while another teammate was asked to share overnight accommodation with them
A 15-year-old football striker said she was forced to give up the sport because it was 'too risky' to take on teams with a male goalkeeper
Fantastic work by Fair Pay for Women. You can find the report here:
https://fairplayforwomen.com/new-report-how-trans-inclusion-in-sport-is-harming-women-and-girls/
The full article is here:
Helen Joyce
Great interview with Helen by Norwegian podcaster, Henrik Beckheim (it is very long - over 2 hours!!).
A great run through of lots of aspects of the gender wars: gender ideology is like a neo-religion or a cult; ideology is replacing medicine; psychiatrists recognise that you should never validate a delusion ( eg. ‘I am Napoleon’) but that is exactly what is happening here; you can’t disprove ( or prove) that Jesus is God but you can disprove that a man can’t become a woman… and so on. Recommended.
I know that a lot of these podcasts and interviews are teaching some of us grannies and grandpas to suck eggs but I think it is always useful to hear the arguments run through and there are usually some nuggets of new information to pick up. And for those of you who are relatively knew to the gender wars…well, this is a masterclass!!
The Lost Boys
Thanks to Baroness Claire Fox for posting on her substack this excellent film. The film was produced by Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell and co-written by them along with Gary Powell. The Baroness also posts a piece on the film from Mr Powell. The film features, amongst others, Glinner, Dr Az Hakeem and detransitioner, Ritchie Heron. I take Ritchie’s point that he doesn’t like the word ‘detransition’ because you don’t and can’t actually transition, of course. Perhaps ‘desister’ is a better word albeit that that word normally refers to someone who has not undertaken any medical procedures? I have a couple of quibbles which I will mention at the end.
‘If you spend years and years telling a boy that men are bad, they’re going to be depressed. Basically, it’s a shame-based depression. They’re going to have really low self-esteem issues. Which leads to all other sorts of issues.’
Dr Joe Burgo, a psychotherapist specialising in gender dysphoria, pulled no punches during his interview for our new film, The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood. This documentary explores why young men get drawn into transgender identification with irreversible endocrinological and surgical interventions, and how they can salvage their lives after realising they have made this mistake.
The documentary allows its contributors – five formerly transgender-identified young men, two specialist mental-health clinicians, an accomplished but now cancelled comedy writer, and the father of a transgender-identified young male – to give their accounts in their own words.
The experiences and thoughts shared are arrestingly honest, sometimes shockingly and devastatingly so, with account after account bearing witness to the betrayal of trust at the hands of professionals who had been turned to for help with psychological suffering. At other times, specialist accounts offer unique insights to explain what is drawing young males into transgender identification and what needs to happen in order for this to stop.
This is the eleventh film by Californian filmmaker Jennifer Lahl, and the third film where she and fellow filmmaker Kallie Fell have covered the harms being caused by the gender ideology that has embedded itself into the medical, educational, media and other establishments. Their last film, The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters explored the experiences of three young women who had mistakenly hoped that their gender dysphoria and mental-health struggles would be fixed by transgender-identification, hormones and surgeries, and it described their journey back towards recovery. As was the case with the young men, these women were offered ‘help’ based on a false political ideology, which was a far cry from what they actually needed. Jennifer and Kallie’s first film on gender ideology, Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?, specifically explored the harm being caused to children at the hands of ideologically-captured adults in the transgender industry.
Young men, young women and children: all are victims of this appalling new colonising industry, and the unique experiences and vulnerabilities of all three groups have been covered in these three separate films. Directed and produced by Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, and co-written by Jennifer, Kallie, and me, The Lost Boys explores the factors that are encouraging young males to gravitate towards a transgender identification and to pursue irreversible cross-sex hormones and surgeries in the vain hope of living life free from the blight of their psychological torment and struggles.
In addition to examining what happens when young males are made to feel shame about their stigmatised maleness and the overwhelming male sexuality that begins to assail them at puberty, the film explores the role of clinical gender dysphoria, high-functioning autism, homophobic bullying, the mocking and bullying of gender-non-conforming boys, puberty-onset identity crises, trauma, depression, anxiety, OCD, peer contagion, adolescent anti-parental rebellion, extreme online pornography, and internet grooming by political actors and by sexually predatory men.
Too many boys and young men are finding themselves told from the one side that they need to abandon their male identity and instead become asexual, non-masculine males; and from the other that they are not true, masculine males and need to ‘transition to’ their ‘true’ female identity. They can end up in a no-win situation, driven into serious irreversible mistakes by an unremitting sense of shame, including socially-induced sexual shame – a powerful psychological toxin.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that young men may seek relief from the tormenting shame and trauma of their strong sex drives via the emasculation of oestrogen interventions and the amputation of their genitals. Gay males are perhaps particularly vulnerable to pursuing these avenues as an escape from the shame of their strong sexual attraction towards other males – especially if they have grown up in schools, cultures or families where homosexuality is stigmatised. Indeed, the ‘transgender’ label even gives them an LGBTQ+ pass to declare themselves to really be females who are attracted to males, which would convert them into pretend-heterosexuals in an instant. What a dangerously seductive prospect for isolated young males who struggle with guilt and shame about being gay and who long for psychological respite from their torment and self-hatred and for a heterosexual public identity.
Transgender identification, with its cross-sex hormones and violent, demasculinising surgeries, results from a betrayal of vulnerable young people by shockingly irresponsible medics and counsellors, whose members include the callous, the idiotic, the ghoulish, the conformist, the mercenary and the cowardly; by a self-serving, degenerate political establishment that is indifferent to safeguarding; and by dangerous internet proselytisers who try to convince young people that their loving, wise, terrified and heartbroken parents are really the enemy.
Desperate young people in distress can all too easily be persuaded that the potion they are being offered will cure all their ills. Yet some words by Kafka – albeit originally crafted to describe something else – so accurately represent the dangerous allure of transgender ideology in our age: it is, “An abyss full of light. One must close one’s eyes in order not to fall.”
The transgender “panacea” is precisely such an abyss full of light offered to the desperate, suffering young. Infantile, reckless adults encourage them to jump, yet it is crucial that they close their eyes and resist. We hope our film, about young men, will encourage more vulnerable young men to close their eyes and turn away from the transgender abyss, and that it will stimulate some thought and discussion about what happens when we communicate to boys and young men that being male is bad; or that, if they are not sufficiently ‘masculine’, then they may well be female instead.
Gary Powell is the European special consultant at the Centre for Bioethics and Culture, California, and the research fellow for sexual orientation and gender identity at the Bow Group.
My quibbles:
I don’t agree with Dr Az referring to autogynephiles (AGPs) as having a ‘sexuality’. This is clearly a fetish and should be described as such.
Gary Powell states: We hope our film, about young men, will encourage more vulnerable young men to close their eyes and turn away from the transgender abyss, and that it will stimulate some thought and discussion about what happens when we communicate to boys and young men that being male is bad; or that, if they are not sufficiently ‘masculine’, then they may well be female instead.
There is quite a lot of emphasis in the film on ‘toxic masculinity’ and I appreciate that Ritchie does refer to maleness being thought of as a bad thing but I feel that it is clear that the detransitioners/desisters in this film all come within the ‘not sufficiently masculine’ camp and it seems to me that that is the usual reason for boys and young men deciding that they want to ‘transition’.
All thoughts gratefully received. Here is the film:
Let Women Speak
Let Women Speak Exeter #LetWomenSpeakExeter
Jan 20, 2024, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Intersection of Princesshay & Bedford St, Princesshay, Eastgate, Exeter EX1 1GB, UK
Endpiece
Another double endpiece for you today, Terven!
A Streetcar Named Desire is based in New Orleans. Hmmm…my favourite rock ‘n roller, Fats Domino, was from New Orleans - here he is actually Walking to New Orleans:
And now, The Mouse Problem (or Monty Python The Prophets!):
Lots of interesting pieces and excellent analysis as ever, thanks Dusty. I can never get enough of Helen Joyce so I’ll look forward to that.
I agree with your comment regarding Dr. Az in the Lost Boys, that jumped out at me too. Your second point re: the motivation for transition for the boys is a lot more complex but I agree that ‘toxic masculinity’ does not appear to be appropriate. Having said that, I as a female can never really understand the confused feelings of gender non conforming boys going through puberty. They seemed to be trying to convince themselves that they felt that their masculinity was wrong, as a way of justifying what they were doing. What a heartbreaking film though.
Fats Domino live - I’m impressed.
Monty Python- the Nostradamus of our times 😁
The Arty Morty piece is a fantastic analysis of trans likeness to wrestling kayfabe; I had to read it twice for it to sink in. I was particularly interested in the brodude/activist joining in the delusion as legitimate cover for their misogyny. Helen Staniland conveys the same analysis in her summation of misogyny-driven activism in TRAs.
The Irish bill is a nightmare; glad that Gript (and Musk) are on their case.
Looks like the evidence of harm from puberty blockers is piling up; I’m hopeful that the momentum will continue to build up.
Saw that report on the universities who effectively ban free speech when it comes to gender critical views; surely they’ll have to take some sort of action.
Helen Joyce’s interview was really excellent; you can’t argue with her although TRAs try to.
I agree that‘toxic masculinity’ is a problem for young men growing up; we need some good male role models in society to show them the admirable qualities of men: emotional intelligence, strength, loyalty, sense of humour, supportive etc.
Loved the Fats Waller video; he was the daddy of rock n roll.Thanks for the extensive coverage of all things gender woo, Dusty. Will X as usual.