The news item serving as 2016’s identity politics casus belli is the outrage caused by plans by Mississippi and North Carolina legislators to insist that members of the transgender community use toilets which accord with the gender recorded on their birth certificates. This has led to a number of wrinkly rockers cancelling concerts in the offending states (probably a relief to everyone who was wondering how the hell they'd wound up with tickets to a Ringo Starr gig). A news report yesterday featuring a transgender American teenager made me wonder just how vigorously the BBC had conducted its campaign for transgenderism since the start of this year. I decided to repeat last year’s experiment. Even discounting direct reports of events in the American South, it’s clear that the campaign has now really taken off. Here’s a selection of BBC news and programme headlines since the start of the year:
Anthony Isaacs: Transgender Jesus
Swansea Sparkle: A Transgender Story
Newsbeat Documentaries: Transgender: Back to Jamaica
Miss Transgender: Britain's New Beauty Queens
Single-sex schools 'must adapt for transgender pupils'
The Health Show with Louisa Peacock and Nana Akua: Cold Allergy And Help For Transgender People
Mapping safe toilets for transgender Americans
China human rights: Trailblazing in the LGBT community [transgender man claims unfair dismissal]
Viewpoint: Why bathrooms matter to trans rights
The Inquiry: Do We Have Enough Genders?
Nicola Sturgeon makes gender recognition pledge
Transgender Action Plan to tackle barriers to equality
The Arts Show: Marie-Louise Muir is joined by transgender author Liam Klenk
Eye on Wales: Transgender Stories
Vietnamese transgender people celebrate win
'The first surgical procedure is key moment in a trans male's life'
Transgender woman crowdfunding for £20,000 treatment
Free Madrid metro passes for transgender people
Transgender baptisms offered at Greater Manchester church
Ireland leads the way on transgender rights legislation
'Contorted' route to get transgender help in Wales
Brighton College scraps uniform code for transgender pupils
and my favourite:
Transgender moths could save your clothes
….and on and on and on. We’ve recently entered Phase 3 of the five-part left-liberal, cultural Marxist media mind-bending process - the “Acceptance” phase.
Phase 1 - “Priming” - involves increasingly dropping a controversial subject (mass immigration, gay marriage, transvestism, assisted suicide etc.) into the national consciousness so that we no longer automatically shudder, laugh, groan, roll our eyes or fall into a deep sleep whenever it’s mentioned.
Phase 2 - “Normalisation” - involves a barrage of positive, feelgood stories, news items and programmes about the subject, designed to make us accept it as a perfectly normal part of life.
Phase 3 - “Acceptance” - is when anyone who dares to raise concerns about the concept is treated as if they’re part of a tiny, pathetic, narrow-minded, emotionally-retarded, reactionary minority standing in the way of Progress.
Phase 4 - the “Sanctification” - means it’s no longer enough to accept transgenderism, gay marriage, assisted suicide etc: you must constantly and loudly signal your belief that those who have undergone same-sex marriage or a sex-change operation or have decided to opt for assisted suicide are morally superior to the rest of us.
Phase 5 - “Coercion” - involves the punishment of “deniers” through ostracism, job loss, and, in extreme instances, imprisonment.
The fact that we’re currently well into Phase 3 - “Acceptance” - is evident from the self-righteous outrage which greeted Germaine Greer’s insistence that a man doesn’t become a woman simply by having his genitalia surgically removed (for once, I find myself in agreement with the old trout). Since then, activists have accused Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard of being transphobic for supporting free speech in universities (what were they thinking?). When such former darlings of the Liberal Left find themselves publicly shamed for stating the bleeding obvious, you know that the Sanctification phase is about to kick off.
I suspect most of us would accept that there are cases where Nature has “got it wrong” and sex-change surgery might indeed be appropriate. But I also sense a widespread suspicion that in many instances the desire to change one’s gender because of a feeling that one has been born “in the wrong body” may be a symptom of mental illness. But even if we’re dealing with what is mainly a psychiatric problem (which, after all, wouldn’t make it any less of a problem), just how vast is Britain’s transgender community? Despite the recent tsunami of publicity, figures are hard to come by. A report by the Gender Identity Research and Education Society in 2011 estimated that around 650,000 people in the UK “experience some degree of gender nonconformity”. But, of course, that’s utterly meaningless. Let’s get down to the real nitty-gritty - in how many cases are those feelings sufficiently pronounced to make the professed gender nonconformist undergo the expense and discomfort of an operation? The most recent official government figures came from the Interdepartmental Working Group on Transsexual People in 2000, which estimated that there were 1,300-2,000 male-to-female and 250-400 female-to-male transsexuals in the UK. All this bloody fuss for a paltry maximum of 2,500 “gender dysphorics”? Pah!
I suspect the paucity of genuine, real-life transsexuals will soon see the cultural Marxists moving on to another spurious cause with which to épater la bourgeoisie - trans-species marriage or an insistence on devoting an episode of Songs of Praise to Satanists or whatever. Morally-deranged creeps began "priming" us to accept paedophilia as normal in the 1970s, but met their Waterloo on that particular issue. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually returned to the battlefield, probably just after the BBC has introduced quotas for transgender staff (for all I know, they may already have done so).
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