Hello! I am sending this on Thursday instead of Friday because I’m going to France tomorrow and I don’t like scheduling posts. Don’t ask.
It was also meant to be a post for paying subscribers only but then I realised that I felt too strongly about the topic discussed in my column to stick it behind a paywall. I’ll make next week paid instead.
One vital dispatch
there’s a new Patricia Lockwood essay!!!!!! it’s about meeting the pope!!!!!! it’s 6000 words long!!!!!!!! it’s exactly as good as you want it to be, I read it all in one go then felt slightly high at the end, obviously go read the Patricia Lockwood essay, though maybe after reading my newsletter because my newsletter will seem rubbish in comparison
A column
I think the trans debate suffers from the same problem as cultural criticism. When you passionately hate something, it’s all you want to talk about. It’s easy for the words to flow out of you, for you to feel like you’re finally done ranting then turn round one last time, like Columbo, to talk about why you hate it some more.
There are novels and movies I hated and I wanted nothing more than to list, in detail, all the reasons why I hated them. Sometimes you can even get so carried away explaining why you loathe something that you will find some more reasons along the way. You started out complaining about the hammy dialogue then it reminded you of that scene where the plot just felt implausible. Annoyance begets annoyance.
Writing about why you loved something is usually more of a struggle, because why do we love the things we love? I could sit here and tell you about that novel I read and really enjoyed but it wouldn’t be very interesting. I would just say “well that bit was great” and “that other bit was also great” and “the ending? it was pretty great”.
Gender critical writers, campaigners and politicians can talk about trans people every single week because there will always be something that irks them. They will complain about trans people in schools and sports and toilets and adverts and movies and companies and swimming pools and everywhere else. There will always be something new to complain about. Did you know trans people did this thing? Well, we’d not thought about it until recently but we hate it. And did you hear about that other thing? Isn’t it dreadful?
It is hard for the other side - “my” side, whatever you want to call it - to retaliate because there is never anything new to say. I think of transgender men as men and transgender women as women. I think it’s neat that they’re out there doing things. I think they should be supported. I just can’t write that down every week, because it never changes and so there’s never anything new to say. “Woman still has the same opinion she held ten years ago”. More after the weather.
It’s why I’ve not written about it a lot over the past few years, despite feeling strongly about it. I just didn’t see what I could add. If I’m honest I still don’t, but sometimes the obvious ought to be stated again.
Earlier this week, the Department for Education released new non-statutory guidance on “gender questioning children”. If a child requests to socially transition at school, it reads, then the school should take a “very cautious approach” in considering it, and must ensure that “parents are fully consulted before any decision is taken”.
What this means in practice is that schools will no longer be a safe space for many gender questioning children and teenagers, and social transition will no longer be an option for them. There are many parents out there who would react poorly to a child coming out - tentatively or definitively - as transgender.
Should schools have a safeguarding duty to those children? I believe they should. I grew up with many gay and questioning friends - I was 10 when my first friend came out as bisexual - and many of their parents did not know about their kids’ sexuality. Even in the early 2000’s, in provincial France, that was a part of life. Boys would talk about boys and girls would talk about girls and adults would be none the wiser. Did teachers ever intervene? They did not. It would have seemed pointlessly cruel.
How is this different? Social transition is defined as “requests to change pronouns, names, and uniform”. Nothing is irreversible about pronouns, names and uniforms. If a child feels safe in the knowledge that they will not get abused, beaten, punished or thrown out for questioning their gender, they will tell their parents about it. If they don’t, schools shouldn’t make that decision for them.
“In exceptional cases where a request to social transition is agreed, children, teachers or staff at a school should not be required to adopt the use of preferred pronouns”, the guidance continues. It is a sentence that is grammatically correct but does not make sense. How is a social transition agreed if the person’s pronouns aren’t respected? The use of “exceptional” is also worth highlighting - in short, it is very unlikely that we will let a child transition socially and, even if we do, we actually won’t. It doesn’t mean anything. You are not letting a trans boy socially transition if you still use female pronouns when talking to or about him.
In a bleakly amusing twist, the sentence that follows is: “schools should ensure that bullying is never tolerated”. By their own definition, misgendering someone does not account to bullying. One does wonder if they asked even one trans person how they feel about that. Answers on a postcard, to the usual address.
The guidance is, as a whole, viciously depressing, not only in and of itself but because of what it represents. Only a few years ago, gender critical campaigners argued that they solely worried about the possibility of over-medicalising young people. That was it: they just didn’t want teens undergoing surgery they may one day regret. Fast-forward to 2023, and the government now believes that parents should be told if a child wants to wear lipgloss to school, and go by a different name. Will that end up causing undue harm to the child, when lipgloss and a new name have never harmed anyone? Pah, who cares. The slope has never felt slipperier.
This should usually be the point at which I start cruising towards a conclusion, but I don’t really have anything to add. Again, that’s the problem with this whole debate. I’m no crusader holding my sword in the sky and riding to my next target. I think this guidance is bad and cruel and sad, just as I always would have. I don’t think it’s going to create more cisgender children: it will just result in creating some more miserable trans kids. Maybe they’ll transition later in life, maybe they won’t. Their lives will just be made harder, for no reason at all.
I thought of them when reading the guidance, and of the trans woman I met recently at an event aimed at queer women. She was in her late thirties I think, maybe early forties, and only just beginning to transition. A group of us were talking and having a pleasant time and at some point she got visibly teary. She felt overwhelmed, she said, finally feeling accepted in a space she always felt she belonged in. We all hugged her and it was lovely but bittersweet. Life is long and complicated and there is no guessing what would have happened to her had the world been a different place when she was growing up. Maybe she could have become herself earlier.
I really want the world to be a different place now that the new generation is growing up. We’re clearly not there yet, but I guess we have to keep hoping, and sometimes writing even if it just feels like stating the obvious.
A…video game review?
Listen, I’ve just spent around 15 very enjoyable hours playing The Messenger and I want to talk about it, because no-one I know has played it and this is my newsletter so I can do what I want.
The Messenger was released in 2018 and it’s a game of two halves. It begins as a pretty straightforward platformer - you’re a guy from a little tribe of humans hiding from some great monsters and tasked with delivering a scroll to the top of a mountain to fulfill some form of prophecy. It’s retro, it’s 8-bit, it’s occasionally frustrating but overall fair.
Obviously gaming reviews are by definition subjective but I would say that the bosses are perfectly pitched. The early ones are easy, and the last couple will definitely require some grinding, and some painful learning of attack patterns, but it’s not anywhere near as challenging as, say, Hollow Knight.
Once you get near the end you chat to the shopkeeper, the one person you’ve interacted with along your adventure, and you tell him that you’re glad it’s nearly over and he tells you “oh so you didn’t watch the trailer then?”, which is just neat. Who doesn’t love a bit of fourth wall breaking in a game.
You beat that “final” boss then the game transforms into a metroidvania, and switches to 16-bit. It’s all a bit gimmicky but very well made; you often switch between the two worlds - representing the past and the future - and solve a series of little puzzles to get to the real ending.
The dialogue is always very wry and aggressively fun. One of the many, many messages you get when you die (something that happens often) is “Did your brother tell you there was a secret passage there? Mine did too”. Another favourite is “Oh did that projectile look like a health potion to you?”. The little shits.
One other good thing about The Messenger is the music, which stayed firmly stuck in my head for about two weeks. One bad thing about The Messenger, however, is the chase sequence they make you go through just before the very end.
I did not manage to finish the chase sequence, despite having played both Ori games. I found it too frustrating and stressful. I ended up watching the final fight and the ending on YouTube. I have no regrets.
I am also still recommending this game to you because I had a blast for 98% of the time I was playing it. It’s an indie as well so it is cheap, and it just felt like it was doing something I’d never quite seen before, which should be encouraged.
Should you buy The Messenger? I think you should!
2023: the round-up
Bye!
Absolutely nail on the head re treatment of trans kids. I was a school and college leader in my youth and I would absolutely ignore and undermine this advice. I would make it very clear to parents that we were an LGBTQ inclusive institution. Also as someone involved in safeguarding for many years, it’s more often parents that are the problem. Thank you.
Great edition, enjoy your Christmas kebab!