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| Pic: Rose Morelli (posed by model) |
I’m not going to say it all again. It’s all been said - and ignored - a million times. ‘We all know what a woman is, we all came out of one’ sums it up pretty nicely, and because we all know, we all also know perfectly well why women need safe spaces away from men. Demurring and ‘whatif-ing’ to the contrary is no more than idle, self-indulgent, and frankly, lazy armchair virtue-signalling from those with their greedy hands stuck in the woke cookie jar.
No, I want to discuss the themes that have repeatedly come up among those males who identify as women, some of whom I count as personal friends, and whose bravery comes not from dressing in a manner likely to draw side-eyes, if not actual violence from other males, but in owning the maleness they know in their bones they can really do nothing more than cosmetic about.
Whilst most of the time, they’re lovely company; funny, witty, sweet, and kind, this often gives way to a darkness with which I as a friend, and representing something I know must pain them (a woman of the variety they feel they were supposed to be), don’t feel qualified to help them. They talk of the pain of loneliness, of feeling like "freaks", of wishing they didn’t feel the way they do, wondering what they did to be afflicted with the feelings they have, and openly expressing the thought that they will only be free of it when they are dead.
It’s disturbing and distressing stuff.
Being afflicted with an othering and isolating condition myself (psychic ability), I’ve searched alternatives to see if there was anything I could find that might help.
One suggestion I proffered was that possibly these friends of mine might well have been women in another incarnation, but had left the earth plane with some unfinished business or something.
“I dunno, hen” shrugged one. “But I’m happy to entertain pretty much any notion if it will explain why I feel like this.”
From where I am sitting, to be trans, or rather to suffer from the medically acknowledged condition of Gender Dysphoria does not seem to me to be a happy state of affairs, and leads me to wonder if affirmation without question is actually as compassionate as those who signal it would have us believe.
It’s actually pretty patronising.
“There, there, dear.” “Of course you are.” “Anything you say…”
I don’t think that’s what people like my own circle of trans friends really need.
90% of the trans-identified males I know are homosexual, their condition condemning them never to find what Quentin Crisp wistfully referred to as "the great dark man", because he is only interested in the kind of female they know they can never be.
In a society obsessed with tidying people away into neat pairs, of course they're miserable.
It strikes me that Gender Dysphoria is right up there with Anorexia, Bulimia and other body dysmorphias that are lodged in the mind and classified as mental disorders, yet Theresa May proclaimed in the House of Commons that we must never call it such.
How helpful is that to people like my friends who desperately want to know why they feel as they do, and wish they did not? Saying what we think they want to hear isn't loving, isn't compassionate; it's about making ourselves feel good because we don't want to be disliked. Who but ourselves does that really serve?
As for woman as just some wafting, nebulous concept, in her controversial single ‘Hard Out Here’ of 2014, Lily Allen sang of the difficulty of life as a woman. The accompanying video action opens with Lily in an operating theatre having liposuction, and pleading that she's "had two babies" when her manager shakes his head, wondering how she could have let herself get into such a state.
The entire mid-section of the song screams of the brutal pressures under which women are placed in order to survive in a world that judges them more harshly and demands more of them than it does of men:
“If you're not a size six, and you're not good lookin', Well, you better be rich, or be real good at cookin'; you should prob'ly lose some weight, 'cos we can't see your bones…”
It's a catchy song. Anthemic. Scans brilliantly, hits hard, and with lyrics such as “inequality promises that it’s here to stay, always trust the injustice ‘cos it’s not going away” - it had me punching the air in agreement.
Yet the following year, in 2015, Lily supported Trans Awareness Week by posting a meme of a brain against a pair of knickers stating that “gender is up here” – pointing to the brain, and “not in here” pointing to the knickers.
If being a woman is just a state of mind, one wonders what would possess anyone to ‘choose’ to be the subject of the kind of life – and pressures – Lily sang about only the year before.
The answer is that genuine gender dysphorics don't choose it - but they would like to know why it chooses them.
For the others, the strident activists who demand we alter our language to suit them, abandon safeguarding, and take a knee for pronouns; to use the sort of from-the-hip language that Bedales-educated Lily might use herself to sound a bit more ‘Pimlico’, I would suggest that Lily knows perfectly well it’s all bollocks.
Bit more Pimlico, innit...?
So do my trans friends. It's time to give them some real love, compassion, and support. Not patting them on the head and lying to them might be a good start...
© Emmeline Wyndham - 2020.
