This week has been hectic although looking back on it, it’s less that I’ve had a hectic week and more that, after last week’s visitation from Cardinal Chunder and friends I was definitely not firing on all cylinders for most of the time. I finally got back to the gym on Thursday, even though I was still feeling a little ropy.
It did leave me a little time to browse the internet more than I should have done. There was also time to write which was good and finally, after some of the stuff I read on line, time to think. Yeh, I know, if I keep practising it might become an habit etc.
It also gave me more time to spend on social media. The result is … well I did enjoy all those posts about Rishi looking like he’d just got gunked on Tiswas but otherwise it’s all a bit grim. Yes, rant warning ahead. MTM steps onto soap box. Yep. Here we go. You might want to scroll on by but …
Blimey. What a bunch of miserable fucking bastards we are! Seriously. What is going on? I saw a post somewhere about young people and their many genders etc and the poster was commenting on what a load of bollocks it all is.
It wasn’t shrill or tub thumping but it wan’t needed. It was stuff that didn’t need said and yet, it was there and because there seems to be an awful lot of tub thumping shrill stuff about ‘wokeness’ it just felt like another person putting the boot in against kindness, respect and consideration for others, which is what a lot of ‘wokeness’ is supposed to be.
Perhaps I feel it more because my son has so many LGBTQ+ friends. But I get perplexed by this anti woke stuff. I don’t mean the endless pussy footing about in case we cause people offence. That’s just stupid and standing against that is fine. I mean the inability to see the difference between not taking consideration for others to extremes and just not considering others. The anti woke reaction I guess.
The one where the logic goes like this. Bob is LGBTQ+ and has behaved like a twat on telly. That must mean everyone LGBTQ+ is a twat like Bob. Even though there are LGBTQ+ people we’ve known all our lives who are friends and we know aren’t twats! Also, let’s not take the matter up with Bob because even though that would be logical we can’t reach him. Instead, let’s go kick our friend Eric who we’ve known for. years. Eric hasn’t even heard of Bob but he just happens to be LGBTQ+ as well and furnished with our new knowledge of famous Bob, who has been a dick everyone, we now understand that all LGBTQ+ must be dicks and since Eric lives round the corner it makes sense to go smack him. Yes, we’ll smack Eric, even though we have known his family for years and his father is our son’s godfather and we know he’s a lovely man etc etc.
Is this for real?
What fucking prick outside the brainwashed nimby in a police state thinks that one small aspect of a person defines the rest of them?
Also anti woke? Yes of course, because a few morons going over the top about getting offended now means that consideration and thought about other people is a bad thing. As if the fact someone has behaved like an arsehole and got offended over nothing gives the anti-woke brigade cart blanche to go out of their way to deliberately upset different, unrelated people who just happen to have the same gender, sexuality, hair colour (insert your own inane reason here) as famous person who’s behaviour they consider rude, in some warped ‘redressing of the balance’. Or ‘perpetuation of the pointless shit and enmity’ as I prefer to call it.
How old are we all? Three?*
*No. Most three year olds have already grown out of this kind of behaviour.
As the mother of a teenager, I feel beholden to say something.
There is always the disingenuous argument in any conversation about the modern youth’s approach to gender along the lines of x, y or z person has decided that they are a toaster, which stems from a misunderstanding of how they interpret gender, is largely irrelevant to the whole gender/trans debate and merely serves to muddy the waters. A bit like the ‘all lives matter’ mantra, when yes, undeniably all lives do matter, but the whole point of black lives matter was that, to a lot of the ethnic population, it felt like non-white lives didn’t matter. Back to the youth of today.
My son explains that there is a person’s sex, which is what you are born as, male or female and that is irrefutable, but your gender is more like a spectrum which is why some girls are very girly and some are, in many respects, blokes with boobs and a high voice. There is of course, every stage of girlyness or blokishness along the spectrum between.
That makes sense.
Yet still I see so much anti LGBTQ+ or minority of any description crap daily on t’interweb. More than when I was growing up in the 1980s for fuck’s sake. I find my self wondering why? Seriously. Apart from the obvious, are we really going that badly backwards? Question, why does anyone give a shit? Or at least, why do so many people give a shit about trivial rubbish like the way someone else expresses their sexuality? I mean, one; it’s not their business how much man, lady or in between anyone else feels. Two; if choosing to be one gender or another makes a person happier, and therefore more readily able to be kind to others, why would anyone stand in their way? Oh and three; did I mention that someone’s sexuality is none of other people’s fucking business.
I saw a Facebook post just recently; someone in East Anglia getting all hot under the collar because Chichester police dolled up a police car for pride week down in Sussex. That’s where Brighton is, in case anyone needs a nudge. The usual comments asking why they couldn’t spend the money fighting crime followed, from a bunch of people who clearly don’t understand how the allocation of budgets works in government, local authorities and large organisations. Here’s a hint, you can’t take the cost of a £500 vehicle wrap from a marketing budget and add it to a different one. That’s now how it works. I’m not saying it’s good but that’s the way it is in most organisations right now.
These folks who have to complain about everything do my nut.
You! Yes you! You miserable fuckers! You’re doing my effing head in.
Seriously, people are so pissed off by the minor inconvenience of having to call someone ‘they’ that they are happy to put hours of time and energy into saying horrible things about them on the internet. Please tell me, who has the time and energy for all this anger and hatred. Jeez guys, just step away from the poison and calm down for one fucking minute. Is it really so fucking hard to be kind?
I dunno. Maybe it is.
It seems that I’ve hit this weird stage in life where I’ve reached the middle and noticed that some of the people around me have suddenly got old. I don’t mean that they’ve physically aged, well they have and I have too, but I’m not talking about that. I mean their outlook is old, in absolutely the wrong way. They are acting like stereotypical grumpy old people; saying and doing stuff that is, frankly, a bit grim. I’m just waiting for someone I hang out at the pub with to say it’s time they, ‘brought back the birch’ or some other rampantly mentalist shit.
So another question … is anyone gay making people be gay? Is anyone trans forcing the straight objectors to LGBTQ+ to be trans. No. Which puts them in a much better position than the lion’s share of LGBTQ+ people then. Because for years people who aren’t straight, in whatever way, have been forced to pretend they are. Not a few years either. Hundreds. Thousands in some cultures. Notable exception some older, wiser cultures than ours.
You know what. If all the self appointed sexuality police in the heterosexual world consider that, as humans, they are big and ugly enough to decide their sexuality for themselves, then surely it follows that people in the LGBTQ+ community are equally well equipped to decide their sexuality for themselves. So long as nobody is deciding anyone else’s sexuality for them and forcing them to be someone they’re not surely that’s OK.
Nobody LGBTQ+ is doing any harm or ‘corrupting people’ by being open about who they are. They’re just doing things their way and by doing things differently they are allowing other LGBTQ+ people like them the chance to be true to themselves without fear, or if they’re not sure, to explore possibilities. I’m thinking people who might otherwise have lived their lives pretending to be someone they aren’t here. You know, folks who are too afraid not to fit in, or who are forced to.
The thing that’s difficult about homophobia is that I can easily see that it’s a big part of our caveman programming and therefore, to some people, it feels natural, like an instinct. Think about it. Back in our caveman days, we were usually at war with the tribe next door. Infant mortality was high and making babies was as much an arms race as the natural progression of a loving relationship, rather more so, in fact. Making sure everyone who possibly could had kids was an important part of survival. Of course they didn’t like anyone challenging that norm.
If you don’t like the LGBTQ+ community, relax because it’s not them, it’s you. That’s your inner cave man messing with your arse. It just means you’re not quite as well evolved as the rest of us. Never mind. Keep working at it.
So while there are no gender police waiting to stop me in the street and put me on a charge for not caring about my nails and makeup enough, I will always support LGBTQ+ people’s right to just be who they are, because in many places they are not allowed to. Since I am allowed to be who I am (and as a woman, in many places, I’m not allowed to do that either) I’d like to think I can afford to extend such a simple courtesy to others.
So, if my son ever wakes up one morning and decides he feels more female than male, it won’t make him a different person. He’ll still be the lovely chap I know and love. He just might be a ‘they’ from that point on rather than a ‘he’—he might even be a ‘she’—but I really don’t care if that is what will make him feel fulfilled and happy.
I’m just a bit shocked, as I get older, how many people my age are going … a bit Oswold Mosley and becoming intolerant, mean, pissy and only interested in negging everything and everyone. What happened to us? I think back to the Olympics of 2012 and I swear we’ve jumped the fucking timeline. Or a whole load of people have swapped places with nutters from the middle ages who don’t understand modern life, think electricity is magic and believe forks are evil. What happened there? I’m sure I haven’t changed yet suddenly I feel like an alien. What’s happened to everyone else. Sheesh.
Me, I play down my gender, ergo M T McGuire rather than Mary, because the minute people know I am female all kinds of judgemental shit comes into play. Less than there was but it’s still there. Maybe that’s why I find it a bit easier to live and let live when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. But the whole storm in a teacup about ‘they’ reminds me of the outcry when women first started using Ms instead of Miss or Mrs; on the grounds that whether they were married or not was nobody’s business but their own.
Before anyone comes back with the answer that being LGBTQ+ is abominable ‘because it’s wrong’ I would just raise a question.
If something is wrong, it means it hurts others. Now, most people who are trans, like most people who are anything, are not deliberately setting out to hurt other people. Indeed, a lot of the time, fessing up to feeling that they are more of a lady inside than they are a man or vice versa, or that they would prefer a same sex partner, is fraught with fear and difficulty. In order to open up about who they are to their family and friends, I suspect they will have to uncover reserves of courage that, with any luck, us vanilla people will never need to find.
Like any of these things, it comes down to the fact there are two types of people. Those who are pricks and those who aren’t. I have zero beef with calling someone ‘they’ if it makes them feel more comfortable and at ease. That’s just human decency isn’t it? If they ask politely and I refuse, I’m the prick in that situation. On the other hand, if they’re aggressive or unpleasant about the way they make the request, then yes, I’d feel less like accommodating them. Not because of what they’d asked but because it might be a situation where they’re being the prick.
As an aside here, I have less beef with calling someone ‘they’ than I do with the kind of American cultural imperialism that requires me to spell humour ‘humor’ and cosy ‘cozy’ in all my book listings, or call poo ‘poop’ like we’re all three years old, or the fact that sometime in the last five years or so, a waiting list became a wait list but I digress.
Perhaps it goes wrong when the state tries to legislate for things that people should just have the nouse, not to mention decency and good grace, to work out for themselves. That’s a bit of ‘woke’ I totally get people disliking.
For example, it’s not the state’s job to legislate about who uses which lavatory. That’s up to whoever owns the loo in question. If some guy dresses up in a skirt and goes into the ladies at a club to perv at them, then whatever he says in court, pretending to be ‘trans’ is not relevant since what he’s actually being is a perv. It’s completely illogical to decide that all trans people are pervs because one pervert pretended to be trans. That’s like saying that because burglaries happen to people all people are burglars; clearly bollocks.
Also, going back to the perv in the lavvy scenario. Let’s say, for ease of reference, that the loo is in a night club. In a logical human world, the ladies using the loo would report the fake among their number to the management. Then the management would warn or remove the person. They either call the police, or ban him, or warn him. It’s their loo and it is under their jurisdiction. That’s how life works. So no, the state should not be intervening where it has no reason nor right and where sensible legislation is not possible. Likewise, the ladies using the loo should not be suing the nightclub owner over the perv in the bogs. Not if the club acted.
If you’re countering with, well, there was that story about the sex offender who said he was trans and was sent to a women’s prison and started reoffending in there. As a result everything should operate on the sex you are assigned at birth. Then, yes, I get that but I refer you to the burglar argument earlier. Also, it’s the same logic as saying that if one bloke in America goes into a school with a semi-automatic rifle and kills a load of people, all guns should be banned. I can’t see many of the types who are ‘anti woke’ on the internet buying into that one, can you? A lot of the shrillest decriers of ‘Woke’ and trans culture I’ve encountered are remarkably selective about how and where they apply that particular brand of logic.
Which brings me to my main question. Why do people care? Seriously, what’s the problem? What people do with their bodies is entirely up to them, surely, unless it breaks the law, which, as far as I am aware, being LGBTQ+ doesn’t.
When my son stuck up for a trans person who was being pilloried for posting on line, someone actually posted, ‘Jesus hates you, faggot!’ in response. Oops, missed the entire point of Christianity somewhere along the way there, bud.
Where am I going with this? I dunno where I’m going, I guess I’m trying to say that we’re all human beings. All these people folks hate are someone’s loved one, someones’s son or daughter, someone’s sister or brother.
Many of my friends are gay, several of them knew at a very young age. A couple from school didn’t come out to me for ages. And I know they were worried as to what I might think. But why should I care? They’re still lovely. Being gay is just ephemera like having brown hair. Back in the 1980s, even my parents never gave a shit about this stuff so I sure as hell never will. As Mum would have said, it’s all cosmetic and Dad would have added, all that really counts is whether or not someone is a shit.
So I guess if I want to say anything here it’s, for fuck’s sake. Life is a tough enough at the moment and hate takes so much sodding energy. Just stop. Stop it already. Be Kind. Really. Miserable people beget misery. Happy people spread love. For the most part, that’s how life works. Be kind because it’ll make you happy, I promise and it’s really not that hard.