Birchillgate: Or the irony of the Oppressed Oppressing the Oppressed

Screenshot from Dys4ia, an autobiographical game about gender reassignment surgery

I should start with a bit of a set up for this, since it's a bit out there as far as a Clinkening topic (although I’ve touched on gender politics before). I originally wanted to write this for the Clinkening last week, but thanks to my phenomenally stupid time management skills, I was two busy fighting the two headed viper of essay deadlines and sleep deprivation to really be able to do it justice.

And I suspect I'll have to to get away with this one.

My attention was drawn during one of my all-too-frequent breaks from my essays to an article by bastion of tact Julie Birchill and her article “Transsexuals Should Cut it Out” (now removed from Comment is Free, so reference will be to the “We've got some clowns...” archived version of it), in which she throws out every trans slur possible in the name of explaining how a “bunch of dicks in chicks' clothing” have no right to contribute to the feminist agenda, and that apparently their issues aren't important enough to discuss.

I originally was a bit wary of entering a debate where, as not a woman, nor a transsexual outside of maybe Baudrillard's definition (where we all are), but since this is as much a debate on excluding voices as it is on the feminist Zeitgeist, I figured it'd be ironic enough for me to get away with it. So let's be balanced about it, let Birchill get her day in court.

The purpose of the article was as a response to criticism of lauded (and controversial: infamous feminist critic Germaine Greer famously describing her: “hair birds-nested all over the place, f***-me shoes and three inches of fat cleavage”) feminist writer Suzanne Moore, who posted an extract from her latest book Red: The Waterstones Anthology about the power of female anger. For the most part the piece was Marxist-inspired discussion of the seeming reversal in gender equality in the last five years, its causes and the warning to the powers that be that women wouldn't be put down and pulled down anymore by identity politics and tokenism. However, in what she calls a “throwaway line”, she comments on the subject of image and gender politics:

The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.

The “Brazilian transsexual” line was a moment of pretty phallic stupidity to be quite honest, a point where Moore lost the point of her argument and relied on pretty lurid stereotypes. Unless she was talking in a kind of Baudrillardian sense – that the body has become an “artifice” that is crafted and constructed to the point where it is no longer sexually attractive in a physiological sense but in the sense of its image, it's constructed image – then perhaps I can see where Moore was going with that. But as she later admitted it was a throwaway line meant to spice it up, transsexual commenters, writers and the like were justifiably upset, as were actual Brazilian transsexuals, given Brazil's appalling record on trans crime, despite it's Carnival reputation. Moore's responses weren't entirely convincing, mainly because she didn't offer a true act of contrition for it (she has apologised for it though, that should be pointed out), more asking for perspective on the 'real issues' and the real enemies.

Yeah, denigrating trans issues is TOTALLY going to make them feel united and that they are part of a universal struggle for equality.

So yeah, there was a lot of classic “Feminism is Middle Aged White Women” issues with Moore's article, and that arrogant lack of self-awareness that broke down the Women's Liberation Movement by the early eighties (Women's liberation being the name for the largest fragment of second wave feminism), but on the whole its focus was elsewhere, and the issue the trans community seemed to have with it was as much about flippancy as it was about actual offence.

Birchill on the other hand...

Right, I'd better get this out of the way; I have a lot of bile built up from reading the piece repeatedly so I'd better get it out of the way. The article was pretty close to fucking abuse, and it's fairly fucking ironic that she in the tagline harps on that “it's never a good idea for those who feel oppressed to start bullying others in turn” as she spends the entire article denigrating, belittling and attempting to silence trans people, ending with an outright threat:

“Shims, shemales, whatever you're calling yourselves these days – don't threaten or bully us lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we've experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain't seen nothing yet. You really won't like us when we're angry.”

Yes Ms Birchill, it really isn't a good idea to bully others because you feel oppressed, is it?

Right, with that out of the way, my vitriol back to safe levels, it's time to try and break down Birchill's argument, such that it is. What is Birchill trying to say, other than “chicks with dicks” need to stop haressing her friend because they have the foolish right to believe that they can be accepted as women, who they mentally have always been but physiology has betrayed? Because, if one line sums up Birchill's argument is, funnily enough, a quote from Moore herself “'People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them.'” There is the notion that there is some kind of competition between M to F transsexuals and born women, as if only one of these groups represents “true” feminism, and more tellingly that there is somehow a conspiracy that men undergo gender reassignment therapy (a series of painful, intrusive, long term procedures) purely, as Birchill eloquently puts it “to have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women”. Actually, she summed it up much better here in a piece simply entitled 'Gender Bending':

Transsexualism is, basically, just another, more drastic twist on the male menopause, which in turn is just another excuse for men to do as they please.

You really do become the thing you hate don't you? Also, I'm glad thirteen years of thought has led you to the same tired conclusion Ms Birchill.

So, to summate, she's a hateful writer who apparently twists an agenda initially based on the fight for equality to turn it against people she considers “no true Sco- I mean Women!” and in doing so undermines her cause, the cause for feminism (by proving a lot of crtics of feminism absolutely right) and damaged the credibility of The Observer, the newspaper this hateful polemic initially appeared in. This has sent ripples throughthe intelligentsia, most of which siding against Birchill if not for her toxic views than at least for the way she said it and has led to the removal of the article (for breaking large swathes of the code of conduct, namely the bit about using language offensive to various groups) and really in the end proving her own immaturity while doing so.

I'd say that Julie Birchill should cut it out, but I don't think the choice is in her hands now that the PCC is involved...

It's a pretty incendiary debate, so comments are welcome, but try to keep them civil. 

Stay safe and always hug it out, no matter who you are

Huggy Dave

The Metafrustration: Blogging about not thinking of anything to blog about

Hello there. When I started writing the blog again, I committed myself to a schedule to wit I would write a blog post every other day, and make sure I had a good split between discussing contemporary news, writing reviews on music and views on writing and philosophy and stuff. I guess this counts as stuff but I do apologise for the complete lack of anything resembling fascinating discourse or argument in the next thousand words or so.

In life, things tend to appear in cycles. As we move between boom and bust in the financial front, most things around us tend to move in similar cycles. We move from slickly produced committee-created music in favour of wonderfully earnest “real” “alternative” music. We stop stuffing our minds with popcorn films and watch more frugal artistic fare. Clothing styles change with the tide. To a degree these are financial based: Who would fund overpriced crap in a recession for instance? And as for music, why do people want to hear about people bragging about being so mind bogglingly rich it causes most people to transcend sanity. In the past it's how art and life interlinked: Art fit the needs and attitudes of the people and to a degree vice versa...

The new millennium may have changed that a little bit.

Maybe this is just me looking back, but with the evolution of the internet going far beyond anyone's expectations and its simple far-reaching nature meaning that uprising and protest and world change is increasingly returning to the hands of the people. People in large numbers can incite change, for good or bad. But what has been lost in the midst of riots and uprisings and despots being upturned is the other massive revolution of the internet brought by its sheer scale and vastness; the fact that there is room for all voices to be heard on it in some form. Hell, the very fact you're reading these words proves it, and the media has fought like Canute telling the tide to go back is the fragmentation of the audience. In the past, music tastes being cyclical made sense; you heard music in record shops and on the radio, and so when audiences got bored and turned off, something else would take its place to begin the other step of the cycle. People picked up their guitars, then put them down when they got sick of the earnestness. I use music as an example primarily because the difference between the two cycles is so readily apparent; on one end you have digitised slickly produced music with relatively simple messages appealing to an audience that likes the way the hegemony is treating them, and when people get sick of that, the underground rises; the music of the people gets its time in the spotlight to shine. With the internet, everyone has the chance of getting the best of all worlds; commercialised music thrives but at the same time the individual taste of a lot of underground subcultures gets their chance to be catered for, and it's hard for a usually very single minded set of old industries to get their head around, over 20 years after the internet started to thrive in earnest, they still don't.

What does this have to do with anything, let alone the frustration of creating a blog post?

My point is the internet is everything and nothing in the world and in terms of media and communication has an appeal for all niches. If you want to write tiny messages about your day, you have Twitter and Facebook to suit you. I've heard various stories over the years in typically graceful moderate language of how the internet is ruining language, industry, music, film, literature and pretty much anything else. The arguments typically being given from old industries and folks who are not entirely well versed on the Internet’s great power for communication, and would rather see the locking down and ruination of it than allow the world to change around them. Either the internet will change society to fit, or as many enterprising individuals and small groups have realised, ways to make money on the internet will be found and really the only thing at risk from the internet as it is are the huge monoliths who crow about it.

It's such a shame they seem to be the lawmakers now...