Apparently, there is both a Transgender Awareness Week and a Transgender Awareness Month. Although, as far as I can make out, these overlap. Transgender Awareness Week falls within Transgender Awareness Month. Presumably, we are expected to be doubly aware of transgender for those seven days. Quite how it might be possible to remain unaware of transgender at any time remains to be explained. As well as Transgender Awareness Month and Transgender Awareness Week there’s an International Transgender Day of Visibility, Transgender Parent Day and Transgender Day of Remembrance as well. All of which is on top of such notable dates as Intersex Awareness Day, Asexual Awareness Week, Bisexual Awareness Week, Bisexual Visibility Day, Non-Binary Awareness Week, Pansexual and Panromantic Awareness and Visibility Day, Lesbian Visibility Day, Omnisexual Awareness Day, International Transgender Day of Visibility, Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and many more. It’s possible there may be some I’m unaware of.
With all that awareness being thrust upon us, we might have been glad of the Day of Silence last April. I know I would. Unfortunately ─ and not a little ironically ─ I hadn’t heard about it.
It’s not only the aromantics, panromantics, asexuals, pansexuals, omnisexuals and bisexuals, of course. The year has insufficient days for all the groups that want to lay claim to one as their very own. There can surely be no date on the calendar which isn’t, of necessity, shared by any number of groups. Everybody who thinks they possess a specialness that they share with a limited number of others ─ in the parlance, a ‘community’ ─ has to have their own day. Or week. Or for the very needy, an entire month. Depending on your whereabouts and micro-identity choices, around this time of year you might be marking World Jellyfish Day, World Kindness Day, World Tsunami Awareness Day (how do you ignore a tsunami!?), National Broadcast Traffic Professional’s Day (according to that apostrophe there is but one lone celebrant) or National Hug a Musician Day (also known as Get Punched in the Face by a Mad Saxophonist Day). Every day is a red-letter day for someone or something somewhere.
Incidentally, I’d like to wish all my readers in the USA a rather belated happy National Indian Pudding Day (November 13)!
Today, however, I would urge you to spare a thought for possibly the least acknowledged group of all – the ordinaries. I’d like to suggest that we set aside a day to celebrate the average person. The unexceptional and undistinguished who walk among us unnoticed and unappreciated. It’s time to give the ordinary people their due. After all, without the average person there would be nothing against which to measure the specialness of all those special people. Without the ordinary there can be no extraordinary.
I propose we institute an Average Person Awareness Day. A day when we mark the contribution to society of those about whom there is nothing much to be said. The mediocre and the middling. The plain and the plodding. The anonymous and the anodyne. The inoffensive and inconspicuous. The unpretentious, unseen, unheard masses. The magnolia emulsioned woodchip in a flock wallpaper world all garish and gaudy. Let’s have a day when we raise a glass and drink a toast and give a cheer and maybe even stand on our doorsteps and clap for those who throw no light and cast no shadow. It would be nice if somebody remembered to invite the nonentities we briefly and half-heartedly tip a hat to on Average Person Awareness Day.
A man from round the Fife coast,
Made a rather peculiar boast.
Disdaining mathematics,
He was very emphatic,
That he was more average than most.
Peter A Bell 
I love your wit, Peter, and I do so agree. The world is mad. Hurrah for being ordinary.
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Beautifully pitched piece there , one of your very best.
I particularly liked “The magnolia emulsioned woodchip in a flock wallpaper world all garish and gaudy.”
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Ha Ha, love it, Peter. Narcissism is the plague of our era. Precious wee princesses and princes, indulged to the nth degree, have grown up while we’ve been asleep and we have failed to notice that they are now right royal tyrants. In the West, we now inhabit a world straight out of Jonathan Swift, the great Irish satirist, where the adults are the children, with no agency, and the children are the adults with a propensity for totalitarianism at their wee fingertips.
To be lauded is the ultimate in achievement, no matter how that lauding is gained, no matter how many bits have to be lopped like a tree that has overreached itself, no matter how base and disgusting the source of that lauding is, because, make no mistake, if those Pride marches are anything by which to judge, some very dubious and thoroughly puke-inducing practices are lauded there, all cosy under the ‘trans’ umbrella.
Every natural, gut instinct is telling you to run for the hills, but that is ‘transphobia’, which they can’t even get right. A phobia is something to be afraid of, but the fact that the synapses do not connect finally till a person is 25, means that it has been translated, with all the panache only the self-flagellating, middle-class young can bring to the equation, to equate to ‘hatred’. Literal hatred. Well, children, we are afraid of the mess you are making of your just-beginning lives, so many of you, and, by God, we are right to ‘hate’ totalitarianism, so you have made your beds and you will have to lie in them.
We, the adults, have failed you, without doubt, over-indulging your whims and demands for attention, especially and particularly the adults in Stonewall and its arms, the adult activists who scream abuse and demand heads on spikes for those who are not believers, and those well-meaning, but soooooooh….stupid ones who have a ‘trans’ person in their family, and, like ‘trans’ people themselves, demand that everyone else pay obeisance to the God of Trans because wee Jeannie or wee Johnnie, whose synapses are still in the infantile stage, decides that she or he should not been in possession of a vagina or penis “cos we were prescribed our sex at birth instead of our innate gender”.
Ay, and that is a plump, pink, porcine pigeon that just flew overhead, grunting its dissatisfaction with genitals whilst pooping, fetishistically, and without the obligatory adult nappy, on everyone’s uncovered head.
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Let it all out, hen!
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Brill!
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Ah Peter, least you forget we are ALL special now.
Reminded of the Life of Brian sketch-
Brian (addressing the crowd) -“You are all individuals”
Crowd chant- “We are all individuals”
Pause…loan voice ….”I’m not”
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Personally I blame it all on a lack of imagination compounded by spending too much time listening to Ed Sheeran and watching MasterChef Australia. Young people are simply incapable of independent thought and must be told who they are. Pharmaceutical companies, purveyors of purple hair dye and badge vendors have cottoned on but where are the rest. Where are the other products for that trans lifestyle. Why haven’t the soy milk companies released a breast milk substitute so you can give your trans child that extra boost of oestrogen mimics that will help them get ahead in life? Disappointing, really.
@Lorna, serious question. I’m starting to think that a lot of this trans adoption in girls is a way of deflecting the attentions of teenage boys over stimulated by porn. Any thoughts on this?
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At least all of us average people have the law on our side !
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A goodly number of female detransitioners have said exactly that, Stuart, so we have to believe them. I can only say that as a young woman, the level of unwanted attention was upsetting, although I have to add that the boys at school were decent, and, later on, many young men were, too, so it is definitely not all males, not by a long chalk, and I do think that the wide access to porn now has done some damage to males in reinforcing stereotypes of women that actually do not exist in reality and never did, and even patterns of female behaviour that do not exist at all in reality.
If people really knew the physical and emotional toll that porn/prostitution has on women in the industry and women out of the industry, they would be staggered, but few really want to know the truth. I was nothing to write home about, but the unwanted attention had nothing to do with looks, really, but everything to do with being female, just that. It often felt like a prey-predator situation – and I mean that in the real sense of prey and predator – just like a lion stalking a wildebeest, for example.
That is often how it feels to women, especially young women. Most of us simply do not understand male libido, its urgency and desperation, and we certainly do not understand sexual fetishes, autogynephilia, etc. Our gut instinct is to run as far away as possible. Don’t misunderstand, as women are just as capable of passion and sexual feeling, but sex does not control us in the same ways as it appears to control so many men.
I do think that we really need to understand male libido far more than we do, the apparent male need for control of the female in all things, and the refusal by so many men to understand that females are autonomous human beings who do not spend their entire existence at the behest of men. We have an existence that is entirely our own and in which men quite often do not feature at all, as, I’m sure, men have a life where, often, women do not feature at all.
I don’t believe I have ever met a woman who truly hates men as a sex class, but I have had the misfortune to meet men who truly hate women as a sex class or who want sex from women and don’t care how they get it. That is why we cannot have all men gaining access to our spaces and rights. We are prey for some men, so all men must be kept out because we cannot tell them apart until closer acquaintance, and the expression of sexual fetishism in public is just as predatory as rape or sexual assault.
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I first heard the term “no-mark” recently, a dismissive term used by someone who considers themselves to be “someone”. On enquiring as to the meaning of the term I concluded “better a no-mark than a skid-mark”.
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