Trans Rights and the Order of Speech: Part One

Simon Elmer

‘There is a new word in Newspeak’, said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949

I didn’t go to London Pride this year. In truth, I haven’t been for years, since the early 2000s, not only because of the festival’s increasing commercialisation as a platform for corporate advertising in search of the so-called ‘pink pound’, but because of its more recent embrace of the Metropolitan Police Force and the London Mayor, who have used it to promote themselves as ‘LGBTQIA+ friendly’ while overseeing the increase in their power over us, whether that’s in new Stop and Search powers against protesters or the Ultra-Low Emission Zone about to enclose all London in its tax regime.

Now, though, I am not merely disappointed — if no longer surprised — by the failure of the increasingly apolitical gay community to resist or even question this appropriation and co-option of Pride, or concerned about how a festival of resistance and solidarity in which I was proud to participate back in the 1990s has become the enforced orthodoxy of the UK biosecurity state to which every politician, institution and public figure must pay homage and exhibit dogmatic obedience. Today, in 2023, I am directly opposed to Pride’s recent, politically dubious and morally indefensible embrace of the violence, abuse and misogyny of what has come to be known as ‘trans-rights’. In this article I’m going to discuss why.

I’ve been meaning to write this article for some time, maybe years, since the orthodoxies of trans first crept into our culture comparatively recently. It was only in January 2017 that National Geographic, then the most-read magazine in the world, put a 9-year old boy on its cover with the quote: ‘The best thing about being a girl is now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy’ (the boy later recanted).

I’ve discussed the authoritarianism of woke in my book, The Road to Fascism, and why it is now the official ideology of the West; and I’ve made reference to the link between the transhuman programmes of what I call the Global Biosecurity State — which has emerged from the coronavirus ‘crisis’ as the new paradigm of governance in the West — and the practices of trans identity, which include the use of puberty blockers on children and the promise of ‘transitioning’ from one sex to another through hormone therapy and surgical mutilation. But as these practices and the ideology driving them have become more institutionalised, particularly in our schools, I have known that I would have to write an article devoted solely to this topic.

I have found it unusually difficult, however, to put my thoughts on this issue in order. Partly, this is because of my horror and fears at the thought of children being subjected to the predations of a medical industry that has just shown itself, under the guise of a vaccination programme, willing to inject experimental gene therapies into a demographic that is statistically immune to the disease their parents were told it would protect them from. Partly it is because of the absurdity and tedium of having to argue rationally and calmly against the irrationality and hysteria of these orthodoxies, which fly in the face of everything we know about human biology — and, indeed, what we call intellectual and moral debate.

But there is another reason, too. Since I am talking not only about an ideology, a political practice and an industry but also about people, it’s hard to discuss the former without speaking of my relation to the latter. In the past I have known and, as a Londoner, still on occasion meet transvestites, drag queens and, occasionally, a man or women who is undergoing or has undergone some sort and degree of medical ‘transition’ that, they hope, will make or has made them happier, more content with themselves, more at ease in the world — nothing more, perhaps, than what we all want. I once counted several of them as my friends, and although I am repelled by the new breed of violent young men who think wearing a dress gives them the right to threaten and attack women and then denounce anyone who disagrees with their dogma as ‘Nazis’, I am very aware that anything I say about the enforced orthodoxies of this ideology will undoubtedly be interpreted as an attack on those who, under the doctrinaire catch-all of ‘trans’, have had all the distinctions between their practices, behaviours, beliefs and identities reduced to the descriptively inaccurate, sociologically reductive, politically totalising, biologically meaningless and medically fraudulent term ‘transgender’. How this has been done, why and to what ends is what I want to address in this article.

The Castrated Self

On 23 March this year a protest was organised by students at Purdue University in the State of Indiana, USA. Unusually, it took the form not only of chants and banners at the protest but, later in the day, of a block party and drag show organised by oSTEM (Out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Inc.), an LGBTQ+ organisation with over 100 professional and student chapters in the USA and UK. The occasion for these actions was the visit of the conservative political commentator, Michael Knowles, who during his talk to a sold-out crowd of 400 students called for the ‘eradication of the ideology of transgenderism’, and discussed how parents could protect their children from educational institutions enforcing its orthodoxies.

Purdue is a prestigious research university specialising in science, engineering and aviation, and whose alumni include twenty-five astronauts, Nobel Prize-winning physicists and chemists, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and senior politicians in the US and other countries. Of its more than 50,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, 85 per cent are categorised as ‘affluent’ — and they need to be. This year, Purdue charged an annual tuition fee of $9,992 for in-state students and $28,794 for out-of-state students.

As Mr. Knowles gave his lecture, in the hallway outside students stood chanting ‘Fuck off Nazis’ over and over for the duration of his talk. Many of them wore medical masks. Along the corridor, young women marched like drill sergeants between their lines. One wore the pale-blue, pink and white trans flag emblazoned with a black assault rifle and the words ‘DEFEND YOURSELF’, which means far more in the US, where 327 people are shot every day, than it does in the UK. The home-made banners said a lot about this ideology. ‘Eradicate transphobia’. ‘Unite to fight anti-trans bigotry’. ‘For the good of society conservativism must be eradicated’. ‘Intellectual discourse requires intellect’. ‘Shut the fuck up’.

These are not the terms of a debate, in a university or anywhere else. These are authoritarian instructions issued from a platform of growing cultural and political hegemony that has come to be known as ‘woke’, and these wealthy students from the US middle classes are its future politicians, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, scientists, professors, teachers, curators, journalists, company directors and institutional administrators.

The policing and manipulation of human sexuality has always been used by authoritarian and particularly totalitarian states to control the behaviour of its citizens. But across the West today, not only the adolescent, puritanical, censorial and increasingly legislated sexual orthodoxies of woke but now also the gender orthodoxies of trans are being indoctrinated into children by our education and entertainment industries, normalised to the British public in our media and cultural industries, and written into our laws and policies by our government, parliament and local authorities. And the goal is the same: to control the behaviour of UK citizens. To this end, the UK biosecurity state has programmes and technologies undreamed of by the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century, whether that’s repressing desire in obedience to the orthodoxies of biosecurity (for example, the effective ban on sex between people from separate households under lockdown restrictions) or — as demonstrated by the students of Purdue University — releasing the pent-up libido of the compliant in exaggerated anger and hatred directed against those who fail to obey.

Indeed, the contempt for and violence against women we associate with the machismo of historical fascism, and which has returned today in the guise and on the justification of defending so-called ‘trans-rights’, demonstrates how easy it is for the ideologues of woke to direct the emotions and behaviour of its acolytes.

If we look to historical parallels, it took just twelve years for the Third Reich to make soldiers from the Hitler Youth, the membership of which was compulsory for all German children between 10 and 18 years of age, and less than that for the Nazi Party to turn them into paramilitary Brownshirts (Sturmabteilung) whose membership had risen to 3 million by the time they formed a government in 1933. In the wake of a similar financial crisis to that which gave rise to fascism, woke started to receive governmental, institutional and financial backing after the Occupy Movement of 2011-12, which drew attention to the inequality produced by the global financial system — pronouns being easier to police than challenges to finance capitalism. But we should remember the trajectory of the Hitler Youth when judging the import and seriousness of the growing number of activists calling on transvestites to arm themselves and — as they openly declare — ‘Kill the TERFS’ (an acronym for ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists’). Just as the National Socialists propagated such attitudes towards Bolsheviks and Jews, trans has fashioned a paranoid and absolutist ideology that reduces any questioning of its dogma to a threat to the existence of its acolytes. We’ve seen this repeatedly stated by trans activists claiming that anything less than vocal agreement (‘silence is violence’) and obedient compliance with their dictates (‘respect existence or expect resistance’) is a murderous attack on their lives (‘protect trans kids’). As Pastor Martin Niemöller might have said: ‘First they came for the TERFS…’

Given which, is it any wonder that the pathetic young men lining the corridors of the Purdue University union shouting ‘fuck off Nazis’, their every utterance policed by ‘butch’ girls of indeterminate gender, are so ready to pull on a dress and cut off their genitals in a desperate attempt to gain access to the phallic order they’ve so easily surrendered to trans tyranny? The phallic order, as we have had demonstrated over the past three-and-a-half years, determines who has the right to speak. The phallus, in psychoanalytic theory, is not the penis but the sign of this right. When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for example, proclaimed that her Government was the ‘single source of truth’ and that New Zealanders should trust no other, she was laying claim to the phallus. When radical feminists claim that ‘all men are rapists’, or a transgender exponent of critical race theory claims that ‘all white people are racist’, they are making the same claim to the phallus. And, once again, it’s to the same ends as the Nazis who declared that all Jews were bankers, or all Bolsheviks were degenerate. The stereotypes are different, but their ideological function in identifying an imaginary threat (coronavirus, rape, racism, transphobia) and silencing its representatives (conspiracy theorists, men, white people, TERFS) is the same. Trans, like every absolutist ideology, refuses to debate with what it classifies and dismisses as ‘transphobes’. Indeed, this refusal is one of the principles of this ideology, which its acolytes are proud to declare.

As examples of which, in 2021 Richard Dawkins, one of Britain’s most eminent evolutionary biologists, author of The Selfish Gene, one of the most influential science books of all time, the former Professor for Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, an outspoken atheist, vocal critic of pseudo sciences and defender of free speech, declared that, while race is a spectrum, ‘sex is pretty damn binary’. In response, the American Humanist Association that in 1996 had awarded Dawkins the Humanist of the Year award stripped him of the title, and he was vilified in the press as ‘anti-trans’ and ‘right wing’. Then earlier this year, when the LGBTQ+ online newspaper, Pink News, claimed that science in fact ‘debunks’ what they call ‘anti-trans myths’, they began their learned rebuttal by asserting that those who ‘deny trans rights’ — by which they mean the right to control what we can say — also ‘deny the fact that humans drive global climate change and spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine’. The rest of the article, of course, contained no ‘science’ but simply repeated the founding principle of this new order of speech — which, as the author rightly points out, encompasses not just the orthodoxies of trans but also those of the experimental gene therapies and environmental fundamentalism — that disagreeing with its dogma is harmful, dangerous and ‘rooted in harmful beliefs’. Like the acolytes of critical race theory who proudly declare they’re ‘no longer talking to white people about race’, the ideologues of trans don’t ‘do’ debate.

Contrary to what its ideologues and fanatics assert, disagreeing with someone’s beliefs does not endanger their existence. Like the majority of the population of the UK, I do not believe that someone can change their biological sex through medical ‘transition’; nor do I believe they should be permitted simply to declare their gender and then be regarded as such under UK law. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t extend the courtesy of addressing a transvestite man, for example, with a female pronoun and by his female name; but that is conditional upon him not accusing me of wanting to kill him and his fellow transvestites for not obediently repeating the mantra that ‘transwomen are women’. And I won’t be made to do so by the threat of arrest for ‘hate speech’ for not according someone’s personal fantasy the value of biological reality. There are many people in this country with whom I disagree on any number of beliefs without hating them or endangering their existence. Many, indeed, despite our difference of opinion, I continue to debate with, because the agreement to disagree with someone without attacking them physically or threatening them with arrest is how a mature society arrives at coexistence of its population. That is how inclusivity works. By contrast, accusing someone who disagrees with your beliefs of endangering your existence and then threatening to arrest them is how a spoilt child behaves and an authoritarian and dictatorial society controls its population.

The flip side to this absolutism is that obedience to the orthodoxies of trans requires a symbolic and sometimes an actual act of emasculation, and with it a willing yielding of speech, which is replaced by repetition of its dogma. Castration, whether through medical procedure or symbolic transition into the masquerade of femininity, is the cutting out of the tongue, the organ of speech, but also the severing of the Western male’s historic domination of the phallic order for no other reason than his sex. However, this is not to the benefit of women or a feminist discourse of gender. The castrated self, who has voluntarily torn out not only the organs of ‘their’ sexual identity — penis, vagina, breasts — but also their tongues, is the ideal because sexless subject of the Global Biosecurity State. They speak in dogma (Orwell’s ‘duckspeak’) because their tongue-less mouths are now the organs of the state, empty instruments for the sounding of its propaganda. The penis — whether that which has been surgically removed from the male body or that which has been moulded from the flesh of an arm or leg and grafted onto the female body as its functionless but symbolic representation — has become the phallus of the state. In this respect they resemble those actors and celebrities who sold their mouths and reputations to promote the lies of the government about the justification for social distancing, masking and lockdown or the safety and efficacy of the gene therapies injected into the public as vaccines.

Trans, however, contrary to its ubiquitous slogan, isn’t a demand for new human rights apparently unique to this castrated self. Trans is an imposed order of speech determining who can and cannot speak, what can and cannot be said, what must be repeated without question and what must be silenced — if necessary by physical violence. Like fascism, trans is not content merely with censoring the speech of those outside its symbolic order — and which it has identified and categorised with the prefix ‘cis’ — but demands, in addition, that those so designated speak only its dogma. This starts with the new division of humankind not into the old and now rejected biological difference between male and female but into the new ideological differentiation between ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’. And like the Nazi distinction between Aryan and Jew, or the Zionist distinction between Jew and Arab, this is not a difference between equals but a new hierarchy between the chosen people and those whose identities the acolytes of trans describe with such derogatory terms as ‘toxic’ (masculinity or femininity), ‘unreconstructed’ (male or female).

This language explicitly suggests that the signifiers of our sexual difference require purging, surgically removing, and the bodies and identities to which they belonged reconstructing — more, that humans are born into a defective male or female identity that requires correcting by the chemical, surgical and ideological intervention of the biosecurity state. In this respect, trans shares the Puritan’s notion of original sin, which it seeks to redress through a biomedical model of the human being the trans consumer is invited to assemble from a choice of identities — agender, androgyne, butch, femme, genderfluid, intersex, non-binary, pangender, queer, transsexual, and a hundred other brands.

Perhaps because it has been prefabricated for its consumers, the ideology of trans, while denouncing anyone who questions it as a ‘Nazi’, is open and even proud about using the methods of historical fascism to threaten and silence its opponents. As an example of which, during her recent trip to New Zealand to speak on the threat to women’s rights presented by the ideology of trans, the British woman and founder of Standing for Women, Kellie-Jay Keen, was nearly lynched by a crowd of male and female trans-activists. In response to which, Tess Hall, a New Zealand writer and herself a trans-activist, published footage of herself burning a book by the writer, J. K. Rowling, whose defence of women’s rights and the biological difference between the sexes have made her a unique target for the vitriol and hatred of the trans movement. And the parallels with historical fascism don’t stop there.

Whether fluttering on their flagpoles above the Houses of Parliament, the Foreign Office,  the Department for Education, the Department for Communities and Local Government and — most incongruously of all — MI6, or hung the length and breadth of London’s Regent Street that so recently held the Union Jack, or printed on the vehicles used by the Metropolitan Police Service, Essex Police and the Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, or displayed on walls in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library, or hung from the porticos of University College London and Brunel University, or sprayed across the new link bridge of the Princess Royal University Hospital in Farnborough, or hung by a transvestite minister across the windows of the prayer room of a children’s hospital in Edinburgh, or hoisted above the Town Halls of Brighton and Hove, Barking and Dagenham, Bristol and Liverpool, or painted over pedestrian crossings in the London Boroughs of Sutton and Camden, or printed on the cricket stumps used in this summer’s Ashes series: not since the Nazi swastika has a symbol and flag branded so many aspects of society or been so widely imposed. But that was in the Third Reich and its occupied territories, which even at its height ruled over just 280 million people in Europe; whereas the LGBTQIA+ Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride flag — which every year adds another letter, incorporates another colour, assimilates another movement, swallows another identity, creates another community of victims — is the adopted symbol of the New World Order in the West and the 900 million people on whose speech it has imposed its order.

As the last three-and-a-half years have shown, the international technocracies from whom our elected governments take their orders like to trial their programmes on smaller countries before implementing them in the Anglo-sphere. And just as coronavirus-justified restrictions in New Zealand, Australia and Canada were testing grounds for the USA, so too the more extreme applications of trans laws have been tested in Scotland, Wales and Ireland before they are implemented in the UK. The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 22 December, 2022, empowering a child as young as 16 and a man or woman of any age to attain a Gender Recognition Certificate that would allow them to change the sex on their birth certificate without a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Although subsequently vetoed by the Secretary of State for Scotland on the grounds that it was incompatible with the Equality Act 2010, the Scottish Government has promised to challenge this decision through a judicial review.

Similarly, although the UK Government has no power over the Government of Ireland, the latter’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment is currently consulting on the draft for their updated Senior Cycle Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) programme. It is indicative of the biopolitical dimension of this programme that it includes the social and personal development of students aged 15-18 with education in ‘mental health and well-being’; but among the reasons for updating the curriculum the Council includes the need to ‘address gender equality’ and ‘gender-based violence’. If we imagined that this refers to the equality between women and men, the draft clarifies that, in the 60 hours of classroom learning allocated to this programme, teachers will adopt an approach that is ‘inclusive of all genders’, and ensure that learning outcomes are taught in a way that ‘LGBTQ+ identities’ are ‘fully integrated and reflected in teaching and learning’. And in case we aren’t sure what this entails, SPHE, the draft states:

Affirms diversity as an aspect of human life and human sexuality, enabling all students to feel valued and included in the teaching and learning in their classrooms. This involves using inclusive and affirming language.

Inclusivity, according to this by now familiar distortion of the term, means strict adherence to the ideological orthodoxies of trans. As confirmation of which, students, as part of their assessment, will have to demonstrate what the draft calls ‘a change or confirmation of beliefs/attitudes/assumptions/values’.

It’s not difficult to believe that an equivalent programme of indoctrination into this order of speech will be imported into the UK sooner rather than later; but apart from observing that these beliefs, attitudes, assumptions and values were, until recently, held by a tiny, marginal and culturally extreme minority of the UK or, indeed, the Irish population, we should also ask when our schools became institutions of indoctrination into this or any other ideology. Admittedly, all education contains an ideology implicit in its understanding of the world, cultural assumptions, historical justifications and pedagogical methods; but imposing a new order of speech represents a radical departure from the principles of a liberal arts education that have been progressively erased by forty years of neoliberalism. As this example demonstrates, this is being replaced by a model of education that has more in common with those employed in totalitarian regimes of the past and present.

I want to conclude these remarks with a passage I quote a lot, from the inaugural lecture delivered at the Collège de France in 1977 by the French semiologist and critic, Roland Barthes, a homosexual man (long before the nomenclature of ‘gay’ was universally adopted) who — I like to think — would be appalled by and opposed to the fascism of trans ideology:

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive. [The Russian linguist Roman] Jakobson has shown that a speech-system is defined less by what it permits us to say than by what it compels us to say. To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate; it is to subjugate. Language — the performance of a language system — is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

A New Lysenkoism

The characteristics of trans qualify it as a form of Lysenkoism. This is named after the Stalinist biologist, Trofim Lysenko, who rejected the genetic theory of hereditary formulated by the German-Czech biologist, Gregor Mendel. In place of which, Lysenko argued not only that characteristics of organisms that were acquired from their environment over their lifetime can be inherited by their offspring, but also that in doing so one species can transform into another.

Lysenkoism — which at the time was called ‘Michurinism’, after the Russian plant breeder, or ‘agrobiology’ or ‘Soviet Darwinism’ — was adopted as the official doctrine of the USSR in 1948. After which, Soviet scientists were forced to denounce criticisms of Lysenkoism as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist’; genetics, in which the Soviet Union led the world at the time, was dismissed as a ‘pseudo-science’; and some 3,000 Soviet biologists were fired from their posts, imprisoned or in some cases executed by the state. At the height of his power over Soviet biology, when he denied the existence of genes, Lysenko claimed that wheat raised in the appropriate environment could produce seeds of rye. This was an absurdity unmatched in biology, perhaps, until today’s assertion that a man who undergoes surgical ‘transition’ can become a woman not only in law but in fact. Applied with disastrous results to agricultural policy after the Soviet famine of 1932-33 that had been caused by the collectivisation of farming, Lysenko’s theories in practice reduced crop yields in the USSR; and, when applied in China, contributed to the Great Famine that between 1959 and 1961 killed tens of millions of Chinese.

In this respect, Lysenkoism has parallels with the imposition of so-called ‘organic’ agricultural policies in Sri Lanka in 2021, which like Lysenko meant banning pesticides and fertilizers, and which in a year reduced rice production by more than 50 per cent. Largely regarded now as a pseudo-science, ‘Lysenkoism’ has come to be used as a term for any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for politically or ideologically expedient ends.

A more recent example of Lysenkoism is the once popular and now discredited notion of the ‘gay gene’, which itself was a product of the increasing biomedicalisation of what is socially or psychologically or otherwise determined, and which shared with the ideology of trans an essentialist understanding of identity. By this I mean the increasingly dominant idea that we are born with an essential self — whether ‘gay’ or ‘female’ — but that normalising social and sexual conventions have repressed this true identity as ‘straight’ or ‘male’. We hear this expressed in the endlessly repeated injunction in popular culture and advertising alike to ‘be who you are’, ‘become the real you’. The authentic self is the dream of the commodity.

However, I don’t subscribe, either intellectually or morally, to these perceptions of gender or sexuality or indeed of identity, all of which are products of the relatively recent and deeply regressive ideology of identity politics. Whether deployed in advertising campaigns, by government ‘nudge’ units or by city mayors appealing to targeted demographics, such essentialism is always an attempt to control others by categorising the multiplicity of identities we assume throughout our lives into some preferably biologically-authorised, state-legislated ‘I’ whose religious, racial, sexual and now gender ‘characteristics’ are protected under the Equality Act 2010. I don’t believe — and I oppose the assertion — that a pubescent girl uncomfortable at growing breasts, or a teenage girl who doesn’t conform to the behavioural codes of femininity, should be told that they are boys; just as I don’t believe and oppose the assertion that a pubescent boy who likes to wear his sister’s dresses, or a young man finding it hard to enter adulthood in an economy and society in which the roles particular to men have so rapidly diminished, are therefore girls or women.

Contrary to the fundamentalist belief on which transgenderism has constructed its orthodoxies, one cannot be ‘born into the wrong body’, because there is no I separate from the body. This notion of a dualism between mind and body originated in ancient philosophies and religions, but has long been refuted by post-Cartesian philosophy and is incompatible with modern psychiatry and neuroscience. The division — whose terms the advertising for so-called medical ‘transition’ promises to unite — is not between the body of the transvestite and their ‘true’ self, but between the perception of the transgender-identifying individual and everything we know about reality.

It beggars belief that such an explicitly ideological pseudo-science has been embraced by the UK state and its institutions, and with rare exceptions has not been challenged by the scientific community. But unfortunately — and disgracefully — UK biologists have been as threatened into compliance and funded into promoting the orthodoxies of trans as UK epidemiologists and virologists were on the equally fraudulent ‘consensus’ over a threat to public health that never existed and the largely medieval responses to a pandemic that never materialised. If we think that Lysenkoism is a phenomenon of the past, in the last few years alone the equally manufactured scientific ‘consensus’ on the threat of SARS-CoV-2, on the effectiveness of social distancing and so-called lockdown, on the justification for mandatory masking and experimental gene therapies, on the imminence of environmental catastrophe and on the sustainability of so-called ‘green’ sources of energy, have all demonstrated that the deliberate distortion of science for political ends is alive and well and thriving in the West.

And just as the ideas of Trofim Lysenko could only have gained a scientific ‘consensus’ in a totalitarian regime, so too the orthodoxies of trans are the products of a new digital totalitarianism. In a decade which is facing previously unimagined programmes and technologies of identification, surveillance and control — the foremost of which is a system of Digital Identity that will be verifiable by biometric data — the division and categorisation of the populations of the West into, as of 2023, an absurd 107 genders is inseparable from the trans-human ideology that has made us, in such a short period of time, accept and even embrace the new orthodoxies of speech and belief being enforced in the Global Biosecurity State.

As a biopolitical strategy, indoctrinating young children into trans ideology, which now includes exposing them to transvestite male strippers, will drive parents to take them out of schools in such numbers that it will be used to justify legislation taking children into the care of the state. In this respect, trans is the ideology of biopolitics, creating consensus for changes to law that are already being made, and whose aim is to place the human being under the authority of the state from the moment it is born — and one day, perhaps, even earlier.

We have already taken the first step in that direction with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which was made into law in April 2021, when the UK was still under lockdown restrictions, and in the same month the UK Health Security Agency was formed from Public Health England, the NHS Test and Trace programme and the Joint Biosecurity Centre. In response to this legislation, in December 2022, the Crown Prosecution Service expanded the definition of ‘abuse’ by partners and family towards ‘trans and non-binary’ persons to include ‘withholding money for transitioning’ and ‘refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun’. In effect, this means that, once a child has been convinced by trans ideology that he or she was ‘born in the wrong body’, the UK state now has the legal right and duty to force that child’s family not only to recognise this psychological disorder as a biological fact but to pay for their child’s surgical mutilation — or face criminal charges. Before this guidance was published, in May 2022 the CPS hired a ‘diversity and inclusion’ officer who, in addition to being a male transvestite, has publicly used the derogatory terminology of ‘TERF’ to insult women who challenge his definition of their sex. It’s a measure of how officially sanctioned the ideology of trans now is that such a man is now shaping the enforcement of UK law.

Beyond censoring dissent and criminalising non-compliance, however, the ultimate goal of trans ideology is eugenics — that is, the medical sterilisation of those members of a population that are ideologically susceptible or legally subject to its orthodoxies. Under changes to legislation and policy, that may one day include the entire population, and not just of the UK. Indeed, the justification and promotion of the surgical mutilation of children by the medical industry on the spurious grounds of upholding their ‘trans rights’ is the realisation of boasts by World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to ‘a fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities’.

The WEF has already issued instructions on how US corporations should incorporate ‘transgender women’ into their workplace, and have identified LGBT+ inclusion as the secret to the post-pandemic success of 15-minute cities.

The government legislation criminalising dissent and compelling compliance with this new ideology, the parallel corporate development of the technologies for the surveillance and enforcement of its laws, and the institutional promotion and implementation of its orthodoxies, all demonstrate that the universal adoption of trans is not coincidental to the Great Reset of Western civilisation but, rather, the post-human ideology driving this revolution into the new totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State.

This point was made most explicitly by Yuval Harari, the Israeli transhumanist, ideologue of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, personal advisor to Klaus Schwab, and author of the best-selling trilogy Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) — the first of which has been turned into both a graphic novel and a child’s book in order to better disseminate and popularise his ideas. In an interview given in 2017, Harari laid out his vision of this transhuman future with all the cruelty and inhumanity of a latter-day Joseph Goebbels:

• In the industrial revolution of the Nineteenth Century, what humanity learned to produce was stuff like textiles and shoes and weapons and vehicles, and this was enough for [the] very few countries that underwent the revolution fast enough to subjugate everybody else.
• What we are talking about now is like a second industrial revolution, but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles or even weapons; the product this time will be humans themselves. We are basically learning to produce bodies and minds. Bodies and minds are going to be the two main products of the next wave. And if there is a gap between those that know how to produce bodies and minds and those who do not, then this [gap will be] far greater than anything we have seen before in history.
• This time, if you’re not part of the revolution fast enough, then you’ll probably become extinct. Once you know how to produce bodies and minds, cheap labour in Africa or South Asia or wherever counts for nothing. I think that the biggest question in the economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don’t think we have an economic model for that.
• My best guess — which is just a guess — is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food for everybody. The problem is more boredom — what to do with them, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

Harari’s projected solution to this problem was a combination of ‘drugs and computer games’. Six years later, however, the drugs being prescribed for our children by so-called ‘trans-therapists’ are more than recreational; the computers in the digital camp of Global Digital Health Certification, the surveillance infrastructure for 15-minute smart cities and Central Bank Digital Currency will do more than distract us from our ‘meaningless’ lives; and the World Economic Forum’s final solution to the problem of ‘useless people’ is to do much more than alleviate our boredom.

Trans is not a cult, as some critics have dismissed it as, thereby unwittingly or otherwise diminishing its origins, reach and goals. Trans is the official ideology of the Global Biosecurity State. And although it is both explicitly and violently misogynist and implicitly and increasingly homophobic — most violently and unsurprisingly demonstrated by transvestite men demanding lesbians have sex with them or be shamed as ‘transphobic’, ‘far right’ and ‘TERFS’ — its orthodoxies have been welcomed into mainstream culture through the conduit of LGB activism. This has largely succeeded because of the Left’s embrace of the latter under its obligations to the orthodoxies of ‘political correctness’, which have been extended, without question or debate or apparent  thought, to imposing the new order of speech that is the first orthodoxy of trans ideology.

Lysenkoism was the ideological product of the subjection of Soviet science to the politically opportunist and crude application of the orthodoxies of Marxist-Leninism following the final defeat of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1929. Similarly, transgenderism is the most recent product of Western capitalism’s counter-revolution against the brief and too-easily defeated social revolutions of the 1960s and 70s. In this fight back, which is nearing its final victory, the socialist critique of capitalism has been replaced by the self-obsession, victimhood and internal division of identity politics; the critique of European colonialism has been recuperated into the racism of critical race theory; the post-structuralist critique of discourse has been transformed into woke’s policing of speech and thought; and feminism’s critique of patriarchy has undergone a full reversal into the state-sanctioned misogyny of trans.

Despite its uncritical embrace by the Pride festival in cities across the West, trans is to the gay liberation movement of the 1970s what the Left of today is to socialism: a state-legislated, corporate-financed, institutionally-imposed programme designed to appropriate the language of human rights, civil liberties and popular protest from movements of social, sexual and political emancipation. Indeed, my own opinion is that the Left has so universally embraced woke because it has the same goal — to police opposition to capitalism. But to what end?

This is what I’ll try to address in the second part of this article.

Simon Elmer is the author of The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State; Virtue and Terror: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 1; and The New Normal: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 2.