A they and her self
The non-binary comedian’s hit TV show draws heavily on an often troubled life. They talk about addiction at 14, the loving parents who kicked them out, the older men who abused their trust – and the happiness they eventually found.
How do they know those older “men” were actually “men”? Is they the only person who gets to be special in this story?
Feel Good is a disarmingly autobiographical love story. It tells the story of a character called Mae struggling with relationships, addiction, identity and life on the comedy circuit. Mae is attracted to men and women, but to women more, particularly women who identify as straight. The first series focuses on Mae’s relationship with Georgina, a teacher who had previously only slept with men and is reluctant to admit to her super-straight, super-posh friends that she and Mae are living together. Mae is a mix of streetwise and naive – reckless, precocious, promiscuous, self-absorbed and a bag of nerves.
I’m not clear on what “disarmingly autobiographical” is supposed to mean. What’s disarming about autobiography? Self-obsession is all too common and I can’t say I ever find it disarming. Tiresome and irritating is more like it.
By the end of series two both characters have evolved. George is happy with her bisexuality, while Mae changes from she to they, announcing: “I think I’m transgender or non-binary or whatever the term is these days.”
The term is “more interesting than everyone else.” You think you’re special and more interesting, and these days that translates to something under the “trans umbrella.”
It’s not surprising people react like this when you write and star in a TV series using your real name and telling a version of your life story. But this is where things start to get complicated. As Martin reminds me, it is a fictionalised version. So whereas in Feel Good, Mae talks about being trans or non-binary, Martin is non-binary but not trans.
Ohhhhhhhh. Thank god we cleared that up. How creative of they to make their character so different from theirself.
The Canadian standup thinks of Feel Good as a dramatised version of life 10 to 15 years ago. But while the addiction at the heart of the story goes back that far, the decision to identify as they rather than she is recent.
Better advertising, innit.
I think I’ll write something ‘outing’ myself as non-binary on multiple fronts. Not just male/female, but Coke/Pepsi, pizza/tacos, pretty/ugly, tall/short, otter/lemur. With all those special specials, I should be suerduper extra special, right? Never mind that I would be delusional about several of them. Who cares? I would be special. Fantastically special. So special, all the other specials would be scrambling to top me, to find a way to one-up my specialness. And I could make money from sales of my book, right?
Iknklast, I bet your book would still be better than this TV show.
Hold on, did this piece just admit that it was a “decision”? Doesn’t orthodox gender ideology believe that gender identity is inherent and sacred, not something that one can just decide or choose?
It’s both. Consistency is not a requirement.
HA! See and raise. I’m neither matter or anti-matter.
It is a challenge to every audience member / viewer on so many fronts: like wading through a leech-infested swamp with a plastic bucket over their head at midnight, in the rain, during an earthquake. Gotta be either eminently unforgettable, or eminently forgettable.
A challenge to any TRA: explain the difference between transgender and non-binary. Additionally, explain how those terms can possibly have distinct meanings when a person claims to be one of those, but is not certain which one.
Bonus challenge: explain how one person might qualify as either trans or non-binary, while another is definitely only non-binary, given the previously explained distinct meanings of those terms.
At this point they’re just fucking with us.
You can see how they must prevent the simple clarity of ‘Woman: adult human female” from reaching a wider audience.
Omar: “like wading through a leech-infested swamp with a plastic bucket over their head at midnight, in the rain, during an earthquake”
Nicely sums up the probabilities of success for any attempt at predicting who will respond in what way to this weirdness, and how your response to them may or may not cause a meltdown into a precious puddle of pronouns and own-truths
There are people who claim to be both trans and non-binary. I’ve met one personally, and read several others online. I don’t know exactly what it’s supposed to mean, but it appears in practice to be someone who does medical transition and who also uses they/them or some concocted “gender neutral” pronoun set.
The Cisalpine Gauls were the ones one the Italian side of the Alps. The Transalpine Gauls were the ones on the other side. The non-binary Gauls were the ones on the mountain tops, looking down on all those boring Gauls in the valleys. And every now and then they’d let one of the Transalpine Gauls climb up and roll rocks down on the Cisalpine scum.
In the series, Mae is at one point nudged to CALL herself trans, and the moment is treated as absurd.
I did like the series for the most part. But…the addiction subtext ran false too. No NA meeting has ever been conducted like that, and it isn’t as if she missed any comedic opportunity by concocting those scenes.
It means they’re extra extra special. Trans or NB is no longer enough to distinguish oneself as truly exceptiona; they’re old hat. Combining the two gives somebody a bit of an edge, but even that will be but a stop-gap in the ever-escalating Snowflake arms race. Just as TIMs in women’s sports enjoy their cheater’s advantage so long as they are the only ones doing it, with identities and pronouns, if everyone is special, nobody is. At some point, new categories of exclusivity and uniqueness will have to be devised. But it will be hard to leave the pampered, hothouse environment of institutional capture which “transness” has snatched for itself.