More than a second
Oh grow up ffs.
I had gender reassignment surgery – then the Supreme Court said I wasn’t a woman
Because you’re not. You could have had rabbit ears surgically attached to your head; you wouldn’t be a rabbit. You could have had feathers painstakingly inserted into your skin; you wouldn’t have been a bird. You could have worn a Marilyn Monroe mask; you wouldn’t have been Marilyn Monroe. Forget about being a woman; try being an adult for a change. Adults understand that cosmetic tweaks are not magic and can’t make us something we’re not.
I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one, writes Juno Dawson.
But you can’t. You can’t be a coffee pot or Delaware or Euripides. The list of things you can’t be no matter how much you want to is infinite. It’s childish to whine about it, let alone claiming you can do it.
On 16 April this year, I held my phone in one hand as a kindly nurse, Sofia, removed my surgical dressings.
“Huh,” I said. “The Supreme Court has just ruled that I’m a man, apparently.”
“Well, you have a lovely new vagina,” Sofia replied.
And all the angels clapped and then we went home for tea.
Why on earth would I share something so personal? It seems that politely asking for a dignified life has fallen on deaf ears, so I’ll be undignified for a second.
Pretending to be a woman and expecting the rest of the world to agree is not even close to “politely asking for a dignified life.” It’s not polite and it’s embarrassingly childish.
If one uses the word “fascism”, people accuse you of hysteria – but isn’t this precisely what fascism looks like?
Uh, no. Not even close.
My view is that despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple.
And there we go: he wants to be a woman and actual women are maggots. I wonder why we don’t cheerfully welcome him into the club.
That nurse Sofia should not have lied to Juno Dawson. He does not have a lovely new vagina. As a famous surgeon in Casablanca once put it, “I don’t change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient’s mind.”
And it’s my understanding that — from what my transsexual British friend told me after he had the procedure — a prerequisite to vaginoplasty surgery in the UK is signing a waiver that explicitly states that the patient is not going to come up from the anesthesia with an actual vagina between his legs.
That Moroccan sex change surgeon’s remark was acute, if a smidge off the bullseye. It’s all in the mind, but it’s not all in the patient’s mind — it’s in the collective consciousness. It’s in the culture. The problem with the trans movement is that it requires total obedience to the mantra “trans women are women” from everyone, or the whole thing falls apart. Like theocracy.
And once the rest of society stops playing along, endlessly humouring these men that their cosmetic surgeries opened a metaphysical portal to womanhood, the ugly truth becomes apparent: they’re just scarred genitals, and ones that require burdensome daily maintenance for life, that are prone to infection, that often require corrective surgeries to fix serious complications, that most of the time can’t even be used for intercourse because it’s too painful, and which the vast majority of “straight” guys don’t want to have intercourse with anyways.
Graham Linehan aptly pointed to Peter Pan, when the audience must clap to demostrate their belief in Tinker Bell to keep her alive. The trans movement thought it could force all of society to keep clapping forever and ever to keep their fantasy of womanhood alive.
If anything, I’m amazed that the charade has lasted this long. How could anyone have been hoodwinked into signing up for an exhausting game of pretend that’s supposed to carry on ’til the end of time?
The minute the novelty wears off, the minute the exciting veneer of newness fades from the sight of crossdressers and preferred pronouns, the moral righteousness of the whole project will fade with it. What’s left will be the banal reality of the human condition. Sex was always binary; preferences around sexuality and gender expression were always diverse; the latter did not change the former.
Once we all get back to normal, there’s going to be hell to pay. The world will suffocate under mountains of regret.
Sorry, Juno, you don’t have a vagina, you have a bloody big useless hole in your body.
A vagina self lubricates and cleans, your bloody big hole doesn’t.
The vagina of a willing woman is warm and embracing for a male penis, your bloody big hole is like sandpaper, unless you use gallons of lube.
And Juno, to a vagina afficianado such as myself, yours lacks the most essential quality – to be part of a woman’s body.
dress like a woman, whatever that means, by all means, but a woman you will never be.
In other circumstances, I might have had sympathy for Dawson – a male so desperate to be feminine that he undergoes painful and irreversible procedures to make him into a “pseudo-woman”.
For a long time, I thought the whole trans issue was a small group of mentally unwell men undergoing these difficult surgeries to turn themselves in “pseudo-women”, removing their penises and testicles in the process.
I thought they were a harmless and pitiable group – like the character Hayley Cropper in the TV show “Coronation Street”.
In fact, when the trans controversy started around 2014, I initially couldn’t understand *why* the gender-critical feminists were so hostile to trans people. (I didn’t know about “trans-identified men” with intact male genitals being let into women’s shelters, hospital wards and prisons at the time).
But the thing is, what is Dawson’s idea of womanhood? “Mesh tops and denim cut-offs…dance to Jade at Mighty Hoopla…expensive cocktails and rare Bratz dolls from 2001.”
Sexualised feminine clothing, dancing to “girlpop”, cocktails and collectable dolls….there’s nothing wrong with people enjoying any of these things. But it’s not a vision of “womanhood”.
It’s a stereotypical and fetishistic view of womanhood, like Andrea Long Chu’s claim that he transitioned for ” for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my God, for the breasts”.
And Dawson demonises natal women who might have even the slightest objection to this view of femininity as “unimaginative, mean-hearted bigots” and “maggots.”
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More than that, it ruled you were never a woman and should never have been told that the law interpreted you to be a woman, that all such claims were lies all along.