So TERFs are currently flooding a UK women’s writing magazine with abuse because they cut ties with someone who is transphobic.
Mslexia had Amanda Craig on their board of judges for a competition - but she spoke out in support of JKR, and another judge expressed that she was uncomfortable working with her. Mslexia then asked Amanda Craig to step down because they wanted to remain an inclusive environment for all women.
Of course, TERFs got hold of this and decided that Mslexia were misogynists for supporting trans women (because that’s what they do) and as well as attempting to ignite a boycott against the magazine, they’ve flooded Mslexia’s inbox with abusive messages (one of the employees said she came in this morning to 200 abusive emails)
It’s a very small team of lovely women standing up for trans rights.
If you can, please support this trans-inclusive publication that encourages gender equality in writing and publishing by subscribing to them or just sending them a nice message!
Theo looked up from the ironing board where he was putting a neat crease in his flannel trousers for work the next day. Steam hissed towards the ceiling as Theo reacted to Adrienne’s shock announcement.
‘Mongolia? Tomorrow? You’re leaving for Mongolia tomorrow? But what will you do there?’
He gazed longingly at the young woman, her paisley patterned dressing gown spread around her as she sprawled over the old armchair, pen in one hand and notebook in the other.
‘Well if one is going to be the greatest travelogue writer the world has ever seen a little travelling is obligatory wouldn’t you say? My agent says I need to visit places other than Monaco, Cannes, and Cancún. I should just live with the natives for a while and let them show me the sights.’
‘Oh dear, will you be gone long?’
‘Not long I imagine. A year should see it done and dusted. Enough experience there for a best seller I should think.’
Theo couldn’t think of anything sensible to reply. He silently repeated her delicious name, Adrienne Montefiore McGlashen, in his head and knew it was destined to appear in large print on the covers of expensive hardback travel books. But Theodore Brown, the name of a shy and sensitive twenty-eight year old, would only ever appear on the manuscripts of finely nuanced short fiction; the bundles he quietly submitted to all kinds of magazines and literary agents, and had been doing so for years without success.
Theo was brought back from his thoughts by the rustle of a key in the front door. It was quickly followed by a crash as the front door slammed shut followed by a clatter of metal echoing from the hall.
Wojtek burst into the living-room, sweat dripping from his forehead onto his stained clothes. He sighed heavily and, exhausted, threw himself down on the old sofa.
Glancing towards Wojtek, Adrienne frowned with distaste. Her parents had bought her the flat; really more landlady than flat-mate, but her parents worried about her living alone so insisted on flat-mates. She pulled her silk paisley dressing gown around her more closely before returning her attention to her notepad.
Theo sucked air through his teeth as he carefully replaced the steam iron on its little asbestos helipad at the end of the ironing board. His eyes scanned the soft down on the nape Adrienne’s neck and realized he had left everything too late. Working as a lowly backroom local government officer how could he ever have convinced the beautiful, confident Adrienne to see him as a fellow-spirit rather than mere flat-sharer, even if her family’s money gave her the security and opportunities of which he could only dream.
With an great effort he forced himself to look away. There was Woi, his other flat-mate, actually Wojtek Kowalski, was a young man from somewhere called Bialystok, sprawled out on the sofa. Woi delivered hot food, by bicycle, for Deliveroo during the day and pizzas for Domino, by moped, half the night. Every day the oil stains decorating the legs of his jeans grew more prominent.
******************
The next evening Theo sat listlessly, pretending to write, having seen Adrienne suddenly float off abroad, disappearing into the sky like a released helium balloon. Riffling mindlessly through the muddle of papers she had casually abandoned in the flat he discovered she had taken out an annual subscription to Mslexia magazine a few months ago.
The subscription continued to operate and in the following weeks the magazine for female writers arrived at the flat regularly. Theo took to reading it avidly, enjoying some of its touchy-feely family sagas and exotic fantasy stories. In fact each issue carried competitions that he felt were ideally suited to his subtle style of writing. Several times he considered he might even have a reasonable chance of winning one of them. But of course there was a drawback. He wasn’t a woman.
It preyed on his mind and eventually he recalled various literary giants. Drawing on his very limited well of courage he decided that what was good enough for George Eliot and Robert Galbraith was good enough for him. He entered a Mslexia competition. It was the tale of a sad and lonely man who befriends a stray dog, which turns out to be an alien with superhuman powers. It helps him find the girl of his dreams. He entered the competition using the nom de plume Thea McGlashen, remembering how often Adrienne had said she would have loved to have had a sister. He knew she only tended to say it when she was cross, but he was sure she didn’t really mean to imply that she’d rather share the flat with anyone but him.
When the flat’s phone rang three weeks later Theo answered and a woman’s voice said ‘Hello Thea, I’m calling from Mslexia magazine’. His heart skipped a beat. He struggled to fake a female voice as exhilaration kicked in and his pulse raced. A chirpy voice informed him that he had in fact won that year’s major prize – a thousand pounds, together with the offer of publication, some personal mentoring, a week’s attendance at a writing retreat in France, free editorial feedback on any future manuscript, and personal introductions to editors and literary agents.
Theo’s spirits soared. He had to plonk himself down on the sofa in order to keep himself from dizzily keeling over as the caller reminded him that the winning entry was also likely to be broadcast, republished elsewhere, and its film rights might well be sold for an awful lot of money. He was gobsmacked. But when she mentioned, before ending the call, that ‘The only further requirement is, of course, that you have to attend the award ceremony in person to be presented with the prize; and that will be really cool won’t it?’ he was left absolutely dumbfounded.
Theo was still lying in the recovery position on the old sofa, battling to come to terms with his paradoxical situation, when the door flew open later that day and Woi, exhausted and stinking of sweat as usual, dumped his bicycle with a clatter in the hallway before falling into the room and throwing himself down on the sofa almost on top of him.
Woi listened with one eye open, sighing as Theo giddily explained the terribly frustrating predicament in which he found himself, having a load of prize-money to collect but only if he was a woman.
Wiping away the sweat from his weary brow with his cuff Woi quickly calculated how many hours he’d have to spend working the gig economy to get his hands on that amount of ready cash.
‘Here a deal, Teo,’ he quickly announced. ‘Or maybe I call you Thea now, it’s ok? I happy to become bisexual, transsexual, transvestite woman; whatever you call it. I see your Scottish pantomimes and your Mrs Brown’s Boys. British people, they believe that stuff they believe anything. You see Some Like It Hot? Show many times in Bialystok. Tell you Theo, I got lotta regulars - eat Chinese, pizzas, all the time. They sure lend skirt, wig, shoes with dangerous high heels. See, I go awards, I collect, what you call, dosh, I come back, we split, how you say, fifty-fifty. What you saying that Theo?’
Of course, Theo agreed almost immediately.
But the thing was, having pulled off the awards ceremony with an acceptance speech comprising ‘Thanks much guys; you real big tippers’ without any hitches Woi thought he might as well help Theo out some more by exploiting the rest of the prize, all of which Theo was equally reluctant to expose himself to. So Woi enjoyed the holiday they called a writing retreat in Montpelier. He had all day just to scribble accounts of unusual incidents that had happened to him on making deliveries to people’s doors. The tutors told him he had an unusual style, an authentic voice, a vivid imagination, and a great deal of potential.
Once back in the flat Woi scribbled some more little pieces describing bizarre gig economy incidents – such as the time he’d been asked to deliver ten miles away and had hitched a lift with his bike on the back of a lorry, - together with descriptions of some of the unusual people he’d encountered – such as the hooker who always ordered a foul smelling curry for delivery in a hurry when she wanted to be rid of any particularly obnoxious client. It wasn’t long before he had a slim book’s worth of material.
Woi sent the hand-written pages to the editor that Thea had been advised would provide free editorial feedback. The editor returned a typed copy, in which he had politely corrected the vast number of grammatical errors in his script, together with a note which said, “I was greatly impressed Thea, by how you are able to write in a man’s voice and change your style so radically from the piece which won you the prize. You are clearly a major talent, a very skilled and original writer. Indeed your new, more direct style is a definite improvement.” The editor happily provided a note of introduction to a literary agent. When Woi approached him the Agent immediately took him on, enthused by this fresh new voice in writing world.
The literary agent soon placed Woi’s book with a publisher and within weeks it seemed like all five million people working in the gig economy had decided to buy a copy, and then another five million after that who wanted to find out what working in the gig economy was really like.
But even before the royalties started to roll in Woi had stopped working in the gig economy. He had decided to become a full-time writer instead. Being well-used to an irregular income he decided the bigger irregular income from successful writing was much preferable. Knowing he couldn’t continue to be Thea much longer he was already contacting some of his old customers as he worked on a story about his sex change and the problems Polish women experienced when transitioning into men.
Theo was pleased enough with his five hundred from the prize money and happy to escape the stink and sweat Woi had invariably brought home with him after long hours of cycling. He realized he’d never have enough brass neck to be as successful as Woi. He just couldn’t summon up the kind of taste for publicity and vacuous celebrity that was obviously essential for any successful writer in the modern world. It was enough for him to hear his winning story broadcast on Radio4 and see it republished on one of the numerous inside, and seldom read, pages of the bulky New York Times.
Adrienne eventually flounced back from Mongolia a year later wearing a gigantic fur coat and smelling of wild horses. She complained heartily about the quality of the macchiato served in Ulan Bator’s coffee houses. Although Theo sought to make her meals, provide her with cushions, and generally satisfy her every whim he eventually grasped that she still found him as uninteresting as ever. Wojtek, however, interested her a lot. While she’d been gone he had transformed into a woman and back again into a new man. He had always been fit and muscular from all the bicycle exercise, but now he was famous and affluent too. Not only that, but he was eager to see what the whole wide world had to offer. Theo wasn’t all that surprised when they hooked up.
They went off to Greenland together, where Adrienne wrote boringly about icebergs, the northern lights, and the best times to catch a boat between Nuuk and Paamiut. Like the Mongolian travelogue it was quite dismal and designed for a niche readership. It had nothing of the fictive truth of Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow. Income and royalties not being a major concern for Adrienne she barely noticed that after publication both books were remaindered almost immediately. Wojtek, though, had scribbled notes on the idiosyncratic fast delivery of well-rotted fish by skidoo to Inuit in igloos dotted sparsely across the snowy wastes. This was a whole other world eye-opener of gig economy tales with a difference. Needless to say publication offers flooded in; companies pleaded with Woi to accept gigantic advances.
Finally, there came the day when Wojtek approached Theo saying that his Agent was talking to him about a movie. A Hollywood operation had bought the film rights to Theo’s original prize-winning story and was already hiring top box office actors. A sequel dealing with a sex change for the main character would be set in Poland and yet another volume to be set in Greenland was already under consideration.
‘That’s ok Woi,’ Theo said, as he pressed his flannels for work the next day and felt a balloon in the pit of his stomach deflating rapidly. Lately he’d started reading thrillers and crime stories and felt quite comfortable saying ‘So how about the same deal as before, fifty-fifty, so long as you do all the tedious interviews, chat shows, and book festivals?’
But Wojtek felt obliged to beat him down.
‘How we say twenty-eighty, Teo? See Wojtek famous name now, celebrity. Publisher calling me the big guns, major writer see. Got books selling plenty. More in pipeline. Publisher say big video games company already bought option to turn Greenland meal deliveries into a new game. You know, Deliveroo intersexuals, mountain biking over glaciers, getting lost where roads disappear into ice-sheet, backpacks full of rotting shark steaks, falling into hot water geysers – is fiction so Iceland geysers ok, no matter not Greenland. Games guy already got three Edinburgh Inuit community guys working hard on it.’
‘But what about me Woi? Twenty per cent? Remember I gave you your start in this. Me and Adrienne were the only writers in the flat.’
‘See Teo, but Adie with me now. We moving to big new house soon. See, writing is ok, but readers the thing. I got readers. But you Teo, well, you just a local government clerk ironing clothes.’
The colour rose in Theo’s cheeks and he swallowed hard. He frowned at being forced to acknowledge the reality of his miserable status in life. But he’d been analysing the plots of the crime stories he’d been reading and was impressed by how planning crimes could be intellectually stimulating as well as exciting. The notion of blackmailing people pretending to be what they weren’t increasingly seemed both viable and attractive.
Merrie-limp, Merrie-lump, where do you go? Your sisters left you one by one, alone in the snow. You call them once, you call them twice, but never do they show. Merrie-limp, Merrie-lump, where do you go?
Alex C Renwick’s short story is featured in this month’s issue of Mslexia
