"Whenever we use a euphemism such as ‘gender-affirming healthcare,’ or allow others to use these phrases without challenge, we are participating in social engineering." I am amazed how many people have no idea what 'gender-affirming healthcare' actually means. It sounds so nice, but the reality is not.
Thanks for the comment, Doreen. The isolation of dissenting voices is a necessary tactic of institutional capture, because the average person must not be allowed to sympathise with that dissent. Sophie Scholl and her peers in the White Rose movement paid with their lives despite not being a threat to anyone. Fortunately, we in the West are not under those conditions today, and it is possible to find support from outside of the captured institution, if not within it.
"However, there has long been a tension between assimilation and liberation factions of the sexual rights movement, dating back to at least the 1970s when some activists argued that any restrictions on behaviour whatsoever, including an adult age of consent, were unacceptable."
Academic experts in the relevant fields (history, sociology, sexology?) should study this dichotomy to describe the demographic characteristics of each group and determine the relative amount of support the assimilation and liberation factions had and continue to have among lesbians and gay men.
I predict that they would find that assimilation enjoyed much wider support among the over-25s with stable work, employment and relationships, whereas liberation was the goal of a much smaller and younger percentage of an activist population that was largely urban. Moreover, one would expect the media, especially the lesbian and gay press, to have covered the liberationists more extensively than the assimilationists because the former would have been seen as being in the vanguard of the gay rights movement. The effect would have been to overstate the liberationists' power and influence.
Human nature being what it is, most people would have found it excessively taxing to be living on the front lines of a utopian social movement day in and day out. Assimilation into an accepting society would have been preferable to dealing with ongoing strife. Unfortunately, the media and opponents of gay and lesbian equality are more likely to remember the liberationist cause and ascribe it reflexively to all lesbians and gays without distinguishing the assimilationists from the activists who opposed all limits on social and sexual behavior.
An example of this phenomenon can be found in the most recent episode of the Manhattan Institute's "City Journal's 10 Blocks" podcast. There, the guest attributed the decline of the family (a perennial preoccupation on the right) to the ideas of the Marxist psychoanalyst and crackpot Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), who is termed the instigator of the sexual revolution. It is as if no other figures besides this radical had ever influenced American attitudes on sex and the family. https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/wilhelm-reich-instigator-of-the-sexual-revolution
Thanks for the comment and the link, Ollie. I can see what you mean about how people change their goals with age, but not everyone fits that description. Some of the 1970's liberation activists are still at it, while others died of old age while accelerating their behaviour to the extreme (Genesis P. Orridge comes to mind).
I recently posted a review of The Well of Loneliness, in which the author Radclyffe Hall specifically called for acceptance of gender non-confirming people like her by society, even though that must have seemed very unlikely in 1928: https://substack.com/inbox/post/148487817
Again- such an incredibly well researched article.
I really hope it's a matter of months, not years, that this information reaches the mainstream. I hope authorities in all affected (or 'infected') institutions are currently working hard to increase the integrity of their security against this.
Thanks Esther, many people have asked how this situation could have happened, and I hope that articles like this one offer credible explanations. A security analysis which frames the problem in terms of attacks and defences will be uncomfortable for people who see only the best in others. As I've suggested in this article, the social engineering attack relies on the gullibility of people just like that, and so it's no surprise to me that the 'progressive' organisations fell first.
You're welcome! Unfortunately I've had too much experience of this kind of manipulation. I can no longer in good conscience support a number of organisations that I've put many years of effort into until they return to evidence-based policy.
Well constructed analogy, and apt, nicely evolved up to a point.
I think the general model is called parasitism, combined with virality. Taking over servers or institutions without destroying them entirely is parasitism, while virality is the amplification effect.
The original decentralized social engineering system to create cells which disrupt social systems of course is Bolshevism and the clandestine cell system - logically independent but synchronized through structured messages. While enormously valuable for the French Resistance against Nazism, it was also damaging when used by terrorists up through and including Al Quaeda. The trick of course is to have cells created in unwitting hosts - parasitism.
Mutualismal and commensalism are other structures to consider. Gay and Lesbian relationships to the straight world entered mutualism - neither side must expend useless energy to manage coexisting (as opposed to policing sex and managing the resulting waste of time hiding relationships) - both benefit. G&L then entered a commensal relationship with Trans - Trans benefitted, but shared no goals, but could go along for the ride with no apparent damage to G&L.
The commensal relationship has turned parasitic.
Spanner laws are where you lost me. I find Catholics pretending weekly to eat the flesh of Christ and drinking the blood, well, odd. You believe that adults pretending (or having) varieties of rough sex is a terrible thing. “Chacun à son goût” as the French, those dastardly agents of subversion might say. Pedophilia does not involve consent, neither does child labor, child soldiers, child genital mutilation, child contracts, child advertising. No pushback on any of that.
Revocation of Spanner laws is mutualism. Kinky need not fear the ask or the give, the rest of us need waste no time.
To me the interesting thing is the source, because unless the fountain is stilled it will continue to flow, find some strange path again to the sea of people.
The source is of course medicine, psychiatry. It’s the origin of “trans”, it created the institutionalization of “therapies” for a new variety of delusional possession, it advocates for institutions to legally require aquiescence to the delusion at the cost of women’s rights. Trans is the only medical condition which requires cutting off healthy tissue to “treat” it, with follow-up requiring the world to affirm a delusion. So medieval.
As the Russian Revolution created Bolshevism and cellular terrorism, psychiatry around 1960 created “gender” and medico-legal cover for the perpetuation of anti-treatment and enforced prevarication
Thanks for the comment. The relevance of the Spanner cases is that they were not about fantasy role play or rough sex, they involved actual bodily harm to the genitals of others using instruments such as fish hooks (ouch), which was recorded for the pleasure of third parties (i.e. it was performative). Rather than merely accept their prison sentences, these sadists and their supporters attempted to use legal means to influence society, and that is the comparison I am making with the social engineering of gender affirming care.
I would argue that gender identity is older than the 1960's, as it stems from Victorian speculative explanations of homosexuality at least. Please see my review of The Well of Loneliness on my Substack for more about that.
I had friends negatively impacted by Spanner, and in fact when I lived in Paris for near a decade when I was invited to leather parties in London it was very tricky because wearing leather (its own fetish) implied you were categorically a sadomasochist since only sadomasochists would wear leather to signal to others of their ilk. Or so was the thought. I found the experience of going to underground clubs with police monitors outside where there was no sadomasochistic activity, bizarre and retrograde.
Men consent to boxing until they are unconscious; with broken noses, eye sockets, limbs, and later of course brain trauma.
People jump out of airplanes to their death in the UK for the kick of skydiving. Not often but it’s entirely preventable, and consensual.
As an adult can choose to have their nose and eye socket broken by a punch, they should be able to choose to do other things with their bodies what they want however painful.
Medical procedures are another thing, because the harm can extend far beyond the original event; tattoos are a medical procedure which harms the skin irrevocably, and can cause downstream issues from
Infection to immunological compromise. Tattoos are legal.
We don’t have to debate this. I understand your point though I disagree in principle and in application.
In reality as far as I could understand wearing English public school uniforms was a more reliable indicator of violent sadomachochism; or so the film “If…” would
Imply.
I believe Spanner overturn was mutualisation in action.
Someone who likes to be caned, or otherwise put to pain, I honestly don’t care. Of all the ways to hurt yourself it’s the most controllable.
You make a good point about boxing, but our society makes an exception for contact sports because it wants to train men for war. Personally, I don't think people should fight for money, because it incentivises them to risk more damage than they otherwise would. We need laws to protect masochists from sadists precisely because the former will readily consent to harm.
I think you may have it backwards tho, masochists are by far the majority, they generally are the seekers. Finding a skilled sadistic top is quite the trick usually. Masochists are quite common.
That’s why I find the debate topsy turvy. I could tell you odd stories about being invited (tricked) into going to parties to find I was the piece de la resistance - that rara avis a shy, trembling actual dominant top gently coaxed out of a lair into performance, at a ratio of 10 or 20 to 1. Needless to say I usually managed to diplomatically exit. It’s a common joke in those circles.
"Whenever we use a euphemism such as ‘gender-affirming healthcare,’ or allow others to use these phrases without challenge, we are participating in social engineering." I am amazed how many people have no idea what 'gender-affirming healthcare' actually means. It sounds so nice, but the reality is not.
Thanks for the comment, Lisa. The euphemism is needed because the reality is so disturbing. Friends don't encourage friends to remove body parts.
And parents don't encourage kids to remove body parts either. Yet, I have been demonized for not "celebrating" my daughter's breast removal.
Sorry to hear that. I hope your relationship improves.
Institutions seem to think they're immune to 'social contagion', but they are not, it's just called 'runaway diffusion' instead.
It's so frightening being in amongst runaway diffusion and being isolated, screaming into a vacuum.
Thanks for the comment, Doreen. The isolation of dissenting voices is a necessary tactic of institutional capture, because the average person must not be allowed to sympathise with that dissent. Sophie Scholl and her peers in the White Rose movement paid with their lives despite not being a threat to anyone. Fortunately, we in the West are not under those conditions today, and it is possible to find support from outside of the captured institution, if not within it.
"However, there has long been a tension between assimilation and liberation factions of the sexual rights movement, dating back to at least the 1970s when some activists argued that any restrictions on behaviour whatsoever, including an adult age of consent, were unacceptable."
Academic experts in the relevant fields (history, sociology, sexology?) should study this dichotomy to describe the demographic characteristics of each group and determine the relative amount of support the assimilation and liberation factions had and continue to have among lesbians and gay men.
I predict that they would find that assimilation enjoyed much wider support among the over-25s with stable work, employment and relationships, whereas liberation was the goal of a much smaller and younger percentage of an activist population that was largely urban. Moreover, one would expect the media, especially the lesbian and gay press, to have covered the liberationists more extensively than the assimilationists because the former would have been seen as being in the vanguard of the gay rights movement. The effect would have been to overstate the liberationists' power and influence.
Human nature being what it is, most people would have found it excessively taxing to be living on the front lines of a utopian social movement day in and day out. Assimilation into an accepting society would have been preferable to dealing with ongoing strife. Unfortunately, the media and opponents of gay and lesbian equality are more likely to remember the liberationist cause and ascribe it reflexively to all lesbians and gays without distinguishing the assimilationists from the activists who opposed all limits on social and sexual behavior.
An example of this phenomenon can be found in the most recent episode of the Manhattan Institute's "City Journal's 10 Blocks" podcast. There, the guest attributed the decline of the family (a perennial preoccupation on the right) to the ideas of the Marxist psychoanalyst and crackpot Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), who is termed the instigator of the sexual revolution. It is as if no other figures besides this radical had ever influenced American attitudes on sex and the family. https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/wilhelm-reich-instigator-of-the-sexual-revolution
Thanks for the comment and the link, Ollie. I can see what you mean about how people change their goals with age, but not everyone fits that description. Some of the 1970's liberation activists are still at it, while others died of old age while accelerating their behaviour to the extreme (Genesis P. Orridge comes to mind).
I recently posted a review of The Well of Loneliness, in which the author Radclyffe Hall specifically called for acceptance of gender non-confirming people like her by society, even though that must have seemed very unlikely in 1928: https://substack.com/inbox/post/148487817
Again- such an incredibly well researched article.
I really hope it's a matter of months, not years, that this information reaches the mainstream. I hope authorities in all affected (or 'infected') institutions are currently working hard to increase the integrity of their security against this.
Esther
Thanks Esther, many people have asked how this situation could have happened, and I hope that articles like this one offer credible explanations. A security analysis which frames the problem in terms of attacks and defences will be uncomfortable for people who see only the best in others. As I've suggested in this article, the social engineering attack relies on the gullibility of people just like that, and so it's no surprise to me that the 'progressive' organisations fell first.
That's something I was vaguely aware of but wouldn't have seen it clearly at all if you hadn't pointed out it. Incredible but there in plain sight.
Thank you for this fascinating article. You really know your work- so many layers that come together.
You're welcome! Unfortunately I've had too much experience of this kind of manipulation. I can no longer in good conscience support a number of organisations that I've put many years of effort into until they return to evidence-based policy.
Well constructed analogy, and apt, nicely evolved up to a point.
I think the general model is called parasitism, combined with virality. Taking over servers or institutions without destroying them entirely is parasitism, while virality is the amplification effect.
The original decentralized social engineering system to create cells which disrupt social systems of course is Bolshevism and the clandestine cell system - logically independent but synchronized through structured messages. While enormously valuable for the French Resistance against Nazism, it was also damaging when used by terrorists up through and including Al Quaeda. The trick of course is to have cells created in unwitting hosts - parasitism.
Mutualismal and commensalism are other structures to consider. Gay and Lesbian relationships to the straight world entered mutualism - neither side must expend useless energy to manage coexisting (as opposed to policing sex and managing the resulting waste of time hiding relationships) - both benefit. G&L then entered a commensal relationship with Trans - Trans benefitted, but shared no goals, but could go along for the ride with no apparent damage to G&L.
The commensal relationship has turned parasitic.
Spanner laws are where you lost me. I find Catholics pretending weekly to eat the flesh of Christ and drinking the blood, well, odd. You believe that adults pretending (or having) varieties of rough sex is a terrible thing. “Chacun à son goût” as the French, those dastardly agents of subversion might say. Pedophilia does not involve consent, neither does child labor, child soldiers, child genital mutilation, child contracts, child advertising. No pushback on any of that.
Revocation of Spanner laws is mutualism. Kinky need not fear the ask or the give, the rest of us need waste no time.
To me the interesting thing is the source, because unless the fountain is stilled it will continue to flow, find some strange path again to the sea of people.
The source is of course medicine, psychiatry. It’s the origin of “trans”, it created the institutionalization of “therapies” for a new variety of delusional possession, it advocates for institutions to legally require aquiescence to the delusion at the cost of women’s rights. Trans is the only medical condition which requires cutting off healthy tissue to “treat” it, with follow-up requiring the world to affirm a delusion. So medieval.
As the Russian Revolution created Bolshevism and cellular terrorism, psychiatry around 1960 created “gender” and medico-legal cover for the perpetuation of anti-treatment and enforced prevarication
Thanks for the comment. The relevance of the Spanner cases is that they were not about fantasy role play or rough sex, they involved actual bodily harm to the genitals of others using instruments such as fish hooks (ouch), which was recorded for the pleasure of third parties (i.e. it was performative). Rather than merely accept their prison sentences, these sadists and their supporters attempted to use legal means to influence society, and that is the comparison I am making with the social engineering of gender affirming care.
I would argue that gender identity is older than the 1960's, as it stems from Victorian speculative explanations of homosexuality at least. Please see my review of The Well of Loneliness on my Substack for more about that.
I had friends negatively impacted by Spanner, and in fact when I lived in Paris for near a decade when I was invited to leather parties in London it was very tricky because wearing leather (its own fetish) implied you were categorically a sadomasochist since only sadomasochists would wear leather to signal to others of their ilk. Or so was the thought. I found the experience of going to underground clubs with police monitors outside where there was no sadomasochistic activity, bizarre and retrograde.
Men consent to boxing until they are unconscious; with broken noses, eye sockets, limbs, and later of course brain trauma.
People jump out of airplanes to their death in the UK for the kick of skydiving. Not often but it’s entirely preventable, and consensual.
As an adult can choose to have their nose and eye socket broken by a punch, they should be able to choose to do other things with their bodies what they want however painful.
Medical procedures are another thing, because the harm can extend far beyond the original event; tattoos are a medical procedure which harms the skin irrevocably, and can cause downstream issues from
Infection to immunological compromise. Tattoos are legal.
We don’t have to debate this. I understand your point though I disagree in principle and in application.
In reality as far as I could understand wearing English public school uniforms was a more reliable indicator of violent sadomachochism; or so the film “If…” would
Imply.
I believe Spanner overturn was mutualisation in action.
Someone who likes to be caned, or otherwise put to pain, I honestly don’t care. Of all the ways to hurt yourself it’s the most controllable.
You make a good point about boxing, but our society makes an exception for contact sports because it wants to train men for war. Personally, I don't think people should fight for money, because it incentivises them to risk more damage than they otherwise would. We need laws to protect masochists from sadists precisely because the former will readily consent to harm.
I think you may have it backwards tho, masochists are by far the majority, they generally are the seekers. Finding a skilled sadistic top is quite the trick usually. Masochists are quite common.
That’s why I find the debate topsy turvy. I could tell you odd stories about being invited (tricked) into going to parties to find I was the piece de la resistance - that rara avis a shy, trembling actual dominant top gently coaxed out of a lair into performance, at a ratio of 10 or 20 to 1. Needless to say I usually managed to diplomatically exit. It’s a common joke in those circles.
I don't disagree that there are many masochists, or that they actively seek harm. Some people really do need to be protected from themselves.