THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

(Conclusion of trans and dental meditation)

BC PIRES

THE TIP of the spear is the only part that actually pierces anything; everything that comes after, every part of the spear that supposedly inflicts the mortal wound and wins the battle, is simply following behind the point.

And the whole point of freedom today is contained in and represented by the transgender community, of whom the Olympic weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, is the reluctant spearhead.

Last week, in the longer TGIF version at www.BCPires.com, I asked, What, really, is the difference between saying to someone, 'You were born a man and therefore you shall remain a man,' and 'you were born black and therefore you shall remain the property of a white person'? I suspect the answer is, 'Only time.'

My instinct, I wrote last week, is to protect the rights of the more major minorities - black, female, queer people - by avoiding extending that protection to such a difficult and challenging minority as trans people…because (that) would unify all the backward forces that wish to continue their exploitation of blacks, women, gays.

And that is precisely what those forces would love to see me do. Those who would replace personal liberty with a common set of limited rights and freedoms declared to be the only one any 'right-thinking' person would need.

That word is fascist.

And our best defence against the rapidly rising global tide of fascism is a lifeguard called Laurel Hubbard.

Because the pronoun describing her gives rise to great resentment. Which may easily be harnessed as the tip of the spear to kill liberal democracy.

Liberty can be attacked on any ground but is defended only on principle. In the grammar of freedom, principles are nouns and emerge only when all the adjectives and adverbs are removed. If a person is free to do something, that freedom does not disappear because the word 'black' is inserted before the word 'person.'

No one today would dream of denying a person their human rights if they happened to be Asian, female, Jewish, a child, a Muslim, a Catholic, an indigenous person or a left-hander.

But every one of those groups of individuals has been subjugated and exploited in the past, often the recent past.

The transgendered constitute this year's black, female, mentally challenged, physically challenged, autistic and every other adjective-based categorisation that was relied upon to deny someone their humanity.

We fail to defend trans people at our own peril.

But the fascism that is the swiftest route to unfreedom requires, to get it going, the intoxicant of hatred of an imaginary common enemy.

We watched it happen live in Hungary and Turkey and even in the supposed Land of the Free, from the very White House, from 2016-2020. Fat Nixon, Fat Abu Bakr, did his best to set black people up as that common enemy by throwing one three-word phrase -