A better line in manners

Speaking of Christine Burns (who participated in that cozy chat about terfs on Al Jazeera)…here’s a think-piece from 1996:

On a Saturday afternoon in a pleasant English University suburb I went along to find out the hard way. To argue, as both advocate and plaintiff, that transsexual women have more in common with the experience of their sisters than they blandly imagine.

Sorry for being bland, but I still get to think that we don’t have the experience of being a woman in common with men.

Under debate was the question of whether the group I was visiting should argue the case with their peers for other women like me to be admitted to their women-only space.

The air was thick with irony as I politely answered question after question. Corrected lie after lie. Defended my client’s very existence and justified their (and my) course in life.. as though I should be expected to succeed in communicating a personal experience that’s no easier to describe to the uninitiated than a panic attack or childbirth. … As though the court before me, drawing its’ authority from the shape of genitals they were born with, had the intellectual right to weigh up and judge the evidence which I’d spent much of my life studying and experiencing first hand. At stake, not just my client’s but my own self image and status as a woman in a club which I didn’t personally want to join. The charge, that my client (and by implication I) would make them feel uncomfortable.

It’s not a question of “drawing authority” from one’s genitals, it’s just a matter of definition. The disdain and hostility are noted however.

That majority would join with me in being horrified by the notion that, after being raped by a man, a woman like myself would be turned away from a politically correct Rape Crisis Centre. Told, in the ultimate act of cruelty, that she was a man. That she should seek counselling from a man. That she made her sisters feel uncomfortable. In a bizarre way rapists have a better line in manners. At least they treat their victims, without prejudice, as women.

Those last two sentences are currently being passed around on Twitter by some of those wicked heartless women who don’t think men can magically become women.

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