A speech by Eva Castor
Image: Eva Castor
In early 2023, women across Canada were eagerly anticipating a visit by England's reigning Queen Campaigner for Women's Rights, Kellie-Jay Keen. The founder and star of the #LetWomenSpeak movement was coming! Alongside this motivating and controversial global leader, we were going to speak freely, in public, at last!
Artist and writer Eva Castor had a bone to pick with the British comedian/shape shifter, Eddie Izzard, and she was ready. Her speech "was all in my noggin'," says Eva.
When out on her runs, Eva usually listened to music, "but that year it was all speech speech speech. I wanted to be able to do it without notes."
But then, Aukland happened, and Keen's hoped-for LWS tour in Canada, which had itself become a hot spot of hatred for women who defend their sex-based rights, was cancelled for security reasons.
Here now, following on the new US President's declaration that there are "only two genders" (he means sex) is Eva's LWS speech of "most excellent fancy."
In August of 1963, the civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a crowd of thousands in Washington, DC.
There he strung together four little words to create one of the most iconic speeches in modern human history… “I have a dream.”
One of those dreams was that his four little children would be judged not by the colour of their skin but rather by the content of their character. When I myself was a girl, I learned this dictate in a slightly paraphrased version: Judge not a man by the colour of his skin but by the content of his character.
And so, it is with a sense of some surrealness that I find myself having to do just that, judge men and boys by the contents of their characters and I am sorry to report that I find millions upon millions of men and boys to be sorely lacking in this regard.
Girls and women have all the same problems that we ever had, to some greater than or lesser than degree, depending on how the winds blow or where the bombs are dropping. But now we face an entirely new set of troubles, a dystopian future which seems as though it may be totally insurmountable.
For we are living cheek to cheek with the first three generations of men and boys raised on a steady diet of violent, depraved and degenerate pornographic images, videos and sounds. The men and boys raised in the toxic porn culture consume a universe of evils: rape of all ilk, including child and animal rape, snuff films, incest, bestiality, bondage, endless humiliations and violent acts of utter depravity. If we could capture these men and boys and wring out the fabric of their sexually saturated psyches the liquid which would issue forth would be as poisonous as the hemlock poured into Hamlet’s father’s ear.
When not consuming volumes of personality deforming pornography, these men and boys may well be spending their time playing hyper realistic, hyper violent and hyper misogynistic video games.
When not playing games or engaging in porn they may well be listening to genres of music where girls and women are regularly referred to as “bitches” and “whores.”
Then there is the cohort of boys and men who say they are in fact girls and women: males of all ages who fetishize the lives of girls and women around the globe. It is easy to tell that these are men and boys because society has structured itself around giving into their every whim. These men are in our prisons, bathrooms, change rooms, sports and awards. They’re in our workplaces, our families, our schools and our marriages. There are so many bad actors in this cohort that it might be hard for some to choose just one, but I have a particular man in mind…
Eddie Izzard…I have a bone to pick with you!
Image: Eva Castor
Eddie Izzard. You are the kind of man who would play the role of Hamlet on a sultry Saturday evening and then steal the role of sweet Ophelia on the rainy Sunday matinee.
Eddie Izzard. You are the kind of man who calls himself a girl while around the globe the ideology which affirms you also instructs vulnerable girls that they may have been “born in the wrong body.” These indoctrinated girls will obsess about becoming men, they will crush their breasts with binders and gasp for air when they try to run, they will be given Lupron and then testosterone, a combination which will leave them sterile for life. All in an attempt to escape the same girl-hating culture which calls you “stunning and brave.”
Eddie Izzard, you call yourself a girl while girls in Afghanistan are trapped in their homes by the Taliban’s horrific regime. Girls who should be able to soar with dance and play and school are now unable to sing or speak or even be seen. These same girls used to risk having their healthy bodies and eager minds being blown into a bloody mist by deranged suicide bombers simply because they dared to learn to read and write.
Eddie Izzard, you call yourself a girl while in the same instant, heartbroken Iranian parents go into chilled morgues to collect the battered bodies of their teenaged daughters, young women who were first arrested, then tortured, then raped and finally murdered because they refused to follow a man’s edict to cover their hair, their crowning glory made as deadly for them as a viper’s deadly bite.
And still, you call yourself a girl.
Fine.
You may play the role of Ophelia for a moment longer and I, I shall take on the role of Hamlet.
Eddie Izzard, I have of late—but wherefore, I know not—lost all my mirth,
Eddie Izzard, you are no innocent maiden, drowned in a sorrow of madness, a betrayed virgin whose youthful body is afloat on a cool emerald-green pod, surrounded by masses of scented wildflowers, her deathly pale and smooth girls’ face shining like a pearl in the last minutes of the falling evening light.
(laughs bitterly)
No! Eddie Izzard you are a corrupt man wearing a thieves bloated body…your old man’s flesh falling off of your old man’s bones. Unlike sweet Ophelia, you are not at eternal rest in serene and sacred waters. Instead, your body bobs relentlessly in a toxic sludge which, rather than lily pads and flowers, contains tangled pairs of torn pantyhose, empty estrogen bottles, used syringes and there, just near the water line where the reeds are thinnest, discarded latex breast forms which are being nibbled on by foolish carps who do not realize that they will be dead before moon fall because what they are eating is a man’s discarded garbage.
This madness! We are living in an age of madness!
And in the play Hamlet, Shakespeare weaves together madness and dreams to create a tapestry of tragedy. Where as Martin Luther King, foregoing the themes of madness, used just his dreams to express a vision for a wiser world.
I don’t know…
Perhaps dreams are only the realm of men because I myself do not “have a dream.”
Instead, I simply am a woman.
My grandmothers were not “birthing bodies,” my mother not a “birthing parent.” My Aunt is not a “cervix owner”, her daughter is not a “breeder” and her daughter not a “bleeder.” I am not a “body with a vagina” and I refuse to lie back and take it. Not for any man.
As I witness the various subjugations made by men and boys upon the four billion girls and women living their lives on this pale blue dot, I often recall Hamlet’s tortured query: “To be or not to be.”
And I submit that for every single girl and woman across the globe that is indeed the question.
Image by Eva Castor
To be or not to be because you were aborted solely because of your sex.
To be or not to be seconds after your birth because you were thrown onto a fly-ridden dung heap and left to die because you were a girl.
To be or not to be a girl sold into child marriage.
To be or not to be the child bride who dies in a child’s impossible labour, lost to history in a dark crimson rush of her brief life’s blood along with the body of her unborn daughter.
To be or not to be a girl sold into a life of sex slavery.
To be or not to be a young women who will die in a menstrual hut.
To be or not to be a women beaten to death by her husband.
To be or not to be a woman murdered on her way to work in Calgary, Alberta.
To be or not to be…
To be or not to be…
To be or not to be…
Indeed…that is the question for each and every one of us, girls and women alike.
To be.
Or not to be.
Eddie Izzard. Get thee to a nunnery! Comedian Eddie ("Suzy") Izzard in costume as seen on the cover of the DVD of his stand-up tour, "Circle."
Afterword
Watch this video about Eva's (aka You've Got Terfmail)'s creative process for preparing her speech for Standing For Women/Let Women Speak/Calgary/2023 (that never happened):
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