‘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.

It makes one think of sex dolls, and thus ‘sissy porn’. This is the unwholesome genre of porn in which a man is ‘forced’ to transform into a woman, whether through the administration of hormones or the donning of makeup and lingerie. It has apparently drawn a sizeable number of ‘normal’ men to cross-dressing, while being altogether less innocent than the desire to spend alternate Fridays wearing frills’n’furbelows and answering to Fiona. One self-confessed fan of this genre is transwoman and literary critic Andrea Long Chu, who also once described his ideal / idea of womanhood as ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes’.

Mr Chu has also argued there should be unregulated access for all, including children, to cross-sex hormones and surgery. A surprising number of activists involved in the ‘respectable’ end of trans activism believe that children should be allowed to ‘transition’ at an age when they aren’t even allowed to be legally left alone at home overnight. As Malcolm Clark has pointed out previously on spiked: ‘If anyone argued that children had a fundamental human right to work or to marry we would think them bonkers or worse. Yet the trans movement wants us to believe that those who have not yet gone through puberty should be given the choice to make radical and permanent changes to their bodies.’

The ‘Protect the Dolls’ campaign is certainly creepy. But it’s also great for opponents of the trans madness. In the Guardian piece, the ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt designer, Conner Ives, scores a hilarious own goal while trying to big himself up. Reflecting on the use of his slogan at the trans-activist protest in London against the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex, he claims that Trans Lifeline co-director Myles Markham said that with ‘Protect the Dolls’, trans activists ‘finally have a message’.

‘Black is beautiful’, ‘Votes for women’, ‘Out and proud’ – these were important political messages. They were to the point and not one bit creepy. They certainly didn’t compare oppressed black people, women or homosexuals to toys.

Speaking as a mere woman, I’d venture the opinion that women are not dolls. We cannot be fashioned by artful materials and a surgeon’s skill, any more than we can be confected out of sugar and spice and all things nice. We are made out of blood, sweat and tears. If some ‘trans folx’ believe that their hormones and snips make them ‘better women than TERFs’, as so many of their memes seem to say, then that only speaks to their delusions.

So here’s a t-shirt slogan I’d happily wear with pride: ‘A doll is a toy – not a role model.’

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.