Pissed-off Toff is astounded by how quickly, and with what fantastical results, the transgender lobby has dominated public discourse … and he speculates as to what the future holds.
A week or so ago, I was watching Question Time on the BBC with David Dimbleby in the chair as always, and halfway through the hour I felt puzzled. “Hang on!” I thought. “By this stage in the programme, I should be frothing at the mouth and yelling obscenities at the screen. But I’m not. What’s gone wrong?”
The reason soon occurred to me. Unusually, none of the panellists had said anything that bothered me to a notable degree; even the ethnic-minority ‘comedian’ had induced in me only a minor twitch of annoyance; no-one in the impeccably liberal audience seemed to be consumed by outrage about anything much that week, nor had any progressive new cause induced wild fits of righteous indignation and virtue-signalling; and it was all rather dull.
But just as I was about to turn the television off and head to bed with a healthy book about the Vikings, it was time for a new question, and the camera zoomed in on someone at the back of the auditorium. “I’m a transgender woman,” announced this person, “and …”
“Ah!” I thought. “We’re off!! At last!!!”
* * * * *
As anyone who has recently glanced at a newspaper knows, the burning progressive issue du jour is the ‘transgender’ debate. Despite the fact that a less-than-miniscule percentage of the population is transgender, and despite the fact that the issue concerns almost no-one, a powerful ‘trans’ lobby has emerged from nowhere, and now seems to have us all by our throats.
In only the last few months, for example, several schools have announced that they are considering banning all girls from wearing skirts. Why? So as not to offend the sensibilities of the 0.1% (or whatever it is) of ‘trans’ boys … or was it ‘trans’ girls? I can’t remember. Then a number of Girl Guide leaders were expelled from the organisation because they objected to sharing tents and showers with ‘trans’ girls – that is to say, with ‘girls’ who are actually boys.
At some stage this debate, vigourously stirred up by trans activists, went main-stream, prompting various dissenting reactions which included the appearance in Liverpool of a billboard quoting the following dictionary definition: “Woman. Noun. Adult female.” Cue confected outrage from the trans lobby, who said it made them feel ‘unsafe’. The billboard was immediately taken down.
Before we get to the most bizarre incident in this brief resumé (and I have chosen only a few highlights of the ongoing saga), let us rapidly familiarise ourselves with the terminology; because to make any sense of this at all, you have to get with the lingo.
So. A ‘trans girl’ is a boy who ‘identifies’ as a girl, and who lives as a girl, but has not had ‘sexual realignment’ surgery, i.e. a full sex change. That comes later. A ‘trans boy’ is the other way round: such a young person is a girl who ‘identifies’ as a boy. Similarly, a ‘trans woman’ is someone who was born male, but who now lives as a woman, and might or might not have had hormone therapy and sexual realignment surgery. Indeed, most trans women – perhaps even three-quarters of them – have not had their tackle cut off. However, according to the Gender Recognition Act, a man can be legally recognised as a woman after he has lived ‘in gender’ (that is to say, as a woman) for two years, and if he also obtains a doctor’s certificate confirming this.
Oh, and there’s another category, too, with its own name: I refer to ‘gender-fluid’ people, who, as far as I can gather, are men some days and women on other days. Then there are ‘gender non-binary’ people, whatever that means. Neither male nor female, perhaps? And finally (not finally, actually; but enough for today), we have the term ‘cis woman’, which refers to a woman who was actually born a woman; as opposed, of course, to a ‘trans woman’, who wasn’t. Basically, for ‘cis’ and ‘trans’, think of Roman history: cis-Alpine for this side of the Alps (the staid Roman side), and trans-Alpine for the other side (the wild Gallic side).
Now that we’ve sorted that out, let us rewind to the episode in this saga which perhaps best epitomises the lunacy of the trans debate. Some time in the summer, a number of ‘cis women’ (i.e. women, biologically speaking) in various parts of the country decided that enough was enough, and started distributing pink stickers shaped like male genitals and bearing the legend “Women don’t have penises.”
These stickers infuriated the trans lobby. Why? Well, according to the more extreme trans activists, if you say you’re a woman, then you are a woman. Thus it is entirely possible for women to have penises. Indeed, most trans women do still have penises … and trans women are just as much women as cis women, right?
Then, on the basis that the little pink stickers were ‘transphobic’ and an incitement to hatred (yes, really), someone reported them to the Merseyside police, who tweeted the following reply: “We are aware of this matter and enquiries are being made.” More zealously still, the mayor of Liverpool said that he would have the offending stickers removed and would “work with the police to identify those responsible”.
All of which takes us into a world that lies far beyond the reach of parody.
* * * * *
We now return to the BBC’s auditorium in Guildford, where, as we have said, the next question came from a transgender woman. Was this person a cross-dressing man who ‘identified’ as a woman? Or who had lived ‘in gender’ for two years, and was now, legally speaking, recognised as a woman? Had hormone treatment been administered? Had surgery taken place? As far as I remember (and I might be wrong), none of this was made clear, nor did my untutored eye allow me to form an opinion.
What was clear, however, was that this person felt aggrieved about something. Straight away, one of the male politicians on the panel was there to offer undiluted sympathy, encouragement, even admiration. “You’ve been very courageous,” he said, his face assuming an expression of pious concern.
Then it was the turn of another male panellist to appease the trans woman by urging the audience to consider the life of Jan Morris. Famously, the author James Morris was born a man, served in the Army, married and had a large family, but then decided that he was female at heart. So in 1972, he took himself off to Morocco, where he had a sex change; this being the earliest days of such things, and no English surgeon being willing to do it. Having returned to England as a ‘woman’, Jan (as James was now called) later formed a civil partnership with her former wedded wife. This story, the panellist explained, was “deeply moving” … and the members of audience were urged to rush out and buy Morris’ recent autobiography, in order that they might be similarly moved.
After that, it was time for another question, and my interest waned. What struck me, however, was the way in which, when replying to the concerns of the transgender person, the panellists paid total, unreserved homage to the prevailing ‘trans’ narrative. The trans individual was thus praised for being so frightfully courageous. But did any member of the panel make the point that it would require just as much courage, and perhaps more, for anyone in the public eye to stand up and question the aims and means of the increasingly strident trans lobby? Certainly not.
And is Jan Morris’ life-story really so “deeply moving”? How deeply moved, I wonder, were Morris’ children when he left for Morocco as a man and returned, his body cut up and mutilated, as a ‘woman’? How deeply moved were they when their father, now neither man nor woman, proceeded to form a civil partnership with their own mother? But as topics of discussion on Question Time, all this was clearly off-limits, verboten, terribly ‘inappropriate’.
* * * * *
So this is where we are. Worn down by decades of PC indoctrination largely sponsored and promoted by the BBC and the ‘liberal’ media; reminded ad nauseam that our country is a cesspit of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, prejudice, bigotry and discrimination; wary of anything whatsoever to do with sex, gender and ‘sexual orientation’; terrified of being accused of a ‘hate crime’ by anyone who can lay claim to the requisite ‘protected characteristic’… thus cowed and softened up, we are easy prey for the virile new trans lobby.
This, surely, is how the concerns of a microscopically tiny proportion of the population – concerns, furthermore, about which many (and I suspect most) people feel a considerable degree of disquiet – have gained an extraordinary hold. In this way, too, we have now got to a point where the more extreme elements of the trans lobby want everyone to accept that ‘trans women’ really are women … even though most of them have their male genitalia intact, and none of them, of course, have the same chromosomes as women, or a womb.
The whole thing is patently, self-evidently absurd. But still, almost no politician and most certainly no-one working in the public sector dares to say a word, for fear of being accused of being ‘transphobic’ or bigoted or intolerant, with all the dire consequences for career and livelihood that that would involve in today’s ultra-PC and ultra-puritanical climate.
* * * * *
I was going to finish this article with something that I thought was quite funny, but which on reflection seems rather less so. Because if our society continues in the direction of travel which the trans lobby has so far succeeded in dictating, the following scenarios, which I dreamt up as the stuff of fantasy, begin to look anything but fantastical. Here they are:
Scenario 1: Jemima is a fearsomely bright and talented 11-year-old girl who has decided that she is a boy. She therefore asks her parents to send her to Eton, for which she is admirably well qualified in terms of intelligence, character and general ability. Can the school turn her down? And if they can, on what basis?
Scenario 2: Johnny is already at Eton when he decides that he is in fact a girl. Does the school have to send him away? And if not, why not?
Scenario 3: The Earl of X is one of the richest noblemen in the land. He has two children: an older daughter and a younger son. In the natural course of events, the daughter might get a flat in London, and the boy will inherit everything else, the title included. But at the age of 16, the daughter decides that she is in fact a man. Not only this, but she undergoes ‘gender realignment’ surgery and completes all the necessary due process to make herself legally male. So who gets the title, the money, the stately home and the rolling acres? The boy, as per ancient custom and usage? Or the woman-turned-man who was previously his older sister?
Yes, I know. These scenarios are set in a world of privilege. But they make my point nonetheless. This is what we are well on the way to creating, and these are just a few of the problems which will inevitably arise.
Welcome to dystopia.
