A Woman’s World
Early in the 20th century, a group of women in the UK fought a feisty campaign against all odds, to try and achieve the right for women to vote. For years, the women were mercilessly ridiculed, giving rise to their derogatory label, ‘Suffragettes’. Their movement superseded a previous lobby of Suffragists, who began along the same lines in the 19th century but were too moderate in their demonstrations to make any impact. The longer their crusade failed to get the results they were desperate to attain, not only for themselves, but for all women the more violent they became, smashing windows and carrying out arson attacks, to fight for equal status as men. It led to disgrace and even prison, but finally, their battle was won in 1928. Women over the age of 21 were allowed to vote, the same as men in England, Wales and Scotland feel a part of the human family in the UK. Many women today have no idea, what struggles and sacrifices were made by these courageous women, to give generations of women up to the present-day equal rights, among other things, to take part in elections.
My mind goes back sometimes to the days when my (so-called) mother sat in her chair with her feet up on a velvet-covered pouf, roaring with unabated mirth at Danny La Rue, in his TV appearances. He was a female impersonator of the day, before ‘drag queens’ were officially branded. I don’t think she ever dreamt that he was gay, otherwise she would have switched him off in a horrified huff. Today, we have numbers of other drag queens, two of whom enjoyed particular celebrity status, namely Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and Paul O’Grady as Lily Savage. Both of these excellent comedians passed away recently and will be sadly miss by millions of people. Over the years, new swathes of drag queens have flooded the international scene, and no one seems to have taken umbrage. They are entertaining and comical and make a career out of this niche market, without offending anyone, least of all the female audience. It never feels as though they are intruding in a woman’s private world.
More recently, the trend to switch from male to female or vice versa, has suddenly become quite a rampant fashion. Some of these people who genuinely feel they inhabit the wrong body, can have procedures to transition and become the person they feel they should be. I won’t go into the macabre efforts in certain areas to offer this to children in or before their adolescence, but it has given rise to a distinctive and troubling development.
One area which needs urgently regulating is transitioned men who enter competitive women’s sports. When young women spend their entire existence training for a swimming career, with good expectations to be very successful, they are entitled to have the assurance that they will be competing in a fair and level environment. However, we have recently witnessed such races celebrating a monster of a man as the winner on the podium, towering over his female opponents in second and third places, as they bravely try to disguise their frustration. I might say, it takes balls for a muscular man to grab the prize and be proud of having shattered women’s dreams of winning a race, when he would have stood no chance in a men’s race.
Then there’s the recent case of the ladies in a female sauna keeping themselves to themselves, when a bearded wonder with his intact naked nether regions, plonks himself alongside them to sweat it out. When the women protested that it was an exclusively female sauna, he told them that the receptionist allowed him in, when he showed her his ID, which declares him to be female.
Along a similar strain, there’s the case in Scotland this year of a man accused and sentenced to eight years in prison for the rape of two women. He was registered as a man at the time of the rape, but subsequently changed his status to female and was interred in the women’s prison. Ultimately the scandal was even too hot for the Scots and his case was reviewed, causing him to be re-assigned to a men’s jail. These cases highlight some very macabre policy-making at present.
It’s disheartening for women who are aware of the struggle and effort made a hundred years ago, to attain the equality we have today. We then have to be confronted by seemly weak men who are unable to live their lives in their own male-territory and seek to acquire personal advantages by encroaching into a woman’s world. It’s rather a shame that our politicians can’t or won’t step up to the plate and sort this mess out resolutely, before even more outrageous circumstances become fashionable.
Photo: pexels / Jonathan Borba