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