The fear of being stared at
Via Glinner’s post, Eddie Izzard’s heart-rending story of being persecuted by three teenage girls when he joined them in the women’s toilet on his first day going out dressed in “women’s clothes.”
Most of what I remember about my first day walking around outside in makeup and a dress was fear. The fear of being stared at, which I knew I would be. This was partly because I wasn’t that good at applying makeup.
Ah the fear of being stared at. A little different from the fear of being assaulted.
I had a little bag I’d brought with me with my other clothing to change back into. So at the end of the afternoon, I came back on the Underground to Highbury Corner in Islington and went to the ladies’ loos as planned. I’d expected to go in, quickly change my clothes, wipe off my makeup, then slip back out in boy mode so I could go home with no one the wiser.
What I wasn’t expecting in the ladies’ loos at about three o’clock in the afternoon were three teenage girls smoking cigarettes. They were probably just skipping school. So there they were, smoking cigarettes, while I was just trying to find a stall, change clothes, and get out of there.
Or to put it another way, while he was just trying to invade their loo to take his clothes off and golly gee there they were having the audacity to be in the women’s loo when he wanted to use it. The entitlement is breathtaking.
I could hear the whispering going on. In the third cubicle there was a lock. So I locked the door and quickly managed to change my clothes and wipe the makeup off my face, not using the handy makeup wipes that you can buy today, but probably with liquid makeup remover or something else incredibly inconvenient.
Finally, the dress was off, the heels were off, the makeup was off, and jeans and flat shoes were back on. Now I had to make it out quickly before the girls could react.
But that was impossible.
The girls were ready to act. They were just waiting for me. And when I finally came out of the cubicle, they shouted, “Hey, mate! Hey, mister! Why are you wearing makeup? Why are you dressed as a woman?”
Why are you in the wrong loo?
So I was heading away from home, walking and walking and walking, around Highbury Corner, down Canonbury Road, while they continued to shout at me. Finally, I thought: Screw this. They’re just going to shout at me forever. Let’s confront this. So I stopped and I turned around to face my teenage inquisitors.
I shouted back, “You want to know why I’m wearing a dress? I’ll tell you why.”
But before I could say anything else, the girls just screamed and ran off in the other direction. I was stunned. Wow. That wasn’t as hard as I thought.
No shit, Sherlock: that’s because you’re a man.
I think that was the first time I was overtly intimidated because of my sexuality.
You assume older people intimidate younger people, but those three thirteen-year-old girls had power over a twenty-three-year-old man.
He, an adult man, goes into their toilet and takes his clothes off, and then he shouts at them and then he claims that they are the ones who have power over him. You couldn’t make it up.
I learned something that day when those girls ran off: If you confront aggression—Sometimes just standing your ground or even with cheeriness and politeness—sometimes you can shut it down. It’s not a perfect science, but it feels better than being scared. I also learned that you could feel empowered by facing people down. They were only thirteen or fourteen, but the turning around and saying, “All right, I’ll tell you,” felt almost like a second coming out because I had to say, “Okay, you want to put me in a corner? I’ll face this down as opposed to screaming and running.” Which I always thought I might do. But I didn’t scream and run—in the end, they did.
Yes, an adult man scared off three 13-year-old girls after he perved on them in the women’s toilets. He didn’t molest them, assuming his story is true, but he did do a thing that girls and women know to be afraid of. If it had been just one girl in there she would have been fucking terrified.
And all this callous behavior and interpretation is because he likes to dress up in clothes coded female. His kink is brave and stunning, while their self-preservation is “aggression.” It takes my breath away.
At least here he’s admitting his AGP. Not his identity, his sexuality. He should feel lucky: it’s not every paraphillia that gets to enjoy the benefits of corporate sponsorship and institutional capture.
He should have called it his kink.
When I have been overtly intimidated because of my sexuality, I couldn’t just duck into the ladies room, change back into a man, and shout at those who were intimidating me. I didn’t have that option…because I am a woman and most men are not intimidated by most women.
And when I have been intimidated, it is a lot worse than just someone saying “hey, why are you wearing make up?”
Pardon me if I don’t buy the story about three teenage girls following an adult man to heckle him. It’s possible, but I would say not highly probable, though I suppose that depends on exactly what they were smoking in the loo.
Michael Conroy also has a take on this at Medium.
https://medium.com/@MichaelConroy68/my-first-day-out-by-eddie-izzard-c8ff9bcae245
On Mumsnet, they speculate Eddie is doing this to facilitate nomination in the Labour party. On the Women’s List.
One of the podcasts in my rota is This Jungian Life, where three analysts (two female, one male) discuss various psychological topics. I can’t remember the exact topic, but in one episode a while back the male analyst started to explain to the two women that they didn’t UNDERSTAND how incredibly WOUNDING a woman’s poor opinion was to a man, and being criticised or mocked by a woman is like AGONY, the intense and searing pain of which no woman can possibly appreciate. I have no idea where this idea that women’s words, or even women’s side-eye, are as painful to men as men’s physical violence is to women (and thus the former clearly justifies the latter) comes from, but I encounter it a lot. (One of the women in this podcast, by the way, is Lisa Marciano, who has had a lot of insightful things to say about ROGD in girls.)
Good for those girls! I like them!
And, iknklast, I suspect that this story is true. There’s a good tradition of working-class heckling, and Izzard deserved it.
And Izzard – oh, the courage he showed in ‘confronting aggression’! And the banal little moral tale he has made of it! I had supposed he would be too intelligent to descend into that sort of self-pitying morass, and that his sense of humour would have allowed him to see the comedy in the scene. I find it very funny, and even funnier because Izzard’s response to it, both at the time and afterwards. I am reminded of the encounter(s) between Pip and Trabb’s boy and his pals in ‘Great Expectations’.
It must be nice to be able to take off the characteristic that attracts unwanted attention so easily. So unlike being female! Or black or arabic or (etc.), but femaleness is the key comparison to this ‘isn’t gender so poorly understood!’ act. In that single sentence, Eddie demonstrates he has no understanding of what it is like to be female, and that he is only putting on a costume.
Well, yeah. Duh. Three female minors were in the women’s toilets, and along comes an adult man in lipstick and a dress. Eddie makes sure to mention their anger, but I bet before they were angry, they were scared. Once he made his retreat from his intrusion into what is supposed to be their space, I’m not surprised at all that they became angry.
He’s actually happy to have scared a trio of minors.
What a fucking liar. He had just gloated over how easy it was to scare them away two sentences ago.
This entire article is a tribute to Eddie’s narcissism.
Ooh, that response from Michael Conroy is great! Packed with zingers.
Hang on. If he was 23 at the time, that’s back in the day when he was happy to describe himself as a transvestite. He would insist that he was a heterosexual man who liked women’s clothing and makeup. It’s only recently that he’s adopted this “I’m really a woman” pose.
Never have heroes; they always let you down. Please, God (or whoever is really in charge), don’t let Grayson Perry fall down this hole – I don’t think I could stand it. (Mind you,I think Grayson’s wife is too sensible to let him.)
I was thinking the same thing, Graham. He used to say that he was just a bloke in a dress. Mind you, he also used to be funny, so things change, I suppose.
I do find it odd how he talked about slipping back into ‘boy mode’. He was 23, an age at which no man describes himself as a boy. Probably trying to make himself sound more vulnerable in the face of those frightening girls. And speaking of the girls, what a snide way of calling them scum without calling them scum: the sort of girls who skip school and hang around smoking cigarettes in public toilets are just the sort of girls that his middle-class audience would instantly recognise as wrong-uns from the council estates and so understand his fear of them.
There are holes in his account of events, though. If he was 23 at the time it would have been 1985-ish, and back then kids only smoked in the toilets when they were at school. Out in public – skipping school or not – kids who smoked did so openly, not in the fetid atmosphere of the toilets of a London Underground station, and certainly not 2 years before smoking was banned on the Underground after the King’s Cross fire. Why go into a crowded, smelly toilet when they could light up on the platform?
As much as I don’t want to call him a liar, I also find his claim about how far they followed him a tad dubious, as the route he described is a minimum of a half-mile walk and requires crossing at least two very busy roads, and in a part of London which is pedestrian-heavy all day long. He could have vanished into the crowd within a minute of leaving the toilets and certainly been out of earshot within two, leaving the girls apparently yelling at nothing. Then there’s the idea that he was surprised to go into a ladies toilet in a busy London Underground station in the middle of the afternoon, only to find actual, honest-to-goodness females in there. On reflection, I’ve changed my mind. He’s a liar.
AoS:
Actually, the toilets were allegedly on Highbury Fields, not the tube ones, although that doesn’t change what you say. I still think the story is bullshit, although what it stinks of is privilege and arrogance.
The story makes me all the angrier because I can’t help hearing it in Izzard’s ironic tone, which suddenly sounds a lot more like a sneering tone to my….mind…ears…? Sorry, that metaphor got away from me.
Bloody Nora. I’ve just read the whole (annotated) thing (thanks @learie).
What vestige of respect I still had has just been washed away on a tide of whingeing, privileged self-pity. Fuxake, can we all just grow the fuck up, please?
Yes, I saw the bit about Highbury Fields when I read the Medium article after I’d posted, but as you said, it makes little difference.
I know what you mean about his voice. It’s perfect for his routine on the story of Noah’s Ark (which I have to admit is one of the funniest bits of stand-up comedy I’ve seen) but reading this with his voice in mind makes me want to slap his smug face to the back of his head.
Just read the Conroy piece and I thought that, with a lot more self awareness and a lot less entitlement, he could have turned the mad search for a locking stall into a good comic bit about misadventures in cross dressing.
he=Izzard
@Bruce #14, the punch line could have been:
Clearly some trans rights activists will need to train Izzard. By referring to being a “twenty-three-year-old man,” Izzard gave up the game right there. Then it’s just a story about a man going into a women’s room and being confronted about it, and even Izzard’s self-serving spin on it can’t really save it.
Izzard is supposed to retroactively refer to being a “twenty-three-year-old trans woman” so that TWAW applies and the girls are super mean and bigoted for ostracizing a woman for the misfortune of having been “assigned male at birth.”
I suspect that some folks will quietly take Izzard aside and do some coaching so the story gets “better” next time.
I can’t believe the brilliance behind “Dress To Kill” has sunk to this. I stumbled on that HBO special almost 20 years ago, managed to tape it (yes tape i.e. VHS) and some years later digitized it. I have watched it at least 20 times over the years and often used it as an anti-depressant. It has the (or a) Noah bit and as others mentioned a wonderful bit about being a bloke in a dress and make up. Hell the paratroop transvestites (“… they’ve got guns! Oh, fuck … I was surprised were you surprised?…”) alone slays me.
WTF is happening.
@Screechy, #17, scrubbing the internet is going to get very complicated.
I guess because Izzard really has a lady-soul, which is something you’re born with, when he went into the potty he wasn’t removing a woman costume and coming back out as a man, he was putting on a man costume. And the super mean and bigoted chavs (who may or may not have been female – they didn’t share their pronouns!) should have been asking him, er, her, why she was dressing up as a lad, and taking off her makeup, not the other way around.
Papito, they’re not costumes, they’re his ‘modes’. He went into the loos in girl mode and came out in boy mode. Quite how that differs from changing costumes is anybody’s guess. Oh, and he’s special because he has ‘boy genes and girl genes’…erm…just like every other living thing that reproduces sexually unless I’ve completely misunderstood how sexual reproduction works. But, yes, he’s that special.
Michael Conroy’s piece is genius.
John the Drunkard made a good point on the first Izzard post about how this has undone all the good he’d previously done in breaking gender stereotypes.
I can’t help but think that this has more to do with Izzard trying to stay relevant than with his actual feelings about his sex. When he started out in comedy, being openly transvestite was controversial (drag artists were a different kettle of fish: their dress-up was for the stage alone, not a lifestyle) and gave him a unique platform while he honed his talent. The trouble is, the transvestite bit became secondary to his comedy – people stopped paying attention to his look because his comedy spoke for itself- but as good as he was it was inevitable that his star would fade as the next generation came through. It’s a rare comic that doesn’t go through at least one re-invention to revive a flagging career, so it’s more than possible that this is no more than an ill-thought attempt to re-align his image with the controversy of the moment, in order to appeal to a new, woke audience.
I also wonder if he was trying to pre-empt criticism. I thought it was interesting that Izzard’s story mentioned going to a “transvestite/transsexual support group” in the 80s — I would be surprised if such a thing exists today, because my impression is that transsexuals are pretty insistent that they are not transvestites and that the two are not really the same thing at all.
Screechy, another thing about that is the very concept of transsexual. A friend of mine got chewed out for using that phrase; it’s transgender! Said in a loud, shouty voice. I don’t know why it matters; they conflate sex and gender so much. Oh, wait, because sex isn’t real and gender is. Right, got it now.
Screechy, that’s possible, but Izzard has always liked to court criticism rather than go with the flow in order to avoid it, and the audience for ‘bloke in a dress’ Eddy is mainstream enough for him to be bothered by the shouty crowd if he’s happy to just tick along. That’s why I’m leaning towards a cynical re-invention to boost his signal and attract a new crowd. I expect that post-Covid we’ll be seeing an Izzard tour of Britain’s university towns and cities, and likely with a stupid tour name like Eddy Izzard: The Bitch Is Back.
I do believe in the heckling teenage girls as girls in packs can be cheeky and abusive. Also, I believe they would run away from any physical threat from a bloke.
Mind you, if their dads had seen Izzard go into the girls’ toilets they might have given him more than cheek and abuse.
I am disappointed in Izzard, who I liked, when he came into my ken.
From today’s Guardian:
Eddie Izzard has adopted the pronouns “she” and “her”, saying she wants “to be based in girl mode from now on”.
The actor and comedian made the announcement during an appearance on the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist Of The Year last week in which she described herself as gender-fluid, prompting the LGBT charity Stonewall to praise her for her bravery.
Izzard said it was the first time she had asked to be referred to with exclusively she/her pronouns while making a television programme and “it feels great”, adding: “One life, live it well.”
Izzard, 58, has previously spoken about her gender-fluid identity and having modes. Earlier in her career she identified as a transvestite, saying she felt like “a complete boy plus half a girl” and referring to herself as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body”.
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There’s more.