Cold Mountain Part 2

Update 371

Here is Part 2, dear readers.

Sticking with Cold Mountain.

Look away now if you like roosters 😂

Thanks to the usual two wonderful readers for suggesting pieces.

Dispelling the Suicide Myth

Excellent and very important piece from Sex Matters ( 13 May). How many times have we heard: ‘Would you prefer to have a dead daughter or a living son?’

For almost ten years, lobby groups have been promoting the idea that for gender-confused children there are only two options: transition or die. The claim that childhood transition prevents suicide has been used as an argument for social transition in schools, for giving puberty blockers and hormones, and for silencing debate.

Championed by Susie Green of the charity Mermaids, and by Stonewall, this message is terrifying for both parents and children. 

“I have my daughter, whole and alive, but if I had refused to listen then it’s very likely that I would have a dead son.”

Susie Green, ex-CEO of Mermaids

“Suddenly Michael who has been presenting as Sarah is being forced to go through puberty… That’s where you see half of young people commit suicide.” 

Ruth Hunt when CEO of Stonewall, 2019

This narrative has been common in the media, including the ITV drama Butterfly (for which Green was the adviser), The Guardian, New York Times and National Geographic. Exaggerated risk of suicide is used as a rhetorical threat to promote gender ideology in political debate, by activists, in workplaces and in guidance given to schools.

It is often backed with the “statistic” that 48% of young people with a transgender identity attempt suicide. For example, the House of Commons Transgender Equality report refers to Mermaids, the trans charity for children, saying: “There was a significant risk of self-harm or suicide where hormone treatment is not yet being given; they drew attention to evidence that the attempted suicide rate among young trans people is 48%.” Transgender Trend debunked this claim in 2016, but it is still being used.

The Cass Review looks at the medical evidence on suicide risk and concludes: 

“It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”

Sex Matters has published a factsheet which brings the evidence together.

Suicide-factsheetDownload

The suicide claim has fuelled demand for puberty blockers

The claim about suicide risk has been used to justify the social and medical transition of children. This pushes parents to demand medical interventions, and to expect teachers to facilitate social transition in school – letting a child present as the other sex, concealing their true sex, demanding others use wrong-sex pronouns and granting access to facilities for classmates of the opposite sex.. 

Whatever the risks and possible harms of puberty blocking and cross-sex hormones, if the alternative is suicide the downsides can be dismissed. The final report from the Cass Review said that even clinicians are misled by this supposed cost-benefit analysis:

“Some clinicians feel under pressure to support a medical pathway based on widespread reporting that gender-affirming treatment reduces suicide risk. This conclusion was not supported by the systematic review.”

But this claim is false – and this has long been known

The overwrought claims of suicide risk and actual suicide have been debunked over and over again, both by campaign groups like Transgender Trend and Fair Play For Women, and by journalists in the USA and the UK. Sex Matters’ factsheet builds on these with the evidence from the most recently published studies. These show that suicide among children is extremely rare, even among those with mental-health referrals. The final report from the Cass Review states clearly that while young people with mental-health issues, including those with gender dysphoria, face elevated suicide risk compared with the healthy population, suicides remain “very rare” (pages 186–187).

She also refutes the misleading claim that puberty blockers reduce suicide risk:

“The evidence does not adequately support the claim that gender-affirming treatment reduces suicide risk.”

Professor Sir Louis Appleby, who advises the government on suicide prevention in England, has called for this misleading messaging to stop:

“Evidence that puberty blockers reduce risk is weak and unreliable. Invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken & potentially harmful.”

Professor Louis Appleby (posted on X/Twitter, 12th March 2024)

The response from transactivists is alarming

You might expect campaigners for young people with gender dysphoria to welcome this news and promote it far and wide. After all, these children and their parents need not fear dire consequences arising from the decision by NHS England and NHS Scotland to halt the routine prescription of puberty blockers. Instead, many are questioning  the validity of Cass’s conclusions and promoting hyperbolic hashtags like #CassKillsKids. Trans academic Natacha Kennedy suggested that the “main outcome of @thecassreview will be more trans children committing suicide”. 

This sort of rhetoric can cause genuine harm. Some children have been told that puberty blockers are life-saving and essential. As Cass pointed out,  living in stealth as the other sex creates fear and strain for children, which is exacerbated by the approach of puberty. In the face of harmful myths about the risks facing gender-distressed children, how are they to know that going through puberty will give them the best chance of developing into a healthy adult who no longer feels discomfort about their sexed body? These children need reassurance, not scaremongering.

Activists who continue to promote this frightening myth are stoking fear instead of reassurance for distressed teenagers that “it gets better”. 

What to do if you are concerned

Every suicide is a terrible tragedy and we must be extremely careful about what we say to young people on this subject. 

The NSPCC says that every warning sign of suicide should be taken seriously and acted on accordingly. Suicidal feelings should be treated as a child-protection issue and trigger a similar level of response to children at risk of harm from others.But parents and their distressed children do not deserve to be terrorised and manipulated by false data that create unnecessary concern. They need to know the facts.

Gay Shame

Excellent piece by Joseph Burgo on Reality’s Last Stand:

Internalized Homophobia and Gay Shame

Young gays and lesbians can’t help but feel ashamed of being different, and a major part of their journey into adulthood and self-acceptance involves coming to terms with that difference. (May 13)

For my entire career, I’ve chosen not to write for academic journals because I can’t bring myself to adopt the “scientific” writing style and terminology expected of contributors. Take internalized homophobia, for example. We hear and read this expression every day without quite acknowledging what it’s supposed to describe: intensely painful feelings of shame and self-loathing. But internalized homophobia is what journal editors expect to read when you submit an article for consideration.

I find it frustrating that publications in a discipline focused on the human experience so often come across as void of feeling. For that reason, I’ve written books for popular audiences instead of my colleagues because I’d rather connect with readers through evocative language than adopt a style that feels unnatural to me. I prefer words most of us would use in everyday life, or descriptions I might use if I were writing fiction.

By contrast, internalized homophobia implies that a pervasive societal attitude called “homophobia” (a misleading word itself because no irrational fear is involved) gets absorbed and adopted within the individual psyche. You can even diagram it! External attitude → internal self-concept. By using this expression, we’ve completely stripped away the quality of the emotional experience with denatured, supposedly more scientific language.

What does internalized homophobia mean for the person who experiences it? What words might he or she use?

There’s something wrong with me because I’m different from everyone I know.

I’d give almost anything to be somebody else, somebody normal.

I feel like I’m so screwed up that sometimes I’d like to die.

Or disappear.

The sound of my voice and the way I walk fill me with self-loathing.

I’m a freak and I don’t fit in.

I hate myself.

I could go on, but these are some of the immediate emotional experiences of gays and lesbians afflicted by so-called internalized homophobia.

Even young gays and lesbians who are more gender conforming, those kids who aren’t bullied because of their obvious difference, will inevitably feel shame about their sexual orientation, and it doesn’t necessarily depend upon absorbing an external negative evaluation. Gay kids brought up in the most accepting environments can’t help but feel a sense of shame, at least in the beginning, because being homosexual makes them different from the majority; it singles them out in an unfavorable way.

Shame emotions arise for varying reasons and in different situations, as I explain in my book on shame. I refer to one of those situations as Exclusion—feeling yourself to be on the outside of a group to which you’d like to belong. Another one I call Unwanted Exposure, which needs no explanation. The fact of the matter is—most human beings are both heterosexual and gender-typical; especially in conformist middle and high school, we’d rather be like everyone else so we can fit in, so finding that we’re different makes us feel ashamed. Inevitably. If our mannerisms and body movements cause us to stand out, Unwanted Exposure may inspire excruciating shame and self-loathing.

In other words, gay shame is unavoidable, even if one conforms to gender norms and has avoided the bullies. Young gays and lesbians can’t help but feel ashamed of being different, at least at first, even in a relatively tolerant society, and a major part of their journey into adulthood and self-acceptance involves coming to terms with that difference, celebrating the peculiar advantages of being outside the norm without making light of the downsides, and building pride in ourselves without reference to our sexual orientation.

But do not get me wrong—widespread homophobia in society is still with us.

Since the advent of legalized gay marriage as well as the commonplace depiction of gay characters and relationships in media, many liberal-minded people have the mistaken impression that societal acceptance is the norm and it’s easy to “come out” as gay these days. Wrong. A troubling number of men and women, even psychotherapists working with gender-confused children, have a visceral disgust at the thought of same sex relationships; many if not most gender non-conforming kids are bullied in middle and high school, just as they’ve always been.

At least until they “come out” as trans.

We know from Hannah Barnes’ book and the Cass Review that up to 80 percent of the kids treated at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) were same sex attracted. Genderists might argue that … well, of course they are because they’re trapped in the wrong body. According to this view, some people who happened to have been “assigned” female at birth may have a male gender identity and be attracted to women; after undergoing medicalized transition to align body and gender identity, he will be heterosexual and therefore “normal.”

As many have noted before me, gender identity ideology is deeply homophobic at heart.

We’ve all read about the dark jokes at GIDS, that soon there would be no gays left—hence the expression transing away the gay. In recent testimony before a committee of the Scottish government, Hillary Cass spoke of her surprise at finding “how much phobia there still is.” She went on to give the example of a young biological male who had begun transition early on: “She’s doing well, she had puberty blockers at the earliest stage, she had feminising hormones at the earliest stage and she passes very well as a woman, but with hindsight she knows she was a boy with intense internalised homophobia and was gay.” Dr. Cass adds: “But at this point in her life she's clearly not going to de-transition.” How could she?

In my psychotherapy practice, I work with several such men:

• One of them swallowed the lies told to him by gender clinicians, that he could become an actual woman via sex reassignment surgery, and as a result chose to go under the knife. He knows now he’s a gay man, but he no longer has a penis. As a result of his surgery, anal intercourse is always painful.

• Another was sent by his Christian parents for conversion therapy when he came out as gay; after it failed to convert him, he underwent surgery to transform himself, he believed, into a “normal” heterosexual woman. He’s truly lost in transition now and can’t ever go back. How could he function as a homosexual when he no longer has the required equipment?

• A third avoided surgery but suffers from a long list of medical complications following years on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. As a young gender non-conforming boy, he suffered such intense bullying and ostracism that he took flight from his homosexuality. Now as a young adult, he has no sexual function to speak of.

In previous essays, I’ve written about the other men in my practice—the straight ones who struggle with autogynephilia, as well as largely heterosexual boys who are on the spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent. While I feel angry on behalf of all my clients for the lies they were told by the genderists, I can become incandescent with rage when I think about the gay men in my practice encouraged to reject themselves as homosexual, forever deprived of a healthy sex life. It also hits very close to home. Given how much I loathed myself for desiring other boys when I was in high school, I fear I would have suffered the same fate had transition been on offer back then.

Why don’t most gay men recognize that the genderists are deeply homophobic? In his excellent new book Gay Shame, Gareth Roberts tries to account for the surprising support gays have shown for gender identity ideology, as individuals and through their dominant support organizations: “I think it’s a combination of social contagion—it’s low-status and gauche to object—and a deep-seated clinging to … cultural stereotyping.” He describes it as a “dissociation from the reality of homosexuality. That we aren’t ‘really’ men; that there’s something wrong that needs correcting” (p. 127). That sounds a lot like shame to me … or internalized homophobia if you prefer.

I used to serve as an officer and board director of my local LGB(TQ+) center in California. Years ago, when I began to work with detransitioners and dysphoric teens in my practice, I wrote my first paper about the role of shame in driving the wish to transition. I showed it to both the board chair and the CEO, two men I considered my friends, and offered to step down from my dual role because I knew my “transphobic” views would incense young activist employees at the Center. They readily accepted my resignation and have since persistently ignored my emails, almost as if I no longer exist. Within minutes I lost an entire friend group.

Since then, in conversation with other gay friends, I try appealing to their concern for the kids caught up in this homophobic social contagion. “Remember how much you didn’t want to be gay when you were a teenager? Don’t you think you would’ve jumped at the chance to become a ‘normal’ woman instead?” Over time, I’ve managed to “peak” a few of them. I’ve written to several female friends about the well-known phenomenon of “disappearing lesbians” (middle-aged butch women who decide to go on testosterone late in life) but they won’t acknowledge that internalized homophobia is what drives it. No one will speak out because they’re afraid of being cancelled like me, or perhaps because they’re true believers.  

Meanwhile, much of the good will and social acceptance we earned and which culminated in Obergefell has begun to erode.

I believe it’s more than a fear of appearing gauche that drives support for this homophobic ideology, at least in the United States; it’s partisan politics and a self-righteous conviction that they’re the good guys, and on the right side of history. If red states are passing laws that ban affirmative care for minors, then blue states must adopt the opposite position. Red = bad, blue = good.

In the future, when they can no longer avoid acknowledging the greatest medical scandal of our generation, most of the gay men who supported the genderists will find it hard to acknowledge they were wrong.

“We didn’t know,” they’ll say (if they bother to say anything).

Who wants to admit he behaved in a cowardly way and just “went along to get along” … despite many warnings from a knowledgeable friend?

To my mind, gays and lesbians who support the genderists should feel ashamed of being cowardly conformists, and I hope that one day they will. Some forms of shame are deserved and have nothing to do with internalized homophobia.

In case you missed it, there was an excellent and entertaining interview with Gareth Roberts on the latest Queens’ Speech:

https://clivesimpson.substack.com/p/episode-90-gay-shame

I have ordered the book - to add to my chronic backlog!!

Jennifer Bilek

A site called Unbekoming has repeated an excellent interview with Jennifer Bilek as well as providing lots of interesting looking ( I haven’t checked them out) links:

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/interview-with-jennifer-bilek?publication_id=355417&post_id=144549054&isFreemail=false&r=20xc5g&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Stop Press

Really excellent piece about the Eurovision shambles by Andrew Doyle on his substack.

Bambie Thug are a disgrace to Ireland!

Eurovision and the rise of the “non-binaries”

Authoritarianism now comes with catchy tunes and trashy outfits.

MAY 13, 2024

The annual parade of kitsch and clamour, otherwise known as the Eurovision Song Contest, has devolved somewhat in recent years. Once a harmless extravaganza of camp and self-knowing nonsense, it has gone the way of most gay culture and fallen into the fatal trap of taking itself too seriously. This fluffy creature has started to bare fangs.

Of course, Eurovision has always been political. The tradition of Greece and Cyprus awarding each other full marks was as daft as it was inevitable. But the spectre of war has somehow now intruded itself; in 2022, the public vote for Ukraine was an expression of sympathy rather than a sincere judgement on the quality of the song, and this year the Israeli singer Eden Golan required an escort of around one hundred police officers due to threats from protesters. Such baleful developments take us a long way from the frivolity of “Puppet on a String” and “Hard Rock Hallelujah”.

This year the trophy went to Switzerland’s Nemo, a man in a skirt who identifies as “non-binary”. The UK entry, Olly Alexander, calls himself “gay and queer and non-binary” but magnanimously accepts the pronouns “he” and “him”. And then there is the “queer” and “non-binary” Irish entry Bambie Thug, a woman who came sixth in the competition but first in the award for the sorest of losers. Having being beaten by Israel, whose very presence in the competition was a source of outrage for Thug, she had the following to say:

“I’m so proud of Nemo winning. I’m so proud that all of us are in the top ten that have been fighting for this shit behind the scenes because it has been so hard and it’s been so horrible for us. And I’m so proud of us. And I just want to say, we are what the Eurovision is. The EBU [European Broadcasting Union] is not what the Eurovision is. Fuck the EBU. I don’t even care anymore. Fuck them. The thing that makes this is the contestants, the community behind it, the love and the power and the support of all of us is what is making change. And the world has spoken. The queers are coming. Non-binaries for the fucking win.”

One might argue that all of this is simply an extension of the high-campery of old. Thug certainly looks pantomimic, with her Christmas-cracker devil horns, and the layers of makeup piled on to what used to be a face. But what were once the glittery fripperies of gay culture have been hijacked by the acolytes of gender identity ideology, a movement that has appropriated this whimsical sheen to advance its authoritarian and sinister goals. It is this same movement that has successfully lobbied governments to introduce draconian speech laws, has hounded people out of their jobs for wrongthink, and has normalised bullying and threats of violence in the name of “social justice”. 

The very notion of “non-binary” is a reactionary concept dressed up in the guise of progressivism. Most of those who identify as non-binary are embracing, rather than rejecting, sex stereotypes. They claim to feel neither sufficiently masculine nor feminine, which is simply another way of reinforcing what it means to be male or female.

The same ambiguity goes for “queer”. Many gay people see this as a anti-gay slur, associating the term with the practice of “queer-bashing”. But now, many young heterosexuals are identifying themselves into this category as a means to claim the high status that now accompanies victimhood. Dannii Minogue, a lifelong heterosexual, recently “came out” as “queer”. To those who have been the victims of homophobic abuse and violence, it’s galling to see straights embracing the term as a fashion accessory. Minogue may as well have come out as a “faggot” or a “dyke”.

A study by the Arizona Christian University which surveyed six hundred people between the ages of 18 and 37 found that of those in the lower age bracket (18 to 24), 39 per cent identified as “LGBT”. Statistically, the majority of these respondents will be heterosexual. If this trend is to continue, it won’t be long before the “LGBTQIA+ community” will largely comprise of straight people with a kink. In fact, we’re probably already there.

Just because a majority rebrands itself as a minority, that doesn’t make it oppressed. This is the context in which Bambie Thug’s battle cry – “The queers are coming” – ought to be understood. The oppression of gay people throughout history is an incontestable fact, but heterosexuals, however fetishistic, have usually been left alone. It’s little wonder that more and more gay people are rejecting the “LGBTQIA+” label.

One of the common mantras intoned by activist groups and the institutions they have infected is that “non-binary identities are valid”. They are not referring to the standard definition of “valid” as an argument that has “a sound basis in logic or fact”. After all, there are only two human sexes and no third gamete. Rather, in the activist lexicon to be “valid” is an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of personal feelings, or “individual truths”, a close cousin of the notion of “lived experience”.

We are assured that “non-binary people have always existed”, a form of historical revisionism intended to shame anyone who refuses to dance along to the circus march of our times. Gareth Roberts points out the folly of such declarations in his new book Gay Shame, and how they are “throwing back into the unknowable past something that was literally invented on Tumblr in 2011”.

To be “non-binary” is a modish form of self-identification, no different from the “goths” of the 1980s or the “teddy boys” of the 1960s. The major departure is that those who identify as “non-binary” are now demanding that others pretend that their identity is something innate. To be born “non-binary” is about as feasible as being born an “emo”, and I have yet to hear of a case of a baby emerging from the womb in ripped skinny jeans and black eyeliner.

So when Bambie Thug cries out “Non-binaries for the fucking win!”, the connotations are a little more sinister than the teenage trends of yesteryear. Major corporations and public bodies are now insisting that we pretend that people can identify out of the categories of male and female, irrespective of the impact on the rights of women, gay people and children. Laws are being passed that will criminalise those who refuse to play along with the fantasies of narcissists. In other words, there is a lot more at stake than the fleeting fashions of Eurovision.

All thoughts gratefully received, of course.

Endpiece

In case you missed this 😊

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