So here I am, enjoying this nice Dark Horse Malbec from Commiefornia as the world burns and coughs and shouts itself horse enough to require deworming. It’s a lovely bottle of red – good and rich, a nice return to that thick spicy flavour other budget Malbecs miss. Still quite a way off from better, more developed examples though and at seven quid I’ve had better. Bit flat with the aftertaste as well. In its defence it’s slow and relaxing, lending one to thousand-yard stares in the supermarket car park pondering the reasoning behind releasing the new Ghostbusters movie during Transgender Awareness Week.
As you’ll remember, Feminism was always rather a niche movement tolerated by the patriarchy in order to keep the womenfolk from drowning their infant children, but as with every example of hysteria before and since, it’d take a white man to really make it sing. It wasn’t until Paul Feig’s seminal, humbling, magnum opus Ghostbusters (2016) that it found a new mainstream audience, delighting fans and critics alike. Deprogrammed with a trigger queef, men received subliminal enlightenment, their dangerous, disgusting feelings toward women dispersing into the ether like tendrils of so much vile ectoplasm.
Feig’s avant-garde approach to filmmaking – throwing out such stale conventions as script and storytelling – was not only a triumph of modern cinema and a shot in the arm for the franchise, but also a tribute to every mother and wife; sister and partner; friend, colleague and sex worker turned into a ghost by the fierce rot of toxic masculinity.
And just like that, misogyny had ended. Women the world over emerged from their hiding places and rejoiced; while men, still trembling with shame, nodded in grudging acceptance while vomiting up the last of their vicious bile.
It really felt like we’d stopped making history and started making herstory.
And then J. K. Rowling came along and ruined everything.
I’m far too elderly to have read Harry Potter but it’s hard not to admire Rowling for inspiring children the world over to love books the way I did as a child. Less so, admittedly, twenty years later where she’s inspired a new generation to delight in burning them. Her offense? Arguing that biological sex is an immutable characteristic. Even gender equality activist and trans ally Hermione Granger herself threw Rowling under the triple-decker bus, making it as far as the UN to ask men for help before the author magicked her black out of spite.
Myself, I was raised by women who did more than their best while surrounded by men in name only. By the very definition of the word, and the way in which I behave, I’m no different than the overwhelming number of men you’ll meet in what passes for our polite society – I’m a feminist. Men, however, are simple creatures and if you’re going to teach us to treat you women decently, you’d better be sure there aren’t no other women on the horizon.
An ex-girlfriend’s mother once informed me that men in prison deserve rape. Taken aback, I asked her about men incarcerated for non-violent offences and those wrongfully convicted (a demographic vastly overrepresented by the indigenous people of her country) and she informed me that because of the many historical incidences of rape, violence and murder committed by men, there was justification in the sexual violation of prisoners. I absorbed little else from her teachings after that, only to recall that any woman who shows empathy for a male victim of injustice of any kind is simply a “traitor to her sex”.
I wonder if that’s why International Men’s Day was on the last day of Transgender Awareness Week – you know, so that a certain subset of ladies can save on train fare when going to protest.
Cishet hoes mad. Do you feel me?
I had a fantastic bottle of wine a while back but didn’t bother to make a note of the name, other than it was a Malbec. I wouldn’t normally choose Malbec since it’s less common in supermarkets and I’m quite unfamiliar with it but for whatever reason I grabbed one that day and it was just so good, like a nice thick fruity oily Rioja with plum like a proper slap round the chops compared to a cheap Merlot.
Haven’t been able to find it since then though, not nowhere. In fact, all Malbecs I’ve found have been pigswill to the point I’ve questioned my own memory. But basically, yeah; that’s what we’re doing here – trying Malbecs til I find that good one again or, you never know, maybe even something as good.
Up next from the same flagrant bastards at Le Manoir Du Baron who disgorged the Pinot Noir I reviewed last month, we have their own Malbec. I’m fully expecting it to taste like there’s an after party dog-end in it but no, this smells good – an okay blend of fruit and alcohol but little body. It’s not sophisticated or complex and nothing lingers on your palate but you could knock back a few of these over a board game with friends and they probably wouldn’t even care that you’re a cheap fuck who brings over the cheapest bottle in Lidl.
Speaking of reasons for writing, at this point in editing, these notes total more than 6000 words of what should be a sub 2000 piece including the wine opinions.
My thinking has been that ‘playing’ the Trannies™ against the Terfs™ would be a way of learning something. I don’t know what. I’ve been drinking.
Maybe I was imagining that a simple treatise of my own mongrel empathy and naive logic would inform some common humanity for when I try again to excuse our species to the dog. I’m not giving up but these notes are a nightmare – I’ve been back and forth with this for weeks now, trying to make something seem throwaway and effortless, but this is a topic that requires the utmost of care and attention. When someone calls me something like an ignorant fuckwit, attempts violence and maybe even includes a racial slur for comic effect, I want to be sure they’re doing so despite me conveying myself as clearly as possible and with no room for doubt or confusion. The worst thing in the world is to be misinterpreted when positing a most heartfelt and sincere expression of one’s own perceptions.
Women are toxic, manipulative and bloodthirsty. Society, given their influence, is a clear and present danger to the wellbeing of our precious children.
That’s the joke. I’ve done the joke now. Thank you.
I mean I’ve already mentioned the misandry of third-wave feminism, those near Catholic levels of original sin, but feminism is a movement and as such it makes waves. So here with the fourth, yada yada – more terminally online and intersectional and thus out of the grip of the gnarled twisted claws of radical boomers. Christ, did that make any sense? It’s the wine, I tell you.
My point is that women are by no means terrible. They certainly aren’t a monolith. What even is such a thing could be happen can? Stop, for instance, looking at the LGBTQ+ community as some amalgamated hive mind, unhindered by discord – that’s as ridiculous, bigoted and downright weird as believing all ‘coloureds’, children of Abraham and Trekkies feel the same way about who they simply are.
I’ll admit that I’ve had a drink or two so do please allow me to imagine myself as a girl growing up. Let’s say she has a keen interest in, oh, I don’t know, space and dinosaurs and this one boy who is also her best friend. She likes to run, because she feels free and it clears her mind, helps her think, figure things out. The only other time her head isn’t stuck in a book, she’s looking up at the moon, thinking, “One day.”
Anyway, our plucky young protagonist goes into a STEM field with her best friend – the boy she had a crush on as a kid who transitioned (this happens offscreen so we can market it to a Chinese audience) so now they’re like sisters – and they both learn to astronaut, like, they’re the best ones. Fast forward over a montage with the Aerosmith song from that movie or whatever the Zoomer analogue is and suddenly there they both are, staring out the tiny window of the 20thirty-something Mars Lander, or maybe it’s Europa, whatever – First Woman on a New Rock, basically. I feel my parable suffers from being told by an idiot who drank instead of sleeping.
My point is that there is a question among some biological women with regard to perceived ‘fairness’ in who does The Thing first. You know, both my hypothetical astronauts are women but, to put it crudely, one was born with eggs, the other, balls. Surely the historical significance of one small step for a ‘Woman’ is not one that should be dismissed with frothing cries of, “Bigot!”?
But that’s not even the fucking issue nor barely the question, is it? You see up top it says Part One. Yeah. I’ve got the wine if you’ve got the patience.
I love everyone equally, at least until they get to know me; and I demand equality as much as I can without a Second Amendment or several hundred acres of arable land for mistreated dogs, but so much these days is being boiled down to the binary, the yin and the yang but with fuck all balance, just a trolly problem where whoever suffers the most before death is decided by a Twitter poll of cocksure sociopaths triggered to orgasm by the melanin level in Christmas commercials.
We can, quite reasonably, opine that trans women are women – and yet we can, quite reasonably, opine that they are not. All I’m entirely sure of is that I’m a dickhead and I didn’t choose to have wine down my beard but by Christ, I can choose to be an ally, to acknowledge the reality of transgender people, to listen and relate and support and fucking explore what this grand newish reality is, while still giving credence to the identity of the biological, the ‘cisgendered,’ the original gangster – Women™.
Women. And what a ferocious gaggle of lovely, bizarre apes they truly are; able to accomplish damn near anything they put their pretty little heads to. They’ll map and cultivate reality, sing it a song and bend it to their will before Man decides which bollock is taking the day off today.
Western women, on the whole, have come a long way in a century. No longer are they regarded as chattel, broodmares or sexual meat for the gratification of cunning perverts and related degenerates. These are some hard won rights they have, rights as inalienable as they are simple – to be treated as equals among fellow bizarre apes.
I’m going to ask you a question but it isn’t What is a woman? for reasons we’ll tackle when next we meet. Instead, how about What is an adult biological female of childbearing age? That seems easier, doesn’t it? I mean, you know it’s a trick question but you feel safe answering. It’s A Woman, right?
Well, yes and no. Now, if at this point you’re still reading then I imagine you’re as much fumbling around in the dark as I am and glad of the company; I don’t know – maybe you’re also on that fool’s errand to discover quality Malbec at affordable supermarket prices. But I digress. As I understand it, and forgive me if I’m – his inward cringe forced a grimace, making a pantomime of his wilted brood – mansplaining, but women don’t take kindly to being treated as chattel, broodmares, sexual meat and such.
Without losing ourselves in a massive tangent involving institutional sexism – and how this new companion of yours, this most recent of your human male approximations, is different this time, and not a carrier bag of leftover pricks cobbled together with any old scraps of arsehole the dogs chewed all the taste out of before being animated by a trickster god as torment for your sins in a past life – please allow me that.
But seriously, you really do have a type.
No, look, I’m sorry. Can we just, for the sake of this example, agree that women aren’t typically referred to as chattel, broodmares and/or sexual meat? Thank you.
It’d be dehumanising, don’t you think? The kind of talk that degrades even the most bizarre of apes into the base sum of their sex parts. Imagine, if you will, being the oiled cock of an eternal hen night where you subsist on Viagra spiked Prosecco slurped from the belly button of a bridesmaid who had her Caesarean scar tattooed over with the alien Grey from Whitley Strieber’s Communion so that it peers at you from out of her knickers through those large black eyes. It’s the kind of talk that puts a woman’s worth as nought but a ride, with consent little more than an obstacle for the sport of it. You’re just a roll in the hay, love – a filthy, expendable incubator for the next generation of women like you or men like me.
Dehumanised to the point, I guess, you’d sooner be taken by one of Strieber’s Greys.
I’m just thinking aloud here, gibbering into the void, thinking how odd we are to be describing our wives and mothers and daughters in terms I’d expect from the beings who snatch them in their sleep. Beings whose world was engulfed by its star long after they’d evolved beyond the need to shed a tear for its loss. What is it we have that they need? Are they what remains when flesh stops evolving and the artificial takes over? Husks puppetized by a technology as foreign to our concept of machines as they themselves would be to the God who sowed their species in the stars before even there was an Earth to hold the heavens?
I mean, in very serious and proper medical texts – and, by extension, mainstream media – we’re referring to biological human females in terms such as birthers and postnatal persons; as people who menstruate and bodies with vaginas.
I get it. It’s clearly obviously gender inclusive language because if a trans man retains his female biology, of course he’ll still be able to menstruate, get knocked up, give birth and breast feed. That makes sense, doesn’t it? And if I were him I can quite imagine being offended or even, I dare say, somewhat fucking perturbed when deadnamed with the gender I was assigned at birth.
All other things being equal, I think most of us can empathise with that, right? Sure, it’s different and strange but ultimately, it’s just some dude living their life, trying to make some sense and maybe even a little poetry out of the chaos before the endgame of Strieber’s Greys’ has us all wishing we’d been born in a universe where we were God’s first mistake.
I’ll call whoever by whichever pronouns they wish. I just think we can all agree that if hypothetical barperson has a beard and big strong hugging arms, I’m not going to be thanking them with, “Cheers, love,” after paying. However, if I’m working out back in the kitchen in that same pub and she gets her heart broken again, I’ll be the one giving the hugs. Then we’re going clubbing to get her mind off that hypothetical bastard who turned such a beautiful hairy face wet with tears.
A little respect and a dash of tender loving care is the bare minimum if you all want to stay sane working in hospitality.
However.
That’s all very beautiful and personal in a way I’m still naive and romantic enough to believe is a story that lives in all of us but, let’s be real, if we’re not all free, none of us are. That isn’t anywhere close to the tale told by the person with a uterus, waiting tables while she bleeds, her smile practiced to complement the ample baby farming milkers.
Can we not maybe think of a new term for trans people and their pre-transition biology? Can we at least recognise that even with the best of intentions, the care, support and inclusion of one group can sometimes come at the detriment of another or others? Is that bigotry? I’m certain everything I’ve said today could be interpreted as such. What if I’m so rotten with hate that a furious compulsion to mould everything into my own little fascist solution to white male guilt has me mistaking intolerance for compassion?
It’s a right toughie, darling.
This is difficult to explore without going deep. In trying to understand both sides here it’s of course impossible not to feel for both sides. You’ve surely read the same news stories as me about trans women in female only spaces and the hilarity that often does not ensue. You’re always gonna get wrong-uns; some just relatively harmless perverts seeing a new in; others demented, lost to society and God and the closest thing to evil to ever be ejected from a birth canal. That’s just we bizarre apes though.
Trans woman in female spaces is the eighties all over again. Did you hear you can catch it off a toilet seat now? The AIDS, yeah. I don’t know, probably because most of them have it and they’re always shitting – you know why. Honestly, how would you know if the bloke stood next to you at the urinal was a bender? They look just like us, some of them, but you can tell, right? Any one of them comes near me and he’ll rue the fucking day. Have you heard they want them teaching our kids now as well? Not on my watch, sunshine. You know exactly what they’ll be up to.
Do you remember all that? Well I fucking do – I’m elderly. It feels like we’re going backwards.
There’s a lot of talk about being on the right side of history but listening to most of you I’d no more want to be stuck on a space ark filled with The Left™ than I would The Right™. Just fire me into the fucking sun and be done with it. I’m a simple Save the Whales libtard type who worries about eating pigs because they’re as smart as dogs and would see it as a civic duty to drop the guillotine on anyone who harms a child but you know what strikes me as a threat greater than the Chinese supersonic craft which the US Navy seemingly believe are Whitley Strieber’s Greys?
That’s right, it’s this crummy French Malbec that turned cheap and nasty in the air. How were we to know that breathing was its only weakness? Christ alive, it’s like gas station box wine with its dusty reflux aftertaste – you know the one, a few seconds later like a dry repetition where drinking it makes me feel like I’m young again, back on the farm where the French refrigerate red of such quality and the fucking Dutch keep playing Leonard Cohen.
I’d always defy them and put Bowie on. This was back in the days of cassettes so one needed to be both nimble and more than a little cocksure, which is where a good bellyful of chilled Merlot came in real handy.
…because the only thing that she enjoys is a criminal world where the girls are like baby-faced boys...
Continued in Part Two
CHRIS PARLETT 
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