We all know the fashion industry fails to cater for ordinary women and their different body shapes. What with the pear shape, the hour-glass shape, and those irritating post baby curves – goodness it just makes the clothes look so, well, ordinary.
The industry thus far has used barely pubescent girls, often from Eastern Europe, as their models. These girls are very tall with large eyes and few curves to show off the garments at their best. It will not show off any ordinary woman at her best, but that is beside the point.
It should go without saying that I have nothing against the girls who wish to seek their fortune this way – but I do have something against the industry for its rejection of the more maternal female form.
Now the fashion industry has gone one better. Why bother casting young girls with masculine body shapes, when you can you just go the whole hog and cast men instead? Only these are ‘trans men,’ so we all must pretend they are in fact women.
This is what occurred to me when reading this piece in The Sunday Times Style magazine. It tells the story of transgender model Hari Nef and his/her modelling career. Nef tells us how he is taking HRT but has not had the necessary surgery to ‘transition fully’. In fact, he tells us it matters not whether he has the surgery (agreed) because “People need to come face to face with the cold, hard, trans reality that these are women with penises, and they are still women.”
Now normally I try to treat such delusions with sympathy but I am afraid my compassion bucket was emptied and my anger bucket was overflowing.
I am prepared, to go with the flow, most of the time. If a man wants to dress as woman then so be it. If he wants to ‘identify’ as a woman and feel more woman than man then so be it. But when a man wants to tell me about cold hard objective realities it is time to tell a few home truths.
It is misogyny pure and simple for the fashion industry to use male models to sell women clothes. You see, women’s bodies are just not good enough – we will go with the masculine shape instead.
The cold, hard, biological reality is that it does not matter how many hormones you take, these men still have XY chromosomes which makes them male. No amount of Newspeak can change this.
The abuse of biology and language is bad enough. But it is the appropriation of women’s lives and bodies that rubberstamps the misogyny.
These people have no idea of the privilege and burden it is to know you can create new life every single month. They have no idea what it is like to nurture life or bring it into being. Prancing down a runway wearing a dress is not the same thing!
The feminists who support all this, simply because they see it as a way to trash gender, deserve total distain. For Polly Toynbee it is all about freedom, not truth. Feminists should “welcome everything that breaks down gender, a spectrum where anyone is free to be and do what they please, the more genderqueer, the freer.”
First, if they are accepting this new transgender misogyny they are now overturning 40 years of third wave feminism, declaring that ‘there was no such thing as gender’ and no such thing as a male and female brain. Now all of sudden we are being told to accept that some men have in fact a ‘female brain’ but are ‘trapped in a male body.’ You cannot have it both ways.
But it is not the intellectual inconsistency that should shame the feminists – it is the hypocrisy. Feminists often opine ‘cultural appropriation’ but male to female transgenderism is appropriation of the entire female experience.
Some feminists are willing to sacrifice the whole of the sisterhood just to get one over on the conservatives. This is not only pathetic but desperate – and evidence of just how shallow their belief system truly is.
