Savage Minds

Dr Az Hakeem, a Consultant Psychiatrist and Visiting Professor in Psychiatry & Applied Psychotherapy who ran a specialist gender dysphoria service in the NHS for twelve years, discusses gender dysphoria and the politicisation of this condition within what has become its own lobby. Discussing his involvement with the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, a group of clinicians based in the UK and Ireland, calling for a greater understanding of the effects of sex and gender in healthcare, Hakeem notes how he and his colleagues are concerned about the current overthrow of reality by gender ideology, especially as children are being put on a trajectory of hormones and surgery. He also explores the theatre of organisational “support” offered by the medical community, vituperating the Royal College of Psychiatrists that issues statements supporting “gender” treatments even though it failed to ask its psychiatrist members and fellows within the College for their opinions on this subject. Hakeem maintains that most psychiatrists do not share the official mantra of the RCP. When asked where scientific evidence exists that demonstrates an enhancement of quality of life resulting from “gender affirming” surgeries or hormones, Hakeem answers, “There is no evidence,” elaborating how there are no follow-up studies on this demographic within the NHS, thus allowing the propagation of false narratives (e.g., that those who are refused treatment will commit suicide) to bend public opinion on this subject.

Vaishnavi Sundar, a writer and self-taught filmmaker from Chennai, discusses her film Dysphoric (2021) that explores the social, medical, and institutional constructions of “gender identity” and her forthcoming film Behind The Looking Glass (2023) that gives voice to the women whose partners “transition”. Analysing the influence of western theories within India in recent decades, Sundar addresses how the theories of “gender identity” have come to infect academia, NGOs, the fields of psychology and human rights advocacy, and even the very groups most affected by this narrative and its medical procedures, the Dalits (those born into India’s most marginalised castes). While Dalits have faced enormous violence and oppression on the subcontinent for thousands of years, Sundar notes that it is precisely these groups which have become the target for “gender identity” in the transitioning of India’s most oppressed, who view “queerness” and “transgender identity” as an escape route from historical economic, political and social oppression. Where “transgender” ideology has taken hold of the more socially affluent in the west, Sundar notes that in India many Dalit women captured by the “gender identity” myth view this narrative as a panacea, an escape from the brutal reality of being female and impoverished in India today.

Mary Lou Singleton, midwife, nurse practitioner and medical freedom activist, discusses the foundational myths buttressing Covid-19 virus mitigation—from the medical, public and political policies—in detailing what she witnessed in her practice. Singleton discusses the political underbelly that virus mitigation shares with the gender identity movement and the recent US Supreme Court decision which upended Roe v Wade while noting the misogyny that leaves women’s bodies expropriated by both political valences. Singleton elaborates how the right wants to restrict the women’s and girls’ freedom to somatic autonomy and reproductive healthcare and the left in unable to define what a women is while catering to regressive sexual stereotypes. Tracing the threads between the pseudo-science spun by legacy media during the past two-and-a-half years of the coronavirus pandemic and the propagation of similar medical hokum regarding gender ideology, Singleton addresses our current era’s most troubling reality where science has been repressed in the name of political decisions and medical totalitarianism.

Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, discusses the state of legacy media and the urgent need for critical media literacy today. Reviewing how corporate media covers the news, filling its pages with junk food news stories that perpetuate stories of “billionaires in space” and Hollywood scandals, Huff notes how propaganda often thrives on censorship, noting that the best propaganda is largely true but is often missing certain crucial elements that would allow the public to analyse issues more in-depth. Huff elaborates on how legacy media uses public concern for “disinformation” to regain control of the narrative by proclaiming anything that does not mirror establishment media as “fake news.” Huff states that this is a transparent twist on censorship and the curation of information. Reviewing the conflicts of interest within organisational alliances that inform legacy media content, Huff scrutinises the Disinformation Governance Board, chaired by co-author of the Patriot Act, Michael Chertoff, and Facebook’s official fact-checker, the Atlantic Council, a lobby arm of NATO. Huff surveys recent neoliberal political narratives that pretend that “fake news” was uniquely a problem during Donald Trump’s presidency while he vituperates the “reactionary control of the narrative,” which he claims is “another form of propaganda that wants to get people to accept the notion that there is a form of censorship that’s good for us.” 

Nolan Higdon, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at the University of California, discusses his latest book co-author with Mickey Huff, Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (Routledge, 2022). Covering the cultural performance of “social justice”, Higdon argues the need for critical thinking skills while noting how social media gives users a “delusion of power” whereby they believe themselves to be an authority on all topics such that when disagreement occurs, blocking has become the default means of interaction. Higdon focuses upon the importance of constructive communication and for individuals to learn how to have their ideas challenged and, at times, to be uncomfortable by fomenting productive relationships of communication instead of the present-day dumpster fire that social media encourages. Considering big tech’s hold over information, Higdon historicises the involvement of DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) in everything from mass surveillance tools to drones to the internet while noting how big tech is quite happy to do business with whomever is in power while trafficking in the “progression of neoliberal capitalism.” Higdon elaborates how major media and big tech have misrepresented working-class criticisms of the economic shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic by spinning the January 2021 demonstrators in Washington, DC as “white supremacists” and “gun nuts,” marginalising any discussion of class. All this while big tech silently removes social media accounts and certain information from the internet.

Kara Dansky, attorney and author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls (2021), discusses Sarah Weddington, the architect of Roe v. Wade, who argued the case before the Supreme Court using the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment that guarantees Americans privacy. Addressing the leaked US Supreme Court draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, which indicates that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn the landmark decision, Dansky details possible strategies for American women to regain the right to abortion. The 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and was buttressed by a subsequent 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, that largely maintained this right. Dansky analyses the various legal and constitutional avenues that would fare better than Roe v. Wade while outlining the dangers for women and girls for the impending overturn of this Supreme Court decision. Explaining how the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, principal author of the brief that carried Reed v. Reed 404 U.S. 71 (1971), argued that women were discriminated against under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, Dansky posits that the Equal Protection Clause would have granted women stronger federal constitutional protections of abortion rights over the Due Process Clause employed by Weddington.

Dennis Kavanagh, a former criminal barrister and one of the directors of the Gay Men's Network, discusses his recent article that analyses the case of barrister Allison Bailey against the UK charity, Stonewall, while historicising lesbian and gay rights in Britain since the 1980s. Noting the incredible irony of Britain’s most important gay and lesbian charity having changed course over its historic protection of gay and lesbian rights to swap out the political narrative of sex for gender, where being “same-sex attracted” has been carefully conflated with “gender dysphoria”, Kavanagh elaborates how gender ideology has become a subterfuge for Schrodinger’s medical condition whereby, on the one hand, this ideology is framed as part of a larger civil rights movement that is not a medical condition, while on the other hand, adherents to this ideology exact demands for medical care. Kavanagh lays out the “culture of silence” that permeates gender ideology whereby women are disproportionately silenced for stating that sex is real, while this movement evidences an appallingly regressive discourse replete with misogyny, homophobia and racism.

Sharron Davies, an English former competitive swimmer who represented Great Britain in the Olympics, discusses how she became embroiled in the debate over men participating in women’s sports in 2019 as she foresaw problems where the inclusion of these men “has the potential to ruin women’s sport.” Having followed the science for many years on this issue, Davies shares her experiences of having had to compete against East German swimmers who were given testosterone to outperform their competitors in what can only be described as a full-blown state-run doping programme. Reviewing the science while arguing for fairness in sports, Davies details how today mediocre male athletes can shift categories and outperform top female Olympians. This obviously poses an existential threat to women’s sports in addition to robbing women of titles, careers, economic remuneration, scholarships and many high-profile opportunities which serve these athletes throughout the prime of their careers and beyond retirement.

In this episode, Christian Parenti, professor of economics at John Jay College (CUNY), discusses his recent article “How the Organized Left Got COVID Wrong, Learned to Love Lockdowns and Lost Its Mind: An Autopsy” elaborating on the power of the pharmaceutical industry that has dominated media discourse surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic along with the medical industry’s fixation on vaccines over treatment. Analysing how Covid became politicised by both parties in the US, Parenti discusses how social and medical policies were fomented based entirely upon politics leaving no room for any type of public rethinking of lockdown much less accommodating shifts in current policies as new facts regarding the virus emerged. Parenti explains how the left was caught in “Trump derangement syndrome” while Trump had lost control of his own Covid task force early on, such that there was hysteria being whipped up as the pandemic had been entirely politicised by April 2020, where “everybody with power is abusing it in the name of public safety.” Laying out how the left abandoned the working class during the pandemic, Parenti criticises the way class dynamics have been entirely elided, noting how “a bunch of American oligarchs…have masked capitalist exploitation in this fog of woke identity politics.”

Richard Hanania, President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a Research Fellow at Defence Priorities, discusses the current Russian war in Ukraine and the intertwined Western cultural war deeply embedded within this conflict’s narrative. Noting how the “white conservative Christians bad” forms the ideological core of neoliberal views of this conflict, Hanania explains how wokery has crept into current media and political discourses which show support through emotional readings of the current war in Ukraine without any concern for the humanitarian impact of neoliberal calls to punish Russia. Hanania describes the generational differences of older generations who suffer from Cold War nostalgia, lending to their hostile views of Russia while giving detail on the links between television’s influence on the representation of the current conflict. Covering the business model of major media like CNN and MSNBC and the American foreign policy establishment and its policies, Hanania covers the current media bias from the right’s militaristic bent and the left’s focus on identity politics while outlining the dangers in how many intake media. Hanania presents the background of US involvement in Ukraine historically, including its involvement in the protests against Yanukovych and its form of “democracy promotion”, which fundamentally amounts to regime change, while also accounting for the historical role of NATO in the run-up to this conflict and the post-Soviet situation in relationship to US foreign policy.