On Noise, Richard O’Brien and Transphobia

Two thousand years ago, as he sat in a room above a public bathhouse in Rome, a Stoic philosopher decided that noise wasn’t so bad for his writing after all.”‘I cannot for the life of me,” Seneca the Younger writes in his short proto-essay on noise — aptly titled On Noise — “see that quiet is as necessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be.” For Seneca, although intermittent noises could still be disturbing, it was possible to train yourself to become so absorbed with your work that the noise would fade away into a kind of mysterious surrounding silence. Enter the door of yourself, and, if you close it just right, you may be able to keep out the outside.

This is easier said than done, as Seneca himself says. After paragraphs extolling the virtues of learning to ignore background noise, Seneca suddenly admits that all of this was a ‘test’ and that he “shall shortly be moving somewhere else.” Even a Stoic, the lesson seems to go, can only endure so much.

I think of Seneca’s essay, which I first read a few weeks ago, when a new piece of aggravation floats into my view today. It’s yet another article about a famous figure who’s decided to inform the world, with the grim satisfaction of a contrarian, that trans women are not women. This time, it is Richard O’Brien. I like contrarianism when it makes sense — but then again, Donald Trump believes himself to be a contrarian of sorts by saying the things he claims are true but that no one else would dare admit. And when it comes to simple transphobia, I can as easily imagine this coming from Trump’s mouth as from O’Brien’s.

O’Brien had been asked by Metro magazine for his views on the trans-exclusionary radical feminist views of people like Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries, both of whom have recently made statements that argue that transgender women are men rather than women. (Trans men are often left out of these conversations altogether, as well as non-binary persons, but O’Brien will take the unique route of excluding everyone but non-binary individuals.) “I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries,” O’Brien told the magazine. “You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman. You’re in the middle and,” he finished with a kind of naïve condescension, “there’s nothing wrong with that.”

As a trans woman from the Commonwealth of Dominica, I am accustomed to the din of transphobia in the brief instances that transgender people are given a platform to speak. On social media, this din is particularly difficult for me to block out, as it is not uncommon for men to casually post that they want to gun down trans women on sight or that we should murder all LGBT people altogether. But I have learnt how to breathe deeper and better, like a scuba diver, and let other things fill the world in front me instead. And when people make such comments, I have learnt not to argue back, even though I sometimes can’t help myself. The last time I did, I was called an “abomination,” a “lost soul,” “not a woman,” and other such endearing things, and was advised to change my lifestyle because God had created men and women. The Garden of Eden is too small and ghostly for me, really, but I have given up saying that. I try to drown out the noise. And sometimes the noise and the music are so blurred together that they become one thing. “Noise-sound,” the composer Luigi Rossolo called music that strove to imitate harsh noise in 1913, and I feel it in my head when I let such comments resonate too deeply, like a terrible metallic echo through a cave. So I try to focus on other things, try to play other songs.

Then I saw O’Brien’s comments, and I felt stung. Here was a person who, incredibly, has been vocal about not being a member of the gender binary, a feeling that O’Brien suppressed for over fifty years. In 2013, O’Brien, who appears to mainly use male pronouns, described himself to the BBC as “probably…about 70% male, 30% female.” He said that he ticks the “M” box when asked about gender but would prefer that there be an “Other” option — and, indeed, we should not have a gender binary on forms but should allow everyone, binary and non-binary alike, to identify, even if that just meant a box marked “non-binary” on forms. I was surprised that O’Brien, who seemed enlightened about the nuances of gender identity, of how you can explore the caverns of yourself and find two mirrors side by side, each showing you a different person who is unquestionably you, seemed so crassly dismissive.

He had been on hormone therapy like many binary trans women, having taken oestrogen for over ten years. When he said to the BBC that “I was six-and-a-half and I said to my big brother that I wanted to be the fairy princess when I grew up,” I understood that feeling of societal contradiction based on appearances and gendered desires, whether or not — which shall remain undisclosed — I wanted to be a similar sort of princess. (Okay, more of a sci-fi princess, in a high-tech deep-sea submersible or on a starship near a Venusian planet, and perhaps I wanted to be one of the Fey, too.) Gender identity, for me, was never about my actions or roles but purely in terms of how I saw myself, how the map of my mind and body had been drawn up; I see myself as a woman not because of what I played with as a child or the clothes I wear or any other such things that have no relation to gender identity, but rather simply because the switch in my mind had been flipped to “woman,” and I felt confused and frustrated by my body, by the name of my birth, by everything. I understood the pain of suppressing who you are for so long, as I waited over twenty years to finally let myself begin to bloom, as me.

So why this new crudity from him?

But then I saw something I had missed earlier: that O’Brien, back in 2013, had rejected the idea of a gender binary altogether for the majority of people. “It’s my belief,” he declared, “that we are on a continuum between male and female. There are people who are hardwired male and there are people who are hardwired female, but most of us are on that continuum.” Suddenly, I began to wonder if O’Brien’s comments were a transphobic-sounding version of this belief about gender: that few people are binary at all, and to call trans women women and trans men men — though he left the latter out — would be to live in too binary a way. I wondered, for a moment, if I was being too hard on him, if what I had taken to be dissonance was really just poorly put-together sound.

Of course, this is a charitable interpretation. I didn’t really believe it. It is almost impossible to read the dehumanising statements of Germaine Greer in particular and say you agree with them without understanding what you are aligning yourself with. I believe O’Brien simultaneously dismisses trans women as women due to his (to me) too-absolutist beliefs about a continuum — and due to his genuine, if ironic and self-loathing, transphobia. He is not as bad, perhaps, as Milo Yiannopoulos, a sexist gay conservative who frequently makes the extraordinary claim that all gay people wish to be straight and that no one could want to be gay, but he is out there. And it’s binary trans people he wishes to erase.

I have no desire for their speech to be censored; I would prefer that people stand up to such rhetoric or protest it at a speech or simply ignore it rather than banning it, since the latter tends to only cause more problems. I would rather people know enough to say no to bigotry rather than have bigotry hidden away like a small forbidden treasure. But I worry when I imagine how many outlets will take O’Brien’s words and, once again, give people something to casually pass around on social media about how transgender people are delusional — and they will gain power because O’Brien himself doesn’t identify as cisgender. More noise, more din, more sound and fury.

I want us to keep speaking up about who we are, so that statements like O’Brien’s and Greer’s stop filling a void with hate. I am glad that this is already happening. And I want it to happen more. I’m tired of people lazily conflating genitalia with gender, with them binding us to the descriptions of our bodies we were assigned at birth. I’m as willing to accept  and respect anyone on a continuum or off a continuum as I am to accept and respect binary individuals like myself. And I’m tired of being told, over and over, that I will never be what I am. I am tired of how these arguments all lack nuance and empathy. I imagine telling O’Brien is it so hard to understand that my map of my mind, in terms of gender, was simply drawn differently from yours, that what is cognitive dissonance for you is the simplest of body-music for me? Are your arguments any different, I think, from the people who erase lesbians and gay men by saying that everyone is bisexual, or erase bisexuality by saying everyone is one or the other, or any other tortured, absolutist configuration?

But I will not move away from the din of these voices, like Seneca. The din is my life. I left some of the noise behind when I left my home in the Caribbean—the happy noises, like the sound of cricket balls being hit and the way the wind sounded like a river at night in the mountains where I lived, and the sad noises, and the neutral noises. I became accustomed to crying at night at my own decision not to return home—a new sound, then an old one. And transphobia, too, forms part of the background noise I will not avoid. Let us continue to speak against this lazy, yet widely shared and destructive argumentation like O’Brien’s, so we can finally, one day, perhaps have a bit more peace. There is better music to listen to, and to make.

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Gabrielle Bellot

Gabrielle Bellot grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica. She has contributed work to or has work forthcoming in Slate, The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, VIDA, Lambda Literary, The Toast, The Normal School, Harlot, and other places, and she was featured on The Butter's 'This Writer's On Fire' column. She is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University and is working on her first novel.

Gabrielle has written 5 articles for us.

35 Comments

  1. Thank you for writing this. I can’t believe how self-centered some people are in forming their world views. Like, “I’m non-binary so everyone else must be, too,” or “I’m glad I didn’t have an abortion so abortions must be illegal,” or “I used to think I was bisexual, but now I’m a lesbian so bisexuality must not exist.”

    And his logic doesn’t make any sense anyway. He thinks everyone is on a continuum, but that there are a few people who may be hard-wired female or male, but for some reason only people who were assigned female or male at birth can be hard-wired as those genders? If we’re on a continuum, why is it not possible to arrive at the opposite side?

  2. No person is an authority on someone else’s identity. Who the heck is this person? I’ve never heard of ’em.

    (Also this was beautifully written)

  4. More articles by Gabrielle Bellot, please! This was enraging, and yet beautiful and enlivening. Thank you.

  5. jesus you’re smart. this is like the smartest way you could possibly respond, whereas I just want to be like “who the fuck cares what that dude thinks” but I’m going to have to reread this a few more times to get it all in my head.

    • yikes at calling him “a dude” though……….just bc someone is awful doesnt mean you should misgender them

  6. This is such a true and beautiful description of what it feels like to listen to, rebel against, hateful talk. Thank you!

    • As an adult human female, Trans women are men.
      At no point will men become women. You were not born with a female brain (Debunked 2019) you were not born in the wrong body, you have a debilitating mental illness that for Money, has been the ONLY mental health issue where the delusion is affirmed.
      You don’t get to colonize the needs of my sex.
      You don’t get to push us from the spaces our mothers and grandmother’s and great grand mothers fought for.
      One woman raped in a women’s only prison by a trans identified male was already far too many.
      This is not a human right movement, it’s a men’s rights movement.
      It’s disgusting that your delusion is being catered to.
      Women transition to ESCAPE misogyny.
      Men transition to perpetuate the stereotypes that produce misogyny.
      Every time the LGB says ‘We don’t support that” you tell us to sit down and shut up and bow to the T.
      #LGBDivorcedTheT #GetTheLOut
      #LGBDropTheT
      Y’all have colonized and stolen the LGB flag.
      And when women, many of them LESBIANS, reverted to using the suffragette colors, y’all stole that and claimed you didn’t know a flag made in 1919, that had been in the news for it’s use being “a threat” to T people, existed.
      You lie about history and preach conversion therapy of homosexuals.
      Push pedophilia and then use the LGB as a meat shield.
      Go back to MOGAI and leave the LGB alone.

  8. Richard O’Brien has been one of my favorite actors since 2009. He’s a big reason I support the trans community (I’m cis and learned a lot about what being non binary means from reading his story) and I’ve had him on this pedestal for years. So to read that he said those hurtful things cut me to the bone. I am so disappointed in him for saying that, because I expected so much better from him. I only hope someone informs him how wrong he is, and that he actually listens and thinks about what he’s done.

  11. A thoughtful response to this low-minded myopic ‘noise’ that is all too often considered nuanced perspective. Thanks for sharing your refreshing rebuttal to this seemingly ubiquitous dreck.

  12. Thank you for writing this well written article. I guess the next time I watch Rock Horry Picture show it will partially tainted due to this Dick.

  14. Thank you Gabby, every time I read something written by you I feel like I become a better person

  15. My favourite article on Autostraddle in the last 12 months, at least. Very beautifully written! Thank you for your words and time.

    I’m so disappointed that he (with Angel Haze) is the only ‘famous’ nb person I know of, and he’s such an asshole. On women’s day, of all days!

    (Please, my fellow non-asshole nb people, let’s all become famous to drown out his noise through sheer numbers)

  16. i would rather negotiate this with Trump rather than someone from a subculture historically hostile and literally worshipping their history. The latter would be equivalent to negotiating things with Cruz.

  17. Thank you very much Gabrielle! So well-written and poetic. Close-mindedness is infuriating.

  18. You’re confusing sex and gender.

    Sex is your potential capacity to either father or bear a child.

    Gender is a system of sex-based stereotypes designed to keep males dominant and females submissive.

    “Genderfluid” is a meaningless concept. Basically the person is doing their own thing and not caring what the standard is. That’s called being healthy, not being “fluid”, and nearly everyone does it to some degree, making the term even more meaningless.

    You are male. You have or once had the potential to produce sperm (and it’s none of my business either way). You can wear whatever you want, adopt whatever name you want, and you are still a male. That’s just the way it is. There’s nothing wrong with being male. It is a morally neutral state of being. And I find it telling that your idea of being “female” is adopting the same damned stereotypes that so many of us have spent so long trying to destroy. Whose side are you on, anyway, and why do you think your upholding of sexism makes you entitled to anyone’s sympathy?

    If someone hits you or rapes you or tries to kill you or threatens to do any of those things or violates your basic civil rights to jobs or housing (you don’t have any more right to use a women’s bathroom than any other male does, sorry sunshine), THAT makes you entitled to sympathy, and also anger and direct action to change the situation.

    But you want to come in and dictate to everyone how a politically oppressed group is supposed to be defined even though you come from the group doing the oppressing.

    Spare me.

    • Okay first FUCK YOU

      But second thanks cause now when my mom asks me to explain 2nd wave feminists to her and why they’re so fucking awful I can just point to your post instead of having to write a fucking essay !

    • Since you didn’t take the trouble to read the guidelines made easily available to you before spewing your tired and hateful nonsense, allow me:


      C. On Truths We Hold Self-Evident

      We’re really sick of having the same fruitless debates over and over again. So, if you’re commenting on this website, please keep in mind that the following facts are not up for debate here (anymore):

      […]
      Queer trans women belong in the queer women’s community.
      […]
      A member of the oppressor group is not qualified to tell a member of the oppressed group that they’re not entitled to feel oppressed, offended, discriminated against, bothered or threatened by something or someone. (Or empowered by something or someone, for that matter.) A cis person cannot tell a trans person that the trans person’s assessment of transphobia is wrong, a white person cannot tell a person of color that their assessment of racism is wrong. Listen.

    • @ ‘yeah right’

      I’ve long had a sneaking suspicion that the average TERF lacks the ability to read, and I must thank you for helping give support to my thesis, since your comment, with its irrelevance to my piece’s content, is a masterfully asinine example of that. I am confusing sex and gender? Did you even skim what I wrote about gender identity above, or how I explained precisely the opposite of what you informed me I had done? Perhaps I will find your comment pasted, verbatim, on other pieces about trans women, as equally irrelevant, illogical, un-empathetic, idiotic, and ill-informed, there as it is here.

      If you are trolling, all I can say is that trolling of so low a level does not work on me, so try harder, or leave. And if you are not a troll–honestly, just leave. You won’t win this argument against me. Tchau.

  19. Thank you for all of your kind words! I really appreciate it. I’m just sad that I had an occasion to write this piece at all. The poison of Germaine Greer’s transphobia spreads on. Hopefully, O’Brien will realise, one way or another, that such restrictive worldviews as he has espoused here are simply not descriptive of reality.

  20. Fuuuck him. Just because he identifies a certain way does not give him authority to speak about trans women at all. If anything, his statements indicate the bias that Gabrielle has so skillfully highlighted and shows him to be totally clueless when it comes to binary trans people. If I had to guess, I’d assume he doesn’t totally believe in gender, similarly to how TERFs are “gender critical” or whatever it is they claim to be. That view is of no use. Gender is, while ephemeral in some senses, a very real thing. A thing where trans women are women. We are not “the idea of a woman”, we are women, not some pale imitation. We are not “in the middle”. If O’Brien truly is transgender, then that means he’s a traitor of the ilk that truscum are and should not be let near anything serious or of consequence.

    Honestly, this only adds to my dislike of Rocky Horror, knowing that it was basically his baby. Unlike some people, I am not generally one to separate art from artist and frankly I think his viewpoint (or a nascent version of it) is expressed in Rocky Horror, through the vehicle of Frank. Frank’s predatory transvestism paints transgender people in a stereotyped light that erases the existence of actual trans people. O’Brien’s disdain for trans women is clear.

  22. My child recently came out as trans. I’m really trying to learn about something with which I am mostly ignorant in order to be as supportive as I can.

    Thanks for the article and all the comments in helping me learn. I was a big Rocky Horror fan growing up. It’s from a different era and so is Richard O’Brien. And so am I. It’s been a while since I’ve watched it and maybe it has not aged well, but back in the 80s and 90s it was the inclusive message that drew me in.

    But, as a cis heterosexual male I am not going to venture any opinions. I’m here (well, reading articles like these) to listen and learn, but I would ask for patience with people like me. I spent many years fighting for LGBT rights but with a focus on the LBG part and without really understanding the T. But I am trying to negotiate new ideas and new terminology to catch up, learn and understand – for my daughter’s sake (saying that is taking some getting used to) and for my own. And to be a better ally.

    I’d always appreciate any pointers for further readings during information (not wanting to hijack the thread though!) and Gabrielle’s writing seems like a good thread to follow. Thanks again.

  23. You were so concerned with finding a reason to be offended that you haven’t even bothered to understand what O’Brien actually *said*.

    Those who are transgendered will never be cisgendered. Period. No trans-woman will ever have a history of the experiences of a cis-woman. Likewise, no cis-woman will ever have the experiences of being a trans-woman. These are not and can never be the same thing and that’s fine.

    You are what you identify as, what you know you are, as far as gender goes, and you have every right to use whatever toilet you want (nobody should be monitoring that anyway, that’s creepy) and to call yourself whatever you decide.

    But if you are trans, you cannot, and it should be obvious that you cannot, *not be trans*. Every trans-woman will always be a trans-woman. This is not lesser. This is, as Richard O’Brien says, *the idea of a woman*. That’s fine. Why do you have a problem with this?

    Those of us who are trans will never be able to look back on our childhoods as the gender we are. Those of us who are cis will never be able to look back on when in our childhood we realised we had the wrong body. These are differences, and these differences will always and must by definition and tautology always exist. No trans-woman has ever recalled her first period of when that boy in fourth grade looked at her differently the first time. No cis-woman has ever recalled the confusion or discomfort or uncertainty of holding garments designed for the gender they were not told they were and feeling like it belonged more.

    Stop looking for reasons to get offended by your obvious bloody allies and peers, and grow the hell up.

    • No woman will ever have the experience of another woman, cis or trans, no person will ever have the experience of other person, because we are unique human beings, so your point is moot.He called transwomen “not natural women”. Wtf is that? There’s nothing natural in today’s people’s lives, apart from the bodily functions. He’s a TERF, period.

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