With an injured tail and wings made of knives
A review from the Edinburgh Festival:
This is a play of knives and fireballs. Marking the final show in Emma Frankland’s performance series None of Us is Yet a Robot, which explores the politics of gender identity and the process of transitioning, Hearty is a ferocious cry for the safety of trans women.
With an injured tail and wings made of knives, Frankland is our guide in the apocalypse. The trans artist hunts for safety in a burning world where trans bodies are policed, activism is commercialised and violence is fuelled by fear. She sharpens the knives protruding from her shoulder blades and builds herself a den to protect herself from the violence outside. This is about survival.
In other words Emma Franklin is a man who identifies as a woman. Wings made of knives sound somewhat different worn by a man as opposed to a woman. If a woman wore such a thing it would likely be seen as self-protective; when a man does it reads as aggressive. “This is about survival,” the reviewer tells us – but whose survival? Is Frankland really performing self-defense as opposed to aggression? It doesn’t sound like it.
There is a charged immediacy to this piece. As reported hate crimes against trans and non-binary people rocket, the world Frankland creates is only a sliver away from our own.
The headline on that link is not “hate crimes against trans and non-binary people rocket,” it’s
“Homophobic and transphobic hate crimes surge in England and Wales.” Quite different.
Also, what about hate crimes against women? Is Frankland concerned about that at all?
When she begs us individually: “Please don’t hurt me,” we realise how much potential threat each new face can hold when society tells you to be ashamed of your own identity.
But there are all those knives on the wings, plus Frankland has a male body. What Frankland is doing here – and what trans activism in general often does – is appropriating the physical vulnerability that goes with being female. That form of physical vulnerability doesn’t belong to Frankland. We wish it didn’t belong to us, but it does, and we’re stuck with it. Frankland is more likely to hurt us than the other way around. Look at those arms:
“Where trans bodies are policed. . .”
“In a world. . .. “
“Please don’t hurt me”
I keep having this vision of a ‘trans woman’ tying himself to the railroad tracks a la Snidely Whiplash. Struggling bustfully and huffing damsel in distress noises. A sympathetic woman rushes to the laydee’s aid; he immediately jumps up and throws the woman in front of the oncoming train and walks away laughing.
It sounds like a movie trailer.
The pose in that picture looks much more aggressive than vulnerable, too.
Pretty risible, coming from a man festooned with knives. That image, plus the (perfect) movie pitch above, puts me in mind of Freddy Krueger whimpering about how cruel the world is to him. Maybe switch the movie title to A Nightmare on Woke Street and it can be all about Freddy’s quest to actively defend himself from the hateful teens, all of whom pose a nebulous future threat to him and therefore need to be disemboweled pronto.
Go to the hyperlinked piece, and you’ll find, of course, that “hate crimes” include “verbal attacks.”
And we all know that, in GB, disagreement with trans dogma gets reported as hate crime.
Is actual violence against trans people a problem in Great Britain? I don’t know, and the linked Guardian article doesn’t offer much in the way of evidence. When the term “hate crime” includes “misgendering”, a woman blogging about how to sex human skeletons, and Posie Parker using the word “castration” to refer to castration, who knows?
There is this, though:
Gay men and lesbians are more likely to experience more serious violence than other victims. Yet we’re not seeing a gay man with wings made of knives.
No, we’re meant to believe that middle-class white autogynephiles are uniquely threatened. Cue the apocalytic imagery!
P.S. Does anyone else find the “wings made of knives” thing a pretentious and ridiculously mixed metaphor?
I looked up FBI hate crime statistics. In 2017, their database lists ~25 hate crimes against women on the basis of “gender”, and a similar number against men. There were over 100 anti-transgender victims. That leads me to conclude only that the FBI is far more conservative in attributing “hate crime” status to the many, many crimes against women. Certainly domestic violence murders of women, one single type of misogynist crime, must dwarf that.