Belgium's first big trans tantrum
By grovelling to the activist mob, the state broadcaster abandons its audience
The level of familiarity with the excesses of trans derangement in Belgium may be lower than I thought, because last month, a satirical TV show took the piss out of The Sacred Caste on primetime TV. And as everyone knows, one does not simply take the piss out of The Sacred Caste.
Well, everyone except the entire cast and crew of the comedy show, Le Grand Cactus, apparently, as well as RTBF, the national (francophone) broadcaster who allowed it to be aired. And the backlash that it caused will make sure it’s a lesson they will only ever have to learn once.
Here’s what happened
On Thursday 19 September, the beloved Belgian comedy show Le Grand Cactus returned to the airwaves after a summer break. Cactus is a goofy and highly irreverent sketch-panel show featuring hosts and guests in cheap wigs and props, lampooning public figures and the news of the day.
Nobody is spared, and no topic is off-limits.
On this particular episode, two actors performed a parody of a song called 3eme sexe (third sex), originally recorded by the French New Wave group, Indochine. The song is about gender-bending aesthetics and oppressive cultural expectations for both sexes. It’s a well-known classic in the Frenchosphere.
In 2020, the band re-released the song, this time featuring Héloïse Letissier, better known as Christine and the Queens. Letissier is the perfect collaboratrice for such a song, because she has been on a very public “gender journey” in recent years, having felt “trapped in a narrow definition of what a woman can be”, as she told BBC’s Newsnight in 2018.
She’s not wrong: if you think being a woman means long hair, dresses and sultry pouts, then yes, that really is narrow. Luckily, the only definition of woman is “adult human female”, and it has nothing to do with the length of your hair or even your personality. However, caught up in the Zeitgeist, Letissier thinks that by rejecting sex stereotypes she can stop being a woman, and she has adopted new clothes, a dodgy haircut, and cool new pronouns in service to that transition.
So in 2019 she declared that she was genderqueer, and two years later, she moved on to using “all pronouns”. According to this 2021 interview, she was non-binary. By 2022, she had had begun gendering herself male (as of this writing, she’s still on male). At some point she became pansexual and asked to be called Chris, then “Rahim Redcar” and I think now she wants to be called “Red”.
It’s hard for the public to keep up, however, and in 2023, in a TikTok video that went viral, she revealed that she was big fucking mad because everyone was still calling her by the female pronoun “elle”. On the verge of tears, she goes absolutely ballistic about the injury of being misgendered.
The lead singer of Indochine, meanwhile, Nicolas Sirkis (he has a teenage emo haircut gone grey!) is known for having an androgynous style that fucks with stereotypes about masculine and feminine dress. His stage name is the (feminine version of Nicolas) “Nicola”. When 3eme sexe was first released, the French music media treated it as his “coming out” but Sirkis has never claimed to be gay or trans or anything else. Dude just has a funky aesthetic.
Bref, these are two dorks perfectly suited to a prime time satirical pisstake about the current climate of self-obsessed gender wankery.
At least by the old rules.
Poking fun at both the premise of 3eme sexe, and Letissier and Sirkis’ fluid notions of their sexed selves, the comedians on Cactus performed a parody of the song, rechristened 128eme sexe. The lyrics consisted mostly just of silly things they “identify as”.
It’s essentially an extended version of the attack helicopter meme, a low-brow, standard-issue gender pisstake of the type we in the English-speaking world were doing in 2019 — plus a few zingers. The rudest line was, perhaps, "Suis je une femme, ou Brigitte Macron?", in reference to the internet conspiracy theory that the French first lady is a bloke.
Sirkis was played by the Belgian actor Damien Gillard, while French comedienne Cécile Giroud parodied the mood and movements of Letissier. The actors jump, gesticulate, pout and gurn into the camera as they croon “I’m a boy, girl, mint tea, who cares, I’ve no gender, I’m a marble, a heron, Jean Dujardin…”
The panellists in the background can be heard laughing. At one point host Adrien Devyver falls apart in hysterics when they get to the line “I’m a melon from Wépion!”
Did you know melons grow in Belgium?
More importantly, didn’t anyone involved in the show know that genderfeelz is the only thing that is off-limits for mockery? Were the actors and producers and caterers and gay stylists and hair and makeup artists not familiar with the enormous bureaucracy that has grown to police speech about “trans” in Belgium in recent years?
The unfiltered guffaws of the panellists, combined with the unsophisticated theme of the parody (“I’m a slice of bread!”) suggest that they might be new to the topic. Or perhaps they knew that they were poking the very sensitive grievance bear, but hadn’t grasped just how professionalised, institutionalised, and generously-funded the gender Stasi has become.
Like elsewhere in the Western world, evolving legislation and policy on “LGBTQIA+ issues” has led to a new powerful bureaucracy and associated funding programmes. As a result, there are hordes of grifters in Belgium who are building careers and status by pretending to not to be the sex they are, as well as many, many more who pretend to believe them. And they are just sitting around, waiting to be offended.
Did the show’s creator, Jérôme de Warzée, fuck around knowing full well he was about to find out? Whatever the case, it was immediately clear to me that we were headed for a coordinated national meltdown.
The pleblic square
I went straight to Facebook, the “pleblic square”, to gauge the initial reaction. The episode had been published on the show’s Facebook page the same evening. From the very beginning, the comments were overwhelmingly positive. And by that I mean: you would have to trawl through about 70 replies yucking it up with laugh emojis for every negative reaction.
Over on Instagram, whose users are far more likely to be performatively woketarded, the reaction to the video was less positive overall, but not by much.
In a demonstration of how bad things are in France, a lot of French viewers expressed admiration at Belgians’ ability to still poke fun at this particular subject. “On peut plus rire de rien!” they complained about the level of censorship in their domestic media scene since the rise of le wokeisme.
The weekend passed calmly enough.
Video: Somebody has already made a karaoke version of the skit that has been viewed nearly 20k times.
The outrage that had bubbled up over the weekend had nothing to do with viewers of the show, or the public generally. It was engineered by professional gender grifters, namely government-funded LGBTQIA+ non-profits, led by a shit-tonne of professional sex clowns (also known as drag queens) connected to the Belgian version of American trash TV show, Ru Paul’s Drag Race. They were reinforced on social media by they/them #SoisGentil virtue merchants and femmes penisis.é.e.s who populate the country’s captured universities.
With zero self-awareness, the drag queens, who parody, mock and dehumanise women for money on TV, were suddenly angry at RTBF for parodying, mocking and dehumanising people on TV.
Why did so many drag queens get involved? Because some of them are on the payroll of RTBF, they may have come under pressure from the universiqueers to speak up. But they are gay men. They don’t claim to have changed sex. Why are they used as brand mascots for trans?
It’s because drag is the alcopop of gender theory. Sex clowns have become a staple of mandated “diversity programming” in Belgium and beyond because they “challenge the binary” in a family-friendlier way than, for example, the more common manifestations of binary-breaking: self-harming autistic lesbians, or fetishistic crossdresers who abandon their families to go masturbate full-time.
Read: It’s a DRAG: the BBC’s unhealthy obsession with drag acts
Consider “Tonya”, who appeared on RTBF in 2023. He represents the typical profile of an autogynephile: after crossdressing in secret for decades, these men are enticed by our contemporary porn-soaked culture, and egged on by NGOs, to abandon self-control and lean into their sexual obsession full-time (the sexual side of the journey is never mentioned).
As per usual with these cases, Tonya’s children and wife were disturbed and mortified by his decision live his fetish full-time. It’s just not a feel-good story, whatever way you slice it, and you can only shine the spotlight on so many “Tonyas” before the public start forming the wrong opinions about “trans”.
So. Drag queens, it is.
Video: “the inspiring gender transition journey of Tonya, 40”
The fallout
As the power gays were huffing and puffing in Indignstagram posts on Sunday into Monday, the NGOs were preparing statements. The text put out by the organisation Federation Prisme, an umbrella rainbow NGO that represents the rainbow NGOs in the south of the country (there are so fucking many!) is truly something to behold.
In a threatening tone, they reminded the show makers of the Belgian law prohibiting “incitement” to hatred and violence, warning that the satire defence offers no protection. They claimed that mocking a group of people is exactly the same as inciting violence against them. It’s a chilling threat to the democratic principle of free expression in a mature democracy like Belgium — even if it was probably written by an autistic enby crying into a squishmallow.
“We demand that RTBF act immediately, to avoid regretting this, and to apologise to everyone concerned,” they ordered, demanding too that “moderation of hateful and discrimination comments on social media is urgent.”
Federation Prisme prepared a complaint, as did Brussels’ Rainbow House, to the media regulator (the CSA) as well as to the Institute for the Equality between Men and Women (the name was chosen back when those words had widely-understood meanings).
By Tuesday, the news was reporting that the media regulator had been “seized” by complaints (there were 200 complaints in total by 27 September) (update May 2025: there were 404 complaints in total, according to the media regulator). An investigation was opened.
RTBF, I regret to inform you, got straight down on their knees. They put out the effuse apology demanded by the activists, and embarked on a contemptible apology tour that still continues, one month after the episode aired.
However, the executives of RTBF and the makers of Le Grand Cactus are not the same people. While RTBF kissed the ring, the makers of the show were a bit less forthcoming. Instead of outright grovelling, they rewrote the lyrics of another Indochine song in which they expressed regret, claiming that they meant no harm but defended their métier, which is satire. They also refused to delete the clips off their various social media channels.
It was not quite a fuck-you, but they managed to keep some dignity intact.
RTBF has shown no such self-respect. An emergency meeting was held at their headquarters, bringing together company executives, members of Cactus, and “representatives of the community” as well as “artists from diverse backgrounds.” The outcome of the 2.5 hour struggle session, RTBF announced, was that there would be both short-term and long-term actions taken in order to fix relations. That means that the staff of RTBF are in for some re-education via expensive “sensibilisation” training packages, presumably provided by the same gender grifters present at the meeting.
Isn’t that convenient!
But it got worse. RTBF began putting out fawning articles like this one, instructing (grown adults) how to deal with strong emotions if the show hurt them. A scheduled rerun of an older Cactus episode, that had first been aired the previous May, was unscheduled from the programming. RTBF claimed it had nothing to do with appeasing the gender drama, but I went back through the archives saw that one of the episodes that aired that month was on the theme of Eurovision, and was chock-full of trans and non-binary jokes.
One can only assume that it was a bad moment to rehash those particular skits.
It’s important to note that the team of Le Grand Cactus are equal-opportunities jokers. I’ve seen them take the piss out of paedophile Catholics, women who are too ugly to get raped by Harvey Weinstein, Pakistani organ traffickers….and so many jokes about gay men’s overused rectal passages. Not to mention Damian Gillard’s recurring character, the uncouth chav “Fabrizio” from the downtrodden city of Charleroi. As far as I know, the carolos haven’t demanded any tribunals.
Unprecedented hubris
The overreaction continued in the weeks that followed. The organisers of Liège Pride festival threatened to pull out of their partnership with RTBF, so RTBF’s public relations guy called them up to plead a truce.
The entitled pricks (see below) issued three demands:
First, they demanded that the 2025 pride parade be broadcast live on RTBF. Second, they wanted the executives do everything in their power to get Indochine to perform during the event. And third, they told the PR guy that they wanted the hosts of Cactus to be present at the parade. Perhaps on a float? Whatever — the Cactus team would be allowed to come up with their own original idea for their appearance. Isn’t that nice of them???!! He also suggested Liege Pride reps should be invited onto the Cactus show.
How more people don’t hate these authoritarian toddlers is a mystery.
The chasm
The most important takeaway from this shitshow is, of course, the glaring difference between the reaction of the state media, the regulator and self-interested “civil society actors” on the one hand, and the reaction of the viewing public on the other.
Social media comments from regular people — who RTBF are purported to serve — keep coming in, and they are not just entertained by the skit but also angry. Not at the show makers, but at the gender authoritarians and at RTBF for kowtowing to them.
Among the thousands of “bravos” and “thanks” and “well done for not backing down to the mob” messages, across social media platforms — including woke Instagram and TikTok — comments are increasingly tinged with impatience at trans overreach. As one Facebook commenter said “RTBF lowered its pants for a minority of uptight people, for associations that create pointless controversies to advance their own interests.”
Can the broadcaster really claim to serve the public if they ignore their reaction in order to appease a minority of aggrieved maniacs?
And what about the rest of the media? They have shied away from reporting that the public largely support comedians’ right to make fun of the trans and enby identitarians. And they have also ignored the resentment at the manner in which the incident has been handled.
To take a couple of examples: the tabloid paper La Dernière Heure plucked comments out of thousands upon thousands of social media reactions to demonstrate, on behalf of their buddies in the rainbow mafia, how the public really really hated the episode and found it transphobic. But the reporter would have had to skip over many more thousands of supportive posts to find these satisfactorily aggrieved ones. And yet they never mentioned them.
Devoid of the necessary context, who does this kind of reporting serve?
La Libre, on the other end of the respectability scale, did the exact same thing in their numerous articles about the incident. They cherry-picked and highlighted only the reactions that would line up with the minority view of the activists. When they posted their articles to Twitter, they were met with universal praise for the show and disgust at RTBF for their unrepresentative response.
All these media outlets buried deep in their reporting a very similar line saying that comments were more positive on other platforms than Instagram, where the sex clowns led the brigade. None of them mentioned that the whole thing was led by professional organisations.
I was glad to see that that La Dernière Heure published a piece in which they invited comedians to weigh in on the drama. Of those who answered the journalist’s request (quite a few declined to get involved, according to the (paywalled) article), they all defended the sketch. The same paper also published an editorial in which the journalist asked why trans-identifying people should be excluded from subjects comedians can joke about. However, when readers’ comments under the article where too enthusiastic in their indictment of trans madness, the comments were closed.
Turning off comments may be a reflection of the fears that media companies have that they can be held responsible for “hateful” comments made on their sites by users (thanks, DSA). But concealing them further helps hide the real story.
The people who found the sketch transphobic (or who pretend to find it transphobic in order to advertise their virtue) kept snitching to RTBF on Instagram, demanding that they delete any reactions that they deemed hateful. There were quite a few claims that negative comments were against the law (that still remains to be seen). A frightening number of these virtue demons simply unblinkingly repeated the thought-terminating incantation “La transphobie tue” like zombies.
If these people get their way, all non-approved opinions will be censored in the future. Rainbow House Brussels recently urged the government to change the constitution to criminalise all homophobic or transphobic remarks. There’s no reason to think they won’t get what they want. After all, which political party wants to be smeared as transphobic by the next generation of voters?
This is not popular social change. This is tyranny.
In search of victims
In one of the early reactions to the Cactus episode, the drag queen Edna Sorgelsen demanded to know how RTBF could dare laugh at trans people only two days after a trans murder!
What? A trans murder?
Sorgelsen must have been referring to the killing of a 37-year-old man in Tbilisi, Georgia, a city 3,500 kilometres from Brussels. Kesaria Abramidzé, a gay man who had had plastic surgery to make him look like a female sex doll, had been killed at home by his straight (chaser) boyfriend on 17 September.
By dragging Abramidzé’s murder into the Cactus backlash, Sorgelsen illustrated the trans activists’ tactic of instrumentalising (and decontextualising) faraway murders to fit a domestic “trans genocide” narrative.
Most of the time, the victims of trans violence are men like Abramidzé. And almost always, they work in prostitution (note: there is no evidence so far that Abramidzé was a prostitute). In places where homosexuality is unaccepted, some very effeminate gay men enhance their bodies so that they have features of both men and women (the technical name for this physiology is gynandromorphism) and they sell sex to a niche clientele (gynandromorphophiles, or GAMPs). GAMPs fetishise men like Kesaria Abramidzé, but they are not generally interested (or willing, or able for cultural reasons) to have steady, and visible, relationships with them.
Considering the sheer volume of demand for their “services”, the lack of access to sexual partners through the regular channels, employment discrimination, and the (relatively) easy money that can be earned, it’s easy to see how these men get into prostitution.
Prostitution is an extremely dangerous job, so it makes sense that violence rates in this cohort are elevated. When NGOs and activists like Sorgelsen cite stories of trans murders, it’s always a reproduction of this dynamic: angry or jealous (or embarrassed) punters or boyfriends, who sometimes double as their victims’ pimps.
Yet despite the fact that there are armies of men like Kesaria Abramidzé offering their sexual services to Belgian GAMPs, cases of violence against them are extremely rare here; the most recent (reported) incident involved a “well-known” local prostitute who was pushed into the river Sambre in the city of Charleroi this summer (luckily, he’s fine).
But these guys are a far cry from the spoilt humanities students ugly-crying on TikTok because nobody takes their neo-pronouns seriously. Nevertheless, “travailleuses de sexe” are constantly rolled out as a proxy by the NGOs to help justify their political demands for things like official recognition of “non-binary” identities and other nonsense.
No more battles to be won
And the authorities have apparently been taken in by the “trans genocide” spin.
When the government updated the loi transgenre to remove the limit on how many times you can change your legal sex, I wrote to the federal government, perplexed, to ask what in the good lord’s name was the problem that limitless sex changes was going to solve.
A spokesperson referred me to the legal arguments made by (publicly-funded) Genres Pluriels, which essentially claimed that not being able to change your sex an infinite number of times creates inequality between people who haven’t changed their legal sex and those who have changed it. Because everyone should have the right to change their sex. Even those who have already done so.
It’s not exactly ending Jim Crow, is it?
That sound you can hear is the bottom of a barrel being mercilessly scraped. It’s a really good example of how wrong and bad special interest “strategic litigation” can be, and it convinces me you can get a law to say anything you want if you have the money to chip away at it long enough. And fuck knows these people have plenty of money.
Rolling in public money
Some numbers: Federation Prisme got €140k from the public last year while each of its seven “Rainbow House” sub-chapters got €100k each. I found 11 more publicly-funded NGOs in Wallonia alone. In 2022, the city of Brussels was allocated €350k for LGBTQIA projects by the federal government. Smaller NGOs, like the ones listed in the image below, likely get project-specific funding from other funding streams.
And that’s just the bottom half of the country. The Dutch-speaking region of Flanders committed a whopping €1.5 million to LGBT causes in 2023 (which is why people say that the situation there is so much worse).
What do they do with all that cash? The big legal battles have all been won, and there are no fundamental rights to fight for anymore. So they throw themselves a lot of parties, film screenings, workshops and parades, mostly. They also help “LGBTQ” refugees get gay asylum with no evidence that they’re gay (what could possibly go wrong?) and they work to infuse school curricula with the wrong-body creation myth to prevent another generation of wrongthinkers. They sell expensive brainwashing workshops to private companies that HR forces their staff to sit through.
They travel around the country hosting mobile advice clinics in which they help young people falsify their administrative documents. They tell them how to get hormones and surgery with as few safeguards and as little waiting time as possible, directing them to the most unscrupulous surgeons, endocrinologists and paediatricians.
Amping up claims of hate
But with no more equalities law to change, simplified administrative procedures, and more and more gender clinics launching gender affirming services, you would think the rainbow tyrants would close shop and leave us the fuck alone. You would be wrong.
As the Cactus episode demonstrates, there is still a big huge problem in society that must be fixed: public scepticism of the niche opinion that human beings can change sex. And as normies encounter transmania in the real world and express their reservations about its very consequential claims about human sexual dimorphism, it’s taken as evidence that “transphobia” is on the rise.
For the NGOs, evidence of this transphobia is a good way to stay in business. But it has led to a deeply perverse incentive: to convince gender non-conforming people of all stripes that they are hunted to the margins of society and despised by everybody. For the associations’ own benefit (and to the detriment of the mental health of the people they claim to represent) they intentionally create the impression that people are going around screaming threats and beating up or killing gender non-conforming people all the time.
The NGOs collect and organise “evidence” of transphobia from extremely partial samples, and then feed it into various reports that then claim that “much more needs to be done” to counter this hate.
This besieged mental state that they have nurtured in young people helps explain the incident at Café Laïque last year, when trans activists threw shit (yes actual faeces), at people attending a talk given by two doctors who had written a book critical of the narrative of transgender children.
The Cactus incident and its social media backlash will be wrung for evidence of hate, harassment and discrimination, too. That data will then be crunched and summarised and sent off to government ministries, as well as to the Council of Europe, the OECD, the European Commission, and the UN OHCHR, among others. Those bodies will then admonish hateful little Belgium to do something about all the wicked twansphobia. This in turn will lead to more funding for the NGOs.
Under the EU’s new DSA rules, all EU member states must now track wrongthink on social media and flag it to the platforms for removal. The latter will suffer huge financial losses for not doing so. In order to sell this censorship as a positive thing to the public, the government badly needs evidence of the damage caused by online hate. While racist, sexist and antisemitic discrimination are largely ignored, the well-resourced rainbow mafia has accrued plenty of evidence to hand to them on a plate. Everyone is happy!
Is Belgium really that transphobic?
Far from it. Belgium is probably the best place in the world to pretend to be in the wrong body. In fact, it is one of the most progressive places in the world on any issue (euthanasia for kids, for example). On a legislative level, Belgium has had self-ID with no conditions since 2018, and in 2023, as mentioned, that law was updated to allow people to change their legal sex as often as they want. Also, the need to make a second visit to the maison communale to confirm your initial request to falsify your sex was taken out of the law. Now it’s one-and-done.
Surgeries are reimbursed on the public purse, and there are no lower age limits for hormonal or surgical transition. The mandated education curriculum guidelines include 57 references to “gender identity” (sexual orientation, by contrast, only gets 44) and the Belgian state even funded an NGO that identifies people who might want to transition while in prison, which allows (encourages?) males to transfer to the women’s estate, which is also allowed.
The tactics of transactivsts
In such a permissive atmosphere, how to prove your victim status? There are three ways in which they do this:
First of all, activists lay claim to faraway murders like Kesaria Abramidzé’s. This is repeated annually with Transgender Europe’s EU-funded “trans murder monitoring” report, which is basically a list of obituaries for South American travesti prostitutes. Every year, the report is picked up and cited breathlessly by mainstream media without ever adding this very relevant context.
The second tactic is to mix trans and non-binary people up with other demographic groups. By artificially stitching the “T” on to the amorphous and ever-extendible “LGBTQIA+” or the even more ambiguous “queer” community, the statistics for trans people are mixed into a larger sample of gay, lesbian and bisexuals, alongside other more novel identity categories.
When a man in a party-shop wig and fishnets gets asked to leave the women’s toilets, this incident can be grouped with the very real issue of gay men being catfished on Grindr in Brussels. The headline will read: the LGBTQ community attacked! thus confusing homophobia with, for example, a divorced dad of three being told he can’t join the girls’ junior basketball team.
Amalgamations like that do a disservice to real victims of crime in order to generate unwarranted sympathy for the cause of people who want us to adopt their bizarre post-modern ideas about sex. It’s marketing, not data.
Likewise, violence against women (humanity’s oldest, most universal, and most popular hobby) is increasingly called “gender-based” violence. This means violence against actual women can be used to make claims about violence against “other types” of women (the male ones).
You’ll notice many NGOs such as Belgian “feminist” NGO Rosa calls murders of trans women “femicide”. I mean, come on. You can’t have the butter and the money for the butter. These men are either murdered because they are women, or because they’re men pretending to be woman.
We can’t even have our own murders anymore.
Besides, victims like Kesaria Abramidzé are same-sex attracted men, so whether their murders are categorised as homophobic, transphobic, femicidal, queerphobia, or whatever, seems to only depend on the political argument being deployed at a given moment.
The mission creep of “hate”
The third tactic of the gender authoritarians is the most crucial to their survival: the expansion of the meanings of the words “hate”, “violence”, “harassment” and “discrimination” as well as what it means to “incite” someone to any or all of the above.
Young people who have adopted these new identities are told that being misgendered or deadnamed, or in any way not “affirmed” by the people they come into contact with, is a violent affront.
In its statement on the Cactus episode, Federation Prisme cites high levels of violence against trans people from a survey that doesn’t show that. But even if they had pulled out the correct statistics, the survey doesn’t define at any point what any of the words hate, violence, harassment, or discrimination mean.
In the intro to the report, the survey designers even admit that there is no definition of the subjects of the survey - the people its purported to study. That’s not just because nobody agrees on the meanings of words like “trans”, but also because the people constantly flit between one self-identification and another (a la Christine and the Queens).
In the same survey, respondents are asked if they have been “refused medical treatment”. This is intended to evoke images of the denial of necessary healthcare, but it is much more likely to refer to encounters with doctors who are reluctant to sign off on testosterone shots of boob jobs without a proper evaluation. In the UK, even “invasive questions” have even been classified as a hate crime.
This survey by the Belgian organisation Safe Ta Night on the safety of LGBTQ people at parties lists as “forms of violence” everything from embarrassing comments to forced fellatio. So when you see a headline like “Violence against trans people increased by 100% last year”, there’s no way to know what that headline means. For all you know, it could be 200 femboys who got catcalled by builders (welcome to girlhood, boys), mixed in with one rape.
This obfuscation is not an accident.
Studies like this suggest that even getting bad vibes from someone who doesn’t accept and celebrate your notions about your gendered-soul belief system can be considered violence or discrimination. Even ignorance of the tenets of trans can be recast as hate.
Here’s just a sampling of things that I have seen called discriminatory or hateful in my travels through Facebook, Discord and Reddit: gynecologists who don’t know how to treat a “fauxgina” (which is actually just a hole carved out of a male pelvis). School principals who don’t let teenage boys get changed in the girls’ locker room. Questioning men about their presence in the women’s bathroom. Criticising the International Olympic Committee’s decision to allow sex self-identification for sporting categories.
Laughing at Christine and the Queens’ bottomless narcissism? Hate!
This mission creep, coupled with the generally dodgy research methodology (like this #YouToo survey in which the study designers admit that there are so many subjective understanding of “transgender” that they didn’t even know what they were counting) makes the data completely worthless.
A demand for celebration
Indeed, it seems that anything less than full-chested enthusiasm for transgender ideology is hateful. This puts the NGOs and their institutional backers on a collision course with reality.
There is very little to be done to legislate against people’s natural intuition that most (if not all) straight men who call themselves “trans women” are erotic fetishists. They dress up as women because it sexually excites them. The slow-burn legal shenanigans that gave them carte blanche to take their fetish public has had zero effect on this intuition.
The research on these men this is not widely disseminated (because it’s hateful!!1!) but it doesn’t have to be. You know a pervert when you see one.
Likewise, you can’t stop people recognising that so many troubled young women all suddenly suffering from the exact same identity crisis resembles a social contagion much more than it resembles a civil rights movement. At best, a the young women who declare themselves male or non-binary or agender or whatever are attention-seeking posh kids. They have zero life experience to inform their opinion that sex is unimportant and can therefore be discarded as an organising principle. These are silly little girls caught up in a fad, instrumentalised by horny transvestites.
At worst, they are deeply mentally unwell, and identifying out of their sex (and threatening suicide unless their breasts are cut off) is a symptom of their mental illness and not a solution to it.
Sexual insults experienced by crossdressing men in public are also counted as hate by the data inflaters. Sexual harassment is experienced by every woman and girl who has ever walked the earth, so they can piss off pretending there is anything special about them — especially since they often dress like porn stars in order to get the attention they crave.
But unlike actual women, transvestites are known to enjoy it when they get sexually harassed— because it affirms their masochistic lady fantasy. They even have a word for the “gender euphoria” (which includes sexual excitement) they feel when they get abuse in the street. It’s called ewphoria.
You want me to call these perverts “she”? I don’t fucking think so.
We developed the ick over millennia, and laughing at (and backing slowly away from) these men is our right. We can exercise our freedom of belief, freedom of expression and freedom of association liberally, when and where we want, even if NGOs threaten to use our disgust as a data point in their hate report, or worse, take us to court.
This rejection might very well be contributing to “trans people’s” mental health problems; I have no doubt many of them suffered emotionally when they saw the Cactus skit. Perhaps all those professional gender NGOs could use all that public money to help them manage their expectations a bit better?
These are not things that trans people want you to hear, but they are the truth.
It’s one thing to believe something about yourself and have other people respect that you hold that belief. It’s another to change the law for everyone to reflect your niche identity, and to criminalise any dissenters. I, like many other people, am not participating in either a young woman’s performative angst, or a man’s crossdressing fantasy. I don’t believe in gendered soul or any other staples of transgender theory. And Belgian law is on my side.
The Red Guard
The NGOs’ need for victims plays right into the hands of the young woke class’s need to accrue social capital by identifying themselves out of the oppressor class. It’s a match made in hell.
Prior to the Cactus skit, Belgium’s most high-profile trans tantrum revolved around a series of manufactured “hate incidents” at the university, ULB. It was commandeered by “Victoria” Defraigne , perhaps the most celebrated gender grifter in the entire country.
Defraigne has hung around the ULB campus for years, failing academically but succeeding in launching himself as an influencer when he “came out” as trans after lockdown (he appears to claim that he was stealth before that. Check out this recent photo and make your own mind up).
Defraigne created some provocative self-branded stickers that can be seen all around Brussels, one of which claims: “Some women have penises. Get over it”. When a rumour went around that a faculty professor had “criticised” the stickers, Defraigne went on a witch hunt to find out who it was. He began publicly demanding that the university root out the wrong-thinker, discipline him or her, and grovel in apology to him.
When he didn’t get what he wanted, he published a timeline of all the “hate” and “violence” incidents he endured at the university, which seems to have been a couple of incidents of being deadnamed, a couple more being misgendered, and once being asked if he was a man in the toilets by women who claimed he was stressing them out. He also demanded the university toilets be de-segregated (the local Green party were only too happy to fluff him up in this endeavour).
Of course, the NGOs rallied behind him and the media faithfully printed his self-indulgent nonsense as evidence of horrific transphobia at ULB.
But why is anyone pandering to this self-obsessed failson? His stickers claiming women have dicks reflects only his own desire to convince straight men to have sex with him. This is might be his own personal civil rights mission, but it’s not clear why so many others treat it like it’s the March on Washington.
RTBF, of course, has dutifully rolled Defraigne out loooooads of times to fawn over his decision to switch from adhering to male stereotypes to adhering to female ones. He has media deals and sponsorships and a book on coming out to your folks and his tantrums help him raise his profile.
But nobody dares mention that giving Defraigne what he wants - erasing sex as a biological reality - has harmful downstream consequences for women and girls: because that would be transphobic.
After the Cactus episode, Defraigne used his… talents… to make a reaction video, in which he outright admits “We snitched on you to the CSA” (the CSA is the media regulator, mentioned earlier) thus adding to the evidence that the whole Cactus “backlash” is an astro-turfed sham and represents only the opinions of an elite crew of irrational and self-interested extremists.
I wrote to the CSA to ask how many of the 200 complaints they received came from NGOs and their staff, and how many came from individuals. I also asked how many individuals used their own original wording and how many just copied the Prisme or Rainbow House statements. No reply, of course. (There are probably enough sex clowns in the country to account for all 200 complaints.)
The alliance between the gender Red Guard and rainbow NGOs gives each legitimacy to keep up the grift. The first step to restoring sanity is to cut off these brats’ source of narcissistic supply by refusing to hold them in such unearned esteem. The second step is to cut off the NGOs’ funding.
Seeing the light of day
Belgians proudly endorse the “live and let live” ethos and they don’t care what adults do with their bodies. Unlike me, most are not crusaders against wrong-bodyism. They just found the Cactus sketch silly and fun. But as the comments show, being told that they can’t laugh might be having a radicalising effect.
Live and let live is supposed to go both ways.
I also sense an element of surprise in the comments from normal Belgian people about the intensity of the reaction to the skit. Again, like elsewhere in Europe and the anglosphere, Belgian people were never really informed about, or consulted on, the legal changes that made all of this possible.
Sure, la loi de l’autodetermination (self-ID) wasn’t exactly a secret, but nobody knew it would mean that we would all have to kowtow to other people’s narcissistic delusions, and that we could be reported to the authorities for not doing so. They were never told that people’s individual identity crises would necessitate the destruction of women’s sports, the erasure of a generation of lesbians, the constant propaganda against children, or the mainstreaming of a two weird-ass paraphilias — gynoandromorphophilia and autogynephilia — which were once kept to the private sphere.
The activists need to own the fact that the deeply unpopular, unscientific, sexist, homophobic and regressive rights that they won by stealth are now seeing the light of day, and nobody outside their bubble is buying it. That’s on them, and they owe it to the people they claim to serve to come clean about it.
#JeSuisCactus
In the weeks following the debacle, the team over at La Grand Cactus seem to have regrouped, and are increasingly taking aim at their detractors. Last week, the writers managed to insert (very mild) jokes about non-binaries and trans (and even one joke about the NGOs) into every segment. But they reserved their deepest scorn for the band Indochine, with running jokes about them all through the show. They even invited the Sirkis/Damian Gillard character back on so that they could mock him for writing songs that all sound exactly the same.
It’s hard to see how comedians can skirt around the trans topic for long, considering its increasing prominence in the public debate. If the NGOs get their way, and the EU’s Digital Services Act is enforced as it is intended, there will be no room for laughing at gender loons without risking a big fine or a prison sentence — or at least, censorship.
When internauts began to draw parallels between the Cactus incident and the outpouring of support for the creators of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, the tongue in cheek #JeSuisCactus hashtag began to appear online.
As a reminder, the makers of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were gunned down by Islamists for joking about the prophet Mohammed. But back in the days of Charlie, it was generally a feature of the leftosphere to support free expression. Now, the zeal for censoring anti-establishment discourse (remember who pays the bills) mean that this pretence has been abandoned as part of core leftist ideology.
Cactus creator Jérôme de Warzée pleaded with the public not to use the #JeSuisCactus hashtag, saying: “We don’t want the LGBT community getting death threats because of our jokes.” Ah bon? Did “the community” receive death threats? De Warzée’s comment suggests that they did, and that such threats were the direct result of his show. Were these death threats reported to the police? Will charges be made? No specifics were provided (they never are).
We have to just trust their word that it was more than just hurt feelings that necessitated this very public struggle session. Plus, we will just have to believe them that the next time a twink gets stabbed by his ashamed lover in the South Caucus that it’s the direct result of Cecile Giraud singing “Et le soir, juste après le souper, Un cahier ou peut-être une fougère.”
Meanwhile, in the parallel universe that they inhabit, RTBF continue their public self-flaggelation, with no acknowledgement that their priorities are now entirely directed to a noisy minority of spoilt babies. Ex-RTBF journo Dan Gagnon was the only person in the official sphere to (inadvertently) accurately assess the situation: the big problem for RTBF is that there is a canyon-sized disconnect between the official response and what normal people think about it the incident.
This disconnect will, of course, be taken as evidence that what the Belgian people need is more education, more awareness-raising, more rainbow crosswalks, more struggle sessions, more expensive parades, more DEI experts, more censorship, more propaganda — all preferably starting at an even younger age.
Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern
Two weeks after the incident, two hugely controversial French writers, Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern, had to cancel a conference in Brussels because of actual threats of violence against them due to their gender critical beliefs.
Since they began to speak out about trans madness (buy their book!), they have been subjected to a real bomb attack, and many, many threats of violence and death. They are rabidly hated in France by the Black Pampers and other ANTIFA-type larpers, as well as actual violent radicals. 46 activists were arrested recently outside a venue where they were due to speak and news reports claimed the protesters had concealed weapons. Another of their events had to take place in the dark after an explosion cut the power to the building.
In anticipation of their visit to Brussels, activists shared among themselves an aritcle from the militant website Paris Luttes that asserted the merits of using violence against the women. It even justified their murder. The event was cancelled soon after, and the women appeared on French morning radio looking absolutely destroyed by the stress of the threats. It moved me to tears to hear Moutot’s once-confident quivering voice talking about how her life has been turned upside down since she broke ranks with the professional man-pandering feminists who now want her dead.
There has been no media coverage whatsoever of the story of the conference cancellation. I contacted RTBF and asked them if they were planning on covering it. Nothing. The organiser of the cancelled conference, Fadila Maaroufi told me the press never cover their free speech events. That’s just not a popular cause, anymore.
The Paris Luttes article is incitement to violence in black and white, whereas the Cactus skit was just an incitement to laugh. It’s clear which one the authoritarians consider to be more dangerous. Mockery is my way of demonstrating that I am not going along with any of this. I will not celebrate women who self-harm at an industrial scale, or the experimentation on the bodies and brains of sad kids, or men who look like Anjelica Huston in the Witches getting erections from pissing next to little girls in public cubicles.
Is that hate? Is it incitement to hate? I guess I’m about to find out.
Wow! Such a comprehensive recounting of Belgium's "first big trans tantrum"! Thank you! The Belgium public seems to remain tethered to reality.
Superb article, everyone should read it.
I lived in France then Holland through the 90’s and I have the feeling there’s going to be a very unpleasant explosion taking a lot of trans to a place they didn’t want to go in public, being called out, harassed and not left alone.
All movements go through cycles. This one manages to keep nobody in reserve to provide support as they offend all women simultaneously, and all men who respect women, and all people who enjoy humor which may not be gentle to a particular group.
Dutch and French adults don’t really give a shit about feelings, an observation I have from my experience living there. There is no instinct to not offend which Americans have, no being nice.
There is an instinct to fairness.
This will be trans downfall in the region.
Again, superb writing.