TERF

So, we watched THAT play…a guest post by Susan Chynoweth-Smith

Susan Chynoweth-Smith (below) is a director of For Women Scotland and Beria's Place. She contributed two chapters to the Sunday Times bestseller, The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht. Unlike most Edinburgh residents, she loves the Fringe, and on Tuesday, 6 August, the offer of a spare ticket tempted her to check out the "Terf" play. No stickering or protests were involved.

If they gave gold medals for hype, Joshua Kaplan and Barry Church-Woods would be on the top of the podium. Fighting thousands of other acts for the fickle attention of Edinburgh Fringe goers is an endurance sport in itself. It’s easy for your offering to be drowned in the swirling eddies of penis puppetry, an exploration of drug addiction performed on a Subbuteo table, a woman grilling fillets of beef attached to her genitalia, and a man with a dustbin touring Edinburgh with a show about rubbish (all real!). Not to mention, Edinburgh’s favourite “fanny physio” dispensing comedy and advice on Kegels while dressed as a giant vulva (all hail Elaine Miller!). In the old days, it was enough to call your comedy review “Aardvark” or “Aaaaaaaargh” and hope for first billing in the Fringe Programme: these days, however, you need to go viral.

So, hats off to the Terf Play team who managed to persuade the press that their rather dull play would be the focus of fiery protests. So successful was their media campaign that the original venue panicked and pulled out. They leveraged that to get a slot at the prestigious (and huge) Assembly Rooms Ballroom. The snag is, you have to fill it.

I will confess to enjoying the opening scene with Daniel and Rupert (Piers MacKenzie and Tom Longmire), two nervy, in their different ways, millennial men: uncomfortable with privilege or paranoid about inadequacy, and boiling with barely understood politics that they, nevertheless, know must be right (when they aren’t panicking about the stove). If Joshua Kaplan ever writes a buddy play about these two, I will be in the queue. They are caricatures (as is everyone in this play) but they are of a type Kaplan clearly understands. 

Enter Jo and this is where it became difficult. The real Jo is a warm, funny, mischievous, kind, generous spirit. We get a brittle, bitchy, hard-edged superior person with an odd, strangled “posh” accent who thinks that “little girls love pink”. Laura Kay Bailey as Jo has been praised for her study of JK Rowling’s accent and mannerisms but I fear I can’t see it. At times, the drawling (almost drunken) intonation means she swallows and elides dialogue to the point it becomes incomprehensible. Nevertheless, Bailey is a compelling presence, if the script fails to give “Jo” depth, she conveys more emotion than a lesser actor might dig from the trite lines permitted her. Kaplan’s assessment seems to be that this is a woman so damaged and hurt by men that she has lost her capacity for that all-important feminine quality of empathy - his Emma says “we are one trauma away from becoming her”. The flashbacks of interactions with a range of sexist or abusive men seem terribly exploitative, especially when her violent ex breaks into her flat. Does Kaplan understand the sheer terror such men inspire in women? Any sign of flickering fear is only conveyed in Bailey’s eyes. Hanging around to exchange cool barbs with a man who has previously beaten you in the street will stretch the credulity of most women. What are we to make of the parting exchange? “Pablo” claims he’s “not a monster, just…” “a man” Jo concludes: does Kaplan really think that wife beating is a standard for heterosexual men? Or does he crudely believe this is what women like Jo assume?

I debated Joshua Kaplan last month. He is a wazzock

There is a horrible moment late in the play when Emma (Trelawny Kean) describes a vertical “hug” in which her large boyfriend lies, full-length, on top of her with his arms either side of her body. Normally, she says, she finds this comforting, but the other day she panicked and a voice in her head was shouting “run” (at this point, I assume most women in the audience were internally screaming “run” too). But it was all fine! She fought down the panic and fear and it all went away! It was all a silly worry about shadows. Kaplan does allow Jo to say that sometimes “shadows are more sinister” but it’s weak stuff. Does this man really not know that there are graveyards full of women who failed to heed their inner voice? Does he really think that women should keep schtum when they are uncomfortable with being physically constrained by a much stronger partner?

The problem may be that Kaplan really doesn’t understand women or listen to them. At one point, Daniel leaps on the table to list his privilege, interrupting the women as he does so, and ties himself in knots about a responsibility to listen to women but also speak for them. It could encapsulate the genesis of the play. The character of Emma is a cypher, spouting huge undigested chunks of the “be kind” talking points that pass for liberal feminism. She is a priggish swat, incapable of understanding what she reads: like the male characters, this is a caricature, but one written without warmth. 

The three monkeys

And there are no real arguments presented in this play, for all the producers claimed it would show both sides. The boys’ argument boils down to Jo being mean and that “people hate you” for saying “something so cruel and vile”. Jo is never given space to explain (probably because presenting the actual arguments of the real woman would be far too compelling). Emma is given a moment when she claims objections to accepting transwomen as women are based on “anecdotes” and comparable to a fear of flying caused by footage of plane crashes, “we have stats, they have dead bodies”. This was ludicrous on so many levels, not least because the only “stats” Emma quotes in the play are the wholly false suicide ones. An emotional lie about death is presented as fact, and actual stats about real dead women and male violence written off as manipulation.

There is one compelling argument, though, and it’s visual. Prowling around the stage is the generally mute trans character “X”. The anonymous actor playing X is by far the biggest, tallest person on stage, he has enormous bare feet and his purple hair shows unmistakable signs of male-pattern baldness. He is dressed in what appears to be a thin white nightgown with one, broken, angel wing and a silver mask, looking for all the world as if he raided his daughter’s nativity dressing-up box. Most of the time, he has tape over his mouth (presumably to signify the imaginary lack of trans voices) but when he does speak, it is in a thin, reedy voice, so it’s fortunate those back and middle rows were not occupied. He lurks, voyeur-like, with head tilted, listening to the others. It’s clear that we are supposed to see this man as vulnerable: he overacts panic and fear, but bad acting is all it is. In fact, it’s all deeply creepy and unsettling. On one occasion he lies on the floor, stretching an arm out to Jo - no doubt to signify that this is a vulnerable person needing protection from a woman Kaplan seems to see as a mummy figure gone bad. But it looks threatening. It’s brilliant and revealing, but not, I imagine, in the way intended. Kaplan tries to imply X and Jo have trauma and violence in common, making her uniquely aware of him and, at one point, having them speak in chorus. But, in fact, X is mocking and appropriating women’s pain. He is everything women, rightly, fear, but is seen by men like Kaplan as broken (like the wing) and therefore to be shunted into the “non men” category.

There’s no true resolution, but there are final insults to women. The venue of the meeting leaked, crowds gather outside shouting “Terf Cunt”.

Transactivists protesting outside a feminist conference, 2021

Rupert tells Daniel that one side is shouting it as an insult, the others are proud of it. No doubt, Kaplan thinks this is all terribly amusing, but he’s clearly never been in a room while people who hate you pound on the windows, bang pots as women talk about sexual abuse, or punch women in the face as they leave. The idea that women would deliberately seek out this sort of conflict is laughable. Naturally, the only person who is fearful and cowering is X, in another over-egged and unconvincing display.

Kaplan has Jo declare in defiant manner that she is a “terf cunt”. Ah, yes, the term recognised by a UK court as an insult, a term used to justify the worst sort of threatened violence coupled with a four letter word for female genitalia. Kaplan has said that he is “reclaiming” the insult, citing a play he wrote called Dirty Jewish Faggot, but he forgets that, unlike this similarly provocative insult, “terf cunt” is not his phrase to reclaim. In the mouths of men who hate us, it is potentially deadly. Its sting is not drawn by being bandied around by men who misunderstand and misrepresent us and distort or shut their ears to our arguments.