Monday, January 13, 2020



'Reparations' Caused The Great Recession
  
Some of the Democratic candidates for president support studying reparations to blacks to compensate for slavery. But in many ways, America has made reparations to blacks. What are race-based preferences if not a form of compensation for historical wrongs? Many cities have “set-aside” programs that award government contracts to minority contractors. President Lyndon Johnson pushed his Great Society programs to “end poverty and racial injustice.”

But few think of the federal government’s housing policy, particularly the Community Reinvestment Act, or the CRA, as a form of reparations. But that is exactly what it was and still is. In many ways, the so-called Great Recession of the late 2000s was a product of affirmative action and a form of reparations gone bad. Really bad.

In 1999, almost a decade before the Great Recession, the libertarian Cato Institute issued a warning about the CRA, which President Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. The CRA was based on the assumption that racist lenders denied mortgages to credit-worthy would-be borrowers, particularly minority applicants. The act initially merely sought data on banking practices to encourage lenders to practice fairness in granting mortgages.

But President Bill Clinton, in 1995, added teeth to the CRA. Economists Stephen Moore and Lawrence Kudlow explained: “Under Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, Andrew Cuomo, Community Reinvestment Act regulators gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in ‘credit-deprived’ areas. Banks were effectively rewarded for throwing out sound underwriting standards and writing loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. If banks didn’t comply with these rules, regulators reined in their ability to expand lending and deposits.

"These new HUD rules lowered down payments from the traditional 20 percent to 3 percent by 1995 and zero down-payments by 2000. What’s more, in the Clinton push to issue home loans to lower income borrowers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a common practice to virtually end credit documentation, low credit scores were disregarded, and income and job history was also thrown aside. The phrase ‘subprime’ became commonplace. What an understatement.”

But is it true that banks were discriminating against minority borrowers?

CATO, in 1999, said despite widespread accusations and lawsuits alleging discriminatory lending, the facts show otherwise. CATO said: “Researchers using the best available data find very little discernible home-mortgage lending discrimination based on area, race, sex or ethnic origin. …

"Other well-structured studies also found no evidence of redlining or unwarranted geographic discrimination. Thus, the claim that lenders redlined or were biased in making loans for the purchase of homes in central cities is not supported. Nor did the studies find that financial institutions discriminated against actual or potential borrowers on the basis of the racial or ethnic composition of neighborhoods.”

What caused this narrative that racist banks refused would-be minority borrowers?

Enter lawyers like then private citizen and attorney Barack Obama. In 1995, Obama, representing 186 blacks, filed a class action mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank. The case was settled, and his clients got mortgages. But, according to the Daily Caller in 2012, just 19 of Obamas 186 clients still had their homes. About half had gone bankrupt and/or had their homes in foreclosure.

Incredibly, at least two of his former clients now believe banks should be prevented from lending to people who otherwise cannot afford their homes. One client said: “If you see some people don’t make enough money to afford the mortgage, why should you give them a loan? There should be some type of regulation against giving people loans they can’t afford.”

Lending standards became so lax that virtually anyone who could fog up a mirror got a home. Then along came the recession, and a lot of people lost homes that they would not have bought in the first place but for lax lending standards. The result? According to the Federal Reserve, from 2010 to 2013, white household median net worth — a household’s assets minus its liabilities — increased 2.4%. But black net worth fell from $16,600 to $11,000, a four-year drop of 34%. As another of Obama’s former clients put it, “(Banks) were too eager to lend money to many who didn’t qualify.”

In 1999, the Cato policy paper on the CRA made the following recommendation: “The Clinton administration wants an even stricter CRA. But more than two decades of its operation suggest that repealing rather than tightening the act would be the economically and socially responsible thing to do.”

Too bad nobody listened.

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NY Law Automatically Registers Illegal Aliens to Vote

Democrats in New York didn't wait very long before executing the third and final step in their scheme to register illegal alien voters. New York Senate Democrats just passed a bill on Thursday that automatically registers people to vote who submit applications to the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Department of Health. New York's Green Light Law was passed by the state legislature back in December and gives illegal aliens the ability to obtain driver's licenses. 

When New York passed the Green Light Law, Cortney interviewed Republican Rensselaer County Clerk Frank Merola, who told Townhall that he suspected the bill giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens was really part of a larger effort by New York Democrats to hand the vote over to illegal aliens.

"I never thought it was about driving,” Merola said at the time. “I think it’s more about voting than it is about driving.”

"There’s no right to driving," Merola continued. "It’s all a privilege. To give the privilege to someone who’s already breaking the law doesn’t make any sense."

But it begins to make perfect sense when you consider the totality of the Democrats' efforts. First, attract illegal aliens to the state with sanctuary policies and generous taxpayer-funded benefits, give them government IDs, and then register them to vote. In New York, once an individual is registered to vote, they do not need to show an ID before casting a ballot.

The first day New York's Green Light Law took effect, illegal aliens lined up around the block at DMV offices across the state.

When illegal aliens line up around the voting booths this November, Democrats like Stacey Abrams will say it's because of voter suppression efforts from Republicans and demand we do away with voter registration altogether. Democrats like to pretend that Russian bots are the ones somehow undermining our elections when it's really illegal aliens the Democrats plan on using to steal future elections -- elections that should be decided only by U.S. citizens.

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Hungary Takes On the Feminist Goliath—and Wins

Feminism is a social and political movement. It is not an academic discipline on par with, say, mathematics, economics, business administration, engineering or physics. Gender studies, feminism’s academic wing, does not constitute an appropriate subject for an academic degree. At best it is a subset of a complex of ideas, issues, and events properly canvassed by the History Department, along with a myriad other themes and developments in the study of Western civilization.

Moreover, such programs have no business infesting legitimate areas of study to the extent that an astronomer must sign an affidavit attesting to his involvement in social justice projects or an engineer proclaim his fealty to the feminist manifesto if he is to be considered for promotion. The same proviso applies to any applicant for a university position. It should be obvious that gender programs and initiatives have nothing to do with mapping the universe, finding a cure for cancer, investigating quantum entanglement or stochastic electrodynamics, studying the economic effects of the Protestant Reformation, assessing the impact of political theories from Plato and Aristotle to the present, resolving truss and anchorage problems in suspension bridge engineering, tracing the history of epic poetry from Homer to Michael Lind’s The Alamo, or any canonical field of authentic endeavor. The fact that a bogus discipline, which has no reason for existing sui generis, can spread outward to influence and dilute genuine subjects is beyond comprehension.

Enter Hungary. In an effort to restore curricular and administrative sanity to university education, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have passed legislation to abolish Gender Studies as an area of official study. Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”

According to reports, Fidesz spokesman Istvan Hollik, echoing Semjen, brought in the economic argument, pointing to the obvious fact that “You don’t have to be an expert to see there’s not much demand in the labour market for gender studies.” But the core of the issue goes deeper. “It is also no secret that our goal is to make Hungary a truly Christian-democratic country, which defends its normality and life and values…And now there’s this situation with gender studies, which is not a science but an ideology and one which is closely linked to liberal ideology, and I don’t think it fits in here.”

Of course, such efforts to abolish clearly non-academic programs from the university will be considered an authoritarian and anti-democratic putsch by such bastions of liberal/left propaganda as the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. The policy is naturally opposed by the Hungary-based Soros-funded CEU (Central European University), which sees the move as an “attempt at censoring academic curricula.” The University, after all, is sacred ground. By these lights the German universities of the 1930s were well within their mandate to espouse and promote the doctrines of Nazi ideology, adopted in the name of progress, justice, and freedom from oppression.

Orban’s surgical strike against the CEU is better understood as a reasonable effort to limit Soros’ totalitarian meddling in the education and conduct of an independent democratic nation. Orban realizes that what he calls the “Soros Plan” entails “transforming Europe and moving it towards a post-Christian and post-national era.” The CEU has now relocated its Budapest campus to Vienna where it can persist unmolested in its aim to undermine Western civilization.

Criticism continues to pour in from all the predictable quarters. “Every undemocratic government wants to control the knowledge production and sexuality, which explains why gender studies become the target in the first place,” said Andrea Peto, a professor of gender studies at Central European University. But Peto’s critique is clearly applicable to liberal/democratic governments across the West, which allow for no counter-proposals and are busy suppressing legitimate resistance or debate. Some democracy! As Ryszard Legutko points out in his brilliant The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, “there is some interplay between liberal democracy and communism…a stifling atmosphere typical of a political monopoly…imposing uniformity of views, behavior and language.” His lengthy exegesis of our current “liberal-democratic system,” as distinguished from traditional liberal democracy, seems irrefutable.

Writing in the progressivist journal Inside Higher Ed, Premilla Nadasen, a history professor at Barnard College, sees the attack on women and gender studies scholars as part of a rightwing push to “return to a heteronormative patriarchal society.” More of the usual gibberish beloved by gender academics. In the same venue, Middlebury College professor Kevin Moss notes, with the vacuity of the pedestrian mind, “Gender studies and gender equality and equality for LGBT people are threatening for authoritarian regimes because authoritarian regimes require for somebody to have more power than somebody else.” In the inimitable expression of Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”

A reading of the Norwegian feminist journal Kilden tells us all we need to know. Filled with the pietistic conviction that they are cutting-edge “scholars” and “researchers,” as they like to call themselves, these self-proclaimed experts in the field of gender studies rely on flawed surveys and pseudo-statistical “studies” masking as science in order to bolster what is nothing less than ideological ravings. Such disciplinary malfeasance has been abundantly demonstrated in many different places, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism?, A House Built of Sand edited by Noretta Koertge, and Janice Fiamengo’s ongoing video series The Fiamengo File.

Feminist ideologues protest that they are the target of “unfounded criticism” while apprehensive about their career prospects—a primary concern, obviously, for those who may inwardly suspect they are entirely dispensable. Thus, the clamor of remonstrations. The ladies doth protest too much, methinks. Their critics are routinely dismissed as belonging to “the extreme right-wing” and as using something called “right-wing logic,” a most convenient calumny that also makes no sense. “Patriarchal knowledge” is at fault, claims Polish feminist Agnieszka Graff, “where men know everything and women aren’t allowed to get a word in.” Seriously? Any unbiased examination of YouTube and University panel discussions on the subject will give the lie to her deposition. Men are generally silenced, rendered apologetic or cowed into submission—unless you’re Jordan Peterson.

Kilden director Linda Marie Rustad is correct in acknowledging “that the attacks on gender are part of a bigger picture”—namely, the upsurge of “right-wing populism.” But what she does not and cannot recognize is that the real problem is not right-wing populism but left-wing progressivism. Two things should be briefly mentioned here. National populism is the result of, the reaction to, hegemonic progressivism and, as such, a necessary corrective to a political culture gone awry. And what is derisively called “populism” or “right-wing” designates a movement that seeks to restore the traditional values of the West: individual autonomy, property rights, equality before the law, the integrity of the nation, the sanctity of the institution of marriage and, in many nations, the Christian communion. The term “right-wing” is actually an honorific.

Left-wing—or liberal—progressivism strives instead to dismantle the nation state, to denounce the history of the West as a colonial monstrosity, to accumulate debt in order to finance various ideological projects du jour, to dumb-down education, to emasculate individual initiative and regulate entrepreneurship to death, and to redefine marriage as a fluid institution and thus destabilize the family. It is sad to note that liberalism is now synonymous with socialist orthodoxy, that is, state control, censorship, political correctness, distributive economics, funded abortion and non-binary gender relations. In Orban’s words, “The situation in the West is that there is liberalism, but there is no democracy.

Orban has understood the nature of the threat and has taken a strong stand against the debilitating sickness represented by the left. In a July 29, 2018 major address delivered at an Open University summer camp, he said: “An era is a special and characteristic cultural reality…a spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste—a form of attitude… determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is now the task we are faced with…[to] embed a political system in a cultural era,” that is, an evolving cultural era. The task is to defend Christian culture, to reject multiculturalism and monitor immigration, to protect the nation’s economy and garrison its borders, and to preserve the traditional gender and family model.

Orban has a welcome ally in Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who has introduced a bill “aiming at the principle of the integral protection of children,” to prohibit the inclusion of gender issues in elementary schools. The bill is intended to respect the beliefs of parents and students, “privileging family values in their school education related to moral, sexual and religious education.” The Brazilian Studies Association is up in arms, duly evoking a terror scenario in which “educators will be dismissed and bullied as a form of persecution” and “marginalized communities” will suffer something like epistemic oppression. Professor Marlene de Faveri of the State University of Santa Catarina claims that “the introduction of such a concept…is…meant to propagate hatred towards feminists [and to] minimize the scientific character of gender studies.” This is typical feminist nonsense. The bill is intended to reduce the malign influence of hard-core feminists instilling hatred and false knowledge in their charges and to expose the blatantly non-scientific character of gender studies.

Obama’s Social Experiments Are Wreaking Havoc on America Today
Orban has an even more powerful ally in Donald Trump, who is drafting legislation that defines sex as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” But it remains for the Justice Department to decide on the legality of the new legislation, which would seriously modify Title IX statutes and reverse the gender loosening rules of the previous administration. While events hang fire, little Hungary is leading the charge.

Liberal despots pickled in the brine of their progressivist ideology, feminist academics raking in lavish salaries for steeping their students in the euphoria of manufactured fury and lying about professional under-representation, and revolutionary zealots sheltering behind the walls of non-productive quasi-professions cannot tolerate conservative proponents of moral decency, civil order, common sense, and historical truth. Feminists and gender mavens believe that feminist politics and its academic vanguard of gender studies form the linchpin that holds the internal campaign against Western culture together. If it is weakened or expunged, the entire structure will begin to totter and the hated patriarchal forces they oppose will reassert themselves.

Hence the self-righteous indignation of the gender fanatics cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of academic freedom, scientific cogency, moral innocence, welfare economics, identity politics, and gender fluidity. And hence the fear and loathing of sensible and courageous leaders like Viktor Orban who insist that “there is a life beyond globalism,” that a constitutional order is essential to the survival and prosperity of the nation, that there are two sexes, not seventy-three and counting, that marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman, and that “every child has a right to a mother and father.”

A caveat should be introduced here. Abolishing gender studies as an academic discipline will not by itself repair the damage inflicted by feminism on what John Milton memorably called “beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.” This is only a first step toward restoring integrity to the university. For, as noted, the feminist bacillus has now permeated almost every office and faculty in the modern university, from hiring protocols to admissions policy to proctorial oversight of sexual conduct to student organizations to practically all licit departments and curricula. How to go about fumigating the parietal environment is a highly problematic enterprise, but the issue needs to be addressed.

Meanwhile, feminists may be livid and progressivists may virulently denounce populist figures like Orban—and his allies Bolsonaro and Trump—as political tyrants and cultural troglodytes. In the words of John Dale Dunn, this is what we can expect in “the current environment of academic and media shills for the left who specialize in vilification and character assassination of anyone who proposes a conservative answer for a serious political question.” Orban’s conservative answer is simple and honest. Our duty, he concludes, is to “defend human dignity, the family and the nation.”

Makes sense to me.

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Academic had gruelling sex swap surgery and then changed his mind at the last minute - and is now accusing the 'transition' industry of pushing vulnerable people like him into irreversible operations they'll regret

The air-conditioned hospital room was as still as the grave. Somewhere beyond the window, the sun climbed above the hottest city on Earth. But lying here, I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering. I gave my companion Jenny a sideways glance. Her smile had given way to puckered lines that seemed to have frozen on her cheeks.

Then came the knock. ‘Your surgeon is scrubbed.’

The doors swung open and two porters pushed a steel slab of a trolley alongside my bed. ‘Lie flat and keep your arms tucked in. We will put you to sleep. Wake up again in nine hours.’

‘Wait,’ I felt the muscles tighten in my jaw. ‘Give us a few moments. Please…’ The porter looked anxiously at the nurse. She nodded and the doors soon closed behind them.

I clasped Jenny’s hand until I felt her bones crunch. ‘I’m scared. Am I crazy?’

She took a deep breath then let it out, infinitely slowly. ‘You told me you’d kill yourself if you didn’t go through with this.’

Then another knock, this time louder, more insistent. Matron stood at the threshold, hands on hips: ‘Dr Sutin is waiting for you in the operating theatre, Miss Rachel.’

It was late in 2016 and I’d flown out to Bangkok for the first in a series of operations to change sex from male to female.

It had taken months of desperation, hormone treatment, counselling and living in ‘role’ as a woman. Now I was about to embark upon physical surgery – the decisive, irreversible step.

At the time it was what I wanted most profoundly, and as I was wheeled towards the operating theatre, this seemed like the bravest moment of my life. Yet I was deeply mistaken.

I was not suffering from gender confusion at all. I had no need to transition. My reasons for wanting a new identity, I would eventually learn, were complex and nothing to do with being male or female.

But I’d undergone an extensive series of extremely serious operations before I finally called a halt, pulling back from the brink in the nick of time.

Today I am still a man and the relief is huge. Yet I have been left with a battered body and a series of disturbing questions about how I could have reached such a state of mind, and about the transitioning industry that helped rush me headlong to the operating theatre.

In fact, I have come to believe that for many of the growing numbers of men, women and, most alarmingly, children wishing to change sex, gender reassignment is nothing more than escapism.

It certainly was in my case. The least we can do is start to tell the truth.

For many years, I had been living an apparently contented life. I’m a successful author and criminologist known for my expertise in faith-based crimes, including ritual murders. I’ve done a great deal of work advising the police and some might know me from my 2012 bestseller The Boy In The River about the case of Adam, a victim of modern day witchcraft found floating in the Thames.

But October 2009 brought a cataclysm which blew my world apart. My 19-year-old son David climbed 65ft up an electricity pylon in Weston-super-Mare and reached for a 33,000-volt cable. Witnesses reported a blue thunderbolt and hearing a buzzing noise.

It should have killed him outright. But it didn’t. From his hospital bed a few days later he whispered: ‘It hurt me so much, Daddy.’

David seemed to have everything: good looks and a razor-sharp mind. Everyone adored him. But he was also troubled, especially at night when he would be struck by uncontrollable terrors. Crossing the threshold into adulthood, he was lost to the mental health system and in desperation he’d decided to try to end his own life.

Each time I stepped into David’s hospital room, his chest would swell. ‘Cuddle me,’ he pleaded. ‘Cuddle me.’ And so I did. I cuddled my little boy every day for 42 days. We held each other until our tears drenched his dressings, and then we held each other some more. The sight and smell of my son’s scorched flesh, then of rancid infection, are now part of me for ever.

I said goodbye to him the day before he died on December 4, 2009. I left the decision to switch off his life to his mother, Sue. I simply could not do it.

With hindsight, it’s not surprising that I chose to leave Richard behind and instead become Rachel. Largely raised by women, I’d had a lifelong admiration for the fairer sex. I loved womenswear and to this day my closest friends acknowledge in me a sensitive side.

But by 2009 I was in my second marriage and dressing up in women’s clothes was not a subject of conversation I wanted to have any time soon with my wife, especially as she mistakenly considered me an Indiana Jones type: an academic lecturer and adventurer.

This marriage ended following David’s death and I found myself increasingly alone with my own thoughts. In the months and years that followed, I turned to my feminine side.

It was nothing to do with sex – I’ve never been attracted to men, just to be clear – but it was something that I wanted quite powerfully all the same. What might it be like to put on make-up? To wear those clothes outside? To step into the ladies’ loos? I drove down to the local Tesco superstore and filled up a trolley with everything from ladies’ briefs to frilly tops, skin-tight jeans to mascara. It felt both scary and thrilling.

I trawled YouTube for make-up tutorials, and after a couple of months became quite proficient.

I learned how to apply subtle tones, how to hide lines and disguise the stubble that increasingly bothered me. But I soon realised that if I really wanted to change my gender then I had to go a whole lot deeper than just dressing up in women’s clothes and applying Touche Eclat. In autumn 2014, I surfed the dark web – the bit of the internet where you go to find stuff not thrown up by conventional search engines. I was in search of feminising hormones – a dangerous step to take, yet one that proved disturbingly easy.

I found what I wanted when I stumbled upon a site registered with the South Sea island of Vanuatu. I filled in all the details and steadied my hand enough to hit the pay button. A month passed. Then, early one afternoon, when I had resigned myself to having thrown away £400 on a scam, my postman Malcolm pressed the doorbell. If he was surprised to find me in female clothes, he masked it well.

A few minutes later the meds tumbled out of the padded bag. They all seemed bona fide and a few even carried expiry dates.

How could I tell that they hadn’t been cobbled together from God-knows-what ingredients on a Guangzhou backstreet? The truth is I couldn’t.

The effects were certainly profound, and almost immediately my breasts began to grow.

Within weeks I was regretting it, however. Feeling desperately ill, I staggered to my doctor’s surgery and confessed.

And it was from that point onwards that I found myself enmeshed in the National Health Service gender identity machine.

I was informed that, conventionally, someone wishing to change sex should wait two years before being prescribed life-changing hormones – an entirely sensible rule.

Normally I would be required to ‘live in role’ first. As I soon discovered, however, the system bends over backwards for anyone who wants to transition. I was not so much fast-tracked as catapulted through the system.

Within six weeks I had been interviewed by all the required consultants, a process normally lasting more than two years. I’m sure I was fairly convincing, but then anyone can give convincing answers with the help of Google.

Then, in February 2015, I was sent to Nottingham for the final consultation that would place me on the NHS process to full gender reassignment surgery and recognition as Rachel by the state.

Feeling inspired, I clutched my handbag and walked confidently into the ladies’ loos for the first time at London’s St Pancras station. What was it like inside there? Could I apply my make-up surrounded by other women? Would I be rumbled?

In truth, none of the ladies in there gave me a second look, and all the time I lived as a woman that remained the case.

I came to think of the ladies’ as my safest space on Earth. In there, no one could hurt me. If I’d stopped and listened to that voice I might have realised it was a vital clue to something else going on.

Over the next 18 months, I continued to take the NHS-prescribed medications. These were testosterone blockers and oestrogen. The state also paid for me to undergo 80 hours of extremely painful electrolysis on my face. My stubble was systematically plucked out.

But it wasn’t sufficient. To be convincing I needed to go under the surgeon’s scalpel.

I knew the NHS would never provide facial surgery so, with the blessing of Health Service professionals, I went in search of private treatment. I found that the world leaders in the field are Thai doctors and, having scrabbled around for every ounce of funding possible, I flew out to Bangkok.

My close friend Jenny, who had followed my path into transition with a mixture of compassion and increasing anxiety, insisted on flying out soon after so that she could nurse me.

The surgery took nine hours and was a process of quite astonishing brutality. At the last minute, I’d decided to include forehead reconstruction around my orbital rims, to make them more almond shaped. So Dr Sutin ground down my eye sockets, particularly around the outer and upper rims, after peeling my face away from my skull.

He performed neck and cheek liposuction, a full neck and facelift and separate eye-lifts. He reduced my facial skin in size before stitching it back on to my skull.

My new, lower hairline now extended from the top of my head around and behind my ears.

When the swelling disappeared, my face would be smaller than before, my forehead a couple of inches shorter and flatter, and my ears apparently smaller. The aftermath of the operation was a blur of semi-conscious nausea and pain.

I was dimly aware of a nurse trying to wake me by shouting my name, Rachel, and scratching my palm.

I threw up every time I awoke. And my temples felt as if someone had put them in a vice, then tightened it another 50 turns.

As my £15,000 covered only a one-night stay, I was discharged and had to stagger into a taxi still carrying my drip and the drainage catheters. Back in our hotel room, Jenny propped up my pillows and I peered at the apparition staring back at me from a mirror at the end of the bed.

My face was scarlet and had swollen to the size of a basketball. Midnight-blue lips were draped across my mouth.

But it was my eyes, or what was left of them, that really made me want to weep. Aqua-clear irises were now angry blotches. Lava lines flowed outwards from them, as if my whole head had become a volcanic eruption.

What the hell had I done? And it was at that moment that the doubts finally bubbled to the surface.

When a NHS referral letter to Brighton’s Nuffield Hospital landed on my doormat three months later, in March 2017, for me to undergo full vaginoplasty – the transformation of all my male parts into a female vagina – I was finally pushed into thinking for myself.

So instead of following the NHS cavalcade, I took myself on a private consultation to gender psychotherapist Michelle Bridgman and Professor Gordon Turnbull, of the Nightingale Clinic, London.

They diagnosed me as suffering from complex PTSD: multiple severe traumas.

I didn’t have gender dysphoria – or gender confusion – as I had thought. I was trying to escape real, visceral and gut-wrenching pain. I had chosen profoundly the wrong way to fix it and the NHS had been all too ready to help me on the way.

What shocks me with hindsight is that no one looked more deeply into my life story.

At no point did anyone in the gender clinics talk me through what had happened with my son David and about the 42 days I spent by his bedside watching him die from his burns.

Nor did they bother to find out about the earlier traumas I had suffered.

My childhood had been ripped apart by a teacher who got a ten-year sentence for sexual abuse. Working in the Congo as a young man, I’d had to bury my first children, twins, who became sick and died. Then there were the hundreds of gruesome police cases I had advised on.

There was no shortage of clues for anyone who had bothered to look – and if it was true in my case, how many others are similarly misdiagnosed?

How many adolescents desperately wishing to change sex are really trying to escape some other form of pain? How many of the children, often girls, who drag their distraught mothers along to the Tavistock gender reassignment clinic in London are really suffering from poor body image in the Instagram era?

The numbers are huge. Tavistock specialists saw 2,000 children in the past year alone and report a six-fold increase in those aged three to 18 being referred in the last five years. Yes, three-year-olds. Although there are a few emerging voices like mine, the cavalry charge towards gender transition is in full gallop.

From April 2017 until the end of last year, I underwent intensive trauma counselling. It wasn’t easy. But I’ve learned that it’s possible to overcome the past and to start living once again in the present.

In October I went to David’s grave for only the second time in ten years. On one of the last warm days of the autumn, I sat on a bench and ate my lunch as the birds sang around me. I had the most profound sense that David wasn’t there. That he wanted me to move on. To be released.

Coming back to my true self as Richard was one of the greatest things I ever did. From time to time I felt a tug to escape into Rachel, but that has now passed.

I do regret what I’ve done to my body. There are some changes that are irreversible. I have to take daily corrective male hormones. I will probably need breast reduction surgery. I carry physical scars. My sinuses have never been the same and I still have no feeling across large parts of my head.

But I am also lucky and grateful to still be alive.

What propels someone to slice their face off their skull and rearrange it? To alter the body they were born into so fundamentally?

People told me that I was a survivor. I guess they saw me as living proof that whatever the fates might bombard you with, you can still make it through. But no one really got the torment of even the most mundane, everyday things. Driving anywhere near a pylon. Switching on a kettle. Lighting a fire. Running through autumn leaves. Watching Holby City, for God’s sake. And it didn’t really matter if there were no triggers. The pain was always there.

For a decade, I ran and ran. I tried to escape my life, my very identity. I changed my gender to leave Richard and his life behind.

Inspired by youthful images of smiling women, I grabbed the chance for a different life.

I know I’m unusual and that few others have experienced the multiple traumas to have befallen me.

I accept, too, there are some people who feel they have no choice but to change gender and I have sympathy, although I suspect the true numbers are small. For the few who genuinely feel they have no choice, perhaps a third gender would be a way forward: neither male nor female.

For as I know all too well, it is nigh impossible for surgeons to replicate female body parts in full, nor can they alter the XY chromosomes with which most men are born.

There is, after all, an added issue here about respect for women born as women. Looking back, I sometimes think that I was insensitive, that in my rush to change identity I trampled through places which rightly afford women their own dignity and space. What really gave me the right to use ladies’ loos, for example?

Most of all, we need to recognise that gender transition can, in truth, be a misguided attempt to escape the person you were born to be – and demand a halt to this dangerous headlong charge.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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