“We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.” —Charles Péguy, “Our Youth” (1910)
Maeve Halligan, co-founder and president of the Cambridge University Society of Women, gave an eloquent speech at the Cambridge Union on May 14. Do not misunderstand me when I say this: I am not suggesting Halligan visits Freedom and Reason, but I must note that our arguments on this topic march in lockstep, especially of late, as I have ramped up my passion over this issue. The more I know about the madness that has colonized our professional and sense-making institutions, the more strident my tone becomes. I must tell what I see. That I hear my arguments in the words of others indicates a frequency out there, and that a growing number of people are tuning in to it.
Here is Halligan’s speech for those who haven’t yet seen it:
Among her debate opponents was Helen Webberley, a demon about whom I have addressed in previous essays on this platform (see An Ellipse is a plane figure with four straight sides and four right angles, one with unequal adjacent sides; The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”). Why am I demonizing a fellow human being? Because we have to question whether she is, in fact, a human in the moral sense of that term. A poster on Mumsnet, after watching the debate, put it well: “I remember once thinking the criticism directed at [Webberley] by GC [gender critical] women was excessive, especially the claim she was ‘pure evil.’ After hearing her speak, I no longer think that.”
Four years before dying in the early days of the Second World War, French poet Charles Péguy encouraged us, above all else, to “see what we see.” All it took for me was watching Webberey’s appearance on the Andrew Gold podcast, Heretics (see the link above). The woman exudes evil. One hears wickedness not merely in her words (which horrify the good and decent person). Watch her eyes. They are black holes. The thinnest sheet of paper could not slide between her and Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician and the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation.
Halligan did not let the opposition interrupt her. However, she had to yield to a point of information from an audience member, a trans-identified male and former patient of hers, who stood and gave his account of how he had been treated under Webberley’s “care.” It was as if this man were talking about Magus Hirschfeld, the German physician and a founding father of sexology, who, with surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt at his side, mutilated the genitalia of men who served Hirschfeld on his estate, a menagerie of disordered personalities—an Island of Misfit Toys. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Medical Atrocities Then and Now: The Dark Continuity of Gender Affirming Care.)
Known as the “Einstein of Sex,” Hirchfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Although Hirchfeld was forced into exile by the Nazis, Gohrbant was rehabilitated and put in charge of live human experimentation at the Dachau concentration camp. However, the madman was not prosecuted at Nuremberg (the Doctors’ Trial). On the contrary, he became a celebrated surgeon. In 1950-51, he was made chairman of the Berlin Surgical Society. Gohrbant pioneered vaginoplasty, an operation where the “patient” is castrated and his penis inverted and pushed into the open wound between his legs (often reinforced with a piece of the man’s colon). Webbereley’s black eyes see what Hirshfeld and Gohrbant saw, a gaze directed by sexual sadism.
If readers have ever wondered how butchers and sadists could persist in the shadow of the Holocaust, the answer lies in understanding the power of ideology to corrupt and grasping the methods by which madness is institutionalized. I have devoted numerous essays to the matter, interrogating the methods and exposing the ideology. You can search for the essays on Google, which—after years of shadowbanning—has finally indexed Freedom and Reason. Google can blame Gemini for that.
What lies behind more than a century of medical atrocities, euphemized as “gender affirming care,” is the obsession among trans activists and the medical industry with altering physiology, erasing secondary sex characteristics, and mutilating genitals to produce simulated sexual identities. This is the spirit of transhumanism. At the heart of the ideology is an obsession with cosmetic surgery, the profession organized around profiting from personal preference (shaped by manufactured insecurity) to enhance aesthetic appearance rather than addressing medical problems to restore normal bodily function and health, genetic engineering (i.e., eugenics), and technological augmentation of bodies. Transhumanism is an anti-human ideology rooted in loathing of the results of natural history and the amassing of wealth—and of power.
Among the grand battles of the Twenty-First Century—antisemitism, demographic transformation, the feminization of boys and men, Islamization, transnationalism—is the struggle against gender identity doctrine, a neoreligion denying the gender binary and the immutability of sex. Indeed, these are all pieces of a whole, a project to negate the moral foundation of the West and usher in a global technocratic order in which species-being is extinguished. Such a project needs Frankenstein, and demons like Webberley are eager to step into the role and make monsters of the deranged and vulnerable.
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