The dead make invaluable political allies. It’s true that they lack presence at rallies and they rarely pull their weight when it comes to making tea for meetings (although in their favour they also don’t drink much tea).
However, they have one quality that outweighs all this: the dead can’t answer back. They’ve said everything they’re ever going to say. Once you’ve harnessed their reputation to your cause, they’ll never be able to renege on you.
All of which explains the unedifying squabble that has broken out over which side the comic fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who died in 2015, would have taken in the contemporary battle over trans rights. On the one hand, advocates of the pro-trans position say he would definitely have been on their team. His novels espouse a generous, expansive moral attitude that encouraged tolerance of others, whether werewolf, witch or golem. Surely he’d have had no problem with seeing trans people however they wish to be seen.
As evidence, they point to the case of Cheery Littlebottom in the novel Feet of Clay. Cheery is a dwarf, and like all dwarfs, carries an axe and has a beard in which you could lose a hand. This is a joke at the expense of Tolkien, who established dwarfs as a mysteriously male-only race. Pratchett’s brilliantly absurdist explanation for dwarf reproduction is that, while female dwarfs do exist, “it was not a subject that dwarfs discussed other than at those essential points in a courtship when embarrassment might otherwise arise”. All female dwarfs simply go by “he”.
Until Cheery, that is, who decides that there’s more to life than ale-quaffing and chainmail trousers. Cheery starts wearing skirts and make-up, takes the name Cheri and asks to be called “she”. And though she faces some resistance, the message of the book is that acceptance should win. What could be more trans inclusive than that?
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Clinchingly, Pratchett’s own daughter Rhianna (who was close to her father and now often acts as the public face of the estate) has endorsed this reading, saying that any implication that her father would have been other than wholly behind trans rights is “horrifying”. “Read. The. Books,” she tweeted.
On the other hand, though, there are the Pratchett fans who consider themselves gender critical feminists. They have read the books, and they still disagree with much of contemporary trans politics. Obviously, they argue, Pratchett would have seen through the crude sexism of extreme trans activism — and the activists who think being right is a licence to bully and threaten the other side.
And as evidence they point, again, to the case of Cheery Littlebottom. After all, isn’t Cheery’s story about how everyone should be free to express themselves, regardless of sex, and without needing to deny biology? What could be more gender critical than that? So both sides argue on, fighting a caricature version of each other, unable to conceive of the possibility that everyone is absolutely fine with Cheery becoming Cheri, they just took different intellectual routes to get there.
The truth is that no one, not even those who knew Pratchett best, can be certain what he would have thought, because the terms of the row taking place over his dead body were not in place when he was alive. It makes as much sense to speculate about which “side” he’d have chosen as it does to ask what PG Wodehouse would have thought about lockdown, or how Jane Austen would have taken the decolonisation of the National Trust. The dead cannot be measured by the standards of a world in which they never lived.
This does not, of course, stop people from trying, especially when it comes to gender identity. There is a micro-industry of efforts to claim people from the past as trans pioneers. Until fairly recently, for example, the female 19th-century surgeon James Barry was understood to be a woman who passed as a man in order to pursue a medical career. But according to trans activists, Barry should be seen as actually male — living as a man not in order to defy the limits of gender, but rather to express a fundamental sense of self.
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Would Barry have recognised her — or him — self as a trans man? It’s impossible to say, given that the concept didn’t exist during Barry’s lifetime. To understand the past, you have first to accept that it was unlike the present. That applies to Pratchett too, whose limited direct comments on trans issues included declaring himself “quite amiable about people’s sexuality so long as they don’t act like a jerk”. Even the fact that he talks about it as a sexuality rather than an essential identity shows how much has changed since.
It seems likely, though, that he would have enjoyed the absurdity of being battled over as an icon, given that one of his favourite subjects of satire was doctrinaire thinking and the ideologues who pursue it. In Small Gods, the Great God Om returns to the mortal world as a one-eyed tortoise, to discover that his followers have degenerated into an inquisitorial sect with a taste for human sacrifice.
Informed that all this is based on the words of his own prophet, Om denies having anything to do with it. “Never met the man!” he protests. “Perhaps he wrote it himself!”
Those who are tussling over Pratchett’s legacy are making him into a small god, trying to hijack his authority for a fight he had no part in. It’s the least Pratchett-esque thing that anyone could do.
Sarah Ditum is a freelance writer
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