defender of the vulnerable

I had a beautiful friendship once, with a woman who is also a writer. We read each other’s works in a kind of ecstasy of communion, making notes at every page. Our conversation was easy and delving, muscular and gracious, exploratory and frank. Then men who wore make up began appearing on the covers of magazines, complaining of oppression. Soon it was a lesser crime to rape than to call the rapist ‘he.’ My friend, who is older and perhaps old-fashioned, seemed terrified of falling out of grace. Her support of these men was tireless. She began following me into strangers’ conversation, making public denouncements: “I wish to publicly dissociate myself from Cathoel’s hateful views.” I am sad at the loss of this intelligent friendship and last week, after a lag of two years, I wrote to her. She wrote back still angry, and this is my answer.

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Ach. I’m sad to see your salty wit and elasticity walled up in this frigid, pious convent.

What interests me about these eagerly conformist cries of Hatred! Hatred! is this: do people imagine their gender-critical former friends are too dishonest to recognise the magma of long-suppressed hatred that now finally has an excuse to pour out? too cowardly to name it? or too stupid to see it? Must be one or the other.

What an aching relief it must be for such people – finally to have found an outlet for the loathing of humanity we have been carrying around in secret for so long. Finally an escape valve for this pressing desire to bully and persecute some tiny, ultra-vulnerable minority. Orgasmic! You can almost taste it.

It’s a cult. A well-funded, white-privileged, male supremacist cult. You have been brainwashed and you sound increasingly ridiculous.

I hoped you might have read more widely since we last spoke, and evolved your thinking. I hoped to reach your better nature and that perhaps you might have had the generosity to tell me, I miss you, too, although we disagree. It’s sad you have simply seized on this opportunity to finger-waggle with such schoolgirl piety, trying to condescend to me about my supposed hatred when in fact even the mainstream conversation on this issue has now moved on and your recited certainties sound dated and ill-read.

You don’t see yourself as the brainwashed handmaiden of a privileged patriarchal cult. You are a defender of the world’s most vulnerable: misunderstood narcissist white men.

It’s a noble position. If somewhat replete with the blinding intoxication of self-righteousness.

What if some men are so privileged they experience being told there is anything they can’t have (the capacity to be a lesbian, for example) as hatred?

Every cell in our body is sexed and this does not determine who we are. This statement of reality is not hatred. I don’t have much hatred in me. Don’t have much capacity for it, being very much occupied with its opposites: attraction and curiosity, humility and devotion. But it’s interesting that in your defence of other people’s right to assert as reality how they feel, you feel entitled to tell me how I feel. Pippa Bunce, for example, the Credit Suisse banker, feels like a woman on 3 days of the week. I say he’s a man, an over-entitled, spoilt, middle aged wealthy man who rose through the ranks on male privilege and does not now offer to take the usual 28% pay cut (or get asked to make the tea) on the few days of the week he feels female. I say he should be free, as should everyone, to wear what he likes and express himself as he wishes, because men can be anything.

You say that’s hate.

So Pippa Bunce is the authority on his own feelings, but you are the authority on mine.

You seem to have no interest in reading or conversing widely in this intricate, complex, and evolving social conversation – you have your slogans and you just know they’re right. You don’t need to make friends or make peace with diverse genderqueer, gender fluid, trans, and gnc acquaintance, as every Berliner does in this most transgressive city. You don’t witness the pleading of confused baby lesbians trying to excuse themselves for the unforgivable transphobia of not wanting penile intimacy, the scorn and scolding they are subjected to. Within the echo chamber of this prissy, shockable, powerfully vocal cadre you are safe from thought.

These last two years I have been spending months at a time in Ghana. Ghanaians’ polite bafflement when I try to explain to them what is going on in the West is mortifying and edifying. What does it mean to be transgender? or demisexual, or any other label brewed in this rage of frothing narcissist fervour (a round hundred of them are listed below – not by me). To my African friends, it means – white people stole everything from us and they’re still not happy.

Have you not wondered why the world’s most violently homophobic nations have women’s football teams filled with trans-identified males? Have you ever asked yourself why in the West, all the most famous transgender people are men? Why almost all of the prominent spokestranswomen are white?

Telling a child they were born in the wrong body is abusive. I can’t see how anyone’s body is ‘wrong.’ It seems to me mutilating and medicating our bodies in search of the authentic self makes no sense. It is the outmoded and conformist gender roles, which fit no one, that have to change – not individual people who cannot fit them. Sterilising children (often gay, lesbian, and a large proportion autistic) seems to me a savage punishment for non conformity. Poor Jazz Jennings, the trans poster child now an adult and taking a year off before Harvard to wrestle with his misery, has ‘remembered’ under hypnosis (filmed and broadcast, because even in therapy he doesn’t deserve privacy) his alter ego as a lost young gay man terrified of not being accepted. Now his gametes will never mature and he will never experience libido or orgasm. He is cut off forever from some of the dearest intimacies human beings can share – and all because he liked boys and wanted to wear sparkly dresses. So insidious is our culture’s corrective homophobia that we’d rather a straight girl than a gay boy. Meanwhile, lesbians are being dragged away by police from Pride parades for daring to express sexual preference. Their dating sites are infested with sexual predators displaying ladybulge. For as soon as we say Trans Women Are Women, sexual rejection of them (ie sexual orientation) becomes transphobic. Lesbians have been told forever that they just need a good fucking and this is the latest manifestation of that creepy male sexual entitlement. It’s corrective rape.

No one has a gender. People have individuality, and to me that is precious. There is no such thing as trans. No one is cis. What woman would identify with the passive, demeaning, pornified gender role thrust on us. The singer Sam Smith now thinks he is a woman because he likes to dance. It’s so insulting. If you can’t see the awful sexism of this whole idea: that women are like this, men are like that, so if you are like that you must really be a woman – I don’t know what to say. For the sake of your public dignity and our friendship I would like to suggest you do some reading. Try Lily Maynard, whose daughter was trans, and Miranda Yardley, who is himself trans. I will hope for the reassertion of the kindly, salty, witty, sceptical, and generous soul I fell in love with which made me want to get close to you and be your friend. You are an idiot and I miss you. Goodnight.