When The Trans Movement Faced An Unpleasant Truth - What To Do About Its Dark, Violent Side?

Alison, Marfa, and Posey had all transitioned in the early days of sexual liberation, and had become comfortable in their skin - and their Givenchy, Chanel, and St. Laurent.  They were ladies not tarts and were known for their good taste, political sanity, and good will.  Although they were happy to see that transgenderism had become widely accepted and practiced, they were the first to distance themselves from the Miami runway queens who were giving the movement a tacky name. 

'Let them be', said Alison to the suggestion that the friends ought to speak out more against the popularization of the trend.  It was one thing to become a Fifth Avenue hostess, patron of the arts, member of the best clubs another thing altogether to prance and diddle and remain in caricature, for that was exactly what these newcomers were doing.  They were still men acting out the role of woman, adjusting to breasts and high heels but paying no attention to delicacy and grace. 

'What is a woman?', conservative critics were challenging those advocates for gender reform, but they focused on biology - genitalia, chromosomes, genetic disposition - and ignored the more subtle, refined, and sophisticated side of womanhood. Of transgenderism's many successes, the focus on femininity and what it means to be profoundly female, not just a flesh and blood vessel was perhaps the most significant.

For decades since the bra-burning feminizing Sixties, women lost their uniqueness, those ephemeral, indefinably elegant qualities which made them female.  Rising up in the Type A, testosterone-fueled man's world meant becoming just like them - tough, brutish, insensitive, and harshly ambitious.

   

In the unforgiving progressive No Means No sexual world, they became adjudicates on the lookout for uncivil, abusive treatment. Tarting up was a way of defying men's sexual responsiveness, and the irony of the feminist movement was thick and jammy. Buxom, forward, provocative women made it to the boardroom and challenged men to look at them - wanting them and not wanting them. 

Now transgender queers were resetting the sexual balance.  A woman who had been a man and who had to deliberate what it meant to be a woman was the new woman - a reflective, selective, determined being who would insist on definition and then pursuit. 

Which is why Alison, Marfa, and Posey chose the sexual careers they did.  Such was the dramatic enterprise of sexual choice, they could have been anything from runway queen to Queen Elizabeth.  The floozies were once men who drooled over busty women and who wanted to turn the tables on them - to become stereotypical hooker-minded, salacious dames; but the likes of the friends had been male sophisticates who appreciated the fineness of women. 

Harrison Davis had been a scion of Boston society, a man of breeding, taste, culture, and financial wizardry before he became Alison Davis, high society icon of Beacon Hill, Shawnee Mission, and Palm Beach.  He maintained his class, dignity, and social posture as a woman just as he had as a man.  The elision was so seamless and marvelously cut that few friends even turned up an eyebrow. 

But to say that Alison was simply the female version of Harrison would be a mistake, for she attributed to herself all the studied elegance, sophistication, and posture of the women of her class.  She added a bit of Alice Longworth's intuition, a touch of Adele Mortensen's insouciance, and a dash of Margaret Blakeley's spice.  Transgenderism in the right hands is artistry. 

But out of nowhere came twisted freaks whose binary wires got crossed and who confounded transgenderism with political progressivism.  These shooters, assassins, and murderers acted out of some sexual miasma - half of them were never really transitioned in the first place, reluctant as they were to lose that dark machismo with which they had grown up.  

Politics corrupts absolutely. Nothing escapes the grasp of those who want to make something civil and reserved into a cause celebre.  The mix of unaddressed sexual insecurity, the fiery illogic of political movement, and the social marginalization which always accompanies this uncertainty is a dangerous thing; and it is no surprise that more and more political killers are transgender. 

All of which is beating around the bush.  For all the Alison Davises in the world - the successfully transitioned, sexually equitable, reasonable and non-threatening transgenders - there are a hundred times as many twisted incarnations of some impossible sexual fantasy.  God created two biological sexes and any diversion from that absolute, incontrovertible fact is nothing but imaginative distortion - a brutal faux reality of sexual deviance gone mainstream and subject to all the craziness of American society. 

Alison Davis admitted that her transition was pure drama - the fantastical creation of an artist worthy of Tennessee Williams, a dramaturge, a Broadway producer, an old Jewish Hollywood mogul who so enthralled with white, blonde, blue-eyed Christian womanhood but so frustrated by being excluded from its created a romantic empire. 

In the hands of creeps, misfits, anti-social freaks, the drama turns into bathos, misery, and  horrible distortion.  Transgenderism should never have been given the latitude it has.  It is no mystery that everything caught in the briar patch of American bourgeois excess gets corrupted.  Something so fundamentally weird like transgenderism can only become even more so once it becomes part of the moveable circus that is American culture. 

Marfa Potter was a man after all, and she had to do all she could to tamp down the inevitable male spurts that surged up at the most inopportune times.  She was not the actor that her friend Alison was, but no less a committed sexual transfer.  She had the same binary sensitivity of the best transgenders, silk stockings and the man's eyes who appreciates them; but she was less successful.  Not everyone can be Sarah Bernhardt after all, but amateurism shows up more easily in the bedroom than the Broadway stage.  Marfa was simply not as good as bringing off the charade as her friend. 

Posey Marker was on the fence.  She actually had been quite happy as Henry Marker, stockbroker and polo player, a kind of Gatsby-esque figure who travelled easily from watering hole to watering hole; and often thought of returning to that life.  She had not opted for surgical revision, thank God, so her options were open.  She loved the dramatic life - what could be more dramatic than a man living as a woman? And especially in her milieu the privilege of being both a successful tea hostess and patron of the arts and a man about town in mufti was appealing. 

So the happy cabal was not meant to be for long.  Only Alison hung on to her principles, but even for her the smarmy, gross exhibitionism of most cross-sex and now the new violence of improperly transitioned men was intolerable; so it was not long before she returned to the life of Harrison Davis. 

'You're back', said a golf partner on the first hole of Piping Rock one May morning.  'Good to have you', and nothing more was made of his return.