Ricky Gervais: mocking trans people?
When it arrived on Netflix last week, Ricky Gervais’s new stand-up special “prompted instant outrage”, said Michael Deacon in
The Daily Telegraph. That wasn’t surprising, because it contains a lot of near-the-knuckle material about sensitive subjects: Aids, dead babies, paedophilia, religion. “Yet his critics have barely mentioned those.” Instead, their fury was roused by a single, brief section about trans people and trans activists. “I love the new women,” Gervais declares in it. “The new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and cocks.” He then goes on to imagine a conversation between a hardline trans activist and a woman who is nervous about someone with a penis entering the ladies’ loos. “What if he rapes me?” she asks. To which the enraged activist screams: “What if she rapes you, you fucking Terf whore!’”
Trans people, sadly, have become an easy punchline for comedians, said Esme Lord in the Metro. Gervais seems to think that’s it’s edgy and challenging to “punch down” at this very vulnerable minority. He laughs at their genitals, and he wheels out the old transphobic prejudice that trans people are predators, who will set upon women in the toilets. Gervais claims that he’s being ironic, said Ryan Coogan on The Independent. “That’s when I say something I don’t really mean for comic effect,” he explains. “It’s a way of satirising attitudes.” Is that really what he’s doing, though? When he claims that the worst thing you can say today is that “women don’t have penises”, he’s not satirising anything. He’s just shoring up “reactionary” views and “acceptable prejudice”.
Gervais isn’t punching down at trans people, said Joanna Williams in The Times. He’s punching up, at the gender ideology that has now “been adopted wholesale by the police, the civil service, the education sector and even the NHS”. Challenging it can mean that you end up in court, like Maya Forstater, or get “enough death threats to paper your house” like J.K. Rowling. You don’t even have to oppose trans activism to see that “it brings with it problems, paradoxes, challenges”, said Dominic Maxwell in the same paper. This is fertile ground for comedians. Trans people are not the butt of Gervais’s jokes: “rigid thinking is”.