I was sitting down to begin my day off and catching up on emails with the TV on, still tuned to Channel 5 from whatever I was vaguely watching last thing last night, and The Wright Stuff was on. Now this isn't a programme I watch, as a rule, though I have gone back and looked up the odd episode online when someone interesting was a guest. If you are unaware of it, it's a talking heads panel show where they take some issue that other programmes might spend an hour analysing, and then are reactionary about it for maybe five minutes. They usually spend longer teasing the subject than they do actually discussing it.
On this particular episode, they suddenly announced they were going to be talking about "dragging up", thanks to this story from the papers this morning, and whether it was offensive. Now my first reaction was to think, oh yes, that might be interesting. Then I thought, oh God, they're going to have nothing but people defending it for being a laugh or transphobes saying people shouldn't ever cross-dress. Maybe I should call in. Humph. I half-heartedly rang the number, but to my not-at-all-surprise it was engaged. Oh well. I sent them a short email giving them a pithy one line opinion and, as an afterthought, put my number on it.
And they called back, almost immediately. Yes, they'd love to put me on. I'm guessing the rest of the "transgender community", as they had put it on the show, wasn't exactly lining up to be on, and I can't say I blame them. Er, OK then.
I tried to marshal my thoughts. I knew I would have only a brief window to get my point across, and it shouldn't be confused. I wanted to say that it was all about intent, and if men wanted to dress up to convincingly play women that was fine (as is vice versa). If they wanted to dress up because they liked the clothes, that was also fine. The only problem was when men dressed as women because haha, isn't that an inherently hilarious concept. You don't need any other jokes or anything. That in itself is too funny for words. Kind of like large breasts used to be in the seventies. And that the reason it is "funny" is misogynist, because men see women as inferior, of lower status, and so dressing up as them has to be a joke.
That was what I wanted to say. But just before he introduced me the presenter, Matthew Wright, jokingly said that the very pretty young girl who passed on the phone calls "used to be a man", and much laughter ensued. Now, I have a particular problem with this type of joke on two main levels. It has an implied insult to her (she looks masculine), or she looks so unlike a man that it is absurd to imagine she might have been born male (because nobody born male can ever be pretty, right?).
I was kind of knocked for six by that, and rendered speechless for a moment. I voiced my offence, probably badly, and because of that jumbled the neat, structured argument that I had for the main topic. Hopefully I did not make too much of a fool of myself. If you are in the UK you can judge for yourself here, at around 1:07.
The only other caller they got on was someone defending it on the grounds of tradition, which is always a stupid argument for anything. Slavery was traditional, once. Arranged marriages are traditional. Fox hunting was traditional. Most people don't defend these things anymore. So I guess I slimmed down the time available for bullshit, if nothing else.
On the same subject, spent the evening watching this section from the Leveson Inquiry, which was fascinating, about Trans representation in the tabloids. If you'd like to watch, the relevant section starts about 54 minutes in.
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