MG has asked me to point out that he left off at least two in his list of omissions in his last hi-jacking of MY blog; The train keeps a rollin' by the Yardbirds (with Jeff Back and Jimmy Page on dual leads) and Sunshine of your love by Cream. I'm happy to put the record straight. I'm even happier to add my own; Crossroads by Page and Plant in a manic performance on, of all places, a 'Top of the Pops' special commemorating the 1970s!
Well. hello daddy, hello mom, I'm just a. . . cherry bomb!
I do not know what it is but there's something about Thomas Nagel's paper, What is it like to be a bat?, which draws me back time and time again but, as Daniel Dennett once wrote, it is the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness. I was reminded of this while I was watching a new, half-hour BBC sit-com about gender-transition (yes really); Boy meets Girl. If it is quite impossible to get inside the head of a bat (or a penguin), how much more difficult is it to understand someone who inhabits, as they see it, the wrong body, whether it is male or female? What defines us in our own minds and the minds of others? How can gender be determined or defined by anything other than the biology of our bodies?
As a penguin, I little more think that I am not male than Fricka thinks that she is not female but it is quite clear that some humans perceive themselves to be other than the raw biology deems them to be. Why should this be so? Undoubtedly, the extreme levels which human consciousness attains, its ability to grasp inchoate and nebulous concepts with ease, surely plays a large part as does the moral relaxation which post-war society drags in its wake. Humans, in the West at least, no longer vilify difference or non-conformity as in the past.
Women are treated equally, or at least as equally as a still-patriarchcal society will allow; being gay no longer condemns one to prison or to a life of secrecy or subterfuge; having a different skin colour no longer, in the main, damns one to be a second-class citizen; bi-sexuality is a now-accepted feature of the human condition. However, and perhaps because it is very hard for the average human, whether gay or straight, black or white, to imagine being in the 'wrong' body, that transgender people still are the almost-forgotten outcasts of human society. It is almost as though human society cannot function unless it has someone to persecute or at least disparage, although at the moment it appears that the Muslims take centre stage in that respect.
For my money, although I have none, the BBC is to be congratulated on daring to broadcast such a programme, even if it does, in one sense, trivialise the issue by presenting it as a simple rom- or sit-com with all of its attendant ephemerality, stereotypes and farce-like situations; casting a transgender female actor*, Rebecca Root, in one of the two lead roles is also to be applauded. (She is, by the way, at least according to MG, hot as in hot! However, I think that it is only because she reminds him of an erstwhile boss.)
The first episode in which boy meets girl due to happenstance, (does it ever occur otherwise?) to the second 'date' in which all is revealed over dinner in a restaurant is writing and performing of the highest order, although MG points out that the boy seems just too sanguine at the admission that his date 'used to have a penis'. However, as I pointed out in my book, still unpublished, human mating rituals are far more complex than a penguin understands and seem to revolve around how much the person, that you imagine him or her to be, attracts you; physical intimacy only comes later.
Only three episodes have so far been broadcast and physical intimacy has yet to be broached (will it?), although the details of an operation to turn the male genitalia into female genitalia has. However, the boy's reaction is to pass out, in an art gallery, which is surely farce-like in the extreme; much better was the eventual recapitulation in which the boy's jacket-sleeve was turned inside out which prompted the 'killer' one liner: it's not tartan is it?
It is a fact of the natural world that a species exists only because it is able to replicate; to produce offspring, in the main, like itself. Humans, in part due to bigger and more conscious brains, transcend this undeniable truth about life in a sexual, as opposed to an asexual, life cycle. (I have no truck with supposedly homosexual relationships in other species. Males and females will fuck anything that moves, or in some cases anything that doesn't move, irrespective of whether it leads to reproduction; all that counts is that the males or females do achieve some measure of reproductive success. What they get up to in their spare time, and lets be honest sex is highly pleasurable and satisfying, is of no concern.)
However we are still faced with the conundrum. What defines male and female. It seems that for humans, as in most other things, it is what goes on inside your heads that is the most important. How else to begin to understand transgender transitions?
* This is no way a judgement; it is merely that actress has fallen out of favour in recent times, at least in print, as a moniker with which to label female thespians.
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