“Androgyny becomes prevalent as a civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” – Camille Paglia

Some time ago one of our bloggers, Psycho Milt, opined that since he was focusing mainly on the fight between Trans Rights and Womens Rights, he’d probably stick to Twitter for that rather than writing for No Minister since the topic would rapidly “get boring” for our readers.

Given the way the issue is heating up I’m not so sure about that, although I certainly don’t get much of a kick in writing about it, given that it may be a minor player in the destruction of our Western societies compared to national debts, supply chain problems, inflation and interest rate woes – plus the longer term effects of population loss, the renewable energy scam, China convinced about driving changes, “the likes of which we haven’t seen in 100 years”, and the seemingly overall breakdown of trust in our institutions, the latter exemplified by the news that this year’s census is a bust again, with a million people not filling it in.

But the Trans Rights wars are very much a part of that last, crunching down not just on the meaning of women’s rights but things like freedom of speech, with an American swimmer getting the Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (akak Posie Parker) treatment in a San Francisco University:

Riley Gaines, a top collegiate swimmer, was assaulted and held hostage after speaking at San Francisco State University recently. Shocking videos showed the chaotic scene as police tried to rush Gaines through the hallways only to leave her barricaded in a room for three hours. Outside, militant trans activists could be heard demanding money for her release.

You can see video of the assault at that link. The cops were useless (sound familiar). But what follows is at least as bad and probably worse:

In the end, not a single person was arrested, and now, SFSU [San Francisco State University] is praising those who attacked Gaines. In a truly insane statement, Jamillah Moore, Vice President for Student Affairs, lauded the “protesters” as brave and in need of healing while failing to even mention the violence that occurred by their hands.

Of course the Trans protestors are “brave”: they’re “victims” of people telling them that they’re wrong, and that’s very hurtful, so of course they have the right to strike back at their “oppressors”. It’s all entirely logical in the world of Identity Politics that takes Marx’s Oppressor/Oppressed dialectic in economics and runs it into sex, race and anything else you can think of – plus a good dose of Post-Modernism just in case you think that rational, reality-based truth might be used against such ideas.

Riley Gaines was a female university swimmer who just happened to be the only women that tied with  Lia Will Thomas, a Trans-Women”, in a race – for which he got the medal and she got nothing because race officials were frightened of the optics of awarding both. Since finishing her degree and no longer under the thumb of the university she’s been speaking out about Thomas’s arrogant, ego-centered, misogynistic bullshit in beating all the other girls, plus his fun in the locker rooms where his meat and vege were still very much intact. But Gaines is tough and she’s going to keep speaking out. She also needs to take SFSU to court, even if it seems like SF is lost cause:

The answer is becoming more clear: Get out. You will not be protected in these far-left jurisdictions because the systems are stacked with partisan activists from top to bottom. We saw that with the recent murder conviction of Daniel Perry. The cops are activists, the university administrators are activists, and the district attorneys are activists. I understand the desire to fight back and retake ground, but you aren’t retaking SFSU, and at some point, your personal safety and the safety of your family have to come first. If you remain in these deep blue areas, it’s just a matter of time before you are victimized.

As J K Rowling put it in a recent interview:

“Women are the only group – — to my knowledge — that are being asked to embrace members of their oppressor class — unquestioningly, with no caveat.”

That whole “their oppressor class” thing is very Trad Left, but of course that is Rowling and there are more quotes at the link showing how hard she’s finding it to fight against this while remaining true to the Left’s ideas in other areas:

In my lifetime, we’ve seen such a shift on the left, and I still would define myself as of the left, but I was born in the 60s when transgression really was the preserve of the left, when challenging authority, and when making the dark joke, and when breaking societal norms was very much the preserve of the left.
…
And I worry very deeply that, as the left becomes increasingly puritanical and authoritarian and judgmental, we are pushing swathes of people towards not just the right, it’s pushing them to the Alt Right.

The “Alt-Right”? That’s so 2018: it’s “Ultra-MAGA” nowadays, or “Domestic Terrorist” if you like – something we’re distinctly not hearing from the FBI about the Trans-rights groups.

The religious angles of puritanical. authoritarian judgmentalism in the Trans movement are pointed out by this scholar of religion who has studied them all over the world (while not being a theologian):

Over the past twenty years, the phenomenological approach has worked well for me. I have travelled to Pakistan where I visited Islamic madrassas. I’ve stuck pieces of paper into cracks of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, visited the West Bank and Bethlehem, gone on two Holocaust study trips to Auschwitz. I’ve participated in Zen Buddhist retreats and in Hindu festivals. I’ve attended African Pentecostal services in industrial estate warehouses, fasted for Ramadan and broke the fast with Muslims in mosques.

And she then nails the key point about the Trans movement in comparison:

People from all these religions and belief systems permitted me to enter their worlds with no compulsion on me to participate or to believe. Yet today, in Ireland, when it comes to gender identity theory, it is becoming difficult to adopt the phenomenological perspective as there is increasing pressure to accept this theory uncritically.

Believe, or else… you’ll have John Campbell and all the other breathless luvvies of the MSM on your case as a H8ter Forever, as Posie found out.

And not just Ireland! She points out the other aspects of religion that the Trans movement involves – but does not discuss violence, though there is increasingly plenty of that:

Not only is the trans crowd not keeping a low profile after one of their own slaughtered six people less than two weeks ago, but they’re also being pretty clear that there’s more where that came from.

William Whitworth, a 19-year-old male who claims to be female and goes by the name “Lilly,” has been arrested in Colorado Springs, Colo., after threatening various local schools. Whitworth has been charged with two counts of criminal attempt to commit murder in the first degree, as well as criminal mischief, menacing, and more. His case, following so soon after Audrey Hale, a woman claiming to be male, murdered six people at a Christian school in Nashville, once again raises the question: wouldn’t we be better off treating this “transgender” business as mental illness rather than coddling and celebrating people who suffer from these delusions?

Here too, with very, very angry (unhinged?) people like this Young New Zealander of The Year.

What was that theory being pushed by Leftists in the last year, about how rhetoric directly leads to violent behavior? Something called Stochastic Terrorism? If so, their screaming about anti-groomer bills “taking away rights” from transgender people is obviously working. The Trans protests now insist that Hale be counted as the seventh victim of that shooting, and naturally they had no qualms about invading two State Capitols to disrupt voting.

Hey! There’s another word that’s been tossed around a lot: insurrection. No comment from Liz Cheney and the J6 Committee.

Meantime, back in Rowling’s Britain, there are some views that Trad-Feminism is going to prevail, as outlined in Welcome to TERF Island, which points out the century old traditions of feminist protest in that land:

“there is a baseline of mainstream feminism already … because there’s a history of socialist organizing, and a strong tradition of socialist feminism … because the UK is easy to travel around, so people can meet with each other relatively easily.” – Kathleen Stock

And what that is now leading too:

There has been so much successful UK pushback, on multiple fronts, that the country has come to be known as “TERF Island.” (“TERF,” short for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” is the pejorative term used by gender ideologues to describe women who resist). And it is women at the forefront. In the face of death threats, job losses, and ostracism, many have stood up to defend their rights and to protect children from harm. They have now won several concrete victories that have set back gender ideology to a degree that its proponents no doubt find alarming.

Closing the Tavistock Institute being just one such massive victory. The article lists a number of books by feminists that really take a hammer to the ideas and language of Trans, starting with the aforementioned Stock, a philosopher and activist:

Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021), a key text in the effort to overcome gender ideology’s jumble of confusion with clear argument, rigor, and open-mindedness. In it, Stock systematically addresses many of the claims made for gender identity and tries to pin down what exactly is meant by “gender.” Above all, the fact that we have used it as a euphemism for (biological) sex out of politeness has been a disaster.

Well yeah! Good of Stock to make that concession: the feminists who pushed Gender Theory thought they were being clever, but eventually created the monster that’s trying to destroy them. As just one example, the idea that gender identity matters more than bodily sex coerces gay women into regarding men who identify as lesbians as potential sexual partners.

Fun fact: Alabama now has as many Lesbian bars as California – one.

And of course the USA may be a different case, given how much money there is to be made from the drugs and surgeries required for Trans to happen. And as this writer, Mary Harrington, points out, Posie could learn a thing or two from the Brexit fight:

Twitter is still full of otherwise seemingly nice people, fantasising about a world in which Farage had died horribly in his 2010 plane crash. And where Posie — AKA Kellie-Jay Keen —  is concerned, the murderous fantasies are even more openly expressed. 
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What happened last weekend in New Zealand isn’t confined to one side of an otherwise principled political debate, in which a few bad actors are spoiling things for everyone else. It’s the latest instance of a post-democratic style of politics now well on its way to being the new normal.

Turns out that she’s a TERF as well – but one who handed out Leave leaflets during the Brexit fight. She sees the similarities in the two fights, even if they’re not obvious at first:

Farage and Keen have a great deal in common. Both are Marmite figures, as iconic in look, manner and rhetorical directness as they are loathed by the bien pensant. Both are gifted communicators, skilled at being heard beyond their bubbles. 
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And both are accused of flirting with “the far-Right”. This is as you’d expect. In the 21st century, Progress means the unbounded forward march of commerce and technology. And any effort at all to set any limits on that forward march, by calling for limits on the free global movement of low-skilled labour, for example, makes you far-Right by definition. As for asserting a sexed limit to self-identification, this also amounts to standing athwart the march of commerce and technology, yelling “Stop!”. Sorry, Posie: you’re also far-Right.

Mary should have a chat with Rowling. Meantime, as feminist intellectual and icon, Camille Paglia puts it (and yes, she had started to become hated by the Left several years ago as she began to have deviant thoughts different from those who once lauded her):

“Androgyny becomes prevalent as a civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.”