Cross

Saturday night was invited by the Wizard to go to a cross dressers club, London's 'premier' transgender club, no less.

There were a handful of biologically born women. One of them had a birthday and was given an enormous cake with a huge erection and large breasts covered in pink chocolate. 

The club is run by Vicky, wearing a fetching silken babydoll dress, who has been doing this for 15 years. She is undoubtedly providing a much needed service. I recently had a date with a cross-dressing male "Don't worry, for the first date I will come dressed as a man" who made his living out of giving dinner parties for men who "like to be comfortable". No sex, just dinner and dresses. He has an email list of 2000 men who like to be 'T girls'.

All of the 'ladies' at the club looked pretty grotesque. I'm sorry. I totally understand why men would want to dress up as women. Why not? It's fun! Make-up and heels.

But dressing like a woman, even getting your bits changed to resemble a woman is not, I'm afraid, the same as being a woman. 

The ladeez tottered exaggeratedly on their heels, skittering about like nervous race-horses, flicking back their hair untold times. Others looked like butch female characters from Otto Dix paintings. 

My 'date' was so turned on by his stockings and suspenders and rubber mini-skirt, he could not stop preening in the mirror. I was the invisible drip-feed to his narcissism.

"You look so pretty" I told him, experimentally.

He sighed with satisfaction. He then told me about his new love, a whispery hippy girl. Inwardly I seethed. Surely it is the prerogative of the dumpee, not the dumper, to confess to meeting someone new.

"Why didn't you ask her here tonight then?" I snapped.

"Oh she's not into this, she's terribly fragile. You can hardly hear what she is saying." he replied. "Unlike me, she has no dark side. She's into yoga. I love her energy. She's really submissive."

Knowing this guy is a power-tripping, game-playing sexual pervert par excellence, with a thin veneer of hippydom, all drawstring trousers and dreadlocks, it was all I could do not to scoff. In fact I don't think I managed to hold back.

"It's like all those men who fancy Thai women, thinking they are so docile. What rot! Those women are hard as nails" I commented.

I stood around bored out of my mind. It was the opposite of sexy. The vulnerability is so evident, wafer-thin under the pancake foundation.

 "I don't know who to fancy". I complained to another bio-female."The ones that look like boys are probably gay, the ones that look like girls could be either way, 'gay' (depending on whether they have had the op, which would mean they fancy women), or 'straight' (if they were pre-op and fancied women) or ...well it's all rather confusing."

A female impressionist did a performance, miming to Cher (black Charles I wig), Kylie (blonde wig), Dusty (tight lurex evening dress). Her spandex leotard barely contained the bulge in her groin.  Her face was odd, huge eyes and grin, no hips.

The birthday girl was hauled out to the dance floor and asked to lick the penis of the cake.

The wizard said "She looked so embarrassed."

"Well that's the difference between a real woman and a trannie" I shot back. 

Perhaps I am being cruel. There was warmth. I accept them. I do. Just don't tell me you are a woman. 

XXY and El bano del papa

Double bill of South American cinema at the Rio, Dalston.

XXY is an Argentinian film I have wanted to see for some time. It's a serious look at the story of an intersex child whose parents have to make a decision whether s/he should have surgery to "normalize" him/her. S/he is now 15, the age when you become interested in sex. S/he has made the decision to stop taking feminising hormones. It's a crux point. There is a distressing scene in which several young men hurl the youngster to the ground and forcibly rip off his/her pants to "have a look". The humiliation is heart-breaking to watch. The parents visit an adult man who was brought up as a girl, who is now happily married with adopted children. They decide to accept their child for what s/he is: "perfect".

I had a friend who was a true hermaphrodite. He had a man's name, clothes, voice and body except for breasts and a feminine walk. Unlike all those porn sites you see with pre-op transsexuals claiming to be hermaphrodites, he had a tiny penis not much larger than a clitoris. He spent most Saturday's at Berketex in Oxford Circus trying on bridesmaid's dresses. 

Once he visited my house. Showing him around, he peeked into my daughter's bedroom, which at that time, was pure Barbie/princess pink, complete with Sleeping beauty style dressing table and muslin draped bed. His big Irish builder's face crumpled.

"I wanted a room like that" he choked "You would have thought that my parents could have given me a room like that!".

My daughter and I looked on open-mouthed. His parents were devout Catholics from a tiny Gaelic speaking village in Eire. It's not unreasonable that they would have struggled to deal with the situation. 

El bano del papa is a Uruguayan film about the visit of Pope Jean Paul II to a small town. The inhabitants are incredibly poor, not even having enough to eat. They are excited about the visit which they hope will provide an opportunity to make money from selling food and other services. The press 'big up' the Pope's visit suggesting that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will turn up. The villagers get themselves into debt. This film is an indictment of the press, the corruption of Uruguayan officialdom and finally the sheer insensitivity of the Pope to true poverty. 

It is like a visit from the Queen; walls are repainted and new carpet is laid. One wag suggested that the Queen must think everywhere smells like new paint.