Last week on the Daily Sceptic, I wrote about the attempts of Government and campaigners to effectively make being female into a form of officially recognised disability as regards the menopause. Yet, as such a move would apply to only half the population, would it not be potentially discriminatory in nature? Why should only women be able to claim they’re disabled when they’re not? Can’t transgender males get in on the act too? And if not, why not?
An equally valid path towards a potential life on disability benefits would be simply to begin self-identifying as being disabled in a general sense, even though in actual fact you are completely able-bodied. Once, such ideas were considered fit only for poor-taste comedy-skits like those of Lou and Andy on Little Britain. Now, there is a whole social movement devoted to the idea out there. It is called ‘transableism’, and it makes mere transgenderism sound positively sane by comparison.
No Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
There has always been the occasional individual who has posed falsely as being disabled: to wrongly claim disability benefits, to avoid military service, to elicit undeserved sympathy or charity from others, or even to gain easy sporting success, as with the completely healthy Spanish basketball team who fraudulently (but quite amusingly) won gold at the 2000 Paralympics.
Transableists are fundamentally different. Not simply out for personal gain, they really seem to believe what they are saying. An excellent example would be Jørund Viktoria Alme, a 53-year-old able-bodied male senior credit analyst from Oslo, who self-IDs as a disabled woman confined to a wheelchair. Whilst still a five-year-old schoolboy, Alme saw a classmate using a splint and crutches, causing him to feel intense jealousy: “As I understand it in retrospect… it was I who should have been there.”
As waves of trans-mania swept the West during the late 2010s, the demonstrably male, demonstrably able-bodied, Alme suddenly came to understand his ‘true’ identity – not only as a woman, but as a woman who had been born paralysed from the waist down. So, he bought a wheelchair and a wig and went around acting like one. And then, in 2022, he appeared on Good Morning Norway to brag about his situation, arguing he wasn’t really doing anything wrong because – his genuine example – he never made use of a Disabled Parking space.
A Farewell to Arms (and Legs)
The technical clinical label for transableism is Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a term coined in 2005. But the apparent goal of more recently relabelling BIID as transableism is to link it directly back to the wider phenomenon of transgenderism, thus to lend the condition spurious but fashionable social acceptability by association. After all, if someone with a penis can now be a woman, why can’t someone with fully working eyes be blind too?
There are now actual academics – or people who self-identify as such – who make these arguments. Clive Baldwin is a Canada Research Chair in Narrative Studies at St. Thomas University in Newfoundland: the fact he teaches a specious Critical Theory sub-discipline specifically called ‘Narrative Studies’ indicates how, for many such people, the very ideas of being ‘disabled’ or ‘able-bodied’ in the first place are simply fake, time-honoured social stories, not objective physical facts at all.
Baldwin has interviewed transableists from across the world, finding many who take matters into their own hands and arrange handy ‘accidents’ to cripple themselves for real. One man dropped a heavy concrete block onto his leg, hoping it would necessitate amputation. Tragically, unsympathetic doctors cruelly saved his leg in the operating theatre: “He limps, but it’s not the disability he wanted.” Another such individual, known only as ‘One Hand Jason’, deliberately lopped off his right arm with a “very sharp power-tool”, like in Evil Dead 2, but only after responsibly practising on “animal parts sourced from a butcher” first.
The most horrific such self-mutilator is Jewel Shuping, who arranged a sympathetic psychologist to pour drain-cleaner into her eyes back in 2006 in order to finally become blind, something she had dreamed of ever since a little girl. As a four-year-old, Jewel’s mother continually wandered her home in the pitch-dark at night, and soon progressed on to deliberately staring at the sun after being told it would destroy her eyes. Once into her teens, Jewel started wearing dark glasses like Roy Orbison, using a white stick, and learned braille, a process she dubbed “blind-simming”.
In 2006, the drain-cleaner did the trick, Jewel’s left eye becoming so damaged it had to be removed entirely after collapsing in on itself like a rotten oyster, whilst the other became an unusable mess of glaucoma, scars, webbing and cataracts. Although her family disowned her as a freak, Jewel herself just felt misunderstood: “I really feel this is the way I was supposed to be born, that I should have been blind from birth.” Just as we have long had women born trapped inside men’s bodies, so we now too have blind women born trapped inside sighted women’s bodies.
Total Wannabes
Those who aspire to become physically disabled by their own efforts are, within the realms of their own little deviant subculture, called ‘wannabes’. Slightly less devoted are the ‘pretenders’, who simply method-act as being disabled, like Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, but slightly less Oscar-worthy.
Such 24/7 thespians, interviewed semi-anonymously by the press down recent years, would include persons like ‘Elisabeth’, “a U.S. resident with two healthy legs but… the body-image of a double above-knee amputee” who goes to parks, supermarkets and even church in a wholly unnecessary wheelchair, but would not be willing to deliberately tie her legs down on a railway-line and await the inevitable for real. However, “If it [a leg-severing accident] happened to me, it would be great to end up as a double-knee amputee… [But] I wouldn’t want to be paraplegic. My image is definitely in the amputee category.”
It would be heart-breaking indeed for such a ‘wannabe’ to actually be involved in a serious accident, and yet crawl away with the wrong disability altogether – imagine going blind when what you really want is to be deaf! This actually happened to ‘Anthony’, inaccurately described as “a pretty average uni student”. Yes, “pretty average” apart from the fact that, “in the back of his mind, almost constantly, a part of him longs to be a high level quadriplegic… [with] a lack of corporeal control and mobility, incontinence and even the need for a ventilator to assist with respiration”.
Imagine Anthony’s displeasure, then, at subsequently being involved in a serious accident – but not nearly serious enough! – which ‘only’ left him confined to a wheelchair with severely limited use of his legs. Not only did the accident disappointingly fail to render him completely immobile with an inability to prevent himself from shitting and pissing himself for nursey on a daily basis, he always preferred to “see myself [becoming quadriplegic] not [by] getting injured, but more… as a result of some condition such as ALS or transverse myelitis”. When interviewed, Anthony was a trainee medical student. Did his first patient end up being himself?
The sacred lived experiences of people like Elisabeth and Anthony, their Narrative Studies-style academic defenders have sympathetically suggested, are (as Canadian newspaper the National Post reported such sentiments a few years back), “just another form of body diversity – like transgenderism”. As if to ram this interpretation home to readers, the Post illustrated its piece with a large photo of what appears to be an unconvincing transvestite in a wheelchair with his legs placed in callipers. This, it would seem, is the next aspirational avatar that ‘diversity’ is slated to take within our increasingly sick society: Stephen Hawking with moobs and some bright red lipstick smeared across his gob.
Doctor’s Disorders
In some more reasonable clinical interpretations, BIID – not ‘transableism’ here, do please note – may actually have some genuine underlying neurological basis. In very rare cases, some doctors and researchers guess, the internal ‘map’ of our body we all carry around with us inside an area of our brains called the right superior parietal lobule, can become distorted, removing the cerebral ‘representation’ of one or more limbs from our grey-matter. When this occurs, our internal body-map, and our actual external physical body, do not match, making the limbs in question appear alien to sufferers. Hence, statements from BIID-sufferers like the following: “I can feel exactly the line where my leg should end and my stump should begin. Sometimes this line hurts or feels numb” or “I feel myself complete without my left leg… I’m over-complete with it.”
In this way, certain forms of BIID may be considered the reverse-equivalent of ‘phantom limb syndrome’, a genuine condition in which amputees, due to their way their internal brain body-map still contains a relic representation of the old, but now-missing, limb, continue to feel genuine pain in their amputated legs and suchlike, even though they no longer have them. The difference with sane doctors who think about such conditions in this way, however, is that they consider them purely as regrettable brain disorders, not wonderful examples of diversity in action which should be embraced and celebrated by all.
Contrariwise, philosophers Tim Bayne and Neil Levy – the latter of Oxford University, sad to say – argue in their 2005 paper ‘Amputees By Choice’ that transabled people who desire amputations should be able to seek them from “reputable surgeons” on freedom of choice grounds (in 2000, Scottish surgeon Dr. Robert Smith caused controversy by actually doing so). If people can have plastic surgery to make their external body conform to their inner idealised image of themselves, by having larger breasts implanted, or getting their penis snipped off and replaced with a pseudo-vagina, then why not allow those who self-ID as Abu Hamza get their hands sawn off and replaced with miniature coat-hangers?
Moral Paralysis
Canada seems to be the current hub of pseudo-academic transableist activism. Such folk’s most persistent champion is perhaps Alexandre Baril, a transgenderist herself. Who she? According to Baril’s own proud online academic blurb:
Alexandre Baril (PhD, Feminist and Gender Studies) is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa. [Her] work, carried out from an intersectional perspective, is situated at the crossroads of gender, queer, trans, disability/crip/Mad studies, critical gerontology and critical suicidology.
“Critical suicidology”? That’s a new one. Baril hasn’t successfully managed to kill herself yet, but appears to be doing her best to push the West as a whole into throwing itself over the civilisational cliff nonetheless, as can be seen from his many exceedingly niche papers – shamefully published by major academic presses like Routledge – such as 2015’s ‘How Dare You Pretend to be Disabled?: The Discounting of Transabled People and their Claims in Disability Movements and Studies’.
Baril uses her paper to help dispel “negative discourses” around such highly discriminated-against persons by “helping to expand the category of ‘disabled people’ [note the inverted commas] and make it more inclusive” – i.e., by including non-disabled people in that category too. But there is a problem. Baril censoriously notes that many truly disabled people strongly disapprove of their transabled peers as being parasites or perverts, competing for scarce welfare state resources.
Baril views this simply as disabled people, brainwashed into false-consciousness by evil capitalism, “conform[ing] to neoliberal concerns for cost and productivity”. Instead, it would be far more desirable, from a Far Left perspective, for the disabled and transabled to come together as one and “fight against political and economic austerity” of the penny-pinching kind which wickedly seeks to limit disability benefits only to the genuinely physically disabled.
To this end, Baril pushes a new conceptual category, the ‘cisdisabled’, i.e., people ‘privileged’ enough to have been born already blind, for example, rather than needing to seek out some drain-cleaner to become artificially so. One brainwashed capitalist cisdisabled bigot is quoted complaining as follows:
Do you know how hard it is for many of us [genuinely disabled people] to get state benefits? I do not think it is fair to a person born with a disability to be denied a wheelchair while someone with BIID is able to have the state purchase a chair for him or her.
How sickeningly selfish. Such uncaring cisdisabled scum possess an unjustifiable “sense of entitlement to define disability”, Baril argues. In 1996, it turns out the Amputee Coalition of America proposed a rule to exclude people who were not actually amputees from attending its meetings. Most persons may think this restriction quite reasonable, but of course these days we have men in dresses being allowed to attend women’s refuges or rape-therapy sessions, so why not non-amputees attending amputee support-groups too?
Crippled Logic
Any arguments to the contrary are histrionically decreed to be a form of “violence”. You may not have previously considered bed-ridden quadriplegics to be terribly capable of acts of “violence”, but for many a 2020s Leftist, conceptual violence is today considered far worse than its mere physical counterpart, in terms of its wider systemic effects upon society as a whole.
In the words of one activist Baril cites, it would be far better for everyone to quickly cave in and admit that “you are disabled if you say you are”. Just as the gender-binary between men and women must henceforth be dismantled, so too must the corresponding “disability essentialism” binary of hierarchies between the disabled and the non-disabled. We can no longer afford to think of “good disabled people”, disabled from birth or via accident, and “bad disabled people”, who just pretend to be so, or else go around lopping their feet off with lawnmowers in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
One excellent way to facilitate this utopian social transformation would be to officially decree that, as most people might initially presume, the transabled are profoundly mentally ill. If so, then mental illness is generally accepted as being a form of disability in itself, is it not? Therefore, argues Baril, mentally ill people claiming they have no limbs when they clearly do, because you can see them, is just yet further proof that they really are disabled after all… or something.
The “involuntary/voluntary disability binary is rooted in a simplified conception of ‘volition’”, Baril explains, i.e., these loonies just can’t help themselves. Maybe, being loonies, they really can’t help themselves – but surely that doesn’t mean they should be actively encouraged to engage in such delusions, does it? Ah, but then, we are forgetting: Professor Baril is a transgenderist, and encouraging such demonstrably mentally unwell persons in their delusions is the whole basis of transgender ideology in the first place.
When we allow identitarian lunatics to take over the asylum, this is what happens – pure madness is arbitrarily redefined as being pure sanity, and our entire civilisation becomes truly crippled to the point of absolute infirmity.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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Perhaps we are paying for the relatively low cost investment in the past, achieved by building gas fired power stations, like Didcot B, next door to the old coal fired one. Reminds me of another energy source that was popular in the trade for a while – heavy oil. Back in the early 1970s, I was taken on a day trip to the brand new Pembroke PS, which burned heavy oil. They (and my old man) were quite proud about it all, compared with coal fired ones – but not long after that the difficulties with Saudi Arabia occurred with the oil price ramping up. We came pretty close to fuel rationing on the roads etc. So that place never made a profit, a cynic might observe.
Re the winter weather prospects, remember that last Autumn and Winter were unusually mild, and it’s quite likely (notwithstanding the output of the climate scaremongers) that we will end up using more heating than last year, even if the prices were the same.
A better solution would have been to cap only a certain amount of kw/h at the reduced rate with anything over that charged full market price.
Admittedly this would be more difficult to achieve for commercial tariffs as opposed to domestic ones due to the much wider range of business needs but at least you give everyone a safety net in a more fair and equal way.
However when it comes to our domestic energy security the proposals I have seen do not go far enough. The removal of the blanket ban on fracking for example, only puts the decision back to local authorities. It mentions ‘where there is local consent’. Unfortunately we know full well that any authority considering fracking will receive the most sever backlash from (largely non-local) activist groups. It’s simply not good enough.
A few years ago, my domestic gas supply was priced the other way round. nPower charged more for small amounts, with a reduced unit price beyond that. At present I’m on a fixed rate per unit, though, with a different firm. Just received the latest bill, with new post October prices in it. It will be 14.88p/kWh thermal (it was 4.17p last year, so a 257% increase).
The issue is lack of supply and lack of suitable storage infrastructure due to investment being misdirected at unreliables (renewables). The net zero zealots also over complicated the grid with all these connections to their beloved bird chomping eco crucifixes. You won’t fix this supply issue by bailing out consumers ad infinitum.
Taking a more balanced view, there is nothing wrong with investing in renewable sources as long as one pays for “insurance” to maintain adequate supply as well. If you don’t pay the premium, you’re gambling – and that could be part of the problem, along with the financial arrangements for various types of generation.
E.g. doing the sums to justify a new 2000 MW station that is not going to do much, most of the time, would be very different compared with the old days. After all, over the next 30 odd years one would be paying the wages for those who deliver nothing physically, but are acting as insurers, in effect.
I don’t think there is any argument for renewables at all, I say that who worked in the sector creating contracts for large commercial users. Even if one believes carbon is the devil, which it isn’t, supplying base load energy from intermittent sources is barking mad. In energy you want reliability if it’s base load, and to balance the grid you want certain sources that can be put online at low cost when required, such as pump storage. Renewables meet neither of these requirements and are just an uneconomic cost borne by consumers.
Yes, there is something wrong with”investing” in renewables and that is that you are not investing, you’re spending. If it was an investment the criteria would be looking at a market where there are not differential prices for renewable versus efficient sources of electricity; that’s a false differentiation.
Then you would look at the competitive position of your business that is selling an undifferentiated product, electricity, in terms of its total output and cash generation after adjusting for transmission costs to determine the likely return.
In the absence of government capital subsidies, mandates and price supports, few, if any renewables are competitive with gas.
Renewables are a bet on the level of stupidity exhibited by politicians and bureaucrats, not a investment in a market based product. Betting on the stupidity of politicians, pundits and bureaucrats is a pretty safe bet.
It makes sense politically, not in any other way. If it means we keep Lockdown Labour out, I guess it’s better than nothing.
So some pragmatic diplomacy with big bad Russia would be helpful. What an insane idea.
FYI: Accessing your site this afternoon is remarkably slow. Not a problem with other sites.
Glad you put that up. I am having similar problems.
I noticed that as well. However, it’s often not obvious as to where the problems. I’ve had several short term breaks in service (e.g. 6 minute just now), and not long ago a 4 day one, until the BT Openreach firm came along to repair a local cable fault. They seem to have a lot of faults due to deteriorating buried cable at least.
The younger generation have always paid for the past, we only recently finished paying for WW11 and there are others who are still looking for angles for us to pay up from hundreds of years ago. Net zero was a crazy idea, to rely on others to polute and supply us is mad
That is how we know all these left wing projects – net zero, anti-racism, LGBT rights etc – are just quasi religious con jobs.
Their activists relentlessly attack the non-offending or least offending and have nothing much to say to the absolute worst offenders.
You’re never going to see any environmentalists causing disruption in China or LGBT activists acting up in Saudi Arabia or Iran – you know, places where one might actually. agree a bit of work needs to be done.
They’re all the same, these politicians: incompetent, arrogant nincompoops, products of an education system which never tells anyone they’re wrong.
Except those that are actually right.
They have no problem correcting people who point out there are two genders, or white people who insist they aren’t racist.
If Truss was the real deal, she’d pull our money and artillery out of the hands and banks of Ukrainian oligarchs. She’d immediately green-flag an off-shore illegal-immigrant holding base and withdraw ALL immigration permissions while they get to grips with cracking down on those responsible for driving the movement of people (not easy because she’d ultimately be dealing with the World Bank and a Mr György Schwartz).
She would immediately stop the administration of gene therapy and launch an investigation into the effects of the clotshot, and find medical solutions to its affects. She’d launch a criminal investigation into those who deliberately destroyed the UK economy over the last few years, printing money to buy out the media, to manufacture the terrifying and grotesque advertising on every medium. She’d extend the investigation into the legality of lockdown and the effects on business and individuals.
She’d purge our institutions of communist infiltration – otherwise known as the misnomer ‘Woke’ nowadays. This would see police being suspended/sacked for showing any political allegiances and she’d she them reverting back to wearing uniforms and driving vehicles without any political symbology. No more diversity/equality/BS training whilst she launches a huge police recruitment with a focus on dealing with crime on street-level.
She’d bin the online ‘safety’ bill and protect freedom of speech and protest in a binding bill of rights. She’d “get Brexit done” – and I don’t mean the tepid one-foot in-one foot out Pfeffel ‘Brexit’, celebrated by faux right wing in the MSM. She’d rid us of the fake protest movement of green extremism and seek to bring criminal charges to those who fund them.
She’d completely reject the Green Agenda, permanently taking the levy out our bills.
She’d plunder the pharmaceutical industry to recover the money ploughed into their coffers via the covid fraud. She’d kick them out of the UK, reversing the previous government’s embrace.
Hancock, Savij Jabid, Witty, Vallance, Van Tam, (to begin with) would be arrested under ‘suspicion’ of so many terrible crimes, it would be hard to know where to start listing them.
Finally – for this list at least – she’d trigger criminal investigation into Bill Gates and his extortion in the UK.
Above is only brief and merely a pinch of the damage done/being done to the UK and its people. Such is the rot set in by a hostile alien ideology over many decades, so influential with such a tight grip on every lever of power – I think it’s fair to say in Liz, I do not Truss. We’re likely witnessing nothing more than pressure-tapping with her promises of a return to actual conservatism unlikely to bring about real meaningful positive change.
Terrific post
An alternative veiw as to why gas prices are so high involving short term contracts with the European commission and the involvement of spectulators in the market.
https://ehden.substack.com/p/energy-market-built-to-fail
Involved discussion is pissing in the wind when it concerns sorting out national energy supply. I posted some days ago that Truss could sort uk energy overnight if she wanted to.
The North Sea has to be opened up to oil and gas production – IMMEDIATELY.
Fracking has to be given the GET GO – IMMEDIATELY.
A Nuclear building programme must start first thing tomorrow morning.
A programme for re-opening the pits must be in place by the end of the week and sod any whingers.
In order to provide funding for the above measures ALL subsidies to companies fannying about with renewables will be cancelled with IMMEDIATE effect. Unfortunately King Chucky will have to whistle for his seabed rentals.
And we’re off…
If I can provide a workable way forward in a few sentences the fact that Truss has done F A simply confirms that she is not working for the people of this country and has other masters.
Truss is a traitor.
I made a similar comment here 2 hrs ago but it seems to have been yanked. Maybe because I listed those who need to be criminally investigated – who knows – but the same sentiment is regularly aired on Live TV by GB News. Here, Free Speech Union runs a site that you have to pay to comment on. If they disapprove of the comment, you won’t get to know why or be given an opportunity to amend if you agree.
Poor form chaps.
Not happy to read that Mike. Post if there are any more occurrences.
I’m all for bringing on all the energy resources we can. But reopening the coal mines I just don’t see. Not because I think we shouldn’t but because in a place where it’s a struggle to find people to wait tables, your’e going to struggle to recruit coal miners.
The irony of it. 40 years ago, there were people literally fighting to be able to continue being coalminers. Now, you’ll probably have to pay someone like a banker to subject themselves to that job. Even then you’ll struggle.
Yes. And then, to continue mining coal at the wages the unions were demanding would have continued to bankrupt the country and hence to zero wages. Now, the country is bankrupt and apparently nobody wants to mine for our own energy at any wage! Crazy. No hope for humans.
The only people knowledgeable enough and willing to get the coal mines up and running again will be the immigrants… again.
Well said HP if only eh?
These people aren’t stupid (although I do have my reservations about Truss), that’s the mistake that’s too often made. I’m sure they know exactly how this is likely to play out. More debt, more financial ruin – a few more steps closer to where they want to be.
The intention is to bankrupt the country and the citizens at the same time.
Once people are in debt and can no longer afford to live the ‘caring, sharing, government’ will step in and offer to remove all our debts in exchange for signing over all our personal assets. Obviously a UBI will be offered in return.
“You will own nothing but be happy.”
Elizabeth Truss is said to be a Chartered Management Accountant, so either she did not pay much attention to her training or she knows exactly what she is doing and is deliberately sending the country into a black hole of financial oblivion in order to rebuild us as a miserable communitarian Soviet social credit society. The policy relies on energy prices coming down but the policy itself will be instrumental in driving them up so that by 2024 the majority of our energy needs will be funded by the state. If they also manage to engineer a food crisis we will end up eating Truss Cockroach Burghers and Duchy Survival Biscuits whilst huddled round our state issued barely functioning heat pump run on state issued energy.
It’s life Jim but not as we know it, or want it! When does the UK get a Ron Desantis or a Harriet Hageman to challenge this nightmare future?
Well said. Agreed.
And we might end up paying through the back door via various forms of tax revenue on other transactions, or higher inheritance tax or whatever, to make it look better at the next election.
Also, consider the educational background of the Chancellor. What they seem to be short of is competent industrialists overall.
There is no shortage of peak energy sources (gas and oil). The artificial shortage is caused by Russian sanctions. End them and the world may become sensible again. But this has been a wake-up for all those who believed in unreliables, JIT supply and ignoring nuclear for base generation. The late, great Jim Lovelock was sounding the alarm on the latter years ago.
Germany’s politicians seem to believe in the magic Yo-Yo nuclear power station, which can be turned up or down in minutes depending on whether the Sun is shining or the wind blowing. Its engineers are quietly pointing out that it takes days to turn nuclear power stations on, and that the lead time on new fuel rods for the mothballed ones is several months. Idiotie durch Technik.
Quite. Historically, in countries with a certain proportion of operating nuclear stations, variable prices were used to encourage a reasonable base load to allow them to run continuously as much as possible. The old (and still valid) economy 7 tariff did that, to some extent. However, if you’ve been keeping an eye on something like this site: https://grid.iamkate.com/ you’ll notice that the percentage output from them has deteriorated quite a bit. It still shows a fairly stable line in the “All time (yearly averages) graph for the “other energy” – which is mostly nuclear & wood fuel. After all, several of the older stations are now being decommissioned, or long since “cocooned” for parts of the reactors – e.g Berkeley, Oldbury, Hinkley Point A, and loads more.
The energy prices had to be capped. Even with targeted financial help the prospect of a six fold increase would have caused panic and led to a deep recession. The risks are still there. The UK is already heavily in debt from the Covid overreaction. We are now suffering the consequence of a lack of long term econonic planning.I wonder what new crisis is lurking just around the corner?