When I was at university, one of my tutors was trans. We knew she was trans because we'd heard she might appear in a skirt and/or earrings. Indeed, for my first tutorial she was wearing both. I remember thinking, "Oh look! Bloke with earrings!", but then everything was so relaxed and normal. She didn't make a fuss or draw any attention to it. When she later contemplated a full sex change, she told the tabloids: "It's no big deal."
No shrieking or posturing or demanding people accept "her#truth". No thundering into the women's changing rooms at the local swimming pool and shouting that this was the only place she'd get changed or she'd sue. No insisting people called her a "proud lesbian" or whatever label she'd dreamt up that morning. She was a trans woman, that was it. She just wanted to get on with her life teaching Aristophanes. End credits.
I was always struck by the calm and, indeed, womanly way in which she must have endured all the awful insults, the people openly criticising her figure, her looks, her inability to walk in high heels. It must have been a fitting initiation into the appalling business of being female, this constant close examination of everything she wore and everything she did, her mannerisms, her fashion decisions, the slightest of errors picked over and laughed at.
Why anyone would want to sign up to the painful pinching tyranny of female footwear or the sly horrors of "realistic" make-up is beyond me, but she did and now, two decades later, she is a brilliant professor at a major university.
I often think about her when I read about the cacophonous, illiberal outrages perpetrated by the provisional wing of the trans lobby - people such as the horrifying Canadian trans woman Jessica Yaniv, whose grim behaviour is a grotesque betrayal of her long-suffering sisters. Yaniv has most recently complained to the human rights tribunal in British Columbia because a series of female beauticians had refused to wax her testicles. You'd have thought her complaints, 16 in all, might have been immediately thrown out. No one has a right to walk into a beautician's salon or, in some cases, her own home and say it's the law that she touch their bollocks. But apparently Yaniv believes it is her human right to receive this service. It is her human right to be recognised as a woman. It is her right to receive Brazilians from the hands of poor, frightened immigrant women. If they refuse, they are transphobes. If they say no, they deserve to lose their livelihoods, as one beautician has done.
I'd like to say it puts us in the peculiar situation of arguing which is more of a human right: the right of a man-born woman to be recognised as a woman, or the right of a woman-born woman not to have to touch someone's testicles. But I won't, because it doesn't. What it puts us in the position of is having to hold a serious discussion about waxing balls.
Really? How does this even get the air time? Why doesn't someone just say, sorry, waxing bollocks is simply below our pay grade, off you run and stop harassing women? Stop pretending this is a serious grievance, stop screaming that you feel violated or degendered or whatever it is you don't feel, because what you're engaging in is the dismal grey slurp of bog-standard misogyny.
What you're doing is trying to humiliate women for being women while requesting they satisfy your disgusting fantasies. Because this isn't about gender or sexuality, it is about male aggression. It is almost as if these activists don't think they're making progress unless a woman has been publicly attacked or lost her job. No woman would storm into a salon and demand that someone give a certain type of wax. So why should people be allowed to claim they are women while behaving like men? @CamillaLong They don't think they're making progress unless a woman has been publicly attacked
Caption: Jessica Yaniv has complained to a human rights tribunal in Canada because female beauticians have refused to wax her testicles
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