Agenda Dysphoria

This week (and most weeks) the issue of gender identity has featured prominently in the media. It was also a central theme in two of the plays staged as part of Riverina Water’s /SOACT’s Ten X 10 Play Fest (23 – 25 June, Basement Theatre, Wagga Wagga).

On Tuesday night Sarah Ferguson interviewed US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on ABC’s 7.30.  The rationale for doing so was that, unusually for a Republican, Taylor Greene is a strong supporter of Julian Assange and Ferguson sought her comments just moments before the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder set foot on Australian soil again, after 17 years, 14 of them in captivity, self-imposed then state sanctioned. In her responses to Fergusons’ questions, Taylor Greene appeared either to fail to grasp what was meant or to deliberately answer with rehearsed generalised clichés about the importance of ‘freedom of press’ and ‘truth’. Disturbingly, while praising Assange, Taylor Greene snidely insisted on using the name Bradley Manning in relation to the US military insider who provided the 400,000 classified military documents to WikiLeaks despite their transition to the female gender, as Chelsea Manning, in 2010. Taylor Young described that transition as‘parading’ a new identity.   Ferguson took issue with that choice of vocabulary and went on to ask the Congresswoman if her commitment to ‘truth’ extended to accepting as fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 US election, defeating Donald Trump. At that Taylor Greene turned hostile, repeatedly asked what Ferguson’s questions had to do with Julian Assange and, to her off camera team and presumably the viewing audience, asked if Ferguson got ‘her marching orders from the Democrat party’.

I have since read in The Washington Post  that Taylor Green is a full blown gun-toting alt right conspiracy theorist who so terrorised her Democrat opponent Kevin Van Ausdal in the 2020 Georgia Congressional election campaign that his life virtually imploded and he had to withdraw from the race. As Sarah Ferguson said, that indeed makes her a ‘strange bedfellow’ even amongst the diverse ranks of Assange supporters!

Then the next day my news feed featured reports that UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has condemned actor David Tennant for his remarks at an LBGT award ceremony whilst accepting a ‘celebrity ally’ award for his LBQTI rights advocacy, Tennant said that he wished Kemi Badenoch, Women & Equalities Minister in Britain’s Tory government, would ‘shut up’ and hoped for a world in which she ‘doesn’t exist anymore’. These admittedly strong comments relate to Badenoch’s reactionary stance on  a number of social issues including denial of the harms of colonialism and the slave trade, repeated criticisms of trans people, and moves to have biological sex deemed a ‘protected characteristic’ under the UK Equality Act. Badenoch, who is of Nigerian descent yet lists Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill as role models, seems an odd fit for the role of Minister for Women & Equalities even in a Conservative administration. A bit like Jacinta Price, the LNP’s spokesperson for Indigenous Affairs, leading the ‘No’ campaign for The Voice referendum.

The above are, of course, examples of the so-called ‘culture wars’ where liberal inclusive and traditionalist privileged paradigms clash in the arena of public discourse. That clash was a theme in The Study of Reuben March and The Sensitivity Editor two plays that featured in the recent Ten X 10 Play Fest. The first was a debut play from Imogen Rubi who also took the titular role. It dealt with scientific and sociological assumptions about the identity and sexuality of non-binary people and was an impassioned challenge to stereotyping and applying the wrong lens to others’ lives. A two hander, presenting an interview scenario between an asexual gender fluid person and a scientific researcher, the play set out to disabuse the researcher, and by extension the audience, of their preconceptions. The researcher character had little dialogue, largely serving as a sounding board for Reuben’s educative remarks. His growing realisation that he might himself be gender fluid may have had more impact if there had been some ‘tells’ planted along the way. The play would also have benefitted from creating more dynamic of tension between the characters with less obvious delineation between enlightened Reuben and the wrong-headed interviewer.  

The list of characters listed in the program for The Sensitivity Editor held out the promise of hearing from PL Travers, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie and Shakespeare about recent moves to revamp their work to suit twenty first century values. Sadly that opportunity was squandered with declamatory dialogue from the editor character and the same, or mere throwaway quips, from the literary luminaries. The cast did their best but Rod Marsden’s approach was hopelessly reductive and superficial. It showed scant familiarity with the works of any of the authors and resorted to cheap digs at various supposed examples of ‘wokeism gone mad’. These included suggesting that the sooty faces in the Chim Chimmeny number of the Disney version of Mary Poppins had been decried as blackface, and that the demise of golliwogs in popular culture has diminished literature (as far as I am aware none of the writers featured were reliant on golliwogs to propel their plots). Marsden willfully misinterpreted the pronoun debate and sought cheap laughs by lumping it in with anti-monarchist and racist issues. I am not necessarily an apologist for sensitivity editing and the reworking of classic texts. I believe different criteria apply to adult and children’s fiction, with an appreciation of context and history obviously being more accessible to mature readers. The depiction of sensitivity editing in this play as solely about not offending ‘snowflakes’ without acknowledging its role in redressing past cultural dominance is unforgivable when there is such scope for a nuanced and valuable approach to the debate.