Bodily searches

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/17/trans-women-uk-railways-strip-searched-male-officers

Trans women arrested on Britain’s railways will in future be strip-searched by male officers in an updated policy

i.e. People with male bodies (i.e., men) will in future have bodily searches carried out by men.

This is how the Guardian chooses to put it. For some reason they preferred not to also say the fact that it much more relevant to the great majority of people (though female sex abusers do exist): in future, women will not have to endure bodily searches carried out by men (or in Guardian-speak, "trans-men will in future be strip-searched by women"). Your wife and your daughters will not be subject to a man carrying out a bodily search. I wonder why the Guardian chose to direct us in a different direction?

The British Transport Police said same-sex searches in custody would be conducted “in accordance with the biological birth sex of the detainee” under updated guidance for public bodies.

Which makes sense, because a bodily search was something to do with your body, rather than whatever you believed your "internal sense of gender identity" was.

N.B. saying your "biological birth sex" is a way of trying to make something simple sound complicated. In this case, it sounds like that practice beloved of erring officialdom: obfuscating with unnecessary jargon in order to pretend that you previously weren't in gross dereliction of your duty. Your "biological birth sex" can just be called your "sex", with zero meaning either lost or gained.

Under the force’s previous policy, officers had been told that anyone in custody with a gender recognition certificate would be searched by an officer matching a detainee’s acquired gender

i.e. Previously, physical bodily searches were carried out as if they weren't something primarily to do with your body, but primarily to do with your non-physical inner beliefs about your internal "gender". So, men who claimed that they had an inner "female" orientation, could, on that basis, carry out bodily searches of females.

That policy could make no sense to anybody (because there's no sense in it). It was merely the desire of rabid ideologues who prefer their ideas above the real-world consequences of those ideas. (i.e. They're rabid ideologues, who lack humanity).

The world has plenty of such rabid ideologues, of course. There are all kinds of people suffering all over the world because people prefer their ideas to the flesh-and-blood human beings that their ideas hurt.

So the question then becomes - who in the British Transport Police is going to resign for failing to perform their duty of preferring real people over socially-preferred but actually harmful ideas?

The same question, of course, is now in play (following yesterday's court ruling) for many people in many domains and organisations. "Oops, it just slipped my mind for a moment that girl's bathrooms, women's changing rooms, women's refuges, etc., exist because of the differences of physical bodies, because of physical reality, rather than because of their users' abstract ideas - a subtle mistake anyone could easily make!" It's not really, is it?

All of education is religious - the only question is, "which religion?"

Firstly, read this: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/muir-woods-queer-woods-california-wokeness-live-not-by-lies/

This illustrates a simple fact: there is no neutral territory. Everywhere where there is education, even a wood, even spiders, a world-view is being communicated. The question is not "shall we teach how to understand our observations?" but "in what context shall we teach how to understand our observations?". And the most important context - everyone realises - is how humans understand themselves, and the world they live in, and how to interpret their inner lives. When people swallow the untruth that some sort of secularism in which we just observe without adding any context, they simply end up as teaching that life should be lived according to atheist nihilism, by default. "There are only facts" is functionally the same as "there is nothing but self".

As we see illustrated in the above article, the world outside the church understands these truths about education well. They know that the world is not a simple, naked, meaningless brute fact. Rather, there is a narrative, a background, a context, in which it should be interpreted. And so, as the world's educators seek to educate others, and especially children, they seek to teach what they hold as the correct, righteous context. They teach their worldview, because that's what educators do. That's what education involves. In the modern world, that increasingly means they teach a self-centred, God-less world-view in which man and his personal desires are the ultimate realities, and ultimate good things.

Lots of Christians haven't accepted these facts about how education works. In my observation, that's usually for one of two reasons.

The first reason is that they've never thought about it. Despite living in a society that has undergone such radical change as Western societies have in the last few generations, they have not applied their mind to thinking about what this means for the task of educating our children. They haven't even begun to reflect seriously upon what it means to obey the Bible's instruction to be "bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). This is a terrible failure to love God with all our minds, in one of the major areas of our duty.

The second is worse: Christians know that education is not neutral, and that the secularist education they have chosen for their children is anti-Christian - but they aren't willing to endure any of the costs in doing otherwise. They knowingly send their children to be educated in a context of darkness instead of light, because doing otherwise would involve discomfort. It would involve change, effort, and the possibility of others in their social groups pulling funny faces at them, which might make them feel awkward. I hope and pray that a lot of these Christians come, or will come, into a third category: those whose eyes have been opened, realised that pleasing God necessitates a radical change of direction, and who are going by his grace and strength to get up and make those changes.

The sexual dissolution

One of the blessings of my mathematical training was that it pushes me to analyse things back beyond the symptoms. To look at systems and structures and fundamentals. Patterns in thinking, patterns in society.
For some years I have been lamenting that it's much too rare to identify the 1960s "sexual revolution" as the outward moment when Western society irreversibly (in the sense of, if we don't reverse this, there's no other way) chose and set itself on the road to ruin.
As such, I'm pleased to see this blog, and the book it draws attention to, getting some attention. You should read it! Note that all the dots join up. And note the implications. All the monumental mistakes detailed in the article are connected. If you oppose one (e.g. identity politics) but not another (e.g. feminism), then you're not thinking straight.

Grooming vulnerable young women in the TV and movie industries

What is it called when vulnerable young women are taken through a process of gradual persuasion that they should take their clothes off for the twisted pleasure of strangers? When they are led through a gradual process that prepares them for the idea that doing such things is either normal or good? That's called "grooming". Thankfully, it's increasingly recognised as something that should be treated as a serious crime.

Generally the word "grooming" conjures up the idea of seedy middle-aged blokes on the Internet trying to persuade young teenagers. Or alternatively, pimps in seedy back-allies or theatres hawking those whom they have a hold over to all-comers. But if you apply a little thought, you'll realise that the problem is vastly more widespread than that. It's everywhere. Sexualisation of young people is a common-place in our society. One place where it is rampant is in Hollywood and television and other visual media. In particular, young actresses are persuaded by middle-aged seedy males ("producers", "directors" or "agents") that it's in their own interests to show their young flesh for the viewing pleasure of the afore-mentioned males, and to all the people they can hawk that flesh to for profit.

On which note, here's a report of an interview with an actress from "Game of Thrones" speaking about how she was led through a grooming process to show her naked flesh (under the pretence that it was the naked flesh of her "character"), in various sexual acts, for the pleasure of the viewers of that show, and the profit of its producers (and her own career): https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-50485264

You'll note that she doesn't use the word "grooming", or describe those who groomed her as perverts or criminals. But does she describe anything else? What is the real difference in what's happened if those who groomed you wore suits and aftershave instead of smelly tracksuits? The most effective groomers are those whose victims don't realise what's going on, even afterwards. Those who are exploited end up confused about the process. Even when the evidence is crystal clear to world plus dog, they still wonder if they were truly loved, appreciated, etcetera, and only see the abuse as something that was a part of a larger, more important whole - rather than as at the heart of everything that happened to them. So, she describes her innocence as a new actress of the depravity she was being asked to enact; describes her shock at seeing the scripts; talks about the crying and trauma before the scenes; the pressure to go through with it to not harm her career; and speaks of it at a distance under a fictional abstraction of "Khaleesi's nudity", rather than it being her own exploitation.

Someone will tell me that she was not groomed or exploited - that it was "empowering", a powerful statement of her femininity. Well, read the article - she disagrees, even if she's not yet at the point of identifying it for exactly what it was. Things that are empowering and honour the glory of the feminine don't leave the females involve scared, traumatised or trying not to vomit. The parading in public to everybody willing to pay a few pennies of what all young women instinctively feel is precious and to be protected - i.e. their nudity - is not empowering, but degrading. Exploiting young actresses for pornographic purposes is grooming, and is depraved, whether it's performed by smelly men in tracksuits in back allies, or men with sophisticated grooming in suits in television studios. It's exploitation, whether it's for the twisted pleasure of the unsophisticated at a low-grade porn club, or the supposedly sophisticated watching it in their nicely decorated lounges in suburbia. What it is is what it is, regardless of the labels that are stuck upon it. I hope that, if you love God and love the Lord Jesus, you refuse to take part, at any level, in supporting such things. Turn it off and throw it out.

"Sexual freedom" is sexual slavery

All-too-frequent newspaper headline: "'I slept with FORTY strangers in five years': Student from loving home reveals how she became an internet sex addict"

Humanistic freedom is the same as slavery. The 1960s sexual revolution allegedly liberated women... to what? Well, as an increasing number of newspaper stories report, it liberated them so that they could become cheap objects of gratification for lustful men, with those men no longer having to face any significant consequences. The old concepts of modesty, propriety and virtue (how quaint!) being broken down, the men can take their fill, exploit young girls day and night, and there's nothing to restrain them. After all, it's all consensual, so what's the problem? Ah, liberation - turns out to be the same as exploitation.

True sexual freedom is not the same as sexual anarchy; it is found in submitting to the Lordship of Christ, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.