There’s an amusing brouhaha about transsexuals in the pages of the left-wing press at right now. Guardian woman, Suzanne Moore, complained that women were now expected to have bodies like Brazilian transsexuals. Some members of the trangender "community" were so upset by this utterly innocuous comment they bullied her off Twitter.Fellow leftist, Julie Burchill, was so incensed that she had a go at transsexuals in the Observer, pointing out the fact that men who have undergone SRS, or Sex Reassigment Surgery, are pretend-women.
Well, in many ways, aren’t they? True, she also called them bed-wetters in bad wigs and "dicks in chicks' clothing" - but, after all, we’re talking about Julie Bullshit here: this is what she's paid to do.
And now the Observer, that bastion of free speech, has removed Ms Burchill’s column from its website and apologised for any offence it may have caused. (Toby Young subsequently published it on the Telegraph website, here.)
What a gutless, pantywaist lefty rag!
One of the most wearing aspects of modern left-liberalism is the way, when it comes to how it expects rest of us to treat its various mascot victim groups (gays, blacks, the disabled, Muslims, transvestites, PORGs, transsexuals, etc., etc. on and on ad extreme nauseam), it starts off by asking us to tolerate those who are different from us and ends up by ordering us to revere, respect, love and venerate them to the point where, because of their “struggle”, we’re supposed to view them as somehow morally superior to ourselves, and where the slightest hint of criticism is treated as a crime against humanity.
Look, like most members of the abled, heterosexual, white majority in this country, I’m actually quite a tolerant sort of cove – i.e. I’ve never physically attacked or verbally abused any member of any minority to their face, and I’ve enjoyed genuine friendships with members of the first four “victim” groups (I have no idea whether any of my friends is a cross-dresser, but I’m pretty sure I’d have spotted if any of them had opted for gender re-assignment.)
Like most normals, I abhor public displays of intolerance, and have even been known to intervene on behalf of victims (obviously, only when there was no threat of being beaten up). And if Suzanne Moore had written something hurtful about transsexuals, I would have given a half-hearted “tsk! tsk!” But she didn’t: she made a perfectly valid point about the physical appearance of Brazilian transsexuals (not, I hasten to add, that I know many Brazilian transsexuals, but we all know exactly what Ms Moore means).
A female BBC newsreader, on seeing a picture of me with my brother, asked which part of Mongolia we hailed from. I thought that was hilarious (if you’d seen the picture, you’d have laughed too). That’s sort of the point – the newsreader wasn’t being nasty about our physical appearance. She was merely alluding to the fact that neither of us looked like your average Englishman: we were visibly different from the norm, just as most of the transsexuals I’ve seen on television (never knowingly met one) don’t look – or sound – like normal women. That’s because they aren’t. Annoying, probably, if you’ve spent a fortune on the operation and female clothing and make-up and hormone therapy and whatnot in order to pass as a female. But I can’t help that: what they chose to do to themselves had nothing to do with me (and doesn’t interest me in the least, to be honest – I just don’t want to know).
Tolerance – i.e. putting up with people who look, think or behave differently to ourselves, no matter whether they annoy or positively repel one – doesn’t in any way require wholehearted enthusiasm for the abnormal. If those who are abnormal imagine it does, they really need to learn the meaning of tolerance, and to start practicing it.
And it would be good if the Observer learned the meaning of editorial courage. Talk about LMF!
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