Juliette, who writes the Kierkegaard’s Lunch blog, has written a dual review of the Will and Harper road movie where Will Ferrell goes on a trip with his recently transitioned trans friend Harper Steele. The first half of the review is for cisgender people:
Watch it all and pick a side. Because you can’t be neutral – and one side is winning this fight.
It’s not the side that meets Harper with compassion and humanity…
And the second half is for trans people.
Above all, perhaps be ready to watch it and to feel both ‘I’m glad they made this movie’ and ‘I’m broken that they still felt they had to make this movie’. I have been watching movies and reading books trying to explain to cisgender people that we are humans, with feelings, not monsters, rapists or freaks for over 40 years.
I think Juliette is articulating something I’ve been feeling a lot lately: we’ve had decades of programmes and movies and books that have tried to say something very simple, which is that trans people are people. And yet we’re going backwards, not forwards.
I had hoped that some of all this, and all the rest, might have moved the dial to a place of greater understanding and decency towards us. For a time I thought it was happening. These days, it often feels like faith in that progress was delusional.
It’s something I think about in relation to this blog, because I’m so tired of writing about the same things over and over again: a group of anti-trans bigots will do something terrible, and nobody gives the slightest shit. Today it’s the news that those friends of JK Rowling, the Tufton Street anti-trans group Sex Matters and our own anti-LGBTQ+ weirdos For Women Scotland, intend to compile a database of every trans woman competing in sports in the entire UK. Given that there are no trans women competing in elite sport, it’s very clear that the role of this database – which seems illegal under multiple laws – is to find targets for harassment and abuse among people taking part in grassroots sport. You’d have to be very stupid to believe that it’s got anything to do with any kind of fairness, let alone protecting any participants.
Yesterday, it was the news that multiple senior figures in NHS trans care have boycotted the WPATH conference, the international conference on transgender health, but attended a conference by the anti-trans, religion-based pseudoscientists of SEGM, an organisation opposed to all gender-affirming healthcare. The SPLC, which tracks hate groups, says that SEGM is the hub of the “anti-LGBT pseudoscience network”.
Also yesterday, it emerged that Elon Musk has so far contributed $50m – that we know of – to fund anti-immigration and anti-trans propaganda.
The day before it was the US school district whose genital-obsessed weirdos carved new windows in its mixed-gender toilets so that adults could watch children urinate, the presidential campaigns blasting anti-trans ads all over the TV, and the presidential candidate claiming that US schools are transgender surgery factories.
And the day before, and the day before, and the day before.
As I’ve written before, to be trans right now, to be talking about being trans right now, feels like the curse of Cassandra, fated to know the truth but never be believed. We’ve watched our healthcare, already wretched, be dismantled. We’ve watched our employment rights, already precarious, attacked on multiple fronts. We’ve watched our politicians embrace beliefs that just a few years previously were largely and rightly considered abhorrent. And through it all, instead of reporting on this the bulk of the press is supporting it.
It’s hard to see a light at the end of this tunnel. I know there is one. But it seems very far away.