The Bedlamite Contagion

I was just about to send you a link to this.

It’s a very good interview. The only problem I had was in choosing which bits to quote. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Ah, but you mustn’t raise an eyebrow. It’s “an empowered act of self-creation.” For some – say, this chap here – mutilated novelty genitals are the latest must-have. The path to a shiny tomorrow. A “genderqueer planet.”

And not, despite appearances, suggestive of something from a Cronenberg film.

Everyone who goes along with it is (especially the ones who get angry).

As I’ve said before,

When you defer to the pretence, complications will likely ensue, along with quite a lot of dark farce. Best, I think, not to give away the store in the first place. To defer to the premise, if only to seem nice or polite, is to risk being fundamentally compromised, robbed of probity, and to be left in a very weak position, or no position at all, to resist further demands for distortion and unrealism – and demands that one participate in someone else’s psychodrama.

It isn’t hard to imagine how repeatedly and emphatically affirming a fiction, an obvious absurdity, and doing it very publicly, staking one’s social status or career upon that claim, rather paints one into a corner. It’s not obvious how someone – say, a self-styled activist – could subsequently backtrack or even equivocate without losing face, or credibility, or funding. Even when the situation has become bizarre or grotesque.

I find this lack of insight, perception, whatever amongst intelligent, educated people quite disturbing.

A couple of years ago, I was having a conversation with some people in their early twenties, when the subject of transgenderism, much in the news, came up. I didn’t immediately say anything, so as not to derail an otherwise agreeable evening, but eventually my silence was noticed, and I was pressed for a contribution.

I basically said what I’ve said here many times, about the hazards of bundling together different phenomena with very different moral connotations, and then being expected to affirm all of these things wholesale and without reservation.

This was met with an air of something close to muted scandal. I was by no means being mean or gratuitously provocative – just stating what should be obvious, and doing so as politely as I could. But to people immersed in the ideological soup, people recently educated, it seems that almost any deviation, however measured, can induce gasping. A sense of jeopardised social status.

As if I’d said we must gather kindling and build pyres. 

Another day, another pronoun meltdown.

Amazing how much this looks like murderous spousal abuse.

I’m not the first to point out that cross-dressing men harassing waiters and serving staff is now a niche trend. Targeting people who are obliged to be polite and somewhat deferential – deliberately manufacturing a conflict, escalating it, filming it, and attempting to get the target fired – does rather suggest malevolence.

Albeit malevolence in a bad drag of victimhood. 

See also this, among many others.

On the subject of WPATH, a thread.

In which, the destruction of a person’s genitals, and the subsequent, permanent loss of sexual function, and a lifetime of pain and medical dependency, is equated with the extraction of a wisdom tooth.

Do note the self-satisfied smirk. 

You see, it’s just an “adventure.” One in which the surgeons share, albeit, for them, temporarily. Not for a lifetime.

I thought Frankenstein was meant to be a warning.

The surgeon referring to phalloplasty as an “adventure” – i.e., destroying the female genitals and attaching a grotesque, non-functional parody of penis – something like this or this – later admits that the procedure will “definitely” have permanent, ongoing complications, including incontinence and necrosis. That cadaverine stench.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons some people are reluctant to be realistic about the issue is that they might then have to consider the possibility that an entire, supposedly affirming industry – one worth close to a billion dollars a year and projected to reach five billion by the end of the decade – is exploiting mentally ill people, including children, and experimenting on them.

Those lovely surgical adventures.  

One small thing I noticed about Andor is that, so far, halfway in, each episode ends on a scene or shot that doesn’t feel at all like a place you’d conclude an episode. There’s no cliff-hanger or significant resolution of anything. No tension or relief. The first couple of times it happens you go, “Oh, er, okay.” Then as you’re watching subsequent episodes, you start to guess that some largely unremarkable scene is probably where the thing’s going to end, and it does.

It seems to be a stylistic choice, presumably done deliberately, but it’s quite odd – repeatedly ending an episode on a relatively flat or underwhelming moment. It doesn’t conclude. It just… stops. I’ve no idea what kind of point is being made.

Ted Cruz gets angry. Not without cause, I think.

Again, regarding trans activism, the issue rather illustrates how little scope for compromise there is. Or, one more time:

When you defer to the pretence, complications will likely ensue, along with quite a lot of dark farce. Best, I think, not to give away the store in the first place.

And yet, here we are.