Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar

Illustration/Uday Mohite

When the UK Supreme Court ruled that sex is binary and the definition of who is a woman does not include transwomen as per its Equality Act, 2010, the multi-millionaire JK Rowling, who chose a gender-neutral publishing name and whose Twitter bio reads, "Writer sometimes known as Robert Galbraith" (her other publishing name), tweeted a photo of herself with a cigar and whisky on her yacht in the Bahamas, quoting the A-team "I love it when a plan comes together. Wonder why Freud appeared in my dream that night, intoning, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, except when it smoulders with metaphor. JK Rowling is apparently allowed some gender play - one may call it trans-ness - but others, only if people like her get to define its limits. Well, she did invent something called the Sorting Hat.

JK Rowling populates the mindset, typified by Donald Trump, that responds to heterogeneity with a domineering nostalgia for ye olde absolute categories. Rowling also said, thanks to this trans-exclusion now women and girls will be safe. From what? How does trans inclusion, an idea as social and emotional as it is legal, harm the safety of women? Cis-women and girls are not being beaten up by trans people, but by men, families, teachers, police, yaniki, the same people who also attack trans people. They are not being denied opportunities because trans people are getting them. They are denied opportunities because men, especially elite men, cis men, heterosexual men are the default centre. You may scoff at the terminology and it may occasionally become too arch, but it does not change the fact of who embodies the norm, and who gets to decide the worth of others, and whether they get a small room in the Big House. When the small rooms fight each other for the small portions, they only endorse the centrality of those in power.

The UK Supreme Court judgement said that in the law, the words "sex", "woman", and "man" were always intended to mean biological sex' as if meanings are not open to expansion. Apparently this protects against the complexity of "heterogenous groupings", sometimes called equality. Protects whom? As the group TransActual stated in response to the judgement, "Society will divide more sharply into queer-friendly and queer-hostile spaces".

Homogeneity is a kind of fantasy isn't it? Those who seek power and control, whatever the traumas that lead them there, want others to be intelligible on their terms, while reserving complexity and ambiguity for themselves. Can we really move towards equality without erasing the categories that have maintained inequality? And can we do so without the complicated, confusing encounter with the fact that each of our identities is in fact heterogenous--we may be a wounded party in one sense, but that does not mean we are not a wounding party in another.

Elsewhere, Meghan Markle who is positioned as the democratic victim of an old imperium, the very emblem of class and race hierarchy, withdrew her support from the Milwaukee Muslim Women's Coalition, because their Palestinian American founder Janan Najeeb called for an arms embargo on Israel and freedom for Palestine. Because they "celebrate different perspectives and backgrounds" but not "hateful words".
Perhaps they support Muslim women the way JK Rowling states they support trans rights - in ways that do not challenge them and allow them the luxury of vulnerability, complexity, agency. The privilege.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com