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We need to fight the misinformation campaign waged by the trans lobby

Several key medical journals, including JAMA, have identified the profound harms caused by medical and health misinformation. They assert that health misinformation on social media disproportionately harms female adolescents, racial and ethnic minority youth, LGBQT+ youth, and other marginalized groups. The recent conference of the American Psychological Association in Seattle, USA, offered a session titled Safeguarding public health in the misinformation era. The abstract stated: There’s been a backlash against the very concept of misinformation. Independent researchers who study how to halt it are under attack by activists and advocacy groups. Many social media platforms are scaling back their content moderation programs. Institutions working to stop misinformation and improve health communication are facing lawsuits to halt their work. Health misinformation … is a global harm with drastic consequences, like disrupting population health efforts and increasing health inequities. The most recent egregious example of misinformation occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic during which a strident diaspora of lay people and medical practitioners decried vaccinations and recommended ineffective and dangerous treatments like ivermectin to treat the virus. In a commendable display of assertion and common sense, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) revoked certification for two physicians who fronted an organization that promoted ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 and that offered treatments for people who had suffered “vaccine injury.” The physicians challenged the decision on the grounds that it was an attack on freedom of speech but they lost their appeal, leaving them limited to no avenues for re-certification. ABIM spokesperson said, “There are limits to what you can do.” This is apparently not the case when it comes to gender identification and medicalized gender treatments for minors. In this realm, the misinformers have been granted immunity to do harm using treatments that have no sound evidence base. I have reached this conclusion after reading a paper published last year and endorsed by the National Institute of Health, Current Opinion in Paediatrics: Medical treatments for GD have a positive effect on mental health, suicidality, psychosocial functioning, and body satisfaction…Political targeting and legal interference into social inclusion for TGD (transgender and gender dysphoric youth) and medical treatments for GD are rooted in scientific misinformation and have negative impacts on their wellbeing. Almost every word in this statement is demonstrably false. Reviews in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, many systematic reviews, amicae briefs in various states of the USA, including a recent one from Alabama, and the Cass review all beg to differ. I have recently written about the shameful organization, WPATH, whose muddled, misguided misinformation about “gender affirming care” is a scourge on a generation of children, adolescents and their families. Yet the very organization and the journal that elsewhere recognizes the harms of misinformation, JAMA, wrote an endorsement of the WPATH guidelines, citing its expanding evidence base of mostly flawed and rejected studies! NSW equality legislation Against this background of misinformation about the nature of sex and gender, in Australia, Alex Greenwich, independent state MP, and the Greens party in the state of New South Wales are attempting to push through the Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023. The primary objective of the Bill is “to provide full equality for LGBTIQA+ communities in New South Wales by amending various Acts to address discrimination and promote inclusivity.” This Bill affects no fewer than 20 other pieces of legislation. This proposed legislation creates disturbing cognitive dissonance and downright confusion. Below are a few of the proposed amendments consequent to the passing of this Bill. Amendment of Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 No 48: Schedule 1[3]–[5] provides that for the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 a transgender person is a person who lives as a member of another sex. This is an extraordinary definitional assertion of how to define a transgender person, using the terms “another sex” with no mention of “gender identity” that is purportedly the foundational definitional identifier. Amendment of Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 No 103 Schedule 15[9]: provides that a strip search must not be conducted in the presence or view of a person who is a different sex to the person being searched, except for a parent, guardian or personal representative of the person being searched, or a medical practitioner, with the consent of the person being searched. Again, sex is asserted to be primary. Will the legislation allow for a transman (biological woman) to strip search a transwoman (biological male)? Or a cisman to strip search a transman? Amendment to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1995. Proposed changes will allow individuals to alter the record of their sex. But it seems that the Bill cannot explain itself without reference to the prohibited binary or the conflation of sex with gender/gender identity. An example of the incomprehensibility of the text of this Bill is contained in Schedule 14. “… a word or expression that indicates one or more particular genders is taken to include every other gender. A word or expression that indicates a person’s relationship with another person by reference to the person’s gender is taken to include any person in the same relationship, regardless of gender. A word or expression that indicates one or more physical or body attributes or body capacity by reference to a particular gender are taken to be a reference to every person with the physical or body attribute, regardless of gender.” In general, the language throughout the Bill is inconsistent, referring in various places to “recognised transgender person” (Section 38B), “another sex” (s.38A), “acknowledgement of sex” (Schedule 2), “male and female” and “opposite sex” (s.23 & s.34A), “former sex” and “different sex” [s. 38B(1)(c)]. Bizarrely, there is no mention of gender identity, or those citizens who choose to identify as non-binary, queer, genderqueer, genderfluid, or agender. Are these descriptors referring to different sexes? Does this proposed legislation even address these identification categories? Is it sufficient in law to identify as a sex other than one’s anatomical sex if that person has not undergone any medicalized sex altering interventions? On what hospital wards do we place non-binary persons or self ID trans females who remain fully male bodied? This section of the proposed legislation appears to require only a “recognition certificate” to permit an individual to be treated as if s/he were of the sex stated in the recognition certificate. Further, there are no provisions in the Bill for children under the age of 18. Lower age limits are not even mentioned. How could the political leaders of a nation draft such a nonsensical Bill? As concluded in the Genspect submission in relation to this Bill: …the amendments are profoundly anti-women and anti-parent and present a danger to children. Legal recognition of a supposed change of sex is a powerful psychological message for a gender questioning child that will lock them into a pathway of lifelong medical treatment and health harms. Allowing a change of “sex” on a birth certificate (including to categories that are not sexes) falsifies data, perpetuates a myth that sex change is indeed possible, and does not encourage an individual [to develop] a healthy acceptance of [his/her] body.  

Dianna Kenny

September 09, 2024

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Nashville shooter journal released. No thanks to Federal Bureau of Interference

Increasingly it seems that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is where investigations go to die. Whether on Jeffrey Epstein, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the J6 pipe bombs, or the assassination attempt on presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, the FBI has a pattern of putting its findings under lock and key and releasing precious little information to the public. Thanks to an incurious corporate media, it has been left to the indepenent press to ask questions, blow whistles and connect dots that others refuse to, on what should be some of the biggest news stories in 21st-century America. The 2023 Nashville school shooting is a case that readily springs to mind. This week, the story was blown wide open, no thanks to the Federal Bureau of Interference, which has colluded with local law enforcement to keep the American public in the dark on this tragic event. On Tuesday, independent online news site The Tennessee Star published 90 more leaked pages of the Nashville shooter’s “manifesto”, putting to rest any lingering doubts about the ideology that inspired her crazed murder spree. Twenty-eight-year-old woman Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who infamously identified as a transgender man named Aidan, was hopped up on a toxic brew of radical gender ideology, critical race theory and Christophobia in the days and years before she killed three nine-year-old students and three staff members at Covenant School. It was Tennessee’s deadliest mass shooting. As previously reported at Mercator, officers from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department risked their careers to leak damning evidence of Hale’s woke worldview to conservative commentators Steven Crowder and Matt Walsh. The Tennessee Star has likewise received multiple leaks and has published dozens of articles on the subject. The words “Darkness,” “Everything Hurts,” and “Religion won’t save” are found scrawled across the first page of Hale’s most recently leaked journal. “Why does my brain not work right?” she wrote. “Cause I was born wrong!!!” As summarised by Not the Bee, whose article provides abundant screenshots of the latest leak: The shooter was obsessed with the idea of being “brown” and being a boy. She drew a graphic picture on one page of two figures having sexual intercourse and expressed her desire to have a penis: “too bad I am a sad boy born w/ a puny vagina.” The shooter wrote that “brown love is the most beautiful” and “brown girls have the nicest skin.” She also wrote the phrase “white nothingness” on multiple pages, along with expressing guilt about her “white privilege”. Among the shooter’s many other musings, as featured in the latest release: “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of.” “I am the most unhappy boy alive.” “I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: Boy’s body/male gender.” “If God won’t give me a boy body in heaven then Jesus is a f*ggot.” “No brown girls, no love.” The Tennessee Star has clarified that the just-published 90-page journal represents only a fraction of all the material seized by law enforcement: MNPD officers, accompanied by agents from the FBI and the ATF, seized 20 additional journals written by Hale between 2007 and 2022 at the Nashville residence she shared with her parents during a legally authorized search on the afternoon of March 27, 2023. Those journals are said to contain about 1,000 pages. In addition, numerous videos, a suicide note, and duplicate thumb drives containing information she may have wanted police to find were seized that afternoon. The outlet has further explained that, while Hale’s collective writings were originally labelled a “manifesto” by MNPD Police Chief John Drake, they are “better understood as a collection of writings in which Hale sporadically wrote her thoughts in the months and years preceding her devastating attack”.  

Kurt Mahlburg

September 06, 2024

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Pope Francis likes countries like Indonesia where there are none of those childless cat ladies

Is Pope Francis a plagiarist? No sooner had he arrived in Indonesia on his marathon trip, he called out JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies”. Well, not those precise words, but sitting next to President Joko Widodo in Jakarta, he praised Indonesia’s relatively high birth rate. "Keep it up, you're an example for everyone, for all the countries that maybe, and this might sound funny, (where) these families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child," he said. Republican Veep hopeful Vance has been pilloried in the American media for his mockery of voluntary childlessness, but he said more or less what Pope Francis said. And to see the wisdom of encouraging large families, take a look at Indonesia’s greying neighbours. They are steeling themselves for demographic disaster. Perhaps the notion of luxuriating in a life without kids works in Brooklyn or Hollywood or in the Beltway. There’s more leisure to check out the restaurants; to go on overseas holidays; to relax in wellness spas. There’s more money for buying shoes and health insurance. There’s no hassle about wiping noses and changing nappies (until you're 70+) . America is a country that is old but rich. But for Indonesia and its neighbours, shrinking families mean that they will become old before they get rich. This is happening across Asia – even in Indonesia, where the birth rate has fallen steadily from about 5.6 in 1960 to 2.2 in 2022. Here’s The Economist on Thailand: In 2021 the share of Thais aged 65 or over hit 14%, a threshold that is often used to define an aged society. Soon Thailand will, like Japan, South Korea and most Western countries, see a dwindling supply of workers and, without extraordinary measures, flagging productivity and growth. Yet unlike Japan and the rest, Thailand, with a GDP per person of just $7,000 in 2021, is not a developed country. It has got old before it has got rich. When Japan had a similar portion of oldies, it was roughly five times richer than Thailand is today. Other countries which are getting old before they grow rich include China, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Elderly people in these societies must look upon their twilight years with foreboding. Those who have no children to support them will have to depend on charity or government support.

Michael Cook

September 05, 2024

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Why aren’t governments tackling the epidemic of sexual abuse in America’s public schools?

This week the Washington Post ran a long feature about a school police officer in South Carolina who has been accused of several sexual assaults on high school girls. It turns out that more than 200 police officers have been charged with child sexual abuse between 2005 and 2022. These officers are patrolling schools to prevent mass shootings. But a few bad apples amongst them have been sexual predators. “The Justice Department and many law enforcement agencies and school systems have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out abusive cops,” the Post claims. The tragic thing is that these allegations come as no surprise. It is just the latest in a steady trickle of stories in the media about sexual abuse in American public schools. No doubt the problem is similar in other countries. The difference is that collecting meaningful information about abuse in schools is far more difficult in the US because of its sheer size and the number of jurisdictions – 50 states plus the District of Columbia and other territories, divided into more than 13,000 school districts. Three articles by journalist James Varney for RealClearInvestigations highlight a massive problem which emerges from time to time but has never been comprehensively studied. He writes: “For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.” Lack of data is a consistent problem which seems almost insurmountable. Last year a journalist for Business Insider dug into the issue after he discovered that the public high school which had attended in southern California had become “a stalking ground for child predators”. He concluded that “shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students”. How many victims? How many children have been abused in American schools? It’s impossible to put a number on it. A tally of newspaper reports would leave out the teachers and school employees who have been quietly dismissed or who are never reported. However, Varney writes that “Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.” Millions? This certainly dwarfs the abuse problem in the Catholic Church, which has been pilloried for shielding abusive clergy from the law.  The key study of the prevalence of sexual abuse in public schools is 20 years old and controversial, but it raises questions which remain unanswered.   In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft, of Hofstra University, was commissioned by the US Department of Education to analyse the extent of sexual abuse in public schools. She relied upon surveys by the data collected for American Association of University Women. Her methodology is not above criticism, but what she found is still being used as a reference point. And it is deeply disturbing. Shakeshaft found that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 reported unwanted sexual misconduct by school employees. “Misconduct” covered a wide range of behaviours, from jokes to touching to leering to rape. If that percentage is correct, she calculated that “more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade”. Around the same time, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released the results of an independent study of abuse by clergy. The John Jay Report found that between 1950 and 2002, 10,667 people made allegations that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors. “So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft said in an interview with Education Week in 2004. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” Presumably she meant the number of victims, not the rate of offending. The cover-up Numerous reports have declared that the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse has been worse than the crime itself. The UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, published in 2022, is one amongst many. It found that: “The protection of personal and institutional reputations above the protection of children was a frequent institutional reaction. Statutory agencies were not informed, perpetrators were ‘moved on’ and there were failures by those in authority to thoroughly investigate allegations. Records about child sexual abuse allegations were not kept.” When a grand jury released a report on sexual abuse in the state of Pennsylvania in 2018, it said that the Catholic Church had developed “a playbook for concealing the truth”. That report was badly flawed, as Mercator pointed out at the time, but the metaphor is a useful one. American public schools are using that playbook. Amongst educators, it’s called “passing the trash” – abusers are quietly dismissed and allowed to move to another school district where they abuse again. Billie-Jo Grant, of California Poly State University, an expert on school abuse, told Varney that the federal Department of Education (DOE) “does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students. DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers' unions and administrators from passing the trash. DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide.” “Passing the trash” is “a shockingly frequent phenomenon in America’s public schools,” according to a 2023 study by the Defense of Freedom Institute. It also cites research by Billie-Jo Grant in which she found that abusive teachers will be passed to three different school districts before they are fired or charged by police and can have as many as 73 victims. There are laws on the books to ban this practice, but they are ineffective. Activists are lobbying for model legislation called the SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation) Act. Progress has been slow; only a handful of states have passed it.  

Michael Cook

September 04, 2024

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Why did Zuckerberg choose now to confess?

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.  On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.  And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so. This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.  In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.  In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree… I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again. A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns.  After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through, but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.  Staggering consequences The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.  The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle.  Again, in my entire career of closely following internet traffic patterns, I had never seen anything like this.  Facebook as an information source offers power like we’ve never seen before, especially because so many people, especially among the voting public, believe that the information they are seeing is from their friends and family and sources they trust. The experience of Facebook and other platforms framed the reality that people believed existed outside of themselves.  Every dissident, and every normal person who had some sense that something odd was going on, was made to feel like some sort of crazy cretin who held nutty and probably dangerous views that were completely out of touch with the mainstream.  What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate.  We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this.  People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced!  During two election cycles, the Covid response was not really in play as a public controversy. This helps account for why. It also means that any candidate who attempted to make this an issue was automatically downgraded in terms of reach. How many candidates are we talking about here? Considering all the US elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we are talking about several thousand at least. In every case, the candidate who was speaking out about the most egregious attacks on liberty came to be effectively silenced. A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up. Of course, Dr Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election.  You can listen to Jensen’s account here:  IMPOTENT PAWNS - Joe Biden conspired with Facebook to reduce Americans to impotent pawns! pic.twitter.com/k5SxQknNRL — Scott Jensen (@drscottjensen) August 27, 2024 Consider how many other elections were affected. It’s astonishing to think of the implications of this. It means that quite possibly an entire generation of elected leaders in this country was not legitimately elected, if by legitimate we mean a well-informed public that is given a choice concerning the issues that affect their lives. Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilisation and set the path of history on a dark course. And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies. When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.

Jeffrey Tucker

September 04, 2024

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This is not fake news: US Surgeon General warns that parenting is a health hazard

The US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, just issued an official advisory warning against the stressful nature of parenting and labelling it “an urgent public health issue.” The document says Surgeon General Advisories “require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” So, according to the Surgeon General, what exactly is the urgent issue and what immediate actions should be taken to rescue parents from the stress of raising their own children? In short, the advisory cites data showing that parents experience more stress than non-parents and that sometimes, some parents’ stress levels are so high they cannot function. It says parental stress can negatively affect children. It says major sources of parental stress include “financial strain and economic instability, time demands, concerns over children's health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulty managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures.” All true. I’m a mom of five children, and I birthed four of them within a time span of roughly five years. 12 years later, I had a baby in my 40s. We had diapers and dating going on at the same time. I’m no stranger to stress. I have known financial strain, the instability of layoffs, bone-deep fatigue, and so much more. As for not being able to function, that depends on your definition of the word “function”. (Does inventing games where I lay motionless on the bed while my kids pile heaps of clean laundry on top of me count as “functioning”?) Parenting has beat the stuffing right out of me at times. But through all these years, I never saw my children as a threat to my mental health. Children are a danger to their parents This Surgeon General’s Advisory is the first time I recall seeing an official government entity framing children as a clear and present danger to their parents. It reminds me of radical feminist Sophie Lewis’ assertion that babies in utero commit “fetal violence” toward their mothers by introducing health threats to and demanding nourishment from their unfortunate maternal hosts. Likewise, Suzanne Sadedin says an unborn baby employs “manipulation, blackmail, and violence” against its mother while floating in the womb and usurping whatever sustenance it can suck from her body. Collectivism is always the answer What does the Surgeon General say should be done about this assault on parents’ health? The “We Can Take Action” section of the advisory starts with this preface: “[W]hile parents and caregivers may have the primary responsibility for raising children… [it] is a collective responsibility.” It then gives a laundry list of collectivist solutions including the following: “Bolster support for childcare financial assistance programs such as childcare subsidies and child income tax credits; universal preschool; early childhood education programs.” “Establish a national paid family and medical leave program.” Prioritise “poverty reduction, prevention of adverse childhood experiences… and improve access to healthy food and affordable housing.” “Strengthen public and private insurance coverage of mental health care.” Expand workplace policies, including “paid parental, medical, and sick leave” and “access to childcare (in the community or on-site)”. Unsurprisingly, most of the solutions call for more government intervention and lots more childcare. (Sorry, but universal preschool has not been shown to improve the situation of the majority of children or their parents.) We will never fix the problem by encouraging less family unity and more government “help” that comes at the cost of higher taxes.

Kimberly Ells

September 04, 2024

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Southeast Asia sea gypsies face cultural eradication

Thirteen-year-old Osama, a member of the Philippine Bajau ethnic group, proudly follows his father, Jaji, out to sea to dive for fish. With his makeshift goggles, he plunges into the water, trying to keep up with his father, who sinks like a stone to the bottom, where he expertly shoots a fish with a homemade spear gun. On these ocean outings, Osama hones his swimming and diving skills, aspiring to one day provide for his family as his father does. His mother and younger brother watch with pride as Osama’s breath-holding and deep-diving abilities improve. Despite being only five years old, Osama’s younger brother already knows how to climb out onto the arm of the boat to grab the fish as their father surfaces. In the evening, the family returns to their shack on stilts, perched over the tide pool. On days when they don't fish, Osama attends a one-room school in the maze of wooden shacks connected by gangplanks that make up the Bajau community on Palawan Island, Philippines. About fifty students of varying ages share the single classroom, with attendance often spotty as many miss school to accompany their families on fishing trips. The weather forecast predicts rain for the next day, so school attendance is expected to be high. Roughly 500 miles away on Surin Island in Thailand, 25 Moken sea nomad children are running from their one-room school, stripping off their uniforms, and jumping into the sea. Their teacher explains that this happens several hours a day, and he has learned to teach according to the schedule of the children and the tides, as these children also need to help their fathers catch fish. Conundrum Governments worldwide have yet to find an ideal solution for their indigenous, aboriginal, nomadic, and minority communities. Excluding these groups from the modern economy and denying their children access to education is a humanitarian failing. However, taking children away for education is equally problematic, as it deprives them of the skills and desire to maintain their traditional way of life. Forcing nomads into permanent dwellings to provide them with government services risks undermining their culture, just as offering monthly welfare checks would. Transitioning seafaring people to low-level labour jobs on land is not an improvement and would similarly erode their cultural identity. Even teaching children to read and write the national language could be the first step toward erasing their traditional culture. As the debate on how to address the needs of traditional communities continues, the encroachment of the modern world into their historical territories threatens to make their traditional livelihoods impossible within a few years, leading to the loss of their culture. This is the situation facing Southeast Asia's sea-dwelling minorities. For thousands of years, Southeast Asia's sea nomads — often called "sea gypsies" — have navigated the waters between Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. This diverse group, comprising roughly one million maritime hunter-gatherers from various ethnicities, including the Salons, Moken, Orang Laut, Bajau, Sama-Bajau, and Duano, live, forage, and fish off the coasts of islands such as Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and the Sulu Archipelago. They face growing threats from overfishing, pollution, tourism, scuba diving, and government policies that disregard their culture. As modernisation and environmental degradation encroach on the marine environment, the unique cultures and way of life of these sea nomad communities are increasingly at risk. Diverse cultures The Salons are one of Burma's smallest ethnic minorities. They travel the country’s Mergui Archipelago along the southern coast and range as far as the Philippines, Borneo, and Thailand. Known for spending most of their time on boats called kabang, they live offshore, fishing for sustenance and rarely interacting with land dwellers. The names "Salon", "Saloun", "Salone", "Salum", and "Salong" are all used by the Burmese junta to describe this group, though they call themselves the Moken. In Burma, the name "Saloun" appears in official documents, while "Moken" is used in official Thai records to distinguish the Thai Moken from the Burmese Moken. Like all ethnic minorities in Burma, the Salong suffer from the long-running war, but unlike others, they have never formed their own government, institutions, or resistance army. The Thai Moken spend most of their lives on thatch-roofed wooden boats, primarily in Myanmar's Mergui Archipelago and along Thailand's Andaman Sea coast. Their language, of Austronesian origin, includes many Malay words and significant vocabulary borrowed from Thai. Traditionally nomadic, the Moken live on their kabang boats during the dry season and move to land during the monsoon. They rely on the sea for their livelihood, practising sustainable fishing and gathering. The Moken have a rich oral tradition, passing down stories and myths through generations. As animists, their beliefs centre around spirits of the sea and land. Their unique boat-building techniques reflect their belief systems, folklore, and spiritual symbolism. Orang Laut are found in the Riau Archipelago and other parts of Indonesia, as well as in Malaysia and Singapore. Historically maritime nomads, many have now adopted a more sedentary lifestyle. Skilled fishermen and navigators, they once served as guides and defenders for the Malay Sultanates. The Orang Laut have a hierarchical social structure and a strong communal identity, practising a blend of animism and Islam with rituals tied to the sea. Their traditional knowledge encompasses boat building, fishing techniques, and navigation.

Antonio Graceffo

September 03, 2024

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