Dear Peepx,
Some of you are remarkable people and you’ve had an astonishing journey – personally, politically, and professionally.
I hope those of you who were an effeminate gay men or a butch lesbian before transitioning, acknowledge how much harder it would have been as an effeminate gay man or butch lesbian, to have done what you’ve done and to be recognised and rewarded by the establishment.
I can only imagine how it must feel for someone who started out as working class and lesbian, to be decked out in a grey morning suit and top hat – that male uniform required when receiving a gong from the very heart of the male dominated establishment.
And how do all those other transsexual pioneers feel now, as they see the political and theoretical umbrella they helped create to provide much needed shelter for others like themselves, and which they helped force open against a weight of considerable prejudice, being expanded to cover such a wide range of people, that folk like themselves – transsexuals – have been pushed out to the margins or forced to submit to the tyranny of an eclectic bunch of self-declared transgender activists, the interests of some of whom may well be completely antithetical to theirs?
Some of these newcomers are very obviously highly transgressive fetishists looking to bring their kink - into the mainstream. Their motivation is to make it easier to connect with the like-minded, and – for this is the nature of many highly transgressive kinks – to make it easier to gain access to those upon whom their kink is focused and enacted.
You trans pioneers know, or should do, that those who are the focus of fetishes and upon whom fetishes are enacted, are often highly vulnerable in terms of age, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, ethnicity, psychological health etc.
You do not have to be a rightwing religious fundamentalist to be concerned about parafilias, which have children and very young people as their focus, apparently attempting to claim legitimacy once again. I say apparently because who knows what is genuine and what is not in the digital era?
It is highly likely that among those who, in the 1970s, used gay liberation as a vehicle to promote the idea of ‘child love’ and who wanted to reduce the age of consent back to 13 or even as young as 4 – were malign forces that sought to strengthen homophobia, by casting the shadow of ‘child sexual abuser’ over gay men. Perhaps those malign forces are still there in the links some people are now drawing between the transgender movement and attempts to normalise and ultimately to legalise, paedophilia and hebephilia.
But you all know, or should do, that it is not just shadows created by malign external forces that want to promote homophobia and transphobia – a political shadow is also being cast by some of the people who are standing alongside you under the ever-widening trans umbrella, and whose place there you continue to support.
There are a lot of transsexuals and gay men who are worried about this, some of whom have been strong enough and brave enough to speak out in support of those who are called TERFs – amongst whom are the many radical feminists and lesbians who were the first to put their heads above the political parapet.
The links that have been made between paedophilia and male homosexuality are ideological and malign, and the same applies to transsexuals and the threat they pose to women, but the problem with the vastly increased numbers now gathered under the Trans Umbrella is that it’s much harder to know where genuine and good stops and bogus and bad begins, and we are not allowed to ask, and we can thank you for that, can’t we?
That’s the thing; you build a political movement and that movement catches a wave – sometimes a wave that’s naturally formed, and sometimes artificially generated – and it moves with a power and speed that is exhilarating and those riding it are propelled from the margins to the mainstream – politically, academically, economically.
I imagine that riding such a wave is a buzz like no other. I have to imagine it because I’ve never experienced it given every political movement I’ve been closely aligned with remains more likely to be torpedoed and sunk out at sea – ironically, by the some of the same people who now appear to support the trans movement. So surfing the wave of mainstream populism is an unknown for me, but I imagine it’s a buzz – like any other sort of power trip.
The trouble with big waves comes when they break. The ones that are the most destructive are those that break onto steep, rocky shores – and the sex/gender shoreline is among the most treacherous and rocky of them all.
Forgive the somewhat tortuous marine analogy – but surely, you and all those other comfortably ensconced members of the coordinator class who are surfing the trans wave, must know its destructive potential.
Some of you will survive; you’ll back off before the wave breaks and maybe even find another wave – but many of those caught by it won't survive, especially those whose genuine economic and social marginalisation the trans members of the boss and the coordinator classes have used to pull in easily persuaded allies from among liberals and the left.
When someone tweets that TERFs will be “hushed” because there are lots of trans Judges, police officers, social workers, etc etc - it sums up the dilemma between, on the one hand, claiming to have real power and significant numbers, and on the other, all those highly weaponised claims of being the locus of the most extreme marginalization. You know, the sort of claims that lead the politically infantile to assert that ‘trans rights are the pre-eminent human rights issue of our era’.
What that hushing the TERFs tweet may point to, but no-one is allowed to speak about, is there may well be a large number of men in positions of power who have fetishes and kinks which make them disposed towards taking actions to try to keep the trans umbrella fully erect.
That might be a voluntary assistance, or made in anticipation of coercion, or even actively coerced. Let’s say you’re a high-ranking politician or public servant and you have a kink, which, if known, would make your role difficult or even untenable. You might well be minded to act in ways that help normalise it.
There’s a lot of stuff that's gone on: from the risible – eg. a rubber fetishist filming himself wanking in the staff loos at a children’s charity and posting it online; the sinister – eg David Challenor’s rape and torture fetish enacted upon a ten year-old girl; and the positively surreal – eg the Yaniv Affair which lurched crazily from farce to noir and back again.
This is the sort of stuff the gutter press usually feeds on and yet it's unusually quiet – contrary to the claims of trans activists who insist the media is heavy with transphobic rhetoric.
The Yaniv Affair would have remained on the social media gender debate margins if Ricky Gervais had not tweeted in classic Gervaisian fashion about the absurdity of a male-bodied menstruation fetishist suing sole operator, ethnic minority female beauticians for gender discrimination for refusing to perform a scrotum wax.
Many of those who doggedly defended Yaniv ignored the sex, class and race dimensions of the multiple discrimination claims, thereby granting a self identified trans woman’s rights primacy over the rights of the working-class women of colour who were being sued.
Feminists were highlighting Yaniv’s behaviour for months and were attacked and punished for being transphobic. How was that weirdness not apparent to Yaniv’s supporters, months earlier? Why were otherwise sensible, politically astute people congratulating Yaniv on a “brave transition” at a point where there was ample on-line evidence of a menstruation fetish focused on young girls?
You do not – or at least I really hope you don’t – want to see the normalization of the sort of extreme kinks which some transgressives want to see made legal and normalised – like sex with children, or sadistic sex where the concept of consent is reduced to a sick joke, or extreme porn, or the abuse of animals.
But this is the point isn’t it? It’s no longer just about folk like yourself – the worthy, the well meaning, the genuine trans people – it’s increasingly about the extreme fetishists, the vexatious and the malign who have pushed their way in under your umbrella – that umbrella you needed to expand in order to give you power and political clout – and over which you no longer seem to have control.
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