Trans and dental meditation in Emancipation week

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

Part I

MY BACK tooth hurts, but not as much as my head. On the one hand, I bit into a plum I thought was seedless; on the other, trans female power weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is in the Olympics. And it’s easier for me to chew right through a plum stone than chew over whether or not she should be allowed to compete as a woman.

Nothing, not even whether Harry Kane plays for Spurs or City, will divide people as sharply in sport over the next few years as how, exactly, we treat – and treat with – transgender athletes.

And outside sporting arenas, trans people will challenge the very notion of our all living together peacefully. Or, rather, will challenge some of us to assess whether we can live peacefully with our own prejudices.

In my own head, I’m not sure I can sort it out.

But at least I didn’t bite down as hard on the plum as the churches and mosques will on Laurel Hubbard and all trans people. (Hindu temples, which see the female and the androgynous in God, ought to be more obliging.)

Now, no one should approach issues of personal liberty more liberally than a West Indian. Our entire history has been one of oppression; and, though they represent probably the smallest minority in the world, numerically, there is no group more oppressed today than trans people. Until very recently, they were not even recognised as actual people.

West Indians should be welcoming to trans folk. West Indians putting a hand out to pull up another oppressed minority is just what Andre Tanker had in mind when he wrote the lyric, “chain of freedom.”

But West Indians – especially, ironically, black West Indians – will probably be the single group most united in condemning Laurel Hubbard and all trans people, not just in competitive sport, but in toto, and out of what they will contrive to see as in principle.

The great advantage of so-called revealed religious truths is that they are above debate. You cannot question the will of God, whether you interpret that will as liberally as a gay ordained Christian minister or as rigidly as the Taliban (whom I think of as “the Totally-Ban-Thinking”) and the I-Sissies. All religions punish the apostasy to which any deep thinking would tend to eventually lead their most sincere adherents.

And trans people provoke precisely the kind of really deep thinking most of us would rather avoid. It is easy to declare, eg, there are only two genders, and dismiss anyone suggesting – indeed, proving – otherwise as mentally ill; much harder to consider the mental limitations that prevent you from acknowledging that, like black people before them, trans people are in fact people.

My own instinct to protect the rights of the more major minorities – black, female and queer people – militates against me extending that minority protection to such a difficult and challenging minority as trans people; not because I would deny the trans their humanity, but because I understand that extending protections to them would unify all the backward forces that wish to continue their exploitation of people.

“Now they’ve gone too far,” declare the holier-than-they, while cracking the skulls of everybody in any way different.

And the human rights of people of colour, women and gays, hard won over centuries, are potentially lost in moments.

It’s hard, too, to be asked to accommodate women-born-men in competitive female sports when you’re still not quite through processing the scores of genders purportedly recognised on Grindr.

Especially for a man like me, committed to the notion of expanding personal freedom – but also to the notion of grammar. I initially had a problem with individuals using the pronoun “they.” I declared it bordering on foolish even to consider permitting the use of the “wrong” collective word to describe someone who was never going to be anything else but a one of a kind.

But of course, my objection was based on more than grammar (especially since there is a strong grammatical argument to be made for the use of “they” when gender is unspecified or unknown). It was far more convenient to dismiss the discussion itself than the human beings at the root of it.

Next week, I want to ask myself (ie, you) why so many of us prefer to impose a binary solution upon a problem we can perceive from the start is multi-faceted.

Without biting into any more plums.

BC Pires is a cisgender lesbian trapped in a man’s body and really should know better than to make joke ‘bout serious thing