From Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aidancomerfordwriting/posts/943593709179246?__tn__=K-R
Aidan Comerford
Nov. 26, 2018
Us Irish have taken on a lot of British culture – their language, their football teams, their willingness to go into the ballot box and shoot themselves in the feet, stomach and face – but now there is something new rising up in British culture, that we must erect a hard border against: TERFs.
“What’s a TERF?” you ask. It stands for Trans-Exclusionary-Radical-Feminist.
TERFs don’t like the term, and I tend to agree. It’s not a good description, because there is nothing radical or feminist about them. Just as God-fearing Creationism was re-branded as cuddly Intelligent Design, TERFism is just good-old-fashioned transphobia, re-packaged with oh-so-rational bows.
Essentially, what we are looking at here is “Homophobia: Season Two.” Luckily, for Irish trans people, this movement is currently as British as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s monocle, but if the TERFs have their way, this show will soon be coming to an Ireland near you. (I think they might be trying to get us back for the whole “Jedward” thing.)
TERFs are doing cover versions of all of homophobia’s greatest hits. Stop me if you’ve heard these ones before:
– “Beware the trans agenda! Trans-acceptance is a cult!”
– “They’re using social media to groom the kids!”
– “Allowing trans people to use words like “women,” diminishes our womanhood.”
– “Transgenderism is a mental illness that can be cured without transitioning.”
– “No, this isn’t trans-conversion therapy, we’re just teaching kids not to give in to their…urges.”
– “Some of our best friends are trans people, and they agree with us.”
– “If we let boys identify as girls, it’s a slippery slope: should we buy kennels for kids who want to identify as dogs?”
I could on, but those are some of the classics.
TERFs also say that a proposed British “self-id” law, to make legally transitioning a little easier, will turn Britain into a dystopian landscape, with rapists in dresses roaming un-tethered through women’s safe spaces. There’s just a slight problem with that theory: Ireland has had a trans self-id law since 2015, and men continue to not require the right shade of lippy to abuse women.
In fairness to Irish people, unlike our British-Brexit-Brethern we have been doing a bit better in the ballot box of late. When we were warned that accepting gay marriage would turn Ireland into Sodom and Gomorrah, we collectively replied, “Turn Ireland INTO Sodom and Gomorrah?! You’ve clearly never been in a Galway Supermacs at 2am,” and, to our credit, we voted to support the LGBT community.
Now we need to redouble our support: British TERFs are coming to warn us that trans-acceptance isn’t actually decent or sound, it is, in fact, leading us into a misogynistic, patriarchal, fetishistic hellhole. We should answer them loudly, with one voice: “NO! That’s not trans-acceptance. That’s “Athlone” you’re thinking of.”
Unfortunately, to our shame, the current King of British TERFs is an Irishman: Graham Linehan. Yes, THAT Graham Linehan, the writer of “Father Ted.” Graham has mis-gendered and dead-named trans people on Twitter. Dead-naming is calling a trans person by their birth name, and it is equivalent to using the “F” word to describe gay people.
“No, not “fabulous,” Dougal.”
Perhaps, in Graham’s case, we could get the British to continue their fine tradition of claiming our successful writers as their own?
“Sure, there’s always one,” your Ma would say, and she would have been right, I think, except that this week Channel 4 aired a documentary called “Trans Kids: It’s Time To Talk,” by Stella O’ Malley, an Irish psychotherapist and writer.
Like me, Stella grew up in the 70s and 80s in Ireland. Like me, she thought she was a boy. She said, though, that around her mid-teens, her “gender confusion” was finally fully cured…by a good haircut – “it changed my life,” she says herself. (I’ve always had a bad haircut, which must be why I still feel like I’m a boy.)
Stella worried aloud that if she were growing up now, with all this new-fangled trans-acceptance, she would probably have transitioned, and then had to de-transition, even though kids’ haircuts are WAY better now.
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Women Born Transsexual 