Farrukh Dhondy | Of ‘Transgenderism’; Battles Over Choices by Men & Women on Sexual Preferences

“Life, they say, is a cabaret

Is there always an audience there?

And doesn’t the melody frequently stray

And turn into vanity’s fair?

A cabaret can be joyous or sad

And reflect life’s real flow --

Erm… depending on how many drinks I’ve had

If it’s too many, I’d better go?”

From The Love Song of Dee Warner, by Bachchoo

In The Spectator, a Tory weekly, the writer and journalist Lionel Shriver confessed to finally coming out. No, she didn’t finally say she was gay. She’s not. She merely said she’s dropping her inhibitions about being on the wrong side in the transgender controversy.

She noted that people had been penalised, cancelled, etc, for saying that transgenderism was a fantasy rather than a supportable truth, perhaps taking courage from the ruling of the British Supreme Court that gender and sex (NOT sexual preference!) are determined biologically at birth -- a boy’s a boy, a girl’s a girl.

Across the waters, the chump Donald Trump said something similar.

Though one should be wary of being on the same side as him on anything, Shriver declares that she is; J.K. Rowling has long been chastised for asserting she is and very many feminists of that opinion are called TERFS -- trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists. Some of them have been pilloried and even forced to resign from their academic posts.

A toxicity still plagues the discussion of transgenderism.

Before it set in and there was even good-humoured space and tolerance of silly jokes, I perpetrated a philosophical one of my own. I said I was “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body” -- philosophical? Well, it was intended to say that my relationships with women had no D.H. Lawrencian male domination dimension -- it was an equal business. Today -- or even then – this “philosophical” intent wouldn’t come through and I would be chastised, hated, cancelled and threatened… or am I being melodramatic? (Yes, get over it –Ed) My other light-hearted “joke”: “What would Karl Marx say to transgender people? He’d say ‘transgenders of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your pronouns’!” I think that’s quite harmless, but even so it was met with objections, not least from my son and daughters.

When the phenomenon of “gender dysphoria” entered the public debate, London’s Tavistock Clinic pioneered the hormone treatment of young children to block their puberty and even recommended carrying out plastic surgery to amputate male sexual organs or female breasts. Was that ever right?

Isn’t the assertion of children that they are in the wrong sex body a psychological deviation rather than the ghost in the machine, the soul in the body asserting a truth?

That’s surely an assertion supported by the religious notion that there is a soul hovering inside the flesh and it can think -- as distinct from the brain which is very much part of, and inseparable from, the physical, gender- specific body.

It occurred to me then that this assertion of belonging to a contrary gender could be based on a very early perception and rejection of the power relationships between the genders that exist in all societies.

Those who argued that biological sex and gender were not binary would point to the existence of “hijras”, sometimes mistakenly characterised as “eunuchs”, in the subcontinent. The argument is grievously mistaken.

Doctors tell me that “hijras” are “cryptorchids”, born as men with penises, whose bones, through distorted growth in the crotch, have crushed their testicles, giving rise to the production of male and female hormones through their puberty -- they are men who have secondary sexual features of both genders -- beards, breasts and breaking voices. In the West, early medical attention allows observation, intervention and the testicles to drop and develop naturally -- so no “hijras”! -- though Chaucer’s Pardoner was probably one.

The UK Supreme Court’s assertion of the existence of binary gender for every legal and differentiating purpose has had wide repercussions. It in no way stops men from asserting that they are women or the other way round.

You can’t be discriminated for the assertion but the law does not recognise assertion as fact.

It does enable institutions to ban transgender men from women’s lavatories, changing rooms or prisons and, for instance, transgender men from competing in women’s boxing tournaments. Some see these restrictions as overbearing.

I don’t.

I support absolutely the right of people to assert that they are living in a body of the “wrong” gender and that such an assertion should in no respect lead to violation of their human rights. Of course that’s problematic. Is it a violation of a human right if others don’t accept your assertions of being what they perceive you are not? Does such assertion apply to race and even to species?

Can a white person assert that he or she is really black or brown? And I can say I’m a dog but I can’t go around biting people or pissing on lampposts.

My friends Kaizad Gustad, the writer-director, and Bobby Bedi, the film producer, are in the process of making a transgender romance set in a fishing village of Mumbai, aimed at international audiences and film festivals. I wish them the best.

I was asked to comment on the script and did. One of my central observations is that bodies, gender-transformed through hormones and surgery, can’t have orgasms.

OK, love has other satisfactions?