Belcher is an enthusiastic, inventive litigant, able to eclipse the brightest streak of silver with copious, dense clouds of gloom; to ground planes on the other side of the planet with a single eruption. Even wholly positive news can't be commented on without the trans vulnerability clause. It's a good news caveat, and it is always front and centre.
Belcher thinks he is victimised. Stand by as I crack my neck and get down to some gratuitous competing.
Here's a good example of a Belcherite response; he was awarded an OBE recently, and along with the 'honoured and grateful' platitudes was the predictable misery-qualification, ie his fears of a backlash. Even commendation from the British monarchy augurs the inescapable marginalisation and oppression of trans folk, while sitting in a posh house in Wiltshire with the great and good on speed dial. Classic Belcher!
I generally reject this as #Transperbole. I take the piss. I sigh. But sometimes I have a visceral response, something like a cup of water in a roaring chip pan.
And that happens more and more frequently now. If you read my piece on Cook, Neeves and Prosho, you might know I'm getting a little obsessed with it. It's a manufactured exercise in fear mongering and subsequent demands.
That ugly, childish competition of victimhood. It's an indulgence, it degrades and cheapens the scars.
But, my experiences, what I've seen other people suffer, it gathers and brews somewhere in my head. I am so tired of the appropriating struggle and the petty complaints cast as human rights issues. It's a Princess and the Pea parable.
My childhood was miserable. I was sexually abused. My dad was highly volatile and violent, with lots of deeply unsettling habits. He was/is a pervert and beat up my mum, an older sibling and me. He was alcoholic and occasionally properly terrorised us, a couple of times with a shotgun.
I was sexually assaulted by another kid in primary school, multiple times. This was never addressed, despite my telling on him. When I was attacked years later, fearing for my life, I got a vivid, dizzying flashback.
I developed a crippling anxiety and depression, becoming agoraphobic. It resulted in a psychosomatic illness, which meant I had no formal education after primary school, and when I did go out, it was furtively, alone. Aside from people who came to the house I saw no one.
That video of Emma Watson speaking to Paris Lees, for example, in her fawning, cut glass accent, is a prime example of the narcissistic vacuity that triggers it. It's by Vogue, which is fitting as it functions as the British Fashion Week of TRA propaganda.
We get to see the full gamut of Watson's facial acting, as she strains at the thought of not seeing some men as women.
Insipid and without anything original to say, why anyone would seek Watson's opinion I do not know. But here she is, and Lees wants to know what would she say to those who believe transwomen should have surgery before using the ladies. A shocked Watson trills "that's another human being!" as if men are some other, lesser hominid.
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It seems that Watson, with her million dollar security, is mortified at the uncouthness of being too strident; this is the woman who went to the UN with MLM-style 'feminism' that is there for everyone and everything and is basically just manners and kindness. Oh, the barbarity of women, even the little common ones, having boundaries:
"Do you know how it feels to not be included?" she begs.
Well, yes, Emma. Yes I do.
When my dad finally left, my mum met a new bastard with explosive rage who immediately moved in. The upshot of this was the house was sold to move hundreds of miles away, whereby I was kicked out of 'his' house (despite the fact that he had never worked). The friends I'd made in the brief interval between then and my dad leaving, the childhood friend who became another sister and essentially lived with us, my siblings, all gone. A kind of explosion. Many of them I never saw again.
I grew up in the countryside, but now was homeless in a city with two, big dogs. I was 15. I moved to another city where I knew one person, sofa surfed, walked around all night, went home with older men, and lived in fear of getting nicked and turned over to social services. Then, in my bid to escape my constant social anxiety, I started taking more and more drugs, eventually leading to heroin. That was an obvious fuck-up I must take responsibility for, but I was a teenager. To my shattered and depleted nervous system, heroin was like a gasp of oxygen in an airless room. I can't say I cared about anything, including myself, either.
Not long after I left home, I was lost, and needed to get to a bus station. I approached a middle aged, safe looking man to ask directions. Before I'd had a chance to say anything beyond 'hi' he turned around to me, lips tight and eyes blazing, as he snarled at me 'no!' and 'get a fucking job'. The venom, the 0-60, was genuinely frightening.
What would Belcher make of that, I wonder? Has he ever been judged from across the street, and screamed at? I doubt it, going by his rizla thin skin.
I had more aggressive, predatory and violent incidents with men I can think of. Belcher loses it if he's referred to as a man on someone else's Facebook page. In a Woman's Hour episode I'll discuss in a minute, Belcher was so intimidated, so scared of Joan Smith he couldn't converse with her over a radio phone-in. People who are on death's door, or seriously mentally ill, going through hell, have assessments for their benefits by tricky, dishonest assessors. Don't turn up? Buh-bye benefits and thus the roof over your head.
Try looking homeless, drug addicted, and get back to me on exclusion and harassment. Try being seen as a woman - you cease to be fully human. Your femaleness is just a weakness, or another failure, expectations you couldn't fulfil.
If I was ever 'caught' looking in a mirror in a public space I felt humiliated, convinced the other person was privately laughing at my delusion.
Helen Belcher scoffs at the idea of same sex toilets. How are you going to tell, he asks, indicating his complete disregard for women's boundaries. Look at the shrieking exaggeration and triggering language here; it's the demands of a flailing, spoilt child in the chocolate aisle of the supermarket.
When I used public toilets, I was interrogated by attendants who banged on the door within a 30 seconds and demanded to see what I was doing. I was refused access to any toilets in cafés. Loudly, sometimes, in humiliating outbursts that were meant to be seen and heard.
For Emma Watson, the notion of truly same sex spaces - ie not accommodating every male who sees himself as entitled - appears to be the closest to common-or-garden suffering ever to exist within her gaze, and it makes her very, very thoughtful - how could anyone have a problem with Paris Lees?
"Oh my goodness, erm, I'm British! And... And, I, I don't... want you to be in danger!" she shrieks, as Lees sits like a finally sated cuckoo, nurtured by a tiny, exhausted Watson wren, who just needs the world to know how brilliant she is.
Then, speaking slowly, as if sucking a Werthers' Original (method acting?), Watson feigns cognitive action;
"I understand fearing what you don't know... I understand, kind of thing, 'I don't really understand about this and I've never met someone, and...' but go - go and speak like go and go learn go speak. Go, and yeah, um, go look into the whites of someone's eyes that's had this experience... "She garnishes this with a kind of facial theatre which could be a flip book of 'suffering constipation' stock images.
Lees thinks she looks emotional - because Emma Watson, she's felt excluded, not invited, hasn't she? A subtle nod, a gentle affirmation follows. It's like that princess Di interview all over again. My, the dignity of it.
The advice to seek out a trans person is a recommendation I don't ever see the other way around. The spectre of gender critical / radical feminists is reckoned to be so frightening and corrupting, a Do Not Interact policy is required.
The dentist told me he would only see me at the end of the day because I posed an infection risk. Dr's let me register on the phone but when I turned up it was all a mistake and they have no spaces. Sorry!
The police would stop and search me when I'd done nothing wrong. I was maliciously arrested and strip searched by scornful, frustrated coppers. Try that, Belcher. Or, try acknowledging the significant physical, social, financial, institutional and legal privileges and advantage you have. If you were underclass benefit scum, Jeremy Kyle would slither across the stage and tell you to grow a pair, however I believe these already exist. So, maybe, use them.
So when they say, or imply, I've no insight into prejudice, or feeling excluded, I have a torrent of furious bile to unleash, it could wash them away, sweep in like a tsunami. The unbound, platitudinous, privileged waffle. I want to scream. I was an abused and abandoned kid, out of thousands of others. And I've seen other people go through things I cannot imagine. I could be here forever.
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| The Fraud's Prayer |
I could fill books with it. The kids who bounced from foster carer to foster carer for a whole childhood, then chucked into a smack-infested hostel at 16. Those who's older boyfriend pimped them out. Who had learning disabilities and were preyed on. Refugees. Orphans. Victims to hideous circumstance. Accidents, suicides and a thousand fatal overdoses. Life is fucking hard.
Some time ago, Belcher burst onto the radio, talking over the host with a clamorous panic as he detailed his presumably very feminine response to government dropping the GRA reform. This included shutting himself in the bathroom, 'in floods of tears' while searching 'how to claim asylum in Ireland' (top til, Belcher; you don't need to. You big mad fanny).
When Belcher's wife discovered this maiden in meltdown, she was livid, and we are to take her response very seriously. She wrote to eighty friends in three hours (without any dictation, I'm sure). Then they discussed genital inspectors.
That's the rational pundit Belcher for you.
I mean, who gives a flying fuck how women prisoners felt when the FDJ case, to keep transwomen / males convicted of sex crimes out of their prison, failed? Or when Sarah Summers is roundly abused? It's nothing on hyperbolic Helen's hissy fit.
When dismissing JK Rowling’s point that parts of her life have been intimately tied to her biology, of being a woman and the violence that makes her vulnerable to, burly Belcher piped up "I'm equally likely to be raped". Seriously. All this, in less than 5 minutes on air.
There's no shame. He then retreats to endlessly snipe from his connivery tower in what looks like a stone cold vendetta against numerous, normally female, people.
The relentless volley of crap from gossamer-skinned people, with the belief they are justified to a world of wall-to-wall adjustments and concessions.
The audacity, the ineffable sense of entitlement that they never encounter awkwardness, or feel different. They must be welcomed and affirmed from the ground up, always. Those who demand the world be more accepting and 'educated' about them; not kids in care, or disabilities, or those with dementia. No. Them.
On Twitter, they squeal about genocide and escape plans, or in punchy, headline comments they warn of 'stochastic terrorism' with all the fervour of the Daily Mail stuck in a broken lift with colourful youth.
We can only control our own behaviour, and it's ineffably boring and sad to define yourself by someone else's, however bad it was. People overcome huge obstacles, and someone will always disapprove.
So, this unremitting tale of harassment and woe from wealthy, successful, empowered people who've apparently barely suffered more than a 'misgendering' online, it all seems deeply inauthentic to me. More likely predicated on entitlement and a belief they will be listened to and acted upon favourably.
And I don't believe that's the assumption of many victims.
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