Captain's Log, 2nd January, 2025

(NSFB - Not Safe for Breakfast)

It’s the first post of 2025 and it’s time to admit my childhood trauma. I cannot now remember what age I was, but I suspect early teens.

It was a normal morning and, as you do, I needed to sit down on the porcelain. Unfortunately my older brother was the occupant of our sole bathroom. Thankfully, he didn’t take too long and I rushed in after him.

And there it was.

Smirking at me, daring me to “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” was a Lovecraftian horror, a discovery previously unknown to science; Turdicus Maximus. I don’t care what it says in the biology textbooks, but such an object cannot possibly be produced by anything human.

What was I to do? For one thing there was no way in Hell I was going to add to it, besides which I genuinely feared for my life should I actually sit down on the throne. The mere feeble flushing action invented by mankind was not sufficient. Would I have to run screaming to Mum and get her to summon the men in hazmat suits with chainsaws? I doubted even they would work. Quantities of industrial-strength bleach sufficient to dissolve entire municipalities would probably have just given the ghastly thing an even more repulsive sheen.

I don’t know how the horror story ended - all I can now remember is the thing. And its smirk.

Our bowel movements are perhaps our first real introduction to biological essentialism. It’s not something we often talk about in polite society, and let’s face it, when it comes to our porcelain productions, none of us comes up smelling of roses.

If, like me, there were no sisters in the house and you’ve watched too many movies, you’ll probably have started out with something of an unrealistic and overly-romantic view on relationships. That first time you actually live with one of those mythical creatures of fabulous beauty and endless enchantment, the spell will be broken.

“Princess Aurora. Angel of the Dales. Flower of the North. What in God’s name is that?” you’ll say as your hair melts onto your scalp and your nose begins to dissolve in the noxious fumes.

There are certain features of our biology we cannot escape from.

You’re vaguely aware as one of those male things that we are not worthy. Girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. They are graceful elegant creatures who move through the world like one of Tolkien’s elves. Us men, on the other hand, are like a sack of potatoes of vaguely humanoid form. And we fart and pick our noses.

It is an endless mystery how the fairer sex find us attractive at all.

All stereotypical jocularity aside, our biology matters.

And gender ideology seems to be the Turdicus Maximus that is impossible to flush.

We’ve applied the bleach of logic and the chainsaws of rationality, and still the thing is there, smirking at us.

The whole ridiculous edifice of the thing we call ‘gender ideology’ rests on the flimsiest of foundations; it is entirely dependent on subjective feelings. There is no objective thing called gender. It is not real. It exists entirely in our heads and what it is, what it means, and how it is ‘expressed’, changes from person to person and from place to place, and also from time to time.

You can have two people who (more or less) behave in the same way, believe themselves to be subject to the same societal expectations, who are, nevertheless, said to be of different gender.

The whole thing ends up as a tortuous and incoherent mess. Phrases are routinely bandied about as if they actually mean something.

“I feel like a woman”. Do you? So do I, but we’re probably not quite on the same page with that one.

The obvious follow-up question seems not to occur to many whose ideological balls are gripped vice-like in this pernicious fantasy of gender. “And how does a woman feel?”

Or you could go nuclear and press the big red Walsh button and simply ask “what is a woman?”

These kinds of questions, unanswerable except without recourse to biology, represent merely first-hurdle type queries. This is before we even get into the whole nightmare world of things like gender-affirming ‘care’ and the macabre medicalisation associated with it.

By any reasonable assessment we ought to be dealing with Turdicus Minimus, something that can be flushed away and dispatched with the lightest of dribbles. It doesn’t take much at all to dismantle the whole structure with a few well-chosen questions. Yet there it is, still smirking away at us.

You can disbelieve reality all you like. But it doesn’t work like that - reality believes in us. Which is an anthropomorphism that expresses the fact that, sooner or later, reality will bite us, hard, on the ass. The piper always gets paid, eventually.

Even if the phrase “to feel like a woman” actually meant something it would still not imply that one is a woman simply by virtue of ‘feeling’ like one. I could feel like a Spartan warrior facing down the Persian hordes at Thermopylae and, who knows, I might even get those feelings right. Still doesn’t actually make me a Spartan warrior does it?

Gender, of all feelings we are said to have, is almost unique. It has been given legal force in many places. The only other feeling I know of that has been given such legal weight is the equally absurd and subjective notion of ‘hate’ as applied to speech in a legal setting. It’s another term that is impossible to properly define.

If a white child was adopted by a black family and grew up entirely within a culture surrounded by other black families and people they would never, ever, be considered to be actually black, would they? Yet they would have all of the typical thoughts, feelings and behaviours of their adoptive society and culture.

Gender, somehow, is said to be of different stuff than this. Those ‘feelings’ in this case are said to be sufficient to be determinative and someone who ‘felt’ they were another gender than one implied by their actual biology would be considered to actually be that other gender.

So what do we have to do to finally flush this execrable thing away?

There are signs that the smirk is being wiped off. The Cass review has dealt a serious body blow that’s left it reeling. Many people are now beginning to realise that the claim of scientific merit to the whole thing, like the ideology itself, is a fiction.

It’s very important to get this right - and not just because of the encouragement of an anti-science, anti-reality, view of the world that belief in the ideology entails - but because there are people directly caught up in this mess who might be thinking about irreversibly affecting their entire lives. Isn’t it only right, don’t we owe it to them, to be developing the most accurate and correct understanding we can?

How can we possibly hope to help those who might be confused or distressed or in need of mental health services if we routinely get our understanding of the root causes entirely wrong?