No Transition

The problem I've found recently is that, true to my suspicions and fears from about 25 years ago, the racists, sexists, homophobes and generally rotten horrid people have not been vanquished or converted to the path of diversity and tolerance but instead have simply been keeping their mouths shut due to the shift in laws and regulations.

Back when I started university in 1990, there were a lot of very annoying gits pounding the corridors of the Students' Union in their Doctor Marten boots and Against Animal Testing T-shirts. These people were pissed off, frustrated and wanted change in a system they regarded as antiquated, sexist and above all controlled by an out-of-touch patriarchy. The agression levels displayed by the figures that held court in the Biko bar on Friday afternoons were, retrospectively, charicatures of a generation of privileged yet opinionated people who wanted change and they wanted it, NOW!

Amongst the exploits of the deliberately antagonistic soldiers of societal evolution were Hunt Sabbing (deliberately bollocksing up fox hunts by distracting hounds, laying false scents and blocking roads), Asda Apartheid Shaming (going into the supermarket Asda and slapping "Contaminated With Apartheid" stickers on corned beef tins), or putting CWA goods through the till and refusing to pay for them, and Off The Shelf (walking into WH Smith's and taking all the porn mags, dropping them with a thud on a cash desk and demanding to speak to the manager). There were more but these stick in my mind more than others.

Back then in this microcosm of society, the loud, colourful, in-your-face irritating people were seen as tiresome but having a point. Apartheid was wrong, fox hunting was barbaric, and people regarded the objectification of women as unpleasant. All noble causes to stand by and in a world where the police could be brutal, bouncers at night clubs and bars weren't certified and gay marriage was a long way off, it was good that some people had the courage to fly the flags of change.

However...

The change that was much sought after was wanted in the way that kids want their presents on Christmas Eve. The consequences of then having nothing to open on the 25th were never thought through.

The Hunt Sabbers I knew were gentle people and clearly cared passionately about stopping hunting. The problems arose when they regarded any and all retaliation by the hunters (or their squires) as unprovoked and dispropotionate. One guy ( who later became Students' Union president of our Uni') told a tale of how he followed a man (who was holding a shotgun) for several minutes, asking him repeatedly why he was killing animals. Eventually the bloke simply turned round and thumped him in the face. The quote that sticks in my mind was "I lay there with my nose bleeding thinking "You sad bastard!"

Another occasion had the SU mini bus, that the Hunt Sabbers had borrowed for the day**, getting deliberately reversed into by one of the hunters, in his jeep, damaging the front end of the bus. The police investigated this and the man claimed his foot had slipped off the clutch...for 100 yards. The sabbers were irate that this horrid act of malicious criminal damage had gone unpunished. I mean, they were righteously disrupting a fox hunt so what right did people with a contrary opinion have to resort to violence to stop them?

On an Asda Shaming adventure, a woman I knew said that, after refusing to pay for goods and then demanding the manager, she called the man racist to his face who, when she refused to leave the shop, got security to physically throw her out. She was kicking and screaming "Assault!" at the top of her voice all the way to the door. I pointed out to her that the cashier on the till could have been another student simply trying to supplement his or her grant*^ and that it  wasn't assault as she had been asked to leave and had refused, meaning she was legally a trespasser and staff had every right to use reasonable force to eject her. After a moment she blustered "Well, it wouldn't have been a student and it WAS assault!"

Something I never understood and still don't is how people who were at the very least, passive/ aggressive in their behaviour, couldn't comprehend how other people would lose their shit and attack them. I also didn't get how they could regard reasonable force as unprovoked and wrong, regardless of how abrasive their own behaviour was.

The Students' Union Women's Officer during my degree was a thinner version of Millie Tant from Viz comic. Openly gay, wore dungarees, shaved her head, dyed the remaining hair a new primary colour each week, took great delight in converting straight women, and had size 6 Doctor Marten boots on her feet. Talking to her alone she could be quite level headed and pleasant. With an audience, or faced with a contrary opinion she became obnoxious, aggressive and/ or angry. Her career was nearly derailed in 1993 when she handed out leaflets in the corridors saying "Rape is..." and included the definition "if you buy a woman flowers and chocolates to ensure sex upon a one night stand". This story got into the national newspapers and she had to go through a vote of No Confidence the following week (which she survived).

These people were a fact of life and while I sympathised with some of it, supported others and took the piss out of a lot of them, I didn't pay too much attention.

And then they all graduated and got jobs. 

Move forward 29 years and the same flamboyant nuisances that vexed the local supermarkets are now middle aged. Upon graduating, most forgot their morals and ethics and went to work for companies that reflected their Honours degrees and intelligence (my favourite being a previous SU President who went to work for the corporate side of McDonald's). However some of the Angry Young Persons got into government. Change was long overdue and since I began my A-levels in 1988 there has been a LOT of awesome evolution in society's laws and norms. The police are now obliged to conduct "positive intervention" in suspected domestic violence incidents. Rape is now possible within marriage by a husband to a wife. Gay marriage is now a reality. The legal age of consent for gay sex is now 16, the same as straight.

The list goes on. 

Also there has been an enforced tolerance of diversity. People who are different or who do not follow previously established "norms" are no longer, in theory, outcast. Racism is now legally so fundamentally wrong that you can be fired or even arrested for comments made on social media that are prejudicial to colour or race.

And there's the problem.

Society has changed from 1962 (year of the first James Bond movie) to now in a phenomenal way. All those people that had grown up post war, or even in the 1970s like me, had to accept this new world where poofs were no longer poofs and calling them poofs was an arrestable offence. My friend's gran said in the 1990s "I'm not racist but you have to understand that the first black man I ever saw was on an episode of Tarzan in the 1950s, throwing a spear". From being gay being wrong (as recently as 1988 we had the now infamous clause 28) to gay marriage, to openly gay senior police officers, to Batwoman being a lesbian, the world has moved on. Transgender is another big issue with acceptance of trans people taking the limelight over gay rights in recent years. All in all, the world is trying to move into an era of tolerance and diversity, shunning the restrictive and sometimes hateful attitudes of yesteryear and becoming one world of accepting those who are "different".

The problem is that there has never been any Transition Training.

Those who grew up being told, legally, that being gay was wrong have to now accept a world where being gay is fine. Those, like me who went to school with pink forms for girls, blue for boys and girls doing netball while boys did football, now have to cope with children being allowed to define their own gender. While racism was always wrong when I was a child, most of us told racist jokes and it wasn't because we were hateful Nazis but because that's what our peers were doing.

I recently read a case that made my piss boil where a man who considers himself to be a woman is trying to sue several body waxers for refusing to wax his genitals. Reason being he still has a penis and testicles. S/he is claiming that, as a woman, their actions amount to discrimination. The fact that the women involved probably just don't want to fondle a cock and balls doesn't enter into the equation.

Acceptance of change is always hard. We are now in an era where the expression "female penis" is used and "gender fluid" describes people who believe their sex changes and is not static (such as Ruby Rose, the new Batwoman). Those of us who grew up as change was on the horizon are more or less adept at dealing with this. Anyone from the eras beforehand is lost at sea. Things that were wrong and unethical or just plain weird to society are now just dandy and at no point did anyone ever say to these people, "Hey, we get that this is all alien to you so let's talk it through". Instead they were told that any disliking of the new regime meant they were intolerant haters, unfit to live in a brave new world.

When I was at school, noone was gay. The word was used as an insult, more usually replaced by "queer" and while legal it was considered wrong and extreme. In an effort to bring things to an even keel there has been huge acceptance of gay (when I was at Uni the initials were LGB. We are now up to LGBTQIA). Those who stood on the originally righteous side of the stance were never invited over the rainbow but simply told "if you don't like it then fuck off". It's the equivalent of having a new president every 4 to 8 years. Just as you get used to the current one, a new guy comes in and is nothing like the first, but you are still meant to accept the new status quo.

"Normal" changes on a yearly basis. Things that once would have got you arrested are now activities which people can be criminally sanctioned for criticising.

And the current US President is a racist dick.

Those who weren't given any Transition Training as the world morphed around them but found themselves pilloried or lambasted for their views, simply learned to keep their mouths shut. As Donald Trump continues to marginalise foreigners and airs his hateful views, you get more and more YouTube videos of people being racially abusive to non-English speakers. If the Commander-in-Chief hates Mexicans then it must be a free-for-all right? 

The enforced tolerance of diversity and the lack of any attempt at easing people into this tolerant, new world means that those who kep their prejudices to themselves for so long hadn't changed at all and are now finding outlets for it all. 

All it would have taken was some common sense. In my opinon the little turd who wanted women to wax his female dick and bollocks is as bad as the imbecilic resident President in the White House. Both lack perspective, tolerance and respect for the feelings of others.
If you want the world to accept change, then show them why that change is happening. When companies upgrade their software, they have a training day or week for their staff to adapt to the new system. They don't simply install new programmes and then call everyone cretins for not understanding how things work now.

---------------------------------------------------------
** It was always a joy to use this bus after the Sabbers had had it. Such as the time the Rock society took a trip to Sheffield Arena to see Faith No More and the whole thing honked of the smelly stuff they used to throw the hounds off the scent.

*^ Back then we got a Grant, meaning you didn't pay any of the money back. It was a gift. Hee! Hee!