By Eh?nonymous
“If you’re a 50 year old truck driver who’s had four children with a wife and you’ve decided the whole time you’ve been a woman, I think you’re probably wrong” – Germaine Greer Q&A
Poor Germaine. Her statement on Q&A was met with predictable howls of indignation and accusations of transphobia. Once the darling of ABC Radio and Television, now thrown beneath the progressive bus along with the rest of womanhood, to appease the surgically adventurous who fetishise womanhood as something to be poorly replicated and culturally appropriated.
This is the cruel and confusing caste system that dictates progressive ‘equality’. The only thing wrong with truly achieving genuine equality is that you inevitably find yourself squarely in the crosshairs of Cultural Marxists, right alongside the patriarchy.
You could almost see the horrible moment of clarity and realisation in her eyes, when the penny dropped and she saw her former progressive allies squinting down that telescopic sight with great determination, with something along the lines of ‘and then they came for the cisgender white beta males, and I did nothing for I despised the cisgender white beta males, almost as much as the alphas that they persecuted and disempowered before the betas…’ certainly going through her mind.
Congratulations ladies, you have finally arrived.
Let it be noted that to the best of my knowledge, Germaine has been steadfast and has not shifted her views one iota in some sixty odd years of activism. Let it be noted that even just a decade ago, the statement that has caused such widespread indignation would have been viewed as entirely factual and reasonable in all quarters, and not even worthy of debate. We may not agree on everything, but I do respect and admire old school pinkos like Germaine, with their integrity and beliefs that do not waver in the high speed internet ebbs and flows of contemporary left wing neo-fascism.
I’m reasonably certain that the world has truly gone mad when commensense transcends politics, and I find myself on exactly the same page as Germaine Greer without either of us compromising our beliefs or opinions in any way, shape, or form.
Right about now you probably think that I’m about to talk about gender identity, and weigh into that whole mess. Not quite. Gender identity, fluidity, or any other ultimately meaningless sleight of hand buzzword is even more irrelevant than usual here. Remarkable I know, given the fact that a feminist has openly locked horns with the transgender movement.
Greer’s next ‘outrageous comments’, along with a similarly themed episode of Compass that interviewed the estranged spouses and children of the transitional or transitioned, made me see this particular social justice warrior lather in an entirely different way.
“I don’t believe that a man who has lived for 40 years as a man and had children with a woman and enjoyed the services – the unpaid services – of a wife, that he then decides that the whole time he’s been a woman” Germaine continued quite sensibly. “You believed you were a woman, but you married another woman. That wasn’t fair was it?”
An interesting pattern emerged before my eyes. A person throwing a devastating pipe bomb into their own immediate family unit for superficial reasons, while completely oblivious or unconcerned about the resulting collateral damage to their spouse, and in many cases young and impressionable children, is nothing new. Just the framing of it is.
Society has always accepted that a man or woman who skips out on their family for obviously selfish reasons, like avoiding responsibility and making their own life easier at the expense of their spouse and children, should not be called beautiful or brave. They should probably be called a bum.
The person who goes through a mid-life crisis and leaves a spouse who is as weathered as he or she is, for a person half their age, is never considered as a victim or someone who should be canonised in some way. He or she is invariably and correctly seen as foolish, embarrassing, selfish, and placing his or her own wants and needs above their family for largely cosmetic reasons. Trade in the middle aged spouse for a younger model, the old family sedan for a new sportier model, and those little extras that give your children the best start in life for a few more personal luxuries.
Many will also understandably ask if he or she has taken leave of their senses, if they have lost some of their faculties, if the pressure that is modern life has made them finally blow a rod. These are all reasonable concerns, and very much the elephant in the room of the transgender debate. Did this person always feel they were born in the wrong body, or merely tip over that narrow precipice between sanity and madness?
If the former is the case, then surely this hypothetical fifty year old truck driver who is so steadfast in the belief from an early age that he is trapped inside the wrong body, yet still thinks that committing to a long term relationship and starting a family, safe in the knowledge that the entire whole exercise is ultimately unsustainable and doomed to tragedy, borders on the criminally negligent. If the latter is the case it is similarly bordering on criminally negligent to pretend that all of this is normal, and that the victim who has had their life destroyed because of it is anybody other than the spouse and children of the said truck driver.
Whichever way you cut it (pardon the pun), the fifty year old truck driver who wakes up one morning and decides that he is a woman, is not a lot different to a spousal abuser or unrepentant drug addict who thinks that committing to a serious relationship and having children will end in any other way than tears. A miserable confused fifty year old truck driver committing a kind of gender suicide before the eyes of his children and re-emerging as…let’s face it, a miserable confused eunuch, can also be compared to a seventy year old man siring a late life baby for purely selfish reasons, a child who will by all rights be an orphan by the age of seven or eight, just like the figurative orphans of the truck driver who has completely changed his identity and everything that made him their father.
Germaine is right to be cynical about the fifty year old truck driver who consciously chooses to start a long term relationship and a family based upon a lie. These people are not to be canonised or lionised. The argument that these things were not as accepted say thirty years ago as they are today does not hold any weight in this regard. Whether we are talking about a fifty year old male truck driver who identifies as a woman, a table, or even, God forbid, a fifty year old male truck driver, is completely irrelevant.
There have always been bums…selfish, narcissistic shirkers of responsibility. The difference is that traditionally there were repercussions for the callousness of obliterating one’s family unit for reasons that were far from altruistic. If you wanted to desert the wife and kids as part of a silly midlife crisis, there were repercussions. You were going to lose friends and family, and in all likelihood die alone unless some kind of late life reconciliation was possible. You certainly weren’t regarded as a protected species (aka the Corroboree Frog) in need of restrictions and raised walkways around your habitat, so as not to confront you with any kind of natural adversity or responsibility as a life form.
One cannot help but wonder if, psychologically speaking, a surgically altered body serves as a kind of state sanctioned safe space for individuals with severe mental issues. The kind of person who feels such a need to be absolved from blame or guilt for their outwardly destructive life choices and behaviour that they will literally go under the knife to achieve it.
Perhaps a heavily surgically modified protective vessel is the most desirable way for the truly damaged to hide away from the normal responsibility and adversity that the rest of us have chosen not to shy away from, and actually embrace as part and parcel of our emotional growth and as part of the human condition.
We certainly live in troubled times when a confused 50 year old truck driver, who is basically exhibiting the same behaviour that all the other bums who have shirked the same responsibilities since the dawn of time, is somehow framed as the victim in all of this. If you have no spouse and dependents and feel the need for a cis-change and all of the associated perks of instant victimhood status, then go nuts (literally). Good for you. But just like the slightly bored middle aged father of three ogling the new nineteen year old secretary, frivolous hedonism has its price, so don’t expect anyone to cry you a river over the repercussions of your actions.
To Germaine, who may well become an ally of the alt-right in much the same way as Bill Maher, purely by the courage of her convictions and unwavering beliefs, I say “You Go Girl!”
Eh?nonymous was a thoroughly repellent unemployed social justice warrior until a one in a million glitch in his Facebook account affected the algorithms in his news feed, omitting posts from his much loved left leaning Huffington Post and I F**king Love Science, and inexplicably replacing them with centrist and conservative newsfeed items that slowly dragged him kicking and screaming into the light beyond the safe space that Mr. Zuckerberg had so carefully constructed for him. It’s a long road to recovery, but every Mark Steyn share he sees in his newsfeed is like another day clean from social justice addiction.
Photo by Maggie Hannan 