Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ should be removed from the music streaming network Spotify because it perpetuates anti-trans stereotypes, according to a whole bunch of alphabet people with too much time on their hands.
The spearhead of this attack on the Queen of Soul’s famous hit is a Norwegian group called the Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance (TCMA), who you may not have heard of but with whom I’m sure you’d get on just fine. There is no such thing as a ‘natural woman’, you see. Quite why they picked this particular song is moot because almost every pop song ever released similarly perpetuates anti-trans stereotypes, apart from maybe ‘Festering Pus’ by Rancid Hell Spawn. It is a peculiar hill upon which to make a stand, but then the alphabet people were never known for their logic. Do the TCMA and others therefore believe that a man who transitions to being a female can never feel like a ‘natural woman’? In which case, isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?
More pertinently, there is the authorship of the song. The melody – a typically canny slab of Brill Building hackery masquerading as blue-eyed soul – was written by Carole King. But the lyrics were actually written by a man, her long-time collaborator Gerry Goffin. Seen through this prism, the song might take on an entirely different meaning. For instance, it could be a paean of praise from a man who is transitioning to his surgeon at the Tavistock clinic who has just fabricated an entire lady garden for his patient from the remains of a cunningly inverted scrotum. ‘You make me feel, you make me FEEL!’ Aretha caterwauls and it is the cry of someone who has been perhaps literally transformed.
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