One thing leads to another. It certainly did last Wednesday,
when blows were exchanged at Speaker’s Corner between transsexuals and
feminists who don’t wish the former to have the rights they enjoy themselves.
[1]
These TERFs
[2]
don’t seem to realise how old-fashioned their prejudice is. For transsexuals play a key part in a novel
from 1960 that took nearly 50 years to get published.
[3]
Murray Sayle’s “A Crooked Sixpence”
[4] tells of an Australian
journalist who comes to London following a girlfriend and manages to get a job
on a newspaper, the Sunday Sun.
[5] Largely based on his own experiences from the
1950s
[6],
the book describes the underhand stratagems by which “human interest”
journalists got stories to titillate their readers, regardless of the damage they
caused to obscure individuals in their hypocritically moralistic exposés.
[7]
A game-changer in the tale is a transsexual who offers to
tell his/her story, naively hoping for fair coverage. (This was very modern: in
1961 the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic - the first in the UK
[8]
- was still 5 years into the future. But the successful fashion model April
Ashley was just about to be outed as a transsexual - in the Sunday People.)
[9]
The brutal editor, Barr, gives O’Toole his brief: offer £25
and “that bollocks about explaining his tragic plight to the public”, then turn
on the trans in print:
“I see the angle like this: “This disgusting pervert has had
himself mutilated to get money from the innocent British public. He even had the
nerve to ask money for the revolting details of his sickening operation. You
ought to be in a prison or a mental home, you're not fit to breathe the same
air as the decent people of Britain, you contemptible beast.” With this twist,
it ought to make a page lead.”
More than half a century later, the decent TERFs of Britain
are turning on the often tremendously brave transsexuals, in a location
famously dedicated to the principle of liberal tolerance.
[1]
http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/17/woman-injured-as-feminists-and-transgender-groups-fight-at-speakers-corner-6933812/
[2]
“Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”
[3]
Originally published in 1961 but pulped almost immediately because of an
attempt by a broke toff to sue the publishers:
Michael Alexander was the model for “Michael Macedon”.
[4]
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crooked-Sixpence-Murray-Sayle/dp/0955823846
[5]
Based on The People, which was taken over by Mirror Group in 1961. Now called
the Sunday People: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_People
[6]
He quit in 1956, like his fictional hero James O’Toole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Sayle
[7]
There was another book about Fleet Street - “The Street Of Disillusion” -
published three years earlier (in 1958) by a man called Harry Procter. Like
Sayle, Procter left the profession in disgust; but Sayle was to return a few
years later and earn distinction in serious investigative journalism.
[8]
https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/2016/08/30/fifty-years-on-the-charing-cross-gender-identity-clinic-and-the-funding-of-a-category-without-parallel/
[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Ashley#Model.2C_scandal
