You wouldn’t identify as disabled…

With the commencement of the Paralympics this week, and following the recent Olympic events in which male boxers were permitted to beat up female boxers, it’s understandable to wonder whether we will one day see able-bodied people who feel – or ‘identify as’ – disabled allowed to enter this excellent competition.

Maybe even extreme proponents of magical thinking will draw the line there. But what about those unusual folk of the ‘transabled’ community, who have gone so far as to have a healthy part of their body amputated? They are without doubt now disabled. But would they be welcomed and validated by people who were born that way?

If you accept the idea of ‘transwomen’ and ‘transmen’, then why not be equally accepting towards the likes of ‘One-Hand Jason’, who won his nickname by severing an unwanted hand with a power tool (‘My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment’). Or Jewel Shuping, who persuaded her psychologist to blind her with drain cleaner (‘I was so happy, I felt this was who I was supposed to be’). Or 60-year-old ‘Alex’, who finally hopped on a plane to an unspecified country in Asia to have his leg surgically removed (‘The only regret I have is that I wasn’t able to do it 30 years ago’) and presumably hopped off again, too.

It’s striking how similar the language that transabled people use about their ‘journey’ is to those who have ‘transitioned’ across the gender divide. It’s hard to logically explain how one can be seen as valid and the other not. Given that we’re increasingly being told that being disabled is a ‘superpower’, who are we to judge? But there is, nevertheless, a natural revulsion in many of us towards such behaviour. At the very least, we feel a sense of pity, as this is surely a form of body dysmorphia.

The same goes for race. We’ve just had the Notting Hill Carnival in London. I wonder if white people identifying as black, using the appropriate greasepaint to achieve the desired shade, would have been welcome? Of course not. That would be vile and insulting. One presumes that anyone who indulged in such behaviour would be chased out of the neighbourhood with righteous fury.

What are we to make of the likes of Martina Big, who was born Caucasian but always wanted to be black? Through a combination of tanning injections and a 50-tube sunbed, she certainly doesn’t look white any more. Back in 2019, she told ITV’s This Morning: ‘I am black – that is my race. I can’t wait to go to Africa. It’s better to be black. The feeling inside is just better.’ She has received grief for her metamorphosis and, considering the great historical injustices white people have inflicted on black people, I can see why. Even if she did initially attempt to sound humble by saying that she was only ‘80 per cent black’, as she still had ‘a lot to learn’. Subsequently, though, the formerly blonde air hostess boasted that she had become ‘a true African woman’, after being baptised in Kenya and given a ‘Swahili name’ meaning ‘big angel’.

This is the stuff of comedy, of course. But the desire to be something other than what one is not can affect people of all kinds. Think of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman born in rural Montana who later identified as black and led a chapter of the NAACP. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren was a presumably intelligent and high-achieving woman when, in 2012, she announced that ‘Being Native American has been part of my story since the day I was born’, some years after contributing recipes to a Native American cookbook and identifying herself as a Cherokee. Seven years later, after taking a DNA test, Senator Warren apologised to the leadership of the Cherokee Nation ‘for furthering confusion over issues of tribal sovereignty and citizenship and for any harm her announcement caused’.

With claims to Native American heritage up massively since the growth of the SJW malarkey, the Cherokee Nation has become so understandably sensitive to the growth in ‘pretendians’ – over-privileged leftist identitarians who get a bit carried away when hating on their own heritage – that it has a helpful online guide on how to spot and challenge these foul-weather friends.

It’s fair to say that most people believe that individuals must be either mad, bad or at least sad to pretend to be ‘transracial’. But why is the equivalent behaviour not just accepted but applauded when it comes to sex? It’s even less justifiable, scientifically. You can’t define what a deceased person’s skin colour was by their skeleton, whereas their sex is written in every atom of their buried bones. We think of race grifters as miserable individuals. But do the same with sex and you’ll be hailed as a spreader of ‘trans joy’ (which, so far as I can tell, largely consists of threatening women who believe in biological facts with rape on the internet).

You’ll also be lionised by the BBC, which got rid of The Black and White Minstrel Show in 1978, but has since enthusiastically taken up touting ‘womanface’ in place of blackface. I would love a quick look at a few of its commissioning editors’ browsing history, as quite a few of them seem literally obsessed with drag queens, to the point that I fully expect to see one reading the Nine O’Clock News any day now. But if the minstrels were insulting and reactionary – which they certainly were – why aren’t drag queens? If someone can explain to me why race-based parody is heinous and sex-based parody ‘a bit of fun’, I’d love to know.

Or indeed, how to explain why we won’t be seeing any transabled competitors at the Paralympics, but we will be treated to the first transgender ‘woman’ – and visually impaired – contestant, the runner ‘Valentina’ Petrillo. He has won 11 national titles as a man, but will compete in Paris against women. Of course, the day will never come when a ‘transman’ athlete wants to run against actual men, because they wouldn’t stand a chance of winning. It’s interesting that even within the trans-activist movement itself, sexism flourishes. When the UK’s Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004, it did not extend male rights on inheritance or titles to ‘transmen’. The law never accepted a biological woman as a man – whereas, as Sall Grover and numerous other women in numerous other countries have discovered, the law bends over backwards to accept biological men as women.

So why is ‘gender’ the only thing that can be transed and not be reviled as an act of aggression on behalf of a privileged group? Why can men get away with what white people or able-bodied people can’t? You’d think it would be all or nothing when it comes to ‘cultural appropriation’, if that’s the kind of language you use. So why are only women available as costumes?

I think it may be because other oppressed groups have developed such collective strength and pride that if they were so insulted, they would instantly turn on the fox in the henhouse – and all credit to them. But women have been so conditioned to bow down to men that if traditional ways of submitting are frowned upon, some will unconsciously seek another way to be handmaidens – or transmaids, as I have dubbed them. And thus they somehow fail to notice that the patriarchy is still the patriarchy. Even when it calls itself Patricia.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.