After the executive order from US President Donald Trump insisting that there are only two genders (male and female), the UK obviously felt it had to keep up with the Joneses and its supreme court declared that, in law, women are to be defined in biological terms only – which is to say, really, that men and women are defined biologically.
This basically means that those who don’t want to switch pronouns, or even think about which is the right pronoun for someone who isn’t exactly matched as far as sex and gender go, no longer need bother to apply their minds.
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has been blathering on for decades about how the West had better militarise its men a bit more or face the downfall of its civilisation, will surely be pleased. He has been huffing and puffing about how onerous it is for a big, strong masculine man like him, men so confident in their masculinity that they can give advice on how to be men, to have to use they/them pronouns when referring to a person not desirous of being called he/him or she/her. Peterson is obviously very much wedded to his kind of “Jungian” male/female binary, as well as to a highly gendered kind of grammar – imagine if the nouns and verbs don’t agree! The world ends!
It is clearly an offence to his exquisitely sensitive soul to have to imagine that there are any genders beyond the standard male and female, or that biological sex might not align perfectly with gender and/or a person’s inner sense of what their gender might be – see what I did there?
The stones cry out. They cry out against such grammatical and genderous aberrations! Surely Peterson, who spent several months in Russia in an induced coma to get over his opioid addiction, must, while in that limbo state, have dreamt wildly of being persecuted by creatures of genders he could not bear to contemplate.
It was, however, JK Rowling, billionaire author of the Harry Potter books, who funded the legal challenge in the UK Supreme Court. She has been campaigning strongly for some time now against trans people, particularly trans women, because in her old-fashioned form of reactionary feminism she cannot possibly see that that trans woman using ladies’ toilets is anything but a man in disguise.
Author JK Rowling with one of the Harry Potter books published for Red Nose Day 2001 in England. (Photo: George Bodnar / Comic Relief via Getty Images)
She may be more worried about the state of her mascara than she may be wanting to rape anyone in the toilet area with her, but as far as Rowling is concerned, she hasn’t had the life experience of being a woman so she can’t be a woman. Finish and klaar.
This position is tagged Terf, as in trans-exclusionary radical feminism, though in South Africa we might be more comfortable calling Rowling a teef (bitch).
Anyway, Rowling celebrated the court victory by flooding social media with pictures of her sitting on her yacht, somewhere in the Mediterranean perhaps, smoking a cigar. Never mind that a cigar is distinctly masculine-coded, so JK is doing a little trans-smoking here. What that image tells us is that what seems a fairly basic legal redefinition is a big issue for Rowling, and its significance goes beyond the surface declaration and vindicates her war on trans women.
Enter Zille
Bully for her. Or bully for the bully. More to the point, for us anyway, was the reaction in South Africa. One reaction.
Barely had Rowling lit that cigar than Helen Zille, grande dame and reigning ideologue of the DA, was furiously agreeing with her on the socials. God forbid that Tannie Helen, the face that launched 1,000 shits, should be left behind if there’s an opportunity to bash the woke. This has been her stock-in-trade ever since she imported some crusty Republican talking points from the US, and gawd knows stuff that comes from the US is so much better than anything we could actually produce here on the continent of Africa.
Helen Zille, the DA Federal Council chairperson, visits Ward 11 at Hangberger Flats in Durban on 19 June 2023. (Photo: Gallo Images / Darren Stewart)
Anyway, Zille said on the Musk propaganda platform that the judges in this case “have protected the rights of women across the English-speaking world from a contagion as dangerous, socially, as Covid was, medically. We thank you from the Southern tip of Africa.”
Just the tip? Zille later went on to elaborate on her utterance in an ostensibly more nuanced way, or at least in a more wordy way, admitting that this trans business applies to a very tiny proportion of the population and failing to tell us why, then, it looms so large in her fevered imagination. It’s clear, at any rate, that this great legal victory is not only about protecting “women’s spaces”, but also about the plague of kids “suddenly” discovering themselves as trans, a plague that has swept across the “English-speaking world” and... what? Killed as many people as Covid?
This is getting unpleasantly Musky. Elon, as we know, has been bemoaning the transness of one of his many children (he wanted only male children, dammit), regarding her as dead and railing against the “woke mind virus” that caused this particular transformation to happen, as though his daughter entirely lacked agency. Note the echo in his language of Zille’s “contagion”, and how the disease metaphor is so favoured by people stirring up a moral panic even as they discount the effects of actual disease.
Also, that “English-speaking world” – does Zille imagine that laws promulgated in the Scottish high court have some purchase on the southern tip of Africa? Or anywhere other than in the UK, for that matter? Is she some kind of colonialist, then, yearning for the firm hand of control as exercised by the British Empire, which as we know can do no wrong? Oh, wait...
I don’t know what all the answers are to the social, familial and personal problems that arise from the upsetting of old-fashioned gender norms, but I know a bit of knee-jerk prejudice when I see it. And I know a kind of glee when it’s expressed in relation to the “other” whose existence bothers you so much, if it really bothers you and this isn’t just political opportunism. I fear Zille actually believes this stuff, and/or has come to believe it as she sheds, bit by bit, all that ancient liberal stuff about the personal self-determination of the individual and so forth.
It does make me wonder a bit about the DA, where exactly the party will end up ideologically, and who exactly is it in alliance with again? DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
