Littlejohn And Toilet Paranoia

Some pundits have experienced problems with the sexual landscape: the most basic aversion of many, often through slavish devotion to that part of the scriptures that abhors such practices, is of homosexuality. Others have difficulty with cross-dressing, which they confuse with being gay. Yet more find gender reassignment difficult to understand. And then there is Richard Littlejohn.

Toilets, Guv? It's for a good slash after a skinful, innit?!?

The Daily Mail’s tedious and unfunny churnalist is deeply suspicious of all behaviour that is not rabidly and openly heterosexual. Over the years, Dick has managed to accommodate his prejudices, even though he bangs on about gays and lesbians rather too much. But now the transsexuals have appeared on the horizon, and thrown his world into panic.

It was all so much more straightforward once, in the days when Littlejohn could call a poove a poove, not get instantly fact-checked and criticised, and trouser the appropriate bundle of The Green Folding Stuff. Then came those rotten lefties, like Marina Hyde at the deeply subversive Guardian, analysing his copy and finding a less than totally healthy obsession with homosexuality.

Angry Mob also found Dick suffering from the same disproportionate need to talk about gay people after he returned to the Daily Mail. Ms Hyde suggested he needed to talk to someone about his obsession. Perhaps he did, because more recently Littlejohn has come to accept that gay men liking other gay men, and lesbians liking other lesbians, is not causing the sky to fall in.

And then came transsexuals. So hardly had the Littlejohn sexual paranoia been stilled than it was once more stoked up: he doesn’t know if they’re blokes or birds! They might not say what sex they are! What if they don’t dress how he expects?! And, most of all, what do they do when they go to the toilet?!? Yes, Dick has to know what happens when a Trans person goes for a pee.

You think I jest? This is at the heart of Littlejohn’s latest column. He talks at length (no change there, then) about “the diversity brigade” and sneers at the thought of “gender-neutral public toilets” (so making what you find outside the home rather like what you find inside it, then), but what it all boils down to is that Dick wants to know how Trans people perform their ablutions.

I mean, it’s not normal, is it? They’re having things done to them, aren’t they? It’s not like Dick and the lads having a good spray up the wall after a gallon and a half of lager, is it? I mean, if God had meant people to be Transsexual, it’d be in the Bible, wouldn’t it? And so Daily Mail readers were treated to yet another slice of closet bigotry spiced lightly with a little prudish intrusiveness.

And, as he gets paid generously for it, there’ll be more later. No change there, then.