This is the third part of what went wrong at Albert Park. You can read the earlier parts from the underlined links below. This won’t fit in the email so go online if you want to read the whole thing.
In the first part we looked a bit at recent history to try and explain what might have led our “elite” tranche of society (media, politicians and “experts”) to get behind the Extremist Trans movement .
Then we’ve looked at the protest as a whole as well as some random individuals in an attempt to understand what the Extremist Trans activist rank and file look like, and what might drive them to describe a clearly violent protest as “peaceful and loving”.
Now it’s time to look at the leaders. I have some sympathy for the rank and file who appear to generally be everyday people, with no real platform and who have been convinced that to be a good person one should punch old ladies, speak in sign, label anyone who does not agree with you “fascist”, wear medical looking masks, force people to do things because you are afraid, believe women can have penises and bark at Grandmothers. Clearly many would not agree that this is how one acts like a good person but, at the core, the people in these various cults are afraid rather than evil, their fear is being leveraged by politicians, “experts” and activists and fear makes you believe in all sorts of stupid things and more sinisterly, makes you willing to force those beliefs on others.
But the leaders are a different story. They certainly seem to have aspects of extreme narcissism. As so often is the case today they attempt to use science to cloak themselves in legitimacy, without having any real understanding of what the cloak is made of. If the rank and file are confused, afraid and looking for something, the leaders seem happy to give them what they want, self aggrandising themselves in the process. They also seem to have many of the features of psychopathy certainly much of what is listed below could be applied to activist leaders at Albert Park:
and also
Psychopathy is complex, you can have all the features of a psychopath and not be a serial killer and psychopath’s are quite capable of contributing positively to society. So long as they get what they want……..
Throw narcissism, religious cult fundamentalism, fear and it’s projection, pseudo intellectualism, physical weakness and physical disconnectedness, social media addiction, large corporate sponsorship and features of psychopathy together and you pretty much hit the Extremist Trans movement right on the head. It sounds like fascism because the Extremist Trans movement is a sort of fascism. It’s hugs fascism, where violence is love, kindness is oppression, critique is misinformation and intolerance is tolerance.
Here we all are, looking for a guy with a moustache as the new face of fascism, just like the old one. But instead of the history repeat, we have the history rhyme and the new brand of fascism smiles and wants to give you a hug while taking away your human rights just the same, because “emergency” reasons. It is utterly insidious, so much more difficult to combat then the obvious violence of your classic skinhead fascist.
So that the new face of fascism looks and sounds like this:
In the doublespeak world of hugs fascism forcing people into unnecessary medical procedures isn’t an imposition on basic human rights rather it is “a tool for confidence”. Ardern presents yet another made up solution to an imaginary problem that she caused.
In this third part I’ll focus mainly on Shaneel Lal who is at the forefront of the Extremist Trans cult and the shenanigans at Albert Park and very much a resident of made up fake problem land.
There isn’t too much I could find about his early years. Lal lived in Fiji until his teens, where he supposedly experienced various types of discrimination, including anti-gay sentiment and attempts at conversion therapy. He moved to New Zealand at 14.
The La Lal legend supposedly goes that while he was doing some volunteer work at Middlemore hospital a person allegedly offered to “pray his gay away” and told him that “all gays are off to hell”. I deliberately use the words allegedly and supposedly as none of this is verified and Lal is accomplished at twisting the truth, or just plain lying.
For instance he falsely attributed a quote to Parker claiming she said:
because of the transgender agenda, cis women are being kidnapped and blended and put into meat for human consumption
What she actually said was that “a women” was kidnapped and cut up and put into kebab meat, a gruesome and almost unbelievable story. But it is at least alleged that it really did happen to a women, much as Parker described:
I tried to hunt this quote of Parkers down and was led to a Twitter post where the poster herself, falsely quotes Parker even though the video is subtitled below and the subtitling says something different:
Saying that “bad thing x happened to a women” is not the same as claiming “bad thing x is happening to women”. I think the fact checkers would call this “misleading”. But what is truth and the accuracy of quotes in a hyper unreal world?
This chimes with the New Zealand MSM repeatedly describing Parker as “anti-trans” while never once providing any evidence that she is anti-trans. Fact checkers are you there?
Our MSM does this all the time if you listen to RNZ or read Stuff there is a far right crazy proto-terrorist lurking on every corner and much of this fear is fabricated out of thin air. Everything they don’t agree with is far right.
One example before we return to Lal. Kevin Veale a teacher of bullshit degrees Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University wrote an article for New Zealand Doctor. In it he does the current Mainstream Media trick of portraying anyone they don’t agree with as being “far right”:
If you click on the link for the “video with Jean-Francois Gariepy” rather than getting the video you get taken to an article in “The National” which is a left leaning Scottish publication with links to the SNP and which carries comment from SNP members such as:
However upon going to the National Article we read:
So the alleged video is not here either. So off to “Pink News” which is a site dedicated to LGBetc news. Here surely we should have a link to the incriminating video yes?
No.
There is much talk about “white supremacists” and “neo Nazis” and more links:
that take us further down the pathway of the alleged:
but this time with an actual link to a video that leads us here:
Sigh.
So the Mainstream Media, makes an allegation based on a quote in an article, based on a quote in an article, based on a quote in an article based on a link to a video that appears to no longer exist. Veale makes a big allegation and a big allegation should require big evidence and that evidence should at the very least directly linked from the article. This does not feel like journalism. What do you think the chances that any of our friends in the New Zealand media checked whether any of the allegations against Parker are true, or they just went to her Wikipedia page? Do we think La Lal checked any of this or did he just do the same thing?
Worse, the allegation seems to be around guilt by association rather than about what she actually said.
And we end with an allegation of guilt by association which apparently translates to Posy Parker is a far right transphobe.
Consider that Shaneel Lal writes for the Herald. He acknowledges himself that he is not dealing with “his” audience:
Further:
In this case I cannot argue with his logic, from his perspective this makes sense and why shouldn’t he get paid for his writing?
However I would not, for a single moment, believe that because Lal writes for the Herald I could pick an article from the Herald and say “Lal supports X because X writes for the Herald and so does Lal”.
Parker talking to the far right does not mean she supports the far right. Can we not talk to people without it meaning we support everything they stand for, or they support everything we stand for? Who agrees 100% on anything?
This is what the Mainstream Media repeatedly did with Parker. There is simply no evidence at all that she is “anti-trans”. She does not state anywhere that trans people should have less rights than you or I. But Lal is interested in scoring points not in the truth. And the Mainstream Media seems to play the same game.
La Lal lands lose association with the truth appears in another interview in the warm up to Parkers arrival. Lal claims that a rainbow youth building being burned down in an arson attack was an example of “queer hatred”.
However, a simple google search reveals an article from the Herald 3 months before the interview above, that describes how the judge in the trial of the two arsonists stated:
The judge said while this was a serious case of arson with “very significant” impacts on the victims, he was satisfied it was “not a hate crime [by the definition] popularised by Parliament” nor was it a deliberate targeting of the communities of Rainbow Youth and Gender Dynamix - the two services that operated a drop-in centre from the building.
“In fact my view this was far from that. And what happened the day was related to these two men’s mental health state at the time and they were clearly seriously affected by their reduced mental and intellectual capabilities.”
It appears in La Lal land tolerance and love involves using the intellectually disabled as whipping boys for whatever his current thing is.
Further in the interview above he states
Queer hatred is at an all time high
Which is a preposterous statement quickly refuted with a half arsed google search:
It is patently untrue that Queer hatred is at an all time high. It would seem to have been worse pre 1993 at the very least, while in fact, step by step, queer rights seem to be getting better and better.
Aside from lying, Lal is a big fan of hyperbole and, it would seem, hypocrisy:
But it’s apparently ok to describe “TERFs” as genocidal:
and any action against the Extremist Trans movement as genocidal:
In La Lal land even an entire natural system’s inaction is genocide:
You see genocide is a very specific term that refers to a specific set of actions and using it to describe other actions is grotesque. Unless Lal does it.
It is difficult to know when his lying, and hyperbolae started but his start in the public limelight seems to have begun at the tender age of 18 with his involvement in the Youth Advisory Group, who are some schoolkids who help the Ministry of Education do stuff somehow.
Talking to the esteemed “Education Gazette” Lal shows the inklings of the race to the bottom victim culture that is a large part of the “Everything is Power and Race”, social pseudoscience that the Extremist Trans groups exist in:
So many struggles. So little time.
From there he went to youth parliament where he was “engulfed by the frightening world of political activism”. There he gave up his youth to the cause in a confusing manner, or something:
He clearly has some wisdom realising how silly he was at 18. However he does not have enough wisdom to that this phenomenon or realising how little he knew when he was younger will repeat every 3 or 4 years for the rest of his life.
All of this was build up to Lal’s crowning achievement: the banning of conversion therapy in New Zealand. It is fair to say that it has made his name as an activist and it’s how he won the highly coveted young New Zealander of the year award, further increasing his fame. It even got him in Vogue:
I expect most New Zealanders were largely unaware of the push to end conversion therapy. It would have passed me by as well if my teenage son had not bought it up at the dinner table as it was passing through government. For him it was a very important thing that everyone must get behind. My wife and I were bemused by the whole thing as
a) our son had shown zero interest in politics previously and
b) intuitively it did not seem like a particularly important societal problem.
We were surprised with the ferocity with which our son reacted to our broad indifference and the discussion rapidly got heated with accusations of homophobia and transphobia being cast around as they almost always are when anyone disagrees with anything depicted as against LGBetc. This shows the insidious nature of this movement. It is everywhere, including the schools, where it is passed on without critique under the hugs fascist premise of it being about love, acceptance and tolerance so that any critique is not only unacceptable it is labelled “far right” and “hate speech” and “fascist” and “-phobic”. Of course your children are being exposed to all sorts of propaganda, as well as highly targeted advertising and an almost limitless supply of pornography. Extremist Trans propaganda represents only part of what they are being assaulted with. But I guess the difference is that much of the rest is not endorsed by teachers, politicians and the media while the Extremist Trans propaganda very much is.
However to my sons credit he was able to be convinced, over a few days, that my wife and myself are not actually Nazi transphobes who felt forcing conversion therapy on people was fine, rather we just thought that specific issue is far outweighed by bigger issues. In particular he was convinced by a logical argument:
Had he observed that he, his friends and all children in Auckland had just missed a year of school due to a disease that had no real danger to them (or almost anyone else who was under 75 and of broad good health)? Yes.
Had he observed that even among his middle class friends the lockdown isolation, lack of socialisation, increased screen time, reduction in sport and exercise and general climate of fear, had damaged their mental and physical health by an observable amount? Yes.
Did he believe that vulnerable children and particularly the poor, would have had an even worse experience than he and his middle class friends while at the same time having even less resource available to them to make up for that worse experience? Yes.
We are told trans children exist. Trans children have much higher levels of mental health problems than average children (anxiety, depression, addiction etc) ergo the governments policies, which by his own experience had caused damage to people he knew who should be better equipped to deal with those problems, must have hit trans kids harder then average kids yes? Yes.
So it would seem reasonable to me that we should be debating how to prevent those damages which hurt all children broadly but vulnerable children disproportionately (including children with gender dysphoria) rather then a problem that only affects very few people, supposedly, yes? Yes.
A rare win for logic indeed.
I wish at the time I had followed up more closely to see who or what was behind this movement, because it would appear that banning conversion therapy is even more of a non victory than I had intuited.
In fact this “victory” shares so much with what is wrong with our society today that I will go into it in some depth. For a victory it would be, if it was an actual solution and if there was a problem that actually required that solution. It is not clear that either of those things is the case. One could describe Lal’s victory as Quixotic except I’m not sure there are even any windmills.
According to Lal:
We’ll ignore the others and keep our focus on Lal.
The End Conversion Therapy Facebook page was started in 2019. It seems to be a Lal promotion page as much as anything as there is actually not a lot of conversion therapy content on it.
The page has 6400 followers and has been going for nearly four years. And that was enough to generate debate in parliament, numerous meetings with politicians, who knows how many MSM articles and reports and eventually, a law change.
Compare to The freedom convoy page which generated 10x as many members in just 12 days:
Yet not a single politician spoke to those protestors, in spite of the fact that vaccine mandates are a clear breach of already existing rights:
So that it would seem that the new definition of our democracy is “rule by loudest minority”.
Specific searches of various types find it is very difficult to find evidence of conversion therapy in New Zealand. That does not mean it does not exist, it does but it is difficult to know how prevalent it is let alone something more subjective like how damaging it is. “Evidence” is highly anecdotal. And a lot of the “evidence” involves someone claiming X happened to them and X was conversion therapy. In fact searches for conversion therapy in New Zealand return a lot of results on Lal’s attempts to ban it, so it would seem Lal has greatly increased exposure to the idea which would seem somewhat of an own goal.
The crux of Lal’s crusade seems to boil down to a letter, written to parliament, by Lal here. The document was written on Christmas Eve 2019 and the final version was saved on 21/05/2020:
It is titled:
So it would seem that at the age of 19 Lal is already the expert, based on the fact that he allegedly had some experiences in Fiji, someone said something to him in New Zealand and he made up a Facebook page and can write a document in Word.
From the start Lal conflates being a homosexual with being a transsexual when clearly they are not the same thing. Arguments that may hold water when you are talking about homosexuality may leak like a sieve when talking about gender dysphoria:
and
Like all of the activist generation who seem to regard Christianity with contempt (weird given that Jesus is basically the foundation of the Wests fundaments of tolerance and acceptance) he attempts to dispel “irrational” conventional religious faith and replace it with a “rational” faith in government, law, and legislation:
The idea that one can legislate away hate is as ridiculous as the idea that you could legislate love into being and is as ridiculous as the idea that you can pray away gayness. Replacing one stupid message with an equally absurd one doesn’t seem to be much of a progression. But what do you expect from a 19 year old man-child activist?
We can see that Lal is big on the Bill of Rights Act, but only as they interest him personally:
Because other people being concerned about their human right to bodily autonomy is “not caring about the issue and grifting”:
Others may protest about the removal of their human right to free movement:
or their right to assembly:
But due to Lal’s apparent epidemiological expertise such protests will cause an outbreak of a largely harmless cold that will somehow stop people from seeing family in their holidays, in spite of the fact that the government was already stopping people from seeing their family in holidays due to a largely harmless cold:
oh and breaching lockdowns is fine anyway, because reasons:
Anyho.
It seems that for Lal, like many cult members, logical incoherence is fine. I thought that a belief of the Extremist Trans movement was that if you are born with a penis you can still choose to be a women and you can change that belief.
Sexuality is fluid you see:
Yet Lal seems to argue that gender identity is not an individuals choice but is something they are born with. So a special kind of not fluid, fluid?
Next Lal tells us that The Ministry of Health made a report:
But it was one of those tricky empty government reports where there was no data or research in the report:
So we are left with the “Counting Ourselves” study from the University of Waikato which Lal uses to claim that 17% of non trans and non binary participants have been subjected to conversion therapy while 12% didn’t know if they hade been subjected to conversion therapy.
This is where we get all sciency.
Ish.
Not really.
The “Counting Ourselves” report is good in that it is better than nothing. At least we have some basic data to support a change in the laws of our country and that is better than everything up until this point.
But “better than nothing” is a pretty low bar.
The Counting Ourselves data comes from surveys. Surveys are notoriously unreliable. If you imagine a pyramid of research where randomised control trials / meta studies are at the top, this research is actually under the sand in a dungeon somewhere with the snakes and spiders.
“Counting Ourselves” struggles with defining conversion therapy in a clear way (something that much of the conversion therapy research does). For instance we see “examples of conversion therapy” such as the one in a paper resulting from the Counting Ourselves survey to which Lal is referring:
One participant shared an experience that could be interpreted as a gender identity conversion effort (GICE; Turban et al., 2020), ‘I have had a psychiatrist tell me she could “fix” my gender and sexuality as it was caused by trauma. She said this in front of my queer, trans partner’ (NZ European/Pākehā, Non-binary, Youth).
“Could be interpreted as gender identity conversion therapy”? Well is it or isn’t it? To me, it sounds like a psychiatrist is telling this person they think they can treat them.
Oh the outrage of a person believing they can do their job.
And did the psychiatrist even use those words at all? Human memory is complex and not well understood, and can be effected by many factors. Your memory of a situation can change over time. For instance there is some evidence that poor memory and declines in memory over time are related to maladaptive personality change. Are we dealing with maladaptive personality changes in this group? Sufferers of gender dysphoria very often have high levels of anxiety and depression. Anxiety can effect short term memory and cause brain fog. When compared to healthy adults, depressed individuals typically show impaired recollection, better memory for negative material but worse memory for positive material and “overgeneral” autobiographical retrieval.
Moreover commonly used antianxiety drugs like benzodiazepines have been found to effect long term memory going forward although they do not effect current long term memories.
With all this in play, which of the participants memories are accurate and which are not?
What other quantifications used in this study include examples that “could be” valid?
And is it then a surprise that 12% of the participants in the Counting Ourselves Survey did not know whether they had undergone conversion therapy at all when no one seems to be sure what it even is?
Further, it would seem difficult to describe an experience as so traumatic and damaging to have it banned, that almost as many people are uncertain whether they have experienced it as those who are certain they have experienced it. For some it would seem, it was not traumatic at all.
Sketchy definitions and memories aside, the bias potential in a survey like this is considerable. For instance the “Counting Ourselves” survey is trying to collect data on a societal group we have very little data on partly because they may be wary of drawing attention to themselves, or perhaps because there are some trans people who just get on with their lives and aren’t interested in the Extremist Trans victimhood competition, or perhaps other reasons as well. Naturally those who are more activist and who have worse experiences, are more likely to fill in the survey then those who are less activist and have had better experiences.
Surveys of this type are for gathering valuable data. The data can be used to inform debate. To do so the data should be as clean as possible so as to make good decisions based on the results. You do not fill in a research survey to make your world better or to change society. That is bias.
“Standing up”, “fight”, “invisibility”, “colonial mores”, “being ignored”, “speaking truth to power”, “holding government to account” these are the words of people who think they are in some sort of battle for survival not people who are filling in a survey for the purposes of gathering specific data about their group. Naturally this will taint their answers.
This bias extends to those who helped construct the survey. In the acknowledgements the authors of the study thank:
the community advisory group members who guided the development of the survey questions and report, and promoted the survey
followed by a list of names. I chose the name Scout Barbour-Evans and the first thing that came up as a search was the following tweet:
You get everything you need from that screenshot. This is more non solution to imaginary problem fakery. I think it a tad self centered that you would go through pregnancy, bring a life into the world and your enduring memory of that challenging and life changing process is that you were “continually misgendered”.
Scout is the sort of person who in spite of having very good evidence that the vaccine is not safe (it’s obviously not effective):
wants the new one and one for her child and one for the Monkeypox she can easily avoid by using a condom
Cults within cults.
So what do you suppose the chances are that Scout (who has no scientific background that I can discern) has helped develop a survey and helped recruit participants for that survey in a remotely non-biased, randomised manner?
Just imagine for a moment, if you will, what sort of survey results one will receive if one asks 1178 Scouts, Lal’s and Eliana’s (I suspect that is the Columbian Eliana that assaulted Posy Parker) questions about how hard their lives are? And when Lal’s and Scout’s are the ones who have made the questions and are involved in the summaries generated from the data?
What I imagine is a massively biased sub sample (around twenty thousand people are estimated to be trans or non binary in NZ) of subjective “experiences”. This is then run through about the lowest rung of our University system (Social Pseudoscience) at one of our worst and wokest Universities (Waikato), a University that ranks so low it’s given a range rather than an actual place:
And from this heavily biased “evidence base” of 135 pages Lal gets a single half page stat:
And that is the scientific basis of his argument that conversion therapy is a problem in New Zealand. This is our expert remember. And that is all there is for New Zealand data.
Back to his expert letter, where he confirms conversion therapy is a bad thing, because “declarations”
The Declaration quoted basically states conversion therapy is “bad” because
national organizations representing millions of licensed medical and mental health care professionals, educators, and advocates
say it’s bad. There is no research referenced on the prevalence and efficacy, or not, aside from “contemporary science” which is a very broad term which could mean everything but probably means nothing. The declaration is made by organisations representing these various people, not the people themselves and not a single actual person is named on the document. It is signed by logos:
Next Lal provides this statement:
In this case I am unable to check if it states what Lal says it does, only the abstract is available online and I’m not willing to pay $50 for the full article. However, that $50 makes me wonder how a 19 year old got access to the full article, let alone understood it, which then makes me wonder if Lal actually wrote any of this at all. It’s pretty hard to read a research paper when you are 19 and have no experience in reading them.
However the abstract seems to talk only about LGB it does not seem to extend this to the rest of the victim alphabet so this is not evidence for the efficacy or not of treatment for gender dysphoria or something that may be gender dysphoria. It also describes limited evidence of efficacy (which is not the same as no evidence) and also “limited” evidence of negative effects. Perhaps conversion therapy is not completely useless at all? Tough to say from an abstract and a single study:
He provides another study from San Francisco:
That was also behind a paywall so I only have the abstract:
In this study we have a very small sample from a specific population. It once again treats Gay and Lesbians as if they are the same as trans people which they are not. It possibly breaks them out in the full version of the study (I couldn’t find the data on the Family Acceptance website either). But even if it does separate conversion therapy on gay and lesbians vs conversion therapy on trans people the sample size means there can be nothing statistically significant in these results. Even the full sample of 245 individuals is nothing when compared to the roughly 1 million trans people estimated to live in the US. There are the other typical confounders as well, for instance how do we separate whether it is the conversion therapy that makes them miserable; or the fact that their parents don’t accept them / don’t believe they are actually trans and make them go to conversion therapy, that makes them miserable? If their parents refused to believe they were trans but didn’t send them to conversion therapy would they be less or more miserable?
How would you elucidate any of that in a tiny sample size of 245? And what about the thousands of other confounders in an area that is as complex and poorly understood as the human psyche and in psyches that are already ravaged with anxiety and depression?
And yet again this study provides no data on the prevalence of conversion therapy either in San Francisco or New Zealand.
Next Lal (or whoever wrote this for Lal) gives us this “science”
First we have the same problem with this study as we have in New Zealand although it is potentially worse as this study is based on survey data from a survey conducted by:
People are welcome to promote whatever beliefs they like although I would appreciate if anyone, either here or in the US can show me how the rights of trans people are any different to the rights of other citizens. What rights are there that you and I have that trans people do not?
But while they are welcome to promote whatever they like, this promotion will inevitably lead to serious bias. Science does not engage in activism. It presents a hypothesis and then it does it’s best to destroy it. The harder it is to destroy the more weight it carries. An activist survey will likely be filled out by those individuals who are more activist. Are you more likely to be activist if you have had terrible experiences as a trans person as opposed to a person who has had less terrible or even positive experiences as a trans person? Just think of all the people who are not out there busily activisting for change because they are at least partly happy and haven’t had many particularly bad experiences. You know the weird sort who are just getting on with their lives as they don’t see themselves as victims. Are they filling in these surveys?
So there is bias in the the making of the survey, the collecting of the data, who the survey is pointed to and who actually fills in the survey.
I could not find the quote that Lal makes anywhere and as he doesn’t link or reference anything properly I cannot be 100% sure that this is the correct reference but I think it is:
And in their limitations:
Further in a discussion of Conversion Therapy the Counting Ourselves team state:
So it is very uncertain whether conversion therapy adds to the mental health problems of trans people or is merely another thing that already desperately unhappy people try in order to fix themselves.
Next Lal presents us with this statement:
So not affirming a persons belief they are transgender is itself a form of conversion therapy. What fun this is. You must only say yes to anyone LGBetc otherwise it’s conversion therapy and off to prison with you. This slope is as slippery as a very slippery thing.
19 year old expert Lal then gives the Minister the benefit of his psychological expertise:
This is a complete perversion of the role of the psychologist. The purpose of a psychologist is not to affirm whatever the patient believes. While it is problematic and probably impossible to convince a gay person they are not gay and should be attracted to the opposite sex, it is not the same as helping a person who is not a male accept that they are in fact a female, when they have a vagina, ovaries and breasts.
La Lal’s logic is like saying it is disrespectful to the patient that a doctor should claim that the patients leg is broken, when the patient believes they have pulled a muscle.
Consider also that, as Jordan Peterson argues, all psychology is conversion therapy. You do not go to a psychologist and pay them a lot of money if there is not some part of your personality that you wish to convert to a different state. You go to a psychologist because you are in some psychological pain and the way to address that is to find the source of the pain and remedy it in some way, with the help of the psychologist. If this process is successful then you will have converted yourself from a less happy person to a more happy person. We do not go to a psychologist if we are already fine and already know what our problems are and how to fix them, otherwise why would we go to the psychologist?
Further, a psychologists duty is to help the patient as they best see fit as that is what they do all the psychology training for. There is, of course also input from the patient. The psychologist may sometimes get things wrong and misdiagnose gender dysphoria. But not every patient who visits a psychologist with suspected gender dysphoria will have gender dysphoria, some will actually just be gay, lesbian, bi or simply confused teenagers. Desistance is a thing and may occur in anything from 30-80% of trans people. What would Lal have happen to them?
If Lal’s (and others) position is that the process of trying to help those desisters come to terms with their reality, is conversion therapy, then obviously the magnitude of this conversion therapy “problem” will be much larger than it really is. And it is already clearly pretty small.
Lal then goes on to share with us the incredible importance of informed consent:
But that informed consent is not important for people who are told a vaccine is 95% effective at preventing spread and very safe, (including in the long term which cannot be known when you only have short term to go on) when it is neither of those things and those people know that. But in spite of that knowledge they are coerced into taking said vaccine (coerced with threat of job loss and exclusion from parts of society). In this case Lal is not interested in the principal of informed consent, he just wants to talk about Pakeha privilege, although there were many Maori and Pacifica protesting the vaccine mandates as well:
Next La Lal lists consumer rights around informed consent. The hypocrisy of Lal seems to know no bounds as all of his arguments around consent are exactly the same as were offered around the vaccine mandate. For instance:
Didn’t seem like that right applied to people who did not wish to receive the vaccine.
I would make a personal observation here. Being a fit, healthy 12 year old my son understood that he was at almost no risk from covid even less risk then from flu. He also understood that the vaccine did not stop him catching or spreading the disease despite the misinformation being spread by out government saying the opposite. However as he was unvaccinated at the end of 2021 he was unable to go to Rainbows End on a class trip with friends as Rainbows End required all entrants to the park to be vaccinated, although they had never had that requirement for actual dangerous diseases like measles. Further he was unable to play the sport he loved as New Zealand football decided that all children playing football had to be vaccinated although they had never had the same requirement for actual dangerous diseases like Polio. So reluctantly, very much against his will and after being coerced he took the vaccine.
So when a 21 year old man child, who has no children himself and also no scientific expertise simply parrots government information and tells me that no one is forcing my child into getting vaccinated when clearly they are, I naturally find this very vexing.
I should be clear. Conversion therapy of homo or bisexuals seems to be pretty unequivocally the most pseudo of pseudoscience. Homosexuality is obviously on the range of human sexuality it has been around since the beginning of history with varying levels of acceptance from actively being encouraged among the Spartans (to increase unit cohesion and loyalty to one another) to being burned at the stake. It seems pretty clear you can’t be talked, operated or drugged out of being gay as people have certainly tried all of those things, a lot. The “best” you can do is to “restrain yourself” for the rest of your life. While restraint is a valuable trait, constant restraint, all day and every day, seems a pretty sad way to lead a life.
But plenty of religions (or cults) believe in plenty of stupid stuff.
The covid cult believes that after millions of years of evolution the human respiratory system has such weak anti viral defence that it can be significantly enhanced with a cheap, plastic, medical looking mask with gaps at the edges and pore size so large that water droplets easily pass through it and steam your glasses.
The climate cultists believe that if you can reduce the amount a cow farts the weather will be more predictable in 25 years.
The Extremist trans cult thinks that if a man wears a dress and calls himself a women that he is then indistinguishable from an actual women.
And some of the religious cults believe being gay is bad and that you can talk / shock / operate someone out of it.
These are all equally illogical. But people are free to believe what they want.
The problem is when they want to force the rest of us to play along with their silly little cult games.
Lal is one of these people. He is an arrogant, narcissistic, borish, man-child. He has no experience of the world because at 23 you have no experience of the world. I thought all sorts of dumb things at 23 and I only know that from having had another 20 odd years to understand how dumb those things I “knew” were.
When Lal opens his mouth and the social science mind farts emit from it, I am always reminded of this scene from Good Will Hunting (we can all guess which one Lal is):
But worse than the fact that we have to hear a man-child who has very little wisdom, talk as if he does, is the way society puts these ignorant children on a pedestal as if they have something interesting to say. I mean Lal has written his memoirs:
as if a 23 year old of any sort has enough experience or wisdom to make a memoir out of. But worse than his arrogance is the people who thought this was a good idea or the fools who would actually purchase this narcissistic, jerk-off, garbage.
Why do the media and politicians pander to all this nonsense, unimportant, fake problem / fake solution garbage? Two reasons I think. One, it’s easy to make a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist and it makes you look like you are doing your job, or like you are some sort of social change superhero. Rosa Parks sat on that bus, alone, with very real and potentially deadly hate all around her, at a time when blacks were routinely murdered and falsely imprisoned and the whites how did it got off scot free. That took huge courage. Lal mind farting all over Twitter supported by fawning mainstream media and politicians media does not take courage.
Two, this is all bread and circuses. Ohh look at the man-child saying the words and fighting the fight. Let’s get him on TV and have him speak and take selfies with him and read his memoirs and make up pointless laws to counter virtually non existent problems and not talk about the erosion of individual rights and freedoms or the fact that we cannot fix roads, reduce hospital waiting lists, stop filling the oceans with plastic or any of the myriad of actual real observable problems around us.
We are in a perverse situation where we do, and allow to be done, all sorts of things that we know are bad for children’s character, feeding them shit food, making them fatter, lazier, disconnected with the physical world, addicted to screens, anxious, depressed, locked down, masked and miserable.
And then we elevate them to Child Gods and idolize them as if they have anything important or interesting to say that anyone hasn’t said already. We take a grumpy, dull teenager who didn’t finish school, we fake arrest her and then let her lecture to us about “the science” she cannot grasp and how to fix the world she lacks the experience to understand. And then politicians fall over themselves to meet her and she mocks them for it:
We take a boorish buffoon of a man-child and we spray his pointless waffle all over the media, he lies (which no one ever corrects), flaps and spews tedious, social science mind farts all over television, radio and newspaper until he rouses a bunch of fearful, misogynistic, cult member sycophants into a violent frenzy against women, who merely wish to discuss the “controversial” idea that we might, for instance, not want to allow loser male swimmers, to decide they are females and wander around the girls changing rooms with their cocks out, while kicking their arses in the pool:
And politicians and the media line up to offer Lal and his La Lal cult yet more validation.
I have a suggestion. When La Lal and the rest of his activist blowhards try and speak there social science babble at us, we should start reverse translating their nonsense back into the original, as it formed in their over-validated, narcissistic and facile minds #mindfart:
#mindfart
As with so much of our increasingly fake world we need to speak out against this.
If you want to call your friend Priscilla Cockwinkle the third and her to call you Grandee Tammyworth Clittickle great, good for you, you are welcome to. It is your freedom of speech and freedom of expression, I couldn’t care less. I don’t care what your sexual preferences are as long as there is consent among adults. I don’t care what you wear and if you are a consenting adult and want to castrate yourself, go for it. And whether you do all or none or some of these things you should still have exactly the same rights in society that everyone else does.
But if the rest of us don’t want to play in your La lal imaginary mental health disorder, we don’t have to. And if we don’t agree with you then you have to convince us with respectable dialogue not scream at us, try to cancel us, try to bully us or actually commit violence against us.
Live and let live goes both ways.