The Crying Game

[sam]

Much as it displeases me when someone uploads a clip and calls it something like this

Godammit. That was Jim Broadbent in a scene from The Crying Game saying "Who knows the secrets of the human heart." It was entitled 'Best scene', I think.

they're not wrong. My favourite line is @3.35. I've liked Broadbent since I first saw him in Life is Sweet (there's the spoon), filmed in Enfield, where I was born again into the congregation of the spoked wheel.

A Trans Perspective on The Crying Game

In an interview given on the 25th anniversary of the release of The Crying Game, writer/director Neil Jordan was asked if he thought the character Dil was a pre-op transsexual. He replied, “She wasn’t that. She was a transvestite”. He clarifies that he interacted with transgender women, including “a beautiful boy on a hormone course” who performed in the film, and his character was not like them. Aside from the misgendering of the actor, Jordan’s response is either born of a lack of understanding of the differences between ‘transvestites,’ by which this author will politely assume the director is referring to cross-dressers, and transgender women, or he is intentionally diverting attention from his culpability in the lasting injury his film inflicted on the transgender community.

Is a time machine ride to a saner era an option? No? Very well. As faithful readers will know, if you think 'misgendering' is a thing, you'll only have bookmarked this board to hatescroll.

Na.tasha, who is welcome to as many full stops as he likes, was of course traumatised by the big reveal.

Who would want to transition if it meant being a creature so revolting that they caused others to literally vomit? If a ‘passable,’ beautiful trans person such as Dil engendered this kind of reaction, what hope could a brick like me have in the world as a woman?

No is the answer here as well. Hope of passing successfully gaslighting all of us, that is. Just be yourself: an unconventional man. Anyway, is it really "nearly impossible to overstate the damage this film has done to trans women"?

Depends how much of a realityphobe you are.

It's a bit much to complain that a straight man might vomit, or at least experience 'his truth' – that would be nausea – on being presented with an unexpected penis at mouth level; and no, I don't think Fergus was secretly gay, though I do like how labels were a non-issue. You'd be forgiven for reading this

Fergus, by contrast [to someone who said they'd feel murderous in his situation], is almost a decent fellow for only hitting Dil

and getting the impression that he gave Dil a real wallop.

This'll take you right to the scene. [Someone had the entire film up, which I originally linked to, but unfortunately it disappeared and this edited clip is the best I could find. You'll see Dil's surprise is actually more diaphram level.] [And now that's blocked from viewers in the UK – what happened to our special relationship, you damn Yankees? I'm beginning to think there's a conspiracy against my embedding videos here.]

If you haven't seen it, you'll just have to take my word on this: Fergus reflexively smacks Dil's hand away when he attempts to touch his face, then roughly pushes him into the side of the bed as he bolts for the sink, presumably because Stephen Rea had a clause in his contract stipulating that he wasn't going to be hugging no porcelain god, authenticity be damned.

Dil is a wonderful character, and I think most of us felt for him acutely at that moment, perhaps emerging from the theatre with a fresh appreciation for the human condition of just trying to get on in a world which fucks with our hopes and dreams. Do you reckon the film would have been nearly as memorable and even consciousness raising if Dil had been a transvestite 2.0, i.e., a very clearly labelled and lauded trans 'woman'? Aside from those either too frightened to tell the truth, or too brainwashed to know what it even is, not a chance.

Feed my spoiler habit

Tangent:

[close]

As a very young man

in the big city I once found myself invited to the apartment of a slightly older man who I was too stupid to realise had designs on me. It was only when we got comfortable on the couch and he reached for what we'll call my Dil that it clicked. Cue almost comical shock. The only thing I beat was a hasty departure. If it had happened again I like to think I would've handled it better, certainly with more tact, because that's what experience is for.

The only thing the T has to do with the LGB is that in matters of sex, our basic instincts are involved. Unfortunately we've slipped into a de-enlightened age of regressive bollocks thanks to gendermentalism. If only it were a bad movie we could walk out of.

[sam]

Indrajit Samarajiva specialises in (r)anti-US blog posts, which I for one don't have a problem with, given the abundant supply of ammunition. He churns out some clever turns of phrase, and I found him moreish until I read this:

How I Grew Up Transphobic

A redemption story! If you don't mind, I have a few notes.

(With Ace Ventura)

The pet detective guy. Way ahead of you there.

Hating trans people was popular culture just a generation ago

Generation Hate. Catchy, no?

From Ace Ventura. I skimmed it for this article, and just don't watch this film. It's a hate crime

Shirley you jest.

Growing up in the 1990s I remember watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in the theatres. I sat there with hundreds of people, munching popcorn, watching a hate crime.

I guess that answers that.

Millions of people did. It was a popular movie.

In the final scene, Jim Carrey has the villain surrounded by cops and he starts ripping off her clothes. The big punchline, the most terrible crime, is that she's trans. Her body is so disgusting that all the cis-men (holding guns) vomit. And we all laughed. We all watched that hate crime and laughed at it together. Today I am ashamed.

You laughed because, evidently, it was funny. It's still funny to anyone who laughed the first time around and whose sense of humour hasn't been snatched from them, leaving an ideological husk.



Everyone gets made fun of in this thing we call life.

It's easy to forget that this was just a generation ago. This cinematic lynching was in 1994 (10 years ago in my mind, but actually 27). The absolute bigotry of the film didn't even register at the time. This was normal. The film ends with a line of cop cars driving to the football stadium, where cis men are athletes and cis women are cheerleaders and everyone is in their proper place.

Remember the "high tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas?

I only bring it up as it's sad to see the misuse of such powerful words from a writer. More of that to come, I'm sure.

Also, whenever you say "cis", my eyes do a little roll.

I watched this and felt good. It was a happy ending. The heterosexuals were good and trans people were dangerous, deceptive villains. This is just how we grew up. We grew up transphobic AF.

Kind of a stretch that a movie about a "pet detective" really brought it out in you.

Growing Up

Growing up in the 1990s in America, I didn't have to go out of my way to be a bigot. We said 'faggot' all the time. Lesbians were a dirty joke. The entire existence of trans people was at best hilarious, at worst a justification for violence. This is all horrifying to write down, but at the time it was just normal. Being homophobic or transphobic is not some unique pathology. This was the dominant culture of the times.

"Transphobia" is wearing out its welcome here on TERF Island.

Octavia St. Laurent in a still from Paris Is Burning

It was not, however, the only culture, and certainly not the only possible one. Also in the 1990s, Paris Is Burning was released. This documentary covered the vibrant ballroom culture of the 1980s, places where no one laughed at queer or trans people but instead celebrated them. While society was telling them to sleep in the cinders, young people found fairy godmothers, shoplifted fabulous clothes, and went out to the ball. These balls were grand contests where—even if just for a night—they were cheered instead of jeered. It's a real Cinderella story.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio

Everyone from Ohio raise your hand.

I knew nothing about this, but it existed. Thus I don't want to say 'by the standards of our times' because that just erases those voices again. Trans people existed in the 1990s, and by stubbornly persisting, they have changed popular culture today. Ballroom was a small subculture, but its influence has now spread far and wide. Today we still do voguing dance moves and use phrases like "yas queen" and "throwing shade." Meanwhile no one is talking out of their butt or saying "alrighty then" (Jim Carrey's catch-phrases). Times have changed.

Alrighty then.

This leads, however, to the conflict we see today. Most young people see trans rights as human rights, but people my age and older simply did not grow up that way. We grew up laughing at the persecution of trans people, it was family fun.

We grew up laughing at absurdities such as the proposition that women have a penis, this is true.

Some of us grew up and are ashamed, but some are still hateful and proud. The loss of the privilege to hate feels, to many people, like an oppression. And so we get continued transphobia today, just much more whiny and self-indulgent.

Whiny and self-indulgent [BIG LAUGH].

Transphobia Today

Today you can't just strip a trans person naked and laugh at their body. That's not funny. You can't say they're disgusting and expect everyone else to agree. You can't portray them as villains, or dangerous, at least not so openly. But make no mistake, people still think these things.

Can't have people thinking the wrong things. It is the job of us bloggers to set them right.

Now they just express them in more subtle ways.

Instead of making vomiting noises, they just ask questions.

Even worse than thinking the wrong things is asking questions.


Whitey asked too many questions

Instead of portraying trans people as villains, they talk about public restrooms. And instead of national films we get irrational Substacks, complaining bitterly about being silenced.

This is where I realised you really haven't been paying attention. I know things have speeded up since you wrote this in 2021, but plenty of stupid and scary shit went down before that.

The real problem, of course, is that trans and queer people refused to be silenced. Cinderella refused to stay in the cinders and went to the ball, and won the prince of public opinion. There was a culture war over the past 25 years and Paris Is Burning is winning...

Look, I love movies too, but it can be helpful to step away from the reel world and check in with the real world.

I think often of how the gay friends I have came out after college, well into 2005.

And now we have transing the gay away. That's progress for you.

Things were messed up for that long, and across most communities they still desperately are. The rising power of trans people across media is really an illusion because A) they're still fighting for the basic right to exist

Sure, let's make this existential. Because we all know that if people stop believing, trans stops existing.

and B) the power, the money, and the guns are still with the people who hate them.

You might want to consider an update to your wetware.

I was quite casually part of the problem for many years. So many of us were ignorantly awful. Supporting trans people today is the least we can do.

That being your second link to the same blog piece, message received.

Trans Rights Are Not Up For Debate

We put the existence of trans people up for debate. They have to prove themselves to us, biologically, socially, legally. We hold no one else to these standards.

If you don't like these standards, we have others.

Do you check anyone’s genitals before you call them he or she? Or do we just treat each other with respect and get on with it? Even the fact that I — a straight cis man — am writing this is obscene. What does my opinion have to do with their rights? And yet trans rights are up for debate, so I write. To say that the whole debate is obscene.

Something is obscene here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Samarajiva.

I will not engage in this as a ‘debate’ because I think it is frankly genocidal.

I will not legitimize a debate that is, in itself, structural violence. I will not glorify the handle that twists the knife. Trans rights are right and denying them is wrong.

Here's where an honest accounting of what rights they don't have wouldn't go amiss.

The objections are all hypotheticals. What if ‘men’ end up in ‘safe’ female spaces. Bitch, what safe space? Men are already everywhere.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that your use of "bitch" isn't throwing misogynist shade, but you don't half pick your moments. Telling women you're not safe anywhere isn't the winning argument you think it is. Nor are any of your others.

Deal with problems as they come up, and focus on the real problem, which is cis men.

FTFY. For avoidance of doubt, trans women are men.

Leave the vulnerable people alone. More to the point, help them.

It is the height of genocidal thought to take a deeply oppressed minority and make them the danger. We are not in danger from trans people. We are the ones killing them.

Unless you're a sex worker in Brazil, this is actually one of the safer demographics we're talking about.

Not just the violent people that do it. The ambivalent people who make their existence up for debate. How do you think an existential debate is settled? It’s with hands around their neck.

I am part of this violence. I grew up in it. I laughed.

As a 12-year old I sat in a theatre and laughed at Ace Ventura until I cried.

You're more a part of the problem now than you ever were then.

There’s a learning curve for all of us.

You can say that again.

PS. Much as I looooove talking to myself, I did reach out and contact Indrajit, hoping for a chat. No such luck.

[Dorothy Parker]

↑ Bolted on because it sounds like it could be the name of a film.

The sadness of Sceptical Man

As a topic, sex and gender causes particular problems for the man who views himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madnesses. This is because in order to pass as occupying “the middle ground”, you still have to give a free pass to lots of insane things, as opposed to lots and lots of them. Instead of going full-on Long Chu — which would of course be too far!  — you have to ignore plenty of stuff which, deep down, you know to be total bollocks. This probably makes you quite cross, only not with yourself. It’s the people who keep pointing it out who are the problem...

For those whose brand values — rationality! curiosity! scepticism! — are quite incompatible with any serious engagement with what has been happening, it has been necessary to portray it as a “culture war” between two equally extremist sides.

That one could've been written for our friends at CycleChat. Find "middle ground".

Leaving Kindland

For me there are essentially two reasons why I object to "cis".

Firstly it is based on the presumption that there are two types of women, the vast majority who were born female and a small minority who were born male, and that "women" is consequently a word for a mixed sex group of people who all share a gender identity. I don't agree with any of that at all, and don't want to use language or be referred to using language which implicitly includes this presumption.

Secondly, the distinction between cis women and trans women is frequently used to reframe the former as a privileged majority and the latter as an oppressed minority who need special protection. Given how genuinely oppressed and marginalised many women in the former category are, I find that argument grossly offensive.

KJK's insane rant

If KJK is "strategically stupid" as described by the OP then she has somehow been remarkably lucky to have gotten women out on the streets saying things that can't safely be said anywhere else. Just by selling t-shirts!

That's women all over the world, and month after month for years now.

If left to socfems those women would have been too busy disentangling convoluted sub clauses in laboriously over-written essays to even get their socks on.

I've just been watching - part 1 is pretty gruelling, and part 2 is classic angry KJK energy. I think OP is feeling a bit called out by KJK. Here's a bit of a transcript.

I'll tell you how you can demonstrate it. Hello can we see all the evidence that said this is good? Here it is: a blank piece of paper. Here's the evidence. There's no evidence!

It's really scary when you think that most of us ordinary people - the women that congregate at Let Women Speak - we know better about this than anybody. Anybody. It just beggars belief. I feel like I'm the world expert in gender dysphoria; what is it? It's nothing!

Oh come and buy a ticket to the Conference, come and join the great and the good, all the non-confrontational polite, respectful, rational, courteous people that will sit and give you a round of applause if you say "I think it might be quite harmful to give children puberty blockers".

Oh well, fuck me, well done! Really? You think so? What, blocking puberty might be harmful?

"Uh, can I just say I also think it's harmful to cut the legs off of newborn infants."

Oh my god, well done! Wow, that's so, oh my god I can't believe someone's finally said it! You're just incredible.

And can I just say if you were in the conference, if you attended the conference, if you're part of the great and the good, the rational, the reasonable the wonderful, I don't think we're on the same team. I don't think we're fighting the same fight.

I think if you set up a conference on the basis that you are going to deal with "gender", "gender identity" and "gender dysphoria" you're just not on the same fight as me. Perhaps I just deal more in real-world stuff. Perhaps I'm just a little bit more abrasive, perhaps I don't mind being disliked, perhaps I'm not courting the great and the good. Perhaps I don't give a shit about their approval. I don't want it. I'd rather not have it, because it means I'm doing something wrong. There's a reason I don't go to these events, and that's because I really cannot - I could not sit there with a bunch of simpering morons listening to people talk about "maybe we should be cautious about giving kids cross-sex hormones".

I'm so cross. And can I just say to all the people who think that I'm not allowed to be angry, or it's not the way don't fucking tune in, don't listen I don't care.

I have said right from the off I don't need to be liked I don't want your approval I don't care if you think I'm right or wrong I don't care about any of those things. What I care about is that I see something, I want to say it, I'm going to fucking say it, I'm going to keep saying it and I'm not going to stop saying it.

And I'm never going to be okay about those of you that compromise. Like sod you, compromise who? Which child? 18-year-old? Should we compromise 18-year olds? Are they old enough are they old enough to cut their breasts off? Are they old enough for medics to go "well, you know 18 is the..." Are they okay for a theoretical paper on how we can just rob them of their futures?

I think she's clear - she's too busy pushing the edge of the GC side of the Overton window to waste her time on people being dragged along by the movement at the other end of it.

We need all sorts of people here, and KJK is utterly key to that end of the fight. If everyone was like, say, Jesse Singal, we'd be making much slower progress. (But he's key to his end too, and we need people like him). Someone has to be there consistently pointing out how extreme the "centrist" position actually is.

This is why I love Jess Phillips

Women must be enabled to live safe from male violence, she says, ushering men into women's spaces and castigating women for resisting it.

You cannot both decry male violence and facilitate it.
You cannot both raise up women's defences, and still punish those who would defend themselves.

What would Jess say to a woman who was made a victim of a man, if that man's identity gained him access to her, and Jess the protagonist who argued for that to be facilitated?

If you sacrifice the truth you lose everything. You cannot trade off one woman's life for another. Make one woman safer, at the cost of endangering others. Bargain for the safety of some women, paid for with the concession that others are placed at risk.

Jess perhaps thinks this is a numbers game. That she can negotiate for a limited number of men to have the right to destroy women's boundaries, by exempting only them from her loud objections to the other men who do it.

Only a fool would not realise that to argue against any woman's boundaries means you are endangering all women.

My bold.