Transparent

So it happened again. This time in reverse. The booking was for a man. What turned up was clearly a young woman. It was obvious as she walked through the gate and across the pad – the way she walked, her demeanour, body shape and face all told the tale and that this was not by any stretch of the imagination, a man. So we had to make that mental adjustment and that is what ticks me off. We have to make the adjustment as if this all perfectly normal.

What is particularly sad about this episode is that this person had all sorts of issues that were way beyond our ability to deal with. Indeed, the training was over after about an hour and a half as this individual decided that she was unable to continue. Not having ridden a bicycle, she was in breach of our terms and conditions anyway. We are not there to teach a child to ride a bicycle, which is effectively what we were faced with; someone who lacked the basic ability to balance and coordinate.

During the introduction session, we noticed the scars on her lower arms and her demeanour told us of someone who had rather more problems than dysphoria. Again, we were expected to pick up and run with the problem, yet we are not equipped to do so. We are there to teach people to ride motorcycles. We are not a branch of social services.

I discussed this with my trainee instructor afterwards – to the effect that if someone has a mental illness, then enabling the delusion isn’t helping matters and that is what is happening en masse. We are expected to affirm someone’s delusion and I object. So did my trainee instructor although he did try, but ‘misgendered’ her on a number of occasions. As he pointed out, XX and XY chromosomes differentiate the sexes and if you are born a woman, you are a woman and vice versa. He was also somewhat more crude about it, involving cocks and fannies. As mentioned in the previous post, I don’t play the pronouns game. I work around it by referring to the person by name. I cannot be accused of misgendering, but have avoided pandering to the pronoun nonsense as well.

The problem here is that these people have their delusions indulged during education, by the health services and by the social services and expect it when they step into the wider world, with those issues still unresolved. We are expected to go along with the lie. Of course we were polite and treated this person with dignity, but our discomfort was difficult to hide, frankly, because we all knew that it was a big fat hairy lie. We were also out of our depth given the wealth of underlying mental health issues going on.

I guess it’s all because I live in a city that is full of wokery. There are times when I wish that I was living in rural France again.