Scotland: When Farce Becomes Horror

Ionesco himself could not have drafted the lethally absurd legislation the SNP have

One of the most memorable lectures I had as an undergraduate student at university was on Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, a defining work of the Theatre Of The Absurd genre. It is both a timeless and timely text, on a par with 1984 or The Crucible in my opinion. During the opening scene, the everyman protagonist Berenger sits having coffee with a friend. Midway through their conversation, a rhino charges past the café. Berenger is startled and concerned but his friend seems unperturbed, in denial that they even saw a rhinoceros. Throughout the rest of the play, Berenger watches in incredulity and terror as, one by one, every person around him, colleagues and friends, transform into rhinoceroses, the cause seemingly being part-infection, part-capitulation. In the final scene, he stands at his window looking out over the carnage, and in a moment of desperation, tries to force himself to transform into a rhinoceros. Despite his efforts, he is unable to and upon regaining his senses, vows in a hopeless frenzy that he will never capitulate. The play is often read as an analogy for how fascism and Nazism spread throughout Europe in the early 20th century but truthfully, it resonates with almost any ‘ism’ or ideology - be it Thatcherism, Marxism or gender ideology. Blind conformity makes dangerous fools of us all, would be the layman’s analysis.

The first rhinos heralding the arrival of gender ideology in the mainstream happened in 2015, it is generally agreed. Stonewall had firmly fastened the ‘T’ to LBG and ‘Women’s Studies’ had been cheerfully rebranded and redrafted as ‘Gender Studies’. ‘Intersectionality’ was the big fourth-wave feminist buzzword. I was at university at the time, in my third year, and remember exactly where I was when I glimpsed the animal: in a tutorial discussing Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I’m ashamed to say, my outlook was closer to Berenger’s friend than Berenger, although I did not deny the presence of the beast. My reaction was closer to: ‘Oh wow, a rhino! This is fascinating! Let’s study it rather than immediately call the authorities to have it removed from civil society’. In my weak defence, I was twenty-one, extremely precocious and still suffering from imposter syndrome at being accepted into an elite university - critical theory is a gift to the intellectually insecure as it wraps very simplistic ideas in poncy academic language and allows you to deconstruct anything, regardless of complexity, into a neat hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed. Moreover, the theory being taught to me was presented as inherently truthful, with little or no invitation to challenge it from the tutor. The rhino was stunning and brave, not aggressive, so I was informed, no more dangerous than a strapping grey unicorn.

Cut to 2018 when I had a considerably more uncomfortable brush with the gender rhino, one that frankly left me shaken. After graduating university, my first job was in a public library. Throughout the summer we held a reading challenge for primary school children and on the sign-up forms there were three options for gender: ‘Boy’, ‘Girl’ or ‘Other’. It was advised we asked each individual child which box they preferred to be ticked. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a kernel of sense began to stir but not enough for me to challenge it outright. No, the harm didn’t truly hit home until a little boy, aged about six, came to the desk with his Mum, clutching a batman toy. I filled in his details then came to the dreaded gender box. Uneasily, I tried to make a joke of it, lightly prompting: “And, um…you’re a boy, yes?”

I will never forget the look of shock and hurt on his face, the confusion as he looked down at himself as if trying to understand what was making me doubt his sex. His mother narrowed her eyes at me. (She was a nice lady. I’d have gone through me for a shortcut.) You can scoff and sneer at my stupidity for ever having gone along with this nonsense in the first place, and maybe I deserve it, but gender ideology indoctrination runs deep for the young and idealistic, cloaked in the language of virtue and kindness. Nonetheless, at that moment the hypnosis lifted, the spell (curse?) broke. It was as stark and harrowing as, well, a two-tonne horned beast rampaging towards me: This stuff makes no sense in the real world.

Over the next few years, I began to see more and more rhinos. Pronoun badges. Bizarre new discrimination policies at work that told me if I referred to someone as ‘she’ after they announced they were a man, even if they made absolutely no change to their physicality or general demeanour, I’d be committing a transgression on a par with calling someone a racial slur. I watched as Professor Kathleen Stock was bullied from Sussex University by a small but lethally strong stampede, cheered on by rhinos in suits in the UCU. They wreaked havoc in bookshops, stamping and eating up any text that challenged their dogma to the point the books had to be hidden away lest they be trampled. They invaded academia, publishing, the arts, the corporate world, the police force, education - even nurseries. But that wasn’t the most horrifying thing. The most horrifying thing was witnessing people in power who were not rhinos adorning horns and painting their faces grey in a bid to appease them (Hi Keir). 

The genius of Ionesco’s play is the titular animal. Consider all the other creatures he could have chosen and why they wouldn’t have worked the same way. A chimpanzee, for instance, would have been too complex; they are too closely related to humans, too intelligent, they arguably could be won over, communicated with. A lion or tiger or other carnivorous animal wouldn’t work either, as they’d have too much of an understandable motive in attacking humans. But a rhinoceros is dangerous by the sheer virtue of its size and clumsiness, nothing more, nothing less. Any violence it commits towards humans is not because it feels threatened or because it wants to feed but because it’s in a bad mood and because it can. What’s more, a rhino doesn’t have to be on the attack to do a great deal of damage. Even the most well-intentioned pack of rhinos, waddling as carefully as they can through a building will end up crushing toes, crumbling the walls, and knocking things over that can never be repaired, all while leaving an unbelievable amount of shit behind them for other unfortunate souls to clean at risk of their own safety.

Even baby rhinos are lethal. I know because I’ve witnessed their threat first hand. This week, I and around two hundred and fifty other women and men of all ages and backgrounds went to an Edinburgh University lecture hall in George Square in the expectation of watching a documentary about women’s rights. A handful of TRAs - that’s Trans Rights Activists to you normies - showed up and barricaded the doors from the inside, repeating their fascistic little act when we tried to move to Old College. Meanwhile, security stood around as gormlessly as Vladimir and Estragon at the end of the first and second act of Waiting For Godot (I’m very much in love with this theme of absurdist theatre metaphors). To cut a long, tiresome story short, the film screening was postponed. There were plenty of us and only ten or so of them (if that) but numbers are relative when faced with creatures of unhinged anger and destructive tendencies. It would, after all, only take a single rhino to keep an entire neighbourhood of people hiding in their houses. Seven student rhinos against a crowd of two hundred and fifty is a no-brainer when all of senior management are also sporting tusks. And my goodness, populate half of Holyrood with rhinoceroses and it’s no wonder a country of five million has been bullied into silence and/or complicity.

Scotland is set to become one of the rhinoceros capitals of the world, if it is not already. Our Supreme Leader Of The Scottish Nation, Nicola Sturgeon has metamorphosed in the last two years from looking unnervingly tusk-y to being one of the most enormous, snorting, bullying specimens of odd-toed ungulate one could imagine on this issue. Ironically, despite her proud rhinoceros hide, she remains astonishingly thin-skinned, and has successfully overseen the trampling of anyone who has pleaded she listens to reason, from UN experts to fathers of disabled daughters who want to ensure their little girls have only female nurses bathe and change them. Tomorrow, Sturgeon will preside over one of the most regressive, dangerous and frankly absurd pieces of legislation the modern world has ever seen. Last week, her government successfully managed to get the word ‘woman’ redefined from an adult human female to anyone to who has a piece of paper that says they are an adult human female. Should obtaining this piece of paper involve a rigorous, measured process that takes psychological and criminal history into serious consideration and prioritises the safety of women and children, this would be permissible to the socially liberal. Alas though, the new GRA has shamelessly scrapped all safeguarding measures. For a man to legally become a woman now - and be entitled to access all female-only facilities, be it changing rooms or prisons, all he has to do is ‘live as’ a woman (whatever the hell that means) for three months followed by an evaluation after a three month ‘reflection period’. It’s also worth noting that the legislation, in actuality, allows people to live as their ‘acquired gender’ after this six month farce. Given that there are now more genders than there are Pokémon what exactly does this imply for those whose gender identity goes beyond the pitiful limitations of man or woman? Will people be able to transition legally into gender fluid? Agender? Moongender? To qualify as a trans-woman (or trans-man) it is also not required for any surgical intervention to take place, or indeed perceptible social transition. Conceivably, anyone who insists enough for six months that they are a man/woman/planet while altering nothing about their behaviour or appearance is on route for a GRC. Oh, and did I mention children as young as sixteen are eligible for irreversible surgery and hormonal treatment that will leave them infertile for life without any reliable adult intervention? Welcome to the not-so-Brave New World as heralded in by Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP.

TRA-adjacent politicians have nowhere to hide with this now. They can no longer deny sex-based rights will be grievously compromised and that predators and fetishists now have ease of access to women (and children’s) spaces, from bathrooms to sports teams. The only argument, and I use the term loosely, left is to paint concerned individuals as hysterics: no one’s going to abuse the system, bigot! So what’s it to you!

Let’s say for the sake of argument that’s true (it’s not), that no predator will use this red carpet policy to harm women or children (they will. In droves), why would you want to vote through legislation that hypothetically enables it regardless? Why would you risk such serious danger? The odds of being struck by lightning during a mild storm are very unlikely but I’m not going to wave a metal golf club in the air at the sound of thunder. Another stroke of genius in Ionesco’s choice of the rhinoceros as allegory for blind conformity is the brutal absurdity.  Rhinoceros is no comedy, yet there is a laugh-out-loud element to the idea of this graceless tank of an animal indirectly taking over the world, it would be hard not to giggle in shock if you did see one of these dinosaur-like yet bovine creatures rampage past your window on an average Tuesday, and no, you probably wouldn’t want to believe the sheer ridiculousness of what you’d just witnessed, and accept the danger you and others are potentially in now. Such is the knee-jerk disbelief many have to the dangers of self-ID and gender ideology in general. No government, not even Holyrood, would wave through something this horrifically stupid, right? I don’t know what to tell you except the truth: they have. Start panicking.

Many, if by no means all, of the women and men I am allied with in this fight for women’s rights, child safeguarding and reality are middle-aged or elderly. They are motivated by their children, grandchildren or simply a memory of a time when there was some semblance of sanity and adherence to material reality. I’m a little different. I’m twenty-nine and have not yet had my children. You can’t call me a reactionary because I came of age in this culture of clownery. I am not trying to save the future as much as carve out some hope there might be one worth bringing new people into. 

Tomorrow, on the the 21st of December, when women in any meaningful definition are officially written out of legal existence in Scotland, much like Berenger I will be standing at my window, looking out at my city. Unlike Berenger though, I will not be trying to force myself into a rhinoceros form. I will simply be accepting and despairing. There is some comfort, I suppose, in the knowledge that any number of us will be refusing to capitulate and readying to fight further. But once this law is passed, as the rhinoceroses are given the green light to storm the streets in glee, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more bravery to venture outside.