Summary of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

This is my hand-written (not AI) summary of The madness of crows by Douglas Murray. Throughout the summary, I’ve tried to extract the core of the arguments as well as possible. For more information about the sources and for generally a better written text, I encourage readers to buy the book.

The Madness of Crowds

Every day we see the crowds behave irrational, this book goes into the underlying reasons.

From the nineteenth century onward, many people lost their meaning due to religions falling out of favor. Something new arose to fill the vacuum. This something came from academia into the mainstream since the 2008 financial crash. It isn’t hard to see why a generation that might never own a home is drawn to an ideology that promises to fix inequality.

This new ideology sees the world through “social justice”, “identity group politics” and “intersectionalism”. The speed at which terms like “LGBTQ”, “white privilege” and “transphobia” have spread is staggering, as Eric Weinstein has pointed out.

These ideas are used to take down millennia of civilization via terms made up very recently. The APA even advises its members how to train harmful “traditional masculinity” out of boys and men. Most people are aware that this system exists because it has laid tripwires across the culture.

Things that were fine a few years ago suddenly turned into a reason to destroy a career. When women broke through more glass ceilings than any time in history, talk about “the patriarchy” and “mansplaining” went mainstream. “Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric began to suggest that things have never been worse.”

The ideology continued by claiming that a large number of people were in the wrong bodies meaning that a lot of our foundations in science and language need to be changed. In the UK and elsewhere police investigate people who will not agree that men can be women.

All these ideas have legitimate human rights campaigns, but it is unclear where this over-correction will stop. The main problem with all these ideas is that they are all complex, which society is unwilling to accept. Even more so, these ideas cause endless contradictions where questioning them can even lead to police investigations. There is something soul-destroying and totalitarian about being unable to speak up.

Gay

The author describes a cinema visit to a Dr Davidson who argues that it is important for gays to turn into ex-gays. Gays are described as “patients” and how patients with “homoerotic temptations” might be cured. The author is not bothered by it, because he knows the group is “on the losing side”. The documentaries that they make will be cancelled due to pressures from political groups and interviews will likely end up like one at the ITV did: “I’ve had enough of him. Dr Michael, shut up.”

“The manner in which people and movements behave at the point of victory can be the most revealing about them.”

If the original idea of gay rights was consenting adults are free to do what they want in private, then that should apply to Christian fundamentalist and other groups too.

In 1857, John Stuart Mill laid out four reasons why free speech is necessary for a free society. Part is that a contrary opinion might be correct and needs to be heard in order to fix an incorrect view. Another part is that without erroneous contrary opinions, the truth may slip into an ignorant dogma.

So although Dr Davidson is in deep and toxic waters, it should be possible to plunge into them.

On the gay rights, many politicians have turned 180 degrees in just a few years. First there was the dogma of not accepting gays, and now there is a the dogma of having to accept gays. As is shown for example by the fact that acceptance of gays is required to become a citizen of Baden-Württemberg.

The author describes how being gay is reported as headlines by the BBC is being pushed as a message instead of “news” reporting. Even the BBC business is widely reporting on two male ballerinas having significant same-sex duets. There is nothing wrong with business and culture pages being devoted to these stories, but sometimes it feels like there is something strange and retributive underlying it all.

Furthermore, the direction of traffic is only one way. Even though gender is considered fluid, becoming gay is applauded but leaving the club is reviled. These conclusions leap over the fact that we still don’t know why some people are gay.

Although the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1973 and the WHO in 1992 removed being gay from their list of mental disorders, it does not follow that it’s an immovable state of being. The moral factor that has most clearly shifted attitudes has been that homosexuality is considered innate instead of learned. Since the basis of contemporary morality is that you should not in any way be opposed to people on characteristics they can’t control.

In this system, many software issues are pushed into hardware. For example, a drug addiction is not a consequence of their own weakness, but caused by circumstances. And thus drug addicts are victims. An alcoholic might have an “alcoholic gene” so there is nothing he or she could do about it. Unfortunately, the research around finding a “gay gene” has been hindered by the large societal push-back that scientists have sometimes found. This subject is now so perilous that academics prefer not to participate.

When going through historical philosopher views such as Aristotle and Foucault, it seems clear that sexual identity was not a wise basis for building a formal identity since it is so unstable.

However, being gay has become a core foundation of “identity politics”. Politicians now often speak about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community even though gay men and gay women rights have almost nothing in common. There are hardly any places where gay men and gay women meet up. Next, gay men and gay women are highly suspicious of bisexuals. And it’s unclear what these groups have to do with people who change gender.

Protests for gay rights split up in the group that wanted equality and the group that wanted to use it to build a new form of society. Where Martin Luther King Jr. had conveyed the seriousness and rightness of his cause he “hadn’t called for revolution or denounced American democracy”. The call for legal equality, which is achieved in most Western countries, turned from enjoying kinks in the private home into wearing fetish gear at “gay pride” marches.

What issues will be looked back on in shame like the criminalization of homosexuals? A number of candidates are available.

Celebrity gay couples for example who announced ultrasounds of them having a baby, writing the woman out of the story. The plainer part of this lie is that it’s only available to rich gays.

Many studies have now been pushed forward finding, for example, that gay marriages are less likely to break up than straight ones. Underlying is the notion that gays are in some sense “better” than straight people.

July 2016 should have been a great moment for gay rights. Peter Thiel, an openly gay man, at a conference endorsed Donald Trump and said “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American”. However, he also criticized culture wars by saying “When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.” Next, multiple news outlets attacked Thiel by painting him guilty of “separating himself from gay identity.” Furthermore, the massacre at the Pulse nightclub, which was carried out by a young Muslim who allied himself with ISIS, was blamed on the Republican Party.

The Marxist Foundations

In the Marxist ideology, there were multiple ranks in the hierarchy, from the workers, to the capitalists, to the military, and clergy. In Marxism, the whole idea was to flatten this hierarchy by taking power away from the upper classes. In social justice, the top of the hierarchy are white, male and heterosexual. Matters are made worse if they are also rich. The aim of this system is to take the wealth from the patriarchal white males to share with the minority groups such as gays, non-whites, women, and trans.

In 2006, 18% of social science professors identified as “Marxist”. The trend is also clear from the thinkers they get their ideas from. Many of whom interpret society solely as a system over power instead of a complex system with trust and traditions.

Always and everywhere is the aim, from French literary theory, to “deconstruct” everything. Apart from itself, academia has found almost nothing it does not wish to deconstruct.

The first target of this group has been to take down fixed certainties, including biological ones. As Judith Butler argued in 1990, gender is nothing more than a “reiterated social performance.” And the same was said for race.

In 1988, Peggy McIntosh argued that whites benefit from the existing power structures but have not “earned” this. Although she is against power, she also argues that we use “our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader basis.”

In 1985, Laclau and Mouffe argued that Marxism should modify the notion of “class struggle” and that socialist struggle could be useful for “new social movements” such as the women’s movement. “Their enemy is defined not by its function of exploitation, but by wielding a certain power.”

One trait of Marxist thinkers is that they continue in the face of contradiction. For example, women and feminist studies believe that victims of sexual abuse should be believed, unless the victim is a man or the accused is a professor of feminist literary theory.

One thing that all proponents of social justice and intersectionality have in common is that the work is unreadable. This is likely because the author is trying to hide something. Any student who questions the work is presented with a library of intimidating gobbledygook.

Via the publication of various hoax studies, various authors showed that anything in these academic areas could be said as long as it fitted pre-existing theories. The true error was not the waste of public funding, but that some day this would spill into the rest of society.

Women

Stephen Pinker in 2002 wrote that biological differences between sexes do exist especially around males being larger than females on average. Even parents might notice the difference between sons and daughters, but the culture tells them those are not really there. This is perhaps the most deranged idea of all since the facts are clearly visible to all of us.

One situation was the appearance of Barrymore on the Letterman show in 1995. Here Barrymore danced on Letterman’s table and showed her breasts to a visibly shocked, and married, Letterman. In 2018 they re-evaluated this episode in a show and the crowd still cheered Barrymore on for exposing herself to men. “The idea of women exposing themselves to men, making men feel uncomfortable or presenting themselves as especially ‘feminist’ for groping or harassing men was a trope that had itself run unmolested for years.”

A related incident made Letterman “definitely uncomfortable” and caused unhappiness with his wife, but still in 2014 the people found these unwanted sexual advances adorable. In 2016 exposing your breasts was a “feminist” act, especially “to a man who had not asked to see them.” It is not that women shouldn’t be able to do what they like with their bodies, but it’s sending out very confusing messages.

It has been a recognized motif throughout history and at least as recently as 1989, that men can not only harass women but women can also harass men.

Relatedly, Dr Jordan Peterson in 2018 in an interview wondered “Can men and women work together in the workplace?” Peterson explained it has only been happening for 40 years or so and asked “How about no makeup in the workplace?” since that is sexually provocative. Next, online chat forums interpreted Peterson’s questions as Peterson saying that women are asking to be sexually assaulted. These misrepresentations cause us to avoid the difficult discussions that should take place.

This all leads to an impossibly large landmine for men. On the one hand, a man is told to have consent classes in school about what is precisely inappropriate or not. On the other hand, many of the best selling books and movies for females are about rape fantasies (for example, Fifty Shades of Grey).

Similarly, in a Nicki Minaj video called “Anaconda” that has been viewed a billion times, Nicky does a lap-dance before a man at the end of the clip. She is allowed to make him drool. But as soon as the man even puts a hand on the woman, she can change the game and walk away pretending it was the man who was wrong. “It is a deranging demand to make on men.”

The current accepted way of regarding women is the same as men but different when it makes women look better. In 2018, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wrote that “if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.” At the BBC, Fern Britton argued that women would be suitable for the money business since they wouldn’t pillage and rob it.

In 2011, the Equalities minister in the 2010-15 coalition “blamed men for the ‘terrible decisions’ made in the world’s economy and said that men as a whole were the principal reason for ‘the mess the world is in’”. This is a contradiction. On the one hand, women are exactly the same as men, but on the other hand men are considered worse.

At a “Women Mean Business” conference the author was a panel member and asked whether it was permissible to ask a colleague out for a coffee. The audience argued that it was perfectly simple. The man was allowed to only ask once and preferably also one woman in the office. This goes against the fact that 10-20% of people find their partners at work.

An investigation by Bloomberg published in 2018 reported that senior men in finance were no longer willing to have dinner with female colleagues, sit next to them on flights, and avoided one-on-one meetings. The sense underneath this report is that people don’t trust the other people making claims.

One of the most striking things about the conference was that the discussion often ended up talking about “privilege”, which is an unbelievably hard thing to describe. How for example to compare people on which privileges they have received throughout their life?

This then leads to the importance of “intersectionality”. Even J.P. Morgan has implemented "unconscious bias training”. Similar training was also implemented at the US Government's Office of Personnel Management in 2016, meaning that 2.8 million people would go through the training, and at the British government. But not all prejudices are bad. For example, most people have a prejudice against people with swiftly moving or darting eyes. Is this a prejudice or evolutionary instinct? Prejudice training may get rid of some negative prejudices, but may suppress some useful instincts.

There is also mounting evidence that more women in selection panels does not increase the chance of women getting hired. The whole area of research underlying “bias training” is mostly a political project rather than an academic discipline. It is therefore unwise to roll out that concept throughout an entire society, including major banks, educational institutions, and government.

In the UK, all organizations with more than 250 employees must not publish the pay differences between men and women, which means a whole new bureaucracy has to be created to handle these targets. Furthermore, in the UK it was discovered that employees who benefited from "positive discrimination” were not from the lowest groups in society. After searching for ethnic minority MPs, the UK conservatives now have one black MP who studied at Eton, and one whose uncle is the vice-president of Nigeria. At labour, one woman has an aunt who is the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. But the primary problem with these theories is that the foundations are not agreed upon, yet they are being embedded deep in institutions.

There have been roughly four waves of feminism. In the first wave before the 1960s, rights for voting, petition to divorce, equal guardianship over children, and equal inheritance of property were obtained. In the second and third wave after the 1960s, feminist championed education, childcare support, and contraception and abortion. By the 2010s, the fourth wave arrived and based on having most equality rights already solved, you’d expect the rhetoric to reflect that.

However, in 1991 Faludi published a book stating that there was an “‘undeclared’ war against women” in Western societies. In the book, she argues that women were “probably” the first slaves and mainly Western men have attempted to tighten their control of people of color and women. In French’s argument the problem is always men. In particular war, which is described as a men's activity, is anti-women. Women, according to the book, are the embodiment of peace. Underlying to all of this is the idea that everything that is good is female and everything bad is male.

In 2018, Laurie Penny on Twitter said that “Men are trash” and that she adores the phrase because it implies waste. Furthermore, in response to a question she admitted that her father was wonderful, a great inspiration.

According to El-Wardany, when women say “men are trash”, she means that the ideas of men of manhood are no longer fit for purpose. One popular hashtag even went as far as saying “Kill All Men”. Ezra Klein decoded this as “They didn’t hate me, and they didn’t hate men”, but it was an “expression of frustration with pervasive sexism.”

Saying this might have been over-zealous in the 1960s, but it now seems acceptable even though women’s rights are much better than back then. Slogans like “male privilege” ignore the fact that British men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women and more likely to die in dangerous occupations.

“Worst among the new lexicon of anti-male slogans is that of ‘toxic masculinity’.” This term was picked up by the APA which claimed that 40 years of research showed that traditional masculinity was against men’s well-being. Again, there is no such term as “toxic femininity”. And does this imply that soldiers should be less connected to violence? Or a male explorer less adventurous?

Investing concepts like ‘the patriarchy’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ does not address the problem. Instead, it seems to turn men into “self-doubting, self-loathing objects of pity.” It looks like some type of revenge.

Whereas gay campaigners spent the 1990s onward trying to convince the world that homosexuality was a hardware issue, and thus protecting the status, feminism has been trying to convince the world that being a woman is mostly a software issue. All the rage stems from this deranged expectation that we should believe something our instincts know is not.

The Impact of Tech

Due to the large number of people that can now be reached by a single utterance, it is increasingly difficult to find a way to speak that fits every possible variety of person. Especially with the persistence hardware of online communication, one single statement can have your career and reputation destroyed.

Silicon Valley is more progressive than a liberal arts college. And according to leading figures in Google and Facebook, they now hire around 10,000 and 30,000 content moderators respectively. And they do not drive fundamental values of societies, but views from the social-justice-obsessed square miles of the world.

Google now for example tries to give a diverse set of pictures whenever you for example search for “physicist”. Although there is something to be said for this, it also skews history since many Western physicists happened to be white men.

The same happens when searching for “European art”. But this is not representative. “The history of European art is not a fifth, two-fifths or a half about black representation.” It is simply not an accurate representation of history. Conversely, if you search Google for “black men”, all pictures are of black men.

If you search Google Images for “gay couple”, you get row after row of gay couples. But “straight couples” will also give images of lesbian or gay couples.

It gets stranger. The second photo for “Straight white couple” is a knuckle with “HATE” written on it. It also shows gay male couples. But searching for “Asian couple” returns what look like Asian couples.

It seems something is being layered over the searches, namely a certain dislike towards certain groups. This would explain why “searches for black couples or gay couples give you what you want whereas searches for white couples or straight couples are dominated by their opposites.” “In the interest of weeding out human biases, humans have laced an entire system with biases.” The one problem with this is that it makes a political goal more important than truth.

Race

Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s “great moral insight that in the future about which he dreamed his children should ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’” In recent years, this dream has been rejected.

In the 1960s, “black studies” arose in American universities. Like with feminism, after achieving victory the discipline turned from celebrating the group to attacking opposites like men or in this case non-black people. Whereas black studies celebrates black history, “whiteness studies” aims to “problematize whiteness”. To teach hundreds of millions of people “the meaning of white privilege” and “how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism”. However, defining an entire group based on racial characteristics is in itself a good example of racism.

Even anti-racism has become racist. Martin Luther King dreamt of “colour-blindness” in 1963, but now professors like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have declared “colour-blindness” an act of racism.

In 2018, Lukianoff and Haidt showed in their book that catastrophizing is one of the distinctive attitudes of the era. We live in a culture rife with rape and close on the edge of Hitlerism. This while some countries do not prosecute rape [see for example this Wikipedia page]. Similarly, the state containing a liberal arts college within North America is the least likely to switch into 1930s Germany ethnic cleansing.

Then the author talks about Bret Weinstein and the aggression that came out of protesters at the Evergreen State College. The protest was about black equity and led to mobs stalking and harassing professors. Furthermore, the police were “forbidden to enforce the law and locked themselves inside the police station”. During an Evergreen meeting of the college’s Board of Trustees, one white student said he was not allowed to speak because he was white.

In 2015, a student told Nicholas Christakis “Even if you don’t feel what I feel ever. Even if nobody’s ever been racist to you, because they can’t be racist to you that doesn’t mean like you can just act like you’re not being racist.” Another student told him how “disgusting” a man she thought he was. Christakis later retorted that “Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words - even provocative or repugnant ones - are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.”

A year later, black entrepreneur and libertarian commentator Kmele Foster defended free-speech and had one member of the audience shouting “Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.” He continued, “colonialism is the problem… the fact that you have one group of people controlling over another group of people.” Later, students went as far as writing that “The idea that there is a single truth - ‘the Truth’ - is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment”. If “the Truth” is a white thing, then what is there for everyone else? The worrying thing is that this has been taught to people. In 2018, Vice released an article explaining that there was nothing wrong for women of color to have a vacation to get away from white people as a new type of vacation.

Part of the madness is that it has already become normal for people of different races to play leading roles. For example, in the 1970s, Kathleen Battle appeared in works by Strauss, Verdi and Haydn. But today everything in fiction and art has to be made undiverse in the name of “progress” and “diversity”.

Cultural appropriation is the idea that when culture is copied by colonialists, it is considered as an insult. For example, in 2015 it was considered “not OK” to wear a Native American headdress when not being a Native American. In 2017, Oregon activists forced a couple to close down their Mexican food truck since they were not Mexican and shared a list of “people of color” restaurants as alternatives to white-owned restaurants. A central problem is that race has now moved to being software instead of hardware. So an Indian man may become British, while a British man may not become Indian.

Interestingly, Kayne West by 2018 went to the Oval Office and sat opposite of Trump and told him he loved Trump and MAGA. In response, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that Kayne is now not black anymore since he wants “white freedom”. Peter Thiel also was thrown out of the gay community once he endorsed Trump. So you are “only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances.”

Another madness is that speakers can speak for any other group regardless of their own characteristics, like a white woman can speak for black people as long as she sticks to the right ideas and sentiments. But as soon as a black person would go against the commonly held belief then suddenly the speaker matters and not the arguments as happened to Rachel Dolezal, Candace Owens, and Thomas Sowell.

Relatedly, there is now a fear engulfing all public figures since one negative response can blow up their career. In 2015, for example, Benedict Cumberbatch referred to “coloured actors” and protested that ethnic minority backgrounds were finding it easier to find work in the US than in the UK. Unfortunately for Cumberbatch, the protocol had shifted and he should have said “people of colour”, which can be said is a tiny linguistic difference. The outcry was enormous. What this leads to is that public figures now write and speak in such a way that “no dishonest critic could dishonestly misrepresent them”.

While some people get attacked for minor “speech offenses”. Other people are allowed to say terrible things. For example, the New York Times appointed Sarah Jeong who had Tweeted things like “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”, “White men are bullshit”, and was a keen user of the phrase “Kill all men”. Ezra Klein defended this as just being about the dominant power structure.

“Whereas some people unwittingly use the wrong term and can be castigated for it, other people use terms that are so wrong and so extreme and yet no especial castigation is due.” So Cumberbatch, a heterosexual white man, would not be allowed to spend years telling how much he liked being cruel to Asian people, but Jeong did because she is Asian.

And publishers go along, since a memoir by Ta-Nehisi was published that contained sentences where he described white people and said “I thought they looked dirty, and this made me racist and proud.” In another book he described his reaction to seeing 9/11 in New York: “my heart was cold”. And how firemen in another state were “not human to me” but instead “menaces of hardware”. Due to people like Ta-Nehisi being promoted, other people follow suit in making the most extreme claims. In one 2018 “Women’s March” one placard waved “No Country for Old White Men”, while ironically another nearby read “No to racism”.

Research in IQ and genetics is one of the biggest landmines. When Murray and Herrnstein published The Bell Curve it was called things like an “academic version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf”. In Middlebury College in Vermont Murray was denied by students to speak and a female academic who escorted Murray out was hospitalized. Years later, neuroscientist Sam Harris admitted to having avoided Murray, but upon reading found that Murray was “perhaps the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime.”

The big question surrounding all this is also how our age will be able to forgive? Since everybody makes mistakes, should it be possible to also be forgiven? Today, controversial Tweets are captured by other users and can be used at any moment for political gains. It is unsurprising that young people today are especially suffering from anxiety and depression.

Things can go even more extreme. Professional racecar driver Conor Daly lost his NASCAR sponsorship deal not because of things he said, but things his father had said in the 1980s.

Trans

In history, we have a lot of things that now makes us wonder “What the hell were they thinking?”. What could we be doing today that might in the future be looked upon like slave trade?

In 2009, in her late 30s, Nancy Verhelst changed gender from female to male via three major operations between 2009 and 2012. After the surgery, Nathan said “I was ready to celebrate my new birth. But when I looked in the mirror I was disgusted with myself. My new breasts did not match my expectations and my new penis had symptoms of rejection”. In 2013, Verhelst was euthanized by the state, which was accepted by the state due to “unbearable psychological suffering”.

In the future, people might look back upon this as the Belgian health service attempted to change a woman to a man, which failed and the man was supported in killing himself.

Although this story is very unusual, it does raise some questions. There is no issue which has so quickly grown so fast. Teachers for example are now told to teach children that “all genders” can have periods.

To a certain degree, gender-ambiguity or gender-fluidity is of all ages and cultures. For example, in India there are the Hijras, a class of intersex and transvestite, and in Iran since 1979 sex-realignment surgeries are disturbingly allowed to avoid being punished for being gay. So even though it is a thing of all ages, but still it’s good to ask questions around this subject.

Intersex has been a well-known phenomenon in the medical profession for centuries. For instance, some people are born with male genitalia but also have some female reproductive organs. According to Dreger in 1990, parents of children born with ambiguous genitalia could not handle the situation. The mother would cry and the father would get drunk. According to the book, surgeries in such cases are necessary or the kid will commit suicide at puberty.

Morris’s memoir Conundrum (1974) makes a convincing argument that there is something as being trans. James Morris transitioned into Jan Morris by voluntarily taking hormone treatment for years and later went to a Moroccan hospital to get surgery. Here just before the surgery, he “went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again” After the operation, Morris felt “deliciously clean. The protuberances I had grown increasingly to detest had been scoured from me.” Furthermore, Morris wrote that, as a man, James was more interested in “great affairs” whereas, as a woman, Jan was more interested in “small affairs”.

After reading an account from someone like Morris, it is simple to conclude that there are people who are born as one sex who believe they should be another. But there are situations where things are not so easy.

Scientifically there is no clear distinction found between trans and non-trans people. However, there is a push to move trans from software to hardware, like with homosexuality. For example, suggesting that some transgenders are actually “autogynephelia” - men who like to dress as women as a sexual kink - has gone out of fashion and is even considered hate speech.

In 2003, the book The Man Who Would be Queen by J. Michael Bailey investigated whether some gay men who could not attract straight men or gay men (due to being too feminine) would change to become a woman. He also investigated a group of people that were sexually aroused by presenting as, or becoming, a woman. In the book, he does not condemn or criticize these groups, but he was on top of a landmine.

An enormous backslash occurred. This simply happened because Baily had researched and found an unpopular conclusion.

The correct idea to currently hold is that trans people get no sexual thrill from being trans. Andrea Long Chu in 2018 wrote “My new vagina won’t make me happy. And it shouldn’t have to.”

During a talk between Ben Shapiro and transgender Zoey Tur, Ben kept the discussion polite, but Zoey threatened Ben with making him go home in an ambulance and later said, unchallenged, “You’re consumed with hatred. That is who you are. You’re a little man.” Ben only stuck to the point that chromosomes affect whether you are a male or a female. Normally, you would expect everyone to turn on the threat of violence in the studio, but here everyone turned on Shapiro.

The main problem is that unlike being gay, that is falling in love with someone of the same sex, changing gender is irreversible. That’s why it’s a good idea to allow discussions about it.

Next is the story about someone called “James” here who describes the process of changing gender in the UK. James from a young age was happily active in the gay scene and at some point wondered whether he might need to change gender. He was surprised by how easily it was to request a gender change at the NHS. James first went on estrogen and, contrary to popular belief, said he became more emotional and even said that the movies and music he liked began to change. In the end, James decided to not change gender after seeing some different YouTube videos and is “very glad now that I didn’t”.

So far, James had only shown him one side of the argument. But later he began to look at “what I need to do to be content with my body, not change my body”. Of all the consultants he had spoken to, nobody had engaged in questions like this. James thought the hormones were bringing him to “the point of being permanent” and, since the NHS was not available for a quick appointment, decided to stop taking the hormones. He noticed he became “more angry, more aggressive and - yes - far more horny.”

James now fears he might be permanently sterile and found it curious that the NHS didn’t look at wider options. James argues we need to know more about trans, why for example does suicide rates not change between pre- and post-op trans? Looking back at almost having the surgery James said “I dread to think what position I’d be in now. I don’t know if I would be here now.”

When trans activists persuade people that being a woman is mostly about software, not all feminists are willing to accept that. This has led to many feminists tripping over the trans tripwire.

For example, feminist Julie Bindel in 2002 wrote in The Guardian that a tribunal for rape victims should not have a male-to-female transsexual as counselor. She also wrote “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your 501s does not make you a man.” Even 10 years later, Bindel was forced to cancel her appearance at a panel at the University of Manchester.

Perhaps the most famous feminist of all, Germaine Greer, wrote in 1999 that people who were born men could not be classed as women. And that in 1977, Stanford University admitted that of 50 per cent of patients many needed life-long consultations with the surgeons. In 2015, a lecture by Greer was therefore cancelled by students who admitted that “debate in university should be encouraged”, but “hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalized and vulnerable groups is dangerous”

At Cambridge an author even said that “she cannot be a prominent feminist any longer. She no longer stands for the same things we do.” So Peter Thiel was not considered gay anymore, Kayne West not black, and Germaine Greer not a feminist anymore.

This contempt spilled out everywhere. In 2018, a mother called Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull hired a billboard to show a dictionary definition: “woman: women, noun, adult human female”. This definition didn’t stay up for long since a Dr Adrian Harrop asked the police to take it down.

What the discrepancy boils down to is that these feminists from the older schools of feminism believe that they challenge social constructs like the right of women to escape violent and abusive relationships and women’s reproductive rights. Trans on the other hand reinforces them. For example, why should feminist be okay with men who become women and then take up knitting pink garments during public events?

Many parents worry about this phenomenon too. For example, many parents do not like nine-year-old’s saying in a viral YouTube video “If you wanna be a drag queen and your parents don’t let you, you need new parents.”

In Scotland, the government advises that a child wishing to change gender should not be told to the parents. And that parents should not be informed when a child on school trips wants to share rooms with members of the opposite sex. The strangest thing is the NHS in England is perfectly happy to support someone to change from a boy into a girl, despite some healthcare professionals warning for “overdiagnosis and overtreatment”.

Proponents of gender change often threaten parents with the claim that children who do not change gender often commit suicide. This is a huge threat for most parents. At NBC in 2015, for example, Michelle Forcier, MD, professor at Brown University stated “To say three- and four-year-olds don’t understand gender doesn’t give our kids a lot of credit.” When asked what the risk of waiting is she said “The risk of waiting is suicide. The risk of waiting is running away. The risk of waiting is substance abuse. The risk of waiting is bullying and violence. The risk of waiting is depression and anxiety.”

Dr Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who is regarded as a leader in her field, at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. She has regularly issued hormones to children as young as 12. One time to a child that suffered from Down’s Syndrome. For complicated reasons, the parents were shopping for other diagnoses and found trans. In response Aydin Olson-Kennedy asked people to donate funds so the child could have a double mastectomy. And even though Dr Olson-Kennedy argues that “If you want breasts at a later point in life you can go get them.”, that’s not really as easy as presented. Operations like that often have to take skin away from other parts of the body and require tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The main issue is that anyone opposing these claims are being treated with threats, blackmail and catastrophism, then how can serious questions be asked. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to persuade them that problems in their life can be fixed by simply changing gender. It has worked for Jazz Jennings and maybe for Caitlyn Jenner, but not for Nathan Verhelst. The problem is the spurious certainty in which this unclear issue is presented as well understood.

Conclusion

The advocates of things like social justice suggest we live in terrible societies. But it’s unclear what the solution is. Firstly, the solutions presented cause enormous amounts of friction in society. The new theory of intersexuality is certain about things we do not know and dismissive of things we do.

There are just too many contradictions and confusions. Why should lesbian women and gay men be satisfied with having their acceptance turned back since now they are not lesbian or gay but are not told they are a transsexual in waiting. This while it is estimated that 80 per cent of children diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” will find this is automatically solved during puberty.

The oppression matrix for social justice does not interact well together. It’s not a theory for which each contradiction needs to be solved by social scientists.

Many disappointments occur in all directions. Male-to-female transsexuals participating in female sports often have an unfair advantage. Anyone who dares to speak up is considered “transphobic”. [See also this recent hearing where Stephanie Turner declared "Within the USA fencing authoritative body there is a culture of intimidation towards women which demands that we be silent when men enter our tournaments."]

One foundation for a decent society is that men should not beat up women. Yet, the world nowadays accepts born men beating women in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). As board-certified endocrinologist Dr Ramona Kurtznik said, a person born as a man has a higher bone density and also a potential aggression edge due to having had more years of testosterone.

Culture is now laid with impossible problems. Women can be sexy but not sexualized. To oppose racism, we must be a bit racist. People are told “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me.”

The big question remains: where to next? The potential for claims of offense is immense. But how should they be arranged? Is a gay white person equal to a heterosexual of color? The rules are made not by rational people but by mob stampedes.

Perhaps, a way out could be to observe that gay men and lesbian women actually earn more than heterosexual people. Furthermore, above the group of white Americans is actually a group of Asian men who earn more. Perhaps we should treat individuals on their merit instead of imposing equity quotas. All in all, we might see oppression where it doesn’t exist and have no idea how to respond.

One big question that remains is how to deal with motherhood. It is nowadays said that having children actually doesn’t make you happy and costs a lot of money. This is even though many people consider having children the most fulfilling role they can have.

But people hoping for this movement to wind down due to the contradictions might wait a long time. Just like Marxism, there is an inherent willingness to accept contradictions. Social justice doesn’t seem to be really interested in solving any of the problems it aims to tackle. Why are people for example happy to run towards the trans issue first? The issue that is hardest to tackle?

Why for example in 2018 in the House of Commons was MP Layla Moran perfectly happy to accept the fact that Karen White was convicted as a rapist and then identified as women and was asked to be put in a women’s prison. To no sane person’s surprise, White proceeded to sexually assault four female prisoners. The only plausible explanation is that the aim is not to create consensus, but to cause division.

And here the Marxist substructure can be glimpsed. If you cannot rule a society, you can do something else. You can make people doubt absolutely everything. Next, present some perfect place; the details of which will follow later. Perhaps they will succeed. Perhaps the advocates of the new religion will further turn people against their own society.

One solution could be to adapt the tactic of a cuttlefish. A small male may here pretend to be a female in order to impregnate. During a march in Washington, there were men who joined a modern feminist party and in a quiet moment whispered “Dude, this is awesome! All these drunk, emotional girls in one city!” Cuttlefish strategies like this are a way to survive a horrible environment, but maybe it can be changed.

One solution is to ask “Compared to what?” For example, in War Before Civilization, L. H. Keeley argues that male deaths used to range between 10 to 60 per cent. Nowadays this number is in the single digit in the West. Some people argue that the Tehran government is not so bad, but they ignore that in 2019 people guilty of homosexual acts would be hanged.

It is suggested that once social justice is done then we will live in an era of universal brotherhood. This ignores the fact that humans probably will behave like humans. Will Chief People Officers hand in their 6 figure salaries on that day? More likely these people know the puzzle is unsolvable thus providing them a job for life.

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr in a famous speech said “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, ‘White Power!’, when nobody will shout, ‘Black Power!’, but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.” We seem to have taken steps back. For example, The Atlantic in 2016 asked the question “Are Jews white?”. The core question here being, as was asked at the University of Illinois in Urbana, in 2017 whether the top 1 per cent oppressing everyone were “straight white men” or “Jewish”. Perhaps we could return to Martin Luther King’s vision and take race out of discussions.

Instead of turning everything into politics, we should try to make it less about that. A discussion between two people shouldn’t boil down to seeing who is higher in the political ladder of repression. If someone has the desire and skill to do something, then nothing about race, sex, or sexual orientation should hold them back.