This totalitarian regime is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Nazi occuation of France. You can't reveal your sympathies with the "wrong" side for fear of being socially destroyed and losing your job. They get to your kids who can out you or leave home to live with one of the creepy guys online or their "supportive" friends and their totalitarian families. Teachers are terrified. Librarians are terrified. The people at the top of pretty much all cultural and educational establishments roll over and spout the ideology, happy to sack those who rock the boat. The only difference is that the initiated kids get themselves mutilated in order to show their allegiance, and that is a one-way ticket for all except the incredibly brave.
Excellent, heartfelt piece; so many librarians have been bullied into accepting trans nonsense without reservations or evidence. Your article does a real service to LGB young people. Thank you. Will post on X to @pittparents & others.
I'd forgotten about "Nothing Ever Happens Here". The child narrator is made to feel responsible for her dad's feelings, rather than the opposite. Which is "parentification", an inversion of the child-parent relationship, and a kind of emotional abuse. Trans widows and trans orphans will recognise a lot of the manipulation in there, that part is pretty accurate from the accounts I've seen from them, but it's framed as if the abusive dad is the good guy.
Thanks so much for the mention of trans orphans and trans widows. I keep the only data in the world on us, now with 56 participating. The rate of defamation, violence, sexual assault on the ex-wives is phenomenal.
Thank YOU for documenting it all and sharing their stories, and for speaking about the reality of domestic life with these creeps! You provide an important counter to propaganda trash like that book.
The trouble with AGPs and sex cases and abusers in general is that they groom people - not just their wives and kids, but everyone around them. They manipulate and condition everyone they meet to think their behaviour isn't that bad, or that they're the vulnerable ones and their needs come first. So this sort of gaslighting shite is par for the course.
It reminds me of "Lolita", although obviously not as well written: that's all about a nonce grooming and raping a child, but he's also grooming the reader to go along with him and excuse his crimes. He uses beautiful language and describes himself as helpless and in love, but from just his actions and the times when the mask slips, it's very clear the guy's a paedo rapist.
It is not just the husbands who groom, but their "therapists" which I document in my memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse.com, 2022)
Yes, I've always disliked Lolita. Nabokov, right? Taking advantage of his "refugee status"
Trans widow number 57 just contacted me to ask for my survey, 20 Questions to Ask a Trans Widow. You are a part of this. The only, sole, unique data in the world on women who got out from the David-Debbie Haytons of the world.
This whole trans delusion is terrifying. Everyone I meet, and I mean everyone, is confused and baffled by it all. I was loathe to talk openly, but once I did so, I found no unpleasantness, quite the opposite. I had liberal lefty Guardian readers telling me how dangerous it is, followers of right wing podcasts said the same, prim old people denounced the biased BBC, it’s as if everyone knows the emperor has no clothes and yet no-one hears our cries. As I said, I find trans and the entire ‘woke’ fad terrifying. I’ve even had a policeman visit my house because someone wrote supposedly racist remarks on an internet thread I started to locate the owner of a letter sent to my address. He arrived the next day. The policeman was embarrassed. Said he’d rather investigate crimes against old people and the vulnerable. The extremists have seized control.
Thank you for writing this. It reminds us how thorough the 're-education' efforts have been: we knew about the ideological capture of healthcare, social work, journalism and education. Why would library science be overlooked? But I'm encouraged by your essay and hope it will inspire courage in other librarians.
It's all just terrifying. It's just about compliance now. Nobody allowed to think differently from the received wisdom of the Transgender gods.
A big thing that sets humans apart from animals is our power of imagination, and this is being crushed. Devastating.
In one of the books she writes about, it sounds as though the girl is described as on hormones and has had surgery. No such surgery is supposed to happen in the UK at least, until they are 18 iirc. Is that wrong? No book should be implying otherwise.
I don't know whether to feel relieved that some librarians are opening their eyes to what's going on, or disheartened by the fact they can do so little about it.
i urge all parents to ask to see the RSHE materials they use at their kid’s schools. In our primary school there is loads of ideology taught as fact. This has been addressed by the new dfe guidelines but its shocking that this authoritarian stance has been adopted by our schools without questions. Its f-ing terrible that children are being used to normalise this cult’s message.
More whistleblowers please. And thankyou to this one.
Thanks for this insight, distressing and disconcerting though it is.
We all need to stop using the acronym "LGBT", find a way to seperate the 'T' off from the LGB. As many hereabouts will know, the interests of 'LGB' people don't readily coincide with those of the (ill-defined) 'T' people. And 'LGB' refers to sexuality (biologically based and manifested), whereas 'T' refers to identity, an idea about oneself - quite different.
Yes, and in addition to that, 'T' is based on gender... which is where the stigmatization of same-sex attraction comes from. (It holds that women's lives-- including their sexuality-- must revolve around men, and that men who desire other men are beneath contempt.) So the 'T' is, and should be, anathema to 'LGB'. Nobody's pressuring the NAACP to include the KKK, after all.
Love how you expressed that. Any time the word 'gender' is used now I think 'gender or gendered stereotypes'. It's the direct link to stigmatization so no wonder that's growing despite all this apparent inclusion and niceness. Funny that. When will the penny drop that the 'trans' movement is about reinforcing strict gender stereotypes that are recidivist, have little to do with who we are and of either sex, then obscures the actual and practical differences we have in spades.
'Gender' seems to have mutated to mean a subset of 'porn' now. It's a character for people to dress up and larp as the 'gender' they choose to 'identify' as. Bring back the children's dressing up box, leave it there and take it out of legislation.
The most scary element is the innate and vicious homophobia behind the TRA cause. Being gay or lesbian appears to be being thought of as some brief stage achieved before being told they are trans. The Vichy Gays & Lesbians might be hugely enthusiastic about that, but I don't rightly understand how gays & lesbians who managed to escape being told they are trans are backing this ideology.
Yet plenty still are. Social media still have gays like Owen Jones (@ownjones84) & Michael Cashman (@mcashmanCBE) who have no hesitation is sacrificing adolescent gays & lesbians to a lifetime of medicalisation, castration & sterilisation. And Jones & Cashman reckons LGB Alliance is (in Cashman's own words) 'an anti-LGBT Hate Group' though he & Jones are repeatedly told it opposes the castration and sterilisation of adolescent gays & lesbians (such as at https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1372313676389179393).
That librarians have decided to take part in this overt homophobia is equally disturbing. Just how do they reckon they will be able to justify it to future generations? The Gen-Z's? Fine, they seem to imbued with a fantastically high level of homophobia, but I'm not sure the ones after them will share the same degree of hate.
It seems their hatred of women is the primary and motivating factor in their attitudes. It lessens other connections and pulls them towards men's rights at the expense of everyone and in particular women. There is no 'loyalty' or kinship towards same-sex attracted women from these same-sex attracted men. It's a very equal opportunities thing this hatred of women.
And that's a really tricky thing that seems to put off or confuse other people when entering this debate - the total lack of self-awareness from these men and when you take sexuality and attraction out of this, the bare hatred and disgust at women is laid bare.
It is great to hear about professionals standing against this pernicious ideology. I have sometimes wondered: couldn't librarians who are forced to see such books in their libraries not sequester them somewhere where they won't be seen?
Trouble is this is coming from on high and their library 'colleagues' and others will then be doing this in return and then reporting them. I have family members and friends who worked in libraries - there used to be all sorts of book-hiding and defacement happening especially with contentious (read religious) books. It was like crowd control a lot of the time and where people and society are revealed red and raw in tooth and claw.
Libraries are strange and wonderful places - the universal access obligation that public libraries used to have meant some odd things happened in there. It was always a tricky balance and could be a very difficult and valuable job. They were the only genuinely accessible place anyone could go so there were always the vulnerable or odd, older, solitary, smelly or disturbed people that had just as much right to be there as I did as long as they vaguely behaved. There used to be a regular few creepy and aggressive men. At one point locally it was the only place people who didn't have computers could access them, so that created another slightly odd culture. All those forgotten or conveniently ignored by everyone 'else'. Lots of other social inclusion got attached to these places - many are now 'warm places' too, for those unable to afford to heat their homes.
I volunteer in a charity shop and whilst I was sorting out the books I withdrew one of these icky teenage books and it went straight into the 'recycle' crate.
I found the growth of 'YA fiction' really odd. When I asked a question I was always being told 'look it up' and to pick a book from the shelves. Any book. Try it myself. Work it out. I grew out of 'children's books' when I was fairly young. I educated myself by reading and it was often self-directed - if I could read it, I learned to think, to empathise, to figure out the more difficult words and concepts, to imagine and then to read more. I used to read books when I was about 7 or 8 that I then read were for '11 to 13 year olds' and thought who the hell is dictating that? What 'themes' are so contentious? Sex? Sexuality? Race? It wasn't my parents, or teachers, or authors, it was the Publishing Industry and marketing. I agree that we need to see ourselves reflected, but that's not how we learn about others or the wider world we share. This narcissistic identitarian pressure to 'represent' us as individuals means we seemed to have lost the ability to see how similar or alike we are and can be.
I agree. And by immersing ourselves in the stories we read, we become the protagonist in our imagination; so we can be all things - boy, girl, man, woman ... animal! We don't have to reify it by thinking we are something we are not and demanding that others treat us as such an 'identity'. It's nuts!
This totalitarian regime is like the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Nazi occuation of France. You can't reveal your sympathies with the "wrong" side for fear of being socially destroyed and losing your job. They get to your kids who can out you or leave home to live with one of the creepy guys online or their "supportive" friends and their totalitarian families. Teachers are terrified. Librarians are terrified. The people at the top of pretty much all cultural and educational establishments roll over and spout the ideology, happy to sack those who rock the boat. The only difference is that the initiated kids get themselves mutilated in order to show their allegiance, and that is a one-way ticket for all except the incredibly brave.
What a truly disgusting movement.
Excellent, heartfelt piece; so many librarians have been bullied into accepting trans nonsense without reservations or evidence. Your article does a real service to LGB young people. Thank you. Will post on X to @pittparents & others.
I'd forgotten about "Nothing Ever Happens Here". The child narrator is made to feel responsible for her dad's feelings, rather than the opposite. Which is "parentification", an inversion of the child-parent relationship, and a kind of emotional abuse. Trans widows and trans orphans will recognise a lot of the manipulation in there, that part is pretty accurate from the accounts I've seen from them, but it's framed as if the abusive dad is the good guy.
For the morbidly curious, Kiwi Farms has a PDF copy of the whole book here: https://kiwifarms.hk/threads/insane-parents-of-transgender-kids.30908/page-93#post-6524237
Thanks so much for the mention of trans orphans and trans widows. I keep the only data in the world on us, now with 56 participating. The rate of defamation, violence, sexual assault on the ex-wives is phenomenal.
Thank YOU for documenting it all and sharing their stories, and for speaking about the reality of domestic life with these creeps! You provide an important counter to propaganda trash like that book.
The trouble with AGPs and sex cases and abusers in general is that they groom people - not just their wives and kids, but everyone around them. They manipulate and condition everyone they meet to think their behaviour isn't that bad, or that they're the vulnerable ones and their needs come first. So this sort of gaslighting shite is par for the course.
It reminds me of "Lolita", although obviously not as well written: that's all about a nonce grooming and raping a child, but he's also grooming the reader to go along with him and excuse his crimes. He uses beautiful language and describes himself as helpless and in love, but from just his actions and the times when the mask slips, it's very clear the guy's a paedo rapist.
It is not just the husbands who groom, but their "therapists" which I document in my memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse.com, 2022)
Yes, I've always disliked Lolita. Nabokov, right? Taking advantage of his "refugee status"
Trans widow number 57 just contacted me to ask for my survey, 20 Questions to Ask a Trans Widow. You are a part of this. The only, sole, unique data in the world on women who got out from the David-Debbie Haytons of the world.
Thank you for this! I wrote about ‘Nothing Ever Happens Here’ for Children of Transitioners. It’s pure propaganda.
https://childrenoftransitioners.org/2020/01/31/your-childhood-now-freshly-whitewashed-reviewing-nothing-ever-happens-here/
This whole trans delusion is terrifying. Everyone I meet, and I mean everyone, is confused and baffled by it all. I was loathe to talk openly, but once I did so, I found no unpleasantness, quite the opposite. I had liberal lefty Guardian readers telling me how dangerous it is, followers of right wing podcasts said the same, prim old people denounced the biased BBC, it’s as if everyone knows the emperor has no clothes and yet no-one hears our cries. As I said, I find trans and the entire ‘woke’ fad terrifying. I’ve even had a policeman visit my house because someone wrote supposedly racist remarks on an internet thread I started to locate the owner of a letter sent to my address. He arrived the next day. The policeman was embarrassed. Said he’d rather investigate crimes against old people and the vulnerable. The extremists have seized control.
Thank you for writing this. It reminds us how thorough the 're-education' efforts have been: we knew about the ideological capture of healthcare, social work, journalism and education. Why would library science be overlooked? But I'm encouraged by your essay and hope it will inspire courage in other librarians.
It's all just terrifying. It's just about compliance now. Nobody allowed to think differently from the received wisdom of the Transgender gods.
A big thing that sets humans apart from animals is our power of imagination, and this is being crushed. Devastating.
In one of the books she writes about, it sounds as though the girl is described as on hormones and has had surgery. No such surgery is supposed to happen in the UK at least, until they are 18 iirc. Is that wrong? No book should be implying otherwise.
The Russo book is based in the US. I think the Stonewall book is uk.
This should go in the newspapers. Camilla Tominey might be interested in supporting this.
I don't know whether to feel relieved that some librarians are opening their eyes to what's going on, or disheartened by the fact they can do so little about it.
i urge all parents to ask to see the RSHE materials they use at their kid’s schools. In our primary school there is loads of ideology taught as fact. This has been addressed by the new dfe guidelines but its shocking that this authoritarian stance has been adopted by our schools without questions. Its f-ing terrible that children are being used to normalise this cult’s message.
More whistleblowers please. And thankyou to this one.
Thanks for this insight, distressing and disconcerting though it is.
We all need to stop using the acronym "LGBT", find a way to seperate the 'T' off from the LGB. As many hereabouts will know, the interests of 'LGB' people don't readily coincide with those of the (ill-defined) 'T' people. And 'LGB' refers to sexuality (biologically based and manifested), whereas 'T' refers to identity, an idea about oneself - quite different.
Yes, and in addition to that, 'T' is based on gender... which is where the stigmatization of same-sex attraction comes from. (It holds that women's lives-- including their sexuality-- must revolve around men, and that men who desire other men are beneath contempt.) So the 'T' is, and should be, anathema to 'LGB'. Nobody's pressuring the NAACP to include the KKK, after all.
Love how you expressed that. Any time the word 'gender' is used now I think 'gender or gendered stereotypes'. It's the direct link to stigmatization so no wonder that's growing despite all this apparent inclusion and niceness. Funny that. When will the penny drop that the 'trans' movement is about reinforcing strict gender stereotypes that are recidivist, have little to do with who we are and of either sex, then obscures the actual and practical differences we have in spades.
'Gender' seems to have mutated to mean a subset of 'porn' now. It's a character for people to dress up and larp as the 'gender' they choose to 'identify' as. Bring back the children's dressing up box, leave it there and take it out of legislation.
The most scary element is the innate and vicious homophobia behind the TRA cause. Being gay or lesbian appears to be being thought of as some brief stage achieved before being told they are trans. The Vichy Gays & Lesbians might be hugely enthusiastic about that, but I don't rightly understand how gays & lesbians who managed to escape being told they are trans are backing this ideology.
Yet plenty still are. Social media still have gays like Owen Jones (@ownjones84) & Michael Cashman (@mcashmanCBE) who have no hesitation is sacrificing adolescent gays & lesbians to a lifetime of medicalisation, castration & sterilisation. And Jones & Cashman reckons LGB Alliance is (in Cashman's own words) 'an anti-LGBT Hate Group' though he & Jones are repeatedly told it opposes the castration and sterilisation of adolescent gays & lesbians (such as at https://twitter.com/mcashmanCBE/status/1372313676389179393).
That librarians have decided to take part in this overt homophobia is equally disturbing. Just how do they reckon they will be able to justify it to future generations? The Gen-Z's? Fine, they seem to imbued with a fantastically high level of homophobia, but I'm not sure the ones after them will share the same degree of hate.
It seems their hatred of women is the primary and motivating factor in their attitudes. It lessens other connections and pulls them towards men's rights at the expense of everyone and in particular women. There is no 'loyalty' or kinship towards same-sex attracted women from these same-sex attracted men. It's a very equal opportunities thing this hatred of women.
And that's a really tricky thing that seems to put off or confuse other people when entering this debate - the total lack of self-awareness from these men and when you take sexuality and attraction out of this, the bare hatred and disgust at women is laid bare.
Well written article that merits consideration
It is great to hear about professionals standing against this pernicious ideology. I have sometimes wondered: couldn't librarians who are forced to see such books in their libraries not sequester them somewhere where they won't be seen?
Trouble is this is coming from on high and their library 'colleagues' and others will then be doing this in return and then reporting them. I have family members and friends who worked in libraries - there used to be all sorts of book-hiding and defacement happening especially with contentious (read religious) books. It was like crowd control a lot of the time and where people and society are revealed red and raw in tooth and claw.
Libraries are strange and wonderful places - the universal access obligation that public libraries used to have meant some odd things happened in there. It was always a tricky balance and could be a very difficult and valuable job. They were the only genuinely accessible place anyone could go so there were always the vulnerable or odd, older, solitary, smelly or disturbed people that had just as much right to be there as I did as long as they vaguely behaved. There used to be a regular few creepy and aggressive men. At one point locally it was the only place people who didn't have computers could access them, so that created another slightly odd culture. All those forgotten or conveniently ignored by everyone 'else'. Lots of other social inclusion got attached to these places - many are now 'warm places' too, for those unable to afford to heat their homes.
I volunteer in a charity shop and whilst I was sorting out the books I withdrew one of these icky teenage books and it went straight into the 'recycle' crate.
I found the growth of 'YA fiction' really odd. When I asked a question I was always being told 'look it up' and to pick a book from the shelves. Any book. Try it myself. Work it out. I grew out of 'children's books' when I was fairly young. I educated myself by reading and it was often self-directed - if I could read it, I learned to think, to empathise, to figure out the more difficult words and concepts, to imagine and then to read more. I used to read books when I was about 7 or 8 that I then read were for '11 to 13 year olds' and thought who the hell is dictating that? What 'themes' are so contentious? Sex? Sexuality? Race? It wasn't my parents, or teachers, or authors, it was the Publishing Industry and marketing. I agree that we need to see ourselves reflected, but that's not how we learn about others or the wider world we share. This narcissistic identitarian pressure to 'represent' us as individuals means we seemed to have lost the ability to see how similar or alike we are and can be.
I agree. And by immersing ourselves in the stories we read, we become the protagonist in our imagination; so we can be all things - boy, girl, man, woman ... animal! We don't have to reify it by thinking we are something we are not and demanding that others treat us as such an 'identity'. It's nuts!
Beautifully put. I was lost in reverie thinking of Joan Aiken :-)
These are scary times.
Does Meredith Russo have an ex-wife? Someone get her in touch with me~