Physically fictional – yet socially real

Steven Tucker has a fine Mercator piece on impossible ideological illnesses


Pregnant with meaning: impossible ideological illnesses


Certain forms of mental illness can only exist within the bounds of certain specific cultural contexts.

It is quite clear that the current epidemic wave of transgenderism amongst Western youth is a kind of socially transmitted psychological disease, or ‘culture-bound syndrome’, for example, but one other even odder such culture-bound mental disorder in existence today is Puppy Pregnancy Syndrome (PPS).

Seemingly only known from a series of rural villages in West Bengal near Calcutta, and also in a few urban slums in New Delhi where such villagers have since migrated in search of work, the condition’s name is surely self-explanatory.


The whole piece is well worth reading as it delves into modern transgender politics, drawing compelling parallels with PPS and the absurd malleability of susceptible minds.


Mum's the word

We in the West may laugh at the gullibility of the PPS-believing villagers of West Bengal coming to unthinkingly accept the reality of physically impossible acts of gestation at the behest of self-interested figures of local social authority such as the bara ojhas. Yet we here in the developed world would seem to have acquired our own domestic equivalents recently, in the shape of media, political and medical authorities whose public propaganda in the name of trans-issues is also increasingly warping susceptible minds about the topic of pregnancy.