UK: The purge of the unwoke

The Labour party is plotting a Stalinist purge of anyone who questions the cult of transgenderism

So now we know. If you believe in biology, Labour isn’t the party for you. If you think people with penises are men, not women, Labour isn’t the party for you. If you believe women should have the freedom of association to set up their own spaces and institutions, Labour isn’t the party for you. If you believe in reason, truth and freedom of thought, Labour isn’t the party for you. This is the loud-and-clear message of the disgraceful purge proposed by Labour members yesterday, and swiftly endorsed by some of the leadership candidates, against anyone who questions the cult of transgenderism – that Labour really has become an irrational, intolerant party of extreme identity politics.

The proposed purge has been given the deceptively liberal-sounding title ‘Labour Campaign for Trans Rights’. This gives it the appearance of being a decent, pro-minority campaign, but it is nothing of the kind. In truth, it is a deeply illiberal attempt to cleanse Labour of any individual or group that believes in biological reality and which thinks that women must have the right to speak freely and to set up their own spaces for association and debate.

So the purge demands unquestioning loyalty to one of the key orthodoxies of identitarian extremism: that ‘trans women are women’ and ‘trans men are men’. Fail to bow before this eccentric dogma and you will be branded a ‘transphobe’ and expelled from the party. As the purge makes clear: there should be the ‘expulsion from the Labour Party of those who express bigoted, transphobic views’. What this would mean in practice is that if you think people with penises are men, and if you think biological sex is immutable, and if you think big blokes should not be allowed to beat the crap out of women in sports such as boxing – all views that are now described as ‘transphobic’ – you will be purged.

The Stalinist vindictiveness of the purge is made clear in its demonisation of two perfectly reasonable campaign groups: Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance. The former is an organisation of feminists concerned that gender self-identification could lead to born males entering women-only spaces – such as changing rooms, rape-crisis centres and female prisons – and which campaigns for the preservation of women’s sex-based rights. The latter is a gay-rights group concerned that transgenderism erases the specificity of the homosexual experience – of same-sex attraction – for example by allowing people with actual penises to identify as lesbian. Scandalously, the purge refers to these two organisations as ‘hate groups’. It says Labour members should ‘organise and fight against’ these despicable, hateful outfits.

This is deeply sinister. It effectively gives a licence to the use of violence, or certainly harassment, against women and gays and lesbians. After all, if Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance are ‘hate groups’, a term normally reserved for racist or fascistic movements, and if they must be ‘fought against’, doesn’t that green-light the use of force against them?

For a few years now, woke leftists have depicted trans-sceptical women in particular as witches, essentially, as dangerous, hateful creatures whose very words and ideas are a mortal threat to trans people’s safety and self-esteem. They have dehumanised these women as ‘TERFs’, a term that means ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ but which has really become shorthand for scum, bitch, someone who is beyond the pale. This has helped to generate some awful hostility and in some instances violence against trans-sceptical feminists. Now, the branding of these feminists as a ‘hate group’ takes the demonisation a step further: it risks endorsing hostility towards any woman who raises questions about the cult of gender self-ID. It sanctions the misogynistic harassment of free-thinking women.

That many of the figures running for Labour leadership positions – including Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Dawn Butler – have given their blessing to the purge is disgraceful. It confirms that Labour is doubling down on its embrace of intolerant identitarianism and PC groupthink. Anyone who thought that in the wake of its catastrophic defeat in the December election Labour might rethink its abandonment of class politics in favour of the divisive, destructive cult of identitarianism has now had a rude awakening. Labour is clearly going even further down the road of self-destruction.

Strikingly, even Tribune, George Orwell’s old magazine, has endorsed the purge of free-thinking women and critically minded homosexuals. That the magazine which published Orwell should now support such an Orwellian move confirms what a mess the modern left is in. Orwell raged against systems of intolerance that demand unflinching intellectual conformity and the suppression of doubt and dissent – now Tribune endorses such intolerance. In supporting the expulsion from Labour of anyone who questions the idea that ‘trans women are women’, Tribune plays the role of Big Brother demanding that we believe 2 + 2 = 5.

This purge suggests Labour is finished. A party that supports trans intolerance and which punishes any questioning of PC orthodoxies is a party that has absolutely nothing important or useful to say to the people of this country. Former Labour voters must be looking at this nonsense and congratulating themselves for abandoning this lost, deluded party.

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LA Mayor and Police Chief Assure Illegals They Can Get Away With Breaking American Laws

In what can only be described as giving the middle finger to the United States of America and law and order, the mayor of Los Angeles and his equally law-breaking police chief recorded a public service announcement letting illegal aliens know they will not be held accountable to U.S. laws while living in .LA.

"Regardless of your immigration status, I want every Angeleno to know your city is on your side," said Mayor Eric Garcetti. "Here in Los Angeles, our police department does not coordinate with ICE or participate in immigration enforcement."

It's amazing to me that he found a lawman to stand next to him and agree with this anarchist garbage, but indeed he did. The police chief, Michel Moore, weighed in with his thoughts: "Our police force does not do the job of federal law enforcment...we will not enforce immigration laws."

Watch the whole thing if you can stomach it. Will nothing ever happen to the ringleaders of sanctuary cities who are wantonly and openly flouting the laws of our land? It's outrageous that this is allowed to continue with no consequences. Why is California still receiving federal funds? Which federal laws do you think you, American citizen, can break at will without facing jail time?

We now have a three-tiered justice system: one for the elite Democrats, who never face time no matter what they do; one for the rest of us, who never get a break; and one for illegal aliens, who are exempted from all federal crimes based on their political importance to the Democrat voting block. How much longer can this go on?

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There Is No Bending of Gender

Regardless of what the activists say, there are two biological sexes. It's science.

“The Dangerous Denial of Sex: Transgender ideology harms women, gays — and especially feminine boys and masculine girls.” This recent Wall Street Journal headline for a column co-written by a Penn State evolutionary biologist and a University of Manchester developmental biologist serves as additional information in the battle to protect children from adults.

Brutal, you say?

Some suggest kids know they’re born in the wrong body or that their behavior demonstrates a mistake of their God-given biology. But the growing demand for sex-change efforts for minors, even young children, is a result only of the warped adults in the lives of these children, not independent decisions by children themselves.

NBC is following the “courageous” story of one family with a nine-year-old girl now taking puberty blockers to help fight off nature and science. The one identifying as the father claims, “He’s [sic] becoming educated on what future choices he’ll [sic] need to make” knowing that the next step is surgery. The family insists that the girl has known since she was a toddler that she is really a boy. Hogwash. Mom has books to sell — that’s why this is happening.

Meanwhile in South Dakota, courage was being sought in a recent state government attempt to protect children from the irreversible impact of sex-change surgery. The Vulnerable Child Protection Act would have prohibited chemical hormone interference or surgical removal of a child’s body parts because of how their behavior, tendencies, or whims can be supported through the swarm of social media. The proposal passed the South Dakota House 47-23 but failed to exit a Senate committee despite shocking testimony from actual patients who regret surgical and chemical reversals.

Among those testifying was Scott Newgent, a 47-year-old “transgender” man-born-female who pursued complete chemical and surgical transition. Newgent’s testimony before the South Dakota Senate was that, after $1 million for operations and care, the result is to be “dependent on drugs and doctors for the rest of my life.” That is clearly not something a child can consent to. Newgent declared, “A hundred medically transitioned adults [are] standing behind me with a signed petition that they are also against medically transitioning children.”

The heartbreaking comments from Elaine Davidson, an Oregon mother whose daughter had both breasts surgical removed and a complete hysterectomy at age 17, point the finger of blame at therapists who steered her child toward sex transition rather than address the mother’s concerns about autism. She learned of her child’s surgeries via social media, as her estranged daughter could obtain life-altering interventions in Oregon as young as age 14 without parental consent.

Face it: There are activists, therapists, “healthcare” providers, and opportunists who contribute to the deception of some spectrum of sex or gender. Biologically, there are two sexes.

There is a spectrum of behavior that uses stereotypical actions to fuel the deception of this social construct of gender identity, rather than a binary sex determined at birth by the presence of either the XX or XY chromosomes along with corresponding sex hormones matching the reproductive anatomy.

Behavior is not biology as it relates to sex determination. Some men enjoy what could be argued are more feminine activities. Similarly, some women enjoy activities more traditionally performed by men. It doesn’t matter to biology: Men are still men, and women are still women.

As for the biologists writing in the WSJ, their words demonstrate the simple fact that it is our culture that has created gender confusion: “The evolutionary function of these two anatomies is to aid in reproduction via the fusion of sperm and ova. No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex ‘spectrum’ or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.”

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Australian Labor party rediscovering the workers

Joel Fitzgibbon and Anthony Albane­se met at a Young Labor conference in 1985. Both were elected to federal parliament on March 2, 1996, the day that John Howard became prime minister.

Even though they hail from differen­t ends of the party, as is often the way with MPs elected at the same time, Albanese and Fitzgibbon­ became and remain friends. Despite everything.

That “everything” includes the dinner for 20 right-wing Labor MPs — held at Kokomo’s in Canberra­, not Otis — on the Sunday­ in between sitting weeks, now cast as a sub-faction to pursue the interests of workers, residing­ within the party explicitly created to pursue the interests of workers, raising all sorts of questions for modern Labor.

Attendees have since told colleagu­es they thought it was an invitation to socialise or that they were trying to find ways of helping the Opposition Leader, something Albanese has struggled to see. They also insisted it was not driven by malice, there was no intent to undermine Albanese, and nor did they mean for it to become public.

It leaked because of the accid­ental inclusion of a government staffer on a group email. Oops. The idea for the group originated at a much more intimate dinner at Otis, the favourite restaurant of powerbroker Don Farrell.

The group subsequently opted to call itself after the venue where it was conceived, rather than after the more funky Kokomo’s, both in the hope of avoiding the puns and word games which could flow from a classic cock-up rather than conspiracy, and because the founders have a serious mission which they want taken seriously.

Revelation of their existence became a mitigated disaster. Both sides of politics took comfort from the other’s misery. Labor MPs were consoled by the fact that at least they weren’t plotting to get rid of their leader or his deputy while Coalition MPs rejoiced that at last Labor’s differences had erupted to the surface.

If anything good has come out of the exposure for Labor (and many senior opposition figures say none has) courtesy of The Australian’s Peter van Onselen, who broke the news on the Ten Network, it is that Albanese has got the message. Because if he hasn’t by now, he never will.

Sensible Laborites see clearly where the party went wrong. They saw what happened with Bill Shorten, a deeply flawed politician with flawed policies to match. They saw what happened with Jeremy Corbyn, also a flawed politician with flawed policies. And they can foretell Bernie Sanders’s fate if he wins the Democrat nomination.

They are entitled to ask how many suicide missions do there have to be before progressive-socialist leaders accept they have strayed too far from the centre, desertin­g the workers their parties were born to represent.

In the wake of the bushfires, Australians profess to care more about climate change and are less wedded to coal. But at the ballot box last May they showed they care more about their hip pockets, their jobs, their tax, their cost of living and their economic security.

Otherwise Shorten, regardless of his shortcomings, would have been elected. Labor would have won Higgins and Kooyong, Kerryn­ Phelps would have held on to Wentworth and perhaps Trevor Evans would have been turfed out of Brisbane. They cared about climate, but not enough to choose higher taxes and a leader they neithe­r liked nor trusted.

This is what Albanese’s colleagues, including Fitzgibbon, have been trying to tell him, believing that while sentiment in some parts of Australia has streng­th­ened, in other parts it hasn’t.

The right worries that despite its greater numbers in caucus it has lost its clout, and Albanese will be more susceptible to the arguments of his natural allies in the left.

Reflecting the tensions, Alban­ese has struggled to articulate a convincing position on coal. Early in his leadership he flew to Queensland to begin the tricky task of repositioning, trying to sound more accepting of it. Yet when Fran Kelly asked last week if he would support a coal-fired power station funded by industry, he replied: “You may as well ask me, Fran, if I support unicorns.”

Albanese risks being branded by the government as Bob-Each-Way Albo, or as Mr Inbetween, the likeable hit man on the TV series who tricked up a horse to look like a unicorn so he could impress his daughter.

Morrison, his authority weakened by his sorry summer, is trying to reweight his arguments with greater emphasis on climate change and less on coal. Thanks to the pressure from rebel Nationals, and his fight to save Michael ­McCormack’s leadership, he faces greater risks in the short and medium­ term.

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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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