Julie Burchill has been oddly quiet this week. Or maybe not so odd, after the gigantic backlash witnessed in the wake of her recent Observer piece, which has been received with wholesale revulsion. This time, Julie went way too far. Her targets this time were perhaps one of the most misunderstood, marginalised and vulnerable people in our society - the Transgender community. The entire article can be found here (it was taken off the Guardian website, where it had originally appeared, along with the Observer newspaper, but the Guardian removed the article after widespread complaint. Ms. Burchill then happily gave her permission for this pile of stinking prose to be reprinted in the right-wing press):
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100198116/here-is-julie-burchills-censored-observer-article/
Some of her more offending remarks include referring to transgender women as a "bunch of dicks in chicks clothing", "screaming mimis", and "a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs", amongst other disgusting stuff. All of this was embedded in a manure of bigotry and prejudice that had seemingly been rotting away since the times of "Love Thy Neighbour" and a Bernard Manning T.V Special.
The whiplash from this event was swift and sharp. The Guardian received hundreds and hundreds of complaints in their comments section, and over 200 emails. In a contrite appraisal of events, the Guardian editor acknowledged that many of the complaints had not emanated from the Transgender community, but from others, who were astounded that the article had been passed as editorially safe, and had so clearly broken the Guardian's own journalistic editorial code. There was a sense from many that if the article had been written about disabled, black or gay people it would never have been printed. The editor apologised in no uncertain terms, and conceded that a dire mistake had been made in allowing such a dreadful piece of bigoted commentary through.
In two paragraphs, Roz Kaveney so succinctly put into a nutshell everything that was so wrong, and so upsetting about Julie Burchill's article:
"Once you decide that some people's lives are not real, it becomes OK to abuse them; for people without the outlet of writing for a national newspaper, it becomes OK to shout things in the street, or worse. The trouble with Burchill's list of negative epithets for trans people is that she legitimises the basic currency of hate speech. Trans people are one of the very few minorities who some progressives feel entitled to mock and misrepresent – but then Burchill parted company with the left a long time ago. By now, she has parted company with common decency.
What I would ask Moore and Burchill is this: do you think that what you've written makes it more or less likely that an elderly trans woman living on a housing estate will get jostled on the stairs by her neighbours? Or that a teen trans man will be punched in the street? It's not anger-fuelled tweets, but that provocation, done with malice by people who should know better, that is the real bullying."
Whilst there is no doubt great damage was done by the editorial staff in letting Burchill's diatribe slip through the net, we see the real Modus Operandi of Burchill in her reaction to the Guardian removing her article - by her then giving permission for it to then be reprinted in the right-wing press. This is an act of revenge, of spite, and damn the consequences. Because the consequences won't affect Julie Burchill. As Roz Kaveney reminds us above, it will be the elderly transgender woman, or the young trans boy, trying to wrestle with the Dysphoria that so often comes before decision that will suffer at the hands of bigots, educated on the fodder of Burchill's monologues. This is dangerous stuff.
There was a time when Burchill could write her short snappy commentaries, always a bit shocking, but never cheap or brain dead. But more than one thing in Ms. Burchill has died. One of these things is her ability to use her nib as a scalpel - now she can not write without resorting to the lowest common denominator - the cheapest thrill, that horrible cheap perfume that makes you gip. Now she writes the equivalent of "I hate Tracey Drew", with a biro on those wooden school desks you got in the 70's.
The second thing that's died is her sense of time. She's still lost in Fleet Street. She even references it in her article, like some ageing demagogue with a weird kind of selective dementia, her stance and attitude is clearly the key that fits the lock of the Loadsa Money era, when bad jokes were good, and even better when they got printed in a newspaper - preferably the Red Tops, as she forever reminds us until we fall off our social club stools that she's a working class girl. She doesn't even notice how out of time she is. I can imagine her dating Alf Garnett - they would have a lot of common ground. If you imagine the article she wrote on the Transgender community being written in 1982, you wouldn't be shocked by it, and poor old Julie is probably wondering what all the fuss is about. She's probably got a mobile phone the size of a breeze block too.
On a serious note, what is heartening to see is the sheer might of the Transgender community and how interlinked they are. Julie Burchill doesn't stand a chance. Even more heartening are their supporters, the you and me's - and there are more of them than there are less of them. And this just goes to show just how out of touch that old Fleet Street hack Ms. Burchill really is. She should be writing period dramas, not ersatz commentaries, spewing bile on current affairs. Julie, for God's sake, put down your pen.
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