Literal and figurative trannyfucker Zoë Whittall, an estimable authoress and journalistrix, nonsensically complains about an award for which she is nominated. God help us all: What if she wins it?
The prize is meaningful because the publishing industry is still hesitant to publish books with queer and trans characters written by queer and trans people. They will embrace books like Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides or Annabel by Kathleen Winter, but… those books would not have made it into the popular limelight if they weren’t written by cisgendered heterosexuals…. [T]he only books by Emma Donoghue to make it to the best-seller lists are the ones without gay characters.
Whittall has an excellent point here, one made much more pithily by Michael Cunningham: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.” But blowjobs are phallocratic, and anyway, whatever a gay male has to say is automatically suspect. Surely a gay man is neither queer nor trans, hence is actually the oppressor of both.
Cisgendered masquerades as a useful backformation but is used as a form of hate speech by tranny apologists – actually, the same people who insist that tranny constitutes hate speech. The difference here is they are trannies but we aren’t “cisgendered.”
So when I’m asked why the Lambdas need to exist,
(Apparently that happens a lot?)
it’s because there is a pink ceiling…. [I]t’s also an opportunity for those writers who do think it’s important to write about lives that reflect our lived realities to gather and celebrate our achievements and to be proud of the quality work that has been produced that year. I’m proud to be on the list, and at the same time, hope the awards will eventually not be necessary.
This doesn’t make sense, of course. If “queer and trans” lit awards aren’t necessary, it will be due to the elimination of “queer and trans” literature or that of the awarding body. It is not true that there will be no need for an award once every queer and trans person gets every queer and trans book published by mainstream houses and, as Whittall implies, once “cisgendered heterosexuals” get nothing at all published if its subjects are queer or trans. (Or, as she elsewhere complains, if they are “closeted” and writing about straight people.)
An ideologue who champions “queer and trans” writers manifestly will not lead us as we “celebrate” the “achievements” of gay-male writers – because those are not “our” achievements, Whittall suggests. My “lived reality” involves being lectured repeatedly that I am actually transgendered and that transgenderists are actually part of the legitimately constituted lesbian and gay community. Both claims are false. Whittall is the kind of activist who would start a Facebook protest against me if I actually published that “lived experience” in any sort of book. (She’s probably mulling one over right now.) The actual oppressor of “queer and trans” people, this ideology holds, is the gay male. I assume Whittall subscribes to that precept along with the others that come pre-approved as a matched set.
I told the editor of Quill & Quire that Whittall was an inspired hire as publishing reporter. I still think that. But, within a circle that should be even more marginal than she admits, Whittall is an ideologue who lobbies for success and recognition for only the literature of which she herself approves. She doesn’t want honest gay literature; she wants literature with an approved “queer and trans” agenda.
Gay writers writing gay stories for gay men are, I gather, to be opposed – unless they are willing to accept outsiders’ labels that they are “queer and trans” (even if they are neither), and only so long as they are not, in Whittall’s estimation, closeted.
Whittall’s are actually mainstream views in what passes for “the gay community” in this town.