The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

My highs and lows of last year . A week late. I had a very good New Year's Eve put it that way!

Here are my highs and lows of 2024. A week late. Plus ça change.

It’s rather a shame really that I don’t actually know what happened in any given year. I could put this down to the lockdown years rather than er…’ageing” but in truth I have always been like this.

It’s amazing to me that people have read all the same books in the same year. Or seen the same films? I try to keep up but I don’t watch a lot of TV and tend to shun much of what is considered popular from Strictly to Quizzes to Crime stuff. This is not snobbery. I just find a lot of these shows dreary and yet somehow also a sensory overload that makes me scratchy.

I just know what I like.At a certain age I believe that is permitted.And I certainly know what I don’t like either.

Lows of 2024

APPS

Yes all of them! I don’t want another fucking app. I don’t want my sleep monitored. I don’t want to have to download another app to go anywhere. I don’t want them to tell me to exercise or where to go or to suggest “memories” to me. What is this ‘making memories’ crap? You have memories or you don’t. This is all one giant superego telling you not to have experiences but to merely observe yourself having them. At one step remove.

Stop it.All of it

GRATITUDE JOURNALLING

Again no. Keep a diary or don’t. Anyone who uses the words gifting or journalling cannot be my friend. Sorry them’s the rules.

PODCASTS

No podcast should be no longer than 20 min and no men should be allowed to make them. I am reasonable like that. There has been much talk of men being lonely and not making friends and sharing in the way that women do. Well yes?

But does every man who has a friend have to make a podcast with him?

My top hate is that bulshitting bully Alistair Campbell obviously.

CASS DENIERS

A top paediatrician spends four years looking at the effects of puberty blockers and produces a long, detailed and nuanced report using all the ‘correct ‘language about cis and trans gender kids. The evidence of the harms of puberty blockers is meticulously documented.

Well ,some of us kinda knew this already. We knew it from detransitioners. We knew from women with endometriosis who were put on Lupron, we knew about bone density, brain function, the huge percentage of children moving onto cross sex hormones whch leaves most young girls, and that is the cohort we are talking about here, unable to have an orgasm or a child.

Cass has changed the conversation internationally and here , watch her speech in the Lords where she explaining the difference between giving blockers for precocious puberty and gender dysphoria.

https://x.com/SexMattersOrg/status/1868772967637041520

But what’s medical expertise got to do with this when you have a bunch of middle-aged men who say they are women yet went through male puberty or have transed their own children telling us that puberty blockers are fine and indeed reversible. Neither of these things are true. None of these people have any medical qualifications, they just have cultist beliefs such as children can be trans as 2. No one is born in the wrong body. We ARE our bodies. These idiots are being shown up for what they are

As I wrote in my column ‘Anyone who has questioned the gender cult has been deemed “far right” or transphobic, but Cass has put a spanner in the works. Neither she nor people like me want to take away the right for adults to transition. Either cult members accept there is a difference between adults and children, and begin to understand safeguarding, or they will have to operate a dark, underground web of selling drugs to children.

They may continue to worship at the altar of “gender identity”, but they can no longer expect all public institutions to go along with their dodgy faith. Instead, this new religion should assume its rightful position among the many strange but unscientific beliefs that we co-exist with: astrology, reiki, and past-life regression, for instance. You can’t stop folk believing weird stuff, but when something is harmful to women, to gay people, to children, then we have every right to refuse this faith in the public sphere.

Until fairly recently, it has been heresy to do so. Those still defending the sterilisation and mutilation of children are exposing themselves daily. Of course, they are squirming because it was never about the children for them; it was about proving their own purity to the other cult members. The kids were just collateral damage in a culture war we were told was not actually real.