In this video above I talk about two things which allow transgender ideology to survive in the real world. The first is no-platforming and the curtailment of free speech, through which means transgender ideology is protected from the scrutiny of outsiders and the decimation the ideology would suffer should its proponents be required to defend their claims openly. Secondly, it is the regressive left which provides the environment for this ideology to thrive unchallenged and allow it to prosper, parasitically feeding off the rights of women and the financial and other resources of organisations established to support and protect lesbians, other women and gay men from a society dominated and run for and by heterosexual males. Of course, heterosexual males co-incidentally make up significantly most of the population of ‘trans women’.
The events surrounding ‘Mirandagate’, my cancelled appearance on Newsnight are well-documented here. Another perspective offered by QueenThingy is archived here, it makes the following observation about the tactics used to silence this debate:
Miranda was being branded all sorts by the Twitter Trans Brigade. I saw tweets variously ranging from calling her a “self hating TERF token” to a “transphobic bigot” to a “harrasser” to a “stalker.” Not one of these ludicrous claims had any evidence presented, presumably because none exists, but they were all taken at face value and swallowed as fact by a frothy circle of online activists. Completely overlooking the fact that Miranda is herself transsexual, branding her as “the villain” and not even stopping to consider what her actual opinions are.
The grounds for withdrawal from debate given were that well-worn excuse, as the author above continues:
This reached a crescendo with Paris Lees pulling out. She tweeted that her reasoning for it was “my existence is not up for debate”, which was met with raucous approval from all the people who didn’t know what the segment was about, but didn’t like it anyway. That there is “no debate about trans people’s right to exist.”
Paris is right. This isn’t metaphysics, and we’re not having a discussion about whether or not other people actually exist or if they’re just figments of our overly active imagination. This isn’t philosophical. There’s no debate about “the right” to exist. There’s no debate about whether they do exist or not, because whether one approves or disapproves of Kellie Maloney, the fact remains that this transition is something which is real and happening. This is practical, political and unavoidable.
Because the thing is, there ARE questions which are raised by this, and ignoring them completely and pretending they aren’t valid does a great harm to us all.
Why would Lees not want to join this debate, why provide such shoddy excuse for evading it? What sort of person is it that so dishonestly mischaracterises such an important opportunity? Lees is known for writing ‘libfem sex positive’ pieces with lurid titles such as ‘I Love Wolf Whistles and Catcalls; Am I a Bad Feminist?‘ and ‘Why I Am So Proud To Be A “Promiscuous” Slut‘. In case you think these titles may make Lees appear shallow, there are other pieces which Lees has written which show the depths of Lees’s character. In ‘The Trans vs. Radical Feminist Twitter War Is Making Me Sick‘, Lees compares a number of women to characters at a girl’s school:
Behind this facade of valid discussion hides a bunch of overgrown school bullies pointing at people who are different and demanding they explain that difference. Asking someone why they are trans is no better than asking them, “Why are you so fat?” Gia Milinovich is the girl in the playground shouting, “You’re not pretty like us!” but who never gets into trouble because she’s banging the head of science, Mr Cox. She’ll tell you what being trans is all about. Me, teacher! Call on me! I know the answer! I’ve read the next chapter!
Milinovich is a woman who has made a career in her own right as a writer and television presenter, yet Lees does to her what men have been doing since the dawn of history, which is to minimise her achievements, focus on her looks and define her by reference to a man. About journalist Sarah Ditum, Lees has another patriarchal trick up the sleeve:
Then there’s Sarah Ditum, your best friend’s mom who won’t sign the consent forms for the school trip. She hates FUN. I don’t. I’m the girl with the short skirt and too much makeup on hiding behind the bike cage with a bong, a pack of Parliaments and Derek from 12th grade.
And there you have it; we may as well be sitting in a 1970s working men’s club with Bernard Manning extemporating on the theme of his mother-in-law and a gruff bearded man, reeking of Players and Double Diamond, turning to his wife and admonishing her for her own misery at being caught in that hostile, beta-masculine environment: “come on, love, put a smile on it”. Paris, women have internal lives, thoughts and opinions; women are not just ornaments or things that exist for the entertainment of men. If you listened to them, you may just catch on and get a glimmer of an understanding about ‘what it means to be a woman’.
Such conservative views on what it means to be a woman are shared by both the regressive left and the conservative right. Indeed, both these extremes seem to meld into each other: the right sees women as men’s property, to be used to breed children and make the home, because ‘that’s how God designed women’. The regressive left sees women as infantilised yet erotic caricatures, ’empowered’ by porn and ‘sex work’ with an ‘innate gender identity’ that makes them well-suited to these roles. Even better, men can have this ‘innate gender identity’ too and tell women exactly what it means to be a woman, leading by manly example and becoming a woman themselves, exactly as Paris has done. In danger of repeating myself yet again, here we have men telling women what it is to be a woman, then changing all the rules exactly when it suits them.
It’s the same old shit: 1970s sexism repackaged, spray-painted and sexed up for a naive generation of millennials whose idea of rebellion is to want a different coloured garage door to their parents. And the problem is, we cannot talk about it, because just like the patriarchal domineering men on the right, the patriarchal domineering men on the left want to control the dialog: no questions, no discussion, no dissenting opinion. And the regressive left is lapping this up: this same aloof group who look down on the far right are themselves are guilty of exactly the same reactionary thinking, leading to this intractable situation where a man’s opinion on what it means to be a woman carries more weight than an actual woman’s, provided the man in question ‘identifies’ as a woman, and all because feelings trump reality.
If you think this sounds fucked up, it is; if you think that this sounds made up, it’s not. There are many examples of the left allowing men who ‘identify as women’ get away with things no decent lefty would have tolerated twenty-five years ago. Here’s a great example of the sort of shit the left is allowing to happen: a white transgender male intimidating and verbally abusing a black photographer at an Antifa rally in Portland.
Indeed, the left is practically falling over backwards to excuse, even accommodate, abuse and violent rhetoric from transgender activists. In ‘How online abuse is politically hijacked‘ Owen Jones provides the most abusive transgender males with the following as a ‘get out of jail free’ card by building a ‘strawtransmisogynist’ out of Lees’s ridiculous ‘right to exist’ claim and the often repeated emotional leverage gained by misleading claims about trans suicide rates:
As I’ve mentioned, many of the detractors are united by their opposition to the trans rights movement, and/or are allied with such figures and give them media space. When many of them talk about the ‘left-wing’ abuse they receive, what they are really talking about is ‘trans activists and their allies’.
But here’s an important perspective and context to consider. The majority of trans people have contemplated suicide. A large majority suffer mental distress in a society absolutely riddled with transphobia. When prominent media commentators who describe themselves as progressive refuse to accept their right to exist, who intentionally and gratuitously misgender them, who joke about them looking like Pete Burns (as one of my trans women friends has been mocked by some of the detractors I’m referring to in this piece) — well, is anger understandable, even if the abuse is unsavoury? I put the abuse I’ve received in that context. They can’t do that, because they fundamentally oppose trans rights and portray supporters of trans rights as misogynists.
The left has become preoccupied with individualism and identity politics, this has resulted in a bastardised ideology that is an unlikely combination of the most selfish Reaganomic and Thatcherite neoliberalism and the worst subjective excesses of post-structural postmodernism where everything is in the eye of the believer, nurtured and ruthlessly enforced by a propaganda machine that rivals Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’. We have arrived at this point through societal deconstruction and the betrayal of class consciousness, meaning people are now pacified by illusionary ideas of ‘equality’ rather than invigorated and brought to life by the fight for liberation and are prepared to believe any old shit they’re told, because if they don’t they are going to get branded a ‘TERF’ and a ‘SWERF’ then banished.
I used to see myself as someone who was politically left but overall apathetic, because it always seemed someone smarter or more motivated than me would make all the changes happen that needed to, and of course that particular messiah of the left is proving as elusive in their own first appearance as the biblical messiah is to his second coming. I’m pissed off and angry at the left, and this is not going to go away. In her 1995 speech ‘Remember; resist; do not comply‘ at the symposium on ‘The Future of Feminism’, Andrea Dworkin said:
But I am talking about a deep silence: a silence that goes to the heart of tyranny, its nature. There is a tyranny that preordains not only who can say what but what women especially can say. There is a tyranny that determines who cannot say anything, a tyranny in which people are kept from being able to say the most important things about what life is like for them. That is the kind of tyranny I mean.
Thank you MIRANDA!
Thank you Miranda. You are a true sister.
Incredibly eloquent and well-argued. Anyone who bans and banishes people like you Miranda, is a cowardly, hypocritical bully, and that’s what all these men are. They are all afraid of women, women’s power and men who support those women. They are afraid of the truth, but the truth won once, it will win again. The sheer degree of insanity and perversion that’s coming out of the trans lobby is unsustainable in the long run.
Well Miranda thank you so much. I was getting to the point where I was beginning to hate transgender people because of what a very loud minority of ‘activists’ or trans representatives have been doing and saying. I am however wise enough to know that having never known a trans person that this was a destructive perspective so I just decided to check for trans voices on youtube to see what the thinking was etc. and found Rya which lead me to finding you. The aggressive activism is making enemies where none be had. Its voices like yours that will save transgender people from hostility based on activists are doing and saying in their name. So thank you. You saved one from entering the gutter heap of disliking a group based on how some in the group behave.