…a spectre of gender dysphoria. Replace ‘gender dysphoria’ with ‘communism’ and this becomes a belated tribute to The Communist Manifesto, a document that inspires the current pandemic, if at a few removes.
Forget Covid. Don’t even think of flu. Tuberculosis, what tuberculosis? Gender dysphoria has become today’s answer to the Black Death, mercifully in scale only, not mortality.
The number of sufferers has increased by several orders of magnitude in a single generation, and it’s still growing at a dizzying pace. Governments are duty-bound to respond to the pandemic as decisively as most of them responded to Covid, though ideally without incarcerating the whole population and shutting down the economy.
Yesterday I wrote about Nicola Sturgeon’s noble effort that turned out to be her undoing. But the scalpel of sex-change surgery that fell out of Sturgeon’s fins… sorry, I mean fingers, was picked up by her Spanish counterparts.
Spain’s parliament has passed the Trans Law to allow anyone aged 16 or over to change sex without parental consent. It’s the same bill that forced Sturgeon to fib “I’m a human being” on her way out of politics.
To be fair, Spain has led the race from the beginning. Men identifying as women have been sent to women’s prisons since 2006 as a matter of course even without legislative approval. But the law turns a practice into an institution.
And of course Spain is one of the few countries that allow people to change sex on their identity card with a simple declaration. That’s like a bearded chap asking a Home Office clerk to change the ‘male’ in his passport to ‘female’ and receiving an obliging “Right you are, madam.”
Spanish media have seen how a similar bill ended Sturgeon’s career and identified the reason: the Scottish bill was too restrictive. It didn’t go far enough.
Clever people learn from silly people’s mistakes. Hence Spain’s Trans Law will also allow children aged 14 and 15 to change sex legally without medical evaluation, if with the minor inconvenience of having to get parental consent. Those aged 12 and 13 will lamentably still need judicial authorisation.
Correctly realising that this pandemic unfolds in close proximity to others, the same law also bans conversion therapy, imposes fines for attacks on LGBT people and allows lesbian couples to register children under both parents’ names. Olé!
Until now Spanish adults couldn’t change sex without a medical certificate of gender dysphoria and proof of hormonal treatments for two years. Minors needed a court’s permission. But then progress quickened its march.
Spain’s far-left government is justly proud. According to Equality Minister Irene Montero, “Spain is a country that can be proud today because it advances rights and becomes a better society. This law recognises the right of trans people to self-determine their gender identity, it depathologises trans people. Trans people are not sick people, they are just people.”
Quite. Look at transsexuals and you’ll instantly know there’s nothing wrong with them. Just ordinary folk, like the rest of us.
Even though the Trans Law indisputably makes Spain a better society, certainly by Marxist standards, it has run into some opposition.
A few members of the ruling coalition don’t think the law goes far enough – why do 12-year-olds have to seek judicial authorisation? What are they, chopped hígado? And what about children under 12? They are people too, you know. They have their rights.
Others are deeply concerned about women’s rights, including such basic ones as not getting raped by men in prisons, dressing rooms and public lavatories. Oh well, soldiers’ chances, I say.
Women are free not to use those facilities, prisons apart. But once they’ve made their free choice to go in, they have to accept the risk of running into a burly, well-endowed ‘woman’ with a five-o’clock shadow.
All those gasps were gagged by parliamentary whips with a ruthlessness typical of a nation whose favourite sport is watching livestock tortured and then killed. A socialist deputy PM was fined a large sum for abstaining. I dread to think what would have happened to her had she voted against.
The conservatives did say that the law treats “basic principles of human dignity… as a joke”. Nonetheless their only substantive objection is that other countries (presumably Scotland) have had to backtrack because they moved too fast. Making a mockery of “basic principles of human dignity” should have proceeded at a more leisurely pace.
This isn’t the first time Spain’s parliament redefined basic human dignity. In 2008 it passed a resolution enshrining full human rights of great apes including chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos.
The immediate inspiration came from Princeton professor of ‘bioethics’ Peter Singer, who founded the GAP project, a campaign for apes to receive full human rights. He espied that chimps and people are almost the same genetically, which had to mean they should be almost the same in every respect.
Singer himself displays the sexual power of his convictions by insisting that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.” Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.” I wonder what poor Mrs Singer has to say about that.
I referred to the immediate inspiration for the judiciary vandalism widely practised throughout the West, with Spain laying a strong claim to leadership. Yet the Marxist paraphrase in the title is there for a purpose.
The specific contents of Marx’s turgid notions have been shown for the graphomaniac bilge they are everywhere they’ve been tried in earnest. But epoch-making writings don’t succeed because they are intellectually irrefutable and empirically vindicated. They succeed because they tweak the right bits of the masses.
Every page of Marx’s oeuvre spouts subversive hatred of, well, everything. The West in general. Capitalism in particular. Religion, especially Christianity, that “opium for the people”. Monarchy. Republicanism. The idiocy of rural life. Jews. Slavs. Colonialism. And so forth, all the way down the list.
That hatred is Marx’s real legacy for the generations to come, his delayed-action cluster bombs, different parts of which have been going off ever since. Where they are planted doesn’t really matter. Anywhere will do nicely.
Bringing down all those hated institutions is the overall strategic task. Everything else is just tactics, and they vary depending on the situation.
It could be anti-nuke campaigns; various anti-war movements; current eco-zealotry; campaigns for the rights of women, assorted sexual perverts, transsexuals, apes; dismissing the whole of history as nothing but monstrous displays of racism and colonialism; shaping schools, universities and the media accordingly – it doesn’t really matter.
Whatever works towards the overall objective Marx established with his characteristic prolixity. Scratch a zealot, whatever his zealotry, and you’ll find a Marxist underneath.
Since the Marxist light shone on them from far back, reflecting and refracting along the way, many zealots may not even be aware of its original source. But it’s always there all right, shining through as bright as ever. And it’s Marxism that reigns in Spain.
If I were a male Russian living in Russia could I declare myself to be female?
It seems unlikely that such liberality would be available in a Communist state, or in Russia.
If I lived in Russia, I’d campaign for gay rights. Homosexuals and transes are routinely attacked in the streets there, which is encouraged by the government. But here, I wish we were a little less liberal. Actually, a lot less.
The dramatic increase in cases of gender dysphoria can be laid at the feet of (anti) social media, as I commented under “Sugar and Spice…” (January 29). What I find so vexing is the absolute lack of any logical on the part of the progressives pushing this agenda. While I am sure that some of them are sincere (with misguided compassion), their position cannot stand scrutiny.
For example, they claim: 1) there were always a high number of inflicted individuals, they were just scared to come forward; and 2) without acceptance, these individuals will commit suicide. That leads to the question, if there were so many confused folks in prior years, and anything less than total acceptance leads to suicide, then why has the suicide rate among teens gone up and not down? They cannot answer that, as their entire premise is false.