Read on Twitter
I was just chatting with one of my oldest and dearest friends in the UKâa cishet Labour activist, so a recruitment target for the terfsâand she mentioned she had emailed the Parliamentary Commissioner of Standards to complain about Baroness Nicholsonâs transphobic trolling.
The email itself was greatâsharp, precise, concise. My friend got right at the shittiness of the anti-trans activistsâ position, the normalization of stupidity and cruelty in the UK. It was a model.
But this was especially moving to me because my friend just casually brought up having sent it after weâd been talking about something totally different for a while. She was just like âoh by the way, I emailed the parliamentary standards commission about Baroness Nicholson.â
It seems to me, who spends too much time on Twitter, that the terfs have won every political and cultural battle of the last few years. Iâm often very scared. But itâs good to remember that they havenât won yet, and theyâre only really persuading Tories.
Iâll say something more. I have to keep this vague, and I wonât answer questions about it. I recently applied for something in the UK, and I was eventually declined because of that poem I wrote. This one:
I wrote this dumb poem in response to a friendâs typo: âI wish i had a boy of crayons.â I wanted it to be funny, wistful, colorful, evocative of the slightly mournful condition of social distancing. That, and iambic tetrameter: text me a line of verse, I WILL complete it.
Conversely, those with whom I was in dialogue were concerned that it âexpresses a yearning to find a young boy or a lad and have sex.â They looked up the word âquinceâ and decided it meant something gay. Ditto âtea-caking.â It was as utterly baffling a letter as Iâve received.
You might be able to spot that âtea-cakingâ doesnât appear in my poem. âTea and cakesâ does. The phrase I used is utterly intuitive and harmless; they changed it to something that sounds sordid, then tried to make me responsible for their own formulation.
As it goes, I *am* a literary critic, and I have some thoughts about the method my correspondent deployed here. But of course, I have neither the opportunity nor inclination to respond: this door is shut, and with it disappears a significant investment of my time and labor.
Which is all in the game. I donât feel entitled to any outcome. I do think itâs an interesting moment to reflect on the extraordinary derangement trans ppl elicit. The terfs like to argue that they only care about scientific definitions. But this is a grotesque, surreal slur.
Also: itâs a *homophobic* slur, straight out of Section 28. And a reminder why we, trans people, depend on the solidarity of our siblings who have survived this kind of oppression for decades. We need each other.
I am, therefore, especially proud of my old friend, a better reader and a more righteous human than many people. And I plan to emulate her example with many pungent, perspicacious emails to come.
