Normal

 “Mummy, mummy! Why is that man wearing a dress?” Years ago that remark would have elicited a different response from today, probably. “Don’t stare, dear, he’s just playing dressing up” might have been the reply, followed by a hurrying away from the freak. Others may have been less tolerant and minded to challenge, but in the main people would have quietly gone about their business and made no more about it.

In the past, a man wishing to be a woman was regarded as an oddity, who nonetheless deserved to be allowed to act out his fantasy only so far as it did not infringe on the rights and sensibilities of others. Such activities would never have extended so far as allowing such a man to associate with children or use women-only changing rooms. They may have sought out the company of the like-minded, or else lived lives of social solitude. Or, indeed, kept their predilections entirely secret, as so many did throughout their lives.

A man in a dress was always seen as less acceptable than a woman in comfortable man-clothes, and the reasons are not difficult to contemplate. A male-inclined woman tends not to present a physical threat to other men, whereas a six-foot, sixteen stone rugby player in a bad wig is a sinister, imposing presence, so out of place that it screams threat from the very top of the lungs. Wolf! Run for your lives!

But transvestism is not the issue. Cross-dressing has been normalised by the pantomime dame and the drag queen scene. Indeed, the majority of men who dress up in female garb are doing just that; dressing up. They otherwise lead perfectly happy male lives and pose no threat to anybody. Actual transexuals are another thing altogether, and so very unusual is this phenomenon that the only way their presence becomes statistically significant is by joining the alphabet soup of LGBTQI+++ to then claim to  be a very small, single-digit percentage of the population at large.

In other words, if you are a transsexual then, by the very definition of the word, you are not normal. Normal: conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. So how did such a vanishingly small minority obtain such powers as to unseat the Scottish First Minister, and be likely to bring about the demise of the next? Why is the Labour Party unable to define what a woman is, for fear of censure? Why are the arbiters of what is right in society incapable of doing what pretty much anybody else can do with ease, which is discern not only what somebody is, but also what somebody isn’t? Man, not-man, man-in-a-dress, man-who-wants-to-be-a-woman, threat-to-women-who-don’t-want-their-exclusive-spaces-to-be-invaded.

You can feel as sorry as you like for the genuinely distressed transsexual, who finds both the transition and later acceptance difficult, but beyond common decency and the same human rights as everybody else (which are far fewer in reality and sense than many in the human rights circus would have us believe) we owe them nothing. All of which is why the witch-trial hounding of Posy Parker in New Zealand is beyond abhorrent.

Mummy, why does that man look funny?

So far down the trans rabbit hole have those who seek to speak for society been dragged that they are every bit as much the problem as are those rapists who hanker after being incarcerated in pens filled with vulnerable prey. So dangerous are the proponents of Newspeak that it is they who should be held up to scrutiny and proscribed. In fact they have done for the rights of peaceful transsexuals to live their lives unmolested much what Pol Pot, Mao and Orwell’s Ingsoc did for the nuclear family. Being transsexual is not a crime, but you abandon all rights to dignity and acceptance when you demand that others treat you as ‘normal’.