Transgenderspeak: The ITV's 'Butterfly'

'Butterfly', which is a three part TV series about an early adolescent boy who wants to 'transition' to being a girl, gets all the 'heart warming', 'delicate' and 'sensitive' accolades about how 'a loving family' tries to deal with the increasingly tough politics that now infuse the psychiatric disorder of gender dysphoria.

The ideological narrative is a little more subtle than 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert', but it has all the elements to persuade us that this issue is popping up out of the cultural ether 'spontaneously', as we are all persuaded to start to explore the political fabric of 'gender fluidity', where we the audience are being groomed to accept early, massive and irreversible medical intervention/sterilization as the preferred option to psychiatric treatment...or even just doing nothing until the child is of an age of slightly more responsible and mature judgement.

The program narrative is emblematic of a number of cumulative cultural trends that have fundamentally shifted the relationship of children to adults, and mass populations generally to the marketed system of social administration and consciousness management.

These shifts have 'empowered' children (removed them from the mentorship of their parents in favour of ‘other voices’) in ways that more traditional totalitarian regimes have tried, but failed to do. Mao's Cultural Revolution in China temporarily reversed the roles of adults and children, but it was too disruptive and violent, had to be shut down and Mao died. In the West, 'the adolescent revolution' promoted and sponsored by privatized marketed consciousness makers goes on, like a protracted Infantile Plague that constantly seeps into adult society...and redefines it in adolescent form, with all the self absorbed narcissism we have come to know and love….exported across the entire socio-economic spectrum from financial system boards of directors to the welfare sector...and everything in between.

The mechanisms of this plague suffuse all the assumptions within this 'challenging' and ‘taboo busting’ entertainment called ‘Butterfly’. It is an expression of the forces that underlie and drive an economy and culture that has moved from the necessity of needs, to the desirability of wants to the totalitarian power of fantasy based indulgence, where the only rules left are those of indulgence capitalism...where there aren’t any rules at all that might interrupt the exponential growth of the system and the politics of desire, fantasies and consuming them at all costs.

Protracted economic, social and existential indulgence, which tolerates and/or encourages excesses and variously ‘suboptimal’ conduct, corrodes rules based behaviour and compromises the boundaries they set, until in the end, there are none except the default rule that anything goes and anything does….and the excuses for it even more imaginative (and spurious) than the adolescent special pleading/exceptionalism that comes with it.

For those who are interested in where that sort of thing eventually ends up, see the interim report of the banking, superannuation and financial services misconduct commission (Royal Commissioner Hayne said, “It is not at all easy to understand why so many employees and executives at AMP were unable to recognise that to charge fees for services that will not, and cannot, be provided is not just unlawful, but also ethically and morally wrong”.), the South Australian Nyland royal commission into the child protection system (The then premier of SA, Jay Weatherill said of it, "What we do know is that a staggering one in four children are the subject of a notification of abuse or neglect — and for Aboriginal children this figure rises to almost nine in 10." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-08/child-protection-systems-royal-commission...) or the Northern Territory ‘Little Children are Sacred’ report (that led to the Northern Territory intervention in remote aboriginal communities in 2007, in response to allegations of rampant child sexual abuse).



The dynamic layout of this plague is as follows:

1. Children have been given a quasi adult agency through an indulgent human rights agenda which has no conditionalities or qualifications or necessary processes before they appropriate these liberties and rights, or requirement to learn their necessary underpinning stewardship, obligations and disciplines, or acquire the necessary maturity of judgement that give life to liberties and rights...and prevent them from being turned into disinhibition and an overweening sense of consumer entitlement-on-demand.

Such underpins put a stop to them being turned into consumer freebies and fudging them into increasingly tendentious claims that span real need, into discretionary wants into-any-fantasy-you-like that is then transformed into a sacred right. And this is happening in the context of an economic system that now routinely mobilizes mass responses on the basis of indulgent dreams and satiating them, to the extent that hardly anyone can now differentiate indulgence from liberality, social decency or moral virtue. Humanitarian libertarianism has become a completely colonized and morbidly obese regime artefact.

2. Over a 50-70 year period, deregulation of the social system/collective in favour of private sectional interests, individual egoism/narcissism and adolescent special pleading/exceptionalism, has not only shredded our social infrastructure, its adult role templates, and securitizing rules based boundaries and taboos, but handed the whole business of socialization over to a totalitarian system of public relations/marketspeak that now dominates the entire architecture of social and media discourse.

That system has us all, but especially our children, at its complete mercy, to the extent that any motivated commercial or social actor can fast track its agenda into the social milieu without let or editing. Alternative sources of authority and received ideas and beliefs have been eliminated and/or discredited and/or marginalized.

After Marxism, feminism, has offered us perhaps the largest proposed secular re-regulation of the social and economic system in the last century. It never got traction because Capitalism only does deregulation, which is the very nasty, perverse and disabling booby prize that women got instead; i.e., liberty as sex role commodification and sexual availability on demand. And it does this precisely because it is systematically geared to disarm/dispose of all potential sources of social management, criticism and values that might interfere with the roll out of a world order without borders, or ideological limitation or barriers to opportunity and opportunists of the commercial, social and ideological kind.

3. As social and moral boundaries have disappeared and sex, or rather the fantasy of sex, has been co-opted as the primary selling/marketing tool within an indulgent economic and cultural system, children have been prematurely co-opted through numerous media channels into a very complex and difficult world of adult reproductive behaviour in which they are emotionally completely out of their depth, leaving them vulnerable to any suggestion or practice, no matter how dysfunctional, species alienated and damaging it might be. And this is made worse by their almost universal blithe conceit that they know all about it, all the way from A to B.

But what is far more telling is that the sex hormonal flush of adolescence is so overwhelming, its potential for behavioural and attitudinal leveraging turns it into a deep consciousness manipulation tool that is almost impossible to edit out later.

This premature co-option of children into adult worlds, not only enables them to escape the power of their parents, but it gives them a quite false sense of equality with adults, when what is really happening is that they are being invited to fall prey to forces much more sophisticated than they are, without them ever having the slightest idea that they are prey, very easy meat indeed and their collaboration in this is the apotheosis of the totalitarian ideal of the marketed regime conditioned subject.

As the Jesuits used to say, “Give us the child and we will give you the man”. The difference today is that it is the agents of Indulgence Capitalism who do this job, by emulating the jewel wasp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp). This insect penetrates into the decision making centre of its victim’s brain and injects a selective venom that paralyses its autonomous judgement so that the wasp can remotely control it. The victim then allows the predator to lead it to its nest where it lays its eggs inside it without resistance. The victim live incubates them, defends them against predators and then zombie-like becomes a fresh food supply when the eggs hatch.

The modus operandi of the jewel wasp is the template for modern marketing and juveniles have negligible defences against it.

When you watch the wretched ‘Butterfly’ parents’ mystified and futile attempts to contain their child’s cross sexual behaviour, think of the jewel wasp sting in the back of the kid’s head….In a previous generation, when there were no external cultural cues and ideological leveraging, the kid would have probably become an uncomplaining and perfectly well adapted closet crossdresser. Today his ‘condition’ is planted and incubated into an existential and psychiatric crisis with all the ideological bells and whistles whose ‘only’ solution is sterilization of his most basic function as a human being.

4. As the fantasy of sex has become an ever more powerful economic and cultural artefact, it has taken over some of the existential/’spiritual’ space that has been increasingly vacated by organized religion. ‘The dance of life’, which is reproductive sex, has been trumped by ‘sexuality’ (one’s sexual receptivity/interests), which has itself been trumped by the bogus ‘sexistentialist’ identitarian proposition that ‘I am my sexuality’. I would suggest this is an article of faith even more heroic than the belief in an omnipotent God, in whose image we are all supposed to be made..... which blithe secular 'materialists' are rather fond of ridiculing....People in glass houses....

Sex and sexuality are not unimportant, but they are the least important part of broadly socialized richly layered, robustly developed and morally coherent adult characters who are capable of grounding and contextualizing themselves across a diverse range of life roles and objectives. People who see their sexuality as central to them do so either because they are adolescents and can’t help it, and/or there isn’t much else going for them...and/or they have a sexual-political axe to grind.

5. These larger shifts now mean that any minor private sexual fantasy and/or sexual off message error can be inflated, elaborated, leveraged and politicised into a force majeure, that will overwhelm surrounding relationships, familial infrastructure and the larger social fabric, regardless of long term consequences, like the larger effects of further destabilizing the reproductive centre, as children are systematically manipulated and sexually ‘plasticised’ into a ‘metrosexual’ regime that has no edges, and where in this case, plastic surgeons have been designated to clean up the ideological mess...and clean up.



This three part feature series is not propaganda in the traditional sense, because it is more emotionally elaborate and complex than that, but it openly markets the cross sexual lobby's agenda, which is not just about making space for a socially microscopic minority, but to gain market share through 'grooming', 'education' and 'empowerment' of anyone who starts to become sexually uncertain and insecure, particularly through the sometimes bumpy and very, very vulnerable transition of adolescence.

The music of the sexual-political Pied Piper (whose original magical medieval music ‘hypnotized’ all the children of the town of Hamelin to follow him into a magic cave) is a small background theme in this film, but it gets disproportionate traction because after 50-70 years of deregulation in the pursuit of an indulgent economy and culture, the reproductive centre is now so damaged, decompassed and unstable, it can no longer defend its children. Any passing opportunistic fad can plunge it into a welter of further and much larger losses, which can crystallize up to a generation later. What makes the Butterfly’s agenda so formidable is that it represents a long accumulation of social and ideological forces that isn’t really visible until one joins the dots.

The parents in this film are little more than caretakers caught up in a situation totally outside their control and understanding. Gender dysphoria does not exist in a vacuum. It gets mediated through a deregulated culture from a minor footnote to a major ‘issue’ through systematic promotion and marketing into schools, libraries, academia, health professional associations and across the media.

Alongside this are well organized attacks by transgen activists through social badmouthing, isolating, undermining, discrediting, defunding, deplatforming and disemploying opponents, censorship posing as ‘anti vilification’ and deep networking of key strategic support to garner spokespeople of power and influence. And it all looks ‘spontaneous’ when what it really is, is a protracted campaign, with its own repertoire of slogans, keywords, stereotypes, cliches, euphemisms and dysphemisms (negative opposites of euphemisms).



The appearance of this film seems innocent enough and an honest 'issue piece' at one level. But at another it is training us to the tiger's saddle, where if you are on it, you can't get off and you can't stay on, because fundamentally, surgically and pharmacologically engineered transgenderism is always going to be a medicalized ‘fake’ in the service of delusional sexual fantasy, that can only be maintained with hormone therapy and constant ideological group affirmation....and aggression for which the transgen lobby is already infamous...because its ideological thrust is so tendentious.

We are confronted here with analogous issues to the art market in relation to authenticity; i.e., imitation (in the style of), copying/facsimile (a close reproduction of an original work) and fake/forgery (deliberate attempting to pass off something as authentically original when it is not).

No doubt, particularly in the case of adolescence (either by doing the sex change procedures early in pubescence or putting of pubescence by using pubescent blockers) ‘transitions’ will be a much more complete and transformative than if it is done later in life, but even the most convincing looking replicas are not the real deal because they do not have the most basic function that defines sex in the first place...the biological capacity to bear children. Sterility is nature’s final word. At best, sexistentialist identity politics are an ideological cover story to obscure the fundamental facts of life. At worst it is a dishonest attempt to pass off a fake as ‘real’. Every one of these ‘transgens’ is going to have to at some point admit to significant others the truth that they are affecting the appearance rather than the reality.

In the ideological realm, the act of identity forgery is not of the secretive backdoor criminal nature that we expect in the art world, whereby art critical expertise as to what is real is fooled by forgery expertise. Rather, the act of sexual/political forgery is transferred to the mass construction of consciousness whereby consciousness of reality is transformed (nobbled) according to an external agenda run by a lobby group in the business of existential/social alteration. Remember the jewel wasp….

The establishment of sexistential ideology is only the beginning.

‘Gender studies’ is a pseudo-scientific parallel of the now long discredited racial ‘science’ or ‘eugenics’ movement; i.e., an ideological idea wrapped in a scientific rationalization. ‘Gender’ is every bit as much an ideological construct as ‘race’ is.

All ‘social science’ is more or less an oxymoron because all social science more or less unconsciously tries to introduce and validate underlying and unstated assumptions and prejudices using scientific method. This does not become obvious for several decades until the underlying assumptions and values it attempts to validate become sufficiently ‘old fashioned’ to become obvious, much in the same way that old films reveal the prejudices and styling of the realities of another age. On top of that, any ‘science’ connected to sexual politics is bound to boast more ideological bouffant than Donald Trump’s hairdo, which is why my attempt below at definition pretends to be no more than distinguishing terms that current ideologues are rather fond of fudging.

Sex is a reproductive biological function, the fundamental reason we exist as a species and it only produces males and females. Anything else is a biologically sterile mistake. ‘Sexuality’ is a socially constructed, categorized, rationalized and these days absurdly inflated sexual status based on feeling which should not be confused with a state of grace or special insight. It is a glorified fantasy which most anything to do with sex is, as are its more serious malfunctions, malfeasances and various other error messages. ‘Gender’ is how we manufacture the social-political context of sex, its social roles and power structures that arise out of the means of social reproduction. Gender appearance, behavioral social practice and sexual political ideology is only tangentially connected to biological sex and sexual feeling.

These days, sex, sexuality and gender are wilfully fudged, cribbed and fluffed by minoritarian sectional interests past increasingly bamboozled and mystified dorkasaurs that are your ordinary punters, who can be ridiculously easily frozen into discombobulated confusion and fear when ‘inclusive’ (don’t have to qualify/political euphemism for colonization) and ‘progressive’ (historical assumptionism) regime apparatchiks and ideological opinionati (received wisdomites) mutter their all powerful magical words (cliches and negative stereotypes).

These come in different flavours, such as ‘bigot’ (strong views), ‘prejudice’ (beliefs ‘we’ don’t approve of), ‘authoritarian’ (firm), ‘right wing conservative’ (lacks empathy and essential ideological massage oils), ‘phobic haters’ (denial of legitimate and principled political agenda) ‘discriminatory’ (the exercise of ordinary critical judgement/discernment that ‘we’ don’t agree with) and Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist or TERFs {feminist critics who think ‘inclusion’ for male to female wannabees, and most particularly ones who want to be accepted as women purely on their own recognisance, is an unconscionable try on, especially when it pertains to hijacking women’s hard won rights, protections and places, including women’s sport and recreation facilities, female prisons, refuge shelters, bathrooms, changing facilities, special funding aimed at specific women’s disadvantage issues and female only quotas}

Trying to determine types of gender is exactly the same kind of ideological baloney that late medieval scholasticism used to practice, by trying to determine how many angels could balance on a pinhead. The possibilities are only limited by the creative quantifying powers of the imagination There are almost endless ‘genders’ yet to be discovered amongst our sexually off message ‘angels’. Just when you think you have it all covered, up pops a newbie and this can go on ad nauseam, keeping the gender studies wallahs in fat academic stipends indefinitely.

And if the ‘butterfly’ in this series gets into his thirties and eventually works all this out, he is trapped in the choice he made at the very impressionable and 'persuadable' age of say 11, living with the potential risks of lifelong hormone therapy...and inability to regain an ‘operating’ phallus or sire children, even if he could get a sex change reversal to re-arrange his sexual persona ‘look’.



The fantasies that drive these disorders are extremely difficult to get rid of and require lifelong active management, workarounds and ongoing reconciliation by very committed ‘sufferers’ and sometime therapists, who singly or together contain and/or chip away at the problem. There is very rarely a complete and permanent fix, especially in the case of gender dysphoria, where on top of the internal fantasy/messages there are the messages from the gender fluidity cultists (ideological/quasi religious irrational beliefs) to muddy the waters, much in the same way as might be the case if one were passionately ‘the’ Justin Buber...and one had a cheer squad of Buberites constantly telling one it was all true and that one really was the real deal Buber.

None of the choices are going to be fantastic. Whatever happens, there will be big compromises, whether it is to try to be a man and find a partner who will 'accommodate' one's female fantasies and tastes in cross dressing, or keep the whole thing to oneself and have a pretty ordinary but reproductively functional sex life, or have the operations and become a sexual facsimile in a transgender/queer community in the same way that drag queens do.

Accommodation of sexual preferences by one’s sexual partner is likely going to preclude or potentially compromise other and very possibly more important criteria for partnering choice in ways that risk giving one more of what one didn’t want and less of what one really did. There will be as many compromises on that front as remaining the normative male and not importing one’s sexual agenda into the relationship.

Sometimes one has to be careful what one asks of the Gods, in case they grant it…which especially applies to the ‘sex change’ medical procedure. It spruiks the appearance of having your cake and eat it. Someone waves around a magical potion or two and the scalpel-of-all-your-dreams-coming-true, and voila; once a guy, now repackaged as ‘a girl’. But ‘package’ is the operative word. It will always be a facsimile. You have to keep taking the potions. One will always (unless the operation is done at an age well before real adult consent is possible, even if puberty blockers can be ‘safely’ employed to age say 16) be stuck with the basic physiology of a male. The procedure is not without risk both in the short and long term and above all, one is never going to be a biological father or mother. All that is so very distant and beyond the ordinary ken of an 11 year old who can only see the overwhelmingly pressing now.

And again, there will be a lot of relationship ramifications and compromises after ‘the procedure’. It is extremely unlikely that most men are going to settle for a transgendered 'woman' as a life partner. Most men want a the genuine article ovaries packed partner they can father children with, no matter how convincing the make-up, voice falsetto, clothing, hairdo, breasts and sexual organ are, or how cleverly ‘she’ can conceal that a male body frame and power to weight ratios, or doesn’t have the same female subcutaneous body fat, or how well ‘she’ conforms to conventional female sex role gender stereotypes.

To say that the sexual-politics of one’s future transgendered life are possibly going to be ‘complicated’ is an understatement; something an 11 year old just won’t compute.

I suffer from sadomasochism which I probably picked up at boarding school in the late ‘50s. I have lived for 36 years in a completely 'vanilla' relationship. It is not sexually ideal, but it ticks what for me are all the important boxes for a lifelong relationship. I am not suggesting for a moment that is the only way forward, but for me, it was the least relationship hazardous and most reliably sustainable way forward. My ‘sexuality’ does not define me except at the unavoidable imaginative margins which are no one else’s business except mine (except when making an ideological point). My beast-in-the-basement is under firm lock and key and staying there for life, no matter how much it rattles its cage, which it frequently does.

I am also slightly autistic, but I do not go around pretending that it is some sort of existential state of grace. It is a specialized consciousness, but whatever the arguable beneficial intellectual trade-offs, it doesn’t make me any less the occasional social pain-in-the arse, which is why I had such a terrible time at school and why I am completely inured to negative feedback. This defect in my character is something I have had to learn to work around, as indeed those around me have had to do if they were (or are) going to tolerate me for more than five minutes.

But that is a very adult view, when one weighs up all the variables on the basis of experience, reflection and mature judgement. A kid of 11 hasn't got a prayer of doing that and to let him charge off to charge up on female sex hormones leading to sex change surgery is simply an abdication of adult responsibility for the stewardship and mentorship of a child. It is the most terrible betrayal, even though it isn’t the fault of the parents that a nasty dose of adolescent gender dysphoria has blown up in their faces.

Parents faced with a gender dysphoric child are in a very tough situation because the condition is being systematically legitimized and ideologically sanctified throughout the architecture of social discourse and lobby group pressure in the medical/health system/peak professional bodies. The weakened social infrastructure for parenting means the ideological transgen Pied Pipers can make the rest of us dance to their tune. We are all just passively reacting to the incoming assault and scrambling for cover before we even know where the ambush is coming from and who/what is undermining us. And that is because the transgen lobby is a completely integrated element within the enormous deregulatory pressure being applied throughout the system of social administration over multiple decades.

And if there is any parental or larger intra family division on how to resist the tide, it is game over, just like in Butterfly. Bring on the potions and the scalpels. Children may be young, but they are not stupid and they are just as expert at playing the ends of the middle as anyone else. If they get online ‘support’ on the web or ‘community’ based ‘transition’ groups, it is like ‘feeding’ troubled Muslim kids on Islamic State/Taliban propaganda or getting them into religiously militant focus groups, with the same sort of result.

Propaganda films that market plastic surgery and hormones to solve gender dysphoria are a mark of the extent to which the reproductive centre and the social infrastructure for mentoring and managing next generation social product into a secure adulthood, is starting to collapse. It marks our collective loss of control not just of sexual imagination, but the processes of responsible decision making at an appropriate stage in life where one has some hope of juggling all the variables and making a sustainable decision.

18 isn't an ideal time to make such large decisions, but it is at least the minimum age of responsible adult participation in a modern society. And it does mean that the parents are not complicit in an early adolescent force majeure. He has the legal capacity to stand on his own feet and wear the very adult consequences of his decisions. He can never turn round and say to them that they didn't hold the fort for him, even against his will and passions of the time, and met their responsibilities to him to guide and support him towards his ultimate adult choice, whatever that eventually turns out to be. A lot can happen in 6-7 years, particularly if they can gradually show the kid that the transgen support networks are a cult that has been made respectable by its marketing and sales department.

Parents need a legal defence against these pressures, which enforces a social policy of not allowing minors to enter into medical relations that will compromise their ordinary sexual functions until they reach an age of adult discretion...and no exceptions, even if children threaten suicide. Adult society cannot allow itself to be held hostage to these dark forces that are invading the lives of some of our more vulnerable offspring. And sexual grooming posing as ‘support’ in this context should be a legally punishable offence. If we do not get tough with this, it will just get tougher with us. The reproductive centre has to be prepared to defend itself against those who would undo it and lay waste its boundaries.



Films like 'Butterfly' are very powerful propaganda with enormous capacity to influence children and their parents. It was thus in Nazi Germany when Joseph Goebbels brought out his most successful ever film 'The Jew Suss', that was so popular in 1940, it won the Venice Golden Lion award for best film. It was a great story, with a very dramatic ending and the punters loved it. It also shaped public attitude in ways that his less subtle and more obvious efforts at promoting anti-Semitism never did. (If you can tolerate watching a Nazi era regime anti-Semitic film, you can see it online, but do not confuse it with the very different Jew sympathetic 1934 English production.)

Goebbels’ private sector descendants have learned that lesson well. ‘Butterfly’ is a testament to that. And if we are to have any hope of pushing back against this insidious enemy within, we are going to have to re-assess the whole suite of measures/trends/forces that have been conditioning us over three generations now.

The transgen agenda is the apotheosis of many stages of deregulatory unpicking of anything that gets in the way of desire and satiating it. The transgens have an enormous momentum behind them. To slow down, halt and roll that back means systematic refocusing on the fundamentals of what it means to be a man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother, and consciously re-regulate our social system in favour of the collective rather than the individual, so that we can rebuild our broken reproductive centre/commons and kick out opportunist interlopers who have no business there.

Adult society has an obligation to consistently and concretely model and mentor to its children how their archetypal sex personas are mediated by their sexual-political gender roles, and how these are acted out over a generational cycle by morally coherent life creation partners, so that the children can reliably carry that on into the next generation, and minimize as far as possible the production of off message squibs.

The only large scale re-regulatory agenda now extant beyond a wholesale return to the original patriarchy is the feminist one. This is a good bet because the first societies to embrace the feminist agenda and fully utilize the substantial contribution to the common weal that woman are capable of in all areas of human endeavour, will win in the coming conflicts, as modern times start to disaggregate. And I do not mean that just in a political-military-industrial sense, but also the strong binding solidarity structures and behaviours necessary to survive as coherent communities and lock in secure and satisfying social outcomes through very difficult times.

If there has been one good thing to come out of the latter years of the modern period, feminism maybe its greatest legacy.

I think women will be the outstanding fighters against a system that has put us in our current laissez-faire predicament of cumulative misgovernance, where we can no longer defend our children from any existential plague that happens to be floating past. A feminist revolution in the means of social reproduction might save our collective sexual-political hides from the damage caused by protracted social deregulation and privatization within both our economic and social realms.

The re-allocation of social/economic resources necessary to accomplish that will only be possible if we start to move out of the consumer economy, concentrate on a much smaller suite of products and services, even as we expand environmental defence and restitution industries, and focus much more energy, time and resources on rebuilding social and existential wealth.

Half our net worth is to be found in that wealth, which for the moment has been all but cancelled by protracted economic and cultural indulgence, leaving us vulnerable, desecured and unstable in the conduct of our affairs. We are as much social/existential bankrupts as ecological ones. And to fix that is going to be as tough as it gets, even with an antagonist agenda as obviously a heavily puffed and fluffed up sham as that of the transgen lobby.

Bring it on…..