OUT TO LUNCH

I was trying to pinpoint the exact moment in time when civilisation (as we know it) came to an abrupt end and propelled us into the crazed, omni-phobic, cancel cultured, virtue signalling apology for an existence that we are now forced to accept as the new normality.

This is the sort of thing you do to occupy your time when you’ve hit retirement age and your wife frowns when you reach for the corkscrew at midday.

She’s perfectly correct of course because she knows full well that a bottle of wine at lunch will be finished during the afternoon which will necessitate another bottle of wine being opened in the evening. But how else is one to retain some sanity while reading all the gloomy news the world has to offer?

Well, maybe sanity is the wrong word here. More a sort of soporific, couldn’t care less, semiconscious, dribbling snooze as the wine does its stuff and briefly makes you forget in which order the LGBTQIA alphabet soup is supposed to appear or how many official genders there now are.

Apparently, the answer is around 100 can you believe?

I’ve just read a piece by Brendan O’Neill on Spiked Online in which he explains that a new law in Canada makes it a criminal offence to ‘repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity’ or to ‘repress… a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth’. 

This means that if you are a father of a son aged ten who suddenly decides that he wants to go to school wearing a skirt and frilly knickers you would be ill advised to take him aside, have a quiet word and attempt to disabuse him of the idea. To do so could result in a jail sentence of five years. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Similarly, a mother who forbids her 13 year old daughter to tightly bind her breasts, shave her head, wear boy’s clothes and demand to be addressed by the pronouns ‘them’ and ‘they’ could also find herself accused of repressing a child’s sexuality and risk five years in the slammer. The message here is that the woke state knows far more about how to bring up your children than you ever will so back off you old dinosaur.

You probably won’t be in the least bit surprised to learn that New Zealand has also introduced laws that make it an offence to deploy practices that discourage a person from realizing his or her gender identity. This would, effectively, prevent a parent from forbidding a child to use puberty blockers; a practice that has already had dire effects elsewhere in the world as the children pass their teens and realize that they have made a terrible mistake.

Quite when this madness took hold I’m not quite sure but it certainly seems to have grown in the past ten years, encouraged by a very woke left wing academia and asinine politicians like Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern who are keen to pander to the latest loony left thinking.

It’s now become extremely fashionable for unremarkable people who have little else going on in their lives to identify as ‘non-binary’ and then go on to claim that they are a persecuted minority. They demand to be addressed by absurdly illogical pronouns and, before you can say ‘Stonewall’, suspiciously well funded support groups are popping up all around the world to protect the often imaginary marginalization of their rights.

Should you dare question the point of all these strange claims to special treatment which are way beyond what a dull, boring, cis-gendered member of society would reasonably expect you will be labeled a bigot and will, before long, run foul of some newly passed hate law which is designed to silence your bigotry forever.

Children at schools in England are now encouraged to determine their own gender from a fairly early age (with no prompting from the parents) and highly paid ‘diversity trainers’ are now infiltrating our top schools and are busy indoctrinating young children with all sorts of lefty gender gobbledygook which is likely to leave them far more confused than enlightened and, very possibly, rather frightened.

Surely they must all be taking the piss? Having a larf as they say in the London pubs. But apparently they are not and all I need do is to identify as a woman for me to enjoy the right to be treated as a woman.

No immediate plans on that front I have to say. For one thing, the queues at the women’s toilet during a theatre interval are much longer than the men’s and I would probably have to join a book club.

However, now that it’s widely accepted that having a dangling appendage doesn’t necessarily rule you out of entering women’s sporting events I suppose anything is possible.

These days, as JK Rowling has discovered to her cost, it is quite wrong to assume that not possessing a cervix makes you any less of the woman you would like to imagine you are. That’s just pure ‘wrong-think’.

Similarly, her mocking of the descriptive phrase ‘people who menstruate’ immediately alienates the many trans-women by suggesting that it is only a biological woman that can menstruate. Such an old-fashioned idea.

It’s difficult to know where all this craziness will lead because just as you’ve become used to the idea of one deviation from long accepted biological reality becoming mainstream another one comes along.

When I was growing up the idea of a man slipping into a women’s public toilet was outrageous and if he happened to get beaten up on his way out then few tears would have been shed. But under the new rules it’s quite possible in parts of the world (not Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia though) to spontaneously identify as a woman after you’ve seen an attractive young lass slip into the ladies toilet and, should the attractive young lass object to your presence there then she’s obviously a transphobe and ought to be arrested.

Remember…as a trans woman you are always a victim. Quite how this is good for women’s rights or gender-based violence (the scourge thereof) is rather puzzling.

The latest ‘trend’ pushed by a trans US academic called Allyn Walker is the notion that the people we used to refer to as paedophiles and kiddy fiddlers should be treated with more respect by society at large. They are part of a collective known as MAP (minor attracted people) and the expression of their attraction and desire is no different to any other sexual leaning and should be respected.

It can only be a matter of time before M is added to the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup.

So, after all that, are we any nearer pinpointing the exact moment in time when civilisation (as we know it) came to a juddering halt?

After extensive research I have come to the conclusion that it was the introduction of ‘dress down Friday’ in the corporate world that lit the fuse.

Prior to that, we all wore suits to work and we could immediately identify our fellow workers by the cut of their cloth, the flamboyance of their silk ties and whether or not they wore gold cufflinks in double cuff shirts.

There were only two sexes, nobody claimed to be ‘non-binary’ and fee-paying schools were there to teach children the three R’s and turn out good, hard working, tax paying citizens who would eventually run the country.

In short, we knew who to take seriously. After dress down Friday it became impossible to know who you were dealing with and whether or not they could be trusted to buy a round of drinks. Dress down Friday quickly degenerated into casual wear for every day and now pretty well everyone in the business world looks as though they are about to fly out on a Greek holiday.

The only problem with this theory is that politicians are mostly dressed to the nines with taxpayer funded bespoke suits, shirts and ties. One has only to think of our own culturally appropriated dandy, Malusi Gigaba, part time porn star and ‘chief architect of state capture’ (according to his Wikipedia entry).

So maybe we have to move with the times and trust the open necked shirt brigade rather than the sharp suited ones. Until Justin Trudeau appears on TV in an open necked shirt that is.

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Speaking of Justin Trudeau I have been fascinated at what has been happening in Canada this past week. After a convoy of huge trucks gridlocked Ottowa ten days ago and decided to stay, the same has been happening in other Canadian cities like Winnipeg, Quebec and Toronto and last weekend Calgary joined the stampede.

Ostensibly this is all about the introduction of a mandatory vaccine passport without which truckers will not be allowed to cross the US and Canadian borders.

However, there is no way that everyone on the chilly streets of those cities is a trucker and so what started as the Trucker Freedom Convoy has now expanded into a general protest against the repressive Trudeau government.

Instead of listening to the people’s grievances and addressing their problems Trudeau decided to play chicken and has been moved from Ottowa to a secret location.

Somewhere he feels safe in labelling the enormous protest as a “small fringe group of science deniers, racists, Nazis and homophobes” despite the very obvious fact that the majority of those on the streets supporting the truckers are just ordinary citizens who want their freedoms back.

Judging by the number of folk carrying ‘F**k Trudeau’ placards I wouldn’t fancy his chances should he decide to come out of hiding and face his people ever again. Who ever thought it would be boring old Canada who would lead the pushback?