Readers of the Daily Sceptic will have seen our coverage of the recent incident at San Francisco State University, where the national championship silver-medallist female swimmer Riley Gaines was made the target of intimidation, assaults, false imprisonment and extortion by trans activists who were protecting the principle that trans women are women, and should compete in women’s sports and be entitled to gold medals. What readers may not be aware is that, based on the available facts, their attacks didn’t go nearly far enough to stop violence against women.
To understand the sheer scale of the violence against women on U.S. college campuses, we have only to refer to the Association of American Universities’ 2020 report, which points out that 18% of women taking a four-year undergraduate course will have been raped at least once by the end of it. This isn’t just unwanted touching or groping, but rape. And this figure is closely replicated in another study by RTI International.
I’m sure we can agree that this 18% figure is astonishing – although the violence against women would surely be much worse if trans women weren’t allowed in women’s bathrooms, or in women’s sports like kickboxing. But to put this into context, let us consider the occupation of Bucha by Russian forces in 2022. This lasted for 19 days, with a total of 25 rapes reported by the survivors, plus an unknown number of rapes amongst those murdered – suggesting a rough estimate of perhaps 50 women being raped once or more during this 19-day period. Bucha had a pre-war population of 37,321, with roughly 53.7% of the population being female. If we estimate that around 3,000 women were evacuated, this suggests a female population of roughly 17,000 at that time. From this we can extrapolate that, if the Russian occupation had lasted as long as a four-year undergraduate course (about 1,100 days), the chance of any individual woman being raped would have been slightly less than on a U.S. college campus, at only 17% (including weekends).
The massive rise in mental illness on U.S college campuses should therefore come as no surprise. Who could possibly process and accept these shocking figures, altruistically taught to students by our noble activist-professors, without becoming mentally ill? Of course students have to organise themselves into violent mobs in order to create campus safe spaces, so as to protect themselves against the likes of Riley Gaines by forcing her into a room for three hours. But there is so much gaslighting; and just like the Russians, the abusers invent all manner of lies and excuses, such as that “Drunken sex isn’t really rape”, or “If there’s so much rape then why isn’t there more murder and gang warfare on campus?” We mustn’t give in to this nonsense, which is just like saying that women can’t have penises, or that Golda Meir was merely Lyndon B. Johnson in drag. If you can’t see there is already anti-woman gang warfare on campus, you’re probably a transphobe.
What we have done so far is admirable. But even as we armed Ukraine against the illegal Russian aggression, we may have to work much harder to bring peace to U.S. college campuses, where the level of violence against women has been scientifically proven to be worse. Even the most pessimistic expectations for the upcoming Ukrainian counter-offensive this spring semester put the likelihood of a Ukrainian victory in Crimea much higher than any possible gains on Californian campuses before the end of the traditional fighting season in August.
In short, we must increase deliveries of political support and weaponry to these plucky students, who – I’m sure we can all agree – have until now been far too restrained and mostly peaceful. We must learn that killing transphobes with rifles merely demonstrates who the real victims are, and if we don’t arm and support trans activists ever more forcefully, we are merely excusing violence against all women. We must leave them in no doubt about who the real thugs are.
History has an important lesson to teach us. The famous “Flower Power” photograph, taken during the Vietman War protests, shows us that the spiritual and intellectual forebears of the current protesters understood that rifles can, in the right hands, become instruments of peace. But in this profound realisation, they were merely echoing the sentiments of the great Mao Zedong, who – if I may paraphrase – poignantly noted that “political power grows, like a flower, out of the barrel of a gun”.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
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