So this is awkward.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot/And never brought to mind?

It’s the time of year when we speak of loss as well as looking forward. Loss is huge. People died. That’s real enough but sometimes loss is petty and what I also bring to mind are old acquaintances. Friends who no longer speak to me because of my impure thoughts. I no longer meet the standards required in 2021. I am a woman who believes in the rights of women and feels that those rights are under threat. There is climate change all right and the climate now means that if one stands one’s ground and refuses to be washed away by the tides of nonsense that is ‘gender ideology’ it can feel pretty damn shaky.

And personal.

Sometimes it washes over you and sometimes it doesn’t. This is not me playing victim. It’s just a reckoning. I simply want to tell you what happens when you are labelled a transphobe, a Terf, basically a murderer who is being funded by the right. I am now responsible and linked with the repression of gay people in Poland and the fascist tendencies of the Orbán Government. More than likely, I have connections with the anti-abortionists of Texas. I am a bad woman thinking bad things, deliberately making the lives of persecuted groups more difficult. I am a sinner against the church of ‘anything goes’. All these things have been said about me. Not only do I not believe in gender identity or souls or essences, I say so in public and have done for years.

There is no salvation for me. Social media believes in eternal damnation. Strangers don’t know me or what I think but them’s the breaks. My friends surely do. Or so I thought.

Most days, actually, I try to avoid the issue. And I fail. It only causes hurt and conflict. Then somehow I watch another Tik Tok of a 15 year old girl showing off her mastectomy scars and trying to flog prosthetics – IE, fake penises – for girls such as herself to put in her pants. Boys such as himself? If I use the right words does this mutilation and commodification and selling of fake body parts make it better for him? Better for you?

I can’t stop looking at the huge scar on the leg of Gabriel Mac, a terrific reporter who had a penis made by cutting out a chunk of her leg, leaving a gaping wound and then having his flesh fashioned into a phallus as this is what Mac desperately wanted. The back story disturbs me. This is a person who suffered PTSD from reporting gang rape in Haiti and therefore staged for herself an incredibly violent ‘rape’ where she was beaten as she felt guilty that she had seen but not felt these things.

My god, what doctors, trained surgeons thought this was the right thing to do a self-harming woman, as she was then? Are we to believe that this new version is the “authentic self” now made visible with a giant cock made of thigh?

Was Freud right and am I wrong? Penis envy? Do I want huge chunks of my flesh cut out of me and restitched elsewhere that hopefully don’t go gangrenous to express my “masculinity?” Maybe so. Someone I used to hang out and who said at various times that they were intersex, then did lots of testosterone and became a trans man – though they also reject that label – used to say that. We reconciled briefly as they explained their aggressive behaviour was the result of smoking too much weed and nothing to do with ever higher doses of testosterone.

That person used to tell me that I was afraid of my own masculinity. There had always been trans people in my life but a new wave hit in the 90s, often female to male and what shocked me was not that women wanted to become men, but the kind of men that they wanted to become. Men in lumberjack shirts, grunters who refused to do the washing up. That person of course no longer speaks to me, though I was supportive, and is now raising children who have no gender, apparently.

It is more than possible I am scared of parts of myself. Who isn’t? But to gender those feelings is completely regressive. If we want to think in terms of stereotypes – and I really don’t – I am good at some of the things that are thought of as “masculine” and bad at some “feminine” stuff.

You don’t write commentary for a living if you want to conform to likeable feminine tropes, that’s for sure. Thinking about stuff is still a pretty “masculine” thing to do in our backwoods culture.

These thoughts are going through my head a lot as I bump into a friend. Having felt for a while our friendship was on the rocks I wasn’t sure as I see them rarely and there are often long periods when we don’t meet. Yet there was the immediate intimacy you have with someone you know. Then there was this other thing. The psychic arm’s length. The distance. The unsaid. So I said something, and I have transgressed. They have “feelings” which I am of course aware of.

Letters from Suzanne

To my Ex-Friends. On being excommunicated...

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