The Politics of Peeing

I took issue with a post on X that the reason there are women’s loos, prisons etc is because men pose such a physical threat to them, women demanded and got separate provision. My post was misconstrued, so I will try to explain myself. 

Leaving aside the reductionism and pessimism of the view of men as innately inclined to physical and sexual predation of women, the reality of the emergence of sex segregated public provision is more complex than female activists having forced it.

The following just scratches the surface of a multi-layered and complex issue.

The rise of public sanitation 

In Britain and the empire, before the Victorian era, public health measures such as public loos, were largely non-existent.

Prior to the installation of water closets in the home, the wealthy would use a close-stool, the contents of which would be emptied by a servant, usually female.

If there was no ready access to a close-stool, ladies would pee in a special pot carried by a maidservant. Gentlemen, if in male company only, peed in a container in a corner of the room or out a window.

If they weren’t near a chamber pot or privy, poor women and men pretty much peed and pooed wherever they could, and their privies would be shared by the occupants of several dwellings.

The Victorian era saw an increase in wider public sanitation measures in cities to stop the spread of diseases like cholera. Epidemics are not only bad for business, they can also kill the rich.

The provision of public loos was heavily influenced by both concerns about public health, and concerns over the “immorality” of people exposing themselves in public. The latter was far more focussed on women than men.

Closed crotch knickers

Prior to the development of closed crotch knickers in the late regency era, it was easier for all women to pee in public, and with the influence of the French Revolution, wealthy women’s dress, outside of formal court dress, was much less restricting. 

Working women were always forced by finances and the physical demands of their lives to dress more simply.

Men didn’t wear knickers either but pulled their long shirt tail between their legs. NB. Men’s shirts still had a tail long after underpants became a thing.

Interestingly, closed crotch knickers for women were initially regarded as immoral. The rise of bourgeois Victorian morality saw them become de rigeur, and the absence of knickers or wearing of open crotch knickers were seen as immoral.

The impact of closed crotch knickers on the politics of peeing and pooing was that they necessitated increasingly voluminous skirts and petticoats to be lifted and the knickers to be lowered. Prior to the invention of elastic, knickers were held up by tapes around the waist which had to be untied and retied.Women of all classes no longer had the ability to spread their legs or squat and have a discreet pee.

Female sequestration

The wives and daughters of wealthy/powerful men were sequestered in the home for the most part, and were the main focus of patriarchal modesty and chastity standards aimed at the guarantee of paternity and the transmission of title and/or property.

However, the domestic sphere for wealthy women was a world away from the lives of the masses.

What a lot of middle class, white feminists forget or choose to ignore, is that many working class women were not sequestered in the home in the same way.

There was a “trickle down” of upper class and bourgeois morality, but it was often over-ridden by the need to exploit the labour of working class women. (1)

The first people to be drafted into factories were pauper women and children. Women worked on the land, and in workshops, in mills and mines, and in the houses of those whose exploitation of the working class enabled them to employ an army of servants to empty their piss pots and middens, and wash the cloths used to wipe arses. 

Even middle class people employed a maid of all work.

There was a vast army of women who carried the dual burdens of their own domestic chores plus low paid/low status employment, and were held to bourgeois standards of decorum while being forced to live in ways that made maintaining them impossible. 

The late Victorian/Edwardian era saw the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the public sphere, and with that the need for both public loos, and the provision of them in commercial and educational buildings etc.

Many men resented the intrusion of women into male areas of employment and blocked or did not support such provision – the so-called "urinary leash." (2)

Due to prevailing modesty standards, it was unthinkable for a “respectable” woman to lift her skirts and drop her knickers in the vicinity of a man, or even to do so within hearing distance, so it was inevitable that all public loos were strictly sex segregated. The clothes women had to wear also made the process of using a loo both time consuming and difficult.

Most women were influenced to some degree by the modesty standards that were a cornerstone of patriarchal religion, and those standards were in play in movements agitating for an increase in provision of women’s loos.

Women did not need to demand sex segregation, it was a given.

The penal reform work of the remarkable Elizabeth Fry is a case in point. She was a member of a wealthy Quaker banking family and very devout. As such, although her penal reform mission became wider than sex segregation, her concerns included the “low and deplorable state of morals” of both female and male prisoners in the prisons of the regency era when the infamous Bloody Code was still in force. 

The movement she ignited, to segregate prisons by sex, was as motivated by questions of sexual morality as it was by a concern for the safety of the mainly poor women who were incarcerated in the brutal prisons of the day. 

It was the wider acceptance of those concerns which resulted in sex segregation being readily agreed and quickly implemented, while other, equally important, penal reforms were not. 

Projecting a 21^st century liberal or radical feminist analysis of sex segregated provision back two centuries onto the likes of Elizabeth Fry risks taking presentism into the realms of caricature.

The Social Compact

Sex segregation of public loos, changing rooms, etc was and remains a powerful social norm which can be backed up by the law if there is criminal action or intent.

So powerful was the normative acceptance of sex segregation, when sex discrimination laws were drafted in the 1970s, no one questioned the exceptions written into them to make provision of women-only spaces and services lawful. It continued to be seen widely as natural and desirable.

 

 Notes:

(1) In the US, the role of slavery, Jim Crow, and the post-slavery hyper-exploitation of African American women, was a gaping hole in much of early white American feminism. In the UK and associated countries, there was a similar gap of the situation of working class women and women of colour.

(2) I worked in the Fire Service in London in the 1990s and saw first-hand how resentful many men still were about women's intrusion into what they saw a male preserve.

Jabotinsky’s Sword

Guest post By Joel Belasco

I grew up in a secular Jewish household after World War 2, with the Holocaust as a haunting frame of reference. There was a romantic attachment to Israel and we had a tin collecting box for the Jewish National Fund on the hall table. Israel could do no wrong because it was showing the world that Jews could be strong and would not tolerate the antisemitism that had been part of their history. 

What was not understood by those with a romantic view of Israel as the David facing Goliath, was that the realisation of Israel as a Jewish state was part of a longer term project to displace Arabs in the colonisation of Palestine.

The modern state of Israel was not the realisation of a biblical prophecy, and its belligerent, aggressive ethnonationalism is not a justifiable response to the genocidal barbarity that was suffered by Jews in the Holocaust. It actually pre-dated those horrors.

During the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emerged among Ashkenazi as a response to antisemitism experienced by  Jews in Europe and Russia. The movement was religiously influenced, promoted the use of Hebrew as its language, and wanted a Jewish homeland in what it saw as its historic place of origin in Palestine. 

The Zionist project always was effectively colonial in nature, seeking to transplant people from a European or Russian environment into Palestine, which was already occupied by an Arab population who were Muslim, Christian and Druse. Displacing the Arab population of Palestine was always an objective of Zionists who espoused an aggressive ethnonationalism using biblical references as their justification. 

Theodor Herzl, a driving force in developing Zionism politically at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the establishment of a Jewish state as, “an outpost of civilization against Barbarism”. 

At this time Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Jewish settlers from Europe and Russia had started to acquire land in Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1902 with the objective of supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine. 

Before the First World War ended, the British Government was lobbied by Zionists to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland. 

At the end of WW1, the Ottoman empire, which had been in alliance with Germany, was defeated. The British took control of Palestine and were subsequently give a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations.

Together with other political concerns, the British Foreign Secretary, Balfour published a declaration which stated:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

This objective was then incorporated into the mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.

Zionism did not then, and does not represent all Jews. The Bund, for example, held a contrasting position to the religious ethnonationalism of Zionism. It was left wing, secular, based on trade unions, transnational in outlook, opposed to war, and it promoted Yiddish as the common language of Jews. It did not support the idea of a Jewish homeland, but advocated struggling for equality and justice in the regions in which they lived.

In many ways, consigning Jews to their own homeland could be seen as getting rid of a problem nearer home.

The political radicalism of The Bund was smothered by the political machinations of Zionists, and ideologically by the support given to Zionism by influential Jews like Montefiore and Rothschild. 

Initially, Jewish settlement in Palestine was accepted by the majority population but as numbers increased following the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish settlers met more resistance. 

The Haganah (Hebrew for “defence”) was formed in 1920 ostensibly to defend Jewish settlements. It was outlawed by the British authorities and operated with restraint until World War 2. As the British refused to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration, the Haganah used terrorist tactics to bomb infrastructure, and even a ship carrying Jewish refugees. (1) 

Once the state of Israel was established in 1948, the Haganah was dissolved as an underground force and integrated into the Israel Defence Force (Tzva Haganah le-Yisra’el).

The Irgun, which broke with the Haganah in 1931, was a self-declared Zionist paramilitary organisation based on the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky:

“Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.” 

Jabotinsky’s “revisionism” rejected the notion that British Empire would support the creation of a Jewish state, and advocated establishing Jewish army to fight for Jewish sovereignty. Politically he was a nationalist and an economic liberal supporting a free market with minimal state intervention, and personal freedom, i.e., a right wing libertarian in today’s terms.

The Irgun was a terrorist organization and described as such by the British, the United States, and the United Nations. Among other acts, in 1946  they bombed the King David Hotel, which was HQ for the British Mandatory forces. The explosion killed 91 people and injured 46. The Irgun was also responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers in 1948. 

In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein described the Irgun as a ”terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization”. 

After the establishment of the state of Israel, the Irgun was incorporated into the Israeli Defence Force. Its political wing was the right wing, Herut (Freedom) Party. 

Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, founded the Likud party and became Prime Minister in 1977. The Likud has been in government since 1977 and is currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), under the leadership of Avraham Stern, broke away from the Irgun in 1940. They described themselves as terrorist with the aim of evicting the British from Palestine to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state. The Lehi were fanatics whose pursuit of their Zionist ideological goal seems to have blinded them to political realities. Unbelievably, Stern sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the belief that they would be more accommodating to Jews than the British. The modus operandi of the group focused on political assassination. Stern was shot by British detectives whilst being arrested in 1942.

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: {Ye shall blot them out to every last man}”– from the Lehi underground paper He Khazit.

Yitzhak Shamir, a leading member of the Lehi, who had argued for the legitimacy of the group’s terrorist actions, later became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983. 

The Israeli State initially integrated the Lehi members into the IDF but some of its members assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman (Count of Wisborg) and diplomat who was the United Nations Mediator in Palestine. Seeing him as a puppet of the British and the Arabs in advocating a peace plan, the Lehi shot him as he was driven through Jerusalem. 

The Israeli Government initially condemned the action and arrested Lehi members. However, before the first elections in Israel in January 1949, Lehi members were granted amnesty. In 1980, the Lehi Ribbon was introduced as a military award “for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel.”

There is a clear historical connection between the colonising aspirations of Zionists and their militaristic, religious ethnonationalism as given voice by the philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. 
In 2005 a memorial day was created to honour Jabotinsky. 

In 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the event, saying, “I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.” (Quoted by Lazlo Bernat Veszpremy in Hungarian Conservative.)

Zionism is a continuous thread in the Netanyahu family. Benjamin’s grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a Polish Zionist Rabbi. The family emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920 and their name was changed to Netanyahu (Hebrew for Nathan). Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian, Benzion Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary when he was living in New York. Upon the death of Jabotinsky he became executive director of the New Zionist Organisation of America. 

In 2009 he is quoted as saying in an interview in Maariv, a Hebrew language daily:

“The tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him to compromise. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.”

In the wake of WW2, with awareness of the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, and with thousands of displaced people, the establishment of a Jewish State became a prominent international issue. But Britain still held a mandate of the territory of Palestine and had been negotiating with Arab leaders since WW1. However, the shadow of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a homeland to Jews, loomed large. 

Proposals for power sharing were challenged strongly by Zionists who could see the realisation of the project they had been working towards for more than fifty years. 

Arabs living in Palestine, seeing the colonial aspirations of the Zionists, began armed resistance. 

The British surrendered the mandate in 1948, and the United Nations took control and made the decision to establish Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine. 

The Zionist government of Ben Gurion, which had recruited  groups of Zionist terrorists (the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi,) to the Israeli Defence Force, was immediately engaged in the Arab-Israeli war. 

For the Arabs, this became al-Nakba as they were expelled from villages, towns and areas in which they had lived for centuries. 

By the end of the conflict, 750,000 Arabs had been displaced and consigned to refugee camps, and by appropriating Arab land, Israel had expanded its territory from the 55% allocated by the UN to 78%. Around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 6,000 Israelis. Hundreds of villages were sacked and there were in the region of 70 massacres of Palestinians. 

What was, initially, an expedient move was soon recognized as having a geopolitical strategic benefit in locating a state with European roots among the Arab countries of the Middle East, and the USA was quick to seize that opportunity. 

The Zionist project that had begun in nineteenth century Europe and Russia and given a militaristic, anti-Arab colonising philosophy by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, had become a reality. 

Its ethnonationalist, colonialist, aggressive xenophobia was usefully concealed by the sympathy extended to Jews after their experiences under the Nazis. The cultural and historical experience of the Nazi Holocaust has been used, cynically one might say, to recruit all Jews to the Zionist colonial project with romantic notions of Israel as the realisation of a religious prophecy. A powerful ideological exercise has been conducted by the Zionist Israeli State which has appropriated and weaponised the Holocaust, and used it to attack any criticism of it and its actions, as anti-semitic.

The Zionist project is deeply embedded in the Israeli State; two former Prime Ministers were active leading members of Zionist guerilla terror groups, and the current Prime Minister comes from a family of Zionists with strong links to Jabotinsky, and he recognises him as a guiding political influence. 

I have read that he has Jabotinsky’s sword in his office.

(1)   In 1940 the Patria was carrying about 1800 European Jewish refugees who, having been refused entry to Palestine, were bound for Mauritius. While it was anchored in the port of Haifa, the Haganah exploded a bomb on the ship which was intended to cripple it and prevent it leaving. The blast sank the ship and killed 256 people and injured 172 others. The survivors were rounded up by the British authorities, put on another ship and taken to Mauritius where they were kept in abominable conditions by the British until the end of the war at which point, they were given the choice of where they wanted to go. 
 

Open Letter to Judge Kevin Glubb

Dear Judge Glubb,

Let me say at the outset that I am against sending people to prison unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. I would much rather New Zealand's judges did not use remand and custodial sentences for young offenders as often as you all do. 

I know that people, and especially young people, can behave in uncharacteristic ways when under the influence of alcohol or drugs and/or hormones, and/or due to peer pressure or mob mentality. 

Given a criminal record can have profound implications for a person's future, I accept that in some instances a discharge without conviction, and granting of permanent name suppression are warranted.

All of this is why, in principle, I approve of your ruling in the case of the young man who, at the age of twenty, punched a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother, in the face, causing her bodily and psychological harm.

According to the reports I've read, you described the offending in question as "moderately serious" given the blows were to the head. 

The outcome for the victim was a fairly minor physical injury; the psychological harm is much harder to assess but importantly, the assault had the very real potential to cause serious, possibly fatal injuries. 

That fact should have featured in your sentencing, if only to use the opportunity to send a message to all men who punch women, and to young men who punch anyone in the head but especially old women, that it is an extremely dangerous act.

You may not be aware of it but men on average punch 160% harder than women. A man punching a woman is seldom an even contest; a young man punching an old woman is about as uneven as it gets.

That aside, women's ability to withstand the force of a blow to the head is significantly less than men on average because of sex-based differences in the musculature of the male and the female posterior cervical spine.

Add to that, the probability of age-related osteoporosis in a 70-year-old woman, and any blow from a man, especially one in the grip of adrenaline and testosterone disinhibition, is likely to result in fractures. A blow to the head could result in a catastrophic cervical fracture.

The young man's defence was that he is "neurodiverse", ie he has ADHD and mild autism, which make him more prone to acting impulsively. 

However, despite his reduced impulse control, he had got to the the age of twenty without any prior arrests or convictions which suggests either he must have had a sequestered life, or controlled himself pretty well, or there was a trigger in that situation, i.e. the anger he felt on behalf of trans people who he thought were being attacked by the mainly older, female rally attendees.

Whatever one's opinion of the victim vis-à-vis her reasons for being at the rally, her actions in challenging a person who was removing lines placed to delineate the rally and the protesters, her refusal to engage in restorative justice, or the use of the case in the on-going arguments about trans and women's rights, nothing can reasonably be said to mitigate such an assault.

It's as reasonable to argue that the young man's action, far from being impulsive, was somewhat calculated in that it is highly unlikely he would have lost control of his fists if the person he was confronting had been a large, muscly man.

It is noteworthy that in 2014, you were faced with another twenty-year-old man who was charged with a similar assault. 

In the grip of extreme alcohol and adrenaline/testosterone disinhibition, and after a domestic dispute, three police officers attempted to arrest him. In the course of the arrest he punched a detective in the face causing a small cut and a black eye.

The two defendants were the same sex and age; they both suffered a serious loss of impulse control, and there were analogous injuries caused to their victims.

So, what was so different that the young man in 2014 deserved to be sent to prison for thirteen months, with no reporting restrictions, while the young man in 2024 got discharged without conviction and was granted permanent name suppression?

Was it being drunk as opposed to being neurodiverse?

Was it resisting arrest by three police officers and in the process punching one of them in the eye, as opposed to launching an unprovoked attack on a 70-year-old woman?

Was it being working class and brown skinned as opposed to middle class and white skinned?

Or was it having prior convictions – which of course may well have been connected to being working class and brown skinned?

Drugs and commercialised medicine......

Hello Bloglet my old friend, I've come to talk to you again....

I have a real issue with the unnecessary prescription of drugs. Whether that is the use of synthetic oestrogen to delay a natural ageing process or alter a genetically determined ratio of female to male sex hormones, the administration of powerful drugs to slow bone thinning, the prophylactic use of antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, the over-prescription of opioids for chronic pain, the use of full-month contraceptives to stop menstruation – it's all too often an appalling waste of resources and it can do immense harm.

Every drug we take has to be metabolised – the biggest burden in that is carried by our liver and kidneys which are part of an integrated system so what adversely affects them, affects every other organ and system. 

Every drug will react in sometimes impossible to predict ways with the individual's metabolism at a particular point, and may interact with other chemicals, including those to which the individual is exposed in the wider environment.

We live in a world that is saturated with a vast array of chemicals – it is estimated that Americans are exposed to around 80,000 in their immediate environment. 

In isolation, any one of those chemical's effects on any given individual at any given point in their life are hard to predict; in combination, it is a convoluted nightmare. 

We should all be doing everything we can to rid ourselves and the planet of these pollutants – and medical professionals should be doing everything they can not to add to the burden we all carry. 

Instead, they are increasing not just the prescription of drugs – too often palliatively and prophylactically – but the use of unnecessary surgeries which always involve the administration of highly toxic drugs at a point when the body, due to the surgery, is at a low ebb.

Modern medicine has a side to it that is ugly and indefensible – the vast growth of commercialised appearance medicine with its cynical, profit-centred preparedness to cater to every whim, to feed off people's unhappiness and insecurity.

When the use of drugs and surgeries is essential to save life or to reduce or remove extreme suffering, there should be no moral dilemmas. Such situations should sit at the very top of the medical triaging process but all too often they don't. People suffer and die even when their situation objectively warrants them being the highest priority; and they suffer and die because they are poor, do not have insurance, and because so much of the available human, drug and technological resources are now diverted into the lucrative branches of what has become a medical-industrial complex.

The beating heart of that complex is not humanitarianism and medical ethics but the pursuit of profit and professional prestige.

Care to argue with that?

A Counter Analogy

I keep seeing analogies like this: "Am I the only one who thinks "what happened in (sic) Oct 7 is the inevitable result of the deprivation of being colonized" sounds an awful lot like "what did she think would happen going out dressed like that?"

They are so wrong, it’s hard to know where to start debunking them. So, to save my poor brain, here’s a counter-analogy.

 

A man, who claims to be homeless, is billeted in a house owned by a widow woman. 

 

She is not happy about the arrangement but her objections are ignored by the authorities.

 

After some time of co-habitation, and with the support of some very influential people, the man claims he has a legal and a moral right to ownership of half the house. 

 

The courts agree. 

 

The woman is angry and upset but none of her legal appeals are heard.

 

Emboldened by this, the man uses his greater strength and aggressiveness to take over even more of the house. Eventually he confines the woman and her children to a much smaller, colder part of the house, which he reserves the right to enter, and take stuff from. 

 

He also begins to physically discipline the children who both resent his presence and his treatment of their mother.

 

When the woman protests further, he threatens her with violence.

 

A neighbour tries to intervene on her behalf but he is badly beaten, and as the man claims self-defence in the context of a home-invasion, no action is taken against him. 

 

The woman tries again to argue in court that the house is hers, and the man should leave. 

 

He counters by saying she is barely competent to manage her own affairs, and that he has well-established legal and moral rights. 

 

The court orders her to continue to share the house with him.

 

The man now feels he can do what he wants, and he not only prevents the woman and her children from entering his parts of the house without permission, he requires them to get his permission to leave the house to go to work or to school. 

 

Eventually the woman loses her job and becomes reliant on welfare. Her children begin to truant and misbehave, and she is declared to be an unfit parent.

 

The man tells everyone who will listen that he has to take charge of the house and her as she is incapable of managing her own affairs. He claims both the legal right and the moral duty to take any and all steps necessary to control her and her unruly brood, in order to protect himself, his wider community, and what is now legally his.

 

As he has a very loud voice and a confident manner, and he persistently references his prior victimhood as a displaced person, he persuades many people that he is completely in the right.

 

In their increasing anger and desperation, the woman and her children begin to act as he has painted them, and one day, one of the children throws a stone at the man. 

 

When the man beats her child, the mother hits him. 

 

It is not a hard blow, except to his pride. In retaliation, he takes full control of their lives. He takes the woman’s welfare cheques; he restricts even further where she and her children can go in the house, and he tracks their every move outside of it. 

 

He intensifies his public depiction of them as feral or insane, as violent and aggressive – a danger, not just to him, but to the wider community. Any acts of resistance from them are depicted as a threat to him and to others.

 

Then, he invites relatives of his to move into the house, and they demand the use of the woman’s remaining rooms. 

 

They go into the rooms, steal what they want and throw the rest out of the window. They change the locks and force the woman and her children to sleep in a garden shed. 

 

Not content with eviction, they mock the women and her children daily, even encouraging their own children to do the same – saying the shed is a fit place for such crazy, lazy, incompetent people.

 

One day, the woman snaps. She sneaks into the house through an open window and stabs the man in the crotch while he is asleep. 

 

Her aim is symbolic; she is not trying to kill, but to emasculate. 

 

The man is not badly injured, and his retaliation is swift and terrible. First, he beats the woman viciously, then he destroys the garden shed and all her remaining belongings and flings her and her children out onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their back. 

 

When some people protest his actions and try to help the evicted family, the man declares them to be abetting criminals.

 

Anyone who defends the woman is deemed to be siding with a crazy, violent, man-hating bitch who, by biting the hand that fed and housed her and her spawn, deserves all she gets, and more. 

So angry do some of the people become, they chase the woman and her children out of the neighbourhood.

 

As the family flees, the anger at the incomprehensible injustice of it all grows in their hearts and minds until they can neither see nor hear anything except calls for vengeance.

 

 

 

 

More On The Chains That Bind Us

Where and when they can, those who rule us prefer the use of ideological fetters over the sword. If they can persuade us that our economic and social chains are desirable fashion accessories which we should purchase from them and don willingly, so much the better. 

 

Capitalism is nothing if not adept at turning any threats to its existence or its profits, into money-making opportunities.

 

The sword is still there of course, often hiding inside a ceremonial scabbard, but it is wielded frequently enough against external and internal “enemies” to remind the masses of the existence of the powerful coercive apparatuses of the state, and who really controls them.

 

One of Neoliberal capitalism’s greatest victories was its destruction or weakening of any and all collectives that argue for a different social order, especially those which threaten its profit and its entrenched power. 

Up there with it, in terms of strategic importance, is having successfully lured a critical mass of left wingers into the intellectual and political shallows where they don’t have to learn how to survive in rough, cold seas, or be strong enough to swim against the current.

 

These warm shallows provide a false sense of security, and never more so than now when a tsunami of interconnected social and ecological issues is likely to drown many of us, or dash us onto the rocks. 

 

From global warming and resultant climate disequilibrium, to accelerating species extinctions, and mass plastics and chemical pollution … the interacting states of global disequilibrium have the potential to tip into whole system chaos. 

 

The possibility of a fusion of disastrous androgenic outcomes is a terrifying reality that has to be kept well-hidden, or social disequilibrium may rapidly worsen and tip into social chaos. 

 

The obfuscation and camouflaging of these realities is ordered by those whose manicured hands are on the system's controls but it is carried by the various strata of the coordinator class – the system managers who work to hide the deep fissures in the economic foundation, and disguise the various forms of rot that have spread throughout the superstructure. 

 

They continue to refine the well-tested tactics of distract, divert, divide and defame. 

1. Create and amplify social issues which distract and divert people away from the gross inequalities and the rapidly accelerating unsustainable nature of the current socio-economic system.

2. Foment divisions in, or forcibly break up any and all collectives that aim to change the system. 

3. By various forms of defamation, destroy the credibility of those who draw aside the ideological veils, especially those who call for mass collective action for immediate, structural change.

 

Apropos of this, I read a tweet from a person whose analysis of many issues, I rate highly. She was targeting those who focus on “shitting on trans people” or “shrieking about pronouns.” 

Her choice of words suggests she is focusing her anger more, possibly exclusively, on those who are narrowly focussed on opposing the current transgender orthodoxy than on those who are narrowly focussed on supporting it.

The interface between sex based, and gender identity based rights, has become a battlefield.

 

I despair when I see the principled, materialist stand that has been taken by left wing feminists being defamed by association with the religious and secular right's co-option of some of the issues. I also despair when I see people being sucked by the right into a literal hatred and fear of gender non-conforming others. 

However, I am not going to easily forgive all those leftish-liberals who flipped into witch-hunting mode so rapidly and so reflexively, there can be no doubt they harboured a pre-existing, deep-seated resentment of dissenting women.

 

Some of them called those dissenting women, “Nazis”, and refused to engage in good faith discussion. Cowardly or lazy others obediently followed suit, and with an unprecedented speed and fervour, the infantile equation of “TERF=Nazi” was accepted as left-wing political gospel.

 

It was a highly infectious ideological contagion that spread rapidly among those with a compromised socio-political immune system.

 

When various elements of the religious and secular right predictably leapt onto the gender critical bandwagon, grabbed the controls and steered it sharply rightward, the whited sepulchres of the liberal left pompously declared that to be proof they had been correct.

 

Even though the transgender orthodoxy has now lurched into the realms of self-parody, there is still a mass of largely reflexive support among leftish liberals for it. 

 

That support invariably takes the form of attacking selected women, and in my view, most of  those who indulge in it deserve as much of a smack as the other extreme. 

 

In a natural and social world at imminent risk of tipping very rapidly from disequilibrium into chaos, the gender identity issue was a master class in the use of division, distraction, diversion, and defamation.

The political left should at least be asking why and how this ideology, and the forms of praxis which flowed from it, morphed so rapidly into a powerful orthodoxy that was embraced enthusiastically by the corporate world, and by much of corporate capitalism’s compliant politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats.

We need to ask, who benefits from: 

- reducing people to isolated individuals, focussed on what they believe are their personal, and these days, bespoke “gender identity”, which effectively privileges the subjective, gendered “self” over the material, sexed body?

- worsening the conditions in which large numbers of people, especially the young, are profoundly alienated, in the sense of being socially isolated and estranged?

- replacing natural, human connection and community with the chimera of virtual or cyber-communities centred around a shared sense of individual self?

- pushing the ideal of self-improvement, of aspiring to be the best possible version of one’s self while forcing many into a struggle simply for survival? 

- dangling the false promise of appearance enhancement via various surgical procedures and chemical potions, and by so doing, creating arguably the most medically monitored and chemically corralled population in human history?

It’s obvious the capitalist system doesn’t care about the wellbeing of any of the people who have been captured by gender identity ideology, so the motive has to lie elsewhere – in the fact that it’s profitable, and currently, it is politically propitious.

We cannot get a grip on the rapid drive to provide gender affirming surgery and synthetic hormone treatments unless we locate it in the burgeoning medical-industrial complex, at the heart of which are the world’s giant chemical-pharmaceutical conglomerates. 

Gender affirming protocols could not exist without the precondition of the global trend towards medicine for profit, at its most starkly venal in the field of appearance medicine.

 

There couldn’t be all this appearance-related surgery without the Five As of modern, chemical-based medicine: anaesthetics, analgesics, antiseptics, antibiotics, & anti-inflammatories.

 

Almost every pill and potion that props up the entire medical system is produced, not for philanthropic or humanitarian reasons, but for profit, and crouching behind that vast mountain of profit, is the spectre of power.

 

For the medical-industrial complex, the gender identity market is, and will always be fairly niche – although capitalism does like the predictability of long term, captive markets, and surgically or chemically neutering people at a young age makes them dependent on synthetic hormone replacements and other treatments for many decades.  

 

The profit motive is real but I have always been, and remain of the opinion that gender identity ideology’s main utility to corporate capitalism, is its diversionary and divisive potential.

 

Everything points to the fact that if the threat–opportunity scale tilts, eg., if an ultra-conservative and far-right backlash gains sufficient momentum and starts to outweigh current market and social control advantages, gender identity ideology and all its various forms of praxis will be abandoned in a heartbeat. 

 

Surely most of us know, the same commercial, political, media, and academic forces that gave the gender identity orthodoxy so much credibility, so quickly, will be used to call it into disrepute and make it disappear just as rapidly.

 

The concern, for all people of good will, should be whether those who have been physically and/or ideologically captured by the current transgender orthodoxy will be sacrificed, and how wide the net of reaction will be flung.

 

The question then will be, where will you stand?

 

 

Ten Annoying Things

Someone asked me what ten things annoy me most about the current centring of gender identity, and the demand for the codification of gender self-identification, (GSI) which has proved to be the catalyst for a multi-faceted and growing opposition. 

Initially, it was socialist and radical feminists who asked that consideration be given to the implications – for women’s sex-based rights and expectations – of codified gender self-identification, i.e., the legal right to change the sex marker on all official records simply by statutory declaration. 

They were immediately attacked by liberals and some on the left, labelled as TERFs, and deemed to be “Nazi-adjacent”, among a plethora of other insults and threats. 

The later coat-tailing of the issues by ultra-conservatives and the political far right was an outcome that could and should have been predicted had the pro-GSI factions not been so busy congratulating themselves on how progressive and on the right side of history they were. 

 So, here’s my list, written in no particular order of importance, given it’s all inter-connected.

The DISTRACTION away from objectively far more important domestic and global issues arising from current states of natural and social disequilibrium, which have the capacity to tip into multi-system chaos far more rapidly than anyone can predict, let alone prevent. 

The DIVERSION of political energy, and the investment of the left’s dwindling supply of political capital in support for an essentially individualistic, and individualising ideology.

The FAILURE to contextualise that essential individualism in corporate capitalism’s on-going aim of neutralising any and all forms of collectivism that might hinder its pursuit of profit at any cost.

The SCHISMS that were opened in an already fragmented and weakened “left” within the old empires that created the shit in which the entire planet is suffocating, and whose populations are best placed to stop more from being produced, and to clean up what’s already here.

The STUPIDITY of the left in not anticipating the backlash to the attempt to privilege a subjective, often shifting, and individual sense of gendered identity over the material reality of dimorphic biological sex which is cemented into the very foundations of the belief systems and sense of self of most people, across cultures, and all of human social history.

The CUPIDITY of the various commercial promoters of gender identity ideology and praxis, most especially those in the medical-industrial complex’s burgeoning realm of medicine for profit, with its absolute subservience to symptomatic and pharmacological/surgical paradigms. 

The CYNICISM of the various strata of system managers and coordinators, from politicians to pundits, in promoting an ideology which, if the ultra-conservative and far-right backlash really takes off, will leave swathes of vulnerable people directly in the firing line.

The IRRESPONSIBILITY of promoting a movement that claims to be in support of the most at-risk, marginalised, vulnerable of people, but which has the effect of making that population among the most surveilled and medically dependent sector of all.

The COWARDICE of all those who had concerns but who sat and watched as principled people, mainly feminists, were subjected to witch-hunts in an attempt to silence them and close down any debate.

The OPPORTUNISM, retributiveness, and win at any cost mindset of the various right wing coat-tailers of the original gender critical movement.