Rewriting the Past in the Preferred Image of the Future

It’s hard not to feel a grudging respect for the audacity of the trans movement; the speed at which ‘trans truths’ have displaced common sense is dizzying. Men like Paris Lees, author of ‘What it’s like to be a girl’ are now routinely celebrated as experts on womanhood. Meanwhile, women in public life like Rosie Duffield MP, who dare to point out incontrovertible facts like ‘men can’t be mothers’, are publicly monstered even by their political allies. But for all its gains, what transgenderism lacks is a sense of history, or a foundational myth. To remedy this, activists have poured money and effort into the claim that trans people have always existed, and that they played a central role in civil rights struggles of the past.

The Stonewall riots have become a bit like Woodstock; everyone claims to have been there. And from Google to the Guardian, ‘trans women of colour’, namely gay cross-dressers Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are widely cited as having “thrown the first brick” or sometimes cocktail glass. This is categorically untrue.

In 2021, I was fortunate to speak to Fred Sargeant, a long-standing gay rights activist who was at the heart of the Stonewall riots with his partner of the time Craig Rodwell, a prominent campaigner and owner of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first lesbian and gay bookshop in the world.

Early on the morning of 28th June 1969 the pair were passing the Stonewall bar when they saw lines of police and heard local lesbian singer Stormé DeLarverie shouting “why don’t you guys do something?” as she was being arrested, just some five or six feet away. As DeLarverie was bundled into the back of a police van the crowd erupted in anger.

Johnson is on record as saying he didn’t arrive until the riots were well under way at around 2am.

“I saw behind the lines of protestors Marsha P. Johnson emptying a bag of trash over the windshield of a police car.” Sargeant told me in an article for Lesbian and Gay News.

“But the drag queens and transvestites were separate to us; they didn’t really get involved in the riots or the campaigning.” He added.

Neither heroes nor villains, Johnson and Rivera were candid about being cross-dressing gay men who were at times homeless and sold sex to survive. Both were members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

It shouldn’t need to be pointed out that in 1969 there was no widespread movement for ‘trans rights’. The term “transgender” itself has a murky etymology, feminist scholar Professor Sheila Jeffreys attributes it to Virginia Prince, a cross-dressing heterosexual male who used the term in the late 1970s in his magazine Transvestia.

In the intervening years the desexed word ‘transgender’ has replaced ‘transvestite’ and ‘transexual’. This has allowed the concept of being trans to be applied to children as if it were an innate and immutable identity. It is this linguistic shift that opened the door for what is an adult psychosexual disorder to be rebranded as a human rights issue. And “progress” has been rapid.

It is worth bearing in mind that it wasn’t until 2015, when Ruth Hunt took over as head of Stonewall, that the ‘T’ was added to the LGB. Even the most wide-eyed ingenue would doubtless recognise that after the granting of same-sex marriage there was a financial incentive to promote this nebulous grouping.

Now, the race is on to bring the past up to speed with modern mores. Last month Dublin Pride went so far as to digitally alter text on a photo from an historic gay and lesbian march from 1983 on their website. A sign of one of the marchers which originally read “The Police Aren’t On Your Side Either” was edited to say “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.” When challenged, the organisation did not remove the image, they simply added an addendum claiming the addition was “obvious”. It wasn’t.

There have also been more attempts across the cultural sector to reimagine historical figures through faddish ideas about identity. Hence Joan of Arc was recently portrayed in a play at the Globe theatre as non-binary, pioneering female artists like Marlow Moss are now routinely posthumously ‘transed’ by the Tate and even the displays at the British museum make mad claims about the gender fluidity of our neolithic ancestors. Donors from the Arts Council England to bodies that support academic research are funding this cultural vandalism.

Transgenderism is a hollow ideology designed to obscure an unpalatable truth about male sexuality. Its survival depends upon putting down roots, or else co-opting those of another movement. From transing the dead to doctoring placards, it must rewrite the past in the preferred image of the future. But whether the biology or history, the truth will continue to shine through attempts to bury it.