IN THE 1980s, while living in Berlin, I was invited to a Marlene Dietrich party. I was the only woman there and by far the least attractive. In my defence, I had also gone to very little effort in glamming myself up compared to the other utterly stunning guests. It was an interesting, if uncomfortable, night. I was (if you’ll excuse the pun) a fish out of water.
Two things have led me to recount this memory in the last year or so. The first is that the party was the first time I became conscious of the hostility towards women, the sheer misogyny, expressed by transvestism. The Marlene Dietrichs at that party seemed to be saying that they could be better, more attractive than actual women, and that accordingly there was no need for the real thing. The idea that men claiming to be women are better women than real women because they put more work in is now articulated directly by leading trans rights activists.
Indeed the trans rights movement is remarkable for the animus it shows towards women and feminism – “terf” (standing for trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is the insult hurled at any women who rejects the mantra that “transwomen are women” and insists on the distinction between biological sex and a gendered social/political identity.
Feminists have long analysed misogyny as rooted in womb envy – that when Freud posited that women suffered from penis envy, he was unconsciously projecting. The obsession of some transwomen with menstruation and breast-feeding graphically, if ludicrously, illustrates this envy.
The second reason this party has come back to me is that I have wondered whatever happened to transvestites. Wikipedia informs me that the term transvestism “is considered outdated in Western cultures, especially when used to describe a transgender or gender-fluid person”. It is now seen as derogatory because transvestitism was historically used to diagnose medical disorders, including mental health disorders, so the “transgender community” now prefers the term “cross-dresser”.
The short answer to the question of what happened to transvestites, is that they have morphed into transwomen: a sexual fetish has been replaced with a gender identity. What was marginal, if not largely underground, is now “out and proud”, transformed into the most fashionable of progressive icons. It’s difficult not to see a similar phenomenon in the way that flashers and other kinds of sexual fetishist have disappeared from popular discourse to re-emerge as newly legitimised and celebrated members of the transgender community. As Miranda Yardley has argued, “the whole point of the ‘transgender’ movement is to politically homogenise a broad variety of behaviours foundational upon sex-based stereotypes and present this as a normalised, harmless (even vulnerable) minority, and this is done in a way that conceals the sexual imperative of this type of male behaviour”.
My Marlene Dietrichs are now politically empowered, and the misogyny, which seemed like a private in-joke in 1980s Berlin, is mainstream. It is of a piece with the exponential expansion of violent and fetishistic pornography on the internet and the rise of “incel” culture. This explosion in misogyny threatens women in many ways, insidious and direct, social and political. The latter is most evident in the assault by the trans rights movement on women’s spaces. It is the reason I went to George Square in Glasgow on Sunday to join the #LetWomenSpeak rally, the first feminist demo I have been to since I was a student forty years ago.
Organised by Kellie-Jay Keen aka @ThePosieParker, the founder of the campaign group Standing for Women, the event was both exhilarating and profoundly depressing. It was exhilarating because over 500 people were there, predominantly women over 40, but including all ages and a fair smattering of male partners and gay men. While feminism has been dominated by academics and theoretical writing, the focus here was on ordinary women speaking, with Keen mc-ing an open mic event where women in the crowd were invited to recount their experience and thoughts. Their speeches were impassioned and enthusiastically received by the crowd.
A parallel protest event took place at the other end of George Square organised by transgender activists. The ostensible aim of Cabaret Against the Hate Speech and furries (men who identify as anthropomorphised cartoon animals) was to drown out the “terfs”. Only a hundred or so bedraggled students, a couple of furries and a beclowned drag queen turned up, and their embarrassingly bad dancing and singing to karaoke had no impact at all on the women’s rally.
Yet I was also deeply saddened by the George Square event. How have we travelled from #MeToo to #LetWomenSpeak in a few short years? While some women and gay groups have been warning Cassandra-like about the harmful political and social implications of transgender ideology for years, it is only now that it has hit Holyrood and criminal autogynephiles are making the headlines that mainstream society is cottoning on. As Keen herself said, that at least is something to thank Nicola Sturgeon and her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) legislation for.
The First Minister, bless her, is digging ever deeper the hole she has created with GRR. On Monday she held one of her occasional live press conferences, no doubt advised by her spin doctors that the recent bad press and her unprecedented negative polling required a dose of podium gravitas, the magical authority she had mustered during her daily Covid briefings. She failed miserably, partly because the journalists, scenting blood, have become much better at pressing her with hard questions.
By way of introduction, and as part of her quest to be “open and transparent to the people of Scotland”, Nicola Sturgeon released her tax returns. Her quest backfired because the tax returns merely directed attention to the £107,000 loan her husband, SNP CEO Peter Murrell, had made to the party. She was forced to say that she did not know he had made the loan and could not remember when she first learnt of it. No one believed her in the press conference (not least because the meagre figures on her tax return do not indicate a couple rolling in cash) and no one has believed her since.
Then the journalists got on to the transgender issue and the million-dollar question she had refused to answer at the previous week’s First Minister’s Questions. Was the double rapist Isla Bryson/Adam Graham a man or a woman? Again Sturgeon insisted he was a rapist and that was all that was relevant; however, as she riffed away (she always waffles on too long in her answers), she made the inevitable Freudian slip and referred to Bryson/Graham as “her” and then “she”. This doesn’t just – inexplicably – reverse her position four days earlier where she had claimed not to know Bryson/Graham’s sex and suggested his trans identity wasn’t genuine, but it commits her to a legal and logical impossibility: rapists are, by definition, men.
She will hardly be cheered by today’s headlines proclaiming “Police Scotland defy Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-id drive by calling transgender butcher arrested over disappearance of 11-year old girl a man”.
Sturgeon repeatedly claimed all was well in terms of protecting women because Bryson/Graham was being risk-assessed as a rapist (hence gender was irrelevant). But that risk assessment was only necessary because his claim to be a woman was taken seriously by the Scottish Prisons Service, which initially sent him to a women’s facility. To start segregating prisoners according to their crime, and not their sex, as we have done for hundreds of years, would mean sending a female murderer of a woman to a man’s prison.
When asked what would happen with respect to other women’s spaces (toilets, changing rooms, refuges etc) when Bryson/Graham was released, the First Minister pointed to risk assessments and measures controlling sex offenders in the community. But this was disingenuous because there is nothing in these that would ban a (trans) woman from accessing women-only spaces. The long-delayed review of the guidance the Scottish Prisons Service uses to treat trans prisoners has, following ministerial intervention, become urgent; a similarly urgent review is equally necessary for the treatment of trans sex offenders when they are released.
Sturgeon’s pièce de résistance – or folie de grandeur – at the presser was the assertion that “there is no other group in society where we accept that the actions of an individual somehow forms a justification for taking away rights from the whole group, or not according rights to that group”. She tried to bolster this with a “poor me” argument, pointing to how tiny trans people are in number and how much they have suffered. But it’s beside the point; the First Minister’s headline claim is nonsense on stilts.
As a society, we frequently take away rights from a whole group, or not accord rights to that group because of the actions of an individual – all age segregation (when a child of a certain age may or may not enter a play space, for example) works on that basis, as does, for example, the banning of handguns because of Thomas Hamilton or liquids more than 100ml on flights because of a single terrorist plot. Much more egregiously for Sturgeon, her claim ignores the rationale for all women-only spaces – toilets, changing rooms, single sex wards, refuges, prisons etc. Men are banned as a group from these spaces not because every one of them is a threat to women’s safety but because the class of men represents a significant risk to women. This is not remotely controversial – it is backed by common sense and countless studies into the prevalence of male violence against women.
Lurking behind Nicola Sturgeon’s fallacious general claim is the idea that when it comes to transwomen, a man, by virtue of declaring himself a woman, leaves behind the class of men he belonged to, and cancels the statistical probability of being a threat to women that membership of that class signifies. If only that were true! The contrast between transmen (natal women) and transwomen (natal men) is telling here. The violent anti-feminist rhetoric of trans activists comes overwhelmingly from transwomen. We hear a lot about sex offenders who are transwomen, but next to nothing about transmen rapists or paedophiles. This belies the notion that transwomen are somehow miraculously shorn of male aggression towards women.
The First Minister famously claims to be “feminist to my fingertips”. Yet she is in the vanguard of the biggest misogynistic backlash against feminism I have seen in my lifetime. Not for nothing are Twitter wags calling her “Aunt Lydia”.
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Photo courtesy of Stage Fright trailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8946866
