A quiet moment of horror

The term ‘moment of clarity’ is used to describe a fleeting sensation of understanding, perhaps of something that is not in itself new, but in a way that feels profound or insightful. It’s sometimes used in the context of an alcoholic or drug addict suddenly seeing their self-destructive behaviour from the perspective of an outside observer, and realising that they need to change it.

I recently had one of these moments of clarity (not the alcoholic kind) while contemplating our perception of the passage of time, a subject I remembered my father talking about when I was a child but which I wasn’t able to appreciate until later in life, when I was closer in age to where he had been when he said it. It boils down to the idea that the longest period of time any person can truly conceive of is that person’s own life, and one’s perception of the length of a given period of time decreases as one gets older. To a ten-year-old, five years is half their life, but to a forty-year-old it’s only an eighth of their life, and feels shorter and less significant. In this sense, time is relative to the one experiencing it. This is hardly a groundbreaking observation; we all remember how long the period between birthdays used to feel as children, compared to now when they seem to come much more frequently, and be much less welcome.

There is a corollary to this: as part of growing up we learn to measure time, but until we’ve learnt to do so we think about the world as a fixed, unchanging thing, that has always been the way we find it. A baby has no concept of why things are how they are, such questions come later - you even need to learn to speak before you can conceive of the concept of “why?”. We accept however our world is as ‘normal’, whether that is the language those around us speak, the customs that people engage in, or our relationships with those we know, beginning with our family. All you have to do is live in a foreign country for a while to realise that what you considered ‘normal’ can be as alien to others as what they consider ‘normal’ is to you.

For example, do you know when Guy Fawkes Night is, and what it represents? If you’re British you do - it’s today, the 5th of November, and it’s when we burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, the Catholic dissident who led The Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Protestant King James I at the Houses of Parliament in 1605, and who was tortured and executed for it along with his co-conspirators. His likeness is best known as the model for the V for Vendetta mask, which was subsequently appropriated by the hacker collective Anonymous:

More than 400 years after the event, our national religion is still Protestantism and we still burn an effigy of a Catholic who tried to change that, and it’s a nice family event with fireworks and mittens and stuff. Totally normal!

So it is with all culture - whatever is accepted by those around you as ‘just the way it is’ while you’re growing up, becomes just the way it is in your mind, and changes to that order will feel like an uncomfortable disruption of accepted norms. I grew up with the understanding that public services like healthcare should be free because they were free (i.e. paid for in taxes), but this state of affairs was the product of sweeping social democratic reforms after World War 2, things that my parents also grew up with and considered normal, but which had not always been so. Americans might read that and think that as a European I should consider myself lucky to have always known free healthcare, and they’d be right - but it’s still just the way it is to me, and I find the idea of it not being that way precarious and frankly quite scary.

It was with such things in mind that I had my moment of clarity and came to the stark realisation that there are big cultural changes that have taken place in the last ten or so years - quite recently from my 42-year-old point of view, just a quarter of my life - that children who were born since those changes occurred will have come to accept as just the way it is. Although this could also apply to things like smartphones that have materially changed the way we live, the thing that brought it into focus for me was the public conception of what ‘gender’ means, untethered as it now is from physical sex. Unlike a technological advance, it’s been clear to me, as an adult watching it unfold, that this huge cultural change was forced into our consciousness by parties with vested interests, but a ten-year-old can have no experience of any of that. Even a twenty-year-old would be aware of this change having taken place half a lifetime ago and been assimilated into what passes for ‘normal’, even if they might privately have reservations.

My moment of clarity turned to a moment of horror when it struck me how it must be for girls to grow up in a culture in which female spaces have always been open to trans-identified men and boys, and how that would affect their willingness to use them. How must it feel for those girls to know that, if they object to getting undressed in front of a person with a male body who calls himself a woman, they could be punished for their supposed transphobia, because they hurt that male woman’s feelings by not giving him the acceptance that men like Alan ‘Sarah Jane’ Baker demand1? The suffix -phobia means ‘fear of’, so if a girl feels afraid because she’s vulnerable in the presence of a man who calls himself trans, then she is by definition ‘guilty’ of transphobia. If it was a non-trans-identifying man like me in that female space, the girl’s fear would be considered entirely justified and I would be ejected, perhaps the police might even be called. But in our deeply propagandised and confused society, if I say that I’m a woman, that girl or woman being afraid of me is framed as her failing, and there must be girls growing up accepting that as just the way it is.

What if even a girl’s parents won’t take her side in the argument? How many girls are choosing not to go into such spaces, or take part in sports, because they don’t want to risk either embarrassment, confrontation, discomfort or injury? What does the concept of prison mean, when it is understood that it can mean not only being locked up, but being locked up with male criminals who have decided (often soon after sentencing) that they are women? What does the fact that all this is just the way it is, tell girls about the world they live in, and about how that world values them?

All of these things apply equally to adult women, but those adult women can at least understand that a change has taken place, one that could be undone. There are plenty who object to it, like this woman2 who was kicked out of a gym in LA for complaining about “grown men in the women’s locker room”, but who doesn’t seem to be getting much support from any other patrons:

To girls (and boys) who have grown up with gender ideology normalised, a change to this status quo might feel as seismic and impossible as how the reintroduction of the death penalty, or the recriminalisation of homosexuality, would feel to me. The tragedy is that while I and many others feel that girls should be entitled to single-sex spaces, the mere fact that they currently aren’t, frames their newly-subordinated status as ‘normal’ in the girls’ minds. This is to say nothing of the other equally harmful effects of gender ideology such as convincing children of both sexes that they might be broken and need treatment, which will be harder for children to unlearn than it was for them to absorb passively through immersion in an ideologically captured culture.

Despite what the most fervent gender zealots might say, even they know that us humans are mammals, mammals reproduce sexually, and that therefore our material bodies are either male or female, the only exception to that being a very tiny section of the population with intersex conditions that result in them having features of both. The entirety of the debate on gender rests on the belief that humans have another immaterial attribute called gender which is simultaneously a ‘social construct’ (whatever that is) but also something they can be aware of as toddlers, and this belief is aggressively taken for granted to the point of being enshrined in law. But laws can change - once upon a time, the English state was allowed by law to brutally torture and execute a person and this was just the way it is, until eventually it wasn’t any more, and now such things are considered barbaric remnants of our past, even if we do sometimes celebrate them like on Guy Fawkes Night.

Hopefully this period in our history will be looked back upon as a bizarre and temporary symptom of a collapsing empire losing its mind and consuming itself, when whole countries’ legal systems were captured by ideological extremists who imposed their religious beliefs about the existence of a gendered soul on entire populations, primarily the female half. But none of these changes happened by accident and they won’t be undone by accident either, nor will those children who grow up in it - especially girls - forget what they were told was ‘normal’, and by whom. Once trust in an authority is lost, it’s hard to get it back, and the cult of gender ideology might end up creating a generation that has learnt not to trust or respect anything their teachers, legal system, media and maybe even family tells them.