Guest post: A metaphysical portal to womanhood
Originally a comment by Artymorty on More than a second.
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.
What a great writer you are, Arty.
I second Deziree.
I just realised that I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of ‘Juno’ Dawson, which might explain why any mention of his name triggers a memory of Les Dawson in drag, in one of his famous char lady sketches.
A couple of links:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cissie_and_Ada
https://youtu.be/ABml9AvVXQ4
I have – I consulted google images to check. He does the look better than most. Photos of him pre-“transition” are of a very pretty boy – and I don’t say that as a sneer. I like pretty boys and men.
I was thinking the other day about how odd it is that the discussion isn’t about androgyny. Why not? I have no idea. And then, having had that thought, I found myself sitting behind a very androgynous person on the bus. I was and am genuinely unsure what sex/gender the person was, Person was not AT ALL the gnc type I generally see on the bus, which is a huge simmering angry male in obvious costume looking as belligerent and unpleasant as possible. This person was like a faun – short, lightly curling hair, a tiny gem in the visible ear lobe, delicate features, no makeup, zero performative hostility – just a very appealing person who would look right at home on an ancient Greek urn.
It’s not a coincidence that Juno is prettier than most: he’s a homosexual transsexual, as opposed to a heterosexual, autogynephilic one. Gay guys who adopt “transwoman” identities are motivated by their appearance and their sexual marketability — it’s all about how they look in the eyes of straight men. On the other hand, straight guys who crossdress don’t care how ridiculous they look to other men, because theirs is a self-contained, narcissistic sexual motiviation — they are themselves the straight men they seek to turn on.
The decision to “go trans” among gay men involves a lot of pragmatic assessment of how “passable” one could become with cosmetic enhancements. If the guy wasn’t very androgynous to begin with — if he was too tall, or had overly broad shoulders, big hands, masculine facial features — he woudn’t opt to cross over. It’s not a coincidence that so many gay transwomen work at Sephora — they’re experts in cosmetics.
The crossdressing straight guys, not so much.