Safe for Some
Safe for Some
(Copyright © 1996)
"On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ’Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.
I should have said ’You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’ The transvestite (sic) held me in a rapist’s grip… Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even … It is strange though that a vocal and combative body of feminists did not throw the whole idea out on its’ ear before it was quietly and sneakily implemented."
Germaine Greer writing in The Independent: "On why sex change is a lie", 22nd July, 1989
If transsexuals have a mammoth job to educate the public at large about the reality of their condition, and the sort of people they are, then it pales into insignificance against the wall of ignorance and hostility created 25 years ago, when feminist leaders callously began denouncing transsexuals as demons, in their struggle to give the womens movement an identity.
The world may have learned a lot since then. But how do you tread when the lies you’re correcting have been peddled by the generation of leaders whose image you otherwise don’t want to tarnish?
What do you say when you know that the reason for being demonised by them was to draw a sharp dividing line between a group with a shared experience of life, and the outside … when you acknowledge how important it was for women at that time to define themselves by whom they excluded … even if that meant stifling the debate about any grey border areas by creating a grossly distorted stereotype with which to label (and libel) all transsexual people.
But that was 25 years ago. The cold frame erected to protect the seeds of feminism whilst they took root and established themselves is surely not necessary today? Is it? Or has twenty five years in the rarefied debating atmosphere of a controlled space … womens space … created a flower that’s too fragile to withstand a slight breeze? If my presence in their midst disturbs some other women then is it really because they seriously believe I benefited from (sic) the privilege of my upbringing? … Now there’s a sick and cruel joke. Or am I, more as I suspect, a threat to the foundations of a philosophy that slandered and raped me … yes raped me … for its’ own ends? And can I forgive that invasion?
On a Saturday afternoon in a pleasant English University suburb I went along to find out the hard way. To argue, as both advocate and plaintiff, that transsexual women have more in common with the experience of their sisters than they blandly imagine.
Second class? Powerless? Low self esteem? Economically disadvantaged? Victim? Discriminated against? Sisters we share more than you begin to imagine … from our earliest recollections.
Under debate was the question of whether the group I was visiting should argue the case with their peers for other women like me to be admitted to their women-only space.
The air was thick with irony as I politely answered question after question. Corrected lie after lie. Defended my client’s very existence and justified their (and my) course in life.. as though I should be expected to succeed in communicating a personal experience that’s no easier to describe to the uninitiated than a panic attack or childbirth. … As though the court before me, drawing its’ authority from the shape of genitals they were born with, had the intellectual right to weigh up and judge the evidence which I’d spent much of my life studying and experiencing first hand. At stake, not just my client’s but my own self image and status as a woman in a club which I didn’t personally want to join. The charge, that my client (and by implication I) would make them feel uncomfortable.
Irony? Well this was a group of bisexual women attempting to decide among themselves whether women like me should be admitted to their events. A group of people whose concept of the term transsexual comes from their political culture rather than from any effort in the past to check out the reality. Yet, as I sat there, I thought about the rather different group of middle-aged, middle-of-the-road, Tory ’shire women which I chair in the constituency where I live and work … and whether they, using a parallel set of prejudices, would feel universally comfortable about admitting any of these sexually ambiguous women to our space.. Their response, since I came out among them as a transsexual woman myself last year, was to show by their deeds that, to them, transsexual is just an adjective … like Tory or married, or any of the myriad others which we all get labelled with. The operative term was the noun. And that wasn’t in dispute. I’d always been a woman to them. The fact that I’d suffered a case of mistaken identity earlier in my life didn’t alter that. Just to make sure I even obliged them to re-nominate me as their chair, when a mere nod would normally do. They did so, loudly and enthusiastically. So I know when I’m among friends.
But then I’d never been slandered and parodied in the name of their political identity. No Germaine Greer or Janice Raymond character had needed to use me to consolidate their power base and substantiate their ideology. Accepting me and my kind didn’t amount to pulling out the foundation stones on an entire political theory for them. Under those circumstances, it’s obvious that most people find it easier than those (presumably less secure) to accept a new experience and integrate it into their view of society.
That majority would join with me in being horrified by the notion that, after being raped by a man, a woman like myself would be turned away from a politically correct Rape Crisis Centre. Told, in the ultimate act of cruelty, that she was a man. That she should seek counselling from a man. That she made her sisters feel uncomfortable. In a bizarre way rapists have a better line in manners. At least they treat their victims, without prejudice, as women.
That majority look justifiably horrified too when I spell out the realities of transsexual life in Britain in 1996. They might not have known before that we are subject to not just petty but truly frightening bureaucratic madness and bullying. Obliged, for the rest of our lives, to disclose our legal status (and consequently relive the pain of what we endured) at every turn. Tell most people that the law decrees that a male customs officer should carry out an intimate examination of my vagina if I’m stopped on the way back from a business trip and they’re horrified. Tell a radical feminist, and there’s likely to be an awkward pause whilst they digest the political implications of how to react. So who do I feel most comfortable and safe with?
To return to the meeting though, I have to say that my hosts went out of their way to be polite. Repeatedly, it was obvious that I was without question an us and that we were yet again discussing transsexual women as them .. so that I had to go out of my way to use language which reminded them that the people being objectified and stereotyped included me. That’s the trouble with stereotypes, it’s so easy to hang on to them by imagining the reality to be an exception, rather than the rule.
We debated and agreed that maybe some transsexual women stuck out as a little odd because nobody had had the kindness and imagination to offer them the help that they needed to blend in. To help them to be assimilated into society. To give them a crash course in the decades of learning which the other women around them had received as a right. As their privilege.
Yet there was a fundamental lack of politeness and empathy too, an expectation that I should meekly agree to play a part in their game. To assume that I should be grateful if they condescended to invite me along to correct their prejudices. To miss the point that their actions made me feel profoundly uncomfortable in their version of womens space.
A space that I now know is safe only for some.
And nobody thought to say sorry.