THIS WORRYING OBSESSION
Eddie Redmayne may look divine in a dress, but the glorification of the tiny minority who feel born into the wrong sex has troubling implications
NO ONE should have been surprised last week to hear that Eddie Redmayne has received a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The Danish Girl. The film, which opens later this month, tells the story of Twenties artist Lili Elbe. Born Einar Wegener, Elbe first slipped into the role of a woman when his wife (also an artist) needed a female model for a portrait sitting.
It was then that he realised that his true gender was female, and Lili was born, or so the story goes. In 1930, he became one of the first men to undergo gender reassignment surgery. For the transgender community, the story of Lili’s conversion is a tale of heroism comparable with Nelson Mandela’s struggle against apartheid, or Emmeline Pankhurst’s emancipation of womankind.
And since Hollywood loves a tale of triumph against the odds, it stands to reason that they should already be thinking of lobbing gilded statuettes in Redmayne’s direction.
But that is not the whole story, for 2015 has been the year in which being transgender went global. It has been front and centre-stage for months, starting with the arrival of Caitlyn Jenner — formerly the ripplingly muscled Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner — wearing only a basque on the front cover of Vanity Fair magazine.
We’ve also had, in no particular order, the Guardian’s food writer Jack Monroe — a mother of one — deciding to reposition herself as a ‘nonbinary transgender’ (meaning that she identifies as neither man nor a woman).
The boxing promoter Frank Maloney, meanwhile, is now a regular on television and in newspapers presenting a new persona as a woman named Kellie. We have had the irony of Benedict Cumberbatch, the most self-consciously politically correct actor on the planet, being accused of the modern equivalent of blacking up his face for playing a funny cameo in the upcoming sequel to the fashion industry comedy film Zoolander, as a gender indeterminate supermodel by the name of ‘All’.
We’ve seen the introduction of the term ‘ Mz’ instead of ‘Ms’ as the correct title for people of a transgender persuasion. There have been lessons for primary school children about gender identity — presented by a transgender man. Germaine Greer has been banned by students in Cardiff for saying transgender women don’t ‘look like, sound like or behave like women’. Schools in Britain have been offered a £30,000 ‘grant’ to encourage them to hire transgender teachers.
And just this week, we’ve seen Fiona Manson, who posed as a single father and used a fake penis to seduce a female friend, avoid jail after a judge accepted the 25-yearold transsexual — known as Kyran Lee and awaiting gender reassignment surgery — was a man trapped in a female body. (‘It must have been enormously difficult growing up,’ said the judge.)
Only a month earlier, in a similar case, Gayle Newland was jailed for eight years after impersonating a man to trick a female into sex. The mother duped by Manson said the judge’s decision to impose a twoyear suspended sentence left her a ‘victim of a sex attack and political correctness’.
Even mainstream entertainment channels such as TLC, widely watched by teenagers, have jumped on the transgender bandwagon. When my 12-year-old daughter happened to inquire this week what I was working on and I replied, ‘a piece about being transgender’, she knew exactly what I meant (when I was her age I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea).
‘Oh yes, Mummy,’ she said, ‘Transgender is really trending right now. You should watch I Am Jazz on TLC — everyone’s really into it.’
I Am Jazz, it turns out, is a transgender reality TV show about a 15-year- old American boy growing up as a girl. Like any other 15-year- old girl, she worries about her bra size, and whether she will ever find a boyfriend.
Under close medical supervision, Jazz is undergoing therapy to block her male hormones, designed to prevent the development of male characteristics such as an Adam’s apple and facial hair. At the same time, she takes oestrogen to help her body look more feminine.
Eventually, once she is an adult, she will have surgery to remove all physical vestiges of her birth sex.
HER parents, who seem like nice, ordinary middleclass people, are fully behind her. Her mother, fiercely protective of her youngest child, accompanies her on medical visits and shopping trips.
Her father wipes away tears and dispenses hugs with studied attentiveness.
They are, in short, the very model of the all-inclusive 21st-century family, a shining example to us all of what life for your average transitioning transgender teen ought to be like. And all this is presented as perfectly normal.
A related story appeared in the Mail last week, of a six- year- old boy from Scotland called Daniel, who is being brought up as a little girl called Danni, complete with dresses and pretty hair bunches.
The child’s parents say that when Daniel reaches puberty he will be prescribed hormone blockers until he is 16 and old enough to decide whether he wants to become a she. Then, he will decide whether to start taking oestrogen for two years before undergoing gender reassignment surgery.
So how did we get here? Well, the sudden interest in this area of life is, in some respects, a sign of more enlightened times. Against a backdrop of increasing intolerance in the Middle East, with organisations such as the Taliban and ISIS preaching vile hatred of all alternative lifestyles — and throwing homosexuals to their deaths from rooftops — it is to our credit as a society that we have come to develop a greater tolerance of less conformist lifestyles.
Live and let live is the modern mantra — and rightly so. Freedom of expression, whether it be political, sexual, social or religious, is a cornerstone of democracy. But the sheer force with which the transgender agenda has been pushed to the forefront of the cultural discussion has been quite remarkable. As has the aggression used by various lobby groups to promote what we might call the transgender case.
Personally, I feel very sympathetic. It must be incredibly traumatic and confusing to feel alien in one’s own skin, to want so desperately to be something you are not.
I cannot imagine that anyone would undergo gender reassignment surgery or pump themselves full of hormones unless their suffering were genuine. It must require both courage and conviction to make irreversible changes to one’s gender.
But the sheer dominance of the transgender narrative in the media, and the aggression directed at anyone who exhibits the merest twitch of a quizzical eyebrow, is astonishing. Raise even the slightest moral, ethical or sociological question about this issue, and you might as well be saying Hitler wasn’t such a bad chap after all.
Quite simply, we seem to have spent most of this year being told that it’s not good enough for us simply to accept transgender individuals as a small but perfectly valid community: we must also embrace and praise them as though theirs were some sort of heroic achievement on a par with the discovery of penicillin and not, at the very core of the thing, just a rare and often traumatic condition.
The simple fact is that like so many ‘culturally sensitive’ issues these days, all open and honest conversation about gender identity is
drowned out by the kind of cultural fascism that prides itself on standing up for minority interests while at the same time denying many others — who often form the majority — their right to expression.
After Caitlyn Jenner appeared in Vanity Fair, one American TV actor, Drake Bell, tweeted: ‘Sorry ... still calling you Bruce.’ Such was the flood of outrage that he had dared to criticise her sexual transformation that he was forced to issue a grovelling apology: ‘I sincerely apologise for my thoughtless insensitive remarks. I in no way meant to hurt or demean those going through a similar journey.’
So it is that any kind of debate or discussion is shut down.
Just as those in the mainstream should learn to accept and understand the alternative life choices of others, there must, I would argue, also be some acceptance and understanding of those who choose to question this cultural trend.
And yet tolerance, on this issue as well as on many others — such as Christianity (bad), the traditional family (bad), climate change (good), animal rights (good) and so on — appears all too often to be a one-way street in favour of those who shout the loudest.
Indeed, the crescendo of noise around gender issues is particularly surprising when you stop to think how small the transgender community really is.
While every individual’s experience is doubtlessly precious, the numbers involved are extraordinarily small.
Only 400 or so people a year actually apply to have their gender legally reassigned. According to the transgender community, at any given time in the UK, one per cent of the population is, to use the approved terminology ‘gender non-conforming’. That seems like an awfully high estimate to me.
In any case, assuming those numbers are correct, of that one per cent, only around one in five will, at some point in their lives, seek treatment. And yet you could now be forgiven for thinking that gender dysmorphia — when someone feels their true gender identity is not the one they were born with — is as common in the population as, say, ginger hair. There is something else, too, that I, as a parent, find increasingly worrying. Because while I’m perfectly comfortable with grown-ups making these sorts of decisions, I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea of children having their normal growth altered in the run-up to puberty and beyond.
Earlier this year, the Tavistock and Portman Trust, which specialises in gender issues, described a four-fold rise in referrals of children under the age of ten reporting ‘gender confusion’.
In total, the number of under-11s referred to the unit has risen from 19 in 2009/10 to 77 in 2014/15. Still a tiny number; but nevertheless a very significant increase. There has to be a reason for this, and it cannot simply be a sudden epidemic of gender dysmorphia. Surely there must be some cultural pressures at play here, whether from schools or from parents themselves.
Any parent knows that children enjoy trying on different personalities and roles. My daughter used to love dressing up as male characters for national Book Week, for example, and my son once went as The Boy in the Dress, from his favourite David Walliams book.
He often complains, too, that girls get shouted at less in class, and how monstrously unfair it is that they seem to be so much better at maths than he is. But I wouldn’t for one moment infer from these actions that he has a burning desire to be a girl.
Children pass through many phases in their lives, and nine times out of ten they grow out of them. you have no way of knowing who or what they really want to be until they have completed the process of growing up.
no, my big concern is that as a result of this increasing focus on transgender people, we are imposing the adult anxieties of a marginal group on innocent children who are not yet old enough to understand the implications — and whose sexuality may not yet have been defined.
THERE is something else, too. A wider — and far more sinister — agenda at work here: an attack on traditional gender roles.
I call myself a feminist because I believe women should be able to be proudly female as mothers, wives, daughters while at the same time being respected and treated as equals to men.
But some of the more radical sisters hate this idea of a clear, confident gender identity. They want to undermine the idea of true masculinity by adopting male characteristics and behaviour themselves; but in doing so they also undermine a woman’s fundamental right to be a woman.
The proselytising of transgenderism is surely part of that attempt to blur the divide between men and women.
Cruelty or prejudice towards anyone is ugly. But something almost as ugly is using the difficulties that individuals with genuine problems face as a kind of Trojan horse for an attack on the traditional gender roles.
So- called equality experts and campaigners in universities and schools mistakenly teach as fact the idea that differences between the sexes are an illusion, as outmoded and discredited as the idea of the earth being flat. not only is this simply not true, it also hasn’t achieved the desired outcome.
no amount of gender-neutral pronouns can detract from the fact that it is still mostly men who run for political office and blow things up, while women still spend more time looking after children and running homes. It is, I’m afraid, the way of the world.
Of course people who suffer from gender dysmorphia need society’s help, support and infinite understanding. But it’s important to recognise that, however divine Eddie redmayne may look in a dress, the vast majority of us are still very happy living in the bodies we were born with.