12 Comments
Oct 26Liked by Graham Linehan

Excellent article, L! In the States, there's a famous retired Navy Seal detransitioner, Chris Beck, who alleges the military therapists and doctors were too quick to "affirm" his sensation of wishing he were female. He had some of the surgeries, I believe but is now very much returned to male mode. The fact is, with its history of child sex molestation, terribly conducted studies and experiments on children the field of "transgenderism" cannot firmly make a claim that such a thing as "true trans" exists. Further, the abuse of the wives is a strong feature in the chronologies of men who "come out" during marriages. In my data on trans widows, the only in the world, many of the husbands served in the military. In the States, it is the case that the military promotes porn viewing in servicemen, with the wrongthink that it blows off steam. The opposite is true and none of the practitioners of "affirming" mental health services is willing to admit this publicly. Gay and lesbian service members are poorly treated by lumping them in with those who have the psychiatric illness of imagining themselves the opposite sex. Many who do have this fantasy join the military thinking their fantasy can be "trained out." While building the physical strength of required in military training may help such a person regain mind/body connections, the stress of life and death activities creates more problems. It's going to take a decade for the doctors and psychologists to come off of their political pedestals and admit this is the largest medical malpractice scandal in history. For a refresher on what the wives go through:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=386T-PB098k&t=23s

Expand full comment

As an individual with two serving close family members, in different services, I can say that the feeling ‘on the ground’ is that this bs is being pushed on them without consent.

Expand full comment

An interesting article and I think it is hinting at something I’d like to bring out into the open and it’s even an area where I think that Graham and JK Rowling are too nice i.e. they sometimes sound as if they are hesitant before the charge of “transphobia” and are therefore eager to make allowances for actual “trans people”. “Transgenderism" seems to me to be the greatest con of our age – and that’s beating some fierce competition”!

There is no “transgenderism” because, under this new insane dispensation, the word “gender” has been completely deprived of all meaning. Since “gender” can now mean anything you want it to mean, it means nothing. Furthermore, the expression “non-binary” is nonsensical and the ones insisting on using it inadvertently negate it by sooner or later reverting back to binary terms e.g. “transmen” “transwomen” and “transition” (which automatically implies moving from one side to the other thereby reinstating the concept of binary).

And this brings me to another problem: the title “Without a shot fired; How gender ideology captured the UK's military charities”. This implies that “gender ideology” is some kind of force or thing on its own. It’s not. It’s a cold calculated tool aiming at destabilisation, division, depopulation, exploitation etc. It is an ideology that insists on the “T” part of “LGBT+” and it truly does INSIST. “No LGB without the T” is the giveaway. As far as I’m concerned, Jeremy Corbyn banged the last nail into his own coffin when he also robotically called out this ferocious mantra.

The “Transgender” Project is the most vicious, relentless and downright bloody evil assault there has ever been on the general population of the world.

Expand full comment

This is entirely consistent with the transing of history. In the same way that people with a GRC got the rights to same-sex marriage 7 years before everyone else, the first trans-identified male was allowed to continue serving a full three years before the ban on being gay was lifted. Not a single person was every thrown out of the armed forces for being "trans" because it wasn't illegal.

It's almost like troons are actually a highly privileged group that have never suffered any real "oppression". Look at the post-war treatment of James Morris as compared to that of actual war hero Alan Turing.

Expand full comment

Thank you for an informative, well reasoned and dispassionate piece.

There is so much wrong with the label "LGBTQ+" and its variants that to address all its failings would test the limits of time, length and readers' interest. Here I will stick to the problem with our institutions' "unquestioning" use of the initial "Q."

If polled, the public would likely say that the "Q" stands for "Queer" and they'd be right. And when asked to define the term "Queer" in the context of LGBT, most people wouldn't have the faintest idea how to reply. Ask an "ally" who's always going about "LGBTQ rights" to name a right that is specific to queers, and the answer is likely to be risible.

That's because the inclusion of "Q" with "LGB" is an example of taxonomic malpractice. Queer is not a sexual orientation. Recently, certain heterosexual influential types have affected a queer identity to great public acclaim in their cultural bubble. Not all gays identify as queer, thank god, but enough do to be thoroughly annoying. The reverse is true for trans people; they're seen as queer by default and need to opt out if they're sufficiently aware of the politics to care.

Queer is not innate. To the contrary, it is a learned set of attitudes and beliefs. Queer is a form of socio-political posturing. Queer is a scene and a hang-out. At best, queer gives disaffected, educated urban youth the latest lens with which to look down on squares. At worst, queer is a postmodern philosophy that is a toxic progeny of Critical Theory. It intentionally destabilizes the pragmatic meanings of sex and gender in ways that are highly disorienting to society and to its members. Queer is homophobic because queer does not recognize stable sexual orientations or relationships or the gay-straight binary. It considers them part of a grand metanarrative that needs toppling.

The very idea of queer rights is preposterous because so far, at least, holding a particular set of political beliefs, which is what applied queer theory amounts to, has never granted the believer protected-class status under civil rights laws, at least in America. One reason is because political beliefs, unlike race, sex or sexual orientation, are neither innate nor immutable. Gay people should be protected from discrimination in employment or housing on the basis of sexual orientation because being gay is part of their essence. They have no choice in the matter. The same cannot be said for queers.

That queer was once and still is a homophobic slur is sufficient grounds for finding the term odious. However, another characteristic of the term queer also renders it detestable. At a time when progressives remain fixated on promoting diversity and inclusion, queer possesses hegemonic tendencies that cause it to disappear gays, lesbians and bisexuals. In their ignorance and to show they are with-it, straight people in the media, entertainment, politics, health care and other public-facing vocations have taken to using queer as a synonym for lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Since queer has such distinctive political connotations and because so few gay people ascribe to the politics of queer, it can never be a neutral or acceptable substitute for the labels gay, bisexual or lesbian. Last but not least, queers and right-thinking people have also taken to queering gay people posthumously, an act that's an anarchronistic identity crime.

Expand full comment

Ugh! Of course Stonewall are involved as they are 'experts' in this area. In reality we all know that they've betrayed the people they were supposed to represent and campaign for and that is gay people.

Expand full comment

BBC: “Inclusive folk session becomes 'safe environment'"

https://www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgmgrel7rlyo.amp?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQIUAKwASCAAgM%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17300025994189&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com

Yes, yet another load of funding goes to yet another establishment that has been “made safe” for folk to scream at each other for “mis-naming gender”!

Expand full comment

That's hilarious (apart from the muppets at the Arts Council funding this). "The ocarina is an unusual instrument and I've been asked in other sessions to stop playing." No, really? Aw, aren't they so desperate to be special. And to exclude others in the name of 'inclusion' is so kind. We used to play ocarinas when we were kids. Bless, he makes them himself, of course he does. So, some greasy lank-haired men with jauntily placed neckerchiefs want yet more attention as they think they are of other 'genders' and all or some or both genders. What has disability got to do with that delusion? I can imagine what happened in these 'other sessions'. Good god man! Your annoying whistling piping noises are shit! Please shut that awful noise up and leave us here in peace! Screaming would sound more musical. Bristol really did fall off the edge of the planet didn't it.

Expand full comment

I am confused. Above is a great explanation of where we are, but how does the issue of gay rights have anything to do with the Royal British Legion and the poppy? The successive UK governments are the people responsible, not the fallen heroes who fought on the battlefields, and the RBL represents those fallen and wounded heroes and should have no part in these politics.

Rainbow colour poppy pins, sold by the Royal British Legion, are political protest pins, and like the White poppy, they are political. The Red Poppy represents all humans who fought and died and suffered and should never be politicised.

...and, whilst I am at it, it is a disgrace that the RBL have further demeaned the Red Poppy by sharing the Poppy pins with football clubs on the Poppy pins. Are people so shallow that they will only buy pins that promote their football club, and do they wear them to honour the heroes or their club? If it makes money for the RBL, how long will it be until we see ASDA/Poppy pins or Sainsbury's/Poppy pins? Or Tesco Meat 10% off Poppy/Pins.

Remembering the war dead and their sacrifice should be all the RBL do...

Expand full comment

A very interesting piece. Thank you.

Fighting with Pride, far from being "a trusted and respected LGBT+ military charity", appear to have been another opportunistic Trojan horse of an organisation like Press for Change - flying under the radar and with only one aim, to embed the TQ+ under the guise of LGBT rights.

Expand full comment
Oct 29·edited Oct 29

Like many veterans who were dismissed from the military for being gay, some of whom were so appallingly abused they are still receiving mental health support decades on, I have spent the last couple of years watching Fighting With Pride (a self-apponted supposed charity alegedly representing those who endured the ban on gays in the military, staffed by a bunch of retired military officers who actually enforced and impossed the ban, none of whom were themselves dismissed for being gay,) change the name of the policy to now read the LGBTQi+ ban. (or whichever additional letters of the alphabet they've decided will look good today!) FWP have also been holding 'secret' negotiations behind the veterans backs with the previous and the new government regarding financial redress without any input, consultation or permission of the veterans. Furthermore, whilst they have held online meetings with the veterans who endured the ban, they are chaired by a transgender woman who the ban had nothing to do with and attended by many more veterans the ban never applied to. They have also held 'secret' meetings with other so called charities where OUR business has and is being discussed yet again by those it has nothing to do with, yet refused to tell veterans who was in this secret group, what they discussed or publish minutes of those meetings. Anybody who has made complaints or representations regarding these issues are either told to shut up as it's none of their business or, as is the case with a number of the more vocal veterans who were dismissed for being gay, have been completely ignored then blackballed and banned from Town Hall meetings. They have now become so dictortorial they have told veterans who were dismissed or discharged by the ban for being gay that they have to agree to 'guidelines' banning their viewpoints, opinions and emotions before they attend online 'community cafes' in each of the areas of the country FWP has a member of staff. Even more serious though, for those veterans who were dismissed or discharged for being gay, FWP are now attempting with further 'secret' negotiations to have the recommendations made in Lord Etherton's report, which said quite clearly that his recommendations for financial redress ONLY apply to those who were dismissed or discharged for being gay, changed in order for ANYBODY, whether gay or straight, who served in the military between 1967-2000 who believe they were affected by the ban, to receive compensation.This could, and perhaps will, include the scum who abused and imprisoned me and others receiving compensation for the 'effects' they endured during the ban. Thus, not only have those the ban never applied to hijacked the gay cause worldwide, those same people have also hijacked the cause of veterans who were dismissed or discharged from the military for being gay. It has become clear to many of those veterans that the hijacking of our cause was pre-planned and archestrated with the conivence of senior figures within the MOD and the establishment in order for FWP and other military charities to act as gatekeepers during the time of the Independent Review to keep those most abused away from the media, to ensure that we stay away from the legal system and the courts and to force a narrative which suggest choosing your gender is the same as being gay, which it most defnitely is not! Many veterans who were dismissed or discharged from the military for being gay have though seen through this farce and have already taken legal advice which, should the government NOT carry out Lord Etherton's recommendations for financial redress as he outlines them in the Independent Review Report, will see class action being taken against the MOD, the Government and others, which during the discovery stage may expose FWP for exactly what they are.

Expand full comment

I knew that the trans hypnosis was particularly virulent in the celeb field but didn’t know it had infected (not so) sweet little Emma Bunton (i.e. Jail Bait Spice):

https://www.attitude.co.uk/life/emma-bunton-shares-passionate-support-for-trans-youth-in-new-video-468097/

Make sure you have a box of hankies spare when reading this beautiful tale of how beautiful it is to have a beautiful message for the beautiful trans beautifuls.

Now this slice of maudlin mucus is dolloped by something called attitude.co.uk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_(magazine)

This is of particular interest:

“In a (sic) 2016, Prince William was photographed exclusively for the cover of Attitude, marking the very first time a member of the British Royal Family had posed for on appeared on or in a gay magazine. Inside, the Prince met nine LGBTQ people who had experienced homo, bi or transphobic abuse growing up and had suffered mental health problems as a result. The issue made headlines all over the world on news and television media including BBC, NBC, ITN, Sky News and many more.”

"The issue made headlines all over the world" - all by itself! Not choreographed at all!

Expand full comment