What’s so entertaining about a man in a dress?

 My local council has a new initiative to get children interested in books. Over the school summer holidays they’re laying on storytime sessions at the local library. Nothing new about that, except that the stories are read by ‘Drag Queens’. I’m not the only one to have opinions on this; Ann Farmer has an excellent article in TCW Defending Freedom on how it will leave children confused, and I agree with her wholeheartedly. I have suffered as a result of that sort of confusion for much of my life. 

My concern is not actually that there will be a man in a dress reading a story to children; it is actually that a big thing is being made that it will be a man in a dress. Diversity is supposed to be about accepting people who want to do different things, not making a song and dance about it. Society has, in one way or another, been making a song and dance about men ‘dressing as ladies’ for centuries, and it doesn’t do any good.

Drag Queens aren’t about accepting an individual’s identity: the objective of drag is surely to completely hide the true identity of the person. Indeed, transvestites have commonly led double lives in the past; by day, they’d make efforts to be perfectly respectable, churchgoing, office-working people, then in the evening adopt an alter ego, putting all semblance of their ‘day’ life to one side, using a nomme de femme, and trying to hide their true identity as much as they can. I don’t think that’s healthy, for them or those around them.

***

I didn’t realise it for many years, but identity problems of this sort have figured significantly throughout my life. When I was seven my parents split up; my mother turned up at school one afternoon and told my sister and me that we weren’t going home, we were going to live in a room in a big house owned by someone from church. All of my sense of security, of who I was, was destroyed; I don’t think the tears stopped until bedtime, and the pain lasted for years.

It wasn’t a total surprise. I had realised that something was up between my parents; my father and mother had become distant over the previous year or so, there had been rows, they didn’t even talk to each other very much. Years later I found out the reason. 

My father had been going to TV clubs in the West End, and my mother - supported by her ‘friends’ at the local non-conformist church - had had a near nervous breakdown. My father, I subsequently realised (when going through his papers after he died) had had an ‘interest’ in feminine attire from childhood; there were sketches of ‘ladies unmentionables’ in notebooks dating from when he must have been no more than about ten.

My mother did what she could to look after my sister and me, but we were often packed off to (her) family, or people from the church, to look after us; the church people knew something of what had been going on, one of them even chose to tell me a few choice things about my father that they probably thought I should know. I was no more than nine at the time.

When I was eleven, church aided my mother to find a boarding school for me; it helped her cope, but it was another huge shock to me to be taken away from the school friends I had known for years and placed among vicar’s sons and prep school types. Things weren’t great there, much of what has been written about boys’ boarding schools in the late sixties was indeed evident there; so much so that, in 2018, my former junior house tutor was sentenced to forty two months custody for offences committed when I was in his care - not that he got close to me, church had already helped me to develop a good sense of the kind of adults to keep clear of. I didn’t stay on to try for Oxbridge, but left at 17 with a crooked nose - a gift from one later-expelled boy who had objected because I wouldn’t ‘oblige’ him.  

My later development was challenging to all around me; my father never really helped me to think about what would make me happy, but seemed to want me to follow in his apparent footsteps, for example, office work as a chartered accountant. Even then I realised he lived some sort of double life, and he did: a respectable businessman on the one hand, and at night, ‘Pearl’, an alter ego that, he hoped, those he met in the day would not recognise. The happiness he must have experienced as Pearl was hidden from his daytime self; he wanted me to follow in his ‘respectable’ footsteps. He even wheeled out a couple of friends - met through the Beaumont Society - to tell me how important it was to get qualifications and a ‘good job’. I was pushed through A levels and a modest university to start a public sector graduate job at the ripe old age of 20 years 6 months. Forty years later I realised how much I had hated my ‘career’, and would much rather have been a writer, a musician, or even a chef… I did get to dabble in all three at various points, but pressure to ‘conform’ - and pay off a mortgage - had kept me on the supposed ‘correct’ path rather than doing what made me happy. To me, it seems that my father’s inability to be honest and open about what he wanted to be, one way or another, may have also resulted in me also not even being able to think about what I truly wanted to do, what would make me happy, or who I should be.

My father did remarry, but remained distant from us for the rest of his life, even to the extent that he and my stepmother moved about as far away from any family member as they could when he retired in 1990. He died in 2006, she last year, and, as part of resolving the matters of their estates, it's become apparent how many things they, and we, could have done better if he had only felt he could talk to us. 

***

It now seems that my father felt he could not talk to us about anything - his life, his finances, advice on property maintenance. He and my stepmother shelled out thousands on solicitor fees for advice they could have got just by talking to me. We never really found out what he did in the war; I do know he was involved in the clear-up at Belsen in 1945, which must have had a huge effect on him. Moreover, in my twenties and later I never felt I could wholly trust him for advice on relationships; youngsters model their relationships on what they have seen between their parents, so, of course, mine were not entirely successful. One girl broke up with me after meeting him and my stepmother, and being told she ‘wasn’t suitable for me’; another - now my ex-wife - met them and decided to keep herself and me away from them as much as she could. It was only in my late thirties that I really started to understand myself and be able to relax in a relationship, and my forties when I first understood what it was like to be happy with someone (thank you Jackie). Those problems of mine, I am sure, arose as a result of the mess that was my childhood, and that in turn because my father felt he could not be the person he wanted to be.

***

So, if a young boy wants to try wearing clothes other than Y-fronts and commando trousers, why shouldn’t he? Moreover, we shouldn’t make a fuss about it. We may think we are more enlightened today than we were in the sixties, but that doesn’t seem to happen: what some youngsters may gather from the media is that a spot of private knicker-wearing may result in being dragged off to see some shrink to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and, for want of a better way of putting it, being lined up to have your willy cut off. (And we dare to say the Islamic world is cruel?) Most significantly, if he seeks advice from the likes of The Beaumont Society, he will seemingly have to consider an alternative identity, a trans name, perhaps; to conform, he will need to become someone other than he currently is. Why? 

Too many in the medical profession are profiting from the societal refusal to accept that a man is a man, no matter what he chooses to wear. Too many politicians and media ‘personalities’ are fuelling the angst of the confused or ashamed. Special interest groups, like Stonewall and The Beaumont Society, have strayed too far from their founding purpose and are letting down the very people they should be helping: young people confused about identity are not being helped, they are being made more confused; and the consequences of their confusion will be felt, not just by them, this year, but by them and others, in years and decades to come. 

And ‘Drag Queens’ reading stories to four year olds may seem like the most wonderfully diverse idea, but it's an idea being peddled by those with fashionable ideas who don’t understand the misery they could be causing, and the huge consequences of confusing the minds of already confused children.