Frank Maloney - Gender Reassignment

[CKDexterHaven]

Lived over 60 years with full male privileges - Check
Rose to the top of a male-dominated profession - Check
Right-wing political candidate for UKIP - Check
Homophobic public comments - Check
Believes in family values and traditional morality - Check
Believes in a 'female brain' (like people used to believe in a 'negro brain' and a 'Jewish brain') - Check

Nasty radical feminists are meant to be the reactionary ones but, to me, it is the transactivist movement that is conservative, homophobic and longs for the days when homosexuality was criminalised and men were men and women were women.

[CKDexterHaven]

Plus, I love the fact that after living most of his life as a successful, straight, white male, he's now in 'the last group to achieve equality and be socially accepted'.

You see? Women have achieved equality but someone forgot to tell us.

[CaptChaos]

I'm surprised those people who have tweeted haven't been immediately shouted down for misgendering Kellie in their tweets, and the writer of the Telegraph piece as well.

Oh no, hang on, not surprised at all, all of them were men, and it's only feminists who want to oppress trans*women isn't it.

[CKDexterHaven]

Yes, men can misgender all they like because they might, you know, punch you. But if women misgender you get to punch them. Yippee!

Plus, Kellie? How many 60-something Kellies do you know? Women that age tend to be Pats and Lindas and Brendas and Ruths. The choice of name is very interesting.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I would feel very sad for someone who was deeply homophobic and believed in the 'female brain' and was transitioning, because all of those are difficult things and I would worry that the combination might indicate someone who'd rather become female than live as a gay man.

But since this is a UKIP member, nah, really, not so much!

[ApocalypseThen]

Women that age tend to be Pats and Lindas and Brendas and Ruths.

He wants to be understood and recognised as a 23 yearold page 3 girl, which I find perfectly understandable, and, in the spirit of liberal feminism, I applaud his determination to rebel against the mindtrap of aging. After all, what is growing old as a woman if not the ultimate radfem plot to revolt all right thinking people?

[vicmackie]

I wonder how he thinks this is going to play out.

[CKDexterHaven]

How will it play out? He's a former member of the ruling elite who has lived all his life with those privileges. Now he's decided to pass the business onto his heirs he's also decided he wants to join a trade union because he's always felt like a worker and he was born with a working-class brain. He will express this by donning a flat cap, buying a whippet, drinking bitter and calling himself 'Len', because he knows that is what it means to be one of the workers.

Any member of the trade union who believes this is, at best, reductive appropriation and an insulting stereotype of class-struggle, and, at worst, a suspicious infiltration of the movement by one of the bosses, will be accused of bigotry and be worthy of death threats. Mostly the workers will tolerate his presence because, after all, he could still have them sacked and because they can no longer organise with one of the bosses always present.

It will play out very well for him.

[diggerdigsdogs]

Oh excellent. I just read this in the guardian and knew there would be MNers who felt te same.

"I have a female brain"

Is Malloney shit at reading maps, maths and understanding politics but really good at ironing, cooking, remembering birthdays, and arranging flowers?

[TunipTheUnconquerable]

How long now till we get articles citing Kellie as one of the few women to make it big in the male-dominated world of boxing?!

[VillaVillekulla]

I love the working class trade unionist analogy CK

[AbbieHoffmansAfro]

It's often the people with the most rigid attitudes to and expectations of gender to whom transgenderism makes the most sense, isn't it?

That seems to me to be true of societies as well as individuals: e.g. women who lived (it's dying out) as celibate men in Albania. It wasn't possible to allow them to be independent, or family breadwinners as women, they had to become a man.

Other people might say they were genderqueer and not worry about what side of a gender binary they were on, but see a spectrum and incorporate different behaviours traditionally ascribed to one or other gender into a more fluid persona.

Why is the choice of name significant though? Didn't get that bit.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I don't think the choice of name is significant.

I also think this has very little to do with the vast majority of trans people (state the obvious, I know).

I looked up the comments made by Kellie as Frank Maloney and they include:

"I'm not homophobic but in public let's live a proper moral life - I think that's important.

"I don't think they [gay people] do a lot for society. I don't have a problem with gays, what I have a problem with is them openly flaunting their sexuality.

"I'm more for traditional family values and family life."

That is someone who is revoltingly homophobic.

There's also a picture going round of Maloney groping women's arses.

I really object to the idea that we or anyone else have a duty to be sympathetic to this person, no matter what they're going through.

[AbbieHoffmansAfro]

I can see that-this is your common or garden 21st century 'celebrity exceptionalism', not a story that necessarily tells us anything about transgender or anything else.

Transgender but homophobic is something I find hard to get my head around.

[CaptChaos]

It's actually making me quite cross.

It's all over Twitter. Various people are writing supportive messages and almost every single one is misgendering her. Calling her Frank. Making jokes about things.

If any of us did that, or Julie Bindel did that, or Cath Brennan did that, we would be jumped all over by trans*activists calling us TERFs.

Why is it ok for Lennox Lewis to call Kellie Frank and use the masculine pronoun for him, but not a feminist?

She was a misogynistic homophobe when she was a man, is that going to change now that he has discovered his lady brain and lady liver and lady whatever else?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Sorry, didn't intend my post as a lecture directed at you - hope it didn't come across that way.

I think transgender but homophobic might prove to be not so much transgender the way many people are, but either someone who really, strongly doens't want to be gay, or someone who has been accused of being gay and who is lashing out as a result.

Not that either of those things would excuse it.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

capt - I think there's a (patronizing?) idea that it must be terribly, terribly difficult for a macho man like Lewis to be supportive of anything like this.

Whereas, of course, for feminists it's easy, innit, cos women are empathetic and so on.

On a human level I suppose I can understand people misgendering someone they've known for a very long time, and I can believe they don't intend harm by it.

[CaptChaos]

I guess so LRD

Ah well, now she has her lady empathy as well, she will be very understanding and not make a fuss about anything.

[vicmackie]

One of the tabloids gad a headline about him today - something along the lines of "My secret life as a woman nearly killed me." I am intrigued. I really want to know what his "life as a woman" consisted of. I'm pretty sure it DIDN'T consist of being sexually harrassed on a routine basis or being sexually assaulted at least once, or being subtly mocked and humiliated his whole life, or being dismissed, disregarded and disdained. That's what I think of when I think of my "life as a woman" and I'd really like to know what his version is.

[UriGeller]

The hardships of living as a woman, wearing a wig, strutting in heels and trying to stuff your cock into XXL tights. Like every woman I know, on a daily basis .

[TiggyD]

Captchaos - Why is it ok for Lennox Lewis to call Kellie Frank and use the masculine pronoun for him, but not a feminist? - I've not seen what Lewis said but as he's worked with Kellie in the 'Frank days' it must be taking a lot to adjust from calling her "him" to calling her "her". If he's doing his best but getting it wrong not many Transpeople will get upset.

[AbbieHoffmansAfro]

I agree. Lewis knew her for about 20+ years as Frank, so he may just have lapsed back into it. Doesn't mean he does not accept her as Kellie.

[ApocalypseThen]

The name isn't at all significant, really, it just sounds very young and girly - it doesn't really fit. It just seemed amusingly at odds with what another woman of that age would be called. I guess it seems like he may not realise that while he may be able to identify as a woman, the woman will be an aul wan.

[AbortionFairyGodmother]

"I have had it explained by a trans*woman with a similar history that they deliberately choose macho careers as a form of denial. Sometimes, it is a way of showing their families they are "normal" and there is nothing to worry about. Sometimes, it is self-denial - if they can do these jobs then maybe they can overcome their desire to be women."

This is just so much BS. Here's a reason: men in super-macho professions are constantly, CONSTANTLY being told that being a man doesn't just involve, you know, being born male. Being "manly" in those professions requires a high and getting-ever-higher standard of masculine behavior. Eventually, men who are not completely masculinity-poisoned, who retain basic human feelings of emotional sensitivity, come to believe they must not be men, because men (in these super-macho professions) must be hypermasculinists.

A man who could be quite notably the most masculine man in a typical room might be more effeminate than 80% of his Marine Corps peers, for instance.

I don't know why people accept this narrative that 60+ year old trans people "ALWAYS" felt like women deep down. If that was the truth, are we to believe that simply none of these heterosexual autogynephilic trans males bothered "coming out" 40, 50 years ago? Funny how this stuff only seems to manifest for men after they've been in intensely male-dominated professions, but then they ret-con their entire sexual and personal histories so that they've "always been a woman."

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

whenthe - YY, I can see that.

I can also see that groping women might be a similar kind of denial/defiance.

But the fact remains, it's not ok. I find it disturbing that we're somehow supposed to come over all forgiving and say oh, don't worry that you spread misogyny and homophobia, you were having a tough life. Any more than you'd say 'oh, don't worry about being racist - you're gay! You have a free pass!'