Merlin Betts
I read this and I immediately thought of the biblical Eve. I bet a lot of you did too. Eve, or an archetypal woman. I didn’t know that “All About Eve” also refers to a band, and that their name comes from a 1950s film, “All About Eve”, which is about women lecherously stealing other women’s star-lit lives. I don’t know how much of these connections the anonymous writers from East Sussex Women’s Rights Network wanted to feature in their HIP article, by the same title.
Were they perhaps trying to suggest that transwomen, like Eve Harrington, are trying to steal ‘real’ women’s lives, without putting the ‘real’ work in? Do they love 80s goth rock? Or do they like the way that in many interpretations of the Bible, women are formed from a rib pulled out of a man’s chest, and made to serve that man, at the behest of a big patriarchal prick in the sky? Anything is possible.
This article isn’t the first “gender critical” piece that Hastings Independent has printed. That was possibly back in 2018. It’s not the first “gender critical” bit of “opinion” that’s appeared anywhere. But it is the one that’s made me think, right, it’s time to talk about this. Everyone is mad. I am mad. We all need to calm down, and talk about this.
So I’m going to do a little series on topics brought up in the “gender debate”, from toilets to the hard science of biology. And we’re going to try to bring ourselves back to reality.
But first, Eve.
In the beginning, we told stories
Since I was at nursery, I’ve had my reservations about religious metaphors, you know: angels, devils, divine and demonic, later on even ghosts and spirits more generally. Something about heaven and hell being the only two options after death didn’t quite sit right with me. It’s not like I didn’t believe in them, it’s just that they didn’t feel… real. I was given them, somewhere along the line (apparently even before I was given my Dad’s paganism), as an explanation for something I didn’t understand: life, death. And they were going to have to serve until I found something better.
Fast forward, maybe to my teens, and a different origin story trope was giving me the itch of unreality, and this trope sits in Genesis (i.e. the start of the Bible, if you somehow weren’t socially adapted to this stuff from childhood).
By now I’d come across the similarity between history, as told by science, and history as told by stories. It turns out when people can’t write things down (oral history), they do actually value the substance of a story they have to remember. They might change some details to suit their times, but they venerate the core story enough (almost like it’s a spirit or a god) that they don’t completely alter it suit their own goals. It’s hard to know what words were used, but those that were eventually written down are often very broad in their meanings. One word can encompass many things. And that’s partly how the stories survived – the content could change, without the words changing.
Deliberate manipulation of history seems like it became much more widespread after we started writing (or recording generally) on paper, stone, that kind of thing. ‘Making our own art,’ and making our own stories I suppose. We started to think of the individual making the thing, not the collective. And then maybe because the scale of deception got bigger as more art was produced, it became easier to convince people they didn’t know the ‘real’ story themselves. Easier to convince us that there had to be an arbiter telling us which recording was the right one, which words were the correct words… and make us lose track of the story we once all knew in the process.
And this is where we come to Adam and Eve. You know, the tale where this God bloke rips a rib out of The Man and transforms it into a woman. The Judeo-Christian story. Well, a (rather patriarchal) take on the Judeo-Christian story. It’s wrong. Or, our usual take on it is wrong. The Church-approved, 100% oppressive nonsensical take is wrong. But in the old Hebrew, it’s not that take that we read. In the old Hebrew, it reads more like oral history. Open to interpretation, capable of surviving the centuries, not yet fully codified into a set formula (despite many overwhelming attempts).
What is Eve?
I started doing some research and, if you’re into your philosophy and theology and all that, God isn’t a male. God is a supreme entity that isn’t remotely concerned about gender. Think about it – man and woman aren’t perfect, so not only how, but why would God (apparently a perfect being) be one or other of them? It wouldn’t be. It’s beyond that. It could be everything at the same time – including both man and woman – but it couldn’t be just one bit of everything alone. So, you could have non-binary God, but you can’t have man God or woman God standing alone. Those are aspects, they’re not independent.
If you’re religious, then suggesting that God is a man is blasphemous, because God is far beyond all this genital nonsense. The first human in the ol’ Bible book, “Adam”, or Man, isn’t a male either. Adam is a goddamn non-binary being. A human that exists before man and woman. That’s what “Adam” means, more or less. Not man, but human. This being is then supposedly separated into the two genders by some divine process.
I read this definition of Adam and I thought, well, when you look at it that way, the story isn’t too bad. And I know some science. I know that all of us humans come from a female template. In the womb, when we’re growing, we begin biologically female. For men, the Y chromosome then starts to send out instructions for that female form to grow and develop differently, and it (usually) becomes a male form. That sounds a bit non-binary, doesn’t it?
The other part to the Hebrew “Adam” is that it also means red, earth, mud, as in the root and associations of the word are “red”. Whereas Eve is something like “breath of life”, which doesn’t seem particularly masculine or feminine to my ears. This makes me wonder about the usual translations of these Genesis passages, which say God used the breath of life to turn mud sculptures into humans, and God pulled woman from man. However you want the story to unfold, I think there’s a bit more going on here than animated mud people being given open chest surgery…
What if these words aren’t names at all, what if they’re heavily loaded with various meanings and they’re trying to tell us the story of… maybe the first mother, and her first child, and not the story of two or three people called Adam and Eve?
Genesis 2
So I started to consider these two stories, because it is two stories, not one. The physical story is that someone was born from the first and last mother. And that child is the first human. The one becomes two.
Churches usually interpret this story as God making the woman from part of Adam. But men don’t have wombs. Men don’t bring forth new life in that way. Women do. Why would God pull a child-bearing creature out of a sterile one? Wouldn’t it make more sense for God to make the woman pregnant? Like with that Mary lass? So I think the “Adam” here is a pre-human female. Not yet man and woman (in the human sense) but containing both, because she’s pregnant.
It doesn’t matter who the father is. I mean, in other parts of nature, females can reproduce asexually (or parthenogenetically, if you want to get fancy) i.e. without a partner. Komodo dragons are an often cited example of this. But since men generally don’t have wombs, they can’t do this.
Apart from my fascination with the history of motherhood in animals, we don’t need a father here because this story is a chicken and an egg situation. The egg comes ‘first’, because it’s a new genetic code separating itself from the previous creature that wasn’t quite a chicken, but the egg also comes ‘second’, nurtured by and birthed from a creature capable of producing children.
It’s the point of divergence, it’s the place where we start, it’s the way we all come from a womb. It’s a “genesis”, or it’s “bereshit” (Hebrew), it’s a beginning. The father, whoever he was, has already done his part. In this moment we focus on the mother and the newborn. It’s also an ending, because the egg has stopped being part of the mother, maybe because the father has stopped being a potential partner and become an actual one, and the mother likewise. In the broader biological context, the pre-human may have also become the last pre-human, to be replaced by increasingly modern/current humans. Beginning and end, they’re kinda the same thing, over and over again.
Genesis 1
Which brings us onto the second story, one that’s more… spiritual, perhaps. Mystical, even. That from the earth, from the raw matter, from the mud and blood, a drive… a something, caused life to push forward. The life is not limited to human, is not limited to male or female. It’s just life. And from this mud, and this spirit, and this air, comes… all manner of complexity. From humble origins, a world of change and renewal. This story isn’t concerned with who’s the mother and who’s the son. Who’s the father and who’s the daughter. This story is just talking about the origin of life. The invisible but eminently obvious drive that keeps us all going.
It could also be describing some of the events that made the world the way it is today – it could be an early science textbook. It could be describing evolution. But I think it’s more about reflecting on life itself, on the brilliance of existence as a concept, as a reality in fact. Adding a little science does make this story more beautiful (in my opinion), but they clearly didn’t need modern atomic theory to write it, so let’s not force that on them.
Now before you go and say God isn’t bound by my human logic, He can do what He wants, I remind you that it’s blasphemous to assume God’s gender (and thereby impose limits on a limitless being) and that it’d be weird for God to pull woman out of a man, but then change everything related to reproduction in nature such that it was focussed on things coming from women and not things coming from men (despite our best attempts to skew that otherwise).
And God doesn’t actually do weird – not that God necessarily exists in the first place. I mean it always has a reason for doing something, right? It’s always “God’s plan”, not “God slipped on a banana peel and then this happened.” And the Bible says there was this story. This thing based in oral history that actually contained many stories, in the old words. Stories that have since left this tale, been locked out by new words, and which have gone off into other parts of our shared cultural reality. Stories that are now maybe coming back to remind us what the point was all along… that life is good?
Recalling humanity
I’m a godless pagan (no gods, no masters), so it’s all a bit moot point for me really, but an interesting set of meanings to reimagine. If you don’t find the philosophising so interesting, skip to the next section.
It might sound as though I’m talking about Genesis like this to be flippant or contrarian, and I do have a streak of that in me. Every masochist has to be able to imagine sadistic things, and likewise everyone attempting goodness has to cover some of it up by being a mardy arse, or a puckish fool. Apart from being a pagan, as I was raised and as befits the land of Albion, I was also brought up with Christianity everywhere. And, believe it or not, I do have some respect for the Christian tradition. I’m not an atheist (nor a science-denier). I’m actually an ordained priest of the Universal Life Church – the one that started as an anti-establishment church (enabling anyone to become a priest, not just those approved by the hierarchy) which now mainly helps layfolk do marriages and funerals.
If you like I’ll talk to you about the Gospel of Mary, and what God should actually be like if the Cartesian Attributes don’t contradict each other. I can mention the spirituality of physics and reference Thomas Aquinas, I can question capitalism with rumours of St Augustine. I’m not entirely averse to talking Bible, as you may have noticed. Even if it’s no-where near my favourite way of doing “faith”.
But really I just think it’s mad that we’ve all forgotten what it is to be human, and discussing an origin story that many of us have been educated in feels like it might begin to address that.
If it’s not clear what I mean by “what it is to be human”, I mean human being – a being, a creature, an entity that exists, lives and breathes, thinks and feels. That is both complicated and simple, that is endlessly flexible but also carefully structured. The basic familiarities of life. We seem to have alienated ourselves from those familiar challenges, and instead we’ve started living through a system of rules and legislation that never pretended to be human – that was always a compromise rather than a solution, that always pretended to be easy when it was actually hard.
In reality, the answers don’t come from a parliament, for example. The folk elected to sit there are just supposed to keep the peace (and I’m not sure they’re doing a particularly good job of that at the moment, but there we go). The answers don’t come from a Church. The folk there aren’t elected and aren’t supposed to tell you anything at all.
“The answers”, the way to exist, come from living life. We’ve learned everything the hard way, through untold ages of evolution. We’ve come from atoms, smaller particles than atoms, we’ve come from nothing and become this. We exist with all of that history and experience inside us. We’re still pretty silly. We still make mistakes. But that’s what we’re supposed to do, that’s the only thing we can do. There is no higher authority, there’s just us – life. Living. Making it work.
It may or may not surprise you to remember, this is the start of an article series about trans rights and transphobia. It’s a series that will contain my opinion. How factual that opinion might be is up to you to decide. Where I refer to sources, I haven’t made them up, but I won’t tell you that my interpretation of them is the only interpretation that exists. If you want to challenge it, by all means do.
What do I think about trans rights?
Cards on the table, I’m white, middle class and my birth certificate says I’m male. I think everyone is non-binary. I think you shouldn’t need a certificate of recognition stating that you have gender dysphoria if you have complicated feelings about your sex organs and your allocated social role. Perhaps because of my position of privilege, I think everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want, as long as they’re not harming anyone else. So I have no idea why it’s so difficult for this country to accept trans people.
Except I was also raised by lawyers. And by the telly. I paid attention to the society around me and I know Britain seriously struggled to accept gays, even coming up to the 90s and the new millenium. It still struggles now. If it couldn’t accept gays, didn’t believe in lesbians, and hadn’t even heard of bisexuals, how’s it going to know what to do with trans people?
Society has moved on a lot since 1967, but a lot of people who were born before then, live now. A lot of people who grew up being taught that gays are abhorrent paedophiles in schools, are alive now. Many of us now happily talk about the LGBTQIA+ community, but a lot of us still have barely any idea what that acronym means.
I mentioned being raised by lawyers. Well, the law also has no idea what most of this means, and the law hates to look like it doesn’t know what something means. The law also doesn’t do detail. It tries sometimes, but endlessly detailed statutes are nightmares that inevitably don’t work properly.
Above all, the law is THE LAW. It resists change. The whole point of the law has become prohibition. There could’ve been a time when it was more… guidelines. Like the pirate code! But now it just exists to stop various things happening, bad and good, good and bad.
So I know that you can’t just make the law suddenly stop being itself. You can’t make it snap out of a centuries long stupor to provide a workable framing for self-identification. The law IS a centuries long stupor. You can’t slap a stupor to wake it up, it’s an internal, almost conceptual thing. You wake up the human, and then the stupor goes away.
How does that translate? Well, if culture shifts in favour of trans people, the law, however begrudgingly, responds. If culture shifts against trans people, the law happily retracts whatever rights it had granted. You don’t talk to the law, you talk to the people.
So, actually, I do have a pretty good idea of why it’s so difficult for this country to accept trans people: our pseudo-christian culture of repressed sado-masochism just doesn’t want people to be happy. Or, more precisely, it believes people can only be happy if they’re put through pain, or putting others in pain.
(For anyone paying attention of course, the real problem is simply the parasite often referred to as “capitalism”).
Survival
Something I’ve not touched on directly yet is that, in our patriarchal society, women are regularly traumatised by men, and it would be really inconsiderate not to realise that this trauma affects women’s view of people who are, or who have been, male-presenting. And for good reason. Trauma responses are there to help us survive. If that leads to social discord, the problem lies with the cause of the trauma, not with the survival response.
Sometimes a survival response is a cause of trauma, and that’s often when things chain reaction into really bad happenings. This is why we need to support survivors, not alienate them, because a survivor who becomes a perpetrator (in one way or another) is next level damaged. And while they still need and deserve our help, there’s much less help available in our society for people going through such complex psycho-social fuckery. In fact they tend to form communities of psycho-social fuckery and storm the White House, or vote for Boris Johnson! Then it’s really hard to reach them.
The other articles in this series will be addressing our society’s inherent misogyny a lot more. We’ll probably even get into men’s misandry (because patriarchy doesn’t let them off either). I don’t know if I’ll interview anyone for my scribblings, but Hex is developing a new podcast component, through which we’ll be interviewing loads of people. And discussions on trans rights are very much on the cards, if anyone wants to come and speak with us.
I’d like to do a little conclude:
We’ve not quite forgotten that we’re all from the same origins, we share a lot of common ground. We should remember to co-operate and support each other rather than fight against each other. We should remember our female beginning. The Bible doesn’t do a great job of reinforcing that message, but increasingly, everyday reality does.
Upcoming articles / talking points:
1. Toilets
2. Sports
3. Single-sex spaces
4. The Gender Recognition Act 2004
5. The 2010 Equalities Act
6. Sex Matters (and associates)
7. The Supreme Court ruling
8. Intersex folk
9. The hard science
10. (Bonus Ball) Hastings Independent Press.
The Tale of the Androgyne.
In a time outside of time, in the Garden (which many places have since been compared to), the Androgyne was frolicking in a woodland. Climbing trees, observing pigeons, investigating mushrooms.
“Oi!” said God, his voice booming out across everything everywhere. Everything looked.
“Oi! Androgyne! Get over here!”
The Androgyne put down the leaf it had been playing with and climbed down from the tree, and began the walk to God.
When it arrived, the midday sun was blasting excessive bright light, giving God’s face an almost cartoonish quality. And the Androgyne knew, without looking, that on that face would be the usual signs. Eyes bloodshoot with rivulets like lava flows. Pupils dilating to reveal a starry abyss, veins poking out of God’s arms like mountain ranges. Cosmic burns and other telltale marks across his body. He’d been huffing stardust again. Sucking the other end of black holes. Playing pool with suns. There was evidence of at least one supernova.
“You look like you need some H2O, God,” the Androgyne held up a large leaf cupping a pool of purest water.
“I’m fine.” God sniffed, “Listen, Androgyne, stand there.”
“Okay God.”
And God ripped the Androgyne into two parts, two new humans. And he sniffed.
The humans looked at eachother, sighed.
God pointed to the woman, “You, you will be the mother, you will be wise, you will be empathetic, caring, you will grow and raise all the new children.”
“Children, God?” the woman asked.
He pointed to the man.
“And you… will be a dick.”
The man looked sheepishly at the ground, “I don’t know if I like the sound of this, God.”
“Tough,” God said, “This is how it is. Unless you think you can do better?”
God smiled, knowing that they wouldn’t have the means to seriously alter his work for many millenia.
“Fuck’s sake.” The woman said.
And with a rip in the very fabric of reality, God careened off to pester another solar system.