Arthur or Martha?

We oldies may be forgiven that for feeling that we are sometimes inhabiting a parallel universe with today’s yoof.

 

In our young days one of our concerns was freedom, especially of speech and expression. Then, it was severely circumscribed. Films were censored, and even if they survived scrutiny by the British Board of Film Censors, the Watch Committee of the local Council could ban it. The chairman of one such got rather more media coverage than he expected when he banned ‘Deep Throat’ . ‘In Southend oral sex is something which we will not swallow!’ he announced.

 

The theatre had been censored by the Lord Chamberlain since 1737 and was only abolished as late as 1968. Swinging sixties indeed. The office was responsible for some of the barmiest decisions known to man, including banning the words ‘up periscope’ from a Naval offering on the grounds that it might suggest buggery!

 

The Obscene Publications Act is still with us, so if you believe that ‘anything goes’ in this louche era you may be in for a surprise.

 

So the British people having campaigned for freedom of speech for centuries, where stands the present young generation?

 

Mainly in favour of banning anything that does not meet their own crackpot view of the world.  The ‘Rhodes must go’ campaign was a case in point. As foreign Rhodes Scholars privileged to be able to study at the expense of the British at Oxford University, the two black South Africans who led the campaign to get rid of the statue of Rhodes from Oriel College repaid our hospitality by insisting that British history should be rewritten.

 

Their future in South African politics is likely to be ‘solitary, nasty, brutish, and short’, (not that they would recognise the origin of that quotation).

 

Now it seems that there is a much broader target. They call it ‘No platform’, which means that they will refuse to give a hearing to any visiting speaker whose views do not coincide with their own. They have no wish to hear any alternative case.

 

One of the most publicised examples was when Germaine Greer was ‘no platformed’ because her views on ‘transgender’ did not suit the student Stalinists.

 

‘Trans’ seems to be their main focus for reasons that are completely obscure except for their wish to uncover even more ‘victims’  of this wicked, uncaring, selfish capitalist society. Nobody knows just how many ‘trannies’ there are, but a tiny minority of perhaps a few thousand at most.

 

The unvarnished truth is that the whole ‘trannie’ issue is a myth. There is no such thing as ‘transgender’; the word does not exist in the English language. Bearing in mind the deplorable state of literacy amongst today’s students, perhaps they mean ‘trans-sexual’ wherein a man wants to be a woman or vice versa.

 

Well, the bad news is that a sex change is not possible. Greer got into trouble by saying that a man who had his bits-and-pieces chopped off  was not a woman but a mutilated man; a eunuch. She was absolutely right.

 

It is simply not possible to change sex. A person born with one ‘X’ chromosome and one ‘Y’ is male. The female has two ‘X’ chromosomes. Nothing can change that.

 

There is no doubt that there are people who believe that they are in the wrong body for whatever reason; psychological, hormonal?

 

They don’t know whether they are Arthur or Martha; they deserve sympathy, not surgery!