Towards the end of last year, I noticed a headline on the BBC website about a mother writing to her transgender son (supportively, presumably). As there is literally no subject on the face of this planet that interests me less than trans-anything, I scrolled on.
However it lodged in the back of my mind. Just how remorselessly, I wondered, had the BBC drip-fed transgenderism into the national consciousness during 2015? Leaving aside all the nonsense about Bruce Jenner changing his name, slathering on make-up, and squeezing into women’s clothing while apparently clinging on (as it were) to his membrum virile, was it just my imagination or had the BBC actually gone trans-crazy? I stuck the word “transgender” into the search box on the BBC website. Even after discounting all the Jenner-related stories, the number of transgender headlines was staggering.
The news item serving as 2016’s identity politics casus belli is the outrage caused by plans by Mississippi and North Carolina legislators insistence that members of the transgender community use toilets which accord with the gender recorded on their birth certificates. This has led to a number of wrinkly rockers cancelling concerts in the offending states (probably a relief to everyone in Ringo Starr’s case). A news report yesterday featuring a transgender American teenager made me wonder just how vigorously the BBC had conducted its campaign for transgenderism since the start of this year. I decided to repeat last year’s experiment. Even discounting direct reports of events in the American South, it’s clear that the campaign has now really taken off.
Here’s a selection (click) of BBC news and programme headlines since the start of the year:
We’ve recently entered Phase 3 of the five-part left-liberal, cultural Marxist media mind-bending process – the “Acceptance” phase.
Phase 1 – “Priming” – involves increasingly dripping a controversial subject (mass immigration, gay marriage, transvestism, assisted suicide etc) into the national consciousness so that we no longer automatically shudder, laugh, groan, roll our eyes or fall into a deep sleep whenever it’s mentioned.
Phase 2 – “Normalisation” – involves a barrage of positive, feelgood stories, news items and programmes about the subject, designed to make us accept it as a perfectly normal part of life.
Phase 3 – “Acceptance” – is when anyone who dares to raise concerns about the concept is treated as if they’re part of a tiny, pathetic, narrow-minded, emotionally-retarded, reactionary minority standing in the way of Progress.
Phase 4 – “Sanctification” – it’s no longer enough to accept transgenderism, gay marriage, assisted suicide etc: you must constantly and loudly signal your belief that those who have undergone same-sex marriage or a sex-change operation or have decided to opt for assisted suicide are morally superior to the rest of us.
Phase 5 – “Coercion” – involves the punishment of “deniers” through ostracism, job loss, and, in extreme instances, imprisonment.
The fact that we’re currently well into Phase 3 – “Acceptance” – is evident from the self-righteous outrage which greeted Germaine Greer’s contention that a man doesn’t become a woman simply by having his genitalia surgically removed (for once, I find myself in agreement with the old trout). Since then, activists have accused Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard of being transphobic for supporting free speech in universities (what were they thinking?) When such former darlings of the Liberal Left find themselves publicly shamed for stating the bleeding obvious, you know that the Sanctification phase is about to kick off.
I suspect most of us would accept that there are cases where Nature has “got it wrong” and sex-change surgery might indeed be appropriate. But I also sense a widespread suspicion that in many instances the desire to change one’s gender because of a feeling that one has been born “in the wrong body” may be a symptom of mental illness. But even if we’re dealing with what is mainly a psychiatric problem (which, after all, wouldn’t make it any less of a problem), just how vast is Britain’s transgender community? Despite the recent tsunami of publicity, figures are hard to come by. A report by the Gender Identity Research and Education Society in 2011 estimated that around 650,000 people in the UK “experience some degree of gender nonconformity”. But, of course, that’s utterly meaningless. Let’s get down to the real nitty-gritty – in how many cases are those feelings sufficiently pronounced to make the professed gender nonconformist undergo the expense and discomfort of an operation? The most recent official government figures came from the Interdepartmental Working Group on Transsexual People in 2000, which estimated that there were 1,300-2,000 male-to-female and 250-400 female-to-male transsexuals in the UK. All this bloody fuss for a paltry maximum of 2,500 “gender dysphorics”? Pah!
I suspect the paucity of genuine, real-life transsexuals will soon see the cultural Marxists moving on to another spurious cause with which to épater la bourgeoisie – trans-species marriage or an insistence on devoting an episode of Songs of Praise to Satanists or whatever. Morally-deranged creeps began “priming” us to accept paedophilia as normal in the 1970s, but met their Waterloo on that particular issue. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually returned to the battlefield, probably just after the BBC has introduced quotas for transgender staff (for all I know, they may already have done so).
I thought we were already deep into phase 4 or 5? If i get mugged in the street the police wont turn up. But if i write anything online against the idea of transgender people i am likely to get a visit by the police pretty damn fast….
I agree totally with your point on this being a physciatric illness which raises the question that surely it would be better to treat the problem in that manner than to surgically and irrevocably alter the shape of the body.
Either way I remember when I first heard of young intelligent men being strapped into an aeroplane to go commit suicide I reckoned you could convince anybody to do anything given the correct approach.
This nonsense just confirms that point of view.