Shon Faye - 'well, it's over' - a brief eulogy for the "trans rights" movement.

[CassOle]

https://shonfaye.substack.com/p/well-its-over

Shon does not understand why the 'trans rights' movement got pushback.

I mean Shon has a degree of some description from Oxford. God forbid that Shon would have to lower Shonself to asking the plebs if they want fries with that.

Triple cooked hand fried chips, surely?

won't somebody think of the Tarquins?

A fascinating thread with some really sane, sensible comments. This stood out and made Shon Faye's article look shallow and unevidenced.

Meh. It’s bleak, things are going to be hard, but let’s not forget that most of us do have jobs.
I saw Shon Faye host a panel at Glastonbury a year and a half ago on trans liberation, on the panel were other trans writers. One of the things that came across then and is explicit in her writing here is that she cannot compute that a trans person puts on a lanyard in the morning and just goes to work. You are either a sex worker or in some other form of valid but precarious desperation work, or you had carved your independence from the system by writing, or you worked trans rights professionally.
Just putting on some moderately smart clothes on, grabbing your lanyard, water bottle and handbag and going to work did not compute, nobody on the panel had anything at all to say when a young trans person asked about their concerns around navigating the office whilst trans because none had ever done so.
And I’m sure her talking engagements are down and publishing may be harder, but there are many of us with open ended contracts at secure work places who are employable on merit and not working on a anything related to being trans.
Will life be harder for us? Yup! Will moving to new employers be harder than before? Probably! But it’s through this critical pathway where qualifications and experience are achieved and built upon that trans future in Britain lies.
Any young trans person reading this, go crush your A-levels, go study something with a strong future and solid job security, go develop yourself knowing that it is worth while because you don’t need to work in EDI, after dinner speaking, writing or sex work, because your future is yours to craft.
Trans life is harder than cis life, and that means we must work harder and smarter than cis people. Not that it’s fair, but it is doable and the foundational stone that is laid first is belief. And I don’t want to see trans people losing the belief in their own ability to carve out a life, because this is the pathway to trans people bleakening our own lives. Don’t do terfs work for them.
Edit: just add in case this is useful to anyone that some of the secure employment areas that I know trans people have jobs in are as follows: academia, teaching, coding, software development, software support, accounting, marketing and so many areas all across the NHS.
I don’t know a single trans person who does or ever has done sex work, I don’t know a single trans person who has ever worked in EDI or been paid as an after dinner speaking.
I move in different circles to Shon obviously, but what underpins job security and employability are developed demonstrable skills and experience of deploying them. These are simply not cisgender exclusive commodities. Fuck Shon for the message she is sending her own community here, she needs to touch some grass and start engaging with anyone with a normal job if she wants to have any relevance at all.

He did mention "medical transition" a couple of times and made it clear that he had medically transitioned himself - I think he's trying to differentiate (in his mind, anyway) between the bepenised transgender and the now-not-bepenised transexual.

So it's not so much the preferred term so much as it's his preferred term, because he doesn't want to be considered the same as all those who are not 'true' transwomen. He writes:

"I see trans women online blaming the NGOs (like Stonewall) and more discursive trends that tended to frame ‘transness’ as a matter of individual self-expression and cosmopolitan values than a material need (the right to access medical transition and to live and work in safety)."

I think he's looking down his nose at "individual self-expression and cosmopolitan values" as not really being trans in his eyes. Only he (and those like him) who cut off their penis can claim to be trans. A hierarchy of trans, with transsexual being more trans than transgender.

Elsewhere, "And as oblivious as the well-meaning cis gays and others who do not medically transition can be, ..." - he doesn't even use the term 'transgender', just 'others who do not medically transition'. You have to wonder if he considers men who keep their penis can claim to be trans at all, or just men self-expressing their cosmopolitan values.

Oh bless him, he’s just trying to create a place for himself as the head of transness, only Shonself can decide who is TRULY worthy.

Yes, I think Faye does believe in 'true trans', and there are a couple of elements to that.

The first is that Faye as a gay male transsexual really doesn't feel any great affinity with straight male fetishists. So he doesn't believe that all varieties of 'trans' are the same thing.

The second is that Faye is quite politically canny, and I suspect has reached the Hayton position of "these extremists and weirdos are undermining the social acceptance I've always relied on."

The obvious thing for Faye to do - and he's not untalented as a writer - is to transition out of the TQ+ punditocracy and into writing gigs where his trans status isn't the sole selling point. Maybe he can do that, maybe not. But I think his activist phase is at an end.

It’s the role of the true narcissist to repeatedly frame themselves, or in this case, Shonself, as a victim. It’s their whole existence, being ignored or not validated is truly the end of days. He’s just a shallow, mediocre, narcissistic man.

they’ve piggy backed the EDI and trans juggernaut for years and milked as much as they can. It’s now running dry and they’re wondering if they might have to put on a lanyard and work in a call centre.

The victimhood is genuinely nauseating.

I've tried to locate my sympathy for Shon but I seem to have mislaid my microscope.

Quite. I have no sympathy for him at all. I wonder if he’s starting to regret having his penis removed - it doesn’t seem to have been the magic fix he may have hoped. He sounds quite bitter.

Has anyone read Shon’s book? I found those few paragraphs genuinely hard to read - is the book any better?

it’s either escorting or the diversity and inclusion panel

Never thought I’d say this but in this instance at least the escorting would be honest work.

He doesn't half go on.

I picked up Shon's book in a library once but didn't get past the first page or two @WimbledonWhites. It failed to engage me on any level.

I wasn't surprised.

So Shon Faye's Milk the System career has hit the skids?

Maybe it wasn't that great an idea to base it entirely on a "loose, shifting constellation of biological, political and cultural phenomena which varies according to context, place & time" while recommending women enjoy their erasure and telling kids to suck dick and get tits early?

I mean, I've seen a few CVs in my time, and no, that wouldn't have made the cut, Shon.

I think a metaphorical biff round the chops with the Haddock of Reality might be more useful!

I was trying to be caring and nice lol. But yeah, I think the haddock might be more beneficial.

That's interesting, I got deleted, I think for suggesting that the people who deliberately target children, and organise the young into their violent and controlling illusion fantasy world resemble those who rallied the young into another violent and controlling organisation in Europe 90 years ago.

I wonder who was so scared of that comparison that they had to get the post removed rather than try to refute my point?

I’m imagining a whiney whatsapp group chat exclusively made up of people who were once feted as Mainstream Media’s Trendiest Transsexuals but who are now consigned to the Scrapheap of Fleeting Fashions…

(disclaimer: the following is fiction but based-on-a-true-story, names have been changed to protect the identities of the real-life participants)

Editor’s note: a previous version of this article misnamed Gloria Gaynor (she/her dis/co).

The group chat members are:

Shun Naye

Shun’s been quite weepy of late, shares YouTube shorts of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive at least fortnightly. Hopes to stay in the ‘Sugababy’ dating category for at least another decade, willing to steal injectable plasma from biological females to achieve this. Chat participants are too busy filtering selfies to adequately risk assess whether Shun is sharing a fantasy or planning a crime.

Harris Wees

Secretly detests the other chat participants because: CLASS WAR.
Smug to have achieved mainstream writing success despite attending a shit midlands comprehensive and being an ex-con but bit embarrassed over the recent TV series flop. Tweed was hoping that hate-watching terves would mask the truly awful viewing figures but even they CBA with it. Constantly ruminates over whether casting a transmantwink to play a young, pre transition transwoman (trans Inception) would’ve been better than casting a boring old bog standard cistwink but isn’t going to admit making bad decisions to his bougie buddies (unless it’s a humorously retro story about precociously clipping a john in a cottaging hotspot).

Hunho Berkdorf

A real life version of the live action Disney remake of Little Mermaid, extensively media trained by the same shadowy PR consultancy company who empowered pandemic era Snow White to describe Prince Charming as ‘Weird… Weird’. In hindsight, Hunho might’ve preferred the escorting option but dived enthusiastically down the EDI river early on and now only bobs up to the surface for the occasional life saving, fair trade lingerie shoot.
Shout out to Hunho’s favourite overseas surgeon for the extra large silicone implants that function as a handy floatation device whenever the Cancellation Canoe gets close to Crashing.

Ohno Crawson

Ohno rarely posts to social media and only occasionally replies to the group chat because Ohno is frantically busy with the ‘Day Job’ of churning out shitty Dr Whooo spin off novels.
If he can keep a low enough profile he should be able to continue to profit from the Geek Pound, he just needs to quit the side hustle of giving career advice talks in school (hand jobs for all!) and stay away from red carpet events - which isn’t hard because the only media company still issuing evening invites to celebrity transwomen in 2025 is Pink News and Ohno isn’t THAT desperate for freebie frizzante. Not yet, anyway.

(even Mussel T Gravy himself can’t squeeze a bloody email response from the stone cold staff at Vogue!)

and Teddy McNobble

Teddy is the group admin who does all the organising that everyone else ignores… in fact, Teddy wonders if the Dollz have completely forgotten about Teddy’s existence…

…Tbf the Dollz have indeed forgotten that Teddy exists because Teddy has been muted in chat for almost a decade (the only thing the other four chatters abhor more than a BabyBore is a Professional BabyBore and Freddy hasn’t published an article about anything but babies since the 2016 sperm donor catalogue dropped).

🤣 👏

Yes. No.

TheUnusuallyQuerulentMxLauraBrown

Bloody brilliant! Have you considered writing for Private Eye?

I think the Guardian runs a system of perverse incentives.

I remember meeting the late Rachel Pollack, who was such an interesting person with such a wide variety of experiences and knowledge and enthusiasms that after a minute or two you'd forgotten Rachel was trans.

You can see some of that with Roz Kaveney, who again is from the older generation and really does have intellectual depth.

But these days, if you're a young writer with a trans identity, publishers will snap you up, and the Guardian will give you a column... but they just want you to write about being trans. I find it hard to imagine the Guardian running a column on, let's say, films or football or town planning by a bright young writer who happens to be trans identified.

It turns the young writers into terrible navel gazers, even if they weren't already, and I'm sure it must be boring for them, and they never get a chance to stretch themselves. And the Guardian don't even know they're running a trans ghetto.

I suppose there was a moment where they could aspire to be screenwriters on Doctor Who, but RTD torched that to the ground.

I'm glad to see that most trans people are more level headed, and aren't buying Faye's ridiculous fantasies about forced electroconvulsion.

Even for a drama llama, Faye's piece is ridiculous.

I dont know much about him, but I'd guess he comes from money and simply has no understanding of how life is for most people. I find it very unlikely he's made money being a 'successful author', whatever he says.

Just another inadequate male who enjoyed the chance to punch down while he could.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Shon.