Tell Me I'm Worthless(10)
Seeing this crowd, these imposters in the guise of women, makes her feel like the princess looking upon the chambermaid. And she can’t speak. To speak would be bigotry.
She skirts the crowd, on the other side of the street, trying to look like a nobody. The crowd thins as she turns around the building, but then she sees that the information that was texted to her was wrong, or at least not up to date. It’s a smaller group of protestors, here at the back entrance, but they’ve spotted her, and they can tell. She knows they can tell. Under the grey sky, their colourful bright clothing looks ridiculously out of season. The edges of the crowd are peppered with policemen and policewomen, looking confused. They don’t even know what this is. It’s totally clear, nobody briefed them on the specifics, beyond that there was some kind of meeting and some kind of counterprotest to the meeting. Her eyes scan the group around the door, but Alice isn’t there. She might still be with the other group, however. Fuck. What would she do, if she was here? If she had to see that face again? And she thinks, also, about all those unanswered messages she’s sent, and feels panic rising. Panic on the streets.
The crowd is chanting at the top of their lungs. When, if, she gets inside, she won’t even be able to make herself heard properly. She’ll have to write all of her words down on a whiteboard, or maybe scream them. If she screams her words that might make her seem hysterical. There’s a quote from Avital Ronell’s introduction to the SCUM Manifesto where she talks about Heidegger, the philosopher, feminising Nietzsche in a piece of writing and representing him as a hysterical bitch, and she always feels like that. Screaming to get her point across… and that’s what the protestors are doing, too. Maybe that’s why they really are women. Ila walks closer, trying to keep her head down, hidden partly under the thick scarf she wrapped around her neck and shoulders. Someone is taking photographs. The chanting is directed straight at her now, stabbing her all over as she walks closer to the group to try and get through. The cops have made sure there’s a path through the angry, hissing transgenders, but it’s a slim path, a fragile route. Ila puts her head down, not looking to either side, and follows it, trying to get to the door as quickly as she can, and from every side they scream at her. “Trans women are real women!” She bites her tongue. “Trans men are real men!” It’s a tuneless, empty chant. Every other syllable is enunciated. “Non-binary is valid!” She actually laughs, a light nervous laugh, at that one, because it doesn’t even fit the structure of their chant. They can’t even get “non-binary” to fit into their own calls for action! The crowd is getting closer on both sides, and, for a moment she wonders what happens if they get to her. The cops are there, sure, but they’re outnumbered. Could she run for it? Maybe, she doubts that there are any athletes amongst the group. But a crowd made of limbs and angry mouths can do so many things.
Finally, after what felt like far too long, she gets to the door, and opens it, into the warm, relatively safe inside of the building. Here, the crowd is still loud, but their monolithic, cult-like chanting is muffled, just a little bit. A smartly dressed young woman stands just inside, at a wooden table. She smiles at Ila warmly, but her eyes keep darting around the room with an anxious energy. They can’t seem to settle on Ila.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Gemma. Did you get in okay?”
The protestors have started to bang with their fists on the windows. The noise is echoing, deep and arrhythmic. She feels like her body is this building, and they are kicking her windows, and this hurts. “I mean, it was okay as it could possibly be, I suppose. Have the police said anything?” Ila asks.
Gemma listens to the banging for a moment. “They aren’t allowed to hit the windows like that.”
“Well, they’re doing it anyway,” says Ila. “What happens if they break the glass?” The question stays in the air. Gemma says nothing.
Outside the building, a policeman approaches the crowd calmy. The crowd, a collection of trans people and cisgender allies from around the city, plus a few from elsewhere, is unresponsive to him. The policeman voted Lib Dem in the last election and thinks of himself as an ally.
“Excuse me,” he calls at the protestors, the ones banging on the windows. “Protest all you like but you can’t do that!” The protestors stop, but he can see them smirking at him, and wonders why.
The meeting is filling up, despite the resistance from the blockade. Ila looks around, and notices that, with a couple of exceptions, she’s probably the youngest person here. A lot of the women have short, boyish haircuts, flecked with grey. Many look like academics. It’s hard to say what the academic look is, but Ila has seen enough tenured professors in her life to recognise the way they dress, the way they hold themselves. A sort of satisfied look on their faces. I made it; I did the impossible. That sort of look. Ila walks up to the refreshments table and pours herself a glass of red wine, although her hand isn’t steady.
This building itself is, apparently, the Black and Minority Ethnic Community centre, although Ila lives here, considers herself a member of the BAME community, and hasn’t ever heard of it before, let alone been here. It doesn’t escape her that almost every woman in this meeting, apart from her, is white. There are a few white men milling around too, here and there. She wonders sometimes if she is being tokenised and used as a shield against accusations of racism from the trans crowd. She probably is. It’s an inescapable fact of being involved in political action. People want you, yes, but not for you. No, they just like how you look in the press photos. A lot of these women only care about protecting women’s sex-based rights as an academic exercise, when this is actually a very material argument, one that affects, infects, and infests public life. This is not simply a thought experiment. She rubs her stomach, absentmindedly. It itches often but is rarely genuinely painful. There is a war on women being fought in public toilets across this country, and she needs to piss.