Four generations of the real matriarchy — a social structure focussed on family and motherhood. Pic: Rod Fleming
We in the West are lucky. We live in the most varied, rich and progressive culture the world has ever known. Its foundation is in science. Science gives us a true way to understand the world and indeed, the universe we live in. While it may have no absolute certainties, as a body it represents the most reliable, accurate and sustainable system of knowledge humanity has even known. It is also the biggest, by far, repository of learning. That is why the unholy alliance of feminism and the cult of anti-science is as dangerous as it is: because it seeks to destroy science as the basis of our culture and replace it with mumbo-jumbo. Continue reading Feminism: a cancer that destroys the matriarchy — and our culture.→
Western feminists, for over half a century, have argued that gender itself has been the fundamental agent of women’s oppression. But very few have considered the consequences of matriarchy. I suggest that matriarchy in the Philippines offers an alternative.
In‘Why Men Made God’ we pointed out that powerful, high-status women in the patriarchy were those who became a part of the patriarchy itself. Some become consorts of patriarchal men. Others, however, become better at being men than men are.
Where the patriarchy was based on forms of meritocracy — often on the power to make financial profit — artificial barriers that might exist in less fluid societies could be broken down by women excelling at being men, and so they could rise in the patriarchal hierarchy.
This was a consequence of patriarchy. In order to compete and succeed, women had to accept rules designed by men. They had to become adept at playing a game that men had devised specifically to favour themselves. When we look at Hilary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher or Theresa May, we must ask, how much ‘woman’ is left? At least in terms of their public personas, none. Continue reading Matriarchy in the Philippines→
A transgirl performing a traditional Sinulog dance in the Philippines. Pic: Rod Fleming
Almost all credible authorities, according to GIRES in the UK, now agree that the baseline minimum for gender non-conformity as ‘at least 1%’ and this has been borne out, again according to GIRES, by recent studies in New Zealand, The Netherlands and Belgium.
Now ‘gender non-conformity’ is a broad church and by no means all of these would identify as transgender. However, research carried out by Professor Lynn Conway and also by the Williams Institute for Law, part of the UCLA, suggests about half of these are, for a prevalence of around 1:200. This is supported by census results from Malaysia, which put the incidence there — a country that is officially very hostile towards transgender — at 1:170 of male-born individuals.
This should tell us two things: transgender is innate and appears in all populations at roughly the same rate; and that as such it is a part of normal human variation.
Of these transgender populations, the vast majority are what is called by science ‘Blanchard HSTS’, ‘Early Onset Androphile’ or ‘transkids.’ These are almost always, uniquely, attracted to men. They appear as transgender very young and frequently begin dressing as girls, wearing their hair long and, in recent decades, taking feminising hormones, in their early teens. They should not be confused with another, much less frequent type of MtF transgender, known as ‘autogynephiles’. These latter are fetishistic transvestite men, for whom dressing and pretending to be a woman is a sexual thrill: think Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner. (We will deal with these elsewhere; they are almost entirely restricted to white, middle-class Western men and globally are a tiny population.)
But why are MtF transgenders so obvious, and so open, outside the West?
