A few months ago I wrote a blog post which, as they do, went to the top of Hacker News. When this happens, I tend to ignore the commentary for my own sanity, but with that recent post, there was one observation a few people made which made me quite happy.

It pertained to the header image I chose for the post, which was this:

That is an arty crop of a photo I took of the statue of Alan Turing, in Sackville Gardens in Manchester, which I visit whenever I am passing by.

By now I would hope that everyone knows Alan Turing’s story. Not the part about technology and computing. The part where his body and mind were slowly destroyed through chemical castration, which was the state-sanctioned punishment for his homosexuality. The drug in question was known as Stilbestrol. As Wikipedia puts it:

Turing was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation. His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido, known as “chemical castration“. He accepted the option of injections of what was then called stilboestrol (now known as diethylstilbestrol or DES), a synthetic oestrogen; this feminization of his body was continued for the course of one year. The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused breast tissue to form.

We all know how that ultimately ended for him.

There is another aspect to his story which very few people know. But they should, because there is nothing new under the sun.

Back in the good old days, meaning those decades which boomers want to go back to and which their preferred newspapers think were stolen from them, no fewer than 60,000 British women were the victims of forced adoption. The “good old days” can be a very sick form of nostalgia.

From the 1950s to as late as the 1980s, no fewer than 60,000 women had their newborns forcibly taken from them by the state, at birth, with most never even allowed to hold their babies once, as punishment for giving birth outside wedlock.

As one of them said: “we were vulnerable, bullied, and told if we loved our babies, we’d give them up.”

Those babies were put up for adoption and to this day, unless they have actively found that out and sought out their birth mothers, they have no clue that they were stolen at birth.

Scotland’s Sunday Post newspaper has done outstanding coverage on this, and bravely supported those mothers’ campaign to receive a formal apology from the state for what was done to them.

You’ve probably heard something about this story. But what you don’t know is why their campaigning was a race against time.

Within minutes of giving birth, your body is ready for the first feed, and that is what happens. Trust me, it is both surreal and wonderful to be feeding a tiny human who didn’t exist a few minutes ago as if you had been doing it for years, because it is as natural a biological process as breathing.

Unless of course you’re an unwed mother in the good old days, which means the state has officially deemed you a little harlot, which means you don’t even get that feed, the first one or any one. But your postnatal body is still making milk all the same, and if that milk does not get expressed, it feels as if your front is being pressed against a wall.

So what the state did to these little harlots was give them a dose of pills to dry up their milk. They did not tell the women what the pills were. They just forced them down their throats, that’s it, be a good little girl and swallow, in those critical hours after childbirth when a woman is the most emotionally vulnerable she will ever be in her life.

Guess what those pills were? Stilbestrol.

The same drug which was used to chemically castrate Alan Turing, to punish him for being gay, was forcibly administered to 60,000 women within hours after childbirth, to punish them for being little whores.

Remember what it did to Alan?

Here’s what it did to those women, as per the Sunday Post:

Diethylstilbestrol – known as DES and Stilbestrol, Stilboestrol and Desplex in the UK – has been linked to a number of breast and vaginal cancers, gynaecological abnormalities and infertility in the children and grandchildren of women given the pills. And the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommends those exposed to the drug have annual colposcopic examinations in specialist centres. But now medical ­authorities admit there is no way of tracking down women given the drug, or their children.

We now know that the drug’s horrific side effects were known as early as 1938, well before the state decided it was a rather cracking punishment for homosexuals, but rather than those side effects being seen as a reason to stop administering it, they were seen as a reason to expand its use. They knew. They always knew.

We now also know that the drug was so horrific that those women’s subsequent children, and even their grandchildren, are suffering from life-altering health issues. That, as it turns out, is how many people have found out that they had an older sibling whom their mother never mentioned: because they are being treated for cancers which are so aggressive that a family investigation proved necessary.

Oh, and guess what else it caused in those womens’ subsequent families?

gender issues for our children and grandchildren

There are a lot of right-wing bigots blaming everything from social media to the BBC for “turning people trans”, but you know what actually caused at least some of it? Stilbestrol, as forcibly issued by the state sexuality police. But it’s funny how, when it comes to trans people, nobody points a finger at the state sexuality police: in fact, they want to become them. It sells papers, I guess.

Still. One paper got them justice. All credit to those mothers who bravely came forward, all those years later, to reclaim their lost dignity before the chemical torture induced by the Stilbestrol killed them.

Thus we come to what I call the second Turing test. Anyone who has ever sat down on the bench across from his statue and looked him in the eye knows this already, because this is why the bench is there: it’s to remind you of that second test. After all, Alan’s statue isn’t a dusty memorial, but a living reminder.

Everything which is administered as a moral punishment for one vulnerable group is being tested for rollout on another group.

Whether that is medication or a policy or a regulation or a technology or some unholy combination of all four.

Because let me tell you, as someone who spends seven days a week monitoring what is happening in real-time by both states and private entities working together to erase a century of human progress, I am seeing the ground being laid for atrocities I don’t yet know how to describe. It always starts with one group of “others” who are transgressing some warped concept of virtue and morality. It never ends with them.

As authoritarianism grows by the day and “others” are being othered, and when you see a group being compelled, regardless of what form the coercion takes or who is doing the coercion, to shut up and take the punishment they deserve, you need to consider what that coercion is the practice run for, and for whom.

Go sit down with Alan for a chat. He’s there to remind you that he may be long gone but that everything which was in front of him is now in front of you.

Remember that.