A sex education lesson – from my son
I defended J K Rowling until my boy showed me the light
‘If it’s OK with you,’ I said to my son, ‘let’s have the J K Rowling discussion now over the phone, and not when we’re together in the car.’
‘Yup, yup,’ he knowingly replied. ‘You’re thinking of the Matt Damon fiasco.’
I was. Every now and again, when one of those socio-sexual-political volcanoes erupts, we debate whatever has people’s knickers in such a frightful Twitter twist.
The Matt Damon conversation was inspired by the actor’s remarking that, while obviously he’d never work with Harvey Weinstein, he would judge every Me Too case on its own demerits. Specifically, he refused to disown his mate Louis C K over that comedian’s moonlighting as a performance onanist.
My son took a draconian line, and not just about C K practising sex as a soloist in front of women (no great testament, we may concur, to his finishing school on the banks of Lake Lucerne). He was barely less tough on Damon for the lack of ambiguity.
The conversation began on the M3 towards London, started simmering as we hit the M25 and came to the boil on the M4. An hour later, a road sign revealed that we’d travelled 70 miles in the wrong direction and were now on the outskirts of Swindon.
You will appreciate the urge, then, to conduct the Rowling Debate from different counties – my son at his mother’s Dorset cottage, I in the bath (I mention this only for an audience in continual need of erotic stimulation) at my Gothically rancid home in Shepherd’s Bush.
The Rowling furore, in case you missed it, concerned the author’s ridiculing of a headline’s reference to ‘people who menstruate’, rather than to ‘women’.
In a lifetime of perpetual perplexity, nothing – not even the saw ‘Travel broadens the mind’; yeah, so what the hell happened to Judith Chalmers? – has bemused me like trans politics.
The tweets in which otherwise like-minded folk yell at one another are almost literally all Greek to me. They bring to mind an unseen exam in which Thucydides’s nonsense about some battle swam into one amorphous mass, until I had to copy the entire answer from my friend Paul Brown, outscoring him by seven per cent.
As far as I understand it, however, what mutated the impeccably liberal
Harry Potter philanthropist into J KKK Rowling was her refusal to accept that by declaring, ‘I am a woman,’ a person born with testes makes it so.
To those who share her view, gender or sex (there is a distinction, but I can never remember what it is) is a biological fact rather than a personal choice. It can be altered by surgery and/or hormonal treatment, but not by a statement.
They will not be dismissed as TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) for standing up for more conventional women placed in danger by men claiming to be female. Nor will they be enslaved to woke dictates.
To my son’s twentysomething generation – a generation immeasurably superior to mine in every imaginable way – this attitude represents a form of persecution against a minority who endure horrendous abuse.
They acknowledge incidents concerning self-proclaimed women who, retaining their penises, terrorise and violate women of longer standing in prisons, changing rooms and elsewhere.
But to them, the self-determination of gender, or sex, is a human-rights issue with no more room for argument than the removal of slave-trader statues.
From his lockdown berth near Blandford Forum, my boy went through the familiar stages while I lay in the bath and desperately strove to follow.
He explained why I was mistaken to defend Rowling. I stuck to my guns. He explained again, more slowly, until I muttered that it was very difficult, and that I could certainly see both sides.
Then he explained a third time, now in the style of a mildly exasperated but indulgent dog-trainer trying to teach a trick to an unusually stupid beagle. I told him that I absolutely understood.
I believe I did. For as long as it took to dry myself and conduct the various dental procedures mandated by rampant gingivitis, it made absolute sense.
The next morning, I mentioned to my parents that their grandson had called and comprehensively educated me on this vexing subject. Being a shade bemused themselves about the politics of transitioning, they asked me to do the same for them.
‘Delighted,’ I said. ‘You see, the really important point about this… Well, you see, the central thing here is that… Umm. I’ll ring him tonight and get back to you.’
And, quite suddenly, the penny dropped. It is possible to change gender, or sex, without going under the knife or freebasing oestrogen. I’ve done it myself, and without knowing. I have transitioned into Mam in the Talking Heads monologue, who tells Alan Bennett’s Graham that she understood why racism is wrong when he explained it to her, but now can’t for the life of her remember why.