Valery Alexeyevich Lugasov

There are two kinds of stories we tell our children.

The First Kind :

Once upon a time, there was a fuzzy little rabbit named Frizzy-Top who went on a Quantum, fun adventure 

only to face a big setback, which he overcame 

through perseverance 

and by being adorable.

This kind of story teaches Empathy.

‘Put yourself in Frizzy-Top's shoes’, 

in other words.

The Other Kind : 

‘Valery Alexeyevich Lugasov, 

if you get too close to That RBMK Reactor, 

you'll be sucked into Ideological Heresy and DROWNED!’

This kind of story teaches them

Fear.

And for the rest of their lives, these two stories compete.

Empathy and Fear.

And so I bring you tonight's play, 

A Work in Five Acts 

About a Fuzzy Little Bunny 

Who got too close to The Core. 

and What Happened Next.

Let us begin.

HUNT

HUNT :

What's that?

SKELETON :

Warrant card. 

I wish to offer my resignation with immediate effect.

HUNT :

No. You don't get off that easy.

I want you to stay a copper and know every second of every minute of every day the true depth of your full betrayal of The Force, of Shaz, Ray, yourself.

Jail isn't your sentence, Chris.

I am.

Glenda Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph that “women like Hunt because he isn’t a bastard – or at least not to his team. In a world of short-term contracts, job insecurity and portfolio careers, Hunt’s undying loyalty to his squad (even while rabidly insulting them) make us wistful for a time gone by when you had a job (and colleagues) for life.”

“On paper, it should never have happened. 

Hunt is Seventies man writ large and we should be grateful that species is extinct. 

He wears a vest and his hair looks like it was styled during a power cut. 

He runs along towpaths in skimpy orange swimming trunks and has a torso that’s closer to a Party Seven than six pack. 

He has no concept of innocent until proved guilty and thinks it’s acceptable to turn up to a swingers’ evening with a prostitute he’s just busted. 

He’s racist, disablist and homophobic, and he calls his only female detective Flash Knickers. (And he means it as a compliment.) 

In fact when you see Hunt’s qualities spelled out like that, it looks appalling. 

[However] the fact remains: Gene Hunt is my guilty secret, and I know scores of other women feel the same.”

According to India Knight of The Sunday Times, the character has attained the status of an unlikely British sex symbol: “the combination of Power and, shall we say, lack of political correctness can be a potent one – which is why everyone in Britain fell in love with Gene Hunt, the hulking great throwback in the BBC series Life on Mars and that men wanted to be Hunt; women wanted to be with him.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Hunt#Sex_symbol_status

Paglia: Well I’ve seen - I don’t know if this crosses into other countries - that there’s a certain kind of taunting and teasing that men, that boys do with each other that toughens them, where they don’t take things seriously. But a girl’s feelings become extremely hurt if she hears something that’s very tough, sarcastic against her. So I do feel that there are profound differences between the sexes in terms of emotions, in terms of communication patterns. My father used to say that he could never follow women’s conversations. He said women don’t even finish sentences, that women understand immediately what the other woman is saying. And women tend to be more interested in - or have been traditionally more interested in - soap operas. It’s not just that the women were home without jobs. It’s that honestly, I believe that soap opera does reflect, does mirror, the way women talk to each other. These communication patterns have been built up through women - the world of women, which. . . It made sense that there was a division of labor. It wasn’t sexism against women that there was a division of labor. The men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things. The women stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women, nursing women, older women, that were cooking and so on. 

So I feel that these communication patterns that we’re talking about have been built up over the centuries. Men had to toughen each other to go out. The hunting parties of Native Americans. . . They could be gone for two weeks when the temperature was below zero. Many of them died. The idea that somehow. . . ‘Oh, any kind of separation of the sexes, or different spheres of the sexes, is inherently sexist’. . . That is wrong. 

Peterson: And inherently driven by a Power Dynamic. 

Paglia: The answer to all of this, everything that we’re talking about, is education into early history. Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization built up. . . In Mesopotamia - the great irrigation projects. Or in Egypt where you had. . . Centralized government authority became necessary to master these. . . You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. Otherwise, desert landscape. So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole. 

Peterson: That’s exactly the great symbolism of the Great Father. 

Paglia: By reducing all hierarchy to Power, and selfish Power, is utterly naive. It’s ignorant. I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous technological paradise they live in. And it’s the product of capitalism, it’s the product of individual innovation. Most of it’s the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the past and show. . . And also talk about war, because war is the one thing that wakes people up, as we see. 

Peterson: And as we may see. 

The Spoon-Headed Man’s Burden

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans. 

 All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that Imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically--and secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty. 

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. 

Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it. 

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant. 

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. 

They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. 

 It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. 

 

The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth. I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery--and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home. 

 But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. 

 They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. 

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) 

Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. 

Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him. 

 It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. 

For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. 

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward. 

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick--one never does when a shot goes home--but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time--it might have been five seconds, I dare say--he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay. 

 I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open--I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. 

 His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock. 

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon. 

 Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. 

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Shooting an Elephant 

by GEORGE ORWELL 

A Natural Eunuch

 

Tears in God's WIneskin: A Theology of Hospitality

Part 2: Eunuchs

 

Eunuchs in Roman Law & Rabbinical Literature

Eunuchs in Roman Law

The Digest of Justinian (483-565 C.E.), the collected established Roman law in Latin, concentrated on the work of the foremost Roman legal experts, Papinian, Ulpian, Paulus and Julian. [1] Statements in Roman law regarding eunuchs fell under the category of slavery and it was Ulpian (172-223 C.E.) who defined the eunuch as understood by the ancient Romans, “The name of eunuch is a general one; under it come those who are eunuchs by nature, those who are made eunuchs, and any other kind of eunuchs (probably those who voluntarily abstain from marriage).” [2] Ulpian’s definition of three kinds of eunuchs is in accord with the teaching of Jesus and it is clear from Roman law that eunuchs were not solely castrated men. Born or natural eunuchs were capable of marriage, even if they had no attraction for women, and were legally allowed to marry, as noted by Justinian. [3]

If a natural eunuch was generally considered to be homosexual, what would be the point of marriage to a woman? Since the majority of eunuchs were slaves the primary reason would have been a commercial one: producing children for the slave owner in order to increase his stock. Just as some homosexual men today marry and sire children, so then procreation did not change the innate sexual orientation of a homosexual eunuch any more than heterosexual marriage changed then or changes now innate sexual orientation. Legal marriages ensured legitimate children and children born in wedlock were simply more beneficial than bastards. Similarly, a natural eunuch might be purchased and married by a woman in order to produce children for her and the eunuch, being a slave, had little say in the matter. Those natural eunuchs who were free men might marry simply to escape from the occasional ridicule they faced, [4] perhaps viewing a heterosexual life as a safer way to live or even hoping to be cured.

Roman law established that slave sellers were required to inform their customers if any slave carried disease or had a defect, with disease defined as being an unnatural physical condition impairing the body for its intended purposes, including procreation. Just as used car dealers today are prohibited under the law from concealing major flaws in cars, so Roman slave dealers were prohibited from concealing serious flaws in slaves offered for sale. Rulings in Justinian’s Digest helped determine what kinds of flaws negated a purchase contract if the seller did not report them prior to the sale. [5] Small wounds, old scars or stuttering speech were called defects and as minor flaws did not require disclosure, but major flaws such as blindness or tuberculosis, were regarded as diseases and required disclosure. In this context, Sabinus defines disease as, “an unnatural physical condition whereby the usefulness of the body is impaired.” [6] Similarly, Ulpian declares that, “if there be any defect or disease which impairs the usefulness and serviceability of the slave, that is a ground for rescission,” but he matter-of-factly refers to slight fevers and trivial wounds as having, “no liability if it be not declared; such things can be treated as beneath notice.” [7] Vivian further states, “we should still regard as sane those with minor mental defects,” otherwise a slave risked having his or her health denied, “. . . without limit . . . because he is frivolous, superstitious, quick-tempered, obstinate or has some other flaw of mind.” [8] Ulpian refers to disease and deformity and then adds, “To me it appears the better view that a eunuch is not diseased, any more than one who, having one testicle is capable of procreation.” [9] It is clear that Roman law did not view all eunuchs as genitally defective and a natural eunuch was neither a castrated man nor suffered from genital deformity. Rather, he had no sexual attraction towards women and it is highly doubtful that a natural eunuch was not understood, by those during New Testament times, to be homosexual.

Apuleius, a student of both Plato and Plat and known for his prose, speaks of “half-men” (semiviri) who call each other “girls” (puellae) and offer both passive and active sex to young men. [10]  He connects these eunuchs to those who serve as cultic priests of the goddess Cybele, a traditional role for eunuchs. Interestingly, it is relatively common today to hear gay men call each other “Girl” and Apuleius regards the natural eunuchs of his day as fully intact males with sexual attraction for other men. Pliny the Elder refers to natural eunuchs as a “third gender called half-male” (semiviri) [11] as does Ovid [12] and Tertullian, [13] while the Roman historian Suetonius expresses concern over the involvement of Emperor Titus with pederasts, recording that he was, “suspected of riotous living, since he protracted his revels until the middle of the night with the most prodigal of his friends; likewise of unchastity because of his troops of catamites and eunuchs.” [14] It is unlikely that Titus would be ‘unchaste’ with eunuchs if they were missing genitalia and Suetonius clearly groups together eunuchs and catamites when referring to homosexual activity.

Certainly, to ‘love boys’ was a permitted practice within Roman law. Not only so, but it was generally accepted by social opinion, having solid support in both military and educational institutes. Theodore W. Jennings speaks of how it is thoroughly documented as being a high honour for boys to be chosen and taken for training by older warriors in the citizen militia of Athens who would also take them as lovers, and is well attested to regarding the famous love affair of Hadrian and Antineus. Similarly in the Samurai culture of Japan, wakashūdo, the ‘way of adolescent boys,’ was an established custom, with an older warrior taking a boy to train in the Samurai arts and, with the boy’s permission, as his lover until the boy came of age. [15]

For civilians, it was believed that there were two kinds of boys, good boys (agathoi), with whom men could develop pederastic relationships, and call boys (pornoi) who were used as one night stands. [16] Nissinen points out that a popular boy could be surrounded by lovers and thus choose his lover from several rivals. [17] He further notes that this bears similarities between the erōmenas and kinaidos, where being the erōmenas was considered honourable for the passive male, while kinaidos carried the stigma of a male being effeminate and desiring penetration. It was less the act and more the effeminacy of the submissive partner that became frowned upon in society. Whether the boy was a prostitute or not, “[t]he unmanliness or effeminacy of a man was regarded as a moral problem.” [18] A stigma increasingly faced by the natural eunuch. Girlishness or sissiness of a passive partner provoked distain and contempt, since it was regarded as a deliberate rejection of one’s masculinity.

Stephen Moore considers on the one hand the Greek and Latin terms anthrōpos, anēr, arsēn, homo, vir, masculus and their cognates, and on the other, the English terms man, male, masculine and their cognates. At the height of status were adult male free citizens, supremely but not exclusively rulers, magistrates and the heads of prestigious households, basically those who socially and economically led the town or city. These were ‘true men’ or vir, and below them were the ‘unmen’ – females, boys, slaves of both sexes, sexually passive or effeminate males, eunuchs (castrates), barbarians and so forth. Free born Roman males could, with impunity, be sexually active but not passive with other males; the law solely prohibited rape, so long as a liaison was consensual it was acceptable. [19] Apart from adultery or rape, the sexual practises for the ‘true man’ that were considered to be against convention involved incest, oral-genital contact or a strange mix of positions and situations relatively impossible or unlikely such as sex with a god, self-anal penetration, self fellating, necrophilia or bestiality. [20]

Interestingly, also included in Roman lists of prohibited sex is the penetration of a woman by another woman, which has far more to do with protection of the male ego within a male-dominant society, than with social comment on lesbianism. Sex was regarded as male initiated and centred significantly on the penis and the act of penetration. [21] The very idea that a woman could or would take on the masculine role of penetrator was anathema to Roman men, as Moore notes, “Purity of gender was no mere abstraction for such males; rather they perceived it as having social consequences of the most concrete and immediate kind.” A woman who dared cross this sacred line was abhorred: “[S]uch a woman – if that indeed is what ‘she’ was – pissed in the sacred waters of gender itself and sent ripples of alarm through the minds and texts of elite Greco-Roman males.” [22]

Since the concept of honour existed only for males, the idea of a male being sexually submissive to another male may have meant loss of honour for the submissive male but the gain of honour for the dominant male. However, the anomalous idea of a woman gaining honour by acting like a male and engaging in sexual activity with another woman meant the loss of honour for all males and thus female homoeroticism was considered a crime against all men and therefore the gods.

Same-sex relationships, at least for males then, were honoured during religious rites and festivals where the gods would be invoked on their behalf, not surprisingly since most of the accounts of male deities of ancient Greek culture contain stories of homoerotic relationships with beautiful young human males, for example Zeus and Ganymede, Achilles and Patroclus. [23] With the arrival of Sappho, and the popularity of her poetry even female homoeroticism lost its stigma. Notably, same-sex relationships are supported, affirmed and praised by a vast body of ancient literature. [24] At the same time, however, we should take care not to assume cultural similarities to a modern day West, as Michael Foucault is careful to note, “. . . the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behaviour. The dividing lines did not follow that kind of boundary.” [25]

 

Eunuchs in Rabbinical Literature

Rabbis at the time of Jesus distinguished two kinds of eunuchs: the ‘sěrîs ’ādām,’ a castrated man and ‘se sěrîs ḥammâ,’ a natural eunuch or eunuch of the sun. The epithet of ‘eunuch of the sun’ appears to relate to a male born incapable of reproduction, so the sun never shines on him as a man and the Mishnah sites various measures by which the natural eunuch might be recognized. Being a castrated man, a sěrîs ’ādām was not allowed to enter into the assembly of the Lord (Yebamoth 8:70a), in accordance with Deut. 23:2, “He who is wounded in the testicles . . . shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” He was banned from worship since removal of or defect in either or both testicles disqualified him religiously as an Israelite male. Neither a castrated or natural eunuch was to be judged as a rebellious son (Deut. 21:18) because he was not considered to be a man. [26] Every Israelite was commanded to perpetuate his race, so to be a natural or castrated eunuch was frowned upon and further implied ineligibility to marry. Anyone performing castration on a man could expect severe punishment. [27] However, a distinction was made between one who actually performed castration and one who caused a man to be castrated. For the former, punishment was ‘malkot’ or thirty-nine lashes, but for the latter the number of lashes could be without limit.

If the natural eunuch was anatomically intact, what else defined him? For this, ancient notions of reproduction and how it occurred must be considered. Ancient physicians had no understanding of human sperm and eggs, believing that conception was caused by an energising heat found only in males, which transformed dormant fluids in the male into a fully generative state, similar to jelly turning from a liquid to a solid mass. When implanted in the womb, this male ‘seed’ would be nourished in the female and develop into a baby. According to understanding dating back to Aristotle, women’s fluids were non-generative because their bodies were believed to be too cool and moist to produce semen, which was why women could not produce children without males; production of a child depended upon the ‘cooking’ of semen by the heat of the male orgasm. Natural eunuchs were similarly regarded to be cool and moist, their fluids too watery and sterile to generate a baby and since semen was potentially transformed into a baby through the heat of male sexual passion with a woman, natural eunuchs were considered unable to procreate since they experienced sexual passion with other men. Only if a eunuch could penetrate and reach passionate orgasm with a woman and implant his generated semen into her could he procreate like a man. However, if he did so he would of course no longer be thought to be a eunuch, having established himself as a fully heterosexual male.

Like Roman law, the Babylonian Talmud distinguished with clear legal consequences between natural and man-made eunuchs. In Yebamoth, Chapter 8.79b, Rabbis Joshua, Akibah and Eliezer consider the law of chalitsah. [28] Rabbi Joshua wonders whether a eunuch had to marry a widowed sister-in-law in accordance with Deuteronomic law and so produce children for the dead brother or be released under the law of chalitsah. Rabbi Akibah explains that a castrated eunuch must submit to chalitsah, because prior to castration he was once in a state of fitness, but a natural eunuch has no need to submit to chalitsah, since there never was a time when he was fit to marry. Rabbi Eliezer opposes this and explains that a natural eunuch must marry, because he might be cured, while a castrated eunuch cannot marry, since he cannot be cured.

Martti Nissinen correctly notes that Rabbinic texts have no actual term for homosexuality than does the Hebrew Bible and Rabbis were more concerned with the blurring of gender roles and the penetration of a male rather than same-sex desire or attraction. [29] He refers to how the Talmud contains only one story that implies sexual interaction between Jewish men (Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin 6. 4, 23c). It concerns Rabbi Judah ben Pazzi entering the attic of a school building and catching two men engaged in a sexual act. The men tell the Rabbi simply that they are two and he is only one, meaning that within Jewish law two witnesses or more were required to testify to the actuality of an event. The story, however, confirms the reality of same-sex sexual activity within Jewish communities and as Nissinen points out, “Specific moral commands and norms are born from the needs of the time and the place; the fundamental thing is that love become real and influential in the process.” [30]

Lesbianism, as across most historical literature, has almost no mention. However, in a discussion between Rabbis concerning the required status of a woman intent on marrying a priest, it is agreed that a harlot cannot qualify to be a priest’s wife, but Rabbi Eleazer surmises this means a woman who has previously slept with a man but not a woman who has slept with another woman. (Yebamoth 76a). In the Palastinian Talmud the Rabbis disagree on this issue, with the Shammai school forbidding a woman to marry a priest if she and another woman have ‘rubbed’ each other, and the school of Hillel allowing the marriage to go ahead. (Gittin 8:10, 49c).

In the Talmud, the distinction between natural eunuchs and castrated eunuchs was substantive as in Roman law although the castrated eunuch seemed entitled to more privileges than the natural eunuch, for example, being entitled to have a child produced in his name by his brother if he died childless. The natural eunuch was discouraged from marrying in the first place, being considered generally unfit and exempt from levirate marriage while the castrated eunuch was not, strongly implying that the natural eunuch was understood to be a gay man. However, what is most significant is Rabbi Eliezer’s comment about the natural eunuch possibly being cured, not unlike the assertion by some today, particularly evangelical Christians, who promote alleged cures for homosexuality.

For the Amoraim rabbis who composed the the Gemara or commentary to the Mishnah in the Babylonian Talmud, as related in Tractate Yebamoth 8: 79b-80b, identifying a ‘eunuch of the sun’ presented a problem and their musings of the possible means of identification are fascinating. None of the rabbis suggest looking for defects in the reproductive organs, but rather characteristics similar to Aristotle’s thoughts on the coldness of the eunuch’s body. These included the absence of pubic hair at the age of twenty (a mark of puberty under Roman law), lank hair and smooth skin, absence of froth in urine, urine which does not ferment and inability to form an arch when urinating, watery semen or absence of steam from the body after a winter bath (both denoting feminine coldness), and an abnormally high-pitched voice, indistinguishable as male or female. The rabbis further suggest that natural eunuchism was caused when an expectant mother drank strong beer and baked bread at noon, implying that the condition arose from a combination of alcohol and exposure to heat during pregnancy. It also provides an alternative explanation for the term ‘eunuch of the sun,’ indicating a premature ‘burn-out’ relating to male heat.

From the language used in both Roman law and Rabbinical literature when referring to the natural eunuch it is impossible to imagine what else is being referred to other than a gay man. It is clearly not a reference to a man born with genital defects, otherwise rabbis would not debate the possibility of a cure that was no less physically miraculous than a cure for a castrated male. It should also be remembered that until the 19th century the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ simply did not exist, so it is the language, accounts and context in available literature that confirm the natural eunuch as a homosexual.

 

[1] Emperor Justinian’s legal commission edited approximately fourteen hundred years of Roman law. More than two thousand ancient law books were consulted to produce The Digest of Justinian, the English translation of which is some four thousand pages long. Ulpian’s legal commentaries were among the books consulted by Justinian’s scholars and provide the basis of one third of the digest. Ulpian was an outstanding expert on Roman law and his legal opinions carried evidentiary weight that was respected and consistently referred to.

[2] Alan Watson [trans.], The Digest of Justinian, Vol. IV: Book 50, 128 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p.458.

[3] Watson, The Digest of Justinian, Vol.2, Book XXIII: 39, p.217 (see my previous reference in Jesus and Eunuchs).

[4] While accepted as part of an integrated society, nevertheless castrated eunuchs and natural eunuchs were a target for the satirists of the day, such as Juvenal who observed, “When a soft eunuch takes to matrimony . . . it is hard not to write satire.” The Satires 1:22.

[5] Watson, The Digest of Justinian, Vol.1, Book XXI: 7, p.144.

[6] Watson, The Digest of Justinian, Vol.1, Book XXI: 7, p.144.

[7] Watson, The Digest of Justinian, Vol.1: Book XXI: 8, p.145

[8] Watson, The Digest of Justinian, Vol.1: Book XXI: 9, p.145

[9] Watson, The Digest of Justinian, Vol.1: Book XXI: 6, p.146.

[10] Mary Tighe and Hudson Gurney [trans.], The Works of Apuleius: Comprising the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, the God of Socrates, the Florida and his Defence or A Discourse on Magic, (London: Bell, 1878), pp.163-65.

[11] “Man is the only creature in which the testes are ever broken, either accidentally or by some natural malady; those who are thus afflicted form a third class of half men, in addition to hermaphrodites and eunuchs.” John Bostock [trans.], Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book 11:110, (Perseus Digital Library), Available Online at: (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D11%3Achapter%3D110

[12] William S. Anderson [ed.], Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books I-V, (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), pp.453-54.

[13] Tertullian calls eunuchs “tertium sexus” a third sex: “Indeed, you have a third kind of being, though not a third mode [of behaviour] but a third sex, more fittingly mocked by men and women than counted among either of them.”   Quoted in Stephen O. Murray, Homosexualities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.301.

[14] J. C. Rolf [trans.], Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum – Divus Titus, c. 110 C.E. (Fordham University Ancient History Sourcebook), Available Online at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/suet-titus-rolfe.asp

[15] Theodore Jennings Jnr, Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), p.12, referring to David F. Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp.110-16.

[16] Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p.96 & 301.

[17] Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticicism in the Biblical World: A Historic Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), p.67.

[18] Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World, p.87.

[19] Stephen D. Moore,‘Of Men and Unmen’ in, God’s beauty Parlour and Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible (Stamford CA: Stamford University Press, 2001) p.135-146.

[20] See Craig A. Wiliams: Roman Homosexuality (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) pp.197-203. See also John J.Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990) p.42-43.

[21] Bernadette J. Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1996), p.241-52, relating to Brooten’s commentary on Romans 1:26.

[22] Stephen D. Moore, God’s Beauty Parlour, p.149 – referring to Judith P. Hallett, Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in, Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner [Eds.] Roman Sexualities   (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p.255-72.

[23] See for example, Christine Downing, Myths and Mysteries of Same-sex Love (New York, Continuum 1989) p.146-67; also W.A. Percy III, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archive Greece (Urbona, Univ of Illanois Press, 1996) p.53-58.

[24] See Michael Foucault. History of Sexuality, Vol.2 The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp187-214; also Dover, Greek Homosexuality. P.4-15; also Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), pp 4-15.

[25] Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.2, p.187.

[26] Israel Slotki [trans.], I Epstein [ed.], The Soncino Babylonian Talmud: Mishnah Tractate Yebamoth 8:80b.

[27] Rabbi Dr H. Freedman [trans.], I. Epstein [ed.], The Soncino Babylonian Talmud: Mishnah Tractate Shabbath 111a.

[28] According to Deuteronomy 25:5-10, when a man dies childless, it is his brother's responsibility to marry the widow and produce a child in his brother's name. The ceremony of chalitzah was instituted to enable the widow and brother-in-law to refuse this responsibility and avoid marriage. The ceremony involved the widow removing one of her brother-in-law’s shoes and spitting in his face, releasing them both from further obligation to each other.

[29] Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), p.98.

[30] Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World. P.140.

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BRIAN

10 JUNE 2020

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

Warning: This piece contains inappropriate language for children. 

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018,  American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people.  The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much.  It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.  I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.