ROD LIDDLE
How Pete Burns helped to create
our fatuous modern world
was more authentic than the gender they
had been ‘assigned’ at birth. Cissexism, or the
fatuous notion of it, did not exist. Even the
singers themselves did not make such claims,
even if they wanted to, which they did not.
But we move onwards and ever upwards
towards a new age of enlightenment and
I suppose we should thank Pete Burns for
playing his minor role. So last week it was
reported that a ‘Christian family’ — can
you imagine having used that description
in 1985? Isn’t that what we all were? — are
at war with its local council and, more spe-
cifically, the social services department over
the gender of their daughter. Next month
the family will be hauled before a panel ofthese ideologically committed busybodies to
decide whether the girl should be known at
school by her given name, a girl’s name, or a
boy’s name, which she says she would prefer.
The decision will not be made by the par-
ents. The decision will be made by the social
services. They will tell the parents that the
scientific fact of their daughter’s gender is
wrong and insist, contrary to the chromo-
somal evidence, that she is a he. And if the
parents kick up a fuss, or carp or suggest
that maybe we wait a few years, she’s very
young and early adolescents are often con-
fused about gender issues, then the parents
may have their daughter taken away fromthem. The council has already begun address-
ing letters to the girl as if she were a boy and
using the name she wishes to take — so that
gives you some indication of which decision
they’re likely to arrive at. And a psychiatrist
has demanded that the child be referred to
the Tavistock Centre in London so that, after
a brief assessment, she can be injected with
drugs to prepare her for a full sex change.
I should point out at this juncture that the
child is 14 years old. Fourteen. The parents
have suggested that their child has depres-
sion and that perhaps she should wait until
she is 16, or preferably 18, before the authori-
ties drug her. Until that point, they say, surely
there must be an acceptance of parental con-
trol and the assumption that the mother and
father know best for their child. But nope, not
set against this weight of fervent and, to my
mind, fascistic right-on ideology — and espe-
cially not, I would guess, when the parents
have made the crucial mistake of describing
themselves as ‘Christian’. Red rag to a bull, I
would respectfully suggest to Ma and Pa. The
redoubtable Christian Legal Centre is look-
ing after the case for the parents and obvi-
ously any sane person would wish them luck.
This story came about in the same week
as it was revealed that a seven-year-old boy,
who was a boy, and looked like a boy, and
wanted to be a boy, was being raised as a girl
by his transgender-obsessed mother. On this
occasion the social services were fully behind
Mum — yep, put him in a nice frock, shove
some ribbons in his hair, we’re right behind
you. Luckily, when the case came to court, a
judge lambasted the social workers for hav-
ing encouraged the mother to cause real dis-
tress to the child. The judge placed the little
boy under the care of his father who is, one
assumes, less markedly deranged than the
mother. He said he could not understand why
so many concerns were ‘disregarded so sum-
marily’ by social services staff. He added that
social workers had ‘moved into wholesale
acceptance that (the boy) should be regard-
ed as a girl’.
But I suppose we cannot blame Pete
Burns for all of this lunacy. Social services
departments are in thrall to a more malevo-
lent agenda than Pete ever envisaged.S
o RIP Pete Burns, transgendered
Scouse popstar. His indescribably
awful song ‘You Spin Me Round (Like
a Record)’ — clever allusion, no? — reached
number one in 1985 and, as part of the band
Dead Or Alive, he had a couple of minor
follow-up hits.
When David Bowie died in January of this
year, a lot was made of his supposed pioneer-
ing androgyny. I said here at the time that
Bowie was deservedly famous for having
written many melodically clever songs, rath-
er than being at the forefront of the LGBT
liberation movement, which he emphatically
was not. Bowie may have been fashionably
androgynous — so were Mick Jagger and
even Marc Bolan before him. But one always
knew that Bowie was a man and he did not
pretend otherwise.
Burns, who possessed much chutzpah
but not a single discernible shred of talent,
might have a greater claim to the old ‘break-
ing down barriers’ stuff. He looked like, and
kind of became, a parody of a woman, resem-
bling in his later years the New York socialite
Jocelyn Wildenstein, horribly disfigured by
plastic surgery, the skin on his face stretched
taut and with a giant cod nailed to his mouth
to resemble luscious lips.
The mid-1980s were really the first time
we had seen this kind of thing and the still
popular Top of the Pops was full of it — Pete
Burns, the equally untalented Marilyn, a par-
tially dreadlocked Boy George caterwaul-
ing his facile, syrupy hits and the marginally
talented but charmless Grace Jones looking
cross and very mannish. They had all prob-
ably been emboldened by Bowie but this was
unquestionably a large step further.
I remember a review of a Boy George
concert in the Evening Standard at the time
— ‘Loved him, hated her’, the critic joked,
without being prosecuted for a hate crime.
The word ‘transgender’ was not, at that time,
part of the popular lexicon — if the popu-
lace had a word, it would have been trans-
vestite, or just tranny — and nor were there
dire imprecations if you sniggered or made
coarse and cruel jokes whenever Marilyn or
Burns hove into view. Still less the insistence
that their recent manifestation as women
In the mid-1980s, cissexism,
or the fatuous notion of it,
did not exist‘Don’t worry about Jerry, he’s only vile online.’