It is well known that the burning of books is motivated by a form of ideological thinking among some people whose views seeks to dominate all other ways of viewing the world. Catholic ideologues in the middle ages were notorious for preventing and killing other narratives by censorship and burning and its hierarchy would even burn to death the authors of ideas they disliked. The Fascists of the 20th century were frequent perpetrators of censorship, the burning of books and also of burning people they didn’t like – only in ovens – after gassing them to death first. The Bolsheviks under Lenin and Stalin censored or suppressed books and shot people who opposed their ideas. Burning was something Stalin’s torturers did to their victims body parts. Catholics did it in pursuit of their idea of a improved religion; the Fascists for their idea of a improved thousand year Germanic Empire; the Bolsheviks for their idea of an improved future for humanity.

It is clear that holders of such dogmatic ideologies, not only wish to silence the views of people they disagree with but also to do them as much physical harm as possible. The latest group of 21st century ideological dogmatists have assembled around the ‘flag’ of who has the right to be classed as a woman and they have become quite influential. In a few instances they have been extremely sectarian and violent against those who think the category of woman is actually biologically determined and not an ideologically determined category. Not too long ago, J.K Rowling expressed a view not in harmony with the the new sectarian dogmatists of alternative gender-identity rights, and true to form for sectarian dogmatists, the books of J.K Rowling were duly burnt. However, this did not do as much direct harm to J.K as it did to other female and male academics who were hounded out of their jobs for essentially expressing the same view.

If this all sounds a bit, ‘Life of Brian’ type crazy, to non-ideological driven citizens and working class populations of the world, then it may seem that it is not worth taking seriously. However, I suggest it is. This is because the idea of individuals having something wrong with their bodies or minds, that bodies and brains, having evolved over millions of years, all of a sudden needs fixing, is a recent one. It is now part of an established middle-class trend in the ideology of modern hierarchical mass societies.

The dominant ideology of capitalist-based mass societies in particular, holds that these latest mass society forms are the best, if not the most perfect, forms that can possibly be imagined or created by humanity. Therefore, those who cannot find peace of mind or reasonable contentment within them must have something personally wrong with them. This view ignores the fact that in a number of ‘advanced’ capitalist countries of the world, it is estimated that 1 in 5 citizens; 1 in 4 women and 6 out of 10 students have some form of mental disturbance ranging from moderate depression and clinical anxiety to more extreme forms including, serious intravenous drug dependency, self-harm and attempts at suicide.

In addition to alienated citizens, there are in our modern mass societies, middle-class professionals and semi-professionals trained to assist those experiencing difficulty with social integration. It is these who make a living out of helping people to ‘adjust’ and rationalise the alienation experienced within the societies and the neighborhoods their clients inhabit. Since in general these middle-class professionals prosper reasonably well from these mass society occupations they rarely see any need to focus upon the alienating, authoritarian, competitive, unjust, and inhuman circumstances the majority of people in hierarchical mass societies are having to cope with.

Because many people also manage to cope superficially well with these alienating societal pressures, it is invariably the ones who can no longer ‘manage’ who seek help or are offered it. It is here we need to remind ourselves of the origins of the modern helping professions. Such 19th and 20th century nation-state provisions of health and welfare, were implemented to ensure mass populations exist which are physically and mentally able to endure the 24/7 madness of either; a) militarised killing during wars between nations, or b) working for between 40 and 50 mind-numbing, back-breaking hours per week for 48 years, on minuscule wages, also for the benefit of the ‘nation’.

Before my life began, some professional middle-class people in mass societies carved a career for themselves by routinely applying electricity to other peoples brains or by directly cutting pieces out of their cerebral-cortex. This was done in order to help them fit into society after the operation. Usually those who didn’t ‘fit in’ were lesbian, homosexual, or considered seriously anti-social ‘misfits’ (!). The banal analysis of previous generations of ‘one flew over the cuckoos nest’ experts, was that these peoples bodies were OK, but their brains/minds needed serious modification.

During my life time this physically intrusive means of citizen ‘adjustment’ was no longer fashionable. Although it obviously still carried on as a fringe minority procedure because I personally knew two people who were ‘helped’ in this way: one with electrodes zapping each side of their temporal lobes (it didn’t) and the other with a hole drilled into their cranium to see what might be causing problems (it didn’t). But post the Second World War, the fashionable helping ethos has steadily moved from being predominantly concerned with re-fashioning the brain to the opposite, being predominantly concerned with re-fashioning the body.

Professional helpers were then (and still are) focused entirely on the individual and not on the increasingly alienating social system as it careers towards its own destruction. So now it is the brain that is mostly judged ok – but the bodies of some people perhaps need changing. Some among the modern helping profession now reason that if an individual’s body parts are not allowing them to feel good about themselves or to integrate into society sufficiently, then it’s the form of the body that needs fixing, not the form of society. Experts can now help by ‘cosmetically’ cutting pieces out of it or surgically putting pieces into or grafting them onto it. If a male would prefer a socially constructed imitation of a woman’s body, to feel at one with themselves and society, that’s also now OK, providing someone will pay for the intensive and extensive skilled flesh and bone reconstruction involved.

The modern helping surgical profession can now cut off testes and penis, create an makeshift vagina type groin entrance and implant breasts. Job done, whopping salary banked. However, this painful and expensive level of physical intervention is not always practical or desirable, so a section of the helping profession have come up with a social alternative. If a male merely wishes to feel better about themselves in society by being treated as a woman, for example, they will declare this idea exists as a human ‘right’ and then persuade (or force) people to address the male as such and treat them as such.

Apparently it does not matter what the majority think – including those born as biological women – or what biological science has for millennia designated as constituting the sexual dimorphism of women among all human and mammalian species. [NB. Since ancient times roughly half of all mammals were classified as females, because their bodies invariably; menstruated, formed ovaries and wombs, produced placentas, bore children  and developed special, lactating glands.] The bio-chemical reality of multi-cellular life on earth, retained over multiple millions of years of plant, insect and animal evolution (multi-cellular organisms having moved on from the single cellular form of mitosis and self-budding) have definitely not mutated away from the two sex model of species reproduction.

Yet this millennia old bio-chemical reality is to be ignored and replaced by a recent bout of petite-bourgeois invented ‘alternative’ thinking! What clearly matters to the sect-like gender identity ideologists, is not reality but, like other fundamentalist ideologues, the dogmatic and violent defense of an emotionally driven idea. In the context of a 21st century confused humanity, obsessed almost daily with entertainment type virtual realities, what does this ‘conversion’ away from biological reality represent? To me it represents a sectarian type assault by those holding a virtual-reality version of life on earth in their heads, and pitting it against the objective reality of the rest of life on earth.

Leaving aside the possible manipulative use of this gender dysphoria symptom (formerly GID) by predatory individuals, that is not the worst of this dogmatic, virtual-reality fantasy. Young people who already go through terrible torment by growing up in intensely alienating and alienated societies (and given the greater number of crises our 21st century social systems are going through), are facing even greater existential dilemmas. Yet some of them are being told – even encouraged – to live out a fantasy scenario they may have been encouraged to adopt – or to entertain unrealistic hopes and ambitions of a future, gender-changed peace of mind and contentment within existing mass societies.

And this trans-formation is to be miraculously achieved by taking hormone altering drugs or by having drastic non-reversible surgery. For some modern helping professionals, their ideological confirmation of a clients emotionally directed and perhaps only a currently preferred perception, is taking place when young people are already having their body parts and feelings deflected this way and that by the natural bio-chemical hormonal and social changes occurring during their transition through puberty and beyond.

It is difficult not to conclude that these modern gender-identity professional and semi-professional ‘helpers’ on so-called gender disorder issues, may well be the latest iteration of those earlier noted professionals. I am referring specifically to the ones who, also blinkered or blinded to the alienated reality of mass society living, arrogantly or enthusiastically thought they were only helping people ‘fit-in’ by destroying brain tissue with scalpel, electrical probe or corrosively destructive chemical mixtures (as with code breaker Alan Turing.)

Undoubtedly, some of these ‘adjustment bureau’ professionals did not live long enough to recognise their involvement in these professionally based ‘crimes against humanity’ procedures, (as defined at Nuremberg trials) that were later abandoned. But we have! Not only have such forms of ‘help’ been mostly abandoned but are now almost universally recognised as a mistake. Mistakes, moreover, with tragic consequences for those they ‘helped’ and for their families and loved ones, who had to deal with a ‘cure’ which was often many times worse than the prejudiced characterisations applied to them by official mass society actions and opinions.

Is the history of class based society ‘helping’ (sic) sort of repeating itself again; once as tragedy, the next as farce? Sadly, it might well be!

Roy Ratcliffe. (March 2023)