Our next Prime Minister in the UK will almost certainly be Sir Keir Starmer (the screenshot is from his recent interview with Andrew Marr - see below). A while back he told us all that women can have penises. He backtracked on that when he realized it wasn’t all that popular a position. One might say that with an eye on the polls he changed his mind about the poles.
He’s at it again. This time he goes for the men. Apparently we can have cervixes.
I’m not sure where mine is. It’s not in my ball sack because I’m sure I would have found it there by now. Must be somewhere else. Maybe somewhere near my prostate, but I’m not sure I want anyone to firkle around up there, however professional they are about it.
In a recent interview Starmer was asked the following question by Andrew Marr
(Marr) Is it transphobic to say that only women have a cervix?
His reply?
(Starmer) It is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.
So, there you have it.
Starmer’s new textbook, Biology for Woke Idiots, will be published next week.
This whole ‘debate’ is unremittingly tiresome and tedious being mostly about semantics and the abuse thereof.
There are only two sexes. It’s uncontroversial. It’s the biological reality because that’s what sexual reproduction is all about.
We can fart about with pointless semantic arguments surrounding various ‘definitions’ of sex as much as we like, but the actual reality is that there are only two (normal) developmental pathways for a human embryo; male or female. Which one of those paths it is is determined at conception.
And that’s all there is to it.
But here we have the next person to (ostensibly) lead our country telling us that men can have cervixes.
The entirety of this (deliberate) confusion is because it is believed (by some) that we each possess something called a gender, and that we have a gender identity.
I’m open-minded. As soon as someone can come up with a logically consistent and objective definition of gender I’ll be prepared to accept the objective existence of such a thing.
At the moment we’re at a place where individual A (female) can behave and dress ‘like a man’ but be considered to be a woman, but individual B (female) can do exactly the same stuff and be considered to be a man.
The only distinguishing feature between the two is their own subjective feeling about what they ‘are’.
Of course, the phrase “like a man” is rather questionable.
Getting right to the heart of the matter, as she so often does, Helen Joyce makes the important point that there’s literally nothing she can do that isn’t behaving like a woman, because she is a woman. Therefore, anything that she does is something that a woman can do and is part of the set of ‘women’s behaviours’.
How on earth have we managed to get to the point where the judgment about whether one is a man or woman is based on a subjective feeling and dependent on association with a set of stereotypical behaviours?
The ‘woke’ are experts at the manipulation of language. The whole insufferable PoMo crap might be crap, but it’s very dangerous crap. This deliberate subversion of meaning and language to achieve political ends is like a kind of linguistic terrorism.
Think about all of the words and phrases that have, mostly uncritically, entered our lexicon. White privilege. White guilt. Systemic racism. Rape culture. Cultural appropriation. Toxic masculinity. Non-binary. Gender and gender identity. Decolonization. Cis and trans. Pronouns. Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.
And the list goes on . . .
Speaking against any of these beliefs can land you in trouble. In another of their linguistic triumphs, the association of right wing with ‘evil’, you’d probably get described as being ‘far right’. In many cases, you can even be fired or disciplined for disagreement with the core belief system. You will face the Inquisition for your heretical stance.
You might be accused of causing ‘harm’ or ‘trauma’ or making people feel ‘unsafe’ - or any one of a number of vague accusations that exist in the woke lexicon. There is, of course, no observable and objective metric which can be applied - the mere claim is sufficient.
I genuinely hold no animosity to trans individuals whatsoever - at least not on the basis of their trans identification. They could still be trans and be total shitbags - just like the rest of us can be, trans or not.
I see no reason, if we judge the feelings of trans people to be important (and we probably should), that we can’t advocate for the classes men, women and trans. It might take a bit of re-jigging things and some financial outlay, but I see no reason why a 3rd class can’t become accepted as such.
The difficulties in women’s sports, for example, would be solved at a stroke if we accepted 2 trans categories (trans women and trans men).
Pretty much the entirety of the difficulties centres around the belief, the core component of the woke catechism, that trans women are women (and that trans men are men).
It’s weird where the sex binary, claimed by many to be “socially constructed”, is eschewed and yet the phrase trans women are women is a claim for membership of a binary.
This, really, is the core sticking point - this claim that if you feel yourself to be a woman you are a woman.
I focus on this side of the equation (rather than the issue of trans men) because most blokes don’t give a shit. We’re not the ones facing any erosion of our rights and privileges. We’re not losing medals, or worried about whether the thing doing our prostate exam used to be a woman. As long as we’re not in an alien spaceship, we’re fine.
Men can never be women, and vice versa, but we really do need to come to terms with the fact that there are humans who believe themselves to be the opposite sex.
We need to find a way to accommodate this without being forced to accept it. We need to be fair to trans people, but we need to be fair to women, too.
I doubt very much whether Sir(vix) Starmer will be able to achieve this. He’s very much of the enforcement mindset as we can see from his quote.
You will believe this shit whether you want to or not - at least on the surface (until we can find a way to ‘check your thinking’ on the matter).
It’s all really a battle between authoritarian shitbags and those of a more liberal bent (in the European sense).
We saw with covid just how quickly everything went all authoritarian on us. Our supposedly liberal values were only a thinly applied veneer, after all.
I think the best result in the UK election would be to have a hung parliament (but not in the sense Starmer means).
You have a real knack for humorous yet on-point columns. Too bad print media is dying, columns such as yours was a big part of what made the Sunday paper worth its price back in the day.
Since I know of real trans-cases (via the wife's former career) sometimes the genes and chromosomes and midichlorians and telemeres and whatnot get a little mixed up. But that is exceedingly rare, and neither inbreeding (like marrying your cousins for umpteen generations as some cultures do) nor environmental toxins nor radiation seems to affect the ratio; one poor woman my wife interviewed had been born with non-functioning testicles and a prostate located in her abdominal cavity.
She needed both hormonal supplement therapy and surgery to remove the offending bits, since their presence increased the risk of cancer by more than 50 times the average (if I remember it correctly, no guarantees).
But she was very much a she, didn't even grow the moustache typical of southern women after the first child.
Which is neither her nor there re: all things trans today, since it was a case of biology, aka White Supremacism. Isn't it funny (in the "funny in the head"-sense) how wokesters and Ye Ole Combat 18-goons seem to share a lot of political opinions?
By the by, Starmer's first name, Keir, has unclear origins:
One theory claims it as a celtic-irish word meaning "dark/black skinned". Which he obvious isn't, but maybe he identifies as it?
Other theory instead claims it is derived from an Old Norse word. Kjarr or kjaerr, modern spelling "kärr".
Which means bog, mire, fen, and swamp. Kind of fitting, no? Especially since the name Starmer is a hereditary nickname for someone who resembles a star, so:
Man-who-is-like-a-star-in-a-swamp.
Will his career resemble a Red Dwarf or a Black Hole?
Ah, but he did something even more frightening than admitting to believing the lies. He implied that the truth shouldn’t be spoken, and that to do so is immoral. Reality must be cancelled because the savvy bullies who thumb their nose at you behind teacher’s back have decided you mustn’t do that.