Yesterday Margaret Atwood was on BBC Radio 4 talking about The Handmaid’s Tale. I blogged about it at Salon Futura because there were issues relevant to literary criticism. But obviously there were also issues relevant to feminism. My friend Maura McHugh has picked up on one of the key points. I’ll reproduced the Atwood quote here, though please do take a look at Maura’s post:

“People would blithely say ‘It can’t happen here.’ That is the most chilling statement that anybody can make, because all of this can happen anywhere given the right amount of social disruption and turmoil.”

Maura is absolutely right that this is important, but it isn’t just a case of “it could happen here”. If you are a member of the right disadvantaged minority it does happen here.

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, at a time when people like me were mostly terrified of speaking publicly about themselves. If we wanted to meet for mutual support, we had to do so secretly and be wary of the police. Many years later (1994, I think) I was told by a lawyer that “someone like me” could not expect justice from a British court, and that if I tried to defend myself then the judge was likely to take offense and treat me very harshly.

Of course for trans people things have got somewhat better in many areas. But I’m pretty sure that there are still groups of people to whom the epithet “someone like you” gets applied as a reason for denying fair treatment. The trouble with institutionalized discrimination is that most of society sees it as right and normal, “natural” even. And representing that, I think, is one of the most powerful aspects of Atwood’s book.