Full Metal Jacket. Part 2
Update 657. Trans Myths Special. #BeMorePorcupine.
Onwards with Part 2 and sticking, of course, with Full Metal Jacket.
Arliss Howard is ‘Cowboy’
Matthew Modine is ‘Joker’
Dorian Harewood is ‘Eightball’
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
UK - The Online Safety Act
Yesterday we reported on this very alarming piece of legislation:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/welcome-to-maos-china
EDI Jester has done another heartfelt piece on this:
United Nations - Reem Alsalem
Excellent report from Ms Alsalem, as reported by Jonathon Van Maren on the Gender Ideology site.
Bombshell: UN report calls for ban on sex changes for children, declares transgenderism a threat to women
July 28
A United Nations draft report by the special rapporteur on violence against women affirmed what many critics have long warned: that there is a “concerted international push (to) erase” women and girls, and that gender dysphoria is “socially contagious.”
The report, titled “Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues: Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls,” was compiled by Reem Alsalem of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and warns that transgender ideology has become a threat to women.
Alsalem’s report is stunning considering that it comes from a United Nations office. For example, she warns that transgender ideology is resulting in the “erasure” of women:
“Recently, there has been a concerted international push to delink the definition of men and women from their biological sex and erase the legal category of “women.” Such efforts have undermined the practical achievement of equality between men and women. Women are therefore being denied their rightful recognition as a distinct category in law and society. It is a form of “coercive inclusion” that relies on the expectation that women will be kind enough to sacrifice their own recognition and protection for the sake of others.”
That, in so many words, is precisely what those of us critical of transgender ideology have been saying for years. Indeed, she goes on to condemn the purging of female-specific terms from language, pinpointing the terminology I have been writing about in this space for a decade:
“The suppression of women in language and law occurs in several forms: by replacing sex-specific language with neutral language; by reinterpreting sex-specific language to refer to gender identity rather than sex; and by referring to females in dehumanizing, biologically reductive terms such as “birthing persons,” “menstruaters/bleeders” or “vagina havers” with “front holes.” Such a framing is accompanied by describing the distinction between male and female itself as “biological essentialism” and “an intrinsic expression of patriarchal structures,” rather than the material reality onto which oppressive gender norms and stereotypes are imposed.”
Consider: That paragraph was not written by a conservative commentator or gender-critical feminist. It was penned by the head of a United Nations office. In fact, Alsalem also uses phrases that indicate an unwillingness to recognize “transgender identities” themselves as valid; she refers, at one point, to the “effort to provide recognition for males who identify as women or girls,” deliberately avoiding the approved ideological language of “transgender women” or “transgender girls.” Several pages later, after condemning governments for not collecting sex-specific data, she also takes a shot at the pornography industry, condemning the “system of pornography, which presents violent and dehumanizing depictions of women.”
Alsalem’s report reads like an outright rejection of the transgender agenda. She states that gender dysphoria is “socially contagious.” She praises the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that the legal definition of woman refers to biological sex,” stating that it “protects women and girls under a distinct category.” She even refers, at one point, to the “harmful consequences of social and medical transitioning of children” in a truly bombshell section that rejects the concept of “gender-affirming care” almost entirely, which I will quote in full:
“There is also a significant co-occurrence of what is known as gender dysphoria or incongruence and autism spectrum disorder diagnoses. Research suggests that the odds of being diagnosed with gender or bodily dysphoria are three times higher for children and adolescents with an autism spectrum diagnosis compared with those without, with girls particularly affected. They are particularly vulnerable to the socially contagious stereotyped roles as a coping strategy, placing them at risk of erroneously adopting stereotypes as their core identity while experiencing dissociation from their sexed bodies. The long-lasting and harmful consequences of social and medical transitioning of children, including girls, are being increasingly documented.
“They include: persistence or intensification of psychological distress; persistence of body dissatisfaction; infertility, early onset of the menopause and an increase in the risk of osteoporosis; sexual dysfunction; and loss of the ability to breastfeed in cases of breast mastectomy (to mention a few). That has rightly led several countries, such as Brazil, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to change course and restrict children’s access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery on sexual and reproductive organs.
“Allowing children access to such procedures not only violates their right to safety, security and freedom from violence, but also disregards their human right to the highest standards of health and goes against their best interests. Children are also not able to provide informed consent for such procedures. In situations in which such procedures have been found to have caused grave and lifelong harm, consent would be meaningless for both adults and children.”
Consider: Alsalem states, without proviso, that gender-affirming care harms children because it “violates their right to safety, security, and freedom from violence.” She recommends that UN member states ban transgender treatments and social transitioning for anyone under age 18. This is not only a repudiation of transgender ideology but an affirmation of everything that opponents of transgender ideology have been saying for a decade. She also advocates for limiting female-only spaces to females and warns that trans activists have been eroding both freedom of speech and belief in their attacks on women who disagree with them.
This report may prove to be a watershed moment in the international debate over the transgender agenda. It is certainly a rejection of much of what activists at the United Nations have been trying to accomplish over the last 10 years — and it is incredibly encouraging.
Dusty - we shall if this is ‘a watershed moment’ but it is certainly a remarkable report given how captured by the gender woo the UN is!!
Trans Myths
Really excellent piece by Claire on LGB Voices going through the myths of the trans rights movement and demolishing them one at a time. All thoughts gratefully received.
The Trans Movement: Myth vs. Fact
Jul 24, 2025
It is important, in the days of social media, to remember that repetition does not equal truth. While many people may share the same post, or repeat the same mantra, consensus is not a measure of goodness. People can agree on things that are fundamentally false, or can agree out of indifference instead of true understanding. Agreement can lead to pain and harm if it is disconnected from love, and this is especially true if the principles behind the agreed-upon idea are widely applied to society.
It is important to evaluate ideas for their truths, and to consistently do so. To do this, we have to discover the validity of an idea that rests in an underlying root: the part of the idea that would be true or false even when no one is looking. It is important to think beyond how something makes you feel, and explore what is. Decisions live beyond this moment, and something that feels good now can have complex consequences down the line.
In this article, I am aiming to reach the core truth underneath the common myths of the trans movement. These are common sentiments that are circulated widely at marches, on social media, and in conversations. If you feel I missed any, please let me know! I’d love to continue with a part 2.
The full piece is here:
Institutional Capture
Lorenzo Warby on his substack, Lorenzo from Oz looks at enormous length at institutional capture, not just the gender madness though he does spend a long time on this. A fascinating and really useful piece of work. All thoughts gratefully received.
How institutional capture happened
Transing from slow corrosion to clearly dysfunctional.
Jul 30, 2025
I was chatting online with friends, contemplating how the evil—that a proper response to a gender non-conforming child is to hormonally and surgically mutilate and sterilise them—and preposterous—that someone with a penis could be a woman—nonsense of Trans genderwoo had captured so many institutions so quickly.
As the friend asked:
‘I was fighting this mad identitarian crap in 1995 and yet the institutional takeover stunned even me—the sheer speed of it.’
How so?, how so quickly?, how so pervasively? All are excellent questions. The Trans genderwoo is particularly egregious but is part of a larger pattern of institutional dysfunction—for example, the way that elite US universities continue to flagrantly violate the law so as to racially bias their student intake and hiring practices.
There is a long story of institutional failure here.
Lorenzo concludes:
Transactivism paraded as repeating and extending the civil rights struggles. In reality, Transactivism drew from the same intellectual wells as Communism, via the sequence of Marxism —> Critical Theory —> Queer Theory —> Gender Identity Theory —> Transactivism. Rage against the bourgeoisie was transmuted into revolting against cis-heteronormativity by exploiting the confusions of adolescence in a highly sexualised society.
If taxpayer funding of activist scholarship had been banned from the start, a great deal of this could have been avoided. So, stripping taxpayer funding from all activist scholarship should be one of the first things to do, if we wish to recover the institutional health of our societies and democracies.
The simplest way to do that? Well, the Dissolution of the Monasteries provides a demonstrably effective example.
Yes, most academics did not buy into this toxic nonsense. But they proved utterly unwilling to do anything effective to stop it, so we should pay them no heed.
The expansion of the unaccountable classes through the expansion of bureaucracy and higher education, crystallising in the expansion of the moral-project state, interacting with the rise of social media and shift in mainstream media towards purveying narratives of glib righteousness, is how the Trans takeover happened.
The full piece is here:
Terf Island Discs
Thanks to an excellent suggestion from Tenaciously Terfin, we are pausing Endpieces for the time being and giving Tenaciously and Liz a well earned rest from their hard work. So welcome to Terf Island Discs. Please let us have four of your favourite songs or pieces of music and provide a link if possible. They need to be reasonably short. We can’t expect to have readers listening to the whole of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto in B flat minor, albeit it is magnificent. Obviously, the choices don’t actually have to be from Terf Island - anywhere in the world! We will feature one piece of music in each general update. Thanks to all those readers who have already sent in their choices.
Please send in your choices via the comments section at this link: https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/terf-island-discs
Next up!
Chosen by: Tenaciously Terfin
‘Running Up That Hill’ by Kate Bush
#BeMorePorcupine
#MakeOrwellFictionAgain
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#JoinFreeSpeechUnion
#LeaveKidsAlone
#StandWithSandiePeggie
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
"This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning"
Thanks for two excellent updates Dusty, tons of great pieces. I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into the Lorenzo Warby, looks fascinating.
#SaveFreeSpeech