Fools

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Visibility, today is April Fools Day, The former tries to enhance the position of trans people, the latter is really just an excuse for licensed bullying!

In my last year at school, aged 17-18, we were given a weekly lecture by representatives from some organisation such as the police, who'd tell us all about modern policing (and advise us not to watch shows like Juliet Bravo, which were a travesty), or Amnesty International, who'd tell us about jolly stuff like torture and asylum, or a museum, who'd tell us about art and stuffed animals. One week a man from the Solzhenitsyn Society came ... and his talk stood out. 

If you don't know him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. His best known works are One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, based on his and others' experiences in Soviet forced-labour camps in Siberia. As with Boris Pasternak (author of Doctor Zhivago), who won in 1958, he was unable to go to Sweden to collect his prize because neither he nor Pasternak were exactly full of praise for the Soviet system and this annoyed the authorities not a little. (Mikhail Sholokhov fared better in 1965 with his And Quiet Flows the Don, which is written in prose so exquisite that, even in translation, it left me enthralled. Wonderful stuff despite its historic setting of war, revolution and civil war).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

The Solzhenitsyn Society, which doesn't seem to exist as such any more, wanted to promote his thinking, especially valid during the tensions of the Cold War that dominated international relations when I was at school, and a copy of the Nobel acceptance lecture Solzhenitsyn wrote but was unable to give was available to buy. If you want to read it, it's here: Alexander Solzhenitsyn Nobel lecture

It's not hugely profound but ends (part 7) with his condemnation of The Lie - that is, false dogmas - and how good literature may combat The Lie and the violence that The Lie gives rise to. Obviously, in context at the time was the lie of the Soviet system: not the communist idyll insisted on but an imperialist and repressive dictatorship. As with any other writer who has been concerned with understanding the nature of falsehood and the evil that ensues (Swift's Gulliver's Travels, fourth voyage, or Melville's Billy Budd, are other good examples from great writers) his concern is that "the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions".

I have grown tired of all the falsehoods that have cropped up in the last five years in particular. Those spouted against trans people, such as their being a predatory presence in women's toilets, a lie that will probably win through, despite its total lack of supporting evidence. Those spouted by corrupt, malign politicians such as Boris Johnson, who is constitutionally incapable of understanding the difference between truth and falsehood; the old dictators who won't go, such a Vladimir Putin in Russia (a true inheritor of the Soviets) or Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, and the new dictators who have appointed themselves such as Viktor Orban in Hungary. Thankfully Trump is off the radar for now. We get no peace from these people, ever. 

Don't imagine for a moment that your democratically elected government is actually all that much better. Here in Italy, where the Mussolini experience led to a hyperdemocratic postwar constitution, Covid has been combated by the prime minister issuing decrees like Napoleon, wrongly using administrative legal instruments to impose lockdown rules and sanction non-compliance in defiance of pre-existing legal codes. Today my regional governor decides whether or not to extend the easter lockdown in his region and even whether tomorrow will be fully closed, with just a few hours' notice for people to make arrangements! This is no good, it's not the way to act, even in an emergency. The payment for all this chaos, trillions of dollars, is likely to be dealt with in part by governments directly dipping into citizens' bank accounts. Watch out for that trick, dear reader. Twenty and so years ago most governments had a pandemic response strategy. I should know as I had professional input into it. What happened to that? Too much trouble to maintain, eh. Governments insist on nationalised health systems, yet run them down. In Britain the health service has vast amounts of money poured into it but much of that goes into servicing the debts on hospitals that were built using a contracting system that demanded private not public enterprise, and to pay a raft of unnecessary managers who have no contact with patients. That state health service is to be privatised soon now that Britain no longer has to maintain a state sytem under European Union rules, the chief reason why Nigel Farage and other millionaires pressed so hard for Britain to leave that organisation. I've lost my business and my income thanks to their Lie.

What bugs me is that people just accept all this. Being fooled and being bullied are so normal that there are few people who notice and object effectively. I'm transgender but live as such only if the law says so and also protects me, which in most countries it doesn't. The Lie has always been the essence of governing, of controlling. The Lie pervades every culture: religions that threaten reprisals in this life and damnation the next, political ideologies that need to gain power and control at any cost, pointless cultural practices and traditions that serve only to point up the outsider.

A year of shutdowns with no end in sight and I look at the medical, social and financial devastation that Covid-19 is causing and demand why this mess arose, why it's been tackled so ineffectually, who's answerable. People forgive too readily.

So as I prepare now for weeks more of being forced to stay stuck in my home, with my official residence actually in another place where vital documents await but that I am forbidden from getting to, with almost all my personal possessions stuck in another country that cannot be reached under any circumstances, with vaccines for me available only in places where bureaucracy and lockdowns forbid me to go, after losing my business and income and my health damaged and my position uncertain thanks to the Lie that is Brexit and the refusal of governments to follow the international agreement resulting from it, I have to say that I am tired of The Lie and its promoters and adherents and the fools who accept it.

In the light of the above, and more constructively, I hope in later posts this month to share, firstly, the advice I have been giving for years on tackling bullying and discrimination in the workplace; secondly, on dealing with bureaucrats, journalists, politicians and the like and in other formal contexts. Given how much trouble trans people can have in all these areas, I'm sorry I never got round to it before. The whole problem of the lack of integrity in many human interactions and relations has always bugged me so, thirdly, it may be helpful to talk more about troublesome people and what to do about them, especially as comments on my post about contemplating transition suggest that mental health and psychological functioning are critical as one considers how to live as trans, given that the official narrative on transitioning leaves quite a lot to be desired.

 

A dip in the archives

This is the picture I think best captures Transgender Day of Visibility for me. Me and five friends in the centre of London in happier, healthier times.

 

Sue x

 

Cari lettori italiani

Devo dire che sinceramente sono stanca della situazione pandemica in cui ci siamo trovati per più di un anno senza un buon esito in vista. Mi dicono che, finalmente, dopo cinque anni di sforzi, mi hanno concessa la cittadinanza italiana, ma non posso continuare l'iter a causa di tutte queste chiusure infinite. Sono stanca del caos, del casino assoluto provocato dal disordine creata dai governi incompetenti e maliziosi della nostra epoca.

Sue x