Brianna Ghey shows there are no easy answers

I hadn’t set out intending to get emotional in the middle of the local market square on Sunday. I’d gone out intending to do a little work in my favourite coffee shop, and then maybe catch the new film, The Iron Claw, from my favourite studio (A24), which friends had assured me I’d like despite it being about wrestling which I loathe.

Yet, as so often happens, I got engrossed in my work and missed the film, and by the time I left the Nero in Warrington’s Golden Square, I only intended to go home.

Except outside the cafe, people were gathering in the town’s undercover market, and I found myself loitering at the back of a crowd to listen to a speech coming from a stage set up at the other end of the square. 

It didn’t take me long to figure out what was happening. I recognised the face on the large screen. That face had been all over the news for much of the past year. That Sunday was the first anniversary of the murder of Warrington teenager, Brianna Ghey, and this was a chance for her family, friends, teachers, and wider community, to honour her memory.

Yes, still… I don’t know why I lingered. 

I was far enough back that I could have easily slipped away, as did others who arrived not knowing what they were witnessing, and then deciding it was not important enough to wait around in the biting cold.

Yet I lingered and the more I lingered the more I knew I had to stay. Doing otherwise just didn’t sit right with me. And that’s odd because I’m not a person who gets involved in public displays of any kind. I’m a watcher. Not a partaker. 

But leaving didn’t feel right because, as I’d listened to Brianna’s school friends make emotional speeches, often overcome with tears, I’d turned to look at the crowd of Sunday shoppers walking past. That’s when I noticed a guy who was laughing.

And I don’t mean just smiling or smirking. I mean a big, imbecilic, slack-jawed guffaw coming from his big dumb face. And I could also see that he was trying to catch the eye of somebody – anybody – so he could authenticate his amusement as if to say “I’m not the only one here who thinks this funny, right?”

Was he laughing at the solemnity or that so many people were crying publicly? Or was he laughing because so many people in the crowd belonged to the trans community? I don’t know. But I do know that his laughter made me want to stand there longer. I hate bullies almost as much as I hate ignorance, including my own.

And, on this, I admit that I am ignorant. I’m a heterosexual guy of a generation who didn’t have these nuanced matters explained to us. My generation had been taught to be open to same-sex marriages and appreciate that LGB (and yes, it was still only LGB back then) didn’t have something to do with driving lorries for a living.

Later, at university, I would read critics such as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, and gender made a little more sense, but, even now, the debate is one I rarely engage with. I have friends on both sides of the argument, and I cherish all my friends more than I cherish having a logical endpoint to my thinking. 

And, yes, I know that to some people, even my admitting this much constitutes picking a side.

Yet I have never been able to resolve the paradoxes involved: the need to protect women’s spaces and sports, whilst having the common humanity to care for others who face a battle to be accepted. Every time I hear an argument that convinces me one way, I hear another story that completely pulls my sympathy the other.

And, no, this isn’t about virtue signalling. I’m just a big wuss who kind of… likes people. 

I also remember some years ago sitting in the office of my sister’s endocrine consultant. We were there to discuss this rare genetic condition she has, but this consultant was a genuinely decent guy who would happily take time to explain complicated science to those, like me, wanting to learn something. I think I’d said something that revealed my ignorance (which was, and I guess still is, profound) and he took time to explain his work with gender dysphoria. He must have spent twenty minutes explaining the emotional toil of his work, much of which seemed to involve dealing with people’s beliefs around simple statements like, “But there are just two biological sexes, aren’t there?”

And maybe people who would ask that might also guffaw and look around the room for somebody to agree with them because… 

“I’m not the only one here who thinks this is funny, right?”

And even if I still can’t satisfy these contradictions in my mind, I don’t find them amusing in my heart. 

Which, sadly, cannot be said about our Prime Minister.

Last week, Rishi Sunak made his controversial jibe at Kier Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions and it’s obvious (as widely reported) that this year is going to involve the party in government weaponising the issue that has Labour so tied up in knots.

Sunak might as well have turned to his backbenchers and asked: “I’m not the only one here who thinks this funny, right?”

And I say all this without any good answers. My instincts are still to protect the underdog and to question the powerful. It’s why I would always want to protect women’s spaces, women’s power, and women’s voices in a world where men have always had easier and better opportunities. Yet now we are aware of another less privileged group of people, who are routinely subjected to laughter like that ignorant guy walking past, ridicule as we heard from the Prime Minister, and violence as we so sadly saw with the tragic death of Brianna Grey, and again over the weekend when another transgender teenager was stabbled 14 times at a roller skating party in London in an attack the police are treating as a “a transphobic hate crime.”

I don’t know why I stayed on Sunday but I think I know why I didn’t leave.

It’s because I didn’t want to turn my back on something that made me uncomfortable. And even as I knew I still didn’t have any easy answers, I know I’m increasingly happy with that. It allows me to exist in a state which is one part confusion, and another part paradox.

As one of Brianna Ghey’s school friends sang a song I didn’t recognise, her voice broke. She missed a note and the moment was jarring. There was also nothing artificial about it. Nothing that would be fixed in the mix (unlike Alicia Keys at the weekend’s Super Bowl where her bum note has now been fixed to make her sound perfect for posterity). This performance was flawed and because it was flawed it felt right. 

It made me want to turn to the guffawing fool and ask him what he knew about suffering or loss or even the challenges of a life where you’re meant to play the hand you’re given, within a society that expects everybody to be the same. I do know that I’m increasingly convinced that it’s not the dull, miserly, workaday majority who make any of this worth living. It’s the minority of people who think differently, are true to themselves, and express the complications of life. Hattip to the outcasts. You are the best of us.

And if I did find myself moved as I listened to Esther Ghey give a short but moving speech, I was more moved hearing the response from the crowd. There’s value in people willing to stand in the cold and acknowledge that life can be a rough, difficult, and often contradictory struggle.

Sometimes not having easy answers is fine.

@DavidWaywell

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