The Bigger Picture Conference: The Broken Chain of Trust with Dr Julia M...

Songbird (by Susan Frybort)

 

The Heart knows...

everything else is catching up.

 

So be patient with the struggle,

meld with the tide.

 

The truth isn't going anywhere

and no matter how strenuous,

change will draw us closer to it

according to our readiness,

based on our willingness.

 

When the songbird

sings into each morning,

 

all that's held inside

from its quiescent rest

 

wakes up

in time.

 

Breaking the Silence: The Reality of De-Transitioning

Civil Service Captured by Woke Ideology. Impartiality a Myth as "Culture...

Gender critical civil servants accused of NAZISM | The 'culture of fear'...

Psychological War on Women - Riley Gaines, Paula Scanlan, Holly LaVesser...

Faded Prestige (by Theodore Dalrymple)

 

The worst enemy of the West is itself, and the same goes for our democracy. We are so arrogantly certain of our survival and superiority, we in the Western democracies, that we never give a moment’s thought to how we appear to others. We don’t have to do so, we think, because of our inherent superiority and invincible strength. Why should we worry what Africans, for example, think of us?

Civilizations, it has often been said, do not collapse because of external enemies, but from internal decay. There is not a strict opposition between the two processes, however, for decay may make external enmity far more formidable than it might otherwise have been. And internal decay there certainly is.

Our unpreparedness to see ourselves as others see us is all the worse because the Western democracies, which thought themselves the model for the rest of the world to follow after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have lost their allure in much of the world, at the very time when they are losing financial and military power.

Try to imagine yourself an intelligent person in a non-Western country reading the story of Susanna Gibson, a candidate for election to the state legislature of Virginia. This lady, now 45, streamed herself having sex with her husband (a family lawyer, by the way), taking paid requests for further sexual activities. I will not repeat what she is reported to have said while performing: Suffice it to say that it was not refined.

Her excuse for her paid exhibitionism is that she was raising money for good causes; that is to say, the causes that she would vote for if elected. Thus, the end justified the means; and this argument seems to have convinced at least some voters. It is by no means certain that she will lose the election.

What would you, the intelligent person in a non-Western country, think? No doubt your own country is full of degradation and depravity, but nothing so frivolously decadent as this. You would think that a country in which such a thing could happen with impunity is worthy neither of respect nor emulation, and even if you would like to emigrate to it, your desire would be to improve your personal material conditions of life rather than join a society that you could admire for its underlying ethics or principles. As the Chinese would put it, the country in which such things happen has lost the mandate of heaven.

It is not only in the United States that the shamelessness of candidates besmirches the prestige of popular election as the legitimation of government. Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others, but the dishonest antics of candidates can make even the last proposition seem doubtful.

In France, a candidate for the French National Assembly, Juliette de Causans, has admitted that she used a photograph in her campaign that had been retouched—so grossly retouched, in fact, that when an untouched photograph of her was placed beside her campaign photograph, you would not have known that it was of the same person, and indeed could not possibly have been the same person. It turns out that several other candidates of her party, called Europe Ecology Equality, have done the same thing.

This is not quite as bad, perhaps, as what the pornographic candidate for the Virginian legislature did, and indeed I have on occasion allowed a publisher to do something vaguely similar by using an out-of-date photograph of myself in the publication of my work (not that I was ever so good-looking that it affected sales in the slightest). But it would satisfactorily demonstrate to any intelligent non-Western person how deep is the intellectual and moral rot of our democracy.

In the first place, the heavy retouching of the campaign photograph implies that a significant number of people—enough to make the difference between victory and defeat—vote on the basis of a photograph of the candidate. This does not suggest a well-informed electorate that takes its political choices very seriously. The electorate is more like the clientele of a supermarket that shops without a list of what it needs.

But perhaps the candidate who doctored her picture was mistaken; in reality the electorate takes no notice of such things as how the candidate allegedly looks. If this were the case, she (and those who did likewise) would have been insulting toward the very people whose vote she (and the others) solicited. No doubt in an age of publicity, sometimes known as information, a certain degree of superficiality is inevitable; but when politicians can so alter their photographs that they bear very little relation to reality, we are approaching Soviet levels of dishonesty, an era when people disappeared from past photographs as soon as they were disappeared from life. (I always laugh, incidentally, whenever I see Mr. Xi’s jet-black hair.)

When the unfortunate disparity between Ms. Causans’ real appearance and that in her election posters was exposed, she said, “It is my right as a candidate to have a beautiful photo.” Could anything better illustrate the egotism that is now current in the Western world?

Alas, having a beautiful photograph and being beautiful are not at all the same thing. Many beautiful photographs have been taken of ugly or even deformed people, but that is not the same as making the subjects themselves beautiful (though they may have beautiful characters). No one has a right to be considered beautiful, and no one has a right to deceive the public by what amounts to forgery.

Far more brutal things go on in dictatorships, of course. But intelligent non-Westerners, who often take it as a given that their government will be mendacious, corrupt, and tyrannical, but who have been read lessons in good government for years by Western intellectuals, will increasingly realize that Western democracies are giants with feet of clay, that our people and our institutions are rotten through and through. Our political life seems little more than a succession of scandal, corruption, mendaciousness, frivolity, and bitter disputation over nothing, while on every hand real and severe problems and dangers go unaddressed. We are therefore no longer to be looked up to, but rather down upon. Prestige is like the blush of a grape, and when it goes, it goes forever.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.

Faded Prestige - Taki's Magazine (takimag.com)

 

Theodore Dalrymple on Britain’s woke police and Oxford street chaos

'I don't believe in progress': Mary Harrington on how modern feminism ha...

Song for Autumn (by Mary Oliver)

 

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

 

The Madness of Crowds | Douglas Murray

Our Parasitic New Elite Despises the Working Class. Culture Wars & The D...

A London Lost: The Death of an English City. (Heresies: Ep. 12)

𝗕𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝘁𝘀 (by Lucille Clifton)

(at St. Mary's)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

 ~ Soren Kierkegaard

 

"I looked in temples, churches, and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart."

 ~ Rumi

 

Is 1984 Becoming a Reality? - George Orwell's Warning to the World

Orwell would loathe today’s left (by Lisa McKenzie)

He slammed the bourgeois intellectuals of his day for their intolerance and insularity. Sound familiar?

I recently re-read George Orwell’s 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, and I was taken by his description of the bourgeois, left-leaning intelligentsia of his time. They live in the shallowness of ideas, he writes, severed from the common culture and life experiences of the working class. They spend most of their time bickering with their chief enemy, the equally bourgeois ‘Blimps’ – archetypal red-faced imperialists. Though they despise each other, both the bourgeois intelligentsia and the Blimps are united in their mutual disdain for the working class.

Orwell, perhaps England’s greatest-ever political writer, notes how the bourgeois-left intelligentsia use a lot of words to intellectualise issues without understanding them. He saw that they frequently Blimp-baited without engaging with the real challenges people face. And he saw that they were only prepared to discuss issues raised in a few select publications – mainly the New Statesman and News Chronicle back then – which they also happened to edit, read and write for.

I was struck by how well this description of the bourgeois-left intelligentsia fits today’s middle-class lefties. This was brought home recently by the Twitter left’s response to the cancellation of Róisín Murphy, a wonderful, soulful singer who has been monstered in recent weeks for expressing her reservations about children being given puberty blockers. Venues promptly cancelled her gigs and her record company halted promotion for her new album, Hit Parade.

Suzanne Moore, a former Guardian writer now limited in where she can write because of her gender-critical views, asked why no music journalists were willing to defend Murphy. After all, this is an extremely talented musician being punished merely for expressing her views. The response from wealthy left-wingers was all too redolent of Orwell’s bourgeois lefties. Musician Billy Bragg, known for his fierce disagreements with gender-critical feminists, quickly responded on X (formerly Twitter). He said that music journalists don’t want to write for the Spectator, the Telegraph or the Daily Mail, share bylines with Richard Littlejohn, Nick Timothy and Douglas Murray, or ‘drift rightward… on a sea of spite’.

All the elements of Orwell’s bourgeois-left intelligentsia were on display in Bragg’s response to Moore’s question. There was the kneejerk baiting of one’s opponents, the refusal to discuss things beyond a few select middle-class publications like the Guardian, and the sheer out-of-touchness. After all, what Murphy said was hardly extremist. It’s an opinion a lot of people share – including leading NHS paediatricians.

This captures the state of the bourgeois left today. They have little more than Daily Mail-bashing to sustain their illusions of radicalism. They are incapable of engaging in the complex debates that actually concern the British public – and, yes, the question of giving puberty blockers to kids really does concern the public. Instead, today’s bourgeois left retreats into the narrow, intellectually conformist worlds of academia and publishing. And they try to shut down debates they feel uncomfortable with.

Those of us who want to engage in today’s difficult debates, including with people we don’t agree with, are banished to what the bourgeois left calls the ‘right-wing press’. This allows left-wingers to satisfy themselves that our arguments and our words can be ignored by association. We are no longer ‘legitimate’, our arguments can be discounted and our views kept out of their safe middle-class publications. These lefties feel no need to speak to a wider audience because, as they see it, that wider audience is simply wrong.

I think Orwell would see all this for what it is – a charade. And he would certainly know that England’s working classes are still the ones doing the hard work, and that any genuine radical politics lies in their hands. If the bourgeois leftists don’t want to dirty their hands by leaving their comfortable X / Twitter bubble, it is no great loss. They won’t be missed.

Dr Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.

Orwell would loathe today's left - spiked (spiked-online.com)

 

 

Free Speech, Comedy, and Woke Culture | Konstantin Kisin

Konstantin Kisin: Woke Culture HAS Gone Too Far - 7/8 | Oxford Union

DEI - Replace the E and Get Rid of the I and the Woke (by Bruce Hurwitz, P.h.D.)

 

Diversity, equity, inclusion. The mantra of every Human Resources Department in the land. They all appear to be very admirable goals to which to aspire. But are they? Let's consider each in its turn.

Diversity

Miriam-Webster tells us that diversity means "variety," or, for our purposes, "the inclusion of people of different races, cultures, etc. in a group or organization."

I take back nothing which I have written in the past. I believe that there should be diversity in the workplace. But not simply the hiring of people from "different races, cultures, etc.," but people who either reflect the demographics of a company's clientele or the community in which the business is located, whichever the owner feels is best.

Let's do a little of what is called ad absurdum, meaning taking an argument to an absurb extreme. It would be ridiculous for a company located in a predominantly Hispanic community in the United States, which only has clients in India, to only hire Scandinavians. It would make no sense and could not possibly be justified.

But consider this: If the company is located in an "Indian neighborhood," and has only, or predominantly, Indian employees, then the company reflects the ethnic makeup of both its clientele and location, but is not diversified unless we dig deeper. Gender immediately comes to mind. For sake of argument, let's assume that half the employees are female, and half are male. That may or may not reflect the actual demographics of the community, but let's give that one a pass.

Next you could consider religion. How many are Hindu? How many are Muslim? In case you don't know it, there are also Christian and even Jewish Indians (5,000 in total, if you're interested!). And, of course, we cannot forget sexual orientation and disability status. So, how much diversification is there and how much is needed to count as "diversified?" When you get into the minutia of demographics things can become quite complicated.

For example, President Biden likes diversification. His spokesperson is an African-American female homosexual. So he has checked three boxes. Can he claim all three or just one or two? (To use a Seinfeldism, can we have double- or triple-dipping?) And what about his Supreme Court nominee? He made it quite clear he would only consider Black women. But the woman he chose could not tell the Senate Judiciary Committee what a woman is! So, out of respect for the Justice, perhaps he gets credit for placing a "Black" on the Court, but we can't say for sure if she is actually a "she." Ridiculous? Moronic? Insane? Of course, but that is what this article is about, the insanity of the Woke culture.

Now the good Justice could have had a great retort. All she had to say to the Distinguished Senator who was questioning her was, "Senator, I may not be able to define it but I know one when I see one." Everyone would have laughed, and maybe she would not have looked so foolish. (The reference, in case you do not know it, is to Justice Potter Stewart's decision in the 1964 Jacobellis pornography case when he stated, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”)

Let's agree that we all understand and accept the need for demographic diversity reflecting either a company's location or clientele, if both are not possible, to the greatest extent practicable. Now that that is out of the way, let's consider another type of diversity, which I have previously raised, decision making.

People reach decisions differently. People learn differently. Some are visual. They have to read the information to be able to appreciate it. Others are auditory; they have to hear it. In my case, I can sit down and read a book of hundreds of pages but I cannot listen to the audio version of the same tome. I concentrate on, and analyze information through my eyes, not my ears. And, of course, there are those who can only learn by doing.

A company should have people who learn and process information differently. All have benefits. All are important.

Enough about diversity. Let's move on to the E in DEI.

Equity

Equity means "freedom from bias or favoritism." How can that possibly be translated into the workplace? "Bias" and "favoritism" are human traits. We all have them. We like one type of food more than another. We like one person more than another. It is ridiculous to assume or claim otherwise.

In the workplace, I have had colleagues with whom I enjoyed working and colleagues with whom I refused to work. It had nothing to do with who or what they were, just how professional or talented they were. I am certain that most of you reading this are nodding in agreement. So, let's replace "equity" with "equality."

Of course, people are not equal. Some are stronger, smarter, or more skilled at certain things than others. I have known people who can do complex computations in their heads. I can barely handle two plus two. There is no such thing as equality except in one regard. And that is the only "regard" that matters.

Everyone, regardless of who or what they are, should have an equal chance to prove themselves. I have advised bosses to give colleagues a chance. Some have surprised us. I would go so far as to say that they surprised themselves! Others crashed and burned and we had a mess to clean up. (For the record, no one was ever forced to take on an assignment; they wanted the assignments, the chance to prove themselves.) It is just that some could not handle the responsibility. But everyone was given support and an equal chance to succeed, and that is what "equality" should mean.

Which leaves us with the I in our three-letter acronym.

Inclusion

What does "inclusion" mean? Returning to our friends at Merriam-Webster, we learn that it means "the act or practice of including and accommodating people who have historically been excluded (as because of their race, gender, sexuality, or ability)."

In other words, there is no need for the "I" because, by definition, if you are diversified you are including persons who may have otherwise been excluded. The "I" is redundant. Therefore, I propose replacing it with an "L" for "liberty," meaning that the workplace is a safe place for everyone to express their opinion without fear of retaliation, retribution, attack or demonization (the antithesis of Wokeism). If one person does not like something someone else says, they should have to explain their objections and then the person can explain what they said, why they said it, and choose whether or not an apology is warranted. (That's how adults do it!) The problem is, as I understand it, the Woke are not forgiving and view apologies as a sign of weakness, and react accordingly. My advice, if you believe you did nothing wrong, has always, and will always be, to double down. In other words, the workplace should be free of Cancel Culture which, of course, is one of the pillars of Wokeism.

Everyone should agree that aiming for a diversified workforce where everyone has an equal chance to succeed, and is free to express their opinions, is noble. It should definitely not be a pipedream. The problem is that DEI is part of Wokeism which, as I have written previously, is a serious danger to business.

Wokeism

In the present context, Merriam-Webster does not even have a definition of "woke." I therefore turn to dictionary.com where we learn that there are two definitions: "having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities," and "Disparaging of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities."

Fancy words. Nice sounding words. No doubt, in many cases, said by people with the best of intensions. But then you get things like this, posted online, on Twitter, albeit subsequently taken down (which is why I don't show the person's name.)

This would be funny if it were not so dangerous. It happens in the workplace. Sort of like, wait for it, "Using Less Anesthesia in Surgeries Could Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Hospitals, Experts Suggest." The article, as you will see, was published in the Science Times, referring to research done at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, and published in Anesthesia Progress. The claim was repeated by a physician from Henry Ford, but what is curious is that the study seems to have been authored by a dentist and someone with a Master's degree in Public Health. (Click on the previous link and see for yourself.) Now according to an article on Fox, titled "Major medical group wipes study advocating doctors give less anesthesia to reduce carbon footprint," "The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) deleted an article from its website this week highlighting research and comments from a doctor who advocates for reducing anesthetic gas in surgery to combat climate change." Well, apparently, as you have already discovered, they did not do a very good job deleting it because I found it, albeit it just the homepage, elsewhere. I guess it is true that nothing ever really is deleted from the Internet. (Or maybe there were two articles?)

What's the saying? "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

When I was in university, one of my professors told us to consider Communism a religion. Winston Churchill spoke of "the Nazi religion." He also described Fascism as a religion, as well as Communism. I believe Wokeism is also a religion. On the micro level, it's target is employers. Internationally, the target is global warming or climate change. But what is it really?

Well, in a word, it's "crazy" and the target, as you are about to learn, is business. Now I don't have any children myself, although, as I understand it, according to the Woke, I can now get pregnant. I don't want to. And I certainly don't know how. But the climate kooks will like me because my not having children is apparently good for the planet. Perhaps they will build a statue in my honor. May I humbly suggest a bald eagle flying majestically through the heavens as I, to paraphrase the poet, "reach out my wing and touch the face of God?"

SOURCE: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/your-kids-bad-environment-leftist-environmentalists-would-have-us-believe?test=81c860ffa15ec5d685c6547209e184c2

SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html

But to be serious, every so often, as the adage goes, "someone says the quiet part out loud." And so Greta Thunberg, hero (I assume it is no longer acceptable to say "heroine") of the Woke, said the quiet part out loud. Climate change is about anti-capitalism. Sad thing is, that is a surprise to absolutely no one who really investigated climate change. Does it exist? Of course? Is the temperature rising? Yes. Is it an existential threat to humanity? Not quite.

If it were, would the deacons (no disrespect meant to real holders of the title) of the Church of Climate Change, when they recently had their annual pilgrimage to Davos, would they have flown in 1,000 private jets? (OK, the article says it was 1,040. Why quibble?) But let's not chastise these leaders of the Faith. After all, they helped what I assume are small businesswomen, engaged, at least in Switzerland, in a perfectly legal trade, albeit prostitution. Isn't it nice that rich men are helping women support themselves?

This appears to be accurate but I can't provide sources. It comes from a post on LinkedIn. (Thacker Pass is in Nevada.) That said, this is sourced:

It is sort of like one of the symbols of Wokeism, the electric vehicle. At least in the United States, and, no doubt, the percentage fluctuates by state and county, but, on average, sixty-one percent of electricity comes from fossil fuels. So much for clean energy. But don't chastise these people for being hypocrites. There's more. The minerals for the EV batteries, especially nickel and cobalt, come from African mines controlled by China, employing slave and child labor, or from Russia, which sells the minerals to China for refining, clearly neither being engaged in environmentally conscientious methods of mining or refining. (I wonder if any of the slaves or children are Woke?) In any case, however you slice it, EVs are very dirty. Now you may chastise.

But I digress, I asked if climate change is an existential threat to humanity? Well, you tell me.

Remember the hole in the ozone layer? That was real. Countries took it seriously. How do we know? The Montreal Protocols of 1987. Here's a random shot of it:

Notice the language? "Each Party shall ensure..." That means the signatories have to, must, no choice in the matter, do what they promise to do.

Now let's take a look at the Paris Convention of 2015 on Climate Change. Again, a random sampling:

Again we have "shall," but this time with the caveat "as appropriate." So the "shall" is really a "shell" as in "shell game." But then there is always Article 2:

So there it is, clear as day, the aim of "the global response to the threat of climate change" is "to eradicate poverty." The purpose of the Montreal Protocol was to eradicate the hole in the ozone layer, period. Paris, on the other hand, is all about, as Ms. Thunberg admitted, capitalism. (And, no doubt, a great excuse for world leaders and their spouses to do a little shopping in gay Paree!)

And that is why Wokeism is a threat to business. When you hire someone who is Woke, by definition they will disrupt the proper operations of your company by crying sexism, racism, or whatever "ism" is the "ism" of the day. If you will, you will be endangering the solvency of your business. You will have to spend time dealing with moronic proposals like changing surgical protocols! Even though they are moronic, a response will be required! If HR is spending all their time babysitting, their important work will not get done.

Now I am certain that some of you are thinking, or are about to, that I am engaging in conspiracy theories. Woke employees, taking jobs at companies that don't meet their standards, simply to destroy them from within is ridiculous. Well, keep reading.

Wokeism may not be akin to religion. It may be more serious than that. The better analogy may be to an addiction. Addicts never take responsibility for their actions; they always blame the substance. It's the alcohol. It's the drugs. They are the victim. Even if they rob, assault or murder they always play the victim card. It was the drugs/alcohol that made me do it! It wasn't my fault! The workplace equivalent goes like this: He's attacking me because I'm a woman. Because I'm a person of color. Because of my sexual orientation. Because of my religion. The idea that someone could condemn their actions or disagree with them for substantive reasons never enters their minds.

The Cure

The cure, I believe, is to have a very clear and detailed employee handbook and, an employment attorney on staff (perhaps in the role of HR director) or on retainer (depending on the size of the company) so that, at the first sign of Wokeism, it can be dealt with quickly, thoroughly, effectively and legally. You don't want a bunch of quislings and, to resurrect another ancient term, albeit in a different context, fellow-travelers, running around your office, whose loyalties are not to you and you alone, but to a movement. After all, it is far from farfetched to assume that people who would glue their hands to, and throw soup on masterpieces of art, would not hesitate to work for a company that is not up to their standards with the aim of sabotage. Don't forget what happened at Basecamp, Disney, Netflix, and Spotify. "But" you are saying, "those are big fish; I'm just a little minnow." The Woke don't discriminate, even a cafe owned by homosexuals was not Woke enough for the employees, so they shut it down! (Actually, because of the heading, I prefer this article, "Woke Coffee Shop Closes Down After Insane Demands From Even-More-Woke Employees.") In other words, it could happen to you. Wokeism, or Woke employees, could be crypto!

In addition to the employee handbook and attorney, you should also make it a habit of asking candidates questions concerning how they deal with rejection and then confirm their responses with past employers or supervisors (i.e., their references). It may not be legal to ask someone if they are Woke, especially if it is considered a religion or "creed" which, in some jurisdictions, is a protected class. (I am not an attorney, so I am not going to deal with the question of "reasonable accommodations" which Woke employees could request.)

If you really want to hear about the ridiculousness of Wokeism and climate change, there is no one better than Konstantin Kisin. Not because of the humor, but the conclusion. And he is right. We have to have faith in our young people, the future scientists and engineers who will solve these climate problems, as they always have.

And that is what is ironic about the Worshippers of Wokeism. They have no faith in humanity. All they know, all they preach, all they believe in, is victimhood. Who, in their right mind, wants employees who every time someone disagrees with them, play the victim card? They are so sensitive, which brings me to the cover photo of this article from the IT Department, not the Gender Studies Department or School of Social Work mind you, but the IT Department of Stanford University. To be fair, the backlash was so great they were apparently forced to reverse themselves. But you can still find remnants of it on the web. Read it. If it were not so pathetic it would be funny. But first, watch the video!

https://youtu.be/zJdqJu-6ZPo

And for the haters who wish to "cancel" me, I shall once again quote Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston's father: "I am only too happy to bear the brunt of a little temporary effervescence and to be the scapegoat on which doomed mediocrities may lay the burden of their exposed incapacity..."

DEI - Replace the E and Get Rid of the I and the Woke (linkedin.com)

The desperate plight of trans widows (by Julie Bindel)

 An Indian filmmaker risks everything to tell women's stories

“Terrible things are happening to women and girls across my country… and the media doesn’t care. It’s only interested in the trans issue.”

Vaishnavi Sundar, an Indian feminist filmmaker, has long been furious at the way women and girls are treated in India. Not only do many of them live in fear of rape and sexual assault, but there is still a staggering gender disparity when it comes to education and workplace equality. This, combined with honour killings; abusive menstruation huts; child marriage and the dowry system, leaves many women longing for a way out.

When Sundar set up her charity Women Making Films (WMF) in 2015, in response to widespread sexism from male film technicians, she was celebrated as a darling of the liberal Indian elite. “Years before Hollywood paid attention to this issue, I encouraged women to work with other female filmmakers and technicians,” she tells me. Yet in 2020 she became a pariah in the film world for a series of tweets questioning gender identity. One of those was: “There are no identities. There is only sex. Male and female.”

She was swiftly punished for her defiance. The film she had spent three years making, But What Was She Wearing? — which is about sexual harassment towards Indian women in the workplace — was pulled just before its screening in New York in February 2020 because the Polis Project had deemed it transphobic. “To block a screening of a film about an urgent topic that affects women across all social strata in society is obscene,” Sundar says. “And all because I say sex is real, and men in women-only spaces can pose a danger to women.”

Since then, Sundar has been ghosted by several liberal media outlets that once asked her to write. “Friends have completely abandoned me; film friends who used to collaborate with me have all stopped responding to my messages. Screenings of my films that used to happen regularly have all been called off even when the film is not about the transgender issue.”

With the well of donors drying up, Sundar began to crowdfund her work. By January 2021, she had raised enough to write and direct a four-part documentary series called Dysphoric: Fleeing Womanhood Like a House on Fire, which interviewed women who regretted transitioning. It was then that she began to see the spread of gender ideology in India as part of a wider international context, with a universal language and terminology. “I learnt that it is just as pervasive in India as it is in the rest of the world, maybe India was just a few years behind,” she says. “I wanted to shine a light on what’s going on in Anglo-Saxon countries and consider how this might impact developing countries in about five or six years.”

It was while working on Dysphoric, that Sundar started wondering about the suffering experienced by the families of trans women. “I was starting to wonder what it feels like for a wife when their husband announces that they are going to live as a woman, and they are just expected to affirm it.” It was then the idea for her latest documentary, Behind the Looking Glass, was born. The pioneering film tells the story of 18 “trans widows” from Europe, Asia, and America whose male partners transitioned and left misery in their wake. Eight of these women have to remain anonymous because of potential danger from ex-partners. As one interviewee says: “This is the untold story no one wants to hear.”

The story is one of humiliation and sexual abuse. What unites all these women is the sense that the person they had married had disappeared, and been replaced with a totally different individual, with a new name. Some women in the film speak of being pressurised into validating their husband’s “womanhood” and being told they were in a “lesbian relationship”. Then there are accounts of the horror of discovering a male partner dressed in female underwear, and of husbands going outside dressed in “pornified” feminine frippery. “These men often force their wives into unspeakable pornified sexual violence”, says Vaishnavi.

There are notably no Indian trans widows interviewed in the film — but this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. (Instead, the film conveys their predicament through images and voiceovers.) “The regions in India where women experience the life of a trans widow are mostly rural,” explains Sundar. “‘Kothis’ — intact males who live a double life, one with family, children and a home, and the other with a cross-dressing fetish, where they may or may not prostitute themselves — are largely prevalent in rural India.” This means it is more difficult for trans widows to speak publicly about their ordeals for fear of shame and ostracisation. It is also harder for them to get a divorce, as it is considered a mark of shame in rural communities.

Many of the women whom Sundar interviewed feel extremely isolated. Their friends don’t dare to say, “That’s horrible, you should just leave”, because the cost — in terms of social capital — is too high. Instead, they have to affirm the husband’s choice and say: “Your husband is stunning and brave — why don’t you just cooperate and become a lesbian now?”

The overwhelming majority of stories from the widows describe husbands enjoying the act of “wearing a woman”, says Sundar. In other words, they are deriving some kind of sexual pleasure from dressing up as women. But the women she has spoken to are no longer willing to keep up the facade of a happy, progressive married life; they are saying, “No, my husband is not stunning and brave.”

Sundar is also interested in the tragic fate of their children. Some are being forced to call their father “mother”; others have experienced being “breastfed” by them. One woman talks about the pleasure her husband takes in “passing” when he is out and about dressed as a woman and posing as a mother. Sundar believes that what excites these men is the idea of having a child and of “being a lesbian mother” — rather than the child itself. The child is simply an accessory to help realise their fantasy.

Not only has the Indian legal system failed to stop violence against women, but the entire apparatus, along with much of Indian society, appears to have capitulated to trans ideology. In February this year, a man was sentenced to seven years for raping a minor in 2016. But because he had transitioned following the rape, female pronouns were used to refer to him in court, and he was subsequently placed in a women’s prison. “Men are being given even more opportunities and excuses when it comes to rape and sexual assault,” says Sundar. Meanwhile, even though many women do not even have a functioning toilet in their homes, laws and policies are being introduced that allow men to enter the few public toilets available to women.

Meanwhile, in a country where gay and lesbian marriage is still illegal, “upper-class so-called feminists have become fixated with trans and non-binary marriage rights”. “They’ve removed the words ‘same-sex’ from this entire debate.”

The trans lobby’s latest tactic, according to Sundar, is to compare the battle for trans rights to the dismantling of the caste system in India — both being about “freeing individuals from the cage into which they were born”. She says that many trans activists have “very cleverly, actually strategically” bound up the issue with that of caste. Yet it takes quite a leap of logic to compare the two: “Caste oppression is the most sinister form of human discrimination ever.”

Dalit women, previously known as “untouchables”, are among the most maltreated women in the world. Not only are they part of India’s lowest class, but they are also considered inferior for their gender, and so are often raped, beaten and abused by men across all caste groups. And yet, Sundar tells me incredulously, there is now a group named “Dalit Trans Lives Matter”, which claims to be an even more oppressed group than Dalit women.

Sundar despairs at the ideological capture of the LGBT and feminist movements in India, which she would ideally like to be working alongside to achieve women’s liberation. Instead, so-called liberal feminists are busy defending pornography, the sex trade, and trans ideology rather than oppressed women. “These women dare to claim that the campaigns to end male violence towards women and girls are a ‘Western import’,” says Sundar. “These upper-class women ignore the fact that rape and domestic abuse is a fact of life for so many women, and that pole dancing is not going to liberate them.”

In this way, India’s struggle is not dissimilar to the West’s. “Women and girls are dying, are raped, on a daily basis,” says Sundar. “We are in a state of emergency and need a united front to even begin to solve the problem of male violence.” With so much work left to do to improve the lives of Indian women, she doesn’t think this is the moment for a feminist civil war.

The desperate plight of trans widows - UnHerd