I REMEMBER when in order to get blanket coverage on the wireless and TV and in the papers the Ra had to put a 2,000lb-er in a town centre, the UVF had to machine-gun a bar and the Brits had to get some journalists drunk.
People today, though – they don’t know they’re born. All you have to do these days to claim more air time and column inches than the royal family is stand outside a library at shout at people.
On Monday morning, BBC Ulster cleared the decks, the Belfast Telegraph cancelled staff leave and the News Letter went to DefCon 1 over an anonymous male and female shouting at two drag artists as they left Holywood Arches Library on Friday after reading stories to children and parents. In an impressive piece of accidental co-ordination, all three unionist outlets went big with the story on their websites on Monday morning, although why it wasn’t deemed newsworthy on Friday, Saturday or Sunday isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps the online footage of the library encounter hadn’t racked up enough clicks.
Why two anonymous randomers are possessed of the ability to bend the unionist media to their will to such startling effect is a question that will no doubt intrigue party press officers and PR professionals, who can only dream of amassing coverage that’s been more duvet than blanket.
To that question is appended a second: How come those vocally and publicly opposed to the drag performer storytelling event were all unionists? I ask because I can tell you from uncomfortable experience that gender obsessives abound among nationalists and republicans. I’ve asked old friends down the pub why they had ignored the Trans issue for as long as I’d known them; I’ve asked them if they really think it’s a massive coincidence that they became passionately defensive of women’s toilets and sports events at exactly the same time as the Daily Mail did. And I get the same answer as I’ve heard yet again this week: Just leave the kids alone.
But that substantial cohort within non-unionism does not find a voice when these stories arise. The SDLP, People Before Profit, the Greens and Alliance either speak up in support of people’s right to live the lives they want to live, or they maintain a dignified distance from the fray. Even Sinn Féin, which has shamefully abandoned the Trans community, is too wary of its large progressive support base to have the courage to vent its Cass convictions.
Why does this divide exist? The only answer that occurs to me, venal and embarrassing as it is, is that a community that has been taught to value candidates’ positions on flags and boneys more than their positions on health and happiness is more open to such culture wars manipulation. I know: Thin.
The drag reading event has been taking place at the library for eight years and organisers EastSide Partnership say it’s one of their “longest-running events and returns every year based on the positive feedback from those who attend and engage”. In other words, for years the only people who cared about storytelling day at the library were those parents and children who turned up year after year to enjoy it. Until the two nameless and faceless champions of ‘our’ children turned up with an iPhone and an attitude.
I can tell you with a high degree of accuracy what the incredibly similar editorial processes were that led BBC Ulster, the BelTel and the News Letter to lead with the same story on the same morning.
Quite simply, everyone involved was fully aware that a couple of nobodies shouting shite at a library is not a story. Not in the traditional industry sense of the word. But everyone involved in the story knew fine rightly the extraordinary power of the number one wedge issue of all wedge issues to get people wound up. Hence the radio phone-ins. Hence the vast acreage of newspaper reporting. Hence the TV and radio bulletins. Hence this article. The extraordinary truth about and the extraordinary power of a men-in-dresses story is not only its ultra-reliable efficiency as a rage delivery mechanism, it is that you can introduce one into the day’s news schedule for almost any threadbare reason – two nameless slabbers can even get the job done.
If this were a single-use, disposable story providing a touch of levity on a grey Monday morning I’d probably not have opened the lid of this laptop over it. But the grim truth is that it is infinitely more insidious than that. To the two hecklers outside the library, to the unionist rentaquotes, to the social media drive-by shooters, drag queens equals Trans equals weirdos equals paedos equals queers equals toilet-creepers. They’re all part of a seething, homogeneous mass of zombie-degenerates whose sole purpose is to target ‘our’ children and pollute their little minds.
In the galaxy of gender identity and behaviour, light years of physiological and social science and nuance separate the millennia-old tradition of performative cross-dressing from non-binary models of living. But the endless complexity of the human condition when it comes to non-normative displays of maleness or femaleness is not only not acknowledged, it’s infinitely more worrying than that – it doesn’t exist.
In this new library storytelling furore, the deployment of the May McFettridge gambit is obvious and partially effective, but it is too limited to penetrate a thick layer of subcutaneous ignorance. Yes, the level of hypocrisy involved in barracking drag performers at a library and delighting in another at the Grand Opera House is Olympian.
But it doesn’t concern, much less inhibit, a person who sees a professional storyteller in a wig and dress as exactly the same threat as the toilet-crawling comic-book Trans villain of their imagination.
None of this matters to those who made it so. In the fairground coconut shy that is media coverage of the Trans debate, there is no room, time or appetite for the separation of targets, much less the discussion of subtleties. For every eloquent, confident drag performer like the one who confronted the library hecklers last Friday, there are a hundred – two hundred – desperate, frightened and, yes, suicidal Trans people facing into a lifetime of derision and hate. But they’re all the enemy.
As for the future of library drag readings, a single bright shaft of hope is to be found in the fact that Gormless Gordon has got involved. Communities Minister Lyons isn’t averse to dressing up himself, although his choice of attire is normally a spinning dickybow, a polka-dot waistcoast and size 48 shoes. He arrived on the scene in his collapsible clown car, parping his horn and squirting water from his lapel flower as he announced the event shouldn’t have taken place and that he was instructing his officials to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
HERE WE GO AGAIN: Gormless Gordon Lyons got involved in the drag queen library row
Should anyone care to put Gordon’s ex-cathedra ruling before m’learned friends for consideration, drag reading events at libraries will almost certainly continue. Because while the Royal Order of Toilet Protectors makes no distinction between the centuries-old practice of dressing up for entertainment/education and the equally venerable gender dysphoria, the law’s analysis will be considerably more rigorous.
And I hate to tell you, Gordon, but you don’t get to decide what goes on in the law library.
