Travels by Trans Part 7: My Home Town
Over the years I’ve lived in various parts of the UK, and because my family background was, well, incomplete, I have no particular roots anywhere. But if I have a “home town” at all, it’s Manchester, and on my way from South America to the Far East recently I took a detour and spent a weekend in the city catching up with friends and running a few overdue errands.
Coming back to the UK is usually a pretty miserable affair for me; there’s nothing new there, the people are as grey as the skies, and the politics are getting stinkier by the day it seems. But Manchester is to some degree an oasis (see what I did there?…. Oasis was a Manchester band…. Oh, forget it!) from most of that.
The thing that struck me first this time was the sheer diversity of the place (and I’m not just talking about LGBT here). Walking down the main shopping area, Market Street, on a Saturday afternoon I encountered a variety of street performers including (in no particular order) a girl singer (pretty good), a band (indie — again pretty good), a Chinese dragon show celebrating the new year (there’s a large Chinese community in the city), Hari Krishna groups , Islamic preachers, street food from all over the world, hip hop, beatbox, Jehovah’s Witnesses and folks trying to sell the Socialist Worker newspaper. All this in 10 degrees centigrade of cold and they were still pulling crowds! Manchester folks are traditionally a hardy bunch.
And that hardiness comes useful when things get tough. Manchester found itself at the sharp end of Irish terrorism in the 90’s when a bomb took out a large part of the city centre. The town bounced back. Last year it got a taste of Islamic terrorism when a bomb went off — a few hundred yards from where I was living at the time — and killed youngsters at a pop concert. The city’s response? A large vigil was held and, rather than calling for retaliation or vengeance, the crowd broke into a spontaneous rendition of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (my second Oasis reference — I’m on a roll here!). That takes heart, a big one, and Manchester’s is the size of a small planet.
That traditional hardiness sometimes has a less appealing side though, and some traditions die hard. On Sunday around 1pm a large tribe of locals, mostly middle aged, all white working class, gathered in my hotel’s lobby and split without the need for any instruction into separate groups of men and women. The women were dressed up to the nines in blingy, expensive outfits and over-elaborate hairdos, and the men were dressed in jeans and t-shirts seemingly designed to show off their beer bellies to the maximum extent. Now of course you see this strict separation of the sexes in other cultures, but it doesn’t happen in most of the UK nowadays, and it was pretty uncomfortable to watch. The two parallel competitions continued, the men showing each other their abilities to drink pints of beer and the women their latest bad taste jewellery. Were these folks wedding party leftovers, or was someone’s case about to come up in the criminal court opposite the hotel? Whoever they were, they were noisy bastards.
Most English people know the phrase “It’s grim up North” (as opposed to the generally wealthier — and slightly warmer — south of England), and there’s no avoiding the fact that that remains the case today. Manchester has a serious homeless problem, and I found myself in a local coffee shop that feels it necessary to keep its toilets locked to stop vagrants from the nearby park using the facilities. Begging is ever present (something I never saw in Britain as a child), and people’s lives are put at risk in the harsh winter months by being forced to live on the streets. And yet nowadays I walk past them as if it’s normal. When I see begging in other countries I’m shocked, but not in my own country. I’m learning about my own double standards — and I don’t much care for them.
But there was worse to come. I’ve long suspected it, but I now have the proof; the country’s going to the dogs. No, I’m not talking Brexit or the clueless bunch of fuckwombles that currently form the government (don’t get me started on either of those topics!) Here’s the awful truth; for the first time EVER I had my arse groped in Manchester’s Gay Village!! Silly man. I’ve got a resting bitch face that can kill birds in flight at 100 yards, and he withered away like some vampire seeing the light at the end of an old-school horror movie. And worse still, a couple of the trans girls I was with were also troubled by another creepy bloke — it almost came to blows. What is the Village coming to?
But here’s the thing about trans women, guys; you might think they’re easy to pick on, but you don’t know their background. Trying to out-run the trans monkey on their back in their youth, many trans women would seek out the most “masculine” pursuits around, including sport and the military (where they would often excel, some as special forces). Disrespect a trans woman, and you’re likely to end up on your arse if you’re lucky, in traction if you’re not. It’s funny how creepiness and stupidity often seem to go so closely together — Some Might Say (another Oasis reference, yeh! OK, OK — I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead!)
