“Protect the Dolls!” Profanity, Sanity, Sanctity and Sanctuary?

A feminist psychologist seeks to promote open discussion of a trans campaigning phrase. Natalie C Rose posts….

In the United Kingdom, very recently, the government’s current Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, was pictured on a Pride parade wearing a t-shirt proclaiming Protect the Dolls (see here). “Dolls” in this context are males identifying as females, so-called trans women, who seek to “pass”. Passing means achieving the perception by others of the trans person being their adopted gender rather than their biological sex. For some trans people this is more important than for others. Social experiences of failing to pass are deemed to cause distress, anger and despair. Google the phrase Protect the Dolls and AI will inform you that “…the phrase originated in the 1980s ballroom scene and has become a popular slogan supporting transgender women. The term “dolls” is a term of endearment used within the LGBTQ+ community specifically by and for trans women. The phrase, popularised by designer Conner Ives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect _the_Dolls) is a call for protection and affirmation of trans women, especially in the face of increasing attacks and discrimination…”. This is a demand made on everyone in society. As far as I am aware there is no similar injunction pertaining to trans men.

Profanity?

But why dolls? Dolls are the archetypal toys of childhood, having manifestations across many cultures through human history. They are varied in form and meaning, witness baby dolls and Barbie Dolls™. The term Doll meaning a woman was once familiar in the all American movie. Uttered by an all-American teen or GI it objectified the glamorous female catching his attention. Dolls, however, are also the stuff of the Horror movie genre; unsettling, uncanny, creepy and threatening.  They stray easily into the profane – blow-up dolls with usable orifices for an adult market not only interested in doll adults but also in doll minors. This was presaged by the shockingly aberrant forms of the misformed sexualised child dolls of YBA’s Jake and Dinos Chapman in the art exhibition Sensation, which opened its world tour in London in 1997 alongside the famous pickled shark and the children’s handprints constructing the face of Myra Hindley (see here). Culture plays out many forms and has multiple active connotations and allusions. Sexual desires weave their way through much of this, and it seems sexual proclivities and fetishes still need material material as well as digital imagery on screen and online.

Sanity?

So, what is with the dolls of transgenderism beyond the ballroom scene that most will know little or nothing about? These trans dolls may be 6 feet 2 inches tall with unalterably broad shoulders, and the male to female dolls are the ones we are urged to protect. Within transgender campaigning, this truly concerns only the males wanting to be females not the females wanting to be males. From the perspective of psychological inquiry, this quickly takes us into the psychological world of some of that male group and their allies and into a delusion of trans-substantiation. To trans woman India Willoughby and to the gender studies scholar Professor Sally Hines, males who don female clothes and make up and also take oestrogen do actually become the 1959 Cliff Richard’s real cryin, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, living’ doll, – they become embodied woman, real females   “..take a look at her hair, it’s real, and if you don’t believe what I say just feel…” (see here).

How many of males currently identifying as females are actually aspiring to a notion of the living doll? More real than a real woman. Some openly describe themselves as better women than cis women;

Trans women are the only real women! Humanity through technology and medical advances has progressed to the point that cis females have gone the way of the Neanderthal; a biological dead end that’s time and purpose have passed”. (see here)

 Are we allowed to say this is not sane, call it a delusion? Here the belief system joins forces with Transhumanism, where individuals want to shuffle off the limitations of the actual mortal coil and attain their fantasised essence, incorporating and possessing it for themselves, forever. Real women, biological females, are an irritating inconvenience and are dispensable.  Surely this is a less than sane and morally offensive subjectivity?

Sanctity?

Non-doll-like, actual women are diverse, messy, imperfect, flawed. Conceived as female, born as baby girls, navigating the trials and tribulations of growing into womanhood, women make up half the human race and they sit at the heart of nature’s preferred model for reproduction of the species. From fairly early on, in all cultures, those women have a wariness (more or less conscious depending on upbringing and experience) of the otherness of males, their superior strength, their propensities for significant differences in sexual, aggressive and dominant behaviour, their gestures, gait and mannerisms. Most men, including trans women, will never understand how instantaneously women, including young girls, women with Down’s syndrome and older women with dementia will reflexively perceive that a trans woman is not a woman. This recognition is not necessarily one of perceiving an active threat, but of something disquieting, untoward. This will add to their sense of vulnerability when it occurs in the context of a woman’s sickness, psychiatric disturbance, trauma or incarceration. Sometimes there will be real danger.  

Sanctuary?

As acknowledged above, trans women, in the main, may present no physical threat to women when they enter women’s spaces, but they do disturb the precious sanctity by disturbing women’s inner peace. Sanctity for womanhood has been sought, often in vain and at a high price, in human cultures through millennia. Where it has been achieved, it is precarious and fragile. Latterly it has been threatened by chants of “Transwomen are Women”, the mantra that closes down discussion and when contested has lost women their jobs.  Sanctity needs sanctuary. Such sanctuary gives women psychological as well as physical safety. Women want it for women’s reasons, such as being able to just be off-guard, to enjoy dignity and privacy, a rest from being kind when you just feel uncomfortable. It is not wanted for the performative reasons of many trans women who seek to enter women’s spaces. As a woman out there, you can only reliably take that privacy and dignity for granted in the company of your biologically female kin in unquestionably women only spaces. 

Please now let us keep to the letter of the UK Supreme Court Ruling about those spaces (see here).