2/8 Walsh mentions Magnus Hirschfeld as his example of a Nazi scientist. Hirschfeld was actually Jewish and gay, and fled Germany on the Nazis taking power.
His sex research institute oversaw the first trans surgery, and he created the first ever LGBT advocacy organisations.
3/8 Walsh also mentions the Nazi scientist Erwin Gohrbandt, who helped perform the first transgender surgery.
But for this surgery Gohrbandt was assistant to a more prominent LGBT rights campaigner called Ludwig Levy-Lenz, who Walsh for some reason omits from his list.
4/8 Gayle Rubin is regarded as the founder of Queer Theory.
Rubin argued there exists a "sex-gender system" which regulates sexuality through the imposition of gender. She argued for dismantling "hierarchies of sexual value" and normalising sexual behaviour considered deviant.
5/8 Leslie Feinberg was a trans activist and communist whose work was influential in making her the first to argue for a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation”.
Her novel Stone Butch Blues was also helped to bring these issues to a global audience.
6/8 Jennifer Pritzker is a transgender member of the very influential Pritzker family.
They through their philanthropy have arguably done more to advance the trans movement than anyone.
7/8 Sirius XM founder Martine Rothblatt is one of the biggest philanthropists for trans issues.
Rothblatt wrote something of a manifesto on the trans movement in 2011: From Transgender to Transhuman, arguing transgenderism was part of a broader progression to a transhuman future
8/8 Finally, George Soros' Open Society Foundation has also been at the forefront of promoting trans acceptance.
The OSF has taken very progressive stances on issues like hormone treatment for minors, and is funding organisations advocating for trans equality across the world.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Some interesting research came out recently on the relationship between people with left-wing authoritarian politics, narcissism and psycopathy.
Interestingly, it seems to vindicate many earlier thinkers who theorised about the connection between leftism and pathology.
1/10 🧵
2/10 The research found a strong correlation between left authoritarianism and dark triad traits. It did not find greater altruism or commitment to social justice.
They conclude that for these people their left-wing views are simply a way for them to express power over others.
3/10 In 1906, a socialist named John Spargo wrote on the pathologies he believed had informed the Bolshevik Revolution.
Spargo had first hand contact with leading Bolsheviks. He was shocked by the ease with which they could hold contradictory views on issues like free speech.
It is difficult to overstate how much everything since 1945 is shaped by the spectre of the Holocaust.
The period since is the story of the religious underpinning of the West shifting from Christianity to a new foundation built on a single commandment: "never again":
1/25 🧵
2/25 Take Karl Popper, the intellectual godfather of neoliberalism:
Popper was compelled to write The Open Society and Its Enemies during WW2, motivated by rebuilding Western civilization as an open society to ensure those horrors would not be seen again
Karl Popper | The Philosopher of Modern Liberalism
Probably no political philosopher's vision of things more definitively won out in the latter half of the 20th century than Karl Popper.
Popper, not Marx, is the philosopher of the modern left. Let's find out why.
1/25 🧵
2/25 Karl Popper was born into a Viennese Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism.
Fearing his position as a Jew in post-Anschluss Austria, Popper moved to lecture in New Zealand in 1937. In 1946, he moved to the UK to join the London School of Economics
3/25 Popper's greatest contributions were to Philosophy of Science. At first influenced by positivism, he rejected their principle of verification, and popularised the principle of falsifiability - generalisations are only useful for science if they can in principle be falsified.
We have all heard the statement "we're all one race, the human race". Yet just a century ago the existence of distinct biological races was taken for granted. How did our perception of race change so drastically?
1/20 🧵
2/20 Racial anthropology emerged as a distinct field of study in the 19th century.
By the late 19th C. and into the early 20th C. more genetic determinist accounts of race had begun to dominate the academy, alongside the rise of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement.
3/20 By the 1920s and 30s, things began to move in a more environmentalist direction, largely due to the influential work of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students.