PRINCE HARRY - SPARE PART

Prince Harry's book cover

I have not read – and almost certainly will not read – Shame, the memoir by Prince William’s younger brother. The title refers to Prince Harry’s role as the ‘spare’ in case the heir to the throne dies or stands down, probably with a nod to the idea of 'going spare' or losing your cool referencing the prince's well-publicised struggles with mental health.

The spare succeeded to the throne twice in the early twentieth century when the elder brother of King George the Fifth, Eddie the Duke of Clarence, died suddenly and again in 1936 when George’s son King Edward the Eighth gave up the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, whom he was told would not be suitable as a queen. Harry has often been compared to Edward, both men having a personal agenda that superseded their loyalty to the concept of royalty.

 

Times have changed since Edward married Wallis Simpson and Harry married divorcee Meghan Markle, at Saint George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle a few years ago. She seemed like a breath of fresh air coming into the royal family at first but later complained about the racism she claims to have experienced at the hands of the British media and the royal establishment. Their popularity quickly went down and the couple moved to California where they have tried to establish a kind of alternative court five thousand miles away from the main one.

 

I have always said that the royal family will die not when we grow tired of them but when they grow tired of us. When the pressures of being in the public eye all the time become too much, the monarchy might effectively abolish itself. There is little prospect of that happening now with William seeming like an ideal heir to the throne, having an impeccable family life with his wife Kate and their three children. They have all superseded Harry in the line of succession, making him fifth in line to the throne, very much a spare part who is unlikely ever to become king now.

 

That leaves him in a difficult position. Being the dutiful younger brother, standing behind his elder sibling and being content with a subsidiary hardly seen role does not fit in with the demands the media makes of people in a modern monarchy. Harry’s wife Meghan has an American sense of marketability about their role and has helped to monetise it by breaking away to establish a separate identity. Harry's book has now become the best-selling non-fiction title ever printed and is ubiquitous on the shelves of shops and he appears eager to promote his viewpoint. 

 

In order to sell so many copies, he had to exaggerate – or at least tell the truth about – the extent of the falling out with his brother and father. Juicy details about their rows were pushed out in advance of publication, just as details of his fairly unheroic killing exploits as a soldier in Afghanistan appeared. It presumably makes for interesting reading and helps to move piles of books to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the public about the royal family.

 

The trouble is that Harry is not really that important in the scheme of things. He and his offspring would soon be relegated to relative obscurity as he is the younger brother (the spare as opposed to the heir) and he faces a lifetime of stolid but boring duty, with the knowledge that, if he puts a foot wrong, he faces life in the wilderness like his uncle Prince Andrew does, having given into the temptation of easy sex on offer. 

 

The alternative is to have people feel sorry for him as a victim. This necessitates a good deal of sharing, which may sell books but is not part of the royal tradition, where keeping a stiff upper lip and not washing your dirty linen in public are part of the requirement for being a good dutiful royal. Faced with the choice of being a loyal but quiet supporter of the institution or being a privileged victim, Harry signed the contract, took the money and went to California. 

 

However, he would not be an important player if it was not for the institution they are now effectively undermining. Just as no-one would care much about his mother Lady Diana Spencer if she had not married Prince Charles, so no-one would care about Harry if he was not a royal. He and Meghan obviously felt like there was enough life left in the royal family for it to survive a bit of buffeting from a salacious memoir by a minor royal out for revenge.

 

The question is how much longer can this go on before the royal family is permanently disabled by the revelations in his book? His mother Diana enjoyed enormous popularity and had an undoubted charisma but her independence could not survive for long under the pressure of fame and she was hounded to death by paparazzi, whom she sought to exploit but could not control. There may be something to be said for remaining behind those castle walls.  

 

This brings up the wider question of victimhood generally. Most of us like to feel sorry for the underdog, who has been given a bad break by circumstances and contemporaries. Harry has chosen to play the martyr rather than the dutiful son and brother, standing four square with his family – which he did before his marriage. He – with a little prodding no doubt from his wife – now comes over as a victim, having lost his mother and, more recently, the rest of his family, the first to a sudden accident in Paris and the second to a lucrative book deal.   

 

People generally do not buy books by those who dutifully wait in line and do their duty. They want to hear about suffering and conflict from the victims. This has led to the growth of ‘misery memoir’ in which people make a fortune from their misfortune. The trouble is that it is difficult to feel much sympathy for a man who has millions in the bank, a flashy website and an Instagram account. He might make a good deal of money from being the ‘spare’ but it is hardly good for the royals. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.    

___________

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

  

DEADLINES AND TO DO LISTS

DEADLINE!

I am writing this early in the morning of New Year’s Eve as 2022 draws to a close. It is often in the early mornings that I write best, with a cup of tea by my side before I have eaten breakfast. The mind seems freshest then as I get out of bed, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, but knowing that there are things to do before the sun comes up and the day proper begins. My to do list is next to me and the first item reads ‘Write and post blogs’. 

So I start the day at the computer and will tick off the above item before the more mundane ones beneath it. I have a self-imposed deadline of the first day of the week for my blog post about tourist guiding (link) and the last day of the month for an essay on some subject of interest to me. I make good money from my continuing career in tourism and my house in London. Writing is just about break-even but it keeps my brain alive, if not my bank account.

 

In the past I made a little money from freelance writing and I still occasionally pitch an idea to an editor but writing is an overcrowded profession and I do not have the chutzpah to stand out from the crowd or the contacts to inveigle my way into writing jobs. So I write for pleasure and do not worry about the money I might make from publication – even though I am convinced that a lot of what I write is better than what I read (said he modestly).

 

Occasionally I idly dream that in future times there will be a profession of e-archaeology and, instead of looking for physical objects buried underground, future archaeologists will surf the web looking for undiscovered treasures and writers who are obscure and unknown today will enjoy fifteen minutes of fame in the future, when people realise that they had talent but not the contacts or chutzpah to get published in their own lifetimes.

 

Not that we will be around to enjoy it, even from heaven above. I have never been able to believe in an afterlife in which our disembodied souls survive, while our physical bodies have ceased to work. When you go, that is it. I do not deny the importance or power of religion but, if God exists, he does so as much as a concept as a being. Not that human beings are worse for inventing a creator. It seems to fill a need and should not be despised.

 

Apart from anything else, an afterlife might be a bit dull – being stuck in a place where we are not able to enjoy the physical things which are so important in our lives – a decent meal, a drink in the evening after a day’s work, sex (frankly) and a good night’s sleep among other things. Even just buying clothes, as I did today in the sales, or warming up after being stuck in the rain are pleasures denied in an afterlife which presumably does not have weather.   

 

With only one life, it is important to make the most of it and deadlines and to do lists are one way I find of doing so. Once I no longer have a list of things to do, life will no longer be worth living and it will be time to stop. I may have more of my life behind me than in front but that stage has not been reached yet and so I will start ticking off items on the list as soon as I have uploaded this and written my other blog: diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

 

SHOULD WE GIVEW THE MARBLES BACK TO GREECE?

 

The Duveen Gallery at the British Museum

I have been doing some writing – and thinking – recently about the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum (BM) which Greece wants returned. We used to call them the Elgin Marbles after the seventh Earl of Elgin who brought them to London. The legality of their removal from Greece was a little dubious and, even if it was properly, authorised, it was done so by the Turks not the Greeks themselves. Greece at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire, which Elgin was ambassador to and they may – or may not – have allowed him to take them to London, where they ended up and can be seen in the Duveen Gallery of the BM.

 

As a young tourist guide, I mentioned the Marbles on a tour of London, knowing that there were a few Greeks on board. “Ah, those are the ones you stole,” said one of them, thus immediately puncturing my attempt to be inclusive. I have long since learned to get my retaliation in first and, if I go to the British Museum with a group, am not afraid to bring up the subject myself. My argument for keeping the Marbles in London is that they do not belong to the British, any more than to the Greeks. They belong to the whole world and they just happen to be in London.

 

In London they can be seen free of charge by over six million visitors a year to the Museum, most of whom will go into the Duveen Gallery (Room 18) where they are on display. In Athens you would have to pay to go to the new gallery in the Acropolis Museum where they have a space pointedly waiting for their eventual return. This will probably not happen in my lifetime as the Museum authorities say that, to return the Marbles, will effectively bring about the end of the BM as other countries queue up to reclaim “their” treasures from it.

 

The Greeks claim that returning the Marbles to Athens will not necessarily set a precedent for other countries to follow and should be considered in isolation. This is a born yesterday type of attitude in my view. You can just hear the other countries saying, “You gave the Marbles back to Greece. Now it is our turn.” The line will stretch around Russell Square and reach the British Library, which used to be inside the Museum, and will next on the list for repatriation of the various volumes they have “acquired” over the centuries. Take this process to its logical conclusion and people living in Britain will only ever be able to see British works of art, in Italy Italian works of art and in Finland Finnish works of art – which is surely the exact opposites of what museums are meant to be and will bring to an end the international flavour of these institutions which are supposed to bring people together.

 

The movement to return the Marbles to Greece puts ownership above accessibility. It says that it is more important that they are in the right place than that people should be able to see them. London is one of the most visited cities in the world and the rather badly named British Museum – most of its exhibits come from outside Britain – is right in the centre of the city, available for millions of people to visit. The Greeks cannot afford free admission to their museums and attract less than a quarter of the number of people who go to the BM. The Marbles are not only more accessible in London, but they are a great advertisement for Greece’s ancient culture and achievements. Why remove them in order to prove a point?

 

It would not be possible for Lord Elgin to act in the way he did today. He did not, incidentally, make a profit from bringing the Marbles to London, where he sold them to the British government for less than half of what it had cost him to bring them here. (If he did “steal” them, he was not a very smart thief.) His attitude was that, by removing the Marbles, he was saving them for civilisation, as they had been badly damaged while they were in Greece and needed to be looked after properly, which could only happen in a museum environment in London. They were originally destined for his home but he had to sell them to recoup some of the considerable amount he had spent to bring them here – not least as he was tied up in an expensive divorce at the time and had money problems.

 

Elgin’s approach – and that of others who filled the Museum with the treasures it displays – was shot through with racial assumptions that would not be considered acceptable today. It assumes that white British men should look after the treasures of the ancient world because darker-skinned locals were not willing or able to do so themselves. I always thought that Elgin had been given an unfairly bad press for his role and feel that he acted from a genuine desire to preserve them for posterity. This does not alter the sense that he felt entitled to do so using methods alien to current attitudes, when it is necessary to show respect to local cultures instead of looting them for the benefit of so-called superior ones who know better.

 

Would the Marbles still exist if Elgin had left them alone and merely had pictures drawn of them to show the world what they were like, as he had originally intended? I doubt it. He acted in a way that conserved them for future generations and prevented their eventual destruction. At least, in that sense, he was acting in a way that led them to being preserved. This at least is in tune with current trends and, instead of being condemned as a thief, his reputation should be rehabilitated as a preserver of some of the world’s greatest treasures.

 

My conclusion: the Marbles should stay in London and not be sent back to Greece. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

NEW NAMES FOR OLD ILLS

Churchill who suffered from 'depression'

When I went to school, you could either spell or you could not. (I write as one who has sometimes misspelled words and relies on Word to tell me when I have got it wrong.) Then something called dyslexia appeared and, before long, what had once seemed mere incompetence had a fancy medical name attached to it and was nobody’s fault. 

Likewise, if you ran away from combat in the First or Second World Wars, you were considered a coward and were often shot for desertion. (Again, I write as someone who has never fought in a military conflict and am aware that I have little right to judge others.) Then we introduced shell-shock which meant that cowardice no longer existed. By giving something a medical name, we effectively stopped judging people for lack of moral fibre.

 

A mother once excused her child’s rowdy behaviour by saying that he was on the autism spectrum and had little self-control. It was not really his fault that he was behaving badly - and spoiling things for other people – because of a medical name for his condition. Pretty soon nobody will bear any responsibility for what they do because you can attach a medical name to what used to be a moral fault and thus remove the element of blame from it.

Similarly, nobody is ever in a bad mood now. Instead they suffer from depression, which never used to exist - although Winston Churchill did admit to being afflicted by the 'black dog'. Bruce Springsteen forgave his father for his bad moods because he was able to attach a medical definition to the process. He was not surly or bad tempered but suffered from 'depression'. 

 

I am, as those who have read this far may be aware, dubious about this whole process. We eventually won the First World War because of a variety of factors, not least American involvement, but also because men were expected to go ‘over the top’, sometimes to almost certain death from enemy fire. Being unwilling to do so meant that you were considered a coward and dealt with accordingly, which usually meant the firing squad.

 

This was the harsh reality of a war that cost the lives of nearly a million men in the British forces, less than a tenth of the total military casualties. And this does not include civilian deaths which brought the figure up to fourteen or fifteen million altogether. This is an unimaginable amount of death in today’s terms and begs the question of whether it was worth it in the end. Many parents were keen to send their sons into the conflict, not least Rudyard Kipling, whose only son Jack was killed in his first taste of combat, one that left a shadow over the life of the poet and short story writer, one that never really lifted. 

 

Kipling effectively sacrificed his own son who, like his father, suffered from poor eyesight and could easily have escaped military service. Yet both father and son were keen that Jack should ‘do his bit’ rather than be stained by the suggestion that he was a coward and could not face up to his responsibilities as a soldier. On such determination was victory eventually achieved against the might of a militaristic Germany that needed to be stopped from taking over Europe – and eventually the whole world – completely. Contempt for what soldiers called cowardice and the willingness to shoot deserters was sadly an essential part of this.

 

Do we lose something by being understanding of the causes of what used to be called cowardice but is now known as shell shock, what used to be called bad spelling but is now diagnosed as dyslexia and was once bad behaviour but is not called being on the autism spectrum? The inevitable end result of this is that nobody has to take responsibility for anything they do with their hands because they are suffering from a medical – rather than a moral – condition which affects what is going on in their heads.  

The end result of this was seen in an American trial when the perpetrator’s lawyers claimed that he had a gene that determined his actions – which were not disputed and involved killing a woman who was unable to defend herself. Yet what is a gene but a determinant of the actions by which we are judged. ‘Use every man after his deserts and who shall ‘scape whipping?’ asks Hamlet in Shakespeare’s plays. (He is talking about the players and Polonius’s promise to do just that.) We all have a lot to be ashamed about – not least this writer – and we should be grateful that we are not always judged too harshly.

 

This begs the question of who a human being is: a moral being who takes responsibility for his or her actions or a collection of genes who cannot be held responsible for such actions. Not only do I believe that we are the former but I think that we have to treat ourselves as such or else nobody can ever do anything simply bad and thus can never be judged.  

 

Yet, at a certain point, we have to subject ourselves to judgement or society ceases to function. Just as the British side would not have own the First World War if they had recognised the concept of shell shock rather than labelling it simply as cowardice, so no justice system could survive if the argument that we should be excused out actions because of our genes was allowed to hold sway. It did not in the end but it did allow the plaintiff to receive a life rather than a death sentence. He was white, incidentally, and I doubt if he would have been shown such understanding if his skin had been of a darker colour. 

 

By all means, use a person’s medical condition to extend understanding towards them. But there comes a time when you have to stop excusing people and start judging them. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA - WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

Crudely anti-Semitic - Mear One's cartoon...

  

 yet Charlie Hebdo was a hero

For people who just want to raise a quick laugh, cartoonists get into a lot of trouble. Mear One is a Californian street artist who drew a satirical anti-banker mural in Brick Lane in 2012. Many Jewish people found it offensive because it portrayed at least two of the bankers as Jewish and would not have looked out of place in Nazi Germany. The mural was defended by Jeremy Corbyn (who later removed his support for it) and taken down – not because it was considered offensive but because another artist was due to fill the spot. 

Three years later the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris was attacked by two heavily-armed Moslem terrorists who took offence at the depictions of the prophet Mohammed in the magazine and randomly killed twelve people and injured eleven others working there. The two killers, who were brothers, were killed by the police but not until after another piece of random anti-Semitism – the shooting of four innocent Jewish people in a supermarket.

 

Even the use of the word ‘innocent’ in this context causes problems because it implies that those who are active in producing images that some people find offensive are somehow ‘guilty’ of racist or offensive behaviour. The so-called crime of the French cartoonists was to show images of Mohammed which depicted him in a particularly offensive light. I have not seen them but understand that one showed him having sex with a thirteen year old girl.

 

Where do you draw the line between freedom of speech and religious hatred? Our society does not permit virulently racists to hide behind a freedom of speech defence. You are simply not allowed to stir up hatred against ethnic groups and then claim that you were exercising this right, just as you are not allowed to slander or libel someone and claim free speech protection. You have to justify your words by saying they were necessary - or true.

 

Although Mear One was not prosecuted for his alleged anti-Semitism (which he denied) he was heavily criticised and I think that he overstepped the mark by showing the bankers with obvious and unnecessary Jewish features like hooked noses. He was right to be challenged in this way and may have lost a case in court if it had been brought. Yet if Mear One was guilty of anti-Semitism were the Hebdo cartoonists also guilty - of Islamophobia?

 

Instead they were shot. Obviously, you cannot support those who use guns against writers. Being Moslem does not in itself give you a right to censor work you find offensive. If we went that way, then it is a power we would have to extend to all religions and even noted atheists might find themselves silenced. Then would come liberals and free-thinkers of all hues. Questioning religion is part of our civic right, even duty, and one we should preserve.

 

Where the line should be drawn between freedom of expression and inciting religious or ethnic hatred is a tricky question. However, one thing I have learned about discrimination is that the attitude of the person subject to prejudice is important. When someone says that he ‘does not have a racist bone in his body’ and is therefore entitled to make jokes about people from ethnic minorities, my immediate attitude is one of extreme scepticism.

 

You are judging (and acquitting) yourself with a phrase like that but it is the person with a darker skin colour who is the victim, not the one who is white, and it is he or she who gets to say whether he has been discriminated against. France is a secular country and has tried to ban head coverings burkinis (a kind of modest bikini) that Moslems regard as important. Surely it is they who should have the final say on whether a law or an image is insulting.

 

However, we do not promise in a western society to protect everyone from perceived insult. You have to roll with the punches sometimes and fighting back by killing unarmed people is obviously not acceptable in a law-abiding society. The action of the gunmen was counter- productive in any case as millions of people supported the cartoonists by wearing ‘Je suis Charlie’ t-shirts after the massacre and by buying future copies of the magazine.

 

Would they have worn those shirts if the cartoons had been perceived as anti-Semitic as Mear One’s mural was? Jewish people are good at spotting anti-Semitism, which is sometimes hidden behind innocent sounding notions such as ‘clubbability’. The person who does not suffer from discrimination is often the worst at spotting it. They think that if they help the child of a friend or mix with their own sort then they are not being discriminatory.

Sometimes they are, however, and are exercising their privileges by subtly excluding people from a different ethnic or religious background from their circle. It is often hard for the discriminator to spot this and he sometimes needs the help of the discriminated to do so. 

 

Jews tend to be more successful than Moslems in our society because they work hard and know how to open doors, while Moslems might go to the mosque and lick their wounds. This, incidentally, is why anti-Semitism is considered an acceptable discrimination by some on the left. It is looked on as punching up rather than punching down – although it is hard to be much farther down than if you are in a gas chamber with the taps about to be turned on.

 

I am still troubled by the lionisation of people who are perceived to be Islamophobic and the demonisation of those seen to be anti-Semitic. I know there is a difference between satirising obvious Jewish bankers and making fun of Mohammed. Yet Moslems say that, if you insult my prophet, you insult me. And one thing that I have learned about prejudice is that it is the person who is discriminated against who should have the final say.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguideblogspot.com - with lots of posts about royalty.

Edwin Lerner

ARE ZIONISTS RACIST?

The Star of David - a Jewish and Israeli symbol

 ‘All Zionists are racists. Every single one.” So said the t-shirt of a man I saw recently at the Tower of London. He was there with his daughter and looked like a right-on person rather than a right-wing one – long-hair, jeans and boots, the typical left-winger’s uniform and the last person you would expect to be a sympathiser with anti-Semitism or Nazism. Nevertheless he identified Zionism with racism utterly, completely and without exception.

I looked up Zionism in Wikipedia and it identified the movement as supportive of a Jewish homeland, a concept that was recognised by the United Nations in 1948 after the Holocaust had killed six million Jews, many in gas chambers but others just gunned down – men, women and children – and left to die. It is said that the piles of dead bodies kept moving and breathing after the killing until death came, perhaps mercifully, to the victims.

 

If you are an anti-Zionist therfore that surely means you are automatically in favour of the abolition of Israel as a nation state and the relocation of its Jewish population elsewhere. That means seven million Jews will have to find new homes or else be absorbed into a non-Jewish state which would probably not welcome them with open arms. Israel has not been shy about attacking Arab countries who have been quite open about wanting to destroy it.

 

An increase in the size of Israel’s population to nine and a half million today – around three quarters of whom are Jewish – means that the figure of Jews who will be effectively homeless is no longer that potent number of six million but, in any case, it is a large number of people to rehouse, certainly not all of whom would fit into Florida or anywhere else that will take them in. It looks as if they will stay where they are - for the time being at least.  

 

There is surely a difference between disagreeing with Israel’s aggressive policy of defending itself, which all too often involves killing innocent Arab children and destroying their family homes, and accepting that Israel exists as a state and here is to stay. If the latter attitude constitutes Zionism, which I assume it does, then I would have to be a Zionist and, according to the man’s t-shirt, automatically a racist. This, not surprisingly, is a charge I reject.

 

The first duty of any state is surely to protect its citizens. Israel does this aggressively, probably inspired by the memory of how Jews were killed by the Nazis, who led their victims into believing that they were being given showers when they were being taken to the gas chambers. This was not out of compassion but because non-panicking people were easier to kill than those who knew what was happening to them and were more likely to resist.    

 

The policy of many who sympathise with the Palestinians, who were often ruthlessly driven from their land, is to undermine sympathy with Israel and to make anti-Zionism fashionable. They would surely deny it but there is an element of anti-Semitism in this. It is a prejudice is thought of as punching up rather than punching down - although you cannot be much further down than when you are in a gas chamber and the taps are about to be turned on.

 

Jews throughout the world have a tendency to succeed. They have won an astonishingly high proportion of Nobel prizes – nearly a quarter from a fifth of a per cent of the world population. This represents a far higher proportion than people from Arab and Moslem backgrounds who tend to be anti-Zionist. Likewise, Israel is a successful modern country with the highest number of patents in the world by the size of its population.

 

Israel will remain isolated an unpopular in many circles. They are losing what I call the saloon bar in the west: moderate middle-class opinion which would normally favour a small country that struggled to survive among hostile neighbours. Unpopularity does not mean extinction, however, and most Israelis would choose survival in their own sphere over popularity in the west, which did little to protect the Jews while the Nazis killed them.

 

It seems to me that what the Palestinians lack is a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela, someone who realises that their enemies must be adapted to rather than conquered. The best way to do this is surely through non-violence rather than an attempt at annihilation, which will never realistically happen. It may make a good slogan or a song but Israel is going nowhere and the sooner the Palestinians realise this, the better their chance of statehood.

 

At present, most Israelis believe that granting the Palestinians their own state will simply move the rocket launchers closer to the borders with Israel. They put survival for their own people above justice for their enemies and are prepared to live in a state of perpetual semi-warfare in order to ensure that survival rather than give up hard-won territory in exchange for a nebulous – and almost certainly mistaken – hope that it might bring them peace.

 

Most people want to live peacefully with their neighbours but need those neighbours to recognise their right to exist in order to do so. As long as Palestinians and their supporters want to see Israel destroyed, its inhabitants will not believe that the country will be allowed to continue. Calling someone who believes in the right of Israel to continue to exist a racist is not the way to convince them that of the rightness of your arguments.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

 

TRANS RIGHTS AND WRONGS

... and Giles Fraser

Unlikely allies: Andrea Dworkin

The late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin said that every man was a potential rapist. I rather took exception to this, thinking that I ought to be judged on what I do rather than what I might do. All women are potential nags or shrews. That does not make any individual female one. Judge a person on their actual character not their potential crimes – or sins. 

However, I have finally realised what Dworkin was meaning by this. She lived in an era before trans rights was an issue and most people stuck to their birth sex. They were what are now called ‘cis gender’ in their outlook and approach to life and she obviously found something unappealing about the heterosexual male – her own partner was openly gay.

 

Women need protection against the threat of rape: that much seems obvious. You cannot prevent crime happening altogether without locking up every potential rapist – nearly half the population according to Dworkin. (We can eliminate men who are gay or too old or too young to manage sex.) Nevertheless, you can reduce the chance of rape actually happening. 

 

Yet now we are in a situation in which it is possible for a trans male to redefine themselves as women simply by stating that they are one. No medical procedures or proof of the process are needed to make this statement. Put bluntly, you do not have to have your penis removed before you think that you are entitled to be regarded by the world as a woman.

 

‘Self-identification’ is increasingly considered enough to change your gender and everyone is expected to accept your decision without question. Yet, like a very vocal set of traditional feminists, I do question this right when it comes to men transitioning to women. They have gained the nickname TERFs – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. It is not a compliment. 

 

Many previously lionised feminists like Germain Greer, Julie Bindel and J K Rowling have been attacked for their anti-trans views and subjected to what seems like a very male form of bullying by people who were previously males and now identify as female but seem not to have left male habits of mind – and action – behind as they adopt a new gender identity.

 

(See Giles Fraser's piece on Terfs being bullied here)

 

Self ID may make things a lot easier for the increasingly large number of people who feel they are born in the wrong body. However, it also make it much easier for a potential rapist to prey on his mainly cis victims. He simply has to declare himself a woman in order to gain access to female only spaces where he can then wreak havoc on vulnerable women. 

 

This has happened on more than one occasion and Dworkin, I feel sure, would be horrified. The phrase that comes to mind is letting the fox into the henhouse, leaving often vulnerable women in shelters for battered women, for example, open to the prospect of being raped by a man who has identified as a woman simply so he can exploit real (or ‘cis’) women. 

 

If you do not believe me, check out this example here  - there are other examples as well.

 

If someone wants to identify as a member of the opposite gender he or she was born into, that should not present a problem. A friend, who knows several trans people, has said that they are usually the most gentle, unaggressive people imaginable. However, it only takes one person to wreck the system and spoil it for everybody else, who has no sinister motive.

 

It is not that being trans is the problem in itself. It is more of a case of what trans peope are allowed to do – or forbidden from doing. The law does not concern itself with the vast majority of law-abiding people, the gentle transitioners, who want to lead lives they feel more suited to. Laws are needed to protect the vulnerable, who are usually women.

 

They may be children as well. There seems to be a fashion for accepting, even encouraging, the process of transition amongst parents of young children. I have no problem with someone dressing up as a member of the opposite gender when young. If they want to act as a member of a different sex, I like to think I would be fully supportive of them

 

However, I do have a major problem with the idea of allowing life-changing surgery - which would affect a person’s ability to reproduce later in life - to people who are not yet adults.  We have an age of adulthood – generally eighteen, sometimes sixteen – for a reason. It is to protect young people from making decisions that they may well regret later in life.

 

Take voting, for example. You have to be eighteen to vote in most elections, the age of adulthood. That does not mean you are not allowed to have political opinions prior to reaching that age. Plenty of young people do and campaign for causes and become involved in discussions. They are just not allowed to cast a vote before their eighteenth birthday.

 

You can always change your mind about the party you vote for – plenty of people do – but you cannot reverse the removal of a womb or a penis. That is a serious business and definitely not one to be undertaken lightly, certainly not as a young teenager who thinks he or she knows all the answers. These ‘answers’ may well be different next week or month.

 

I once saw a sign saying simply “Trans Rights Now’ in the window of a house. That depends on the rights being demanded I thought. There should be no problem with acceptance of people who want to transition once they have reached adulthood. Those who are not yet adults may have to wait until they are before they can be allowed to choose their gender.

 

At least this gives them a chance to change their minds before they change their bodies.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com