Quotulatiousness

February 22, 2026

“[T]he trans cult … attracted many mentally ill people [offering] instant visibility, attention, and status”

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the visible-to-cheapskates portion of his Weekly Dish post, Andrew Sullivan tries to point out how the Democrats can salvage something from their decade-long, all-in approach to all things trans (warning, contains Andrew Sullivan):

I had dinner this week with a young gay man who was castrated and had his endocrine system permanently wrecked as a result of “gender-affirming care” for minors. He was super girly as a kid and had an undiagnosed testosterone deficiency which delayed his male development. He liked playing with girls, seemed to act like one, and when he socially transitioned as a teen, he passed easily. Suddenly all the sneers of “faggot” he’d endured as a boy went away. In today’s “gender-affirming care” environment, that was enough.

“Compassion” and “science” took a gay boy, flooded his young male body with estrogen, and removed his genitals — because the docs and the shrinks determined he was too effeminate to be a “real man”. Only when he personally figured this out as an adult and got himself off estrogen and onto testosterone did everything change. He felt energy and mental clarity for the first time. And his life as a man could finally begin — although his body will never be fully repaired.

Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic (I can hear your groans now). I’m obsessed, you say, and this is a trivial (boring) matter. I’ve lost some good friends who feel very much that way, and my social life has shrunk. But then I meet someone like Mike (a pseudonym) — and I’ve met many others, gay and lesbian — and realize not a single gay group or resource is on his side. In fact, the “LGBTQIA+” lobby all but denies he exists, or dismisses him as transphobic — a dreaded “detransitioner”.

I was thinking about Mike as I read the latest polling — out this week in a liberal online mag, The Argument. The poll shows what we well know: 63 percent of Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination. This isn’t a transphobic country. But, equally, 62 percent oppose transing minors (50 percent strongly), 60 percent support banning transwomen competing against women in sports, and 53 percent want to ban gender ideology in elementary schools. These numbers have gone up the more the debate has raged. The backlash is so intense it has even reversed the public’s previous opposition to bathroom bills.

Now check out the liberal response. Bluesky erupted in fury that the poll was published at all. “Please help us,” one X member tweeted with direct appeals to Tim Cook and McKenzie Scott, who have bankrolled this campaign. Jill Filipovic complained that the “Dems … should have focused on things like ending discrimination in housing and employment”, rather than sports and kids, unaware that the Bostock decision already did that with employment. Most liberals have literally no idea that trans people already have civil rights. Off-message.

In this air-tight ideological bubble, where Bostock is unknown, the Dems flounder. “This isn’t happening” was the first gambit. Good try. Then: “this has all been ginned up by the far right, and Dems did nothing”. Did they miss the Obama and Biden Title IX diktats, Admiral Levine’s removal of lower age limits for transing kids, Biden’s “nonbinary” official Sam Brinton stealing dresses, or other embarrassments like the White House invite to Dylan Mulvaney? Then they say it’s a tiny issue. But it helped Trump massively in 2024. And if it’s tiny, why not compromise? After that, it’s just MLK-envy all the way down, the desire to be the next Rosa Parks. But it’s odd to campaign for “civil rights” when you already have them.

After trying to debate, you come to realize it’s pointless. The woke mind is not really a mind; it’s more like a bunch of synapses. Presented with an actual argument, they snap shut. This is part of what Eric Kaufmann calls the “sacralization” of minorities. For the woke, the “oppressed” are sacred. And in the social justice hierarchy, no minority is as oppressed and thereby as sacred as trans.

And so what sacred trans people say they want — or rather, what a tiny group of trans activists say they want — is all that matters. Anything else is illegitimate or “hate”. And any opponent is a bigot. Try arguing your way out of that dogmatic thicket. It’s like trying to disprove the Holy Trinity. I’ve given up.

But the real world keeps intervening. We just saw a ground-breaking lawsuit that won a $2 million judgment for a double mastectomy at 15. And this month saw two awful mass shootings by mentally unwell men caught up in the trans craze. Between Tumbler Ridge, Canada, and a Rhode Island hockey match, 12 people are now dead, including 6 children. And this is no longer a shock. Ask yourself what the 2023 Nashville Covenant School shooting, the 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, and even the 2024 attempted assassination of Trump, have in common.

Yes, it’s categorically wrong to link trans people to mass killings. That’s false and dangerous. But you’d be dumb not to worry that the trans cult of the last decade may have attracted many mentally ill people into a space where they have instant visibility, attention, and status. We have set up an open-ended subjective category — anyone who says they’re trans is trans, period — almost designed to attract delusional narcissists, and, with every safeguard thrown away, there’s no way to distinguish the nutters from the genuinely in need.

February 20, 2026

QotD: The burden of “emotional labour”

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I paraphrase, of course. Though not, I think, wildly:

    Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.

Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.

    Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.

Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.

    [Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.

And,

    Interpreting his moods.

At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.

Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – “Men don’t express their feelings” – with one of a much more modish kind – “Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair”.

    Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.

One more time:

    All of it unpaid,

It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid”. As “emotional labour”. As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.

The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether”. Though possibly not in ways the author intended.

Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.

And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour”. The final indignity.

The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting”, while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.

As I said, worth pondering.

But back to the pages of Vice, where Ms Ashley Fike is telling us how it is:

    According to Pew Research, only 38 percent of single women in the US are currently looking for a relationship. Among single men, that number jumps to 61 percent. The gap says a lot. Women aren’t opting out of love. They’re opting out of being someone’s therapist with benefits.

Stoic, heroic women burdened by needy, emotional men. It’s a bold take.

And I can’t help but wonder what all of those single women, cited above, are doing instead of finding a suitable mate and building a happy life, perhaps even a family. Are they searching for a sense of purpose in causes, protests and political fashion, fuelled at least in part by envy and resentment? Just speculation, of course. But it would, I think, explain the tone and emotional convulsions of so many single, progressive women.

    The Guardian calls mankeeping a modern extension of emotional labour, one that turns a partner into a life coach. This isn’t about avoiding vulnerability. It’s about refusing to carry someone else’s emotional weight while getting little to nothing in return. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.

Again, the term “emotional labour” and its connotations of calculation, antagonism, and something vaguely inhuman. As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.

The reliance on this conceit – as the basis for an article, perhaps an entire worldview – doesn’t strike me as an obvious recipe for contentment, or indeed love. What with the endless cataloguing of shortcomings. All those reasons to resent.

    Some men have started opening up more, which is good.

Ah, a glimmer of hope.

    But too often, that openness lands in the lap of the person they’re sleeping with instead of a friend or a therapist. Vulnerability without boundaries can feel more like a burden than a breakthrough.

So, don’t bore your wife with your troubles, gentlemen. No, search out a therapist. Or, “Be vulnerable, like we asked, but somewhere else”.

David Thompson, “Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy”, Thompson, blog, 2025-11-16.

February 3, 2026

Lawyers versus the genderwoke establishment

Filed under: Health, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle celebrates the recent court victory of a young woman who sued her surgeon and the psychologist who recommended her for surgery:

It is curious that one of the proven cures for human hysteria is the threat of legal action. During the Salem witch trials of 1692, the supposedly “tormented” girls who had accused villagers of cavorting with the devil “cried out” against a gentleman from the nearby town of Andover. He promptly issued a writ for defamation, and the girls swiftly retracted their claim. It turns out that the forces of God will back down from Satan when faced with the prospect of a lawsuit.

This week, a jury in New York has awarded $2 million in damages to a detransitioner called Fox Varian. Now twenty-two years old, Varian had previously struggled with her gender identity and was subjected to a double mastectomy at the age of sixteen. Both the surgeon and the psychologist were found culpable for not following the standards of care or communicating adequately with each other during the consultation period.

Varian no longer identifies as transgender, but the damage has been done. During the trial, she said she regretted the surgery almost instantly. “I immediately had a thought that this was wrong”, she said, “and it couldn’t be true”. After surgery, she recalled the pain in her chest as being akin to “searing hot … ripping sensations” and that she felt “shame” at the fact that she was now “disfigured for life”.

It goes without saying that no medical professional should be complicit in the mutilation of a child who is so clearly in need of psychotherapeutic support. According to research by the Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023 around 6,000 girls under the age of eighteen had undergone double mastectomies. Worse still, at least fifty of these children were under twelve-and-a-half years old. Activists have routinely claimed that no minors are being subjected to “gender-affirming” surgery. This is a lie.

What now for the many thousands of detransitioners who have grown up to regret their treatment? Even puberty blockers have been linked with testicular atrophy, increased risk of cancer, osteoporosis and impaired brain development. It is shocking enough that all of this was encouraged by those in a position of authority and trust, but we should never forget that it was in the service of a pseudo-religious belief in a gendered soul.

This was hysteria, plain and simple, and not even the brightest minds were immune from falling under its spell. No reputable study has found that “gender-affirming medicine” is beneficial to patients, and yet the medical establishment kowtowed to activist pressure. It is reminiscent of the judges and ministers of Salem, going along with nonsense out of fear that they too might be accused of witchcraft.

Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 19, 2026

QotD: Epaminondas and the defeat of Sparta at Leuctra

Filed under: Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 371 BCE, the Theban General Epaminondas did battle with Sparta at the height of its power. Sparta, having won the Peloponnesian War 33 years earlier, dominated Southern Greece and carried an invincible reputation. They were unstoppable, and they were coming. Thebes and the rest of the Boeotian city-states, led by Epaminondas, needed a way to fight back.

Epaminondas led a smaller force (some 6,000 to Sparta’s 11,000, though historians debate the exact numbers) to a field in front of a Boeotian village called Leuctra. The Battle of Leuctra would not only mark the beginning of centuries of Spartan decline, but also change the way Greek armies battled all the way through the conquests of Alexander the Great.

How did Epaminondas do it? How could he upend the mighty Spartan empire with a force barely half the size? The answer lay in resource allocation, patience, and 300 extremely important gay men.

If you had the misfortune of fighting against a Spartan army in the last few centuries BCE, you had to contend with a phalanx of hoplites. Thousands of men would align shoulder to shoulder, stick out their shields and spears, and push. You probably had a phalanx of your own, but against the Spartan line, you stood no chance.

Epaminondas didn’t have the numbers to directly contend with the Spartan phalanx, but he did have a specific elite force: the Sacred Band of Thebes. The Sacred Band was made of 300 hand-picked warriors paired off into homosexual couples. The idea was that lovers would fight more fiercely for each other.

Instead of a futile effort to out-push a force half their size, the Boeotians overloaded one side. They put a majority of their force on the left side, thinning out the right. They advanced this overloaded left wing before the weaker right wing, hoping to win before the Spartans could fully engage.

The Boeotian left wing, led in part by the Sacred Band, broke through the Spartan line. With enemy forces charging the side and rear, the Spartans quickly routed. When the dust settled, Epaminondas inflicted upon the Spartans one of the most decisive blowouts in Greek history.

Diagram courtesy of WarHistory.org

Over 1,000 Spartans perished in the Battle of Leuctra, including their king and military leader Cleombrotus. The Boetians lost around a hundred, but exact estimates are hard to come by. By anyone’s estimate, their casualties paled in comparison. Sparta’s military reputation would never recover, and the next 200 years marked an era of Spartan decline.

Epaminondas didn’t invent the phalanx. In fact, it’s unclear who really did. There is evidence of a similar strategy in Sumer over 2,000 years earlier. It’s a fairly basic idea — everyone hold your shields together and push. But Epaminondas did advance the strategy. Others would continue to innovate on Epaminondas’ “oblique” advance, up to and including Alexander the Great.

Luke Brown, “Pushing Tush Is Ancient Technology”, Wide Left, 2025-10-13.

December 13, 2025

QotD: Victorian mores, homosexuality, and the Empire

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The public school phenomenon, which probably isn’t a euphemism but we’ll use it as one. You know, the whole “beatings and buggery” thing, and I’m going to stop now, because of course you know what I mean. Lots of Old Boys from all tiers of the public school system really did go out to run the Empire because they wanted to escape Victorian women, who were indeed as bad as that in a lot of cases (again, think “Karen on steroids”). But how much of that “to escape women” thing was because the women were awful, and how much of it was because the Old Boys were not-very-repressed homos?

This is where modern identity politics really messes up historical analysis. We probably all know that the vast majority of Victorian homosexuals were married, because the vast majority of Victorians were married. This isn’t my professional field, but because I went to grad school I’m pretty well up on it – the ivory tower finds Victorian poofters endlessly fascinating, because they are huge homo cheerleaders (obviously), but also because of the costumes.

Women and gay men love playing dress up — have you noticed? — and Victorian dress up is the best, because it’s a) expensive, and b) time consuming, but also c) flattering to just about any body type. It was socially acceptable among the upper classes to be porky (and nobody dresses up like a chimney sweep or factory hand), so both men’s and women’s fashion in the Late Victorian era can accommodate modern bodies. (Unlike the early Victorian era, which continued Regency fashion. They’d love to dress up Regency style — there’s a reason “Regency romance” is the most popular genre of light porno books for cat ladies — but it takes a specific physical type to pull off, and they don’t have it). […]

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah — lots of people in grad school really, really into Victorian queers, so if I seem extremely well informed on this topic, don’t read too much into it.

“Repressed homosexual” was redundant back then. Oscar Wilde, for instance, was sort of the ur-homo — he was so gay, just gazing too long at a picture of him at his dandiest could give you an uncomfortably strong urge to touch a penis. […] Oscar Wilde was also married, and had two children, because that’s how even the queerest of the queer rolled in Victorian London.

Given that, you’d expect one of two things to happen to public schoolboys once they got out into the bush. Either they’d totally let their freak flag fly — you know, given that everyone else in their social world was an equally repressed public schoolboy — or they’d bottle it up even further, because it was important to show nothing but the best image of Her Majesty’s servants to the wogs at all times.

As far as I know, the latter was almost universally the case. Before the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), you could have a nonstop bacchanalia over there … if you were straight. Those guys could, and did, rock the casbah with extreme prejudice. It started tapering off early in Victoria’s reign, but in the late 1700s you had British army officers converting to Islam (no, really) for the express purpose of getting even more tail, by marrying the Koranically sanctioned four wives (sometimes with all the age of consent queasiness that implies).

The repressed homos, on the other hand, got really into scholarship. It’s not generally known (because even then the vast majority of their works were of interest only to micro-specialists) but Anglo-Indians were insanely productive scholars, on every conceivable topic. You could fill a decent sized library with their five-, seven-, nine-volume works on Sanskrit philology, and the botany of the lower Himalayas, or the migratory habits of tigers, or pretty much anything. And if they weren’t the scholarly sort, the repressed homos simply threw themselves into their work, of which there was always an endless supply — take a look at a map of India, recall that there were at most 200,000 Britons in the whole place, and you’ll see what I mean.

So: Were they going out there to get away from Victorian women? Absolutely. Were they therefore going to turn the place into Studio 54? Absolutely not.

Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.

November 13, 2025

How the school environment encourages male disconnection and stokes extremism

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, a parent describes the experience of visiting a local high school and observing just how politicized and progressivized most of the classrooms are (which also strongly implies that the instruction is part education, part indoctrination):

Wokal Distance @wokal_distance
Nov 11

I despise the Groyper movement, but if you want to understand where Fuentes gets purchase with young men I will tell you how it happened by telling you about my experience at the orientation night when my son joined elementary school band:

My 11 year old son son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents orientation night which was held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.

The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and various decorations that all invoked the various totems if diversity. Black lives matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging, and basically ever sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present. The advertisements for post secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on indigenous ways of knowing” as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation. Many of the teachers has “this is a safe space” sticker son their doors, and others had variations of “in this house” messaging on their doors or on the walls of the classroom.

The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive leftist coded “in this house” and “be kind” aesthetic. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as the the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that classroom. The only way I can describe it is to say that progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory.

A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before acknowledging the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing. Standard leftist land acknowledgement boilerplate. Additionally, every interaction was done in the style of HR style professionalism mixed with progressive leftist coded gentle parenting.

When it comes to how the teachers behaved I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my sons school in order to explain it. To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my sons school are women with almost no exceptions. One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education Assistant, and my son came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a “boy teacher” at school. The level of wonderment and surprise he expressed was on par with what I would expect if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways.

My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior. As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently “gentle” and “kind” in response to various passive aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carries out by his more socially developed (often) female peers.

To say that band night was feminine coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn’t well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan “the future is female” was taken to be a command delivered from God Himself turned into an education program.

Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11 year old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. he is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be effectively managed rather than engaged with an taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.

This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is 6 years old all the way until he is graduated from university.

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average 11 year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, etc) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in. And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye with a straight face and deny that any of this ever happened. Making matters worse these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots.

And all this happens during their formative years.

Now, Imagine you are a young white male.

You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile “nice boy.” On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and “diverse” candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements, and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

On top of that, that if a you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings, and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the worlds pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male.

While all this is going on a series of scandals (COVID, Men in womens’ sports, trans kids, etc) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl.

Once you understand this, the real question is not “why are some young men radicalizing?” the real question is “why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?”

None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. The point is to get you to understand why young men will attach themselves to any voice who is willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success.

The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men, and have completely destroyed young men’s trust in institutions. Young men view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate, and they view the narratives that emerge from those institutions as being expressions of as nothing more then a story told to legitimize an ideology which seeks to hold them back. As such, the institutions and their narratives have absolutely no normative pull on young Gen Z men.

I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you acknowledge what I have laid out here, and engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, Universities, non-profits, HR departments, and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Andrew Torba, and other pathological influences.

/fin

H/T to Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit for the link.

November 8, 2025

QotD: Singing in church

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, this is oriented toward, primarily, Father Erik and Father Tim, who are certainly free to disagree with me, but anyone who attends mass regularly might find it of use. I also do not know if what I see in my church is normal, but suspect it is.

Note: I used to have a good singing voice, not quite commercial quality, IMHO, no, but quite good nonetheless. I loved to sing. I still do, the songs I can still handle, too.

Almost nobody sings reliably in my church. Oh, they can, but they generally do not. The exceptions are hymns everybody knows the tunes to, some of the responsorials, ditto, and, notably, last 4 July, “America the Beautiful”. And, at Christmas, the traditional Christmas songs.

So why those and not the others. Well, the typical hymn in the typical modern church was penned by a couple of nuns from the Order of the Discalced Sisters of Sappho, or priests from the Gay Jesuit Alliance, and printed in the hymnal largely as an exercise in flattery.

Okay, that’s not really true … or not entirely anyway. No, the real problem is that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, NOBODY KNOWS THE BLOODY TUNES, SO OF FREAKING COURSE THEY DON’T SING, WHILE THEY CHANGE THE HYMNS SO OFTEN — WEEKLY, AS A MATTER OF FACT — THAT NOBODY EVER HAS THE CHANCE TO LEARN THE TUNES.

So I propose the following: Pick five hymns — among my recommendations, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “We Gather Together”, “Amazing Grace”, “How Great Thou Art”, “Abide with Me”; but I’m not a fanatic about it — and use only those five for however long it takes for 75% of the congregation to sing all of them. Then change ONE and keep at that until 75% will sing that. And keep doing that until you have a repertoire of 20-25 songs everybody knows and most everybody will sing.

“Make a joyful sound unto the Lord” and see if your parish doesn’t grow and if your parishioners aren’t a lot happier in mass.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-03.

October 27, 2025

“The Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Conservative Woman, Daniel Jupp considers the recent schism in the Church of England, which has left the original church shorn of the vast majority of Anglican worshippers across the globe:

“Canterbury Cathedral aerial image” by John D Fielding is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Today, though, the English Church is broken. The Anglican Communion, which encompassed all the places across the world touched by English exploration, discovery, trade and power, where English Christian missionaries often led the way, has witnessed a devastating schism. At the start of this month Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. As is tradition, the appointment was approved by the Prime Minister and the King, but the nomination came from the Church.

Whether Anglican Christians worldwide approved doesn’t seem to have been considered. Based on multiple past fissures between the part of the Church active in the United Kingdom and the (much larger) Anglican communities globally which had each time been papered over, it may be that the hierarchy in England assumed that the same would happen again.

If so, they were wrong.

The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (also known as Gafcon) represent the Anglican faith in Africa. Their response was to declare publicly that they would no longer send delegates to Church meetings in the United Kingdom, no longer consider the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals or a seat of authority to which they deferred, and no longer consider themselves in the same communion as the Bishops and clergy of the Church of England within England. Perhaps even more tellingly, they asserted that they were the true Anglican communion, more loyal to the instructions of the Bible and Anglican interpretation of those than priests in England. There’s a subtle but powerful distinction there – they were saying not that they had broken away from an Anglican vision of Biblical instruction and Christian identity but that the Church in England had done so.

African Anglicans now assert that they are the true Anglicans, and that the organisation within the UK is not. And in terms of the number of people who follow their message, they are right to assert this.

In losing the African churches and the global, more conservative branch of Anglicanism, the Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet.

Imagine a company that lost 80 per cent of its customers. Or a political party that lost 80 per cent of its voters. Or a nation state that lost 80 per cent of its territory. These would in each case be recognised as unmitigated disasters.

Now imagine this following a previous disaster, which was the end of Justin Welby’s period as Archbishop over a scandal based on not being firm enough and honest enough about paedophile cases in the clergy. One would think the Church might be looking for a non-controversial appointment intended to restore moral trust immediately and defuse criticism.

They did not do this. Knowing the much more conservative and traditionalist stance held by the majority of Anglicans, they chose not to listen to those people, and did something it knew to be passionately opposed by them.

There is an intense irony here that gets to the heart of the self-inflicted problems of the Church of England today. Sarah Mullally has been very clear on the kind of Church she believes in – she’s a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and activism, she has strongly backed asylum and migration, she is a self-declared feminist, and she is both politically and it seems religiously progressive. As Bishop of London, she boasted about representing a diverse and multicultural city, and put her experience in handling diversity as one of the key qualifications and evidence of positive experience she could bring to being the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This was an intensely reality-averse selling-point. London’s slightly lower trend on the relentless decline of Christian faith and attendance compared with the UK as a whole is based not on Mullally’s competence and persuasion. It is based on traditionalist, conservative-minded members of the African Anglican communion in London being more likely to go into a church.

And these people hate woke attitudes and politics.

Update, 28 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 4, 2025

Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky tells the story of “Jane and John”, a distressing tale of rapid onset gender dysphoria:

Image via the Boston Medical Center

In Ontario elementary schools, students are taught that whether you’re a boy or a girl is not determined by your physical body. Kids are encouraged to “explore their identity”. You may have a girl’s body. But how do you feel about it?

These kinds of discussions are going on because schools have accepted what rational people call “gender ideology”, but I prefer the term “gender mythology” because an ideology usually has to do with political systems. In my view the idea that a person’s sex is unrelated to their physical body, that they have a kind of soul sex, if you will, is clearly a myth.

[…]

Jane and John

This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of this person.

Jane was a happy, clever, talented, and expressive girl who always wanted to help others. She displayed precocious empathy and enjoyed teaching younger kids various skills. Jane became socially conscious at an early age and was bothered by the fact that she enjoyed a middle-class, Western quality of life while so many others were clearly struggling. As an elementary student, she canvassed her neighbourhood collecting donations for disadvantaged kids. She came to identify with groups she saw as persecuted or oppressed.

Her school was very racially diverse, but she did not observe much racial discrimination. What she did notice was a fair bit of homophobia. She quickly took every opportunity to be an ally to the LGBT cause. In her middle school, there was an LGBT club, which she joined. Jane would often arrive home from school in an angry state because another student had said something that upset her, like, “being gay is a sin”, for example.

Jane’s parents were progressives who made it clear that she would be loved and accepted if she were a lesbian. Jane laughed at that and replied that she “dreamed about boys”.

Jane was a high achiever who was active in athletics and music. At 16, she became a vegan. She was in most ways a typical high school student, but her allyship with LGBT people gradually moved towards activism.

At university she quickly gravitated towards Indigenous and Gender Studies. Her close friends were all LGBT people. Her best friend was a transwoman (a man who identified as a woman). Jane came out as “bisexual” but her main romantic relationship was with a man.

Then, abruptly at the age of 20, she announced to her parents that she was to be called “John” and that she was going to transition to male.

By her own admission, Jane had been perfectly happy as a girl/woman for 20 years- “until I wasn’t”. This does not fit the Gender Mythology narrative. There is simply no way you can reasonably argue that she had, at this late age, suddenly realized what she truly was. She herself did not even claim that. So, what happened?

[…]

It was pretty obvious to me that Jane’s “transition”, like [trans-race activist Rachel] Dolezal, was the result of a combination of personal qualities and social influences. All the stars aligned to point her in that direction. She desperately wanted to be part of the community she had connected with and was tired of just being an ally. Claiming to be bisexual did not really cement her position as an insider. But becoming trans was her ticket.

Due to the extreme nature of taking on that identity — lifelong drug regimens and a number of surgeries, all of which presented serious health risks, going down that road reflected a true commitment and not only made her a part of the LGBT tribe but catapulted her to the top of the hierarchy.

What Jane experienced is known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and was first identified by the physician/researcher Lisa Littman. Learn more about it here. If you want to get a 2SLGBTQ++ (plus whatever other letters and numbers they’re using now — I can’t keep up) activist spitting mad mention ROGD. The phenomenon proves beyond a reasonable doubt that gender dysphoria can be induced in vulnerable people by social circumstances and aligns well with the research and clinical practice of Dr. Kenneth Zucker from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.

Zucker ran the clinic for some 20 years and was pushed out due to his refusal to accept “affirmative care” as the only acceptable treatment for gender dysphoria. Zucker found that about 80% of kids would eventually grow out of their dysphoria and thus did not believe in affirming kids’ identities but rather focused on helping them cope with their condition.

Since affirmative care (an oxymoron!) has been adopted, we thus know that 80% of the kids who have been put on the road to gender transitions (and most carry through to the end) would have seen their gender dysphoria dissipate naturally over time. But once the first step — puberty blocking drugs, is taken, kids almost always go on to cross sex hormones and many continue with various surgeries.

Gender clinics do not do follow up nor do they support de-transitioning, but it is clear that the number of young people out there who have seriously harmed themselves through “affirmation” treatments is significant, and more harm is being done day by day as long as affirmative care remains the standard treatment for gender dysphoria.

September 23, 2025

“[A]nyone who tries to tell you ‘Antifa is just an idea’ is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR uses the methods of counter-terror analysis:

None of Antifa’s public propaganda channels have attempted to deny that they were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is a fact of considerable significance, which I will now use the methods of counter-terror analysis to examine.

Antifa’s distributed structure makes it impossible for any one chapter or cell to know what another subgroup didn’t do.

It is quite possible that Tyler Robinson is a true stochastic terrorist, inspired and motivated by Antifa propaganda and considering himself part of Antifa but without planning or logistical support from others in the organization. I give this about 60% probability.

The fact that Robinson had peers on Discord with apparent foreknowledge of the assassination attempt does not falsify this possibility. Even if they did assist with the assassination, their connections to Antifa might be equally deniable, equally just a matter of their states of mind.

The assassination was in complete accordance with Antifa doctrine and propaganda. Direct action against “fascist” targets, ranging from low level intimidation up to political killings and organized attacks on government facilities, is exactly what Antifa is organized to do.

Thus, with over 90% probability, other members and aboveground allies of Antifa regard the operation as a (tactically) successful Antifa op, whether or not they had any foreknowledge of it and whether or not Robinson was stochastic.

The ones who aren’t fanatics or idiots have probably figured out by now that the assassination was a serious strategic blunder. You might expect that they would be scrambling to deny that Antifa had anything to do with Kirk’s death.

Some of Antifa’s aboveground allies [are] in fact doing this; the dominant form of denial by Democratic politicians and activists is to deny that Antifa even exists as more than an idea.

But Antifa itself has not done this, and I predict very confidently (95%) that it will not. The real reason it won’t has nothing to do with its structural inability to know that no member of Antifa was involved.

To understand why this is, you need to grasp what Antifa is for. Not its ultimate purpose, which is to foment a violent revolution that will enable Communists or Left-Anarchists to seize power, but the way it operationalizes that goal in practice.

The purpose of Antifa direct action is to shape the political environment through terror. Its goal is to intimidate its opponents into paralysis — to raise the costs of their speech and public action by predictably opposing it with violence.

I am not speculating about this, because if you read Antifa’s propaganda and organizing materials it will tell you exactly this.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is perfectly accordant with Antifa doctrine. Antifa cannot deny this, nor disown Tyler Robinson even in the likely event that he is only stochastically connected to the organization, because … what use is a terror network that disavows intimidation of its opponents?

Antifa’s goals require it to be a credible threat to “fascists”. If it denied that it had anything to do with killing Charlie Kirk, it would demotivate its own foot soldiers and decrease its usefulness to its aboveground allies.

Antifa needs to exist in a kind of mixed state — simultaneously deeply threatening to its enemies but deniable by many of its allies in the Democratic Party, journalism, and academia.

It is also, however, important that none of its aboveground allies can actually believe their own denials. Otherwise Antifa, perceived as useless, would risk losing the funding and political cover that has until now allowed it to operate with some degree of impunity.

You may therefore safely assume that anyone who tries to tell you “Antifa is just an idea” is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying.

At Woke Watch Canada, C.C. Harvey discusses the “red thread of Antifa subversion” over the last ten or so years:

Establishment leaders now even cuddle up with extremists who do not hide their violently subversive orientation. When the ENTIRE establishment took a knee for for the (self-identified) queer, Marxist, violently revolutionary group BLM during the 2020 riots, the subjugation of the professional classes was complete. We stopped being allowed to object to our institutions becoming vehicles for communist revolution. We were called racists and far right extremists and conspiracy theorists for even thinking bad thoughts about BLM and the woke communist revolution, and could be punished for talking to friends about it in group chats. We all became ideological captives of neoMarxist revolutionaries.

The DEI industry exploded, and although it is losing steam in the USA, it still functions as a modern Red Guard policing Canadian discourse and behaviour. If we’re being honest, we will admit that even most conservative politicians here were cowed. The entire establishment worked together to erect a new politburo and stasi throughout Canada and the USA, and far beyond.

Republicans are dismantling the neoMarxist structures that have been erected in America, and this is of course being disingenuously characterized by leftists as proof that Trump is fascist and authoritarian. BLM has largely imploded with corruption and infighting, but Antifa appears to have grown even stronger, especially its queer contingent, and their membership is agitating heavily as they see the Trump administration tearing down what they built.

Antifa is not just a gang of idealistic rabble-rousers in black hoodies rebelling against authority. It is the heir of a century-long Marxist project seeking massive, sweeping revolution, and advancing their goals via inversions: turning truth into lies, sin into virtue, desecration into liberation. From the beginning, Antifascist communists were passionately committed to revolution in all areas of human life and society.

It is not by coincidence that antifa and the LGBTQIA+ are entwined. Antifa have always been committed to sexual revolution — crossing sexual boundaries, normalizing deviance, dissolving the family.

Even in earliest iterations, the antifascists were dangerously radical in sexual ideology and policy: the historical record shows they handed children to paraphilic predators in the name of antifascist sexual liberation as early as postwar Germany. That anti-family, fetishistic spirit runs straight through antifascist history and is on full display in today’s TQ+ movement. TQ+ is conjoined with Antifa (Trantifa, if you will) to actively promote hypersexualization, the destabilizing of sex identity and family, and the mainstreaming of disorder and perversion.

Marx and Engels attacked the family as a “bourgeois prison”. Later Marxists carried this out through radical experiments in sex and pedagogy, all under the banner of liberation. Today’s gender and queer theorists are majority Marxists.

Marxists deal in inversions, so indoctrination presented as education, perversion rebranded as liberation, abuse disguised as compassion, self-mutilation celebrated as authentic selfhood. Today, Antifa-aligned “Queer Resistance” brigades advance sexual inversions and corruptions that are just as damaging as antifascists of bygone eras: in postwar Germany, the antifascist Kentler experiment assigned orphan boys to be raised by wealthy pedophiles. Today, an uncomfortable number of LGBTQIA+ activists have been caught adopting babies and toddlers to abuse, raping their own children, or sexually assaulting minors. As a result of our establishment embracing the far left revolutionary zeitgeist and sacralizing “marginalized” identities, safeguarding has been sacrificed on the altar of LGBTQIA+ identitarianism.

Update, 25 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 14, 2025

Funny … I saw multiple reports that the accused assassin was an extremist “conservative” …

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t normally lean on content from the social media site formerly known as Twitter, but there’s more solid information there than in 99% of the legacy media. For instance, here’s ESR on the background of the alleged assassin (I use the word “alleged” because I can’t afford lawyers for nuisance suits):

The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Two newspapers are now reporting that Tyler Robinson was living with a transsexual who is cooperating with the FBI, so I’m going to consider this confirmed.

Rather than talking about the obvious stuff, I want to focus on the questions I think the FBI will be asking the boyfriend.

Not about the assassination itself. They’ve already got Robinson dead to rights on aggravated murder. Given that he apparently had to be dissuaded from committing suicide when he was caught, he may even plead guilty and confess.

No, the interesting question is his connections. With probability approaching unity, he was Antifa. The question is: explicit Antifa, or stochastic?

I think we can take it as given that Robinson wasn’t given orders to kill Kirk by some supervillain sitting at the top of a command hierarchy. Antifa doesn’t work that way.

Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy, it’s a whole bunch of interlocking directorates with common ideological goals. This trades away some capacity for large-scale organization in order to gain resistance against single-point attacks.

To the extent Antifa as a whole takes orders at all, it’s by paying attention to the targets suggested by above-ground left-wing figures. Yes, including Democratic politicians, who treat Antifa as a conveniently deniable militant wing. The decentralization of its organization helps with the deniability, too.

Robinson may have been part of an Antifa cell that provided him with logistical support, knowing what they were contributing to.

Or, he may have been acting alone in a direction shaped by Antifa propaganda. There’s actually a continuum of possibilities; he might have dropped deniable hints to Antifa associates as a way of gaining status within the group.

I think what the boyfriend is going to get the most serious grilling about is the nature and scope of those connections. That is, if Robinson doesn’t reveal them himself.

They’re going to get his cell, if there is one. They may be able to nail down the entire Antifa chapter it’s part of.

Further connections are going to be tough to prove. It is highly unlikely, for example, that there are direct command links from the Democratic National Committee to Antifa.

It will probably be more productive to follow the money; if they can flip the right people in his chapter they may be able to go after dark-money groups like Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations.

Which, to be fair, probably don’t know they’re funding assassinations? But are probably carefully averting their eyes from the fact that they fund people who fund other people who fund assassinations. The network is carefully designed to preserve deniability in all directions.

The long play in smashing a terror network is always to cut its funding chain. That job got well started with the dismantling of USAID, but there’s a lot more work to do.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination may give us the thread that unravels the whole weave.

Also on former-Twitter, Larry Correia:

    Oilfield Rando @Oilfield_Rando
    Imagine the newsroom editor meetings where they’re trying to figure out some way, any way, to spin the news that the shooter was shacked up with a trooner before they publish articles about it.

    Because make no mistake, they can’t avoid publishing it. They know it.

My bet for the news blitz narrative that’s coming —

It’s the fault of his conservative, religious family, for driving this young man to kill because they couldn’t accept his forbidden love. How tragic. The real bad guys here are those conservative Christian hate mongers who won’t let love be love, and as usual liberals are the real victims. Plus a single shot from a really old deer rifle shows why we need to ban assault weapons. If you grew up with a Republican father that means you are MAGA forever and pay no attention to the millions of militant leftists and rainbow haired pronoun people on TikTok bragging about how much they hate and rebelled against their conservative religious parents, that’s different.

Larry Correia, Twitter, 2025-09-13.

September 2, 2025

Too much empathy can be more dangerous than too little

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spaceman Spiff explains why boundaries matter, in so many different areas of modern life:

Empathy is a virtue many strive to demonstrate. But few will discuss its downsides. Why it is not universally good or useful. How it can be misdirected.

In some situations it is lethal. It can reflect a suicidal urge we now see in Western nations.

Much empathy in society is in fact sentimentality, which is dangerous. Sentimental ideas about mixing cultures, elevating poor performers through quotas, or tinkering with traditional gender roles have real world effects.

With such an emphasis on empathy, which many think of as niceness, we overlook the need for boundaries to maintain a functioning society.

This is the issue at the heart of much that is damaging us today.

Individual rights

We live in an era that champions individual rights to an almost autistic degree. This is a product of Western liberalism, which now seems to be entering its terminal phase as its effects ultimately destroy what made Western societies strong.

Since an individual’s rights trump everything we cannot easily enforce boundaries our ancestors could take for granted. Try challenging a gay pride parade or transgender material in schools on the grounds of public decency and the least you can expect is to lose your job.

Profound changes have happened just in the last few decades and all in the name of individual rights. The erosion of boundaries on behaviour is one of the most visible aspects of this.

Physical boundaries

The concept of boundaries is almost universal and spans everything from the mundane to the spiritual.

Most countries recognize the right to private property and inherent within this is the notion of boundaries. My car is mine and no one else’s, for example.

This is applied to our homes and gardens. These are ours and defendable from theft. Ultimately this in turn includes a neighbourhood or locale, even a region or state. All these things have visible boundaries that demarcate where they begin and end.

Most famously this applies to national borders, a traditional form of boundary in use for thousands of years. Failing to enforce this barrier is national suicide. The world is not like us and if it comes to us we will look like the world in return. Borders keep the barbarians out.

Everyone instinctively grasps these kinds of boundaries. We close our windows and have locks on our doors because of this understanding.

Using boundaries to exclude others feels natural.

Cultural boundaries

Less explicitly visible are cultural boundaries, often transmitted via tradition and convention. We have spent the last century attacking many of these as old fashioned, with little pause to consider why tradition emerges in the first place.

Marriage between men and women. Complementary gender roles. Sexual mores kept private. The sanctity of childhood, its innocence protected from intrusion.

As we removed constraints in the name of progress we destroyed much of the glue that held our societies together. We are now watching things unravel as people marry less and produce fewer children. We see widespread mental illness and anguish as the few basic certainties of life are destroyed in the name of progress.

People don’t know who or what they are when cultural boundaries are deleted. Women, men, natives, newcomers, the working class. Who are we really without some certainties in life?

August 4, 2025

TERF Island

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Spiked, Jo Bartosch reviews Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology:

The truth is, before they are revered, history-makers are almost always reviled. From universal suffrage to the abolition of the slave trade, the freedoms we take for granted today began as the unpopular obsessions of the awkward and bloody-minded. Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology charts how just such a small group of determined women – mocked, maligned and misrepresented – dragged sex-based rights back from the brink, often at huge personal cost. It’s the story of how they were hated before they became feted.

Part battle manual and part whodunnit, TERF Island is an insider’s chronicle of how a scrappy, unfunded grassroots movement of mostly middle-aged women outmanoeuvred a lobby bankrolled by billionaires and cheered on by multinational corporations and well-intentioned human-resources departments.

I have been involved in the TERF wars for a decade, and I know McAnena herself is no bystander. Formerly a volunteer at Fair Play for Women and now director of campaigns at Sex Matters, she has done her time in the trenches, too. Each chapter is a vivid, accurate and compelling profile of a key figure in the movement, including Transgender Trend’s Stephanie Davies-Arai, Fair Play for Women’s Nicola Williams, Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen and Maya Forstater, whose case against her employer established gender-critical beliefs as protected in UK law – all women I’m proud to know.

It’s almost hard to remember how recently it was considered heresy to say, to use the words popularised by Keen, that “a woman is an adult human female”. In April, the Supreme Court confirmed this truth in law. The BBC may still choke on it, but the legal precedent stands. Yet only a few years ago, saying this out loud could land you in a police station, on the dole queue or even in hospital.

McAnena captures the febrile atmosphere of those early days, when stating a biological fact was enough to have you smeared as a fascist. She takes us inside the campaigns that exposed the lunacy of housing violent male offenders in women’s prisons, the cruelty of sterilising confused children and the institutional capture of sporting organisations. Now, a decade after Davies-Arai launched Transgender Trend, barely a week passes without a professional body or council quietly reversing a discriminatory “trans inclusive” policy. That didn’t happen by accident.

What makes TERF Island so readable is that it doesn’t just document the headline moments. McAnena records the unglamorous grind: women lobbying MPs, poring over policy documents and calmly dismantling pseudoscience from stalls in the high streets of British towns. As McAnena puts it, the campaign against gender self-identification, which galvanised the resistance, brought “hundreds of women on to the streets and thousands more online to defend their sex-based rights”. “It was the catalyst for greater awareness, resistance and campaigning for the rights of women and children in the face of the demands of transgender ideology.”

July 21, 2025

“Normal”? Dude, that’s extremist right-wing hate speech!

Filed under: Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Bone Writer on the huge increase in young people “identifying” as something other than what unreconstructed cavemen used to call “normal”:

Walk through any high school, scroll through TikTok, or attend a freshman orientation, and you’ll see the new hierarchy of modern identity:

  • Straight white male? Bottom rung.
  • Bisexual nonbinary neurodivergent? Stunning and brave.
  • Confused, anxious, fluid? You’re seen. You’re valid.
  • Rooted, stable, and clear? YOU must be dangerous.

It’s not just a cultural shift anymore. It’s a cultural mutation. A slow but total dislocation from reality.

We are no longer celebrating the diversity of life. We are celebrating the diversity of escape routes from it.

Identity as a Compass? No … It’s Identity as Camouflage

There was a time when “identity” meant something integrated, a clear expression of who you are, shaped by your values, your upbringing, your nature.

Now, identity is:

  • A product
  • A protest
  • A mask

It’s often less about expressing truth and more about shielding from judgment.

And nowhere is that clearer than in the explosion of LGBT+ self-identification, especially among the young.

The Numbers Don’t Lie but No One Wants to Look at Them

In 2012, Gallup found ~3.5% of Americans identified as LGBT.

By 2021? Over 20% of Gen Z now identify somewhere on the spectrum.

Among Gen Z women, bisexual identity has grown by over 400%.

Do you really believe this is all “just visibility”? Do you really think the human genome changed this much in 10 years?

Of course not.

What changed was the culture. And culture now rewards deviation and punishes normativity.

Reported by Axios in 2021

July 14, 2025

Emperor Hadrian and Antinous the God

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Reginald Godwyn reviews a new monograph from Dr. Sean Gabb:

Sean Gabb’s The Cult of Antinous is not a hagiography. It is something better: a quiet, erudite demolition of pious lies from both the ancient and modern world. The lecture-turned-book is a brisk, sardonic tour through the most decadent cult of the Roman world, and one of its most effective. The boy died, yes — but what followed was a miracle of political opportunism and spiritual success. Gabb does not flinch from the disturbing parts. Nor does he genuflect before the fashionably uncritical idolatry now surrounding Antinous as gay icon. This is not a work of celebration. It is a work of historical thought, dressed as a lecture and sharpened with scepticism.

It begins, as it must, with a photograph of Hadrian and Antinous — stone fragments now housed in the British Museum, staring out from beneath museum glass and centuries of self-serving speculation. “Hadrian is on the left”, Gabb says, “Antinous on the right”. But from then on, it is the boy — not the emperor — who takes centre stage. The story is simple enough. Antinous was a Bithynian youth, met Hadrian at around age twelve, became his lover, travelled with him, and died in the Nile under suspicious circumstances. Hadrian made him a god. Cities were built. Statues were raised. Coins were minted. Shrines were erected. And the worship spread quickly and widely—and in ways that make some modern historians uncomfortable.

Gabb’s treatment of all this is not exactly kind, but it is always fair. He reminds us that, when it comes to Antinous, we know almost nothing. The written sources are sparse: Dio Cassius gives a few lines; the Historia Augusta offers rumour. Most of what we “know” is based on “could have”, “may have”, “might have”. And yet on this we have built dissertations, operas, novels, and now neopagan blogs filled with inverted pentagrams and airbrushed torsos. Gabb is not impressed. His repeated refrain is “castle of supposition”. And rightly so. Royston Lambert, he notes, was especially fond of these castles.

But for all that, there is a real story here. Gabb walks us through the ancient views of sex, pausing only to make the necessary disclaimer for his mixed audience of Chinese undergraduates and English middle class language students:

    Please be aware that other civilisations frequently have or had views of sexual propriety different from our own. This lecture will discuss, and sometimes show depictions of, sexual relationships between adults and persons somewhat below the present age of consent. Some of these relationships involve disparities of legal status. Though not recommended for imitation in modern England, such relationships are nowhere explicitly condemned. The lecture will also not avoid language that many may consider indelicate or obscene.

What follows is a lesson in ancient sexual economics. Among Greeks, boy-love was structured: older men pursued beautiful adolescent boys, usually between 12 and 17, who were supposed to receive but not enjoy. The Romans were less sentimental: they cared only who did the penetrating. “To use was fine. To be used was shameful.” Gabb’s phrasing here is withering, but accurate. There is no anachronistic moralising — just the dry, clinical reconstruction of a culture with different priorities.

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