Rachel, Matt’s mother, was clear when she agreed to take part in the Tavistock series that she didn’t want to sugar-coat what Matt and the family has been — and continues to go — through. They live in Wales. It’s fair to say that in their part of the world transgender rights are not on many people’s radar. Sometimes it’s the small things that resonate. Matt, who loves swimming, was recently disqualified from a competition for being in the boys’ team. “I said to my partner, Pete, ‘Don’t flower it up.’ I want it as gritty as it gets so people see what it’s like.”
At the Tavistock, Matt’s caseworker, Dr Charlie Beaumont, encourages him to unpick his feelings, but Matt finds it painfully difficult to talk. His caseworker is concerned there “is a lack of consistency of gender presentation”. On the other hand, if not prescribed blockers, might Matt self-harm? Matt is 12. There are signs that breasts are beginning to develop. It’s not long now before periods will start.
There is a sense that time is running out, but Rachel tells the doctors tearfully: “I’m not quite ready to lose Tills.” She struggles with the impression that has come from Hollywood that being transgender is easy. “I hear all the stuff about people being gender fluid and think, this isn’t a fashion thing. There are people in the media who make this all look easy: a man one day; a woman the next. But the reality is it’s hard work. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. This isn’t left-wing parenting. I’m not somebody going, ‘Look how fluid I am with everything.’”
Matt, who loves writing stories and is a massive fan of David Walliams (who wrote the children’s book The Boy in the Dress), is round-faced, with short hair and expressive big brown eyes. At passport control the authorities often cast around for a girl — “Where’s Mathilda?” — and don’t believe his mum when she points to Matt. So much so, the family has a letter from GIDS for whenever they go abroad.
As early as aged two and a half, a health visitor commented that Matt — then known as Matilda, or Tills, which is what Rachel still frequently calls him, perhaps betraying her own bewilderment at the turn of events — had an unusually deep voice. “As she got older I always thought she was just a very strong tomboy,” Rachel says, looking back. “Detested wearing dresses, didn’t want to have her hair combed. I remember buying her knickers and thinking, why on earth does everything have to be covered in princesses? Aged five, she told me she wanted hair that didn’t move. In other words, she wanted me to shave her hair off.
“I wasn’t too bothered. Not until she started telling everyone she was a boy. At that point, I thought I’d better go to the doctor.” Hormone tests were carried out and the assumption was that this was a child who was intersex. When the tests came out negative, Rachel was referred to the GIDS unit.
What was that like? “Oh, they make you question everything,” she says. “I think they are trying to find out if this has been nurtured at all. Is this the child or is this the parent pushing their child to be something they don’t want to be? But I think they identified quickly that I wasn’t happy about it. Why would anybody want their child to face the kind of prejudice that was likely to come her way?”
Matt struggled with his education and being bullied until he got a place at a specialist school where he is accepted as male. “At the old school I’d beg them not to be so gender specific. Now I worry that I sent him to the wolves every day.” Despite his being happier at school, Rachel still checks on Matt through the night because she is worried he might hurt himself. She has got rid of anything that could cause harm — the cords on a blind, dressing-gown ties.
In the documentary we watch Rachel weighing up the pros and cons of hormone blockers. “My concern is that it suppresses things. Maybe if she did go through puberty, she’d click into girl mode and be actually, ‘I want to be a girl now.’ I don’t think that will happen, but my worry is that I really am interfering. Now this isn’t nature, it is nurture. On the other hand being able to press the pause button could be a good thing.”
What does Tills/Matt think? “Tills thinks the rest of the world has gone mad. Just leave me alone. What’s wrong with me? I’m just me.”
Stephanie Davies-Arai is a parent coach behind a website called Transgender Trend, concerned about the rise in the number of children referred to gender clinics. She argues: “We are setting children off on a path towards sterilisation: medicalisation. It is an experiment that has no precedent … Are we really willing to so readily accept that a child is the ‘wrong’ sex at this age rather than address the bullying and the culture that tells him so?” It’s a view, she says, that has lost her friends — “There’s a feeling that if you don’t go along with current trends, you are transphobic.”
At first I presumed Transgender Trend was religiously or politically motivated, but that doesn’t seem to be the case when we meet. Her view, thoughtfully argued, is that when she was a teenager she, too, would have questioned her gender. “I would have been trans. Because I was not only a tomboy; in my head I was a boy. My sister and I went through our pre-pubescence calling each other Mike and Bill. Until my mid twenties, I didn’t want to be a woman. I was a rebel. I look at what is going on and think, I would have gone for this.” She doesn’t think children can make a decision about gender until their mid twenties when the brain has reached maturity, and that living as the opposite sex at a young age means “you are changing that child’s brain, you are building a new identity and by the time you are 12, puberty is the enemy”.
Her concern is that, with the help of social media, there might be more awareness around trans, but we’re ignoring the issue of social contagion. Davies-Arai argues that it’s become cool to be “trans”, more accepted than being a lesbian, for example, which is one possible reason why referrals of teenage girls have increased so dramatically. She has heard of clusters of girls binding their breasts and saying they are boys; that parents complain their children are coming home saying, “I’m not sure if I am a boy or a girl,” after a class talk about transgender. “Any kid who is like I was — outside the crowd, a bit awkward, the ones who don’t fit in — all ‘gender nonconforming’ kids are included under the trans umbrella now and they are being given no alternative way of understanding their feelings of distress.”
But what would she do if her traumatised seven-year-old child announced he/she wanted to change sex? “I would say, be quite casual about it. Don’t make a big fuss. Take it away from gender. Parents are advised now to take it very seriously — and I think that is the last thing you do. Address the bullying instead.”
If Davies-Arai does have an agenda, it is a feminist one. Almost 1,000 natal females were referred to the Tavistock last year. Might this be more about girls struggling with puberty and their bodies? “There’s nobody asking, why do so many teenage girls not want to become women? I think that’s what we should be asking, rather than accepting the least likely answer, that they are really boys. It seems a way for us not to seriously look at the culture we are bringing our girls up in.”
To some degree, Carmichael might have sympathy with this last argument. What she and her team try to figure out, over months and years, is, “How far are the physical changes one seeks motivated more around feeling that you fit in and are accepted by others?
“You might think, gosh, what are we doing?” says Carmichael. “But there isn’t a right and a wrong. No one has the answers. It is an evolving picture with many voices contributing. All we can go on is that people who have taken this route feel this was the right thing to do.”
In the documentary, Beard, the director, says to Ash: “Some people change their minds …”
“Some people. Not me,” she responds. Do you think you’ll be a girl for ever, he asks. “Yes,” she replies. And turns a cartwheel.
A BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHTER IN THE BLOODIEST CONTEST EVER
Rhys Blakely
NOVEMBER 8 2016
IT BEGAN WITH a ride down a golden escalator in the marble atrium of a New York skyscraper. It was June 16, last year, and
Donald Trump was announcing a run for the White House. America had no idea what was about to hit it.
Some of the crowd had been paid $50 apiece to turn up at that first campaign event and Mr Trump made headlines with a 40-minute speech in which he praised his golf courses, promised to build a “great wall” along the southern border and called Mexican immigrants rapists. The most wildly unpredictable US election in living memory had begun.
In the months to come, Mr Trump would feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier, a Hispanic beauty queen, the leadership of his party, and the Pope. Defying the pundits, this former reality TV star, whose divorces and sex life had kept New York’s tabloids entranced for decades, would become the first presidential nominee of a major US party to have no experience in office since Eisenhower and the very first to have boasted about the size of his manhood in a presidential primary debate.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton would face another populist. The former secretary of state announced her candidacy in April last year. She set off on an image-softening road trip to Iowa. The path ahead was rockier than she imagined. The rivals she feared most — Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator — stayed out of the race. But Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont, would electrify Democrats suspicious of Mrs Clinton’s ethics, her ties to big business and her support for free trade.
She endured a bruising primary while the FBI investigated a secret email system she used while leading the State Department. In February Mr Sanders effectively battled her to a tie in the Iowa caucus, the first primary contest, and then trounced her in New Hampshire. Mrs Clinton was running to be the first woman president, but young women shunned her candidacy.
As the primary race headed to the South, black voters saved her campaign. But questions lingered over whether she could animate Obama voters. She emerged as the second most unpopular nominee of a major US party since polling began. The silver lining? She was running against the first.
It was often predicted that Mr Trump’s candidacy would fade. Seventeen Republicans had thrown their hat into the ring: it was a good year to run as a member of the Grand Old Party. A Democrat had occupied the White House for two terms, and rarely has a party kept it for three. Most voters thought the country was on the wrong track. There were six past and current Republican governors and five senators in the race.
Few thought that a brash, twice-divorced celebrity could make a mark. Early on, though, Mr Trump displayed two skills. The first was for attracting media coverage. His mastery of Twitter and of insults bamboozled his rivals. It was estimated that he garnered “free” media coverage worth $2 billion.
The second skill was reaching voters who felt overlooked and left behind, especially white men without a college education. His candidacy coincided with a new scepticism about what he called “the siren song of globalisation”.
Mr Trump’s diatribes against political correctness, free trade and illegal immigration electrified a section of the right. Supporters quickly forged a consensus on what made him special: his outspokenness, his business acumen, wealth that made him immune to cronyism and his outsider status.
At his first “town hall” event, in the critical early voting state of New Hampshire, Jim Donahue, 65, a maths teacher, thought that Mr Trump could be “America’s Vladimir Putin — a nationalist to make the people think that the country could be great again”.
It was not until the first Republican primary debate, on August 7 last year, that his rivals realised that Mr Trump was a threat. He was leading the polls and placed at the centre of the stage. His demeanour was glowering, his tan a striking shade of orange. In the opening seconds, the moderators asked the ten men who had qualified to participate if any would refuse to rule out running as an independent in the election.
A theatrical pause — then one hand crept up: Mr Trump’s, of course. The crowd booed this challenge to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not turn on a fellow Republican. The atmosphere was somewhere between game show and a bare-knuckle boxing match. It was riveting television. The audience broke records.
That evening, aides of Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom the Clinton campaign feared the most, realised something: untethered to an ideology, unburdened by a respect for facts, and willing to say things no other candidate would dare, Mr Trump was unmanageable.
But that first debate also highlighted his flaws. Megyn Kelly, a star presenter, confronted him on how he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”. Later that evening he was swarmed by a mob of reporters. Amid the mêlée, Mr Trump fumed. “I think Megyn behaved very nasty to me,” he said. That night he retweeted a message that called her a “bimbo”. He later suggested that she had asked him unfair questions because she had been menstruating.
That pattern would recur: Mr Trump could not let slights slide. Fourteen months later, when they met for three presidential debates, Mrs Clinton, apparently on the advice of psychologists, baited him. In Las Vegas she said he would be a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump could barely contain his fury. “No puppet. No puppet,” he spluttered. “You’re the puppet.”
Voters were already worried about his temperament. In the final days of the campaign his aides had blocked him from Twitter, to stop the acts of self-sabotage that frequently cost him support. His treatment of women would come back to haunt him, too.
The summer of last year, however, became known as the “summer of Trump”. While the Clinton campaign churned out thousands of words of policy proposals and dodged press conferences, Mr Trump did things no candidate had ever done. At a fair in Iowa he gave children rides on his helicopter. He spent more money on “Make America Great Again” baseball hats than on polling. He demurred when he was asked to denounce a leader of the KKK. He did not release his taxes. He had fun: “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he said.
Last February a second place in the Iowa caucuses for Mr Trump was followed by a victory in the New Hampshire primary. As the primaries headed first to the conservative Deep South and then north to the rust-belt states of the upper Midwest and the industrial Northeast, Mr Trump kept on winning. May 4 marked the Indiana primary. Mr Trump started his day by alleging without a shred of evidence that the father of Mr Cruz, one of only two rivals still standing, had helped to assassinate President Kennedy. By the end of the day the contest was over: Mr Trump was the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee.
Mrs Clinton, meanwhile, was making campaigning look like solemn work. In July the FBI said it would not recommend charges after investigating whether she had broken the law by using a private email server. The revival of that investigation ten days before the election would send Democrats reeling, and the unflattering inner workings of Mrs Clinton’s campaign were revealed when private emails were hacked, probably by Russia.
Time and again, though, Mr Trump defied the laws of political gravity. He won the votes of evangelical Christians despite saying: “I’m not sure I have ever asked God’s forgiveness.” He said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
He called the voters of Iowa “stupid”. He said that women who had abortions should be punished. The leaders of his own party denounced his attacks on a Hispanic judge as racist. He made remarks some interpreted as promoting violence against Mrs Clinton. He was forced to fire his second campaign manager over alleged links to Kremlin-sponsored strongmen, praised Mr Putin and asked Moscow to hack Mrs Clinton. In the final presidential debate, he suggested he might keep the country “in suspense” and not accept the results of the election.
America has seen populists before. None, though, rose as far or as fast. US politics will never be the same.
LEONARD COHEN
Obituary
NOVEMBER 11 2016
FOR SOMEONE WHOSE songs earned him the epithet “the godfather of gloom”, Leo
nard Cohen had a highly developed and mischievous sense of humour. “I don’t consider myself a pessimist,” he noted. “I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain — and I feel soaked to the skin.”
The subject of his songs over a career that spanned half a century was the human condition, which inevitably led him into some dark places. He suffered bouts of depression and his mournful voice and the fatalism of his lyrics led his songs to be adopted by the anguished, lovelorn and angst-ridden as a personal liturgy.
However, there were also what Cohen called “the cracks where the light gets in”. Despite his image as a purveyor of gloom and doom, the inherent melancholia of his songs was nuanced not only by deep romanticism but by black humour.
A published poet and novelist who was in his thirties before he turned to music, Cohen was the most literate singer-songwriter of his age. With Bob Dylan, he occupied the penthouse suite of what he called “the tower of song”. Together Cohen and Dylan not only transformed the disposable, sentimental métier of popular music into something more poetic and profound but, for better or worse, made the pop lyric perhaps the defining form of latter 20th-century expression. In an era in which anyone who warbled about “the unicorns of my mind” was liable to be hailed as a poet, Cohen was the genuine article.
Many of his best-known songs — Suzanne, So Long, Marianne and Sisters of Mercy — were romantically inspired by the women in his life. In Chelsea Hotel #2, the theme of longing, love and loss turned to pure lust as he described a liaison with the singer Janis Joplin as she gave him “head on the unmade bed/ While the limousines wait in the street”.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 7