Mick Hartley

Classicist Mary Beard, interviewed in the Herald Scotland, on trans:

On trans rights, Beard says: “I don’t fully understand why, more than anything else, it’s proved to be an issue we find very hard to discuss. Why did this, of all issues, become so toxic? There may be, and I’m sure there are, some transphobes, trans-haters, out there, but most people I think aren’t in that category. Many of them are puzzled, worried, about where this leaves cis women.

“Those are utterly reasonable questions that we ought to be able to raise, but that’s proved impossible, and I’m not clear why … I want to explore what’s preventing us managing to have a conversation about this.”

Beard says she’d like to make a programme about the difficulties around discussing the issue, but adds: “I’m probably too much of a coward. That’s a shame as we need to find a way in which this can be talked about because people get terribly damaged on all sides – not just one side.”

As a feminist, does she perceive a clash between ‘trans rights and women’s rights’? “I hope there isn’t,” she says. “It’s presented as if there is, and I can see where people are coming from, but what we ought to be thinking is ‘how do we square the circle here?’. I hope in 20 years time we aren’t talking like this.”

Social media has clearly “played its part”, Beard feels, in creating this mood of “outraged standoff, where nuance and complexity is rejected”.

That’s why Beard feels we need plenty of liberal arts students. Humanities subjects, she believes, encourage sophisticated and balanced debate.

She detests Conservative attacks on arts degrees, on the grounds that law or science graduates may earn higher salaries. “For crying out loud,” she says, “of course we want science and law, but we also want people whose training provides foundations to talk about difficult things.”

Like you, for instance? – trained to talk about difficult things, but clearly clueless on the trans issue. I mean, if she has nothing but "be nice" platitudes, why even go there? 

I was never very keen on her since that LRB letter after 9/11, when she suggested that the Americans had it coming…