The problem is: I was wrong. Or, to be a bit more accurate, I got things partly right. But then, for the rest, I basically just made it up. In my defence, I wasnât alone. Everyone was (and is) making it up. Thatâs how the gender-studies field works. But itâs not much of a defence. I should have known better. If I were to retroactively psychoanalyze myself, I would say that, really, I did know better. And thatâs why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic level, I didnât have proof for part of what I was saying. (Confessions of a Social Constructionist)
Only in the light of this agenda does it make sense that so-called ‘sex education’ should be advocated to take place throughout the school years “from kindergarten to college” when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is a constant indoctrination in new attitudes. (Thomas Sowell, ‘The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy)
It has long been said that nothing is ever true till it’s been officially denied. Today, nothing is ever truer until saying it has been made a thought-crime. Let’s look at an example of how that happens – and I do mean how that happens; what the cause and effect chain is. Before I am ready to explain in my own words, however, this post will take a longish trip though the words and experiences (including some genuine ‘lived experiences’) of others.
A very able friend of mine spent her working life teaching – latterly as headmistress of sizeable schools, some prestigious, others she intentionally chose to be very challenging – before retiring just a little before 2015’s trans-wokery kicked off. Speaking of several decades of secondary school intakes (some two hundred pupils annually), she said (the following summarises a much longer conversation):
In many years, there was a pupil in the 11-year-old intake who was not comfortable with their gender identity. In many years there were none. We never had a year with two. But in many years, there was one.
My policy was to be sympathetic and observant, to avoid making a big thing of it, and to help the pupil be aware that, over the next few years, more bits of their adolescent/adult nature would wake up – including more bits of their sexual nature; that they were going to learn more about themselves, not just about what we taught them, while they were with us.
Invariably, by age 16, these pupils were OK with their gender identity. Some (far from all) were gay. None still thought they were not their biological sex.
Of course, with a much larger sample size, or just the random chance of a different sample, I could be saying ‘almost invariably’ here, but my experience was that not one who thought their gender and body mismatched at age 11 still thought so at age 16.
Since 2015, many schools have been following an exactly opposite policy. Instead of sympathy and support, there is flattery and affirmation. Making a big thing of it is now demanded, not avoided. And you risk cancel culture, or even legal trouble, if you advise an 11-year-old trans-thinking pupil to expect their sexual nature and self-understanding of it to grow (let alone, to wake up) in the next 5 years.
With that for starters, let’s tour some related issues.
The wisdom of a policy depends on what you think the underlying probabilities are. Older readers may recall the Cleveland child-abuse diagnosis scandal back in the mid-1980s. An NHS paediatrician in Cleveland believed the feminist narrative – that patriarchal parents perpetrate lots of child-abuse. Her job was to examine infants of local families referred for the usual childhood diseases. Someone published a very preliminary paper speculating that certain genital signs were consistent with child abuse. She began examining every infant who appeared in her clinic for those signs – and reporting more and more of them as abused. Soon she was reporting every single infant she saw. At first, every case was investigated, every family ripped apart, but after she had reported a total of more than a hundred in the space of a few months, push-back called a halt – and then her left-wing defenders pushed-back against the push back (there were feminist ‘New Statesman’ articles decrying the ‘prejudice’ against her, etc.). In the end, most people in Britain assumed she’d gone nuts (those who did not say her examining of infants and victimising of their parents was itself abuse) but her defenders’ commitment to the narrative warred against that idea. If you refuse to question what the narrative says patriarchal parents do, then you train yourself never to see her rate of detecting child-abuse as absurd. What you think reasonable – and what you think absurd – depends on what you already believe. I did not think her or her supporters honestly mistaken, but I could see their errors were layered (layered in their minds, layered in how they were acquired over years), older absurdities protecting newer ones from looking crazy.
Next, let’s compare the experiences of Heather Barwick (Dear gay community, your kids are hurting) with those of Moira Greyland (The Story of Moira Greyland).
Heather (the original Heather of ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’) describes a caring childhood in which her ‘two mommies’ did not intentionally harm her. When she talked to them years later “but it seems like you’re not listening”, when she uses the analogy of a child whose parents would listen and understand if their child said (for example), “I love you – but your divorce hurt me terribly”, Heather is talking about being hurt by an ideology – ‘abused by it’ one could say – but she is emphatically not talking about abuse in the sense that word ordinarily conjures up.
By contrast, abusively is exactly how Moira Greyland was raised by her parents and their community of “aggressive gay pagans”. She was certainly abused by their ideology – that of the Californian society in which they moved easily, without question – but that takes second place to the fact that her well-connected gay father violated her at age five, at the request of her famous-author mother, who was determined to raise a lesbian child. (Moira describes the mother as significantly the more vile of the two! I’m glad I never took to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books; it would be distressing in retrospect to have liked them.) Moira knows from her younger self how useful to perpetrators the ideology can be in the minds of its victims. As she grew up, she went through a phase when she utterly refused to see what was done to her as abuse, but was rendered furious by evidence of abuse to other children.*
As Moira grew older still, yet more aware of how her whole circle exploited their ‘anti-prejudice’ ideology to have fun with exploitably-vulnerable youngsters, her opinions evolved further.
What sets gay culture apart from straight culture is the belief that early sex is good and beneficial
Inside the circle Moira grew up in, they knew very well why they wanted this. “Don’t think they don’t know”, she warns (that statistically few children will grow up to lead an alternative lifestyle if left alone in their early teens**). “Donât think for a second that they DONâT know”, she says, the value to them of
“providing a boy with sexual experiences BEFORE he can be ‘ruined’ by attraction to a girl.”
And she goes on to explain why she says, “Don’t think they don’t know how to”.
Moira also knows how useful to perpetrators the ideology can be in the minds of witnesses and those they talk to, not just victims – and she is not alone in having experienced how the ideology can be used to make a suspicion rebound on any who dare raise it. Patrick Courrielche’s wife was just one of a group of Hollywood wives who, comparing things their kids had said about sleepovers at a certain house, suddeny realised there was a pattern (a pattern, the Courrielches later discovered, that had also been noticed several years earlier by a quite separate group of Hollywood parents). “The impromptu story swap lit off a firestorm.” – at first.
But Mr. and Mrs. Creepy knew something my wife and I didnât understand at the time â in Hollywood, thereâs something more toxic than spooning in bed with other peopleâs kids. … Word was getting back to us that The Creepies, in a seeming attempt at deflection, were telling anyone that would listen that my wife and I were right wingers â unrelated intel anywhere but in La La Land. Within a matter of weeks, the spotlight had shifted from their creepy behavior to our politics. The turn was startling.
Moira, raised in this ideology, now rejects it wholly. Where Heather only regrets the ideology-caused harm of kindly carers, Moira now regards abuse as that lifestyle’s statistical norm.
So, with these detours done, with these contrasting examples and ideas in mind, what do I think? Here is one last distantly-relevant detour to frame the analysis. An investigator of fraud and theft at UK firms long ago told me:
We go into any case assuming that 30% of the employees are pure as the driven snow, 10% will steal if it is safe to do so, and the firm’s health depends on the other 60%. If the culture acts against crime and rewards honesty then the 60% rally to the 30%, the 10% know and experience being under the eyes of the other 90%, and thefts are rare. But if the culture signals that no-one cares, that it’s a mug’s game to be honest, and you can safely be light-fingered, then slowly, one by one, the 60% rally to the 10%, the 30% (those who don’t leave – or get punished for rocking the boat) learn to look away, and theft becomes the culture, restrained – but only occasionally and inadequately – by the need not to kill the goose. It takes time to reach 70% – but once you do, the journey back takes longer and is a lot harder.
Most people think sex crimes worse than thefts – but also find sexual desires stronger than financial ones. Just for this discussion, I’ll sometimes reuse these 90:10 / 30:70 percentages merely as labels, deferring the question of what the real equivalent percentages may be. As for the 30%, the 10% and the 60% between, let’s call them the uncorrupt, the corrupt and the corruptible.
It sounds like Heather was raised in a 90:10 society. “I know you have been hated”, she says of her carers, in assessing some of their temptations to “not listen”. It sounds like Moira was raised in a 30:70 society. “It looks like he’ll skate on all this”, she says of one member caught in peculiarly egregious activities, since they’ve been creating, promoting, defending and de-stigmatising this narrative for quite a long time. As it went from being twitter-risky, to being career-limiting for teachers and punishable for pupils, then career-ending for some dissenters and physically dangerous for others (even an L or a G or a driven-to-suicide-for-being-off-message T), then a hate-speech crime to question everyone’s right and duty to recruit the underage to the cause (and a hate crime accusation for heterosexual men or lesbian women to refuse sex to an M-to-F trans), it becomes safer to go further – and so the 10% gain adherents.
And that (finally! đ ) leads into my thought for this post: the question “How apt is a given lifestyle to lead to pedophilia” has a non-binary answer.
People did not just fear to discuss whether islamicism could have any statistical relationship to grooming in Rotherham; they felt obliged to deny it and hide it. That fact, that cancelling and criminalising of free speech, explains much of how it was that a larger gang had victimised some 1400 girls, not a smaller gang some 14 or so, before people dared to say it was happening. Making it an islamophobic thought-crime to notice didn’t just delay discovering the crimes that an existing gang were committing anyway. It helped the gang grow and persist – helped more of the corruptible rally to the corrupt. It helped the crime rate grow – taught more of the law-abiding to look away. It made the very thing that it forbade you to say more statistically true – because it forbade you to say it. It ensured that Lord Ahmed of Rotherham (who was finally convicted last month of pedophile assaults on two boys and a girl) would be more representative.
It’s a pattern as old as the Bible. When the elders desired Susannah, each felt timid to be merely a peeping Tom at first, when alone, but they were bold to form a rape gang once they thought they could control the public discourse – till Daniel picked holes in their story. And it’s as new as CNN, who also thought they could control the public discourse – till Elon Musk said he was not perverted enough to appear on CNN.
This history echoes through today’s trans-genderism. Activists spend Scottish taxpayers’ money campaigning to lower the age of consent to 10. Across the pond, the modern age of Dem-endorsed sexual-identity consent is lower – try preschool. And over here (as over there), don’t tell the parents, let alone ask their consent – silence will help Scottish children “thrive”. The jargon-laden public-domain justifications of this may seem to make little sense, but they do teach a lesson – that swift promotion comes to a woman with a wholly faked identity, married to a child-molester, whereas dismissal awaits those off-message.
To dissenters, the lesson is “be afraid” – dissenting has risks, sufficient risks that nowadays, it doesn’t take a village to raise a child; only a child is unafraid to tell the virtual village that the self-identified Empress has no ideological clothes. But to the already-corrupt 10%, and the corruptible 60%, the lesson is “don’t be afraid” – the ruling ideology has your back. Why be a self-denying chump when it makes a pedophile safer to self-identify as trans – when a powerful ideology not only has your back but not-so-secretly thinks that “early sex is good and beneficial”.
Pedophilia does not need this kind of help to occur.
“Both Nicky and her brother Kevin later identified as gay” [the writer grants that, of course, they might have been so anyway]. “They were both troubled, and Kevin committed suicide. Maybe it was an identity crisis, or maybe it was that they were being fucked when they were children.”
But it is easy to foresee that, when the latter speculation is cancel-cultured, the crime will become commoner.
Unfortunately, foreseeing consequences is something the politically-correct have been bad at for a long time. Communism in Russia and China caused bad economic consequences, which caused the communists to punish those who complained about them, which meant few dared, which meant the unaddressed problems got worse, which meant temptations to grumble became stronger, so the communists imposed harsher punishments, so people grumbled about the punishments, and so on and on. The punishment of those who grumbled about the punishments is all most of us remember about Stalin and Mao; not many remember the earlier victims who grumbled about the famine that socialism caused.
Nowadays we have the word ‘transphobia’. Roughly half – that’s an official (FOIA-confirmed) half – of Scotland’s convicted, imprisoned trans are sexual offenders. That’s not 70% – but it’s a lot more than 10%, let alone than before legal changes made it not just ‘offensive’ but an actual offence to doubt an offender’s self-identity. Do locked-up rapists identify as trans because they feel like women? Or because they feel like raping women (both inmates and warders)? Do others identify as trans because they feel like women? Or because they feel like serving their sentences in the company of women? Political correctness requires you believe the first explanation. Political correctness requires you believe it is transphobic to consider the second explanation. And in Scotland, so do the official rules and the officials’ attitudes demand it even more stringently than similar officials in Rotherham demanded you avoid islamophobia. Down south in England, one might wonder (though AFAICS officially no-one does) if the headline “84% increase in female-perpetrated child sexual abuse” is related to over a third of them having only recently reclassified themselves as members of the fair sex.
Like the Cleveland doctor and her allies, if someone believes sex is just social construct, and destroying patriarchal indoctrination is merely exposing a long-existent reality, then it affects their understanding. Even if they let themselves notice people who identify as trans and thereby get a pension, a sports trophy or the darker advantages I mention above, they will assume such cases are unrepresentative, exceptions that prove their rule. But if you think the real incidence of a true trans state is very low – if, for example, you want evidence before thinking that the brain’s chance of diverging from its body’s sex is so very different from the observable chance of any other one organ in an otherwise normal-appearing body – then you’ll think the few real trans likely to be overwhelmed (in numbers and in the public eye) by people the woke indoctrinate into it and people who see the opportunities created by woke control of speech.
Remember the two quotes that head this post. Hating free speech may seem secondary to the woke, just a necessary means to enforce the dogma until its truth is grasped by the ignorant masses. But hating free speech will always become primary. Hating free speech determines who joins the movement and who leaves it. Hating free speech will determine the statistical make-up of the self-identified trans. Where this came from can be debated. Where it’s going can be deduced.
___
* When I first read of ‘dangerous faggot’ Milo Yiannopoulos a few years back, I saw an analogy with his state then. Milo had exposed three pedophiles, but gave an interview in which he nevertheless refused to regard the older man who initiated his own underage gay experiences as an abuser.
** Moira (unlike me) avoids weakening her writing style with the statistical qualifications I occasionally put in my summary of her post. As regards the inner thoughts of her own vile relatives and their circle, I suspect she is 100% right to do so – that is, she is right to describe them without qualification in the sense that they don’t care. And it would be the height of impertinence for the woke to complain that she applies this style more generally, given how they write. But Niall pedant Kilmartin inserted a couple for the benefit of Samizdata’s readers.
Either one accepts or rejects the doctrine of Herbert Marcuse (and others) that Freedom of Speech is “repressive tolerance” because it “harms disadvantaged groups”.
I reject this Frankfurt School doctrine – even though it is, at least arguably, part of the “law of the land” and the policy of all institutions (public and private) and major political parties.
My rejection of this anti Freedom of Speech doctrine is why I am a member of the Free Speech Union, and I would urge all to join and become brothers and sisters in liberty.
Does it occur to anyone else that the only possible exit at the end of this long wearying tunnel of woke babble and spiraling Overton-Window shifting is a paroxysm of violence? The unindoctrinated will attempt, at long last, to defend their children from this horrific infestation – and will face consequences that escalate into violence. How can they not offer violence in return?
Who would you NOT kill to stop your child from being delivered into the filthy hands of some trans MAP goblin?
Well, there’s a lot to say.
For now I’ll just say that this is definitely in my top 5 Samizdata posts of all time.
Great article, Niall.
This. You mentioned the 1980s Cleveland child abuse scandal (so-called by Wikipedia, though actually the scandal was about false claims of child abuse). A decade later in the 1990s there was another spike in the doctrine that all claims of sexual abuse must be believed. I remember thinking at first that surely those talking in such absolute terms were just using hyperbole to counteract the previous climate of opinion, in which accusations of sexual abuse of children made against “respectable” people were dismissed out of hand. But when I looked into it, I found plenty of writers who said in the clearest possible terms that they meant what they said: every accusation of sexual abuse was true. They frequently added insinuations that anyone who expressed any scepticism was sympathetic to the abusers at best, and quite possibly at it themselves.
Once that doctrine caught hold among opinion-formers, the incentives for making false accusations were greatly increased. Something like the disastrous Operation Midland in which Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald publicly described the accusations made by “Nick” a.k.a. Carl Beech as “credible and true” became inevitable. Mr Beech was later sentenced to 18 years in prison on twelve counts of perverting the course of justice and one count of fraud.
Besides blighting the lives of those falsely accused, some of whom died before their names were cleared, the effect of that period of unqualified credulity has, obviously, made it more likely that genuine victims of sexual abuse will not be believed.
I think this all stems from the left’s age-old perception of the right as the party of overly-moralistic, Comstockian “somewhere-someone-is-having-icky-fun-and-this-must-be-stopped” Puritanism.
(Some truth to that perception, of course, for reasons beyond this comment.)
Now, the left seeks to overthrow that hated moralism by any means possible. The most effective tool they’ve found is to push against any principle of old morality, and when they feel pushback from the right, go all in on the issue at hand. Their goal is to craft a public perception that they are for freedom while we hate fun and difference.
I don’t believe that the left is as rabidly pro-pedophile, etc., as they appear to be. I think it’s just that they will be pro-anything that the right fights against.
When the right said “we’re fine with LBG”, the issue lost its resonance with the left, and they had to move on to the next step out. Polyamory, bestiality, pedophilia – all were the next most outrageous attacks on old morality, and so they were the next issues raised and defended by the left.
Think of your kid, mad at you and looking to get a reaction from you. He’ll do more and more outrageous things until he gets the anger he expects to see, and then he’ll feel satisfied. (“See? They’re always mad.”)
We are essentially dealing with children. Child psychology is going to be a winning strength for conservatives for some time.
Brilliant article, that requires several readings and needs to be widely shared.
As for the specific sexual subjects.
I do not relate to people who wish to push sexual intercourse on children, or who wish to encourage young boys and girls to be chemically and surgically mutilated in order that boys may pretend to be girls, and girls may pretend to be boys.
“Paul just by writing the above you have broken the 2010 Equalities Act and other Acts of Parliament – you risk punishment”.
I can think of several sexual metaphors for the correct attitude towards the “law of the land”.
Being a cat person, I do not have a dog in this fight. Being one of the categories listed above, I do not want myself anywhere near this fight. I will only comment that it’s the outliers that get in the news and the political discourse, and damn few of them are outliers in the general direction of Mother Theresa.
I had the displeasure of viewing some contemporary woke American military and CIA recruitment adverts recently. Man, you’d want an army/intelligence service full of such people not just beaten in a war, but have unconditional surrender imposed on them đđđ
Just to make us all feel better – I have relatives and friends in the various services. The ads you’re seeing are the product of the woke Obama-hired leadership. The actual service members do not reflect such ideals. The woke leadership would rather they did, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Our military ranks largely remain based.
That’s good to know, but do they worry they may be getting exploited by a leadership class less interested in national defence than making the world safe for woke capitalists, BLM and the alphabet people?
Always. That’s been their lot since Thermopylae – who and what am I serving? It’s a more immediate worry presently – but they deal with it. And they point to the Afghanistan retreat and laugh, nervously, and mention that maybe the woke ad executives running the military will now sit down and let the operators and specialists work.
But there are a lot of good, highly-trained people who are looking to wander away when their current time is up. When the six-year people don’t re-up, that’s when we’ll need to worry.
Brandon ought to draft democrat voters and send them to the frontline in Ukraine for ‘democracy’. Or better yet send them to ‘retake’ and occupy Afghanistan in the name of gay and trans rights. These people (Democrat voters) deserve what they voted for good and proper.
As it happens, Niall, I have read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ‘Darkover’ novels’, and liked them. Only later did I hear about her home life. It’s probably best to read books before you read about the author! Or no books would be written. I haven’t heard anything about Tolkein, and I don’t intend to look!
I believe you (ah, it’s ‘Tolkien’, actually đ ).
By all means continue not to look – part of the tedium of growing up is enduring the knowledge that J.K.Rowling cannot provide you with a magic wand, Dianna Wynne Jones has never been to any other of the related worlds, and the old wardrobe in the Lewis’ attic that so fascinated the son of the woman C.S.Lewis married never did anything extraordinary – but be assured if you look at Tolkien you will only find a catholic leading a thoroughly moral life, mostly conventional but with interesting views on artistic sub-creation as being part of the divine act of creation.
You will also get occasional information about how The Lord of the Rings was written. For example, book four – (Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor) was written chapter by chapter as letters to his son Christopher who was being trained by the RAF in South Africa at the time, which explains to me why the chapters in that volume are more self-contained, more internally dramatic and more carefully and consciously ended than others.
And you will learn that Tolkien was apt to mumble in his Oxford lectures, so that Dianna Wynne Jones complained his superb detailed analyses of the nature of story and what you could do with it “sounded fascinating (what I could hear of it)”.
All stuff one can live without knowing.
Further to Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray, (February 8, 2022 at 9:11 am), and not so jokingly as my response above but just for the record, I did, very early in my ‘young adult’ reading of SF&F sense a certain smell about a coterie of Californian writers (Theodore Sturgeon and suchlike). It was nothing one could prove or be very sure of, just an occasional odour in the style (bit like John Nathan Turner over this side of the pond). I also noticed they tended to get the gigs – to write for StarTrek and the like – and in other ways sensed this was a clique or culture, not just an individual thing.
I do not want to exaggerate what I knew then – indeed I knew almost nothing (and thought very little – just very occasionally felt a slight surprise or distaste and a vague wonder).
Many years ago, Marion Zimmer Bradley was cruel to one of the other people in my writers’ group. I haven’t read her since. And as for the revelations about her personal life? I just said “that doesn’t surprise me” and ignored the whole thing.
I grew up on the “big three” of Sci-Fi: Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradley, and later expanded into Sturgeon, Damon Knight, Philip JosĂ© Farmer, Alan Dean Foster, Frederick Pohl, and pretty every old Ace double I could find at the used book store and any works published under Del Ray’s imprint. Sci-Fi later exploded and the ratio of quality of story to quantity of books decreased, and that, along with college, curtailed my childhood voracious reading habit, but I had time to read Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and other luminaries-and-lessors in the genre.
Marion Zimmer Bradley just never clicked with me, I was more into Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, and Ursula K. Le Guin* if I had to pick out specific female Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors I enjoyed.
Having heard of MZB’s home life and abusive deeds, not reading her works for me is no sacrifice. I didn’t enjoy her works much anyway – Mists of Avalon just seemed a girl fanfic of Arthurian legend. However, if I did enjoy her writing I would still read it, even knowing what I know now. I am one of those “you can enjoy good art from bad people” persons. It does color oneâs views, but you should still read it. Would knowing that Leonardo Da Vinci was a pedophile (a current historical controversy) detract from his Last Supper?
This, as always, is just my humble opinion.
*Le Guin early years only. Le Guin later went into full feminist fantasy, like a prototype of Sheri S. Tepper.
Like some commenters above, I too spent decades thinking little of it and/or appreciating art while ignorant of or ignoring artist. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about the relevance of Burke’s remark:
The wider hints in books and scripts that I commented on (February 8, 2022 at 11:11 am) in themselves might not overly concern a free-speecher (save to make the background info about authors unsurprising). However info about the circle and culture around MLB and others is information about precisely those in Hollywood/La-La Land/California-dreaming-and-ruling who create and police ‘the narrative’. It is not just (though it is also) seeing what the narrative police do to “an L or a G or a driven-to-suicide-for-being-off-message T” that shows ‘the narrative’ intends “the interested object alone” – that any “pretended good” is being, and will be, most determinedly “thrown aside or perverted”. In the modern world, California authors, Hollywood producers, etc., do not just enter our lives in books and films; they and their spiritual heirs enter it in cancel-culture. So I think it wise to assess available sources of information, not especially to decide what (not đ ) to read next (still less to decide what others should or should not read) but to get an idea of what the “interested object” is and how it will be “compassed” by the narrative.
An excellent and powerful article. Perhaps we can now understand why the scum in the eyesore at Holyrood wanted to assign every child an SNP-approved supervisor, thereby facilitating Frankfurtism’s intended destruction of the male-led family unit? Wokeism certainly needs to be exposed and excised as the only cure for the cancer which it certainly is.
The Jannie (February 8, 2022 at 10:07 pm), the very first teacher appointed to be a ‘Named Person’ state guardian was later struck off, after a court found her shared fantasies “regarding the sexual abuse of childrenâ to be of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character”.
(I’m not sure why the court said ‘or’ rather than ‘and’ – maybe legalese required it – and how the person named Dayna Dickson-Boath could have sought to recruit other adults to her fantasies about abusing children in an un-menacing way I do not quite see – maybe I would if I studied Ghislaine Maxwell’s techniques.)
The abrupt and rather sotto voce dismissal of the minister in charge of named person is so far only reported to concern behaviour with unconsenting adults.
Read that old post to see Sam Duncan and I agreeing that “Scotlandâs (state) schools have been in decline for decades.” Itâs the only country in the world where literacy rates actually fell over the course of the 20th Century.
My memory was niggling at me, so I dug up a bit on the net. For a while, she was married to Walter Breen, who wrote many influential books on coins. Breen died in prison after conviction for child molestation. Birds of a feather, I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_H._Breen
A church of England school warned parents of consequences if their six-year-old son showed “an inability to believe” – that any boy pupil of yesterday who today appears wearing a dress “is actually a ‘real’ female”.
The dogma seems to have changed (a lot) but the idea that pupils must be punished for “inability to believe” in whatever it currently is seems to be coming back (and going back – and back and back).
As Moira remarks, Breen was very into it, and very into using the ideology to enable it – and thus escaped consequences for a long time. His preferred form of pedo was G but he could be B enough to commit the assault on his five-year-old daughter that her mother told him to do, as I mention in my post.
In my comment above (Niall Kilmartin, February 8, 2022 at 11:11 am), I spoke of ‘hints’ and an ‘impression’ and being ‘vaguely’ aware, but I realise that’s not quite the whole truth. I did just once that I recall come across a short story in a ‘daring’ SF anthology by people who in retrospect I see were the very heart of the society Moira was talking about. The story introduced the reader to a planet, hated and despised by the ignorant and prejudiced rest of the galaxy, that had liberated itself into thinking fathers should sleep with their daughters and only bigots thought ‘motherf*ck*r’ was an insult – and because of this was as happy, unrepressed and peaceful a place to live as the rest of the galaxy was repressed, narrow-minded and miserable. The anthology’s self-flattering blurb indicated the author group thought themselves wonderful (wonderfully superior to the mundanes) but were rather given to nervous breakdowns and suchlike ‘eventful’ lives.
I had, not many years before, read Brian Aldiss ‘The Dark Light Years’ (ultra-brief summary: if we lived in our own bodily wastes instead of being so repressedly embarrassed about them that we flushed them down the loo, we’d all be happier), but I knew Brian did not himself live in a cesspit. So, insofar as I thought about the ‘happy planet of pedo incest’ story at all before looking for better SF, I imagined it was no more than the an idea-projection (or actually, in this case, a pose – of an untalented writer hoping shock value would compensate for a story with so little plot or point).
I was much younger and more ignorant back then. Long, long afterwards, I read Moira’s account – and recalled that story in the anthology I’d read once, discarded and long forgotten. I realised that it, and the blurb of the book it was in, were propaganda – and I’d been foolish not to see that at the time. It was pure propaganda (the story had no other plot or point) but (as Hannah Arendt said of Nazi propaganda) it was as frank as it was mendacious – or, I could say, as frank as PIE.
Looking back on it, I realised that it was I, the reader – with far, far less excuse that Natalie in the different aspect she discussed above – who had supplied the excuses, the “they don’t literally mean it”, the “it’s only a pose” assessment with which I dismissed it from my mind for years and years. Walter and that whole ideological group were clearly good at deceiving and concealing, but as I write this, the question arises in my mind whether I could honestly accuse them of overtly deceiving me in that explicit short story. Did I not rather deceive myself?
It does however have a great deal to do with crushing free speech – and so a great deal to do with the core point of my post.
Niall – the developments, in the Church of England and most other institutions in the Western world, are indeed terrible.
Of course a six year boy putting on a dress does NOT make him a girl – one might as well punish people for an “inability to believe” (i.e. a principled refusal to believe) that 1+1=98.
The only hope is that ordinary people (such as the truckers in Canada) will successfully resist the insanity (in all its various forms) that the Frankfurt School of Marxism “educated” establishment elite are pushing.
As for the elite universities – as this is what they are now pushing, it is time they served a more useful purpose (such as being truck parks).
The quote from an article looking at why such a high proportion of Stasi informers were writers and artists.
“The quote from an article looking at why such a high proportion of Stasi informers were writers and artists.”
Ayn Rand made much use of the concept of the quisling writer in Atlas Shrugged. Unless a writer is very good, (and so many of them are not very good), totalitarianism is their best route to power and prestige, and so they quietly serve it when they can.
This article (h/t instapundit) offers an interesting (and, sadly, experienced) complement to my post. A girl who went trans and then backed off writes of the role that internet porn played in the process:
Evidence for the post’s thesis is sadly easy to find.
One of the more modern ways in which our NHS is not always quite so marvellous as is claimed. (That said, I’m not that sure whether a private hospital is technically still legally allowed to follow a saner policy – especially in Scotland.)
Another example is the NYT and the BBC, whose stories about the brutal murder of an elderly woman by another woman (who had previously murdered twice before) was so tender of the murderer’s feelings that a certain detail about the other ‘woman’ was only mentioned in the very last line.
For yet another bleakly-hilarious example of how the ideology will protect, hide and deny, read Distraught over orders to investigate trans kids, Texas child welfare workers are resigning (found via Instapundit who comments “I didn’t think it would be that easy to get rid of them”). If anything could be more where all is most in this self-revealing article, note especially the moment (about half-way through) where the social worker is horrified they might now have to investigate a report related to a parent giving their child doctor-prescribed trans drags, because previously any such report had instantly been marked ‘priority: none’ and the agency only investigated [vigorously, I suspect] any report of a parent hesitating to give their [school-groomed] child the [woke-doctor-prescribed] drugs.
Here, it goes beyond just hiding and denying into perpetrating. The school tells the child their white skin puts them in a melancholy state of inherited racial original sin – then offers a way out: escape their otherwise-ineradicable guilt by adopting a marginalised sexual identity. A woke doctor will prescribe what they need. The day after the kept-in-ignorance parents finally discover this is happening, the school questions the child and reports the parents’ insufficiently enthusiastic response to the social workers who then ‘investigate’.
=== Added 30jul2022 ===
The NHS Tavistock Trans clinic’s culture of fear goes back 18 years.
Way ahead, once might say. Evidence of how far the Tavistock’s culture of fear put ideology above the welfare of children is in CapX:
=== Added 22dec2022 ===
122 cases of trans assaulting women