The more things change. Seventy years ago when British publishers Hamish Hamilton saw the manuscript for The Catcher in the Rye, they decided some of JD Salinger’s language was a step too far.
They duly excised the F-word and other colourful mentions before publication in 1951. No matter that the Americans had allowed it all. In 1993, the Brits had second thoughts, republishing the novel with all the f..ks intact.
It’s one of my favourite stories about censorship, in no small part because newspapers such as this one still worry about the F-word, even as its use has become widespread and many of us have begun to find it more expressive than offensive. Of course, we don’t want our children to use it, and yes, we are guilty of double standards, but like so much value-laden human behaviour, swearing is messy territory.
Yet the judgments we are asked to make around ethics, personal freedoms and public good seem to be increasing.
Some are clear, others not. Sometimes we’re relieved when governments make the call, sometimes we lament a political class that rolls over to noisy minorities. And we all have a personal censorship list – the people or symbols or ideas we’d prefer to see banned rather than tolerated.
Nazi salutes? Let’s ban them, not just because of the dreadful history they revive, but because their absence harms no one: there is nothing lost to a society that relegates Hitler’s symbols to the history books.
Vaping? Yes please, let’s kill the vape before it adds another addiction to our world. It’s potentially damaging to health but, more than that, it’s such an unattractive habit, with users looking for all the world like opium smokers as they wander the streets. Everyone to her or his own, but yuk!
Gambling? Impossible to outlaw, but let’s at least control marketing to kids, and let’s bring in the cashless gambling card to help people control themselves and limit money laundering.
Enid Blyton? Here’s where a sense of proportion can desert even the most sensible. Do we let “shut up” and other less-than-perfect expressions from the Famous Five remain as quaint artefacts or do we wash the pages for a new generation, one we must acknowledge regularly hears the F-word in the playground, if not in the kitchen?
Many aspirational Australian mothers in the 1950s would have been happy to see Blyton’s work censored on the grounds that the writing was banal and the stories set in an alien land. Not that they worried about the odd “shut-up”, which adults were prone to bark at children while ordering them never to use the phrase. But agitating about it now? Is that a waste of energy or what?
Now for the tricky one that emerged this week with a Melbourne rally that turned nasty and a Sydney meeting that turned violent: both gatherings were about sex and gender, and both were sharp reminders of the complex arguments around the intersection of individual rights and collective mores.
In both cases people had gathered to protest against or debate transgender politics and how, in effect, the rights of transgender people can run alongside the rights of others without everyone getting into a brawl. Not surprisingly, given the passion on both sides, there was no escaping a brawl.
In Melbourne the fallout continues as Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming battles colleagues keen to punish her for attending the Let Women Speak rally called to discuss “bad transgender laws and policy” and the need to “protect and promote biological reality”.
In Sydney, a church-organised meeting to discuss parental rights attracted a protest from LGBTQI+ people, who in turn attracted about 500 people who violently protested against the first crew. It was unforgivable behaviour, just like the neo-Nazis who zeroed in on the show in Melbourne.
Are we about to see more of this extremism as gender transition becomes increasingly a political rather than biological matter? We’re fine about an individual transitioning and even laud their courage in acting, often after years of distress.
But how far are those of us who are not transgender expected to go in acceptance? How much of a backlash should we expect if we question the rights of men who transition to women and expect that change to be seamless?
We know what happened to author JK Rowling when she waded into the field, arguing that transgender women could not change their biological sex.
On a new podcast she says: “I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement” even as she confesses she has been afraid for her family’s safety for questioning nomenclature such as “women who menstruate” rather than simply women.
You don’t have to take an activist position like Rowling to have felt confronted by the issue.
A few years ago, introduced to a woman at a function, I realised I had known her in her former life as a man. Back then, he had been pretty dismissive of me as a middle-aged woman; he had younger fish to fry and the words arrogance, privilege and male complacency come to mind. Now she needed my support and my acceptance as she navigated a new world.
I felt sympathy but also a little schadenfreude. How the tables had turned. In time, I thought, she would figure it out, better understand the nuances and realities of living as a female and hopefully find a way to interact with women and men. But an easy switch, with me as an advocate or supporter? No thanks.
Another story. A friend asks, do you think X is a man or a woman? X had transitioned from male to female and was keen to join an all-female book club, but the members were hesitant after years of shared conversations and confessions in their “safe space”. The dynamics would change and X, who’d always been a “pants man”, was unlikely to have dropped his predatory predilections. Automatic acceptance was just not possible.
Unfair? Is excluding transgendered people from all-women book clubs a hanging offence? Is it discrimination or common sense to hesitate to send your six-year-old girl child unchaperoned into lavatories that are now becoming gender neutral?
We live at an incredibly fluid time when it comes to sex and gender. The noise grows as advocates on each side of the debate seek to exert their moral power over the other.
Of course transgender people must be treated equally in their personal and professional lives, but the idea that non-transgendered people have no rights to question or debate the issues that arise in prisons or hospitals or schools is simply ludicrous.
We need tolerance plus realism as we move in uncharted waters.
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