Sunday, January 13, 2013

Bigots and the people who give them bylines


Just to start the day off on a completely non-controversial note, I'd just chip on the Burchill Observer article that's starting to light up the Twitterverse.


First off, the article itself. It's the typical careless Jools mish-mash of occasional sling-shot one-liners and tired arguments that Burchill long ago settled in her own mind over a bottle of a good vintage in the Groucho Club. 

The class thing is the only interesting wrinkle in it. She appears to be suggesting that herself, Bindel and Moore are the only ones brave enough to call a spade a spade and a transexual a fugly freakish abomination. Because, you see, they're unhindered by political correctness. Because they're working class. And smart. And brave.

Apart from that, it's the usual shite that Burchill's been churning out for 20 years to keep herself in Woodbines and coke. Lazy, with boredom seeping out of every line and written in the knowledge that there are always enough young, enthusiastic commissioning editors thrilled skinny at getting A Burchill Article  - any Burchill article - that she could list her favourite soups in alphabetical order and still pick up a cheque for it.

As a few people have already pointed out, the more interesting question is why did the Observer/Guardian publish it (impressionable commissioning editors aside). 

It seems to me that the Graun and Observer subscribe to the underlying thesis of Male Original Sin - that badness, or at least the lack of goodness, is written into the very DNA of every man. It's the thinking that every man is a rapist or wife-beater once social conditioning is stripped away and opportunity arises.

By this way of thinking, a transexual isn't a female mind trapped in a male body, hating how they feel and look, but a grotesquerie imperfectly aping female mannerisms and who can never be a real woman.

When you read the stories of young men, teens and even pre-pubescent boys trying to hack off their own penises with scissors and knives in sheer despair at their gender dysphoria, is your reaction that these are people who want to play at drag queens for a day? Or people who find that, by biological quirk, a woman's or girl's mind is residing in a male body? 

Burchill and Bindel, the Guardian and the Observer don't buy this. These are not real women, with a woman's finer instincts and virtues. They're apes in party frocks, fooling no one. They may have lost their penises, but they have lost none of their crassness and coarseness. That's in the bones, not in the boner.

And so we have the perfect anti-transexual shitstorm. Bigots and bullshitters willing to formulate such messages; newspapers dumb enough to give such messages credence and air.