Polly Vernon
LAST WEEK – around the time ITV aired episode one of Butterfly, a drama about a young transgender child, and some days
before the Government closed its consultation on reviewing the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, which could allow trans people to identify with their chosen gender more easily – I narrowly ducked accusations of transphobia on Twitter. I’d retweeted an article that criticised the Wellcome Collection for billing a programme of events as: ‘womxn through their art…’. The museum chose the word ‘womxn’ over ‘women’, because it thought it more inclusive; this article wondered how, exactly, the W word – the original one, featuring an ‘e’, perhaps an ‘a’ – had become so offensive it required asterisking. I retweeted without comment, though I support the article’s sentiment. Call me a gender-static Gen X stick-in-themud – but I think of myself as a ‘woman’.
‘Oh Polly, don’t say you’re anti-transgender too!’ tweeted someone within milliseconds. OH FUCKING HELL (I didn’t reply).
Am I anti-trans? No. My general policy of believing every last one of us is entitled to a dignified, fulfilled, safe existence, regardless of how we look, identify, what we believe… miraculously, this extends to the trans community! Of course it does! But I also believe female biology is a Thing, with Implications, that it shapes women’s lives, for better, for worse, or for more complicated; and it can’t be X’d out. I don’t think this makes trans women lesser. But I do think it needs to be acknowledged, particularly as we are perhaps reconfiguring the legal definition of womanhood by reviewing the Gender Recognition Act.
Although, you know what? I could be wrong. Oh yeah! I’ve been wrong about other stuff – I’m a flawed human being, capable of knee-jerk reactions and undesirable prejudices. Thing is, for me to be in a position where I could be convinced of that wrongness, I’d need to not be utterly bloody terrified to raise the issue in the first place. I’d need to feel I could express concerns without inviting immediate accusations of antitrans sentiment. Without being tarred, feathered, saturated in shame; shut down, taken out, lampooned and no-platformed. Without, in short, being subject to all the tactics that characterise this debate, along with all modern debate (wherein the word ‘debate’ denotes ‘mindless rolling online screaming match’). But I don’t feel that at all. So I’m just going to keep quiet, while my POV festers, and gets more entrenched, less open to compromise.