A Blog Tour Interview - and a Sad Omission

I was reading Oliver Baez Bendorf’s short, tragic essay on fleeing the United States over on Lithub when I recalled a recent conversation I had with a blog tour participant for White Feathers.

Bendorf’s flight was prompted by the Trump regime’s persecution of transgender people like himself, or rather, the emboldened attacks on him enabled by that regime. He concludes:

I know only that I entered into motion because there was no ground left on which to stand. Because I have writing to do. Because I was not put here to prove I could endure the terrifying, brutal things humans do to each other. Because there are flowers in bloom that need my attention, and loved ones growing older.

On my tour, one of the interviewer’s questions was: why did the women present the men with white feathers? What would drive them to do such a thing? And my reply was:

I think the root motivation is seething rage and resentment – you see similar in many middle-aged women who may or may not have been hurt by men, but use this hurt to turn on transgender women and persecute them obsessively. The sentiments behind the white feather offensive and the recent surge of transphobia have the same feel about them; some British women espousing “gender critical” (transphobic) beliefs have suffragette colours in their social media accounts. It’s also worth noting the connection between fascism and nationalism – Emmeline Pankhurst came full circle in support of the government and attempted to have all Germans expelled from the country. She also championed the white feather movement, along with her daughter, Christabel. Transphobia is often a gateway drug to radicalise people over to the right.

This section was not on the blogpost so I queried it with the blogger, who explained to me that she could not risk putting it up there because whenever she mentioned that topic, she got threats and harassment, and due to demanding issues in her personal life, she was not in a position to take those on. I reassured her I understood and hoped things improved.

But I felt very sad that it is now unsafe to say anything about transphobia, particularly as it does relate to the suffragist movement as described above. The person who felt the need to redact that part is positive towards trans people, but also lives in an area, and a country, that is making it impossible to express such opinions without state and social backlash.

It is getting to the stage where any writer, cis or trans, writing about anything related to transgender issues, would be nervous. An Irish author who recently got reviewed in a national newspaper was chided for using the word “queer” as it was apparently offensive to gay people who remember the 80s and 90s. However, what is not being said is that the term “queer” is disliked by “gender critical” people, many of whom are straight, because it is less specific and more inclusive than “gay” or “lesbian”, and god help any stray T that wanders in and sticks to the LGB. That is behind much of the animus to the term recently. (Note that I don’t use it myself. It’s a reclaimed word for the LGBT community and I am hetero.)

If a perfectly good book can “fall short”, if I can’t name the connection between transphobia and the suffragette movement, if transgender people feel so unsafe they must flee their country of origin - we have a problem. And my next novel, which has just gone over for edits, contains a transgender character: does that mean I’ll be faulted for that? Now admittedly I have privilege here. That’s less of a price to pay than exile, ostracism and terfish dogwhistles (not to mention that my Muse is invariably, 100% activated by the message “You’re not allowed to speak about that” and will absolutely come up with 100,000 words about “that”) but one must admit it might have a chilling effect.

I really hope this madness is soon over. It is nothing more than manufactured, right wing mania that appears to have captured large sections of our body politic. Ordinary people don’t care about this, and never have. Trans people in the loos could not be lower in my priority list of “things to care about”. We have a planet to save, and a fascist coup to overpower. I cannot wait until this vile, time wasting ideology is yeeted into the pit of hell where it belongs.