Jarvis Dupont

After months of lockdown stress, I decided to treat myself to an afternoon of pampering at a health spa. I felt sure my anxiety-ridden bones would benefit from a nice long soak in some warm, soothing, vitamin-infused waters. I convinced myself that a deep massage, followed by a detoxifying celery juice smoothie would exorcise my inner demons and factory reset my mind’s iOS to pre-COVID levels of tranquility. Oh, dear reader, how wrong I was. For I had omitted to include the torrent of anti-trans bigotry I would encounter at the spa. As traumatic as it is, I shall relive my experience for you here so that it may never be repeated. As a trans woman, I am no stranger to uneducated TERFs and their ‘gender critical’ ignorance.

(If this were a documentary, I would open with the track ‘Turning Japanese’ by The Vapors which, yes, I know that’s the wrong ones, but I still think it would work so please have that song in mind as you read the opening paragraph.) Today something beautiful happened. A tortured soul was finally able to present themselves to the world as their authentic self. YouTube star, songstress and social media guru Oli London came out as Korean. Oh, and also nonbinary too, but to be honest all that gender stuff is getting a little old these days. When almost every social media influencer is either nonbinary or genderqueer, the market becomes somewhat oversaturated. Like what happened with Beyblades.

Dear Demi (whoever you are), I hope this letter finds you well and that you are able to mentally center yourself in a positive and mindful way by doing whatever it is that you do, (I’m sorry but I just don’t have time to Google you what with dealing with my own groundbreakingly courageous gender non-conforming shenanigans). I cannot express just how important it is that you’ve come out as a plural. Your bravery to invite the world to dip their jaded fingers into the open wound of your vulnerability strikes such a chord with me. I watched your video (at one point I thought I recognized you from somewhere...maybe a commercial for a cereal or something?

I wake up each morning and take a good long look in the mirror. ‘Wow! You are AMAZING!’ I say to my reflection. And I mean it. I truly mean it. I am literally gobsmacked at how incredible I am — and in so many ways. As a trans woman I am FIERCE. As an activist I am FEARLESS. As a human being I am empathy personified. Yet the moment I step out of my boudoir and into the virtual world of online social media, I am bombarded by negativity. Why is this? I know it’s not me. It’s YOU. Yes. I am sorry dear reader, but the fact that you are unable to handle me and all my perfections is a YOU problem. As an online influencer I am no stranger to violence. My viral videos often bring with them a torrent of abuse.

Before I begin, let me get one thing straight: I am not a racist. Therefore, anything negative I say in this article is aimed exclusively at Harry, NOT Meghan. I would never dream of criticizing a strong independent WoC and everything Meghan has done in her life so far, and will achieve in the future, is empowering — and a direct result of either her own inner strength, or the systemic racism she has faced while navigating the stormy seas of prejudice.  Good, now that’s out of the way, I shall get to the plant-based meat substitute of this article. The Oprah interview was nothing short of Earth-shattering. As a Brit myself (although I inwardly apologize for this every damn day), the impact Meghan’s truth has had on us as a nation has been immense.

A video game with a multitude of problematic themes and mechanics has recently been released which has once and for all cemented my already unfavorable opinion on so-called ‘open world role-playing games’. Cyberpunk 2077 was launched on PC and gaming consoles this week, which generated tumultuous excitement and praise across all the major social media platforms. This unavoidable hubbub came from the majority of the gaming community who were applauding the title for its ‘beautiful graphics’ and ‘combat mechanics’ et cetera. However, there were also a small group of (decent) people who were quick to point out the darker and more problematic elements of this immersive video game.

The Mandalorian is a fabulous new show on the Disney+ channel based in the Stars War universe. I watched at least 10 minutes of one episode the other week and I must say I very much enjoyed what I saw. As far as I could deduce, it is about a COVID-aware masked space knight who is instructed by bigots to capture a non-binary trans-age baby called ‘Yodel’ (they probably want to practice gay conversion therapy on the poor they) but thankfully, the Mandalorian is an ally who ends up empathizing with Yodel’s struggle and together they go on a quest to seek acceptance in a cold transphobic universe.

A worrying trend has emerged recently of non-trans uterus owners demanding the removal of inclusive language when dealing with gender-related issues. This is extremely harmful to the trans community as it is a blatant attempt to invalidate our existence as trans women and trans men. Many organizations have been making a valiant effort to respect trans and non-binary people by using more progressive and inclusive terms or phrases when advertising their products and services. This has been seen as a positive step forward in the struggle for validation for those of us who identify as non-cisgender.

Once more, I attempt to fall asleep. My eyes are heavy, I feel dizzy, weak. My body is wracked with aches and I am shivering uncontrollably. The blessed relief of healing slumber still eludes me. Is it morning or night? What day is it? I don’t know. Nearby I hear a muffled groan. Someone else is suffering. Another victim of this god-awful pandemic. How many more of us will it take? With some difficulty I manage to turn my head and can just make out large, blocky letters which from my perspective spell ‘AROD’, adorning the outer sides of my Dora the Explorer play tent. From the amount of light passing through the garish green fabric, I’m guessing it’s early morning. Moments before dawn. I survived another night. Another night of this sleepless nightmare.

As a trans woman and a Harry Potter fan, every day brings fresh pain. She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has written a new book (ironically, under a male pseudonym), and according to Pink News, it features a cisgender male serial killer who murders his victims while wearing women’s clothes. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from trans rights activists on Twitter has been immeasurable since Pink News imparted this information. It would seem that Rowldermort has finally decided to go full TERF and is not even attempting to hide her seething hatred towards the trans community.It’s probably no coincidence Rowling’s pen name for her amateurish yet unfathomably popular crime novel series is ‘Robert Galbraith’.

Dear Twitter,The other day I spotted an elderly man not wearing a mask in the pharmacy. He had a badge pinned to his shirt which proclaimed him to have COPD, absolving him of his responsibility to do the decent thing. At first glance everything looked legit, but to my keen eyes, the kerning on his medical exemption badge was all wrong. A friend of mine is doing a graphic design course and after discreetly WhatsApping them a close-up, they confirmed to me it was indeed a clever forgery. I immediately opened my Twitter app so that I could broadcast me shaming him to my 128,000 followers, but my plan was abruptly scuppered. I tapped the familiar icon and was confronted with a message telling me that my account, MY account had been suspended! SUSPENDED! Can you imagine that?

After years of speculation, Lilly Wachowski has finally given us confirmation that The Matrix trilogy is an allegory of the transgender experience. Although it is obvious to anyone who filters popular media through the lens of woke issues that Neo’s struggle to understand and accept his identity represented the conflict every transgender person faces, to have it verified by one of the writers is a significant step forward in the fight for equality. Some might question the reason as to why it’s taken so long for Lilly, who is herself transgender, to speak up about this and why she chose to highlight it now: ‘(In 1999) …the world just wasn’t ready for it’ she explains in a video.

The Associated Press recently posted an announcement on their website detailing their decision to capitalize the ‘B’ in Black when used in the context of race and culture.'These changes align with long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American,' writes AP’s Vice President for Standards, John Daniszewski in a blog post on the AP website.The following day a further announcement was made explaining why they had taken the decision to continue to use a lowercase ‘w’ in ‘white’ when used in the same context.

Professor Sprout has called out J.K. Rowling’s violently problematic comments regarding trans people in a recent article in the Times of London. ‘If you seriously want to become a woman you should be allowed to. You can’t be fascist about it,’ said the Hogwarts Herbology teacher, as she expertly re-potted a Bubotuber without wasting so much as one drop of its valuable pus. I could not agree more with the professor’s words. Since I transitioned, ‘Biology’ has become as problematic a subject as the Dark Arts. I am beginning to suspect Rowling had intended for us to see Voldemort as the hero in her books all along, seeing as she has far more in common with him than any Gryffindor.

For some time now conservatives have been using the tactic of rummaging around in a person’s past, searching for evidence of problematic behavior. They call it ‘cancel culture’. What makes this entire situation worse is that conservatives are not even doing anything original. They are attempting to appropriate a custom which has been practiced by people on the left for years, claiming it as their own. Normally I would see mob-shaming as a perfectly legitimate method of purging society of wrongdoers. The digging up and cataloguing of people’s past micro-aggressions so that we may discredit and ostracize them from the Tribe is something The Woke have been doing for at least a decade now.

It seems that recent events, from Black Lives Matter protests to J.K. Rowling’s transphobic Twitter rants, have given the wrong sort of people (Trump supporters) an excuse to inject their ignorant negativity like a poisonous bile into the noble veins of identity politics.But what is identity politics? Identity politics is a beautiful way in which we can bring people of all backgrounds together, before labeling them, allocating each of them demographic privilege points according to their place on the oppression hierarchy pyramid, and finally segregating them. Think of it as scratching a societal OCD itch of needing to organize the books on our shelves into alphabetical order. It’s neat. It’s tidy. It makes sense.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you will have been exposed to the bloodcurdling realization that the world’s (previously) most beloved author, J.K. Rowling, has outed herself as a transphobe, or ‘TERF’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist). After a shockingly bigoted rant on her Twitter feed, followed by a blog post in which she doubled-down on her hatred (I didn’t read it because the things it said were far too upsetting, but I’ve been told it’s filled with unspeakable hate and as such has been named ‘The Blog That Must Not Be Read’).

As soon as the lockdown guidelines were announced across the UK last week, I made the decision to move back in with my parents. As you can imagine after three years at university, this has been a somewhat challenging situation to adjust to! It has been made even more testing due to the fact father has had to lay off many of the staff due to them calling in sick. We are down to one cook and a mere handful of cleaners. It’s a nightmare! Thankfully we have a solid internet connection and I have been able to occupy myself on social media the past few days. I say ‘occupy’, but that’s more of an understatement. It’s been more of an essential lifeline to me.