BeKind is one of the Great Icks — to use the vivid word so beloved of Love Islanders — of our age. It’s a form of brainwashing which is particularly insidious as it’s generally applied to females, starting out in childhood when numerous items of BE KIND clothing can be found in the girls’ section of shops but not in the boys’. (Note to clothing manufacturers and retailers; it’s not girls who need reminding to be kind, judging from the violent crime stats.) As well as a conditioning process for female children, it’s a shaming mechanism for adult human females regularly used by the trans lobby to reward women who give up their rights — and to rebuke women who don’t. Everything from single-sex toilets to sporting trophies must be sacrificed on the #BeKind bonfire — and now beauty pageants are being thrown upon the conflagration.
Contests in which women are judged solely on the way they look may not appear to be something any self-respecting rad-fem should be defending. But beauty is a talent of a kind and — like sports have traditionally been for proletarian boys — it’s one of the few ways a girl of working-class origin may access a life of fun and money. I grew up in an era when the Miss World competition was the site of much moral fervor, be it the hurling of flour at host Bob Hope by Women’s Libbers in 1970 or the title-stripping of wayward winners Miss World 1973 Marjorie Wallace (making out with Tom Jones on a beach in Barbados) and Miss World 1974 Helen Morgan (had a baby without being married). Though beauty pageants are now considered naff, there is still something affecting about young women in the prime of their physical appeal presenting themselves for validation from people far less attractive than them.
And now one of those less attractive people — twenty-two-year-old trans Rikkie Valerie Kolle — has won the Miss Netherlands title and will go on to compete in the Miss Universe contest. Handily, the Miss Universe organization belongs to Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, a Thai media tycoon who is also trans. The jury opined weirdly — considering that this was a beauty pageant rather than an Outward Bound course — that “This finalist shone throughout the show and made the most progress… has a solid story with a clear mission.” Mission creep, even.
Rikkie is certainly handsome; in the twentieth century, before delusion became a badge of honor, they would have stood a good chance of making it as a male model, an actor or a pop idol and would probably have enjoyed a lovely life. But now they’ve been encouraged so publicly to believe they can live a life as a woman, I feel they may be bitterly disappointed. Because there comes a point when encouraging men to believe they are women is cruel.
You see them all over social media, with faces that only a blind mother could love, posing in basques and gym slips. You see the usual daft Transmaids telling them they’re Stunning and Brave, as though putting on bronzer with a heavy hand makes them Rosa Parks.
They’re ceaselessly confirmed in their delirious claims that they’re better lesbians, better breast-feeders, that their fauxginas — basically wounds which are never allowed to heal — make them better sex-partners for some lucky man who will never know the difference. This then gives them the crazed over-confidence to suggest that a lesbian woman like Kathleen Stock must be “a man” for wearing a suit and sitting with her legs at a jaunty angle. But that’s what beautiful masculine-presenting women do, from Dietrich to Doc Stock; beautiful masculine women are actually made more attractive by their mannish tailoring and posture. The tragedy of trans is that for them the opposite is true, their lingerie and lipstick highlighting the fact that they often resemble construction workers on a drag-stag night.
I’m just tired of the pretense. I grew up in a sexist society which required women to lie constantly — to themselves and others — if they were to be accepted and acceptable. Then came a brief moment of honesty — and now the required lies again, even more misogynist than before.
Women’s rights being under threat as they are, we must all unite — Catholic mothers, lesbian rad-fems, women who despise the objectification of woman and beauty pageant contestants alike — because we will all be robbed, in various ways, if we are not united in saying what a woman is. First they came for the female prisoners — but you’re a private schoolgirl and you’ll never go to jail, so you let the men colonize them. Then they came for the athletes — but you’re a bookworm and will never win a sporting prize, so you let the men claim medals. And now they’ve come for the beauty queens — but you’ll never be a beauty so you’ll let men trample over these under-privileged pretty girls with their size twelve stripper-heels. Let’s just hope you have nothing worth taking by the time the big grabbing hands get around to you.
Though lying is a quick fix for not hurting people’s feelings (“No, your bulge doesn’t look big in those skin-tight ski-pants!”) it does the tiny minority of our fellow citizens who suffer from body dysmorphia no good at all in the long run — encouraging delusions merely puts off the day of reckoning. No matter how much a man believes he is a woman, he still stood more chance of catching and dying of Covid than an actual woman, but many were upset when during lockdown some Latin American countries required men who had been living as women (whatever that means) to stay at home on the alternate days when males were required to do so. One such person, “Monica” of Panama City, was told by a shopkeeper “We can only serve women today.”
And increasingly, crimes committed by men who identify as women are recorded as crimes committed by women — even rapes — thus driving up the perceived female crime rate. How is that fair? Forget the delusional #BeKind — a bit of bracing #BeCruelToBeKind would do us far more good.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
