Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb, The Sex Wars

How I Became a Fascist

JosieHolford / March 4, 2025

My New Identity

I haven’t changed. The world around me has.

At first, my new identity came as a bit of a surprise, even though it crept up on me over months—perhaps even a couple of years.

After all, I campaigned for Labour before I could vote, steeped myself in Orwell as a teenager, developed a New Statesman and Guardian-reader identity in high school, and have never cast a ballot for a right-winger, Conservative or a Republican in my life.

Yet, overnight, I became a ‘far-right, Nazi bigot.’ What changed?

What happened to me?

Like the life cycle of a monarch butterfly, I have apparently undergone a radical transformation. I am now what is known as a political extremist—a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, and a generally bad person.

This required no effort on my part.

There was no road to Damascus moment, no great revelation, no personal epiphany. I was not inducted into a cult, nor was I abducted by aliens.

In fact, I don’t think I did anything at all—except continue to educate myself and hold on to simple lifelong understandings I had always taken as self-evident. (See sidebar left for the kind of heretical and outrageous beliefs I mean.)

These views seem like simple, obvious common sense. Until a decade ago, we all knew this. 

Then along came Gender Identity

Gender identity does not exist in the material world. It is a theory—a recently introduced belief system rooted in regressive sexual stereotypes. Like a highly contagious and deadly virus, it escaped from the ivory tower of academia to infect and/or affect us all. 

Its adoption has been both homophobic and misogynistic, as well as a danger to children. Like all such ideologies, it has no place in our schools, public institutions, policies, or laws.

This pernicious theory took hold among certain groups and has now become entrenched as dogma among anti-science identity-addled fantasists.

Kathleen Stock recently explained its effect on otherwise reasonable and intelligent people:

“Gender is an ineffable but highly potent substance known to paralyse even high-functioning minds upon first contact.”

This is how the ever-eloquent J.k.Rowling describes it in a rejoinder to an abusive troll:

The afflicted are impervious to reason, logic, and apparently self interest

Kara Dansky and others tried to warn the Democrats. she even wrote a book about it and sent them all a copy. Read So much for S 9

Consider the strange case of Senate Democrats. On Monday, March 3rd, they unanimously voted against advancing S.9—the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025, —which seeks to preserve Title IX protections for female athletes. Despite 79% of Americans, including 67% of Democratic voters, supporting such protections, every elected Democrat in the Senate opposed the bill.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made a particular spectacle of defying both reality and fairness, invoking the famous John McCain moment. He defied his party with a thumbs-down vote to save healthcare. She delivered a gratuitous, insulting slap-in-the-face thumbs-down to fairness for women and girls.

Whatever happened to the notion that politicians were problem solvers and seekers of reconciliation? This was pure – and unfathomable – posturing. Why? 

Don’t Democrats want to win elections? Do they plan to remain sidelined for another election cycle or two? Are they oblivious to the anger of their formerly loyal supporters? Why are they so deaf—even to the political reality of electoral survival? Is it a case of “Just say No” to whatever the GOP comes up with?  How does that help anyone? 

What explains this behavior?

Political Shifting Sands

Julie Burchill, writing about a virtue-signaling pop star, described a broader political shift: 

“When I was young, I disliked right-wingers because—among other things—they judged people through the prism of race, despised the proletariat, believed that men’s feelings were more important than women’s rights, and wanted to ban things they didn’t agree with. But this is now a good summing up of the contemporary left.”

I have always associated the left with social and cultural equality, egalitarianism, rights, freedom, legislative progress, and reform toward a fairer society.  I do not associate the left with a rejection of science. I do not associate the left with the idea that men can appropriate women’s sex-based rights, that children should be taught they may be born in the wrong body, or that their natural puberty should be halted and replaced with cross-sex hormones to better simulate the opposite sex. I do not associate the left with the notion that male offenders—including those guilty of violent sexual offenses—should be housed with women simply because they declare themselves women. There is nothing “left” about that. Quite the opposite.

I have not changed my mind. But the ground has shifted. Holding these same beliefs now places me outside the mainstream left at least on the issue of material reality, and sex-based and homosexual rights.  And according to detractors with whom I sometimes tangle online, these views make me a Nazi, a far-right extremist, a bigot, a white supremacist, a Christian nationalist, and a variety of ‘phobes. And—everyone’s favorite—it makes me a fascist.

Everyone is a Fascist

Look at the crowd gathered in the Iowa State Capitol  to protest the removal of “gender identity” as a protected characteristic from the Iowa Civil Rights Act last week.

Hundreds of trans activists filled the State Capitol building in protest, and shouted “F*ck you, fascists.”

Here are the words of Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor of Iowa explaining why she signed the Bill. 

Iowa Governor @KimReynoldsIA released an official statement on her decision to sign into law legislation that removes “gender identity” as a protected characteristic from the Iowa Civil Rights Act.

“It’s common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men… https://t.co/n7mXZLSd5y pic.twitter.com/gGRD5wPyPd

— Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) March 1, 2025

In what ways do you disagree with her?

Writing in 1944 Orwell said: Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’ 

What IS a Fascist?

This particular word—so often thrown around on social media—has become the insult of choice. It serves as shorthand for those unwilling to think critically about gender theory, as well as for those who can think but refuse to when faced with its consequences. In essence, it means: You are not in my bubble, and I will not listen to you. To disagree with me on this subject makes you a vile, hateful person, a monster who must be cast out, shunned, canceled, and condemned.

Ricky Gervais describes the dilemma here:

Welcome to the new fascism folks.

Fascism has become the go-to accusation for those who believe that anyone outside their ideological echo chamber is a dangerous heretic. It reduces disagreement to moral condemnation, branding opponents as beyond the pale rather than engaging with their arguments.

It’s a justification for destroying careers.

This is what happened to the Scottish poet Jenny Lindsay:

Street Thugs

Black Pampers – so-called because of their outfit and customary infantile behavior – on the streets of New York to protest women speaking.

For many, this word fascist also serves as a marker of authoritarian personality—the kind that silences dissent with noise, threats, and intimidation. the kind that likes strutting about in intimidating clothing issuing threats and abuse. 

If you’ve ever attended or observed transactivist demonstrations, this description may seem apt. They call themselves antifascists, but their tactics resemble the violent, self-righteous mobs that roamed the streets of Munich and Berlin during Hitler’s rise.

I’ve read about this, watched footage of it, and even witnessed it firsthand at a women’s rights rally in New York City in 2022.  The refusal to acknowledge the humanity or opinions of others is classic totalitarian behavior. The mob’s abuse and  simplistic slogans drowned out the voices of women who just wanted to tell their stories. Joseph Goebbels mastered this propaganda technique, and Orwell captured it perfectly in his novels:

  • War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
  • Four legs good, two legs bad.

Goebbels knew that for propaganda to be effective, it had to be simple and endlessly repeated. The same strategy is at play here.

  • Trans women are women.
  • Protect trans kids

And the more aware people become of the fact that these slogans represent absurd, unscientific ,and dangerous ideas the louder and more insistent the activists shout them.

George Orwell described it in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

The line, spoken by O’Brien, the Party’s grand inquisitor, describes totalitarian oppression, where dissent is crushed.

Nailing Jelly

Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

Seventy plus years earlier Goerge Orwell explained the problem. Orwell had, of course, volunteered to fight fascism as a soldier and he almost died because of it. He was that rare bird of any century – an independent thinker. So how did Orwell define fascism and what did he say its most reliable opponents?

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.” – George Orwell: ‘What is Fascism?’

So how do you define what you mean by fascist? Leaving aside our current elected leaders and their posturing and performing, what does fascist behavior look like to you? 

Now that I have become a fascist I no longer have confidence in the media outlets that I used to trust. The Guardian and the BBC began pushing harmful falsehoods about sex and gender while silencing dissent. Talented women journalists were forced out, many finding refuge at The Telegraph and other conservative outlets—not because they had changed, but because the so-called progressive media had become repressive and intolerant. This was the era of UK Stonewall law’s “No Debate”.  In the US, Admiral Levine said  “The science is settled”, and all and sundry from pop stars to politicians chanted the magic mantra:  “Trans women are women.” Women were told we must be inclusive. We must be kind. We must center the most marginalized and vulnerable. 

All the charities and advocacy groups that had championed women and gay people fell by the wayside. NOW, HRC, ACLU, GLAAD, PFLAG, GLSEN, NWLC, Stonewall, SPLC etc. all capitulated to the new revenue stream. 

Since becoming a fascist, I have also discovered that I am impervious to the insults and such appeals.  

How Odd

But how odd that “the most marginalized” were no longer the poor, the disadvantaged, disabled, and the socially excluded. Instead, they were heterosexual men of privilege who demanded to be seen as women—men who sought to break social boundaries while abrogating women’s sex-based rights and supporting wildly radical, unevidenced, medical treatments for a new species of children who were to be taught they could be born in the wrong body (but that this could be fixed). 

This ideological shift found its symbolic expression in the fractured version of the 1978 Rainbow flag—a flag that had once celebrated concepts, not identities. By injecting identities into it, the core values represented by the original six colors were fragmented. Now, that “Progress” is planted as a territorial marker across institutions and corporations, declaring their ideological capture by a belief system utterly lacking in evidence and that many gay people consider homophobic. 

I’m left wondering when this gender fever will finally break. When will the liberal media and the Democrats return to reality. When will they stop silencing debate, stop advocating for indefensible and entirely unevidenced, irreversible medical treatments for children, and start to recognize that rights cannot be reconciled by suppressing discussion or by expecting women to surrender their hard-earned protections?

The Open Goal

On this issue, Democrats handed the GOP an open goal. Republicans have eagerly taken advantage, positioning themselves – on this issue at least – as champions of common sense, fairness and women’s rights.  Until Democrats come to their senses, they risk condemning themselves to the electoral wilderness, leaving the GOP free to wield its wrecking ball against those who genuinely need compassion, dignity, healthcare, and support.

The left hasn’t lost its core values, but it has lost touch with reality. “No Debate” won’t hold. The Democrats need to listen to their own voters and the the liberal media must stop silencing dissent and start the conversations necessary to restore sanity.

Orwell reminds us, true fascism is always defeated when it resurfaces

“In the long run – it is important to remember that it is only in the long run – the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.

To say this is not to idealize the working class. …  the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreover they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worthwhile to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible.” – George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War

Does Orwell’s analysis still hold?

I’ve asked a lot of questions. Do you have any answers or thoughts? I would love to hear them.

Notes:

Ian Kershaw, (2016). To Hell and Back: Europe 1914–1949. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310992-1. P.226.
George Orwell, What is Fascism?’
First published: Tribune. — GB, London. — 1944.
‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.
Julie Burchill, Is Paloma Faith the most irritating pop star ever?
Kathleen Stock, “Gender cannot be a get-out-of-jail card for violent men: There’s a reason that some unstable narcissists choose to transition behind bars

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About JosieHolford

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1 thought on “How I Became a Fascist”

  1. This is brilliant. To your question, I am not confident Orwell’s analysis out of his experience of the Spanish Civil War still holds. I think instead it is more mixed. The “working class” is no more a monolith than any other grouping. I think anyone, no matter their economic or educational attainment, can be duped or can avoid it, can be a force for good or for ill. The bottom line is that we are in a frightful mess, and I see no ready way out—certainly not in our lifetime.

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