[Content note: suicide]

Last night I stepped off a stage and ended up in 1971.

My brother and I were the featured act at an open mic night I’ve played at many times before, a mix of musicians and comedians. It’s fun, although inevitably you have to put up with the odd person whose pub pals have told him he’s hilarious and who really isn’t. Last night’s example of that was the old man who got up on stage after our (fantastic, if I say so myself) performance.

I’ve seen him before. He’s a peddler of seventies-variety “take my wife, please” jokes with a whiff of misogyny to them. Last night the whiff became a stench. His new material is about lap dancing, his horror of women who groom their pubic hair, and in a piece he’s clearly very proud of, a horrible nightmare in which a beautiful woman turns out to be “a ladyboy”.

He isn’t the only stand-up to decide trans jokes are where it’s at. Last night, popular US stand-up Dan Telfer wrote on Twitter:

I am so fucking sick of transphobic jokes at stand-up open mics. It is absolutely everywhere and comedians who pretend it‘s not are in denial. There is nothing awkward or yucky to joke about here, cis folks. Take a long hard look at your bullshit shock jokes, for fucking serious.

it clearly touched a nerve: the post has been liked by 31.4 thousand people so far. Lots of comedians are doing the same stale jokes like it’s 1971.

Nobody’s saying you can’t make trans jokes. I did last night, on the very same stage between songs, and got some big laughs. But if your punchline is “Ugh! Trans!” then you’re a hack.

Last night’s hack didn’t have any new spin to offer, no hilarious take: his joke was that he had a dream, there was a sexy woman in it, she was trans. The expectation was that the room would share his disgust, but it didn’t and he died on his arse. Judging by the daggers he was looking at me later, he blamed me for that.

Good. I usually hate seeing comics die on stage, no matter how bad they are, but this was thoroughly deserved. I had to sit ten feet away – our table was at the very front – from a man who hoped to mine laughs from sharing his horror of bodies like mine. Imagine how it feels to sit through that, to feel every pair of eyes in the room turn to look at you as it becomes clear what the punchline is going to be. Those feelings linger long after the hack has come off stage.

“Ugh, trans” isn’t a punchline. It’s a punch down. The idea of trans people deceiving straight men is so commonly used as an excuse for violence and sexual violence against us that there’s a name for it: the trans panic defence. The idea that trans people are disgusting, horrific, worthy of nothing but contempt – a trope that is still very common, especially in comedy – keeps many of us in the closet and continues to harm us when we’re out of it. If the world keeps telling you you’re a monster, it’s hard not to believe it.

When I got home from the gig last night, I read a long blog post by another Scottish trans woman, Becca, roughly the same age as me. “After six years of being on hormones and presenting completely female, I am still getting misgendered far too frequently and as the years have gone by, the sheer hopelessness of it all has finally sunk in,” she wrote. “I would honestly rather be dead than seen as a ‘man in a dress’.”

It was a scheduled post, timed to go live hours after it has been written. By the time it was published, Becca had stepped in front of a train.

The reaction to 57-year-old TV presenter Philip Schofield coming out as gay has been interesting. Interesting because it’s been a very different and much more positive reaction than the reaction to Jameela Jamil coming out as queer the day before, which says a lot about the racism, misogyny and intolerance queer women of colour have to endure.

And it’s interesting because despite the relative positivity there’s nevertheless been a really nasty outbreak of homophobia among some commentators and on social media.
Max Morgan puts it very well:

The main issue I want to address is the repeated portrayal of Schofield (and ergo other men who come out after years of marriage to a woman) as a liar and a deceiver, as someone who used his wife to cover his dirty little secret before ditching her when it was expedient for him to do so. I’m obviously not privy to the inner workings of the Schofields’ marriage, but I do know that in a great many cases this grubby insinuation couldn’t be further from the truth.
…For me, and so many others, the closet wasn’t a place where I said, “I’m gay, but I’m going to hide it in here,” it was a place in which I fought tooth and nail, at great psychological cost, to convince myself I wasn’t gay at all. I knew I liked boys when I was about 6 or 7. And I knew very shortly after that that a boy who likes other boys was the very worst thing you could possibly be. So I convinced myself I wasn’t that.

I’m older than Morgan and younger than Schofield, but we all grew up during a time when just to admit that LGBT+ people existed could cost people their jobs, when vicious homophobia was in the daily papers, when people like us were only ever portrayed as sick, perverted, predatory.

LGBT people who grew up in the 70s, 80s and 90s did so at a time where every aspect of the public discourse was awash with a particularly nasty and virulent brand of homophobia. The press, the media, even the government – fuck, especially the government – displayed an unflinching commitment to hammering home the message that being gay was wrong, shameful, disgusting.

We were perverts. We were predators. We were mentally ill. We were spreaders of disease. We were paedophiles, hell bent on corrupting children for our own nefarious ends. We were incapable of fidelity, or of love. We were a powerful lobby, to be feared and mistrusted. We were poofs, faggots and queers, dykes, rug-munchers and trannies. We were less than human and fair game for whatever violence came our way.

So many of us did exactly what the advocates of lethal conversion therapy want people like us to do: we tried with all our might not to be gay, or trans, or whichever part of the rainbow we are. We fought to try and make ourselves “normal”, to deny what our own brains and bodies were trying to tell us, to refuse to see any signs that we were who we were trying so hard not to be. Many of us managed to keep that fight going for decades.

I didn’t marry to deceive. I married because I was in love, and because I thought that love had cured me of my sadness. I genuinely believed that I could be Mr Right, and for a while I was.

Morgan:

I took those vows because I loved my wife, and that remains the case to this day. I would never knowingly have misled her, or undertaken any conscious act that would have hurt her in any way. Sure, there was a deception taking place, but it was a tangled and intricate web of self-deception, from which it would take me a further 13 years to extricate myself.

And the more people depend on you, the more awful the consequences of untangling that web.

I’m currently reading Stuck In The Middle With You, by Jennifer Finney Boylan – like me, a trans woman who came out after years of marriage and after becoming a parent. She writes:

I still believed, on some fundamental level, that love would cure me. That if only I were loved deeply by someone else, I would be content to stay a man… Of course, nobody really gets cured by love, but transsexuals are hardly the only people who believe romance will lead them outside of themselves. You can’t fault a person for hoping that love will make her into someone else, someone better. The world is full of false hopes, many of them dumber than the hope of being transformed by love.

But of course, understanding any of this requires compassion and empathy, something sorely lacking among the tedious contrarians and twitter trolls.

It’s no coincidence that many of the people condemning Schofield for his supposed “deception” are the same people calling Jameela Jamil a fake, a liar who‘s pretending to be queer in order to get “woke points”. As ever, the pejorative use of “woke” is the battle cry of the intolerant and privileged.

Many of them are also so-called “gender critical” activists who claim teenage trans kids aren’t old enough to know who they are (in many cases advocating dangerous and discredited conversion therapy, which converts many perfectly healthy LGBT kids into damaged or even dead ones) while telling trans women of my age that if we had really been suffering we’d have come out in our teens.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter to these people if we come out in our teens when we’re single, in our thirties when we’re in a relationship, or in married middle age. They don’t want us to come out at all. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

I’ve written before about dubious “the sinister trans cult stole my children” articles: all too often they turn out to demonstrate that some parents find it easier to blame sinister, shadowy forces than their own shortcomings when their grown-up children cut all contact. But I’ve rarely seen an example as downright awful as this one.

This is from The Christian Post last year, and it’s being widely circulated again by anti-trans types. I’m not linking to it because it’s just hateful and packed with some really, really unpleasant stuff.

The “kids” are in their twenties and thirties. The “anguished mom” is “tormented Lynn Meagher”.

Meagher lost contact with her son for nearly a decade after he came out as transgender. She reconnected with him in 2013, which was a struggle because she didn’t feel she could call him “she” or a woman, and use his preferred female name while remaining true to her beliefs — particularly that sex cannot be changed and no amount of cosmetic surgery can alter biology.

“I did the best I could to have a relationship with him where I just loved him for himself, and was hoping that we could just disagree on what we disagreed with and love each other anyway,” Meagher said.

Got that? I just want to love you for who you are, except for the “who you are” stuff. Incidentally, did you count the deliberate misgenderings in those two paragraphs? I make it eight.

The thing about grown-up children is that they can speak for themselves. Here’s Meagher’s daughter, posting in November in a discussion about the article.

She didn’t lose me to a cult. She lost me to her racism (she’s a Proud Boy). She lost me to her abuse (she threw me against the wall so I would stop crying). She lost me to her transphobia (she collected signatures for the anti-trans bathroom petition). She lost me to her greed (she stole survivors’ benefits the federal gov’t gave me to buy herself fur coats and a car). She lost me to her cruelty…

The Proud Boys are a US far-right group. If they’re not actually neo-Nazis, they’re incredibly good friends with many people who are.

Just in case you had any doubts about this woman’s eligibility for the Mother of The Year award, here’s a message from her son, responding to an article critical of his mother.

thank you thank you thank you for addressing her, her hateful rhetoric, and the article she wrote (which was originally uploaded with mine and my siblings full names, and was found when a friend of mine had searched my name for my top surgery fundraiser, basically outing me as trans to future employers. it makes my situation more manageable to know that people see through her BS, even without knowing about the emotional/religious abuse and physical violence she inflicted on all of her children and husband for years. thank you.

The article notes that our anguished mom has made lots of new friends, not just from far-right groups but also some of the leading lights of the UK anti-trans movement. They gave her “lots of hugs.” Which sounds like more love than she ever gave her children.