Who Wore It Better? I Mean Worse. Who Wore It Worse?
Giant prosthetic breasts test the limits of tolerance
A biochemistry tutor at St. Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford is getting worldwide attention for his gigantic prosthetic bosom. Matt Rattley, 42, has drawn comparisons to Kayla Lemieux, the Canadian shop teacher who stirred controversy by wearing massive mock mammaries to work in 2023.
Lemieux apparently gave up on wearing his fetish gear for children after the New York Post published photos of him walking to the store without it. He was last seen going to work at a new school wearing stubble, pants, and no fake boobs. Parents had criticized Lemieux and the Halton District School's Board of Trustees passed a unanimous motion to develop a new dress code as a result of the scandal.
Rattley looks uncanny in photographs. His beard is bad enough, but his male shoulders and hands are disproportionate for a woman. He does not seem at all embarrassed, however. No photographs of Rattley walking around outside of his costume have been published yet.
However, the absence of embarrassment is more likely due to the high social costs of complaining about him. “No one in his male-dominated department has publicly criticised his sexist sartorial choices, and he has been pictured and filmed at professional events looking as though he has wandered in from a stag do”, Jo Bartosch writes at Spiked.
People have been arrested in the UK for saying that men are not women. If Rattley filed a criminal complaint against a colleague or student for objecting to his fetish costume, British police would very likely arrest that person.
Dr. Ace North, a research scientist at the Oxford University biology department, recently received pressure from his superiors to stop putting gender critical stickers on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI, British DEI) posters.
“As an employee of the university I feel grossly insulted that this is tolerated, even celebrated, yet even mild criticism of gender identity ideology is shouted down”, North said of the new controversy on X. “I can’t imagine how young women in his classes may feel.”
Mr. Rattley’s paraphilia props have reignited a debate within ‘gender critical’ circles about the limits of personal freedom for men who put themselves on display in female form. Boundary violations are a classic form of male domination, leading many opponents of transgenderism to argue that all male cross-dressing is harmful. Most of this tranche wears the label ‘Ultra’.
Contrarily, there are many critics of ‘gender identity’ who draw a line at personal freedom, arguing that progress against the excesses of transgender ideology is much harder without acknowledging a man’s right to wear what he wants. Bartosch identifies the fault line:
This is where personal liberty rubs up against the social norms and boundaries that protect us all. It is where JK Rowling’s famous ‘dress however you please’ entreaty to both truth and tolerance begins to fray. Rattley doesn’t claim to be a woman. He is just a man who wears low-cut frocks and a huge rubber rack. The question is not about his identity, or even his motivations, but whether his choices infringe on others.
Bartosch was referring to this famous tweet, now more than six years old, in which author J.K. Rowling argued that ‘live and let live’ was possible. Rowling was responding to the travails of Maya Forstater, who eventually won her employment tribunal case against a dismissal over her statements that women are not men.
Previous management at Twitter locked this tweet down in their distaste. Innumerable app users have noted their ‘likes’ and retweets disappearing ever since. It is therefore an historic irony that gender critical discourse now divides over the statement to “Dress however you please”. A simultaneous debate over language — “Call yourself whatever you like” — is also happening.
Rowling has received criticism this week for using female pronouns in reference to a close friend who is transgender. “JK Rowling herself has stated in the past that ‘it starts with a white lie’ and ends with women being made to give away their rights”, writes one prominent critic, Lisa.
“I can still respect her”, Lisa writes. However, “I don’t think it’s unreasonable or ‘Ultra’ in the slightest to feel disappointed that Rowling herself commits to this ‘white lie’ in her private life.” Rowling is impossible to cancel, nor does Lisa want to cancel her. Still, “I don't understand why she would do this herself.”
The ‘Ultra’ argument is that by using female pronouns for any man, ever, the speaker undermines the project of getting the Kayla Lemieuxs and Matt Rattleys of the world to stop cross-dressing in public. The counter-argument is that policing private language is an ideological act which does not actually stop such men from acting out their fetish.
The one thing that does seem to shut them down is embarrassment. Mr. Lemieux only acted that way in front of children, not bothering to play dress-up for a simple walk to the store. Likewise, Rattley probably does not wear his costume full-time, but only for the unwilling audience at Oxford. If embarrassment was enough to stop Lemieux, it will likely work on Rattley — but that is only going to happen if Oxford University becomes intolerant of his behavior.
Longtime readers of The Distance will recall that this issue has come up before. In most western jurisdictions, a man in a dress is not breaking any laws, so it is very hard to justify removing him from a gender critical conference, for example. The line is much easier to draw at further boundary violations, such as using the women’s restroom at the same conference.
I have no hard evidence to supply for my sense that this debate has shifted. Time, and the continued appearance of Matt Rattleys, have eroded the tolerance-levels of many critics of genderwoo. As Lisa says, gender critics are not a church, and J.K. Rowling is not our pope. But that also means that no one, including the Ultras, gets to decide these things for the rest of us.
It was not tolerance, but intolerance of opinion that got us here. No amount of intolerance is going to unwind the problem. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we shall either hang together against the false consensus at Oxford, or be hanged separately.
A woman carrying breasts like those for years would likely walk stooped, with grooves in her shoulders from the bra straps.