Although Woodlawn transitioned before coming to NYC, Reed was taking artistic license here. But something of the kind really happened with Holly, and yes, what was known as a “he” became a “she”. It’s just a gender change; no need for offense.

But that would underestimate the degree of offense taken when anyone, even 45 years ago, wrote lyrics like the above, and then the song gets played to the Perpetually Offended. As the Guardian wrote:

The Guelph Central Student Association, a group at the University of Guelph in Ontario, apologised for including the song on a playlist at a campus event.

In an apology published to Facebook and subsequently removed, the group said: “We now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and we’d like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgement.”

The Guelph student group promised to be “more mindful in our music selection during any events we hold” and added: “If there are students or members of the campus community who overheard the song in our playlist and were hurt by its inclusion and you’d like to talk with us about it and how we can do better, we welcome that.”

Here’s the Guelph Student Union Facebook post, now MIA:

I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with that at all: in fact both Reed and Warhol were extraordinarily sympathetic to transsexuals like Woodlawn and Candy Darling, who would at that time been totally ostracized from society at large. The apology above sounds like something from China’s Cultural Revolution: the kind of things criminals would wear on a sign around their necks. Perhaps the student union realized this, too, and maybe that’s why they removed the post. They’ve refused press requests for comment.

Warhol’s and Reed’s friends of course defended the song (from the Guardian and the Star):

Friends of the late Lou Reed responded on Saturday with disbelief to a claim by a Canadian student body that the singer’s 1972 hit Walk on the Wild Side contains transphobic lyrics.

“I don’t know if Lou would be cracking up about this or crying because it’s just too stupid,” the singer’s longtime producer, Hal Willner, told the Guardian. “The song was a love song to all the people he knew and to New York City by a man who supported the community and the city his whole life.”

and:

Friends, colleagues and biographers of Reed have come to the late singer-songwriter’s defence.

“The song was a love song to all the people he knew and to New York City by a man who supported the community and the city his whole life,” said Reed’s former producer Hal Willner in an interview with the Guardian.

Howard Sounes, author of Notes from the Velvet Underground: The Life of Lou Reed, told the Star that Reed “cannot fairly be accused” of being transphobic.

“Lou Reed was a difficult and sometimes unpleasant person, but transphobic he was not,” Sounes said. “Reed was a bisexual who had close friendships, and conducted love affairs with, (transgender) men.”

In the mid-1970s, Reed was in what was essentially a marriage with a transgender person who went by both Ricky and Rachel, Sounes added.

“Lou loved Ricky/ Rachel, and was very public about their relationship at a time when such things were considered extremely outré . . . He was in love with transgender people. He found them exciting — sexually and intellectually — and he celebrated them in his work.”

. . . In a 2016 article about Reed for New York magazine’s entertainment blog Vulture, music critic Bill Wyman said much of Reed’s work centred on “the experience of the unwanted and the despised. Some of the words we have today — bullied, gay, trans — didn’t really exist as such back then.”

In his piece, Wyman singled out Reed’s compositions “Sister Ray” and “Sweet Jane” as examples of bringing transgender stories to mainstream music.

What happened here is what happens so often these days: students or Authoritarian Leftists just hear a word that “triggers” them, and then, without understanding the context (or reading an “offensive” article), respond with a kneejerk ideological reaction, apologizing profusely to the marginalized and often demonizing their opponents with slurs like “transphobe,” “racist” or “sexist.”

Well, transgender people are widely disliked and mistreated, and all of us should ensure that they’re treated like everyone else. Changing gender, like being gay, is not a “choice” but, to a determinist, a cultural and/or biological imperative. There is no excuse for discriminating against them.

But the Guelph Student Union carried this too far. Like Dan Arel, who accused Richard Dawkins of writing the “conceptual penis” paper (the real authors were Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay), they had no clue about the facts behind what enraged them (in Arel’s case, he apparently didn’t read the paper he went nuts about).

Why do I write about these issues, ignoring the perfidies of the Trump Adminstration? For one thing, because Trump and his odious minions are widely analyzed elsewhere, everyone knows I despise them, and I have nothing more to add to analyses of the Daily Presidential Follies. I am on the Left, and I don’t want it torn apart by ridiculous infighting about issues like an old and apparently transphilic song. If we keep behaving this way, taking offense at everything and demonizing those who should be on our side, we’ll never have the unanimity it will take to reclaim our government from the ultraconservatives.

For the sake of that unanimity, we must speak our minds—and not be cowed by the slurs that are the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the Regressives.

h/t: Alexander