Tuesday 30 July 2019

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 drainOur 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.)


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.


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