the brilliantly leaping gazelle

This Thursday is Fireworks Night.”Remember, remember/the fifth of November’ goes the saying. But do people? Most people, if they had any recollection of it at all, would probably say it had something to do with a failed attempt to blow up Parliament. But as for the reasons that convinced the would-be terrorists to   think that mass murder was righteous, not so much. I must admit that I wasn’t too sure either.

But then the more I discovered about their motivations in 1605, the more it seemed to be all too relevant to 2026. It might seem a stretch, but certain aspects of both their reasoning and the subsequent punishments meted out by the state seem worryingly familiar. Not in their actuality, but in the permissions that allowed those actualities to happen.

The events that made mass murder justifiable to some people  in 1605 are the same reasons that other people use for it in 2026. Religion. Doesn’t really matter which one. Because, as Voltaire observed, once people believe in an absurdity, they can commit atrocities. But briefly, in 1534 Henry VIII invented a new religion, just so he end one marriage and begin a new one. Overnight everything changed. Strict observance to the new religion became compulsory. Various sufferings were endured by those who didn’t. When he died, and Elizabeth I took over and things only got worse. Plots to assonate her followed, as did people being burnt at the stake and beheadings.

When she died a a new King was imported from Scotland and he became called James I. His chalice was a country poisoned by religious violence, which abounded with treachery on both sides and opportunistic intolerance. Naturally, instead of calming matters, James decided to made them even worse.

In early 1604, he publicly announced to Parliament that he “detested” the Catholic faith. Days later, he ordered all Catholic and Jesuit priests to leave the realm and reinforced harsh anti-Catholic laws. This betrayal was the all the justification the plotters needed for mass murder.

What strikes me is the similarity of Henry creating a new religion because the previous one didn’t suit his needs,  and the new religion that believes that women can have penises, all because a few deluded people want it be so. Because that what it is, a new religion for our times. And just like every other religion, it t is a collection of absurdities, nonsense and various affronts to reason. Same, but different.

What is the same is the draconian imposition of conformity demanded by those who declare themselves believers i this new religion. The same self-serving, craven and pathetic conformity by the elites. By the very institutions one might reasonably imagine to oppose it, of academia and the press. In fact, the only people in society that persists in refusing to believe in it are the ones who have no say in how it is run. 

And the echoes reverberate still more. Heretics aren’t burnt at the stake. No, they might get a visit from the police because someone has complained about a tweet that was critical, mocking or plain ridiculed the new religion. They won’t be treated like the monasteries – sacked, pillaged and left in ruins – they’ll just have their entire life ruined like Graham Lineman to the extent that he has to move to the US to rebuild it. And when he did come back to the UK – ironically to defend himself in court against charges made by a believer – he was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow,

Consider the fate of Sandie Peggie. She had the temerity to complain about the presence of a woman with a penis her  changing room to the bosses of her hospital. She was suspended for doing so and the legal battle to clear her name has created another one. It was a salutary warning to others who might complain. And there might have been more, had the Hate Crime Bill not been enforced in Scotland. It hasn’t been repealed though and is therefore still the law. It clearly demonstrates the Scottish governments unequivocal endorsement of this new religion and given state sanctioned permission to those who wished to silence heretics..

Alternatively, you could do what Maya Forstater did. After she was sacked from her job for highlighting just how absurd the new religion’s fundamental proposition is, she fought back. Not only did she win her claim of unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal, she then then co-founded the charity, Sex Matters. One of their aims is to continually fight against the arrant nonsense of the new religion.

It also explains why they’re at the High Court today and tomorrow, and why they’re challenging the City of London Corporation’s decision to keep the bathing ponds at Hampstead trans-inclusive. This inclusive approach means allowing some believers into the ladies’ pond and some other fantasists into in the men’s pond. Although its the former that Sex Matters are most concerned about because it is the the former who are far more likely to avail themselves if the judgement goes their way.

But it shouldn’t. Sex Matters argument is wonderfully simple. Operating single-sex facilities this way is unlawful. In  2025 Supreme Court ruled that sex meant biological sex, and single-sex spaces were for the use of people of that biological sex only.

For me though, it’s also about reality, Not just in how we perceive it be but also how others, who believe in this new religion, have some misguided expectation of indulgence from non-believers. An indulgence they are deeply unwilling to extend to anyone else, a trait they share with not just the new religionists of 1543, but also another one thats very much alive now.  About how far the deluded fantasies of some socially inept individuals should be indulged by the very society whose norms they reject. Of what the limits are, of how much can be surrendered, and at what point does society draw the line, and say ‘This and no more.”

I think that line should’ve been drawn along ago. Its a tautological inversion of the most offensive kind to suggest that there exists a concept of inclusivity that excludes. That priorities the wants a minority of a minority above the majority of the population. A man can no more become a woman just by saying so, than another man centuries earlier, can invent a new religion, by doing essentially the same thing but on a much bigger stage. He enforced compliance on pain of an  actual death. Now it is the pain of a social one.

Same, but different.