Is it Possible to be Non-Binary?

Over the years I’ve sat on so many fences that I’m thinking of taking a plaster cast of the rear end and selling it to fencing manufacturers as some kind of template for their products.

I had, previously, prided myself on being able to see ‘both points of view’ and tried to be accommodating, but these days I’m kind of wondering whether this should have been more a source of shame than pride.

These days I seem to be continually asking myself the question - am I crazy or are they crazy?

I’m beginning to wonder whether the ‘battleground’ these days isn’t right vs left, or even authoritarianism vs liberalism, but whether it’s reality vs fantasy. The excellent Chris Bray has been zeroing in on this theme recently, as I’m sure have many others.

You may, or may not, recall the classic from about 3 years back when some teachers at an Oregon elementary school wrote an email in which they claimed rolling one’s eyes was “a harmful practice rooted in white supremacy”.

I’ve figured out what this about - ‘woke’ is a cunning ploy to make progress to net-zero. Just sit your typical sane person in front of CNN or BBC News and hook their eyes up to a generator. Hey presto, you can power a small city.

Lest you think this eye-rolling thing was just a couple of kooks being kooky in Oregon, in 2024 the UK Civil Service paid people to give a training course to their staff in which eye-rolling was used as a possible example of racism in action.

These ‘training’ consultants recommended you should nod your head instead - because the two gestures obviously mean the same thing. Every time someone rolls their eyes I interpret it as complete agreement with whatever I’m saying.

This is a minor, and amusing, example but already you can see the division in worldview here. Some people seem to live in a wholly different ‘reality’ to the rest of us. How do we cope with this? How can one even begin to think about compromise when worldviews are so diametrically opposed?

The answer is that you can’t.

It’s a question similar to that Israel has had to ask itself for the last 75 or so years. How does one find a peaceful solution with people who don’t want peace?

There is no ‘compromise’ to be had with someone who ‘believes’ trans women are women, for example. There is no objective or measurable sense in which a man could ever be a woman. This is different to the practical issue of what we, as a society, actually do about men who have male ideas about what being a woman is and who choose to live their lives according to this fantasy (or vice versa).

The reality is that men are men and women are women. What we do, as a society, about people who choose to ignore this reality is an entirely separate issue. But this separate societal determination (whatever it ends up being) has to be anchored in reality.

If the only way you can get someone to ‘agree’ with your ideas is to sell them a constructed fantasy version of reality then your ideas are not good ones. For one thing they violate the scientific method - which is a way of sifting out ideas not based in an anchored (measurable) reality. Bad ideas need the buttress of balderdash in order to make them ‘viable’.

But I guess the scientific method is (yet another from that endless list) an example of ‘white supremacy’ in action.

You may also recall the case of that black professor - Harvard or Yale not sure - who set out to prove the thesis that black people in the US were treated unfairly by the police because of their race. He found the opposite when it came to police killings and weak to moderate support for the thesis when it came to non-fatal violence. He was told not to publish his results by his colleagues, not because the results were wrong, but because the message was wrong. He published anyway and landed himself in a world of trouble.

The idea, the constructed reality (aka a fantasy), was more important to maintain whether or not it in any way accorded with actual honest-to-goodness reality.

We’ve seen it writ large recently with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. There are all sorts of ‘splits’ over this. One of them being whether Kirk was racist or not. But, honestly, are you going to take the opinion of whether he was a ‘racist’ or not from someone who is predisposed to believe eye-rolling is a white supremacist gesture?

The other big ‘split’ here is a question of symmetry. There are people actively trying to sell you a ‘reality’ (aka a fantasy) that violence on the ‘right’ is just as bad (if not worse) than violence on the ‘left’. They are trying to equate the decade or more of oppressive ‘cancel culture’ (in all its many and varied forms) with the drive to eradicate from the public square those who think Kirk “got what he deserved” and are openly in favour of political violence (but only towards those who possess the ‘wrong’ ideas - aka ‘the right’).

There have been plenty of examples of people being fired from their jobs for saying innocuous things like “All Lives Matter” which, of course is, duh, entirely equivalent to thinking you should assassinate those with whom you disagree!

A large portion of people will effectively ignore sustained and widespread left-coded violence (BLM, Teslas, etc) or try to draw some ‘comparison’ with the regrettable violence during the January 6th Inch Erection protest. One violent protest compared to how many? Hundreds? Thousands?

Or what about the source of that Jan 6th protest - the doubts over whether the 2020 US election was fair and above board? Not a chance it was in my view, I’m afraid. The Jan 6th protesters had a legitimate grievance. Even if fraud didn’t happen on a wide enough scale to skew the result (and I believe it did) the whole electoral process was chock full of security vulnerabilities whether they were indeed exploited or not. That’s a fundamental problem that needs addressing whether you believe the result of the 2020 election or not.

But the MSM, almost universally, tried to paint a very different picture. We even saw people claim the 2020 US election was the most ‘secure’ ever - which, as a former security professional once involved in designing aspects of secure voting schemes, was a claim that made me laugh out loud. It was so absurd; a fantasy.

The recent report claiming the UK ‘countryside’ is not welcoming to anyone other than pasty whitey is another case in point. I often walk round a local woodland near me and have noticed just how white supremacist the trees are - and as for the non-inclusivity of all of those footpaths - don’t even get me started.

Apparently the racist nature of the UK countryside can be tackled by “intersectional investment that addresses overlapping forms of disadvantage, with inclusion as a guiding principle”. Yes, someone actually wrote this. You won’t be surprised to learn that it was written by a bunch of academics at a university, of course.

I’m having difficulty typing this - the text on screen keeps rolling and rolling around. Damn my white supremacist eyes.

Everywhere you look, it seems, there’s this fundamental split between worldviews and I really do agree with the opinions, like those of Chris Bray, that it’s a question of those whose world view is anchored in reality vs those whose worldview is rooted in fantasy.

I don’t know how this can be ‘fixed’. I don’t think it can be in any meaningful way - at least not in the short term. I don’t think the processes and systems that worked well when most people’s views were more anchored in reality are now sufficient to properly address what’s happened and happening today.

Indeed, many, if not most, of our essential institutions have wrapped themselves up in this blanket of fantasy and we can see the result in the crazy policies and processes they enact on our behalf. Immigration? Sure - it’s a great thing - let’s increase it by 10,000% from where it was 20 years ago¹. And we’re told not to have any issue with an increase of that magnitude? That everything is just fine? Another fabricated ‘reality’ (aka as a fantasy). Everything is not fine with it.

Anyone remember this little constructed ‘reality’ (aka a fantasy) they forced upon us?

The whole covid ‘response’ was not anchored in reality. I’ve said it many times before, but I can’t think of anything the UK government got right on covid² - either in its actions or in its public ‘information’ about it. It was a fabricated ‘reality’ and look where it got us? Billions more in debt, people ruined, people dead - and all because of a fantasy. Now, I’m not one of those who goes along with the whole virus ‘hoax’ theory so I don’t mean fabricated in this sense, but the whole hysteria was whipped up from a fabricated sense of danger that wasn’t anchored in reality.

Here in the UK, the gormless tit known as two-tier Keir, our Prime Minister, has realized he’s perhaps the most insufferable turd that has ever been elected by the British people heading a government that is less popular than an anal fistula. So he’s been doing his usual thing and flip-flopping all over the place in response to the political winds.

His most recent was to make conciliatory noises to the hordes of Adolf Gammons we supposedly have in the UK and to grudgingly make a few nods to the problems caused by uncontrolled immigration. His new ‘big’ idea? Mandatory digital ID for everyone. He’s trying to get us to believe this is necessary as a tool to curb immigration. Yet another constructed reality (aka a fantasy). Digital ID’s are not a solution for people, but for governments. They are of no benefit to us, but a massive (and chilling) benefit to any government - particularly one as hostile to free speech as the one we have in the UK.

Governments and politicians are, we know, in the business of selling a fantasy. They’re not leaders but sales men and women. Any ‘manifestos’ they write are usually quite inventive works of fiction they use to try to persuade you to vote for them. We expect their product to be fantasy. We hope, usually in vain, that despite us knowing we’re being a bit conned they have some grasp on reality.

It’s more serious when a very significant section of a population loses its grip on reality. It’s even more serious when you let this bunch of fantasist freaks run the show. That’s precisely what we have been doing for more than a decade now. Trans, DEI, borders, CRT, decolonialism, genderwoo, and the rest have utterly captured almost all of our institutions - including the whole machinery of government.

Although the quote above, “intersectional investment that addresses overlapping forms of disadvantage, with inclusion as a guiding principle”, comes from a university, it could have come from almost anywhere. There are a set of ‘template’ phrases that get trotted out in every official institutional document. They’re all meaningless, designed to sound important, but they are in reality content-free drivel. Crushingly pretentious claptrap - and the fantasist freaks lap it up and go all gooey-eyed over it.

It is quite scary, to be honest, not to mention repulsively asinine. So many people seem to have an inability to see through any of it. They mistake vacuity for substance.

Our leaders, certainly in the UK, no longer talk in any intelligible way - they seem to be nothing more than a walking vast repository of platitude. And that’s all ‘woke’ ever seems to be - a heaving ocean of platitude that threatens to engulf the few small islands of sanity and reason we have left.

Dismantle this, dismantle that - oh, that stuff over there? Dismantle that too. And replace it with what? Justice and fairness and diversity and equity and inclusion and a mega-dose of kumbayahishness.

There’s a reason why ‘populist’ movements are gaining traction all over the place in Europe - and it’s not because people are becoming more ‘far-right’ or anything like that. They’re just fed up with years of absolutely mind-numbing bullshittery. Bullshit that has, unfortunately, had some very negative impacts on their societies.

Go try and talk to a wokeoid - you’ll be lucky if you can get beyond a couple of minutes before they do the whole drama queen thing and throw up their hands in horror at having to talk to a ‘bigot’.

They’ll cut you off faster than a teenager’s tits at some ‘gender affirming’ clinic.

This is why I wanted Trump to win so badly. Not because he’s some amazing orator or someone to emulate all that much. He’s a bit of a loose cannon, to be honest. However, he represented the best chance for the world - yes the world, not just the US - to start a necessary rollback of the years of woke drudgery and madness.

If Harris had won? I don’t even want to think about that - we’d have been unburdened by what has been all the way to Hell and back again. Remember before the election how various Democrats were making quite significant noises about how the First Amendment was a bit of a problem? Something that needed to be altered. Yeah - and now they’re all gung-ho for it via the Kimmel effect. Trump playing 4D chess again or just the usual from the “if we didn’t have double standards we wouldn’t have any standards at all” crowd?

To be honest I do think there’s an element of ‘double standard’ going on on ‘the right’ in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The Republicans have a window of opportunity in which to decimate their political opponents - a window that won’t stay open all that long now. Should they? Difficult one to answer. The ‘woke’ side have been employing these ‘cancellation’ tools and lawfare and the rest for over a decade now and now they’re wanting the other side to play ‘fair’? Hmmm.

Even though it’s illiberal - and I freely admit that - I think it would be better if this appalling ‘woke’ movement could be crushed - almost by whatever means necessary - by which I mean whatever legal means necessary. I just don’t think ‘societal sanity’ can be restored any more and re-anchored in reality without some fairly drastic measures. Playing at being nice and fair and ‘liberal’, in its classic sense, is like faith-healing when what’s needed is a scalpel.

The difference between Starmer and Trump is very stark (mind you, the difference between Trump and almost any other world leader is fairly stark, too). Trump rarely minces his words whereas Starmer is just one catastrophic mince-fest after another. When you have the leader of the UK, a country that is fast becoming an authoritarian hell-hole with free speech protections being eroded day by day, telling the president of the US that we ‘have’ free speech in the UK one can only look on in a kind of bewildered horror.

But this is the guy that recently ‘recognized’ that other fantasy, a Palestinian state.

We might hope for the much-vaunted “two-state solution” to, one day, be more than just the current fantasy it is, but that’s only going to happen when the Palestinians actually want peaceful co-existence with Israel which they currently mostly do not.

I just want us to climb out of our current mess - the deep holes we’ve dug ourselves - and go back to a world where reality matters. But it’s going to need a very long stepladder indeed. There are all sorts of almost insurmountable barriers in the way. One of those is our modern technology, particularly in the form of social media and over-reliance on mobiles. These are things we can’t roll back now - and they’re not always a bad thing. Like anything else there should be some kind of cost-benefit analysis applied - but governments are not so keen on doing those kinds of things properly these days.

Net zero costs and benefits? Who gives a fuck about those? Gotta get rid of the CO₂. Bad stuff, nasty nasty CO₂. What has CO₂ ever done for us, eh? Who cares if we head back to the Middle Ages? It would be worth it to demonstrate how virtuous I am and how much I care about the planet. Granny? Oh, fuck her - she can freeze to death, her Carbon footprint has been way too high anyway. But make sure she’s wearing a mask because we’ve got to protect her from covid.

Everywhere, it seems, people are battling monsters drawn straight from the pages of fantasy novels. We’ve had Patriarchus Rex and Intersectionalaurus as fine examples of the largely mythical beasts the radfems and ‘woke’ have been trying to slay. They are not, of course, entirely fictional beasts - but, like we had with covid, their importance and threat level has been somewhat over-exaggerated. It’s the over-exaggeration that propels them into fantasy land.

And remember how, at the height of covid, it was judged that ‘racism’ (whatever these pillocks conceived that to be) was judged to be more of a ‘public health crisis’ than covid itself. The deadliest disease to have ever befallen mankind (allegedly) took a back seat to the ‘importance’ of demonstrating your allegiance to St George of the Fentanyl and so we had the most mostly peaceful Summer of love and tolerance the world has ever seen.

Going to church? You bastard selfish killer. Going to some strip club? Those jiggly things will protect you better than any mask, Sir.

One of the most-heard phrases we saw online was “make it make sense”.

It’s the cry of people who want to live in a world of anchored reality. Not some non-binary fantasy world where reality itself lives on a ‘spectrum’.

1. In the UK net migration was at around the 5,000 mark as a yearly average at the turn of the millennium. Today it stands at nearly 500,000 as a yearly average - an increase of 10,000%

Pretending that immigration at this scale is not an issue is trying to get us to believe in a fantasy

2. OK - it’s my view there was a novel(ish) virus that did cause a disease - and they sort of got that right (they wildly overemphasized the ‘novel’ aspect though and massively, massively overstated the threat level). Other than that I’m struggling to think of anything else they did get right