The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 27COMMENT
Our new airport rituals
fly in the face of sanityAnyone who has braved an
airport recently has my
deepest sympathies: flying is
just horrendous at the
moment. What was
supposed to be a short hop
to Dublin for a wedding last
weekend ended up being a
journey into the fifth circle
of hell. The security queue
at Stansted was so long, we
missed our flight. On the
way home, Ryanair insisted
we arrive at the airport a
casual 3½ hours early to
avoid disappointment.
On a travel conference
panel the other day I was
asked how the industry
could reboot itself post
pandemic. One answer is
surely to alleviate some of
the stress that has built up
around air travel.We should rapidly
remove as much Covid faff
as possible. After 9/11, flying
was transformed as we
began disrobing,
delaptopping and chucking
away half-drunk bottles of
Evian to pass security. But
how much of this is still
necessary, and how much is
security theatre maintained
by bureaucratic inertia?
Similarly, is compulsory
masking still worthwhile
when most people wear
feeble cloth masks and take
them off frequently? Are
vaccine certificates
necessary given that jabs are
starting to wear off? If we
allow hygiene theatre to
calcify alongside security
theatre, air travel will
become unbearable.Things ended
with a bangOf course it doesn’t help
when you’re a swarthy solo
traveller with explosives in
your backpack. Flying home
from Aberdeen airport, I
tripped the scanner with a
bottle of water in my luggage.
Predictable so far, but
things escalated rapidly
when I was surrounded by
police and marched off to a
brightly lit room — apparently
traces of TNT had been
detected in my bag.
It’s amazing how nerve-
racking being questioned by
the police is, even when
you’re fairly sure of your own
innocence. Eventually I
persuaded Plod that I was a
Sunday Times journalist and
not a jihadist. I think they
found the former marginally
less distasteful and let me go.NEWMAN’S
VIEWand lost in its own mythology.
I’ve also given up on The
Marvellous Mrs Maisel, which
I loved in its early years,
because it has become dull.
The real villains here are
the streaming giants, who
pump out this candy floss at a
rapid clip, aiming not for
substance or depth but for a
monopoly on our attention
spans. The other villains are
ourselves. Because the only
way to express frustration
with all this dross is to vote
with our remotes: turn off the
TV drip and pick up a book
until they get the message.Is anyone else fed up with
television at the moment? We
have more of it than ever
before, with glossy new
shows rolled out almost daily,
yet the output is increasingly
banal and forgettable.
My household has been
absorbed by the “scamdram”
genre of late: The Dropout, We
Crashed, Bad Vegan — tales of
deceit and delusion from
Silicon Valley and beyond.
Yet beyond the gripping
formula, most of these shows
feel somehow hollow. There’s
no question the Elizabeth
Holmes story portrayed inThe Dropout is a real
marmalade-dropper, but
there’s something unseemly
about the speed at which it
has been picked dry by the
content vultures. The scandal
has already generated two big
podcast series, an HBO
documentary, a blockbuster
TV show and an upcoming
film with Jennifer Lawrence.
Even when a good show
does emerge, it usually ends
up ruined by overexposure. I
didn’t bother watching the
Peaky Blinders finale last
weekend because the series
had become so overwroughtMore TV shows than ever but little to
watch. Luckily I’ve a novel solution
lSadly I don’t have time to
read as voraciously as I used
to, so I sometimes turn to
the books I devoured as a
teenager for comfort.
Recently I felt a yearning to
pick up CS Forester’s
Horatio Hornblower series,
which electrified my 13-
year-old imagination with
tales of Nelsonian derring-
do. But where was it?
My treasured collection
of Hornblower books was
originally lent to me by my
uncle John in Manchester. I
say lent, but in truth I
filched the books and
whisked them down to
London with zero intention
of returning them,
assuming a grown-up
wouldn’t need such things.
John, who died a couple
of years ago, occasionally
used to grumble about his
lost books. I always found
this a tad ungracious, until I
walked into my own
nephew Shmuel’s bedroom
the other day. And there
they were on the shelf. The
Hornblower books, it
seems, had made their way
from my parents’ house
back up to Manchester and
been illicitly passed down
another generation. I can’t
possibly ask for them back,
but at least I know exactly
how Uncle John felt.Josh Glancy
Week ending
Sarah Ditum
If Stonewall is
worried about
asexuals being
obliged to have
sex in marriage, it
should check in
with an average
straight coupleO
ut of the many accounts of
Ukrainian resilience and
bravery, there was one that
didn’t pull my heartstrings in
quite the way it was intended
to. The website Pink News
published an article claiming
there was a “war within a war”
against Ukrainian trans people. The
problem was that trans women were
trying to flee the country but being
turned back at the border — along with
every male of fighting age — if their
passport still said “male”.
One trans woman said that she was
scared not only of Russian bombs but of
being pressed into the army. “I don’t
want to shoot people. I don’t want to kill
anyone,” she said. To which, I must
confess, my gut reaction was: “Yes,
and?” I imagine a great many of the
conscripted, on both sides, would rather
not be in a war at all. That’s war for you.
There’s a more compelling case that
trans women should be allowed to seek
refuge because they’re particularly likely
to be targeted by invading Russian
troops, but that wasn’t the claim being
made. Instead, the argument was that
identifying as a woman ought to be
enough to get you out of the duties of
your sex. That’s insulting to women —
many of whom have voluntarily taken
up arms for their country — as well as to
the men who never considered their
service optional.
It’s hard not to wonder how many of
Ukraine’s stranded trans women would
pragmatically re-embrace masculinity if
the rape squads arrived, and fair enough
if they did. Self-protection is a strong
current in human nature. The desire to
avoid danger is powerful. Tying it to
gender identity shouldn’t make it a
special case: most of us, deep down,
have a strong internal sense of not
wanting to be injured or killed.
For a long time the politics of gender
identity have developed in the half-light,
pushed forward by lobbyists through
unscrutinised back channels,
promulgated in the fleshless world of the
internet. There’s nothing like a war to
bring a sharp dose of material reality to
proceedings. Perhaps the clarifying
influence of events in eastern Europe
helps to explain why in the past two
weeks we have seen so many markedreversals in the once-unstoppable
advance of trans activism in the UK.
The Equality and Human Rights
Commission published guidance that
uncompromisingly restated the legality
of single-sex spaces as (in the words of
the Equality Act) “a proportionate
means of achieving a legitimate aim”.
Trans people should be protected from
discrimination for being trans, but in
certain contexts — such as refuges,
healthcare, prisons and sport —
organisations can say that trans women
aren’t women.
Perhaps that emboldened Boris
Johnson to stake his place in the
argument about trans women in
women’s sports — an argument brought
to a head by the announcement that the
British cyclist Emily Bridges would be
competing as a woman, having broken
records as a man. (Bridges was
subsequently ruled ineligible for female
events on the technicality that she was
still registered as a male athlete, and
British Cycling announced a review of its
trans inclusion policy.)
“I don’t think that biological males
should be competing in female sporting
events,” said the prime minister. “Maybe
that’s a controversial thing to say, but it
just seems to me to be sensible.” Labour
politicians must have been filled with
despairing envy, given their party’s
continuing struggle to give a sane
answer when the gender issue lurches
into view. On LBC, the Labour
frontbencher Emily Thornberry primly
announced that she would not be
looking up trans women’s skirts, which
was probably a relief to trans women
everywhere.
Not all these political manoeuvres
were deftly executed. The conversion
therapy rethink, in particular, was
messily done and led to the cancellation
of the Safe to Be Me international
conference in London on LGBT rights
after more than 100 organisations pulled
out in protest.
But better an untidy exit than a bad
law written to appease activists rather
than protect the public. At the very least,
the government’s position on
appropriate therapy for trans people
should be decided only after the final
Cass review of gender identity services
for young people is published: anThe transgender
swimmer Lia
Thomas stands
apart on the
podium from
rivals she beat
at a college
championship
last month in
Atlanta, Georgiainterim report has highlighted horrific
failures in care for children with gender
dysphoria.
None of these decisions was taken
cruelly or without consideration for
trans people’s needs. All the same, trans
activist groups responded as if it were a
succession of horrific defeats. “Our trust
has been shattered,” wrote Nancy Kelley
of Stonewall — although the organisation
managed to regain its equilibrium long
enough to launch a “groundbreaking”
project on asexuality.
One wonders just what rights
Stonewall thinks asexuals are being
denied. If they’re worried that sex in
marriage is obligatory, they should just
check in with an average straight couple
two years in. But the identity juggernaut
means that people who experience little
to no horniness are now just one more
minority to be rolled into the ever-
expanding rainbow.Britain’s first openly trans MP was also
“bitterly disappointed” in the
government. That’s the Conservative
Jamie Wallis, who came out last month
to much celebration of his bravery (and
much not mentioning of his dodgy
business enterprises, including running
a sugar daddy site), followed by the limp
trombone noise of him announcing: “I
will continue to present as I always have
done and will use he/him/his pronouns.”
Which makes him a man, heroically
coming out as a man.
It’s all very silly, but the tortured logic
of trans activism leads to some very silly
places. It leads to apparently sensible
people arguing that male puberty
confers no irreversible physical
advantages and that sports were only
ever sex-segregated to stop the women
embarrassing the men — which suggests
that female athletes have been crimping
their performance to spare male egos.It leads to people claiming that no
man would ever pretend to be trans just
to get an advantage, as though people
aren’t constantly busted pretending to
be something they’re not (poorer,
blacker, more dyslexic) to edge their way
into a prize, a scholarship or some extra
time in an exam. It even leads to Boris
Johnson sounding the most grown-up
person in the room.
Trans activists call last week evidence
of a culture war, but it really isn’t. No
one in power seems keen to appear
spiteful or cruel towards trans people:
the government is simply, finally, taking
seriously the fact that there is a problem
when groups such as Stonewall are
allowed to dictate not only the law as
they would like it to be, but also reality
as they would like it to be. And, besides,
who needs culture wars when there’s a
real one going on?
@SarahDitumThe crazy logic of trans activism leads to surreal
debate, but the grown-ups are fighting back
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