Peter Tatchell and the Assassination of the Women’s Liberation Movement

On the evening of Thursday 23 November 2017, Peter Tatchell gave an address at a Barclays Spectrum hosted ‘Transgender Day of Remembrance’ (‘TDOR’) fundraiser for the transgender children’s conversion charity Mermaids Gender, they who last year were told to back off by Justice Hayden, and stop meddling in the life of the family of a child, in the Family Division of the High Court case re:J (2016).

TDOR is, in the U.K. at least, the cause without a problem; of course, any murder is wrong, an unlawful death that should be condemned, however the transgender murder rate is often used as emotional leverage by transgender activists, yet the reality is far different. There is an excellent analysis of the available data on the murders of transgender people on the FairPlayForWomen website which states:

Since 2008 the number of transgender people who have been murdered worldwide has been recorded annually by the Trans Murder Monitoring project (link to all the data is here.)

Some important trends can be seen in the data. The vast majority of all transgender murder victims come from countries in Central and South America;  Brazil and Mexico having the highest numbers.

Further:

Of the 317 murder victims, 102 had their professions recorded. About half of these were sex workers; a notoriously dangerous line of work.

And:

In contrast to places like Brazil it is much safer to be transgender in European countries including the UK. There were only 11 transgender murders recorded in 2016 for the whole of Europe. This represents only 3.5% of annual murders worldwide (despite Europe making up 10% of the world population). Italy, Turkey and Spain are the highest risk countries in Europe for the transgender community

And most pertinently for the U.K.:

The UK is one of the safest European countries to live. In fact there were no reported transgender murders in the UK at all in 2016. Since the start of the Trans Murder Monitoring project in 2008 there has been on average just under 1 transgender person murdered in the UK each year.

The conclusion being that the murder rate of transgender people is on the whole no different to the murder rate of the general population.

In summary, although worldwide the transgender community experiences unacceptably high murder rates this varies dramatically depending on where someone lives. Fortunately in the UK transgender people are very rarely victims of murder and are at no more risk than the average person living here.

What is actually happening here is that the murders of poor black, Latino and Hispanic transgender individuals is being used by ethnically white political opportunists in comparatively wealthy countries. If you don’t believe me, here’s what another tranny makes of the appropriation of black and hispanic trans deaths by white trans women and political opportunists.

Of course, Mermaids is the darling charity of the autogynephiles who have absolutely fuck all in common with these children, as Ray Blanchard explained to me last year:

That type of transsexual who are very well represented to say the least among trans activists, when they involve themselves in treatment of children, they are really colonizing a clinical population to which they don’t belong. They are claiming the boyhoods of pre-gay males for themselves and saying: ‘I was this kind of boy.’ They weren’t.

The ideology that allows this to thrive is based upon reading gender non-confirming behaviour in young children as evidence that child is transgender; when you look at the narratives claimed by or on behalf of these children, their transgender status is based upon cultural stereotypes. If you listen to any homosexual adults talk about their childhoods, you will often encounter gender nonconforming behaviour, and this is why it is often suggested that transitioning children can be interpreted as a heterosexual conversion therapy practised upon children.

Of course, left to their own devices children generally outgrow whatever phases, fashions or fascinations that grip them, these are transitory, and around 80%-90% of children identifying themselves as transgender desist. But let’s not let that get in the way of a corporate jolly to benefit an organisation that leverages threats of suicide of their own children…

Tatchell gave an address to this meeting and the following is based on a transcription of a recording of the meeting. Within the source used, the transcription is based upon the time period in minutes and seconds from 17:17 to 20:57. It is my belief that this transcription is literal, and so is a true and fair representation of Tatchell’s words as delivered.

If Tatchell wishes to dispute this account, I will be pleased to release the entire audio recording, which I have several copies of.

Anyway, on with the show: after some preamble about communal living in the 1960s and 1970s, where Tatchell recounts that practically everything was shared, from records to sexual partners, and continues with the history lesson:

At this time, of course, in the 1970s, the feminists of the day, people like Germaine Greer, their battle cry was “biology is not destiny”. That biology should never dictate a woman’s place, aspirations or achievements in life.

What a tragedy now for those same feminists to say that biology IS destiny, they say that if you are born a man or a woman, that’s the way you are, forever. That biology determines all.

Tatchell begins by building a straw feminist, creating an argument that is fallacious or a misrepresentation, so that he can knock this down. As I’ve said many times before, transgender ideology relies upon the clever use of imprecise language to make people believe its claims, and this second statement is worth taking apart to see what an ideologue Tatchell is; very quickly we can see the way he uses language and ambiguity to shift the goalposts and present a dishonest argument.

Core to this misrepresentation is his use of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. These words, like many words, have more than one meaning and I shall present these thus:

• ‘Woman’ is either an adult human female or the social role an adult female occupies in society;
• ‘Man’ is either an adult human male or the social role an adult male occupies in society.

In each case we formerly have a materialist, biologically based definition of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, the latter based upon the social convention of what it is to be either one of the former: these are gender roles, or cultural stereotypes.

Biological sex is immutable; every cell in our bodies reflects our chromosomes: XX, XY or a combination thereof. This determines our reproductive class, there are some exceptions and there are even some XY males who have a rare androgen insensitivity which means their karyotype appears female from birth onwards, and with the help of egg donors and IVF themselves can even bear children. These CAIS women are explicitly not transgender.

Tatchell’s latter statement is misleading however you cut it; Children are born male or female, this is reproductive class. They are not adult females or males, and they are not born with an innate social role as whatever our culture determines is the social role of a man or of a woman, this cultural role is something we all are socialised into, it’s not what we are born as (although we may of course be born into these, but it’s not the same).

When, in ‘The Second Sex’, Simone de Beauvoir talked about a woman being made, not born, she was referring to the cultural role and stereotypes women are conditioned to perform to, living in a world dominated by men, and that this is a whole life experience because of her biology and the way this biology is then instrumentalists against her.

In real life this pans out as the positive stereotypes belonging to the ‘men’, and the negative stereotypes belonging to the ‘women’; just remember who is always responsible for cleaning up the piss and the poo in society. From birth to death, it’s women.

De Beauvoir was also an existentialist and this shows in the crux of her argument, that what a woman is, is not an inherent quality of the individual, rather something the individual becomes. In our supposed enlightened world, although we are all born male or female, when we are adults it’s up to us, as adults, to stretch the idea of what it means to be a woman, or a man: we can break out of our boxes.

So, in conclusion:

• We are born female or male, and this is our reproductive class;
• This is fixed, and although some exceptions exist as males with female karyotype, they cannot reproduce without an egg from a biological female;
• Although our sex may be immutable, biological constraints aside what this means is down to us, not society or cultural roles of ‘man’ or ‘woman’: and
• Tatchell’s opening argument is factually incorrect, a misrepresentation of the feminist position and from an analytical position undermines the rest of his argument.

Now one of the great things of the trans movement is to challenge that orthodoxy to recognise that gender and gender identity is about much more than those: it’s about emotions, psychology, feelings.

It’s about mental state, you can’t simply reduce it to genitals, and that’s a new understanding which I’m really sad to see so many traditional feminists, and some of the new ones, don’t seem to understand. They’ve gone back on their liberating ideas of the 1970s and reverted to a biological determinism in the twenty-first century. And that is really sad.

Here is where Tatchell poisons the well. Instead of making a sustainable and coherent argument, he engages in an elaborate ad hominem against all those awful feminists women who have the audacity to disagree with him. He is trying to make the women he describes sound old and out of date (a common tactic, burn the TERF witch, Tatchell is at today’s date 65). We now know that we are dealing with a liar.

We have already established that gender, or rather the gender roles of ‘woman’ or ‘man’, are cultural constructions. What we call ‘gender identity’ is an individual’s personal relationship with those social roles. We could describe this as being either ‘how you fit in’ or, on the basis you define your life through cultural sex-based stereotypes, we could call this ‘sexism’.

And we get to this so-called ‘modern’ idea that the trans community has introduced: gender is all about feelings (not a hierarchal system women and girls are born into) . What a load of shit. The very feminism Tatchell mischaracterises challenges these expectations head on. What do we get for ‘gender equality’ (read instead, social role equality) from the transgender movement? I will tell you. We get:

• ‘Sex positivity’ from autogynephilic trans males who get off on the idea of being fucked by men;
• The promotion of prostitution and other ‘sex work’ that vectors against women but is ‘liberational’ (read ‘autogynephilic fantasy validation’) for men; and
• The reinforcement of cultural stereotypes based on sex, the very thing Tatchell claimed to argue against yet so clearly reinforces.

What a load of shit. Peter Tatchell is a liar.

Even sadder is the often quite hostile disrespectful attitudes of some of those feminists towards trans people and those who are gender fluid.

‘Gender fluid’… seriously going for the Tumblr vote again. It’s all cultural, Peter. Would you fuck a female because she said her gender identity was male? Can you not see what path this vector is taking? And let’s lead onto this ‘hostility’ you complain of… on the basis that a woman is something she becomes from living in a world of men, what rights do transgender males have to tell females what it is to be women? I’ll wait…

Some of you may have seen the video of the talk given by Sheila Jeffreys and Linda Bellos in York, where Linda Bellos openly threatened violence against trans people.

I’m astounded: I couldn’t believe it, but it’s there! Linda Bellos, this great black lesbian activist, who pioneered so many wonderful things, is on record in video as threatening violence against trans people. And it’s not just that, she even said ”if they come near me, I’ll sock ‘em”, waving her fist, and she later on said she was prepared to threaten violence to, quote, “defend women’s rights against trans women”.

And that is really, really shocking. Really shocking. First of all that anyone could threaten violence, never mind have such an extreme attitude, extreme bigoted and prejudiced and negative attitude towards trans people, that they could talk in that kind of language.

And at this point we know Peter Tatchell is a hypocrite. He’s complaining about a tenuous claim made of violence against trans people by women. Has Tatchell ever spoken against the rhetorical violence excused by invoking the word ‘TERF’?

Tatchell relies on misrepresentation (or Tumbr) as opposed to making a real argument. This quote by Linda Bellos is clear from watching the actual video, that she is saying she would protect herself and other women from attacks equivalent to which had happened at Speakers’ Corner on 13 September, following on from what Sheila Jeffreys had said. Bellos was not making a threat of violence against transgender people. It is sad that autogynephilic Labour Party members like Heather Peto have campaigned to have her expelled.

So we do have a real battle on as many of you will know there is a faction, not all feminists but there is a faction of feminism which is now lobbying and campaigning against the much needed changes in the Gender Recognition Act.

Again this is a lie; there are also transsexuals who think the changes to the GRA 2004 work against us. See Debbie Hayton spell this out in The Times.

In the name of defending women’s rights, they are prepared to trample trans rights. And that is so, so wrong. We should stand together in solidarity.

This is just empty rhetoric. There is a rights conflict between women and trans identified males who claim to be women. What you are doing is you are telling women to shut up and do and they are told. Which is exactly what men have been doing forever.

You are no better than any other man.

I shall give Peter the last word, which he does without any irony:

We should all recognise that all of us, no matter whatever our experience of discrimination and marginalisation, violence and so on, whatever that different experience, we have a common cause. We have a common interest of standing together to help support each other, because obviously divided we are weak, united we are strong.

Postscript 1:

I asked Peter for an email address if he’d like to comment on this piece before release. I got silence.

Postscript 2:

I also asked Peter to comment on the violence at Speakers’ Corner on 13 September, particularly whether he had spoken against this. Here is the trail.