Trivial Pursuits!

by Les May

MY wife and I live a gendered life.  The rubric in my head which I work to is, ‘I’m a man, so when shit needs shovelling, I shovel it’.  Occasionally that crude way of expressing it is literally true, as on Christmas Day 2003 when the drain blocked downstream of us and sewage backed up on our garden path.  I wasn’t alone, the husbands from the other houses affected got stuck in and we eventually cleared the drain.  Our wives left us too it. Usually it just means my wife is better at ironing than I am and I’m better at hanging wallpaper, putting up shelves etc.

My wife wasn’t born good at ironing or folding newly ironed clothes; I wasn’t born with the ability to put up shelves or wield a shovel.  They are skills we learned.  Why did we learn them?  Because we were gently pushed in those directions by the society in which we lived and the expectations it placed upon us.

My grandfather’s generation of men were expected to be ready to ‘go over the top’, cross a few hundred yards of open ground festooned with barbed wire and raked with machine gun fire, and kill any Boche they found in the trenches if they got there.  My father’s generation of men were expected to be ready to be ready to storm the Normandy beaches, fly the bombers to Berlin or man the merchant ships in the Atlantic.  I am happy to record that I just missed the dubious pleasure of National Service and that I’m extremely glad I did. I certainly did not want to have to accept the soldiering role even though it is what society would have expected of me.  Was I suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’ or was it just a personal preference of not wanting to be stuck in a uniform and bullied?

Before you rush to complain that I am poking fun at gender dysphoria, as I shall show later,  I am not.  What I am trying to point out is that the notion of ‘gender’ is to do with Society’s expectations of what it means to be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and that these expectations are likely to change through time.  In other words our notion of gender is temporally fluid.

But to build an identity around that notion of temporal fluidity by saying you are ‘non-binary’ is trivial.  To demand that others in society abandon the rule of thumb of, ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck’, which we operate when choosing the pronoun to address you with, is arrogant.  Would you be happy with ‘it’?  Putting on a frock, a wig and some lipstick, and trying to insist we call you ‘she’, won’t work either.  You may delude yourself that you’ve ‘transgendered’ yourself into a woman, but the rest of us aren’t so gullible.  If dressing up like a woman is what ‘floats your boat’ go ahead with my blessing. Just don’t think you are making a political statement by doing so or try to impose upon me how I should regard you. Telling you so isn’t ‘hate speech’.

And don’t think that your personal preferences merit your being given special protection under the law.  They are just that, personal preferences, and are about as important as having a punk hair style, carrying a Gucci bag or wearing Clarks shoes.

The argument against making people who claim to be ‘transgender’ a protected category or suggesting they should have ‘safe spaces’ or even taking them very seriously, is perhaps best made by looking at what transgender advocates actually say.

‘A transgender person can be anyone who feels some incongruence with the gender identity they are socially (or culturally) expected to conform to’.

On that definition my own reluctance to go soldiering would qualify me as transgender in 1960.  It also covers men who like to wear their wife’s knickers under their business suit.   Using this same definition just how many people fall into this category in the UK?  This is what the same source has to say.

‘Based on all the information we have, combined, the observations of 25 years, I personally felt a starting point should be 10% of the population. This would equate to 6 million.  This was quickly debated-out based on simply being unrealistic.  We had the starting point of 2 million, we have agreed to take this number to over 3 million people who are transgender to some degree in the UK’. (my emphasis)
So there you are.   A figure of 3,000,000 transgender individuals has been plucked out of the air, presumably to inflate their significance, and it seems you can be ‘transgender’ just a little bit.   You couldn’t make it up!

(You’ll find the quotations above and a lot more at the link below.)

http://blog.transgenderzone.com/?p=1011

A group of people who I think have a much greater claim to be a ‘protected category’ are those who are transsexual.  In a recent review I accepted the figure of 5,000 for the number of transsexual people in the UK.  I have not been able to check this figure, but I am going to take it as correct. By transsexual I mean people who feel that they belong to the other sex, they want to be and function as members of the opposite sex, not only to appear as such.  

Functioning as the opposite sex means in the case of men surgically losing their primary (testes) and secondary (penis) sex organs.   Speaking as a man I consider this suggests a very high level of commitment indeed.  Such people have my full support and I am happy to treat them as women, though biologically they are not.

I recognise that there is a degree of inconsistency in the view expressed above.  I accept the ‘gender’ argument for transsexual women, but pour scorn on it when the ‘cocks-in-frocks’ brigade try to use it.  That’s because real life is messy. For me the over riding argument is my shared humanity with transsexual women.  Even an atheist understands ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.

My attitude to transsexual women is not shared by everyone, Germaine Greer being one person who does not share it. In 1997, she unsuccessfully opposed the offer of a Newnham College fellowship to physicist Rachael Padman, arguing that, because Padman had been "born male", she should not be admitted to a women-only college.

Apart from occasional murmurings of dissent from people like Greer it seems to be true to say that in the past transsexual people have been allowed to lives their lives ‘under the radar’.   The purpose of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 seems to have been to clarify their legal status.   Amongst other things at that time women received their State Retirement Pension at the age of 60.  The activities of the ‘cocks in frocks’ brigade and their noisy supporters, the failure of the media to distinguish between transsexual people and those who sail under the flag of ‘transgender’, and above all the use of the word ‘trans’ as an all purpose label, seems likely to have a negative impact on the lives of transsexual people.

To give but one example. I am not aware that natal women have raised objections to transsexual women using female toilets, changing rooms etc.  The demands of those who claim to be women because they are ‘transgender’ a.k.a ‘cocks in frocks’ to access to facilities normally reserved for women may cause consternation from those who are natal women, some of whom may suddenly become aware of transsexual women sharing the facility and react against this.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/not-all-transsexuals-think-trans-women-are-women/

Had the ‘transgender’ brigade not been taken under the wing of an organisation like Stonewall which promotes the interests of people who choose sexual partners from the same sex, it is unlikely that they would have made much progress.  The shallowness of the arguments presented at the link below may be enough to convince thoughtful people that the claims of the ‘transgender’ brigade are rather trivial and need not be taken too seriously.

.

http://blog.transgenderzone.com/?p=1011

The opinions in this article are entirely my own and should not be attributed to any other person.

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Lesbians Lame Lad & Then Kill Him!

TODAY's Daily Mirror reports:
'A Twisted mum and her lesbian lover have been found guilty of murdering their two-year-old boy.'
Rachel Trelfa, 31, and Nyomi Fee, 29, beat Liam Fee and broke his leg, then murdered him. 
Two other lads were put into a cage and tied up in a room with snakes and rats.
The murdered toggle, Liam Fee, who lived with the two degenerates women in Glenrothes, Fife, died in March 2014 after having been hit so hard that his heart ruptured.  On examination he was found to have 30 injuries, including a broken leg and arm.
The defendant pair, originally from Tyne and Wear, had claimed another youngster had strangle Liam to death.  To support this claim they had put the lad's hand in the victim's mouth so that traces of his DNA would be found by the police.
Liam's father, Joseph Johnson was in tears yesterday after the verdict.  It seems that, according to Fee, Liam's birth had been secretly planned be Fee and Trefla while they were having an affair.  Fee said Trefla deceived Liam's father Joseph when she became pregnant by him.   When he discovered her treachery the two lesbians left Gateshead for Scotland with the young lad in August 2011.  Nyomi Fee told the Court:
'We started our affair in 2010.  It was our intention for Rachel to get pregnant with Liam and us to be a family.   Once she was pregnant we were going to move to Scotland.'
It seems Liam was only months old when the abuse began.  An expert found he eventually suffered heart injures similar to those of road-crash victims.
Among the umpteen external injuries on the lad's body there was bruising to his private parts and fractures to his upper arm and thigh.
On the day of her son's death, Trelfa spent time at a riding stables looking after her horse before going home for drinks and a meal with Fee.
The case had to be decided as a matter of joint enterprise, and it did not matter which of the two women struck the fatal blow, because they had a common criminal purpose.
They then tried to shift the blame on to a lad of only primary school age, claiming he had been acting in a sexualised way towards Liam.
In the end it was the evidence of this lad and another boy that helped to undermine the lesbian's lies.
Today, the Daily Mirror in an editorial writes:
'... the police, and health and social workers, all have questions to answer about how clues were missed, to learn lessons for the future and save other children from the inhuman clutches of another Rachel and Nyomi Fees.'
The other question that occurs to us at Northern Voices is that we are continually inundated by activists in the GLBTIQ* (etc) movement about the rights of these minorities and there is a ongoing lobby called STONEWALL, led by the distinguished northern actor, Ian McKellen, from Bolton, who I once appear alongside in a bit part in the film 'Scandal'.  Might it be that the agencies and social services in Scotland didn't follow through as they might when they were reports about Liam, because of a belief that they may have been accused of bias against lesbians?


*  GLBTIQ stands for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (Australia)

Sexuality Attitudes in the Building Trade?

ATTITUDES towards sexuality in the construction industry requires some careful research and a journal in the British building trade, Construction News, is seeking the views of UK contractor and cost consultant employees for a survey on attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual employees in the construction sector.  Take the survey now - all answers are anonymous and treated in strict confidence.


A similar survey by CITB last year , shared with Construction News, found that sexist and homophobic language was regularly heard on sites.   What a surprise!  According to Construction News:  'Almost half (48 per cent) of workers said that they had heard homophobic language in the past year, while 13 per cent had heard it at least once a week.'


Now Construction News has teamed up with sister titles Architects’ Journal and New Civil Engineer, along with gay, lesbian and bisexual charity Stonewall, to explore attitudes towards sexuality, including homophobia and workplace support.


Mark Hansford in an article in Construction News entitled 'Is our industry homophobic?' on the 3rd, February 2015 wrote: 
'Built environment companies do less to promote sexual diversity and tackle homophobia than banking and the armed forces...'


According to Stonewall, a leading gay rights campaigning group, lesbian, gay and bisexual workers' productivity could be at risk as it singled out the construction industry for failing to keep pace in the drive to support sexual diversity.  The British building trade doesn't even figure in the league table of the Workplace Equality Index of 100 leading firms:  in the top 10-ranked companies for workplace equality are the heavyweight consultancy Accenture, closely followed by the Home Office and the computer giant IBM. 


The league table started in 2005 and is based on a ranking of companies’ efforts to improve sexual orientation equality.  In addition, only four built environment companies are participating in Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme, representing just 0.6% of the 627 participating organisations. 


Now National Construction Enterprises  (NCE) have teamed up with sister titles The Architects Journal and Construction News to conduct an anonymous survey that explores attitudes to sexuality across the whole construction sector.  The survey is targeted at the whole construction industry, and employees of both genders and all sexualities.