JULIE BURCHILL: ‘Protect the Dolls’ is trans activism at its creepiest.
Reading a Guardian report on the new pro-trans ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt campaign, I reflected that there’s no tell like a self-tell.
When Tilda Swinton and a host of lesser-known fashion and showbiz faces (I had personally never heard of Pedro Pascal or Troye Sivan) put on one of these hilariously over-priced garments – £75! – and smiled self-servingly for the cameras, did they have no inkling of how the use of the word ‘dolls’ would play? Not after all the years when we gender realists declared so many times that women are born, not made? That ‘female’ is not a costume you can wear in the way that Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wore the skins of his victims?
Even the tiny minority of autogynephiles who have had themselves turned inside out by surgeons who would give Dr Frankenstein a run for his money can never truly be refashioned as women. They can, at best, become an imitation of one.
So, in a way, transwomen are ‘dolls’. But not the kind they think of themselves as. Social media have fuelled the rise in images of men with body dysmorphia and / or a kink portraying themselves as fairies and little girls, even when they’re six-foot-four abattoir workers called Big Al. Whether these men are deluded or having a laugh is a matter of conjecture, but I’d say that either one indicates what the centrist dads call a ‘bad-faith actor’. The silly and the sinister often overlap on certain issues. ‘Palestine’ is one, trans is another.
There are without doubt ‘transwomen’ who have simply got carried away with the thrill they get from dressing up like Widow Twankey when their wives are at book club. But there are some who are downright creepy, and their embrace of the ‘dolls’ motif only draws attention to this, however unwittingly.
Why is yet another Disney actor with a zillion dollar movie scheduled for release in a couple of months issuing politicized statements that will alienate potential moviegoers? Flashback to two weeks ago: Another Day, Another Disney Celebrity Tanking Their Franchise:
