Prison leads the way

Following the High Court’s ruling, male criminals identifying as women are now put in women’s prisons. This upholds the sacred principles we are all told to live by.

That’ll teach you to use the right pronouns

Those who tell us to live by such principles are prepared to accept any ensuing sacrifice, provided someone else has to make it. In this case, the sacrifices may be dire.

Since female self-identification no longer has to involve penile amputation, the newly converted women, especially those of a violent disposition, often proceed to rape every woman they can get their hands on, sometime even including the female warders.

Never mind. Those well-hung libidinous girls are still classified as women, and prisoners who refuse to address them as such may extend their stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

The pronoun war has spilled over into jails. Calling a trans woman ‘he’ or ‘him’ now falls under the rubric of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”, similar to, say, brandishing a shiv.

An offender against pronoun rectitude will be assessed by an independent adjudicator who will decide whether the offence was malevolent or accidental. If it’s the former, extra time may be tagged on to the current sentence.

Like any other conflict, the pronoun war must have its casualties, and prisoners are the first line of defence to be cut down. However, wars have a tendency to escalate.

The first shots may be fired in prisons, but the logic of warfare will guarantee a full-blown cannonade on the out as well. Before long, anyone refusing to use the dictated pronouns will have his/her/its/their collar felt.

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If wrong pronouns are punishable by prison time, it’s only fair that the same law should apply to those who haven’t yet been incarcerated. We are all believers in equality, aren’t we? Of course we are.

‘Equality’ and ‘levelling’ figure so prominently in practically every political speech that it’s hard not to infer that such virtues supersede all others. If so, then prison provides a perfect model for society at large.

Politicians of all hues won’t admit it, but it’s true. Prison is the ultimate ideal they see in their mind’s eye, the only arena in which the battle for equality has been won decisively and irreversibly.

Prison is a microcosm only waiting for a quantum event to expand indefinitely. That big bang won’t be long in coming.

Just think: prisoners are equal in everything. They all have the same housing, food, clothes, schedule of activities, access to sports and entertainment, communications facilities, work duties if any.

True, they are also all equal in their institutional inferiority to the warders, but that in no way violates the sacred principle. Champions of equality, especially those in government and its environs, assume that they themselves will occupy a lofty perch whence they can look down on perfectly equalised hoi-polloi.

This arrangement was prophesied by Dostoyevsky in his novel The Possessed: “Everyone belongs to everybody, and everybody to everyone. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. There may be slander or murder in extreme cases, but equality is the main thing.”

The Soviets banned the novel because it treated such prophesies as a dystopic nightmare rather than a worthy ideal. How long before the same will happen here?

The ultimate equality of all before the omnipotent state presupposes book burning. The match has already been struck, and the kindling is already smouldering.

For example, books where racially pejorative terms are used are being expunged from school curricula, even if the book is as passionately anti-racist as Huckleberry Finn. I’m sure that the turn will soon come of books featuring sinful pronouns.

And then recalcitrant writers may follow such books to the pyre. See you there.

P.S. ‘Conservative’ pundits both here and in France are salivating at the prospect of their French colleague, Eric Zemmour, mounting a serious challenge in the upcoming presidential elections.

I’m sure Col. Putin is ecstatic too – Zemmour is his adulatory admirer. This is what he wrote in Le Figaro: “While France has renounced her former mission, Putin has become the last defender of Eastern Christianity. …He defends national sovereignty, family and the Orthodox religion.”

And there I was, thinking I’d never root for Manny Macron.

7 thoughts on “Prison leads the way”

  1. We seem to live in an age of suffocating conformity, in which the public, including and maybe even especially the educated public, seems eager to embrace the latest trend or fad in speech or thought, no matter how ridiculous. On the other hand, I wonder how much of that seeming acceptance by the public is a pretense. It’s easier to play along with the latest fad or taboo, especially if it masquerades as a moral imperative, than to openly resist it and risk damage to one’s income or social standing. I wonder if there is an analogy here to how the public (and even the leadership) gave lip service to the pronouncements of the state in the last stages of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. I do think that satire and wit of the kind you display on these pages is a powerful antidote to what we are witnessing now.

  2. My understanding is that the entire pudenda has to go. Not just a part but the whole thing. And two years testing without male hormone. Then you can qualify as a woman.

    Yee-ouch.

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