Those "Protect the dolls" t-shirts – is that really the slogan they want to go with when protesting the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces? Trans women as dolls? To most people, I'd imagine, it just reinforces the sad image of trans women as men dressed up as parodies of femaleness, with girly clothes, bad wigs, and faces smeared with wildly inappropriate and over-the-top make-up.
Julie Burchill at Spiked:
When Tilda Swinton and a host of lesser-known fashion and showbiz faces (I had personally never heard of Pedro Pascal or Troye Sivan) put on one of these hilariously over-priced garments – £75! – and smiled self-servingly for the cameras, did they have no inkling of how the use of the word ‘dolls’ would play? Not after all the years when we gender realists declared so many times that women are born, not made? That ‘female’ is not a costume you can wear in the way that Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wore the skins of his victims?…
So, in a way, transwomen are ‘dolls’. But not the kind they think of themselves as. Social media have fuelled the rise in images of men with body dysmorphia and / or a kink portraying themselves as fairies and little girls, even when they’re six-foot-four abattoir workers called Big Al. Whether these men are deluded or having a laugh is a matter of conjecture, but I’d say that either one indicates what the centrist dads call a ‘bad-faith actor’. The silly and the sinister often overlap on certain issues. ‘Palestine’ is one, trans is another.
There are without doubt ‘transwomen’ who have simply got carried away with the thrill they get from dressing up like Widow Twankey when their wives are at book club. But there are some who are downright creepy, and their embrace of the ‘dolls’ motif only draws attention to this, however unwittingly.
It makes one think of sex dolls, and thus ‘sissy porn’. This is the unwholesome genre of porn in which a man is ‘forced’ to transform into a woman, whether through the administration of hormones or the donning of makeup and lingerie. It has apparently drawn a sizeable number of ‘normal’ men to cross-dressing, while being altogether less innocent than the desire to spend alternate Fridays wearing frills’n’furbelows and answering to Fiona. One self-confessed fan of this genre is transwoman and literary critic Andrea Long Chu, who also once described his ideal / idea of womanhood as ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes’.
Mr Chu has also argued there should be unregulated access for all, including children, to cross-sex hormones and surgery. A surprising number of activists involved in the ‘respectable’ end of trans activism believe that children should be allowed to ‘transition’ at an age when they aren’t even allowed to be legally left alone at home overnight.
For more on Andrea Long Chu, and many other trans voices, see this video from Mary Cate Delvey (who featured fabulously in the previous post). It's long – over two hours – but Chu comes up early on as case number three, at a minute and a half in. "Getting fucked makes you female, because fucked is what a female is." "To be female is in every case to become what someone else wants."
Mick Hartley 
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