'Public executions' tweet about gender-affirming care

Jake Shields @jakeshieldsajj started the evening with a bad tweet:

Then, in the late night / early morning hours, he tweeted:

It seems that Twitter got rid of this tweet, but the Wayback Machine preserved it.

Twitter did not shut down the entire account, so the guy continued to tweet bad things. Here's something he said about a trans woman athlete. It's illogical and in bad faith (which I'll point out first), but that's not my ultimate point, so bear with me.

He notes a trans woman's placement in a race with 20,000 women. The trans woman didn't quite make the top 6,000. She's in the top third of runners. In this tweet, she's being shamed for not taking top place and treated as a cheater for not placing last either. In this misogynist's tweeter's mind, the only valid reason for a trans woman to compete against cis women is to prove that "men" or "male" bodies are superior. He can't just let her run a race with 20,000 women just because she's a woman too and let her run at an extremely ordinary pace alongside all the other women.

Again, the illogic and bad faith is not ultimately what I want to point out there. What's more important to me right now is that the "trans sports" trope is used by the same people who are calling for public executions. So everyone needs to think about that the next time they see a "trans sports" meme. What is that meme actually signaling, please?

Regarding the original tweet about public execution: Twitter is blocking criticism of it.

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See also: "Trans Fighter Alana McLaughlin Responds To Jake Shields’ Calls For Execution Of Transgender Allies" Jake Shields has once again shared his controversial and unwanted opinions on trans rights, suggesting allies of the community should face public execution, by Craig Pekios, Last updated on April 27, 2023. This article links to a tweet by Alana McLaughlin commenting that this was not Jake Shields's only recent "openly genocidal tweet."

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Result of platforms encouraging this behavior:

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Regarding the picture of Radcliffe & Darke in the tweet above, please see: "One person in a couple is always taller than the other". It's a 5-minute read on Medium.

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By the way: This guy may have raised the theme of "public executions" because of this:

"Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed a bill that will allow juries to impose the death sentence even if all 12 jurors do not agree.

He is also likely to approve a second bill passed by the lawmakers on Tuesday that would make sexual battery of a child under age 12 a death penalty offense.

The governor, who is rumored to be considering a presidential run, has publicly pushed for both bills -- legislation that opponents say violates the U.S. Constitution and could lead to wrongful executions."

— "Gov. DeSantis signs controversial death penalty legislation: Critics say these bills could lead to wrongful executions." Miles Cohen. ABC News. April 20, 2023.

Before that:

"Pastor Mark Burns made headlines in 2022 for calling for the return of the House Un-American Activities Committee to arrest and execute LGBTQ+ and transgender allies and individuals whom he accuses of "grooming." In a video released after his appearance on The Stew Peters Show, Burns stated, 'The LGBT, transgender grooming of our children's minds is a national security threat because it is ultimately designed to destabilize the republic we call the United States of America. That's why, whenever I'm elected, I want to start holding people accountable for treason to the Constitution. I'm going to push to reenact HUAC... We need to hold people accountable for treason, start having some public hearings, and begin executing those who are found guilty of treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United States of America...'"
— Trump Endorses Pastor Who Calls For LGBTQ+, Transgender Executions: On Monday, former President Donald Trump endorsed Mark Burns for South Carolina's 3rd Congressional District. The pastor has previously called for the execution of LGBTQ "indoctrinators." Erin Reed. April 3, 2024.

Also:

"Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, who previously alleged that Donald Trump once considered having a staffer “executed,” said Friday that former Attorney General Bill Barr has “danced” around the fact that this wasn’t a one-time incident.

“Kaitlan Collins … at CNN interviewed Bill Barr and asked about an anecdote I had shared about a meeting he and I were both in, in the Oval Office, where Trump straight-up said a staffer who leaked a story should be executed,” Griffin said on Mediaite’s “Press Club” podcast."

— Ex-Aide Says Trump Discussed 'Executing People' More Than Bill Barr Claims To Recall Alyssa Farah Griffin says the former attorney general "danced" around this fact during a recent interview on CNN. Marco Margaritoff, Huffpost, Jun 15, 2024

An abused boy is a tragic figure in M. A. McRae's novel 'Not a Man'

Shuki, a young eunuch, is repeatedly abused by men in the novel Not a Man. He and his fellow adolescents learn a good deal about sex as they grow up. Originally posted to Helium Network on May 13, 2014.

M. A. McRae's novel Not a Man is a sordid tale of a child sex slave. Written with a good amount of tenderness, the subject matter is nonetheless hard to take, especially with such a great quantity of words and repetitive anecdotes about abuse.

The premise

Not a Man is set in the modern world, probably in the mid-20th century, given the references to technology. The story opens in an Arab nation that is never named. Shuki, whose family is impoverished, is a 10-year-old sex slave to a wealthy man named Hassanel Daoud who is of English descent and was raised Arab according to his stepfather's culture. Hassanel often puts the boy in restraints and allows other men to have their way with him. The boy puts up with it because he knows his family needs the money and because he sees "Uncle Hass" as his caretaker.

Hassanel asks Shuki if he will consent to a "small operation" that he likens to a circumcision but does not explain any more fully; he bribes Shuki with the promise of gifts. Shuki is drugged and gagged as a doctor performs an illegal castration on a bed, cutting off his testicles and shortening his penis. Hassanel sentimentally retains the awful mementos of this procedure, and ever after, he takes pride in the idea that Shuki consented to this for him. Shuki, however, knows that he did not consent, and he privately determines to run away at his first available opportunity. Subsequent events are set in England.

The story makes clear that the practice of castrating "bed-boys" used to be fairly common in this culture, but that it became illegal and is now so uncommon that people no longer immediately recognize a eunuch as such when they meet him on the street. It is only when Shuki's nudity is revealed — which he assiduously avoids — that others understand that he was castrated. One man tosses Shuki out of a holy area, telling him that he is an "affront to Allah."

Unrealistic and creepy

Shuki is taken advantage of by many men throughout the story. Hassanel's sex-mad teenage son, Hasquitri, upon learning that Shuki is a eunuch, appropriates his father's boy toy for his own purposes. A wealthy businessman pays him for sex. His friend makes love to him. Even Shuki's teachers and a doctor to whom he turns for help have inexplicable stirrings for him as soon as they learn that he is a eunuch, and some act impulsively on that attraction. It happens so many times that Shuki believes he can obtain British citizenship by "offer[ing] myself to the Home Secretary in return for what I want."

This seems unrealistic in its thorough creepiness. It feels as though Shuki is surrounded by psychopathic molesters wherever he goes in his native land and also when he travels to stay in England. If this were a true story, it would be a horrid confessional.

The story is repetitive and excessively long, having roughly the same word count as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", except that, in this case, the golden egg can never be retrieved.

What redeems the book is that Shuki evinces an unstereotypical personality. He often plays along with the perception that eunuchs are biddable while really he is waiting for the right moment to ask for more money and gifts or to run away. He loves horseback riding, and he cares about training himself as a fighter as well as working on his literacy.

Some time after his castration, he tells one of his bed partners that

"it's only recently I've realized what I really lost that day...A man and a woman, together, in a relationship that will probably last until one dies...that sort of love is inevitably based on a sexual relationship. It's not sex that I miss, but what sex can lead to."

It is a mature thing for a young teen to say, but then, he's had plenty of opportunity to contemplate it.

For those who wish to read it

The e-book can be purchased cheaply on Smashwords, a self-publishing platform. Not a Man was released in 2011. The two subsequent books in the Shuki series are The King's Favourite and To Love and To Protect. The Australian author, M. A. McRae, keeps a blog.

The story drags on inexcusably and could have been told in a quarter of the number of pages. As it is, there is no subplot, but just an endless series of rapes and mishaps, with rather limited insight from the teenage characters into their situation. The book is nonetheless a useful reminder of a sort of life that does not exist only in fiction; sex slavery has been a reality for children, castrated or not, throughout history and even today in the underground economy.

Image: A photograph of the Boy Scouts Monument of Letran students in the Philippines, taken by Ramon F Velasquez. © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Wikimedia Commons.