Uncle Dysfunctional

by AA Gill

  Jules, by email

  There was a fat prat who begat,

  Bloke triplets named Nat, Tat and Pat.

  It was fun in the breeding, but hell in the feeding,

  There wasn’t a spare tit for Tat.

  Dearest Uncle,

  I’m a neutrois person, sometimes identifying as “a gender”. Though people always ask, “What’s next on the agenda?” And laugh, like they’re the only person who’s ever said it. And I either have to gender shame them and walk out, or just smile and pretend I’ve never heard it before. The thing is, my partner is gender fluid. Although, actually, ze is being a bit sluggish at the moment. The fluidity gets stuck in the blokey quadrant when it comes to tidying up and folding things. What is it about the Y chromosome that means you can’t fold a towel? OK, that’s not what I’m writing about. I’m comfortable with my self-identification, and I’m basically happy with my gender-sluggish mate, but what I can’t stand is not being able to have a conversation about anything else. It’s all my cis friends talk about to me. In fact, all my LGBTQ friends talk about it endlessly. It’s not that I’m not interested, up to a point, in gender, it’s that we all have to be so careful and polite and worried about saying the wrong word. It’s like talking about sex in church. Did you know, there are more than 50 gender identifications? You need to be a genital trainspotter to get them all right. What, for instance, are “spicvak pronouns”, for fuck’s sake? Or “two-spirited”? Actually, that’s quite interesting: it’s a Native American (not Indian) Zuni term for someone who swings both ways. It’s called “he man eh” in Cheyenne, which sounds funny in English but, of course, you can’t laugh because that’s transgender-shaming someone’s sensibilities. And it’s white colonial insensitivity, humour hegemony. I’m fed up with having to pussyfoot around all this stuff. And, of course, you can’t say “pussyfoot” because that offends absolutely everybody, including foot fetishists. I’m all in favour of political gender correctness – safe spaces, non-discriminatory language – but it all becomes about the grammar and finger-wagging snobbery. It’s not like being free and open and just what you like, it’s like being a member of some terrible, stuffy club. And it’s not about the really important stuff, like housing and benefits and schools and job discrimination and what’s on your passport. There is no end to the language and the pronouns, and it’s become my identity when my whole fight was to lose my identity. I’d like to talk about football and Game of Thrones, and Theresa May’s kitten heels, and quinoa. Anything but gender definitions. The only thing I envy about all you cis folk is that you never talk about it, your gender. It’s like the colour of your front doors – just there. Whether you cook on gas or electric, full fat or diet; it’s what you are. I want to be like that. Do you know what the definition of a bio queen is, by the way? It’s a person who identifies as a woman, dressing as a man who dresses as a woman. For fuck’s sake, which communal dressing room do they use?

  E., London

  There was a non-binary neutrois from Khartoum,

  Who took a gender neutral ace to ze room.

  They argued all night, about who had the right,

  To name what and which and then whom.

  Mr Dysfunctional,

  Oh boy! Ohhhhhhh boy. Are we great. Are we great. We put the “grrrr” in great. The grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. And the “eat”. We put the “eat” in great: breakfast with syrup and butter and hash browns on the side. Liberals don’t do that – they don’t have butter dripping off their chins at the bar, listening to Tammy and crying into their first Jack at 8.30 in the morning. They have kale juice and Valium on the side. Grrrrrrr give yourself a big hug – a manly, A-frame, “no downstairs touching” hug. Oooo yeah, you’ve earned that. Unless, of course, it’s a little intern beside you. Then you can give her the loin lunge because you’ve earned that, too. You are president. Oh yes. You are “this isn’t about me, this is all us – all us.” You are president. Who put the “dent” in president? You did. No, I did. We all did. We all loin-lunged the “dent” in president. But only the guys – only the guys with a functioning, low-hanging, unfeasibly juicy pair are president. Sorry ladies, no president for you. You’re squashed on the glass ceiling like a damselfly on the windscreen of life. Oh my God, who writes this stuff?

  But the pussy-grab you can feel, ladies, that’s exciting. A fistful of man digit – it belongs to a president. Sweet. Heat. Suck it up. When I say “it doesn’t mean just me, of course”, I am the President of Presidents. I am The Trumpster, the Grand Wizard of Trump. OK. Grrrrrrrrrr. Incredible. Incredible!

  I would just like mention the Secret Service here today: if there’s someone beside you who you can’t see, a big, all-American man-mountain, he’s in the service – of the secrets. They’re not presidents, they’re better than that – they look after presidents who are better than all the other presidents. The man who saves the president’s life on a daily, hourly, minutely, secondly basis, that’s who. I’ve met some of the most powerful, attractive, fanciable, fecund men ever in the Secret Service. They’re incredible. Who put the “in” in incredible? Whenever we have a shower in the morning, and we’re all under the power together, I can feel the man-power, and smell the most real men, with the most real jobs in the real world. Four-square, hands on hips, clench-it-and-take-it-like-a-man jobs.

  I have a question. It’s not that I don’t know the answer, it’s what liberals call rhetorical. Yes, they do say “rhetorical” because they can’t say “rest your tonsils on that, bitch”. It’s a question where I already know the happy ending. Pay attention, Dysfunctional. Who put the “dys” in dysfunctional? Don’t tell me, I already know. So, the question is this: me and my buddies here have got to be president for at least four years. Really. I’ve had marriages that haven’t lasted that long. So my question is, Dysfunctional, I’ve got to deal with a shedload of other countries. None of them are America. And just why is this? At this juncture of our history, why aren’t there more Americas?

  I mean, why aren’t we franchising America? Buying up useless countries, asset-stripping them down and rebranding them as America? This is the problem with Washington – no one has a business mind. No one thinks outside of the diplomatic box.

  So, this is what we’re doing: we’re going to franchise until we have the biggest damn takeaway country in the world. And then we’re going to start building American worlds in space. Oh yes. USA! USA! USA! The question is, I need to meet all these other, un-American countries and, like, smack them, or pussy-grab them, but I’m damned if I can tell them apart. So, can you give me a handy guide to telling countries apart? For instance, if they were say, like, Miss World contestants, which, obviously they all are, but didn’t have the sash because I’d already used it to blindfold them so the Secret Service guys could get their balls buffed without having to be seen. If countries were pussy, what sort of pussy would they be? This is your assignment. Who put the “ass” in assignment? You know it, baby. Go work it.

  Donald, Washington, D.C.

  Your letter came as something of a surprise, Mr President Trump. I didn’t have you down as someone who asked for advice, though I did imagine that you would write letters as though you were addressing a Nuremberg rally of drunk, antique gun enthusiasts. Your enquiry raises an interesting question: are countries like women? Can you anthropomorphise them? The fact that most people do see their nation as a person is interesting, and that most of us tend to see her as a woman, usually a mother. I mention this because of your observation about glass ceilings: you may not have a woman president but you already live in a female country. It is a woman, it is a mother, it is the motherland. You have never lived in a male country. America is personified by a woman: Liberty. She stands at the end of your hometown, adorned with a poem by another woman asking for the world to send her refugees. Liberty was given to America by the French, and she bears some familiar resemblance to their national figure, Marianne, the revolutionary feminist with her breasts out, storming the barricades. In
Britain, we have Britannia, a seafaring goddess who harks back to classical Rome. The Romans had any number of representative women, as did the Greeks. And the Egyptians. So if you want to remember nations by their female familiars, there’s Marianne, Britannia, Athena, Liberty, and you might like the she-wolf of Rome for America.

  Acknowledgements

  Alex Bilmes would like to thank Nicola Formby, Gerald Scarfe, Jamie Byng, Hannah Knowles, Rafi Romaya, Ed Victor, the staff of British Esquire, especially Rachel Fellows and Brendan Fitzgerald, and Adrian, the Uncle I never knew I wanted, but am lucky to have had.