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Anthropology Politics Pronouns Or Else Psychodrama

The Bedlamite Contagion

May 22, 2024 93 Comments

Quoted below, extracts from a conversation that in many circles would result in much hissing and flailing of limbs, but which, it seems to me, very much ought to be had:

I was going along with “trans women are women,” not because I believed it, but because I thought it was the kind thing to do. And I couldn’t see the harm. And [then]… I realised we were supposed to believe that trans women were women. I didn’t think any of us really believed it. I thought we were all just pretending. So when I realised that we were supposed to believe that trans women are women, that’s when I stopped pretending that I believed it…

It’s captured everything. This ideology – this crazy, insane ideology that has no grounding in reality – has captured… every institution. It’s in schools, it’s in mainstream media, it’s everywhere… and it’s utterly absurd… Denying the existence of the mental illness doesn’t help those who suffer from the mental illness. All it does is prevent them from getting the necessary care.

It’s not a sign of good mental health for a man to want his penis inverted and turned into an open wound that he has to dilate for the rest of his life. That’s not evidence of a sound mind…

The reason that we’re forbidden – the reason they went on this de-psychopathologising campaign – which was WPATH, the organisation I wrote the report about – the reason that they did that is they wanted to destigmatise transgender identities. I understand that… But the answer is not to deny the existence of the mental illness… Let’s say there’s a stigma attached to being schizophrenic. The answer is not to deny the existence of schizophrenia. That would not help schizophrenic people at all. And the same thing goes with gender-related issues…

In any other branch of medicine, doctors would ask why. If you saw a sudden, 5000% increase in young people with bipolar disorder, the mental health world would investigate immediately… If you saw a 5,000% increase in girls suffering from anorexia, immediately we would want to know – what was that trigger, what is causing this? And yet, with gender, the 5,000% increase happens and nobody says a thing. Everybody’s pretending that it’s perfectly normal and healthy. Why? Because… it’s gender. You’re not allowed to question anything. You can only celebrate.

It’s almost as if we’re supposed to celebrate a 5,000% increase in teenage girls showing up at gender clinics and wanting their breasts cut off.

From the following video, in which Andrew Gold talks with the formidable Mia Hughes, author of The WPATH Files, about pseudoscience, malpractice, and experiments on children.

 

It’s a forty-five-minute watch, but there’s plenty to chew on. Much that could be quoted. I should point out that the later sections of the interview, which explore surgical affirmations, or as one surgeon puts it, “creating body types that do not exist in nature,” does get a little vivid, and indeed surreal.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Problematic Civility Travel

A Simple Thing, Made Worse

May 18, 2024 69 Comments

Lifted from the comments, a little elaboration on an Ephemera item from yesterday. Specifically, an everyday scene from Ruislip, Greater London:

Queuing means the old, small and weak are treated fairly. Not all cultures queue. I saw this living abroad. pic.twitter.com/XAXOY5n5uq

— Larry Lemon (@larrylemonmaths) May 13, 2024

Note that the would-be bus passengers, the ones accustomed to queuing and now looking on in weary dismay, have varied shades of skin.

As Rafi adds in the comments,

But you’re not meant to notice the downgrade. 

Quite. And the fact that mentioning the degradation may result in scolding or social punishment of some kind is itself part of the degradation. Plenty of people are itching to seize upon any such transgression, thereby asserting their own high status. Above the likes of you.

And so, quite a lot of people who don’t much care about the skin tone of those doing the pushing and jostling, but who do think that politeness and queuing are good things, things that a society shouldn’t lose, are, by many progressives, pushed into the category of Incorrigible Bigot, as invalid by default. As if the grievance, the stated issue – “queuing means the old, small, and weak are treated fairly” – could only be about the pigmentation of the players, not their actual behaviour, to which attention has been drawn.

And with those who prefer politeness suitably cowed or demoralised, the degradation continues.

It should, I think, be pointed out that this suppressing and demoralising effect, the adding of insult to injury, has not gone unnoticed by many of those keen to do the suppressing and demoralising.

Some years ago, I mentioned a car journey in which, for reasons that escape me, I was distractedly listening to BBC Radio 4’s Loose Ends – a sort of whimsical revue of chat, music, and substandard stand-up. The generic left-leaning comedian of the week, whose name I didn’t catch, was pleased by the taboos surrounding immigration and multiculturalism. Lots of code words were used – “Sun-reader,” and so forth – so that the disdain for working-class people and their fears wouldn’t be too overt.

The gist of the comedian’s punch line was, “Isn’t it hilarious that people who have concerns about mass immigration and failures to assimilate – the rapid and estranging transformation of their neighbourhoods – now have to be quiet because otherwise they’ll be called racists and possibly lose their jobs. Ha! We won!”

This triumphal non-joke – and it was blatantly triumphal – was deemed incredibly funny, or at least ideologically congenial, and much mannered clapping ensued. Of course, this was aired shortly before the uncovering of events in Rotherham and elsewhere, and before our immensely vibrant age of Congolese machete gangs.

And so, if that nice Mrs Wilson, the old dear two doors down, can no longer get on a bus, and dreads waiting for a bus because of the Third World scuffle that now ensues, and if she no longer feels she can complain about this without being thought racist, then this is totally fine, apparently. Indeed, it’s a basis for triumphal smugness by BBC comedians and BBC studio audiences.

Today’s word, since you ask, is alienation.

Update, via the comments:

sk60 adds,

Culture matters. Who knew?

Well, again, quite.

And the rate at which new arrivals materialise, their sheer numbers, will have an effect on how well, or how poorly, those new arrivals adapt to the customs and values of the host society. Indeed, it will have an effect on whether those new arrivals feel inclined, or obliged, to make any such attempt.

Which brought to mind this:

Regarding that allegedly “hostile” immigration policy, the number of net legal migrants for the past year has been the highest recorded, several times the level of three years ago, and is somewhere around 700,000. This figure is likely to be revised upwards, of course, as with previous years’ figures on immigration.

700,000 is equivalent to the entire population of Sheffield, by the way.

And yet, it seems we’re supposed to imagine that such massive, unprecedented immigration, seemingly indiscriminate immigration, both legal and otherwise, couldn’t possibly create problems. Things one might lament. Things lost and irretrievable.

If the word irretrievable sounds too emotive, consider the practicalities in the bus stop video. How does the customary courtesy prevail – how does it reassert itself – against a jostling mass of rude people? People whose attitude is screw the rules – and by extension, screw everyone else. The considerate, including the elderly or frail or physically unimposing, will either have to start jostling too, or just stand back in muted dismay and wait for the next bus. Probably in the hope that the same thing doesn’t happen, or happen quite so badly.

So, one more time. Some things, when lost, may be irretrievable.

And note, as in the case linked above, the progressives loudly denouncing as “hostile” any reservations about massive, unselective immigration can in the very next breath bemoan “societal breakdown,” as if the two things couldn’t ever, under any circumstances, be related.

Our betters, you know. They say so themselves.

Update 2:

Oh, to be in Portugal.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All Pronouns Or Else

Terms And Conditions Apply (3)

May 15, 2024 123 Comments

Further to this, touched on in the comments,

Here’s Helen Joyce on transgender overreach, exploited politeness, and belated pushback:

The fact is, I have said everything as kindly and nicely as I can, and I still get told not to say it.

There is no way that you can say to a man who identifies as a woman, insists he is a woman, that, fine, he can do what he likes, but he can’t actually come into women-only spaces – and that you reserve the right to say that the reason is because he’s a man – that doesn’t offend him…

What has happened is that a lot of women have seen their willingness to be polite absolutely taken advantage of… What it’s come down to is that people who don’t identify as their sex have taken other people’s politeness as license to override other people’s desires, needs, rights, and boundaries…

It reminds me of a sign, when I was a child, that shopkeepers used to have behind the till, that said, “Do not ask for credit because a refusal often offends.” Don’t ask to come in, don’t ask me to call you a woman, if by that you mean that you’re entitled to come into women’s spaces, or to count as one. And then I won’t have to refuse, and you won’t have to complain.

Full interview below:

 

An earlier, longer interview with Ms Joyce has been mentioned previously and can be found here.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Media Policing Pronouns Or Else

Into Himself

May 13, 2024 120 Comments

Time for a spot of downtrodden-minority news:

The 26-year-old suspect has been charged with assault. She remains in custody until her next court appearance.

The Vancouver Police Department, quoted above, are referring, rather coyly, to this chap here:

A trans-identified male has been arrested after assaulting a breastfeeding mother in Vancouver, British Columbia. Nathaniel Francis Beekmeyer, 26, was charged on Friday, with media and local police referring to him as a “woman.”

The assault occurred on Thursday, May 9, at approximately 2:15PM, when the mother, her husband, their baby boy, and one other family member were sitting in their vehicle on Commercial Drive. A strange man opened the door of the car and attempted to grab the mother and her nursing four-month-old infant from the back of the car. 

Happily, passers-by assisted the alarmed mother, and Mr Beekmeyer, who was shirtless at the time, was overpowered and arrested shortly afterwards, before being charged with assault. Unlike the police and several news outlets, including the Vancouver Sun and the CBC, witnesses to the crime were quite comfortable using the words he and man when referring to Mr Beekmeyer.

A YouTube channel belonging to Beekmeyer has now been identified where he has uploaded several disturbing videos in which he refers to himself as a “dead girl,” discusses reincarnation, his mission to transform men into women, and declares in a video titled “Oestrogen is the Strongest Euphioriant [sic]” that the female hormone provides “the greatest high.” 

Apparently, it’s the kind of euphoria that results in one attacking random women and their four-month-old babies. Until a crowd of passers-by pin one to the ground.

Almost all of Beekmeyer’s videos are shot in a decrepit room with disturbing scribbling on the walls. In some of the videos, he is completely silent, and simply sits in front of the camera with distorted music playing in the background. 

If the above isn’t sufficiently Silence of the Lambs, there is more.

“Let’s take some oestrogen. This is pure oestrogen,” Beekmeyer says in one video. “First of all, we open the vial. Now we take a whole bunch. How much do we take? Well, how much is this? Hmm? I love it. That was about 15 milligrams. So seven days’ worth of oestrogen. Yeah, I was trying to take a lot because I love feeling euphoric,” he says. 

He’s going to his happy place. Where the good vibes are:

“Oestrogen is the greatest high. Women get it all the time. Men should get it all the time too,” Beekmeyer continues. “Oh my god, it turns me on because I turn myself on by acting all super cute after. It’s such a heaven doing drugs, you know… Even if you’re a serial killer like me, you’re gonna have to start to realise that a female form is not weak. It’s strong.”

He continues: “Now I’m thinking, how can I kill you? I could have killed you in a different video… Yeah, I’m a serial killer. Do you hate women? I hate women. They don’t take enough oestrogen.” 

So nothing of concern there.

Readers with an interest in self-expression and interior décor will find much to ponder in the video below:

🚨A man in Vancouver, Canada, was charged yesterday after assaulting a mother while she was breastfeeding her baby.

Nathaniel “Millie” Beekmeyer, 26, identifies as transgender and made videos about taking estrogen so he could masturbate to himself. pic.twitter.com/W03mw5gpN8

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) May 11, 2024

When not sharing his thoughts on how “super cute” he is, and therefore how sexually aroused he is, Mr Beekmeyer declares himself a saviour who will “fix the world.” Specifically, by transforming men into women. However – and this is perhaps something of a catch – “all women have to be destroyed.”

Mr Beekmeyer adds, “I’m a beautiful person.”

For reference purposes.

Still, at least the public were spared getting what might laughingly be referred to as the wrong idea, thanks to the police and media misleading said public about the identity of a dangerously deranged criminal.

Though it occurs to me that, for the passers-by who intervened and overpowered Mr Beekmeyer, it must have been quite strange to see subsequent reports in which this shirtless man was referred to by the police and the media as a woman. As if their own, first-hand perceptions, from mere inches away, were somehow wildly and implausibly inaccurate.

And as noted by Genevieve Gluck, author of the piece quoted above,

This is not the first time a law enforcement agency in Vancouver has given incorrect information on a suspect’s identity due to their transgender status… The Metro Vancouver Transit Police claimed they “didn’t know” if the primary suspect in a SkyTrain sexual assault was male or female despite having recovered semen during the investigation. 

But hey. This is where we are now. Feel the progress.

Update, via the comments:

As noted previously, you have to wonder whether the absurdity above will continue indefinitely, a sort of routine surrealism, or whether it will it just peter out, like any fad, and then be remembered with some embarrassment. As if it were on a par with wearing flares.

And if it does become unfashionable, I wonder how the players below will feel:

Readers will note that both the Telegraph and the court refer to Mr Dolatowski as if he were in fact a woman – not a mentally ill, paedophilic man. I’m sure the parents of the molested children were thrilled by the consequent air of unrealism and unhappy farce.

It must be quite surreal, and presumably upsetting, to hear lawyers and officials pretending that a 6’5” man – the 6’5” man who recently molested your child in a supermarket toilet – is somehow, magically, a woman. One would hope that lawyers, judges, and the other occupants of a courtroom – and possibly, at a stretch, even journalists – were interested in reality, in establishing facts. Not affirming some unhinged and misleading fantasy. 

I wonder how those journalists, lawyers, and court officials will retrospectively process their very public participation in our current, ongoing clown show. In which, as above, the child molester is flattered and indulged, his pretence affirmed, while his victims are repeatedly insulted. Will they still like to think of themselves as beings of high probity?

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Written by: David
Anthropology Free-For-All Parenting

Not Entirely Arbitrary

May 8, 2024 101 Comments

Lifted from the comments, a difference of worldview:

From subsequent rumblings in the linked threads,

This is why it’s so important to always be aware of your privilege!!

Some replies bemoan patriotism and a sense of affinity with one’s country, while others denounce “supremacist systems and the myth of meritocracy.” At which point, readers may object that being born in a relatively congenial part of the world is not a “privilege,” or by implication a basis for guilt, or a Gotcha! to be exploited by others. Any more than being born somewhere less congenial is a sin, a thing for which to atone.

Readers may also note how an alleged randomness, in which differences in outcome can only be explained by pillage and oppression, and in which nothing has ever been earned, can, for some, be ideologically convenient. And a habit of mind.

“I think they know they ‘got lucky’ but don’t really care,” chides one of the subsequent commenters. “Everything is luck and random chance,” insists another. Note the implication that the comfort and agreeableness of a society is merely a matter of chance, of luck. As if the preceding cultivation of values and behaviour played no part whatsoever. As if culture and civilisation didn’t matter.

You can of course say that a newborn played no part in preceding events and cannot take credit for them. But those preceding events were in large part a product of collective effort, of a preference for one kind of society over another, and of people, including one’s ancestors, behaving accordingly. The “relative safety” of the country in which one is born is not some arbitrary, unrelated thing. It doesn’t arise simply by “random chance.” A person doesn’t just happen to be born into a context that their parents also just happened to be born into.

I could not have been born to Mr and Mrs Jeong in South Korea, any more than I could have been born to a Yemeni peasant couple, or a Californian billionaire. Much as I – the person talking to you now – could not have been born in 1652. The newborn me was a result of a particular lineage, of choices made by specific individuals and the genes of those individuals – who can of course say the same thing about themselves. To imply that anyone’s birth is a random thing, as if it could have happened anywhere, at any time, as if the particulars were immaterial, is, it seems to me, a little odd. Indeed, arse-backwards. And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some random occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events. I’d imagine it wouldn’t seem random at all.

Or, as Mr Burkett puts in in the thread linked above,

The fact that your individual consciousness feels randomly situated from the point of view of that consciousness is a demonstration of the limits of consciousness, not an actual description of what’s happening. That your subjective feeling is of having appeared randomly does not suggest, well, anything about the world, and the fact is that you didn’t. 

Unless you imagine a queue of souls waiting to spawn in some small but arbitrary body on a continent chosen by the spin of a wheel. Or cosmic bingo balls.

Update, via the comments:

Ian adds,

How the hell do they think civilisations come about?

In one of the threads or sub-threads on X, Geoffrey Miller and others point out that civilisations are built by, among other things, lineage, ancestry, and no small effort over vast stretches of time. Often with a view to posterity and giving one’s offspring a better life. This prompts someone to reply, rather sniffily, “It’s only by chance you were born to said ancestors.”

As if one could have entirely different ancestors who are entirely unconnected to the ancestors one does actually have. As if, while having entirely different ancestors, you could somehow be exactly the same person you are now, and not someone else. A hypothetical being. The assertion – that a specific person being born in a functional society was some random, meaningless occurrence and somehow unfair – is often deployed by people whose goals are rather questionable.

One commenter, a “pansexual she/her,” insists that civilisations are built by “stealing and oppressing other people.” Other, more edifying variables are not deemed interesting. I’m guessing that our “pansexual she/her,” the one who doesn’t think that lineage and genetic continuity play a role of any importance, isn’t herself a parent. And therefore hasn’t had the strange pleasure of seeing her children develop the features and attributes of various relatives. A sister, an uncle, a grandfather.

Regarding which, commenter Uma Thurman’s Feet adds,

The biggest change in my life was when I realised I love my kids and I wish we had had more. 

Which is sort of why the Rawlsian tosh mouthed above, and mouthed so triumphantly, with such self-satisfaction, is ultimately unconvincing. Not only is it glib and arse-backwards, it also rather jars with the imperatives and experience of parenting.

Consider this an open thread.

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.