Women must not be erased by this ‘agender’ agenda
Pssst! Over here! No, not up there – behind the sofa. Or the domestic barricade, as I’ve grown to think of it. Why am I whispering? Oh, I’m not allowed to speak up. Or, for that matter, speak out. I’ve been silenced, you see. Like Harry Potter author JK Rowling, tax consultant Maya Forstater and, far more unexpectedly, ex-olympian Caitlyn Jenner.
I’ll get back to them, all crowding behind my sitting room furniture, later. First, I must publicly denounce myself, à la the Chinese Cultural Revolution, for crimes against wokeness.
This time (my unforgivable infractions occur more often than you’d think) I dared to bring up the new cover of Elle magazine, which features the model Olly Eley, who claims to have no gender and self-describes instead as “agender”.
“That’s an interesting… personage,” I remark to my 18-year-old carefully. “What do you think?”
“I think whatever you say is going to be wrong and offensive,” comes a suspicious reply. “Who uses the word ‘personage’ anyway?”
Dear readers, I agree. I probably should have left it there and eggshelled away on tiptoes. But I’m not quite so surrendered yet.
“I don’t want to misgender hi-… he-… this personage,” I explain. “I just genuinely want to understand the whole agender thing.”
“There’s nothing to understand,” my daughter says with an elaborate shrug. “Everyone’s different. Why should your generation have a problem with that?”
A good question. Not that I was afforded the opportunity to answer it; she promptly disappeared into her room before you could say “Emperor’s New Pronouns”. But I shall attempt to do so here.
I don’t have any beef with Olly Eley, apart from thinking maybe the tattoos could be dialled down. Eley is a striking androgynous personage, whose appearance confounds the norm; face of a boy, breasts of a girl.
The Britishaustralian model told the magazine: “I’ve never felt female, but then neither have I felt male. If there was a thin line that connected the two genders, I would be a dot floating somewhere between the two, but untethered to the line altogether. It’s the only way I can describe it.”
It’s actually a very effective way of describing it. Later in the article, Eley says just about the most sensible thing I’ve read from a non-binary activist about the rest of us, struggling to catch up.
“I understand that asking someone to entirely dismantle everything they thought they knew about gender is complicated. You can’t help how you grew up or what you’ve been told. This is a journey for everyone.”
To be honest, sometimes it feels as though we are conducting the current gender journey, gagged, blindfolded and at gunpoint in the back of an armoured Hummer, so far are the rest of us out of our comfort zone.
In recent days, we have witnessed the aforementioned tax adviser Maya Forstater mounting an appeal against being sacked for stating her honestly held belief that sex is a biological given and that men cannot become women.
Needless to say, she has been vilified and cancelled on social media for challenging the new gender orthodoxy. Ditto JK, who had the temerity to tweet the hashtag, #Istandwithmaya.
The same outrage was recently heaped on Caitlyn Jenner for saying trans girls, who are born with greater muscle mass, should not be permitted to compete in women’s sport.
You could argue that being excluded and treated unfairly is a far more authentic female experience, but angry trans athletes are a humourless bunch.
Either way, when the world’s most famous transgender figurehead is being slammed for not being trans enough, I think it’s fair to say the planet has gone mad.
But wait – it gets even more surreal. A newly discovered species of ant from Ecuador has been given a scientific name ending “they”, in recognition of gender diversity.
Yes, the miniature trap-jaw ant, Strumigenys ayersthey, is thought to be the only creature in the world to have the non-binary suffix.
I bet those gender-fluid Formicidae will be even more chuffed to discover that the cost of a Gender Recognition Certificate in the UK has this week been cut from £140 to just a fiver. Or is it a micro-aggression even to suggest they might want to choose? Lower your voices, but this sort of quip is exactly the kind of thing that makes (whisper it) young people very cross.
Interestingly, it’s rare for trans men to make a fuss about pretty much anything – apart from Guardian journalist Freddy Mcconnell, who was born female, transitioned to male, but kept his ladybits in order to give birth to a son and then wanted to be named as the boy’s father on his birth certificate.
This despite the fact he was filmed (yes, really) during the whole of the labour. Last year, he failed in his appeal against a High Court ruling that had refused his attempt to hide the biological truth.
Quite right, too. But it was still disturbing to learn that he regarded the “mother” tag to be such a terrible insult. Maybe I’m the one who’s out of touch. One of our main exam boards, OCR, would clearly think so; it considers female issues to be so retrograde that it has mooted the idea of changing its “Women in Literature” GCSE and A-level topics to “Gender in Literature”.
Cancelled at home. Erased in academia. Is it any wonder I have a problem with a journey I never asked to take? I never imagined I’d say this, but I’m with Eley when it comes to moving forward, pace: “I’ve accepted that I’m a non-binary person living in a binary world.”
I wonder if the model will get shut down for such seditiously reasonable talk. After all, the current vogue is very much for overturning the status quo to accommodate the strident few.
Sure, the model has every intention of “disrupting” things, but being “agender”, I hope it won’t be a systematic attempt to undermine my – and my daughter’s – hard-won right to be heard.
The current vogue is very much for revoking the status quo for the strident few