Trans

Reality punishes lies. Here is an anecdote: take a man at an elite British university who is slightly autistic, a philosophy student with an awkward personality—he eventually decides he is trans and has the op. Autists often feel disconnected from their body, in all likelihood his obsessive nature decided to resolve his strange relation to his physicality with an op—if I never feel at home in my body then a gender change must be the answer, so he reasoned. He then became a prostitute in Brighton, a city well-known as an LGBT Mecca; he presented as female. One day, after he had finished with a client, he cheerfully informed the man that he was trans—a naïve statement that might be expected from a sheltered autist. The client experienced a meltdown and choked him to death and burned down the house. Reality punishes lies.

What happened was that the boy caused his client’s perceived reality to collapse. This is a dangerous thing to do to a person because, as the boy found out the hard way, when a person experiences reality collapse they often flip to extreme positions: self-harm or murder—a good reason not to spike a person’s drink with psychedelics, by the way; or, indeed, to pretend you are the opposite sex when you are not and then initiate the most intimate act possible between two humans.

There are some people—myself included—who collapse their perceived reality all the time, mostly to move with reality; and for me this is a spiritual exercise where the final goal is to identify with unmediated consciousness and not the transitory identities that form and reform within me—the various personas crafted by the ego. However, to collapse perceived reality involuntarily and without experience beforehand is an event that disturbs; some people encounter what is essentially an ego death through drugs, near-death experiences, uncovered adultery, the revelation that they are adopted, sudden loss of work, and so on. Occasionally, I suggest, in jest, that the world would benefit if the water supply was spiked with LSD; actually, this would almost certainly be catastrophic—and it would also violate other people’s psychic integrity. It is true that the world would be improved if all people—trans or otherwise—became more loosely attached to the personas their egos craft; and yet people must come to that discipline if called to it, you cannot impose it on them.

You see you could sleep with an enlightened master and then reveal you are actually the opposite sex; he would smile and laugh, not being attached to any particular presentation—it is all a play, only emptiness is reality. Yet this is what our boy expected, a saintly man who visits whores; he was naïve: he thought the world is filled with saints, people who are infinite in their tolerance and forgiveness. Of course, he was spoilt: mum and dad provided, approved, and welcomed his broad-minded outlook and his cute little performances. “We’ll support you, whatever you decide.” Yet reality is not an audience that adores you—and it is not infinitely forgiving, except to those who serve it; no forgiveness and infinite comprehension without respect, and this boy did not respect reality—now playtime is over.

I must admit, incidentally, that I have almost no interest in the trans issue whatsoever. I once chatted with someone who made occasional references to “troons”, and, since he was associated with the right, I for a time thought it was slang for “octoroon”—an 18th-century term for people with 1/8 African blood; actually, as I eventually found out, it is a derogatory term for a trans person. I was pretty ignorant about this issue; and though I mention it from time to time it leaves me largely indifferent.

Everyone knows that it is an issue that impacts a tiny, tiny group; and yet it has become a central cleavage in the division between in-out groups that characterises the left-right divide in the West. Personally, I doubt that half the statements—for or against—transgender issues are deeply felt by either side, except that the whole business, along with climate change, pretty much demonstrates which team you are on at the moment; so if you want to play, you better express a strong view in this regard. This is not to say the issue is insignificant, for if the trans activists get what they want then the changes to society will be very far-reaching and profound; and the left will merely roll on to the next issue, almost certainly sex with children; remember, once it is established that someone can begin a transition to another gender very early there is no reason why they should not have sex as well—and the leftist activist treadmill, the leftist religion, eagerly seeks new issues; and I am sure it will be this one.

So as an issue in itself I am indifferent as regards the trans; if someone wants to cut off their balls, wear a dress, and asks me to call them “Susan” I have no objection. I doubt it is a good idea, but if you really want that…Yet, of course, this is not really the issue at stake; it is about compulsion, not harmless eccentrics who have always existed and always will (as do their more malevolent companions)—and it is also about reality distortion. For what the left demands with this issue, as with so many others, is that you accept their reality and accept it under compulsion from the state; when Jordan Peterson protested against compelled pronoun use he was on the right track as regards this issue. For as we shall see, this is just another gambit for control—and status accentuation.

We must pause here to consider language use, very crucial to this issue. So far I have said “trans”, yet the issue is currently presented as being about “gender” and not “the transsexuals”—indeed, whether we are in a discussion about gender or sex is quite important to the way this issue is framed. I will often speak about “sex” in this essay, although I accept that there is such a concept as gender too. I was once interviewed on a podcast by someone with strong views against trans activism, and he was adamant that “gender” should not be used at all—and suggested it had been invented by the CIA for nefarious purposes. In the sense I understand “gender” this is what I mean: the cultural ways in which sex is expressed differ; so that, for example, a kilt is functionally a dress and yet is male attire because it is so in Scotland—and it is so because it is nested within a wider sign system that is, in turn, linked to biological and spiritual sex.

So far as I can tell, trans activists just take the cultural analysis of gender, of how a kilt comes to be a man’s item of clothing, and then act as if this sign system does not plug in anywhere else—not to biology, or to spirituality. Obviously, gender is malleable; it would be possible—though difficult—to change a kilt into a purely female clothing article, though it would require very coercive and highly propagandistic measures; yet to change what a kilt signifies does not change biological sex or spiritual divisions between the sexes. I suppose that basically gender is never completely isomorphic with biological or spiritual sex expressions, and it is the fact that sign systems do not always map precisely onto other layers of reality that trans activists exploit—and yet if given freedom, gender and sex align almost seamlessly.

I think at heart, as I will discuss later, the left admits that nobody changes sex; at some point in my life the language moved from “transsexual” to “transgender”; and the tacit admission in that move is that the cultural signifiers can float and be adopted at will with no reference to biology or spirituality, although sex never changes. Note also, “transgender” is a word that makes it difficult to speak about an individual; it is literally a they word—you cannot say, “He’s a transgender,” in the way you can say about someone, “He’s a transsexual.” This gives us a clue as to why the language was changed, it is about an attempt to destroy the individual; it is an attempt to make Heidegger’s inauthentic “they” more than a philosophical abstraction, to make it a concrete actuality.

It is socialised language and it actually makes it difficult to articulate the process underway, since, for example, I could not say the boy I described at the beginning was “a transgender”, whereas I could have said he was “a transsexual”. As with many leftist ideas, it is a profane inversion—we are meant to lose our individuality through contact with the Godhead, not efface the individual through language. As with all leftist language use, the intention is to obscure and make the issue difficult to talk about; and its terminal goal is to create an in-group identity that anyone, whatever they feel about sexuality, can adopt—hence the enormous recorded increase in teenagers who identify as LGBT.

Stated correctly, to change gender means: “I can adopt various signifiers and physiognomic features so as to more or less mimic the sign system that indicates the other gender.” Embedded within this idea is the admission that nobody changes sex; and when the right protests that nobody can change sex they, in a sense, talk past the left—the left does not even claim that. The right’s assertion, put fully, could be said to be: “Sex and gender are isomorphic, except in some very marginal cases where dysfunction has occurred—or when there is a novel development that has yet been processed by culture in accordance with the biological and spiritual dimorphism.”

To return to the play of masks: trans people change masks, but just because they change masks does not mean that they are not attached to their masks; theirs is not a spiritual position, generally they are absolute materialists—so they exchange one rigid identity for another, they are still asleep. In some ways they are more asleep than most people, for they often impose their new masks through pure intellectual will—especially if autistic—and that is not an organic development, it does not move with the real; it moves with the egotistic desire to impose an intellectual narrative on reality: it is, of course, literally pride; the view that what you have crafted in your mind can be imposed on reality by verbal fiat—though reality only gives you rewards if you open yourself to it, acknowledge your nothingness before it.

So not to inform someone that you are trans when you are is abusive. I hate to use this much, well, abused word; but there is no better word—it is to abuse a person’s trust as regards the most intimate possible human relationship. To do so is to open the possibility that you could inflict an involuntary ego death on someone; the results, not uncommonly, run to murder and suicide—or profound dislocation and distress. What has been done is to consciously manipulate a person’s perceived reality and their grasp on it; and this is abusive, it is to reach into and distort another person’s fundamental sense of self and so it is the deepest violation possible—aside from rape. It is effectively to rape another person’s soul. A boundary has been violated and a person’s most intimate property has been tampered with, as if you broke into their house and rearranged all their furniture—and then, if they then complained, said it did not happen or that they had a latent desire to have their furniture messed around with anyway (“You’re just latently gay; deal with it, sweety. You’re only angry because you’re gay, really.”)

The left frequently complains that it is being gaslit; of course, it is the primary gaslighter; the left seeks to control through narratives that induce shame and build in-out group dynamics based on resentment. Trans activists often jump back to a rather antique Freudian line that people who do not wish to sleep with the trans or express disdain in this regard are merely repressed or latent homosexuals. Strange, really, since as we shall see the trans issue is very much connected with our cybernetic world and not Freud’s world where everything is pistons and pressurised steam that seeks a means to escape the unconscious and its steel pressure chamber. It is besides the point; even if someone is latently homosexual, the way to help them is not to seduce them under the guise that you are a woman; if someone is in serious psychological conflict about their sexuality it is unlikely to be helpful to distort their perception of reality, to distort it further—it might even lead to murder or suicide. Of course, it is all baloney; an attempt to undermine opposition to the trans through shame and gaslighting, nothing to do with genuine attempts to help people who are conflicted in their sexuality or to come to an accurate assessment as regards reality.

Besides, in truth, I doubt that homosexuals are made; I think they are born, and their numbers are probably no more than 1.5% of any population at the very most—though a common fantasy, understandably, for homosexuals is that “everyone is like us really” and if we can get them drunk or fool them their real desires will come out. They retain a large influence for three reasons: they tend to have above-average intelligence; they tend to work in highly loyal clandestine networks; and thirdly, unfree societies, in which we live, use perverse people as enforcers to control the population—people with no families have no loyalty, except to their patrons. Hence, as Gibbon observed, the eunuch emerges when a society has become a decadent tyranny; the eunuch thrives in Byzantine imperial politics, and as a man with no stake in society he is loyal only to power—not family or other organic links. Hence for the trans issue to explode in America, the greatest empire the world has ever seen, makes sense; the empire is decadent and Byzantine, the eunuchs—the trans—have arrived on schedule.

A common line taken by the trans is that if a sexual partner cannot tell the difference then it does not matter either way; and so the trans issue is partly an issue for our time because it is about simulation and virtuality; and we live in an environment that is highly virtualised and simulated, and everyone feels we are on the cusp: some even more sophisticated virtuality awaits, just slightly over the horizon.

Behind the transsexual issue lurks the question, “Can a machine (a technological artefact, rather like a trans body) be human?” “Can it imitate humanity perfectly, and is to imitate a thing to be it?” The trans issue runs in parallel with climate change: we are meant to eat artificial meat to avert climate change; and we are meant to copulate with artificial trans bodies, perhaps to reduce the population that consumes so many resources—sterility is virtuous. Again, the question arises as to whether the simulation matches reality and whether you can tell the difference—if it makes any difference at all.

“All the correct tastebuds are stimulated, what do you mean it’s not meat?” “The neurones for sexual stimulation in a heterosexual man have fired in the correct order, what do you mean this person you slept with is not a woman?”. Those are empirical claims, incidentally; and even if it is not consciously expressed the correct circuits, so to speak, are not engaged when people eat fake meat or meet men who masquerade as girls. No, this is uncanny valley territory and the uncanny is essential to horror; hence the trans issue evokes horror, something has been covered up: when it is exposed the screams begin…the house is burned down.

The simple answer to this is to imagine a restaurant that finds a way to make sausages from sewage. The sewage is treated, shaped, and flavoured so as to be indistinguishable from a real sausage. Has the restaurant done anything wrong? In law, certainly so—and if you were fooled and found out you would want redress. Why? Because it is wrong to coerce people, and that includes coercion with lies; whether or not the sewage-meat is excellent or deeply unhealthy is neither here nor there—the crime lies in coercive deception. This answer is sufficient in itself without any recourse to questions about what constitutes a real man or woman; no need to evoke biology, metaphysics, or God.

Yet, on the other hand, we still ask: “How is the sausage made?” To say that it does not matter how the sausage is made indicates a guilty conscience; if there is truly no difference then the factory floor would be opened up and we would all see the sausage—or, correctly, see how the sausage is turned into a vagina. Yet the coercive deception—the lie—exists because this exposure is feared. As with “Beyond Meat” products, as with fiat currency, and as with the trans, the right wants the authentic and the real: the left says we should be satisfied with appearances, for quality implies discrimination—and that is bad.

As soon as you say: “Well, being trans is fine but do not deceive anyone else as you go about it,” you find, funnily enough, that you are in the anti-trans camp; and why that should be so we shall see later, for all is not as it seems as regards this demand to “be women”. For now, it is enough to say that coercive deception is wrong—whatever the product, so to speak, you sell; and, indeed, did an excellent product ever need deception, or even advertisement? Certainly not, quality speaks for itself.

Yet all this has been a distraction, a wander up the garden path; for, in fact, the contemporary question over transgender issues does not concern verisimilitude at all; it is nothing to do with how plausible an imitation woman can be made, for, according to contemporary beliefs, it is enough to declare that your pronouns are now she/her and not he/him for the change to be in effect—and even the pronouns they/them indicate that this is not really about dimorphism in sex. So far as I know, it is not even necessary to change your appearance or dress in any special way. If I woke up tomorrow and said, “I’m a woman now,” and placed a few pronouns in my Twitter biography then that would be enough; no need to change anything else—no need even to raid my aunt’s closet for a bra into which I could stuff a few socks, no need to buy a wig on Amazon, no need to slip into some second-hand heels, no need to tuck my substantial member into a steel-wired box-shaped undergarment. No need even to take these minimal steps, all that is required is that I feel a certain way and make a public declaration; if I do so, I am as good as the next woman—at least so far as this belief system goes.

It is possible to imagine a government that established fully objective criteria for people who claimed to have transitioned: surgery to a particular standard, government-approved vaginas only (a terrifying thought, surely “HMG-standard” vagina would be grey and with a sandpaper consistency); breasts in five or six approved sizes, with nipples in one or two shades; mandatory speech therapy and behavioural courses to pass so that daily behaviour met a minimum feminine standard—the qualifications to be a woman could be quite rigorous. Yet nothing like this is proposed: there will be no “woman licence”, annually renewed or otherwise—and that is because the belief system has no interest in femininity or masculinity; it merely says that words and feelings can change reality, and, further, everyone else is obliged to respect your words and feelings under pain of government sanction, media disapproval, and social opprobrium.

So it turns out that this has nothing to do with sex or gender after all. Everyone engaged in earnest beard-tugging as to whether 7 out of 10 heterosexual men would judge a trans vagina to be indistinguishable from the indigenous article bark up the wrong tree. Whether or not a trans can “pass”, whether there is metaphysical sexual dimorphism, and whether or not certain genetic clusters happen to conform to long-standing sex differences encoded in cultural institutions are all neither here nor there.

Correctly stated, the current transgender movement’s demand is not, “Recognise people who were born biologically and spiritually male as female.” Put accurately the demand is actually: “Whatever we say or feel about reality must be granted as true.” To refute this position does not require an appeal to genetics, the Bible, advanced philosophy, or postmodernism—or anything. I get up in the morning and say, “I am a beachball.” During the day, I bounce about a lot and generally behave like a beachball. By the day’s end I observe that I have not turned into a beachball—it is demonstrated that I cannot state that I am a thing and then become it by verbal fiat; at best I can mimic some superficial elements about it.

As already mentioned, everyone involved in this game—and it is very much a game—knows that really. Where does this all come from, then? It comes about because Nietzsche was correct: life is a vicious power struggle, specifically a struggle for status—a struggle lived out through values; and this struggle is partly conducted through language. In other words, if I can make other people call me a thing—especially if that proposition is ridiculous in common sense terms, then I am a pretty damn high-status individual. The phenomenon was named by the acidulous blogger Spandrell, “Point deer, make horse,” in homage to a Chinese fable about a corrupt emperor. We live in a society that considers femininity, victimhood, and minority status as the highest values; ergo, men who wish to be very high status, who follow the status economy closely, will want to be: firstly, feminine; secondly, victims; and thirdly, a minority. To become trans is the trifecta, transgender people are: feminine, victims, and a minority. The person who can impose his verbal fiat over society—make his underlings call him a girl when he blatantly is not—represents the top dog, no doubt.

Everyone knows that elites counter-signal their contemporaries by playing poor, always have done; only the poor want to be ostentatiously rich, the rich want to play pauper; not least to reduce envy from the poor—and transgenderism is a great way to play pauper; and this is why we hear so much about how transgender people are victimised via crime statistics; the greater the victim, the more holy and high value. In this transvaluation of values the lower classes can then be demonised, turned into the out-group “the cis”—the unwashed out-group who have not been inducted into the special jargon, the sign regime, that is used to explain transgenderism; a complex jargon mostly taught and developed at the most elite universities, by the way.

The unwashed and unlettered majority retain isomorphic sex and gender; hence they must become “the cis”: the word is simply the opposite to “trans”, as in “Cisalpine Gaul” (Gaul on this side of the Alps, as opposed to “Transalpine Gaul” on the far side). Yet forget this Latin etymology for a moment, the reason “cis” is used as an out-group designator is to goad and manipulate; it suggests negative femininity, as in “sissy”, and it also has a sororal relationship to “comrade”—it suggests that we shall become like “sisters” together.

This is why the conservatives who contest transgenderism slightly miss the point when they talk about biology, tradition, or the Bible. The people they are in discussion with—or in a fight with—know all that well enough. Indeed, to deny reality is the point: only really high-status people can afford to deny reality and be blatantly contradictory and hypocritical; if you can be hypocritical and get away with it—force other people to acquiesce to your ridiculous assertions—you must be very valuable indeed. So the hypocrisy and contradictory assertions are the point; to punish the unwashed for their inability to keep up with the lexical dynamics within transgenderism demonstrates status—this is much more than whether or not a person passes as female, as variations such as “Xer” show. As Julius Caesar, another Latin, observed, “We came, we saw, we kicked their ass.”

This is the classic left-right division at play: the right represents the masculine position, and the left the feminine position. The feminine position says: “Words can change reality, and words should not hurt how I feel about myself. This is about how I feel as regards my contemporaries, you must respect it (it is about my status; my narcissism and insecurity when reality confronts me).” The right says: “There is an objective reality out there; here is the evidence—facts don’t care about your feelings.” Essentially, you can do absolutely nothing with your life, but if you claim to be transgender in some way—there are many variations, you do not even have to be snipped—then you can become an in-group person and claim status as a victim; very high status, in fact. There are even laws about what people can say about you, just as with the king in olden days.

However, the right’s error is that it attempts to negotiate or debate with the left—it debates and negotiates with emotions. Rationally, this is pointless: you cannot debate or reason away an emotion, or a purported emotion. Possibly, one-on-one, you could get behind the logic that underlies the emotion (or the lie); but practically, in public debate, it cannot be done. This indicates that pundits like Ben Shapiro are not really doing what they claim they are doing; you cannot oppose an emotion with facts and logic—yet this is precisely what they claim to do; either they are grifters, or simply masochists who want to lose and then have a moan about it. Probably they derive some narcissistic satisfaction from the act that they are “rational” and “logical”; yet this has nothing to do with actual facts or logic—or winning. The situation comes about, in part, because the right is already very feminised: it thinks you should negotiate with women, but if you do that then you will always lose; you cannot stably negotiate with emotions—emotions are non-negotiable.

For example, if someone comes to you in tears—periodically they let out a scream—it is pretty futile to use facts and logic on them, at least not immediately; perhaps you could help them with some Stoic thought and philosophy when they have calmed down sufficiently—in the immediate situation, they need to be contained; stroked, hugged, or calmed down. Yet this is not really the situation we face with the left-right divide; the left pretends emotions; it is more akin to a toddler who sits down in a supermarket aisle and maintains their feet are “hurty” and refuses to move unless they are carried—probably there is some truth to it, the child is tired; substantially, they make out they are in more pain than they actually are to get an easy ride.

It is emotion, in this sense, that the left deploys; again, there is no point in negotiation—not with a real emotion, and certainly not with a pretended emotion. I knew a man who was in so much emotional distress after his mother died that he was literally slapped on the cheek by his wife, since that was what it required to snap him back to reality—no room to negotiate there. Even less room if the other person has faked an emotion to get what they want: you cannot negotiate with a lie. To meet emotion and lies with reason, logic, and negotiation is to waste your time. This was why Trump was so effective; no narcissistic huff-and-puff about reason and logic, he just said that woke people are losers—he met emotion with emotion, or with emotional truth.

Indeed, the entire LGBT movement has never, ever been about homosexuality or people who genuinely feel that are the wrong sex. From the start, it was founded by former Marxists—such as Harry Hay—on the hunt for a new cause; just as the Marxist-Leninists used “national liberation” as a wedge to attack the West, so it was decided in the 1960s to use “gay liberation” as a new non-class wedge against the West. The Marxist-Leninists always intended to do away with the nationalists once their goal had been reached, just as the LGBT movement has no inherent interest in homosexuality—actually it has substantially left homosexuals and all other groups under its umbrella worse off; not every gay person is homosexual, and not every homosexual is gay.

The reason the transgender movement is so broad in its linguistic conception—from xer to they—is that it is meant to provide a parallel in-group marker to set against organic society; just as men in a car factory were meant to identify as proletarians in the old days. It has nothing integrally to do with sexuality; as previously noted, anyone can join—become “queer” or “trans”—whenever they want. The kernel—people who are genuinely homosexual or confused about their sex identity—finds itself expanded out, so that now large numbers of teenagers identify with these labels; perhaps they consider a little surgery here and there, a modest snip. Again, this is not a development that can be countered by facts about biological sex; it simply is not about that issue, even in its own terms.

This is all a logical outgrowth from feminism, incidentally. The so-called Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) are doomed—as with all conservatives—to lose. The reason is fairly simple: feminism asserts that men and women are equal; if there are inequalities between men and women then this can only be due to residual bigotry, biased institutions, and so on. From this it follows that the division between male and female is arbitrary; if we are fundamentally equal, how can there be any difference? No, any differences arise from arbitrary and unjust impositions—attempts to exploit people who have been designated “women”, just as America’s criminal justice system exists to exploit people who are called “black”. So the idea that gender is, as they say, a social construct that can be mutated at will remains entirely consistent with what feminism must mean; note well, the idea that gender can be changed at will with a new biography—new pronouns—constitutes arbitrary action. “Why is this so?” “Because I say it is.” Thus spoke every tyrant in the history of the world.

I do like the name “TERF”; it is quite evocative, since it suggests that these women inherently wish to defend their “turf”, they want to stand their ground—and their ground is biological sex. Although they will deny it to the Heavens, they constitute the right; and this is because as soon as you start to engage with reality even your language becomes rightist in nature. “We will defend our turf as women.” It is only the same as the patriot who wishes to defend his physical turf from foreign incursions, the businessman who wishes to defend his property from confiscation, or the religious person who wishes to defend the integrity of their rites. It also rightly establishes that it is the transgender movement that constitutes the aggressor; the person who decides to stand their ground does so because he has been transgressed against—nobody decides to stand their ground out of the blue; no, we stand our ground in response to a specific threat.

Doubtless PhDs and popular books are in preparation even now on the topic; just as Susan Sontag produced AIDS as a Metaphor, an extraordinary book in which she condemned doctors and scientists who spoke about AIDS as if they were engaged in a battle—as if bodies had borders that were violated or subverted by outside invaders, as if you should be concerned that hostile entities have entered your body and undermined it from within. This disturbed Sontag; although it is simply a truth that evolution produces entities—undetectable to your immune system—that undermine your immune system and allow other hostile entities to destroy your body; evolution has produced such organisms—some barely even alive, being more like dead matter, such as the AIDS virus—in many forms.

Yet to use such language could, possibly, spark another holocaust, averred Sontag. And so I fully expect that there will be an earnest thesis on the TERFs: “TERFs and turf: blood and soil rhetoric in 21st-century post-fascist movements”—you can fill in the blanks. Yet doctors talk about AIDS—and other infections—as if these are invasive entities, armies, and covert infiltrators because when someone is infected with such a virus it really is a battle; the language is isomorphic with reality.

Sontag produced fantastic critiques as regards language; and she rightly, for example, noted how AIDS arrived with the computer virus—and how the language around both meshed; both were created by a networked world, networks of modem-tapped telephone lines and networks of air routes that facilitate global viral transmission work on similar principles—and can probably be modelled in a similar way. Yet she never proposed an alternative way to described reality; and that is because there is no alternative, to quote Sontag’s contemporary—Margaret Thatcher. The language is sound, you really do battle AIDS—you do not have a tender conversation with it. So what Sontag—people like her—propose to do is simply cover up reality, forbid people to describe their experiences; indeed, you could say that Sontag belongs with those people who oppose revelation.

Yet the TERFs will lose; they have decided to defend a property, femininity—yet feminism socialises women; even de Beauvoir, the rather forgotten but paradigmatic 20th-century feminist, held that “femaleness” was not biologically determined; if a woman has a hysterectomy, she says in The Second Sex, then she is still a woman—not due to hormones or genetics, but because she lives in the sign system that signals her as feminine; in other words, feminists have never thought biological sex is connected to femininity—if they did, they could not be feminists. The precondition for this outlook—a departure from reality, as with all leftist ideas—has been inherent within feminism from the start. The TERFs fight within the egalitarian structure laid down by feminism; yet they cannot be consistent and logical—if they were, they would admit there is no sex equality. Yet they cannot do this; and so their opponents will own them, for they take the logic of feminism to its correct conclusion: there is no difference between man and woman—save arbitrary and unjust impositions—therefore, if I say I am a woman I am one. If you have a problem with that it merely demonstrates your self-hatred and unconscious misogyny.

The TERFs will also lose because their opponents are very often highly successful and aggressive men; real alpha-male types. For various reasons connected to psychopathology, a certain male type—instantiated in Caitlyn Jenner and Zoey Tur, the former a top athlete and the latter a hyper-aggressive newshound—often wants to take the transgender route; in part, this relates to a desire to be high status; these men have often achieved everything possible in their careers, the final status gambit is to become a woman—a great physical and mental challenge that also grants them, as white males, the hitherto unrealised status boon that comes with femininity and victimhood. Men were always behind feminism, and these new man-woman feminists will easily brush aside the butch lesbians, tomboys, and TERFs. These are men who get things done and get what they want—in business, sport, and politics—and so they will have it their way, as men always do.

Incidentally, these men are the same type as the serial killer Russell Williams, a British-Canadian air force colonel who had a storied career until he was picked up as a serial killer; he murdered women and liked to wear and photograph himself in their underwear after the act. Perhaps, in time, this would have developed into a desire to be transgender. It is men like Williams—special forces heroes and the like—who often take the transgender route. They are highly intelligent, ruthless, and remorseless in their actions; and perhaps have a touch of autism too, Williams’s father was a nuclear engineer. In short, the type of man who likes softcore girly pics that depict “a girl with a gun”, a look beloved by a certain libertarian type in the States: the men who want to become, literally, girls with guns. This type will get what they want, I am quite sure—they always have done in the past; and I would not be surprised if I hear that Williams has requested to transition to womanhood in prison—a very logical, perhaps desirable, way to ease his sentence.

Hence, the few times I have chatted up trans people on Tinder, I noticed that they take a sadistic pleasure in the fact they think a man is fooled and on the line; it is easy to tell from their language—in reality, they know they are not real women; it is all a charade, and they enjoy the charade and the chance to play with another person’s reality. And why not? For many are the Russell Williams variety; men are sadistic—especially men who, say, have had a stellar career in the special forces or the military. Obviously, you can pump them with the relevant female hormones but the old masculine desire to torture or be sadistic remains intact. Further, many will have transitioned purely as the ultimate status enhancement; they are only there for the status, the old ultra-competitive masculine heart beats on. Sure, some are the rather wet and basically confused boys—as with my first example—but the advanced guard are not. These “women” are hard as nails, I tell ye—and, frankly, rather malevolent.

So, in conclusion, this whole issue has very little to do with sexuality and sex changes; a tiny kernel—a tiny eccentric or psychopathological minority—has been settled upon as a useful tool to work over the system: the incentives have been created by the inner logic found within gay liberation, feminism, and the equalities legislation that has been passed in the West over the years. It is the “they” ideology; the idea that everything is collective, and that there is no private property—and consequently no individual, since “they” own it; socialism by verbal fiat, linguistic abolition of the individual. The fact that the overall value system has long venerated the female, the victim, and the (deformed) minority meant that this issue would be picked up pushed through by, well, ambitious men. When this issue has triumphed, a new one will be on the agenda and the process will begin again—probably some conservative transgender people will break off and announce that what was once a pure and good movement has gone too far and become irrational.

Possibly Western societies will have ceased to function by then, for I am not sure that you can unglue from reality to the extent that law protects the statement, “What I feel to be true is true.” I am not sure that a society can survive when child sex becomes normalised; not because there will be some general uprising against such a move—nobody cares about other people’s children—but simply because to depart from reality to that extent is unsustainable.

In its esoteric aspect, the transgender movement is about a desire to become a hermaphrodite—a particular way to know God, a path followed by Jesus and Moses and the Buddha. Yet, as materialists, the transgender make this idea—the union of the masculine and the feminine—into a parody; it is a spiritual operation, not a literal one. Magic is real, but it does not work by verbal fiat; you have to work at it: you cannot just say, “Now I can fly,” and jump out a window—you need a broomstick at the very least. Yet this is precisely what transgenderism attempts, doubtless literal operations and derangement with pronouns accomplish some magic effects—especially among the burgeoning trans movement found among computer programmers, a priesthood of sorts. Yet, substantially, this is a movement that covers up reality; it covers up consciousness, the divine—and so no matter how many genitals are hacked off in Bangkok, you will find few true hermaphrodites among the transgendered.