#5 – Gender Gnosis
Weekly Review #5 – Gender, gnosticism, rebirth – The Week In Books: Maoism, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution
This week I was sent an article by Matt Osborne on gender as a new religious movement.
The article argues that the gender creed has advanced through ‘a fit of cultural imperialism.’ It has torn through society, etching its symbols and stamping its ethos on Officialdom. Its speech codes and holy slogans have colonised the tongue. The naive and credulous have been engraved with its emblems, all of them feeling the sudden absurd need to notify us they are a she/her or a he/him, as if this would’ve otherwise remained a mystery.
A million methods of deceit have multiplied, a thousand devices to enforce compliance have emerged. The online masses have been submerged in a swamp of vapid dogma, whilst the concepts of ‘kindness’ and ‘compassion’ have been counterfeited and brandished as cudgels. The creed has swaddled itself in the robes of ‘justice’; the legal language of ‘rights’ drips from its mouth like toxic spittle.
It is a creed which believes itself in possession of a divine secret, veiled knowledge revealed only to a select few. In this sense, it is gnostic, from Greek gnōstos, denoting something that is known but that cannot be transmitted to the uninitiated, whom it calls ‘cis people.’
A salvific belief in hidden gender-beings — gender gnosis — has taken over the brain of liberal Christianity like a misfolded protein.
Gender gnosis is at first a mere whisper. The individual who hears its call is brought to the realisation that they are ‘in the wrong body’ and must thus undergo a grievous journey across the abyss, aided only by the needle, the surgeon’s knife, and the cultic encouragements of their ‘trans siblings.’
‘Gender identity’ is a ghost in the machine, a spirit caged in a meat vessel, a phantom trapped in a body to which it does not belong. It is this gnosis, this spiritual revelation of otherness within oneself, otherness to one’s own body, revealed through the piercing pangs of ‘dysphoria’, that has now summoned a million absurdities.
This great and gruelling journey, this going-across, this ‘life-saving’ expedition – ‘the transition’ – seeks to decouple the mind from the body, surgically coercing and compelling it to align with the precious internal revelation. Only through such ‘affirmative’ measures can the individual be reborn.
It is always assumed that the mind is correct, and the body wrong. What if the exact opposite is true? No matter. The revelation takes centre-stage and overrides any awkward notion of ‘reality.’ Reality itself is relegated to the status of ‘construct’.
Those disheartening qualities that the body still exhibits, those inconvenient reminders of reality, are dismissed outright and deemed irrelevant. Believers must see past the body, to the soul, to the ghost of the divine identity.
The result, these new gnostics tell us, is literal transmutation of the flesh through magical utterance. “I feel like a woman, therefore I am one.”
The whole thing is absurdity on the grandest scale.
It was acknowledged as absurdity for most of the twentieth century. But it was an absurdity confined only to a few men (and even fewer women), who were severely hampered by issues relating to the self-perception centres in their brain. It was reasoned that the only way to deal with the distress these individuals felt was to partially indulge their peculiar desires.
It is only in the last decade or so that the absurdity has undergone rapid transmutational growth via the internet, inveigling a fresh, gullible, much younger cohort. ‘Rational’ and ‘sensible’ people, liberals mostly, have been willing to coddle the absurdity by pretending that it is something other than absurdity.
And rather than a smattering of men, the scales have conspicuously tipped, inducting more young women into the gender cult than ever before, overtaking the number of boys and men by a large margin. A regime of childhood drug and surgical treatment has been inaugurated, and to interrogate this is the height of ‘bigotry.’
Palingenesis, or Heroic Rebirth
Osborne has an interesting tangent toward the end of his article which can be further explored.
He notes how the term palingenesis is not often used to describe woke or gender or even communistic beliefs, and it should be. Palingenesis means heroic rebirth. The concept is extremely old. We meet it many times in the Greek myths; it was present in much else before it.
The death and rebirth of Christ – preceded by the transfiguration – is the cardinal doctrine of Christianity.
The idea of rebirth still lingers at the base of most storytelling today. The Hero’s Journey was a concept popularised by Joseph Campbell to describe the anatomy of storytelling found in most religions. It has since come to serve as the crux and fulcrum of stories in general, including the stories we tell about our own lives. It follows a simple formula.
The hero exists in the ordinary world. Life’s patterns here are predictable and familiar. Something calls on them to leave this world and transcend it. At first they refuse to. Change is unnerving. The hero meets a teacher, a mentor who delivers the lessons that can be carried forwards. With this, the hero is ready to depart the familiar world. The hero crosses a threshold, and embarks upon a quest which conjures many trials, spawning new enemies as well as new allies. At some point midway along the path, the hero must delve into his or her inner cave. An internal struggle ensues, where the past must be reconciled with the future. This period of contemplation prepares them for the great ordeal. Everything looks bleak. The hero must scrape through and claim a reward: knowledge, a skill, a precious item. The hero begins the journey home, but meets a final hurdle. Whether figuratively or literally, the hero must die and be reborn in order to overcome this last obstacle. Only then can the hero return to the ordinary world with the newfound treasure.
The concept of rebirth is powerful precisely because it speaks to the idea of individual ‘progress’, culturally conditioned into us by Christianity, but more generally by life itself, which is forever in flux, altering, swerving, moving as if towards something, pointing forward, like an arrow in constant flight.
We have narrativised history using this same concept. Its shadow hangs heavy over the phrases we use to describe all great historical upheavals – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Risorgimento, the Reconstruction. This emphasis on rebirth is not peculiar to the West. It spans the breadth of human experience, from reincarnation (punarjanma) in the Eastern religions, to transmigration of souls, to the endless cyclic rebirth of Saṃsāra.
It is not difficult to spot the concept of palingenesis lurking at the very core of transgenderism. The entire ideology is animated by what they perceive to be a very literal rebirth: the rebirth of man into woman, or vice versa. It is this quality more than anything which gives the gender cult its religious flavour.
National Rebirth
Rebirth found a new Italian form in the early twentieth century. In political theory, the term palingenesis has most commonly been associated with Fascism. In an attempt to clarify Fascism’s core characteristic and differentiate it from bog-standard nationalism, Roger Griffin called it palingenetic ultra-nationalism.
Fascism was born from the maelstrom of the First World War. The soldiers of Italy returned from the trenches believing themselves to have been reborn. Mussolini used the term trincerocrazia, or trenchocracy, to describe these veterans, these reborn heroes, these ‘futurists’ and ‘men of tomorrow’, these ‘aristocrats of the trenches.’ They fashioned fresh outfits, formed new groups, and set about violently pursuing the rebirth of the Roman Empire.
‘The brutal and bloody apprenticeship of the trenches will mean something. It will mean more courage, more faith, more tenacity. The old parties, the old men who carry on with the exploitation of the political Italy of tomorrow will be swept aside. The music of tomorrow will have another tempo. It will be an andantino sostenuto, and a hot-blooded fortissimo is not ruled out… The Italy of today is here. The Italy of tomorrow is too.’
– Mussolini, ‘Trincerocrazia’, 15 Dec 1917
This idea of national rebirth was transplanted to Germany in the 1930s. The same palingenetic impulse also galvanised the Communist parties that gained power in the twentieth century. The Russian Revolution ushered in a complete cultural cataclysm. The signs and symbols of Tsarism were supplanted, and Russia was reborn under the hammer and sickle. Undesirables were purged, traitors cleansed, and a new culture and new ontology was set up for the New Soviet Man.
A similar pattern was followed in China in the years after the Communist Revolution (see my piece in the books section below), and likewise in Cambodia and North Korea. These forms of rebirth were political, attempts to enact it at the level of the state.
Gender Rebirth
In the hands of the gender creed, the idea of rebirth was individualised.
What first had to be reborn was the language they used to describe themselves, hence the obsessive infatuation with pronouns. One’s birth name became their ‘deadname.’ All the barriers and obstacles that hindered their linguistic rebirth were decried as ‘fascistic’. Strict meanings and coercive forms were being projected upon them, they claimed, controlling them against their will. They followed Roland Barthes here, who said:
‘Language is neither reactionary nor progressive, it is quite simply fascist.’
Language imposes a structure. It has rules, a grammar, codes which dictate the order and arrangement of words. For an individual to affirm themselves, they must use it, they are compelled to speak. The speaker must abide by the rules of grammar in order to be understood. If I were to construct my next clause with a disregard for these rules, understand likely is it highly wouldn't it first you at. You’d have to piece it together.
For all its poetic elasticity, language has a strictness of form and a rigidity of definition. Those who sought to embody the absolute freedom of the individual, who granted themselves the ‘right’ to define and identify themselves however they so desired, were compelled to rebel against what they saw as coercion by way of language.
It was this ludicrous logic which led the gender cult into calling anything and everything ‘fascist.’ Their most obvious targets were the ‘TERFs.’ Aside from the raging envy which arose from the fact that the TERFs were actually women and they weren’t, the TERFs sought to uphold strict, and accurate, definitions in relation to sex.
Since fascism was the ideology most noticeably associated with the imposition of strict forms, it was only inevitable that to every sixth-wit gender activist who sought to rewire language around their own ego, the words ‘TERF’ and ‘fascist’ would become synonymous.
Ironically, in seeking to use law as a way of engineering how others spoke about them, the gender cult instituted their own petty little regime of ‘fascist’ biopolitical control.
The Week In Books
These are the books I bought this week.
I started reading Frank Dikötter’s The Cultural Revolution.
The book covers the period 1962–1976, when Mao ignited the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It’s hard not to hear historical rhymes with our own era.
This is the Great Hall of the People, which was opened in 1959 to commemorate the revolution 10 years earlier.
7000 communist cadres from across China rocked up here in 1962 to attend the largest conference ever held, to assess and discuss the dire situation the country found itself in. The Great Leap Forward had catapulted China into tumultuous disarray.
In the early years, Stalin had been Mao’s financial benefactor. When the communist revolution in China succeeded, Mao modelled it after the Soviet Union. Private property was commandeered, entrepreneurialism was abolished, and any who held to the old ways were to be castigated as ‘rightists’, in many instances killed. Like Stalin, Mao massaged an unlimited cult of personality about himself. Agriculture was collectivised, and workers were shepherded into state-run initiatives. Those rural villagers who resisted the new regime were delivered to the mob. Between 1947 and 1952 no less than 1.5 million ‘rightists’ were purged.
Stalin died in 1953. Freed from Moscow’s diktats, Mao saw this as an opportunity to ratchet things up a further few notches. Prices were fixed, the state monopolised grain, collective farms, like those that led to the famine in Ukraine, were introduced. Far from having nothing to lose but their chains, villagers became little more than indentured serfs. This was ‘The Socialist High Tide.’
In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalinism, inaugurating the era of deStalinisation in the Soviet Union. The personality cult was shut down. Mao glimpsed danger here, but played along for a while. Cadres in his party began to openly echo Khrushchev. Stalinism in China must be rolled back, they suggested. Anticipating a plot to topple him, Mao began preparing his revenge. At first, he feigned the encouragement of free thought and free speech, heralding the day that the party would ‘let a hundred flowers bloom.’
Inspired by the revolt in Budapest, workers across China began speaking out, airing their grievances. By the winter of 1956, farmers were withdrawing from the collective farms. Here, Mao turned the wrath of the people upon his own enemies and doubters in the party. Their vitriol and rage was to be channelled towards those who still typified bourgeois values, the harbourers of unclean thought. The ‘dogmatism’ of the party leaders was to be rooted out, so that social justice might flourish once more.
With the party purged, Mao now set about restraining the people. A great new project began in 1958. Millions of villagers were herded into communes. ‘Catch up with Britain and overtake the United States’ was the professed goal. This was known as ‘The Great Leap Forward.’
Homes, land, belongings, and livelihoods were requisitioned. Collective canteens were set up to distribute food according to merit. ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ – Lenin’s dictum here became holy writ. The pressure to perform led cadres into falsifying their grain yields, exaggerating their output. More and more grain was handed over to the state. Villagers starved.
Some party leaders dared criticise the Great Leap Forward. In retaliation Mao vilified them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Terror swept the country. Cadres, in an effort to meet Mao’s targets, enforced ever harsher work schedules upon the people. Workers rebelled. A whirling vortex of violence broke out. Hangings, executions, mutilations, beatings, and torture became common place. One boy, who had stolen a handful of grain, was ordered to be buried alive by his own father. 45 million people were either worked, beaten, or starved to death.
By 1962, the dark reality of the situation was undeniable. The powers of the communes were relaxed, grain was shipped in from abroad, and local markets allowed to return. Mao’s role in the famine was cautiously criticised by party members. But they nonetheless agreed that the general line was correct. It just hadn’t been implemented properly. Mao’s instructions had not been followed accurately enough.
Here began the Cultural Revolution, born of a great crisis.
Mao’s response to the catastrophe of the famine was to blame it on ‘rightists’ and class enemies. A great re-education campaign was declared. Over the next 10 years a society-wide purge ensued. Entire regions were condemned as ‘roaders’ (those who sought to take China on the road back to capitalism). Armies of student units were assembled, calling themselves the Red Guards. By 1966, the cultural revolution erupted and was amped up to full-scale rancour.
Mao gave the student hordes licence to ‘bombard the headquarters’, to purge the highest echelons of power, and overthrow the ‘capitalists’ still hiding in the party. In what became a purity spiral, Red Guard units began besmirching other units as ‘rightists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’, turning on each other, igniting venomous internecine clashes. By 1968 the violence had spread to such an extent that the army had to step in.
I will be writing more about The Cultural Revolution in future posts.
The second book I bought was Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans, which I’ve wanted for a while.
I also got Joanna Williams’ How Woke Won.
Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
And finally Martyn Rady’s history of The Habsburgs.
I will be writing about these on future posts.
Let me know if you’ve read any of them yourself, and what you thought.
And if you read this far, let me know what you’re reading below.
I’m reading “How To Sell A Haunted House” by Grady Hendrix. I read his brilliant horror novel “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires” a few years back so thought this one was worth a go. Less impeccably skin crawling so far but it has time.
Great piece, enjoyed that. I can totally see the fit of gender transition into the rebirth narrative and would agree that those who buy into it often see it as that, a way to become someone new, divorced from previous trauma or experience. The problem is that there is no transition, there is only the process, which never ends. I believe that coming to this realisation is and will be the cause of many detransitions.