Peter Pan: Delusions of Grandeur

Tales for our Time

Another contribution by a grandmother of a trans-identified child…

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Peter Pan was a cool dude. With his cocky green hat, complete with feather, and his snug-fit pants and jacket he was a personage to look up to. And look up to him you had to as he jetted round the world, a wingless wonder.

He was an Influencer and influence is what he did. Kids gathered wherever he went, wanting to join him, to be like him, wearing dark glasses to look like him and trying, fruitlessly, to fly. These were the Lost Boys—the lonely, the outcast, orphans, drifters, loners, the unwashed, the unwanted, the unloved.

They hung around Peter ready and eager to do whatever he asked.

But Peter scarcely needed to ask. It wasn’t for him to engage with his followers, his fans. He was a superior being in a superior world.

Yes, he had a gang but the gang took care of itself. Yes, he was into a number of rackets but the rackets had their own energy. Yes, the rackets were illegal. But what did that mean? The authorities were on his side anyway. They colluded and connived and made the things Peter did so much easier. And he didn’t even have to pay them. Their values and beliefs coincided with his.

Governments came and governments went. Laws were made but never enforced. Everyone seemed happy with the way things were. The politicians were receiving bribes, the police were receiving favors, the wheels were well-oiled and running smoothly. And Peter’s rackets grew and spread, with the Lost Boys always ready and eager to do whatever he asked.

There were the drugs. Peter was always high, high enough to fly, and the drugs made him even higher and gave him an ever stronger belief in his own invincibility.

And there was the sex. Young girls were flown here and there to supply a need. Sometimes they went to America where they hung out with politicians and businessmen and media tycoons in splendid houses by the sea.

Sometimes they went to the United Kingdom where they ate in the Pizza Express with royalty.

Sometimes they were flown to Egypt and the Arab states where they danced with emirates and sheiks. And businessmen and media tycoons.

Sometimes they stayed in grand houses in NYC and could be glimpsed coming and going through heavy front doors. They went, too, to Romania where they partied hard with Peter and his Boys.

Peter was forever young, he was a puer aeternus. He would never grow up. He had lost his shadow: he had no Dark Side, no conscience, no remorse, no regrets. His appetites remained acute, his flying remained ace and his charisma remained alluring.

The Lost Boys, though, were another matter. They had started off orphaned, abandoned and lonely. They had found companionship and purpose with Peter. But they had got old and fat and they no longer had the energy or desire to do everything Peter asked. They were misfits, they didn’t fit in.

What was to happen to them?

It was no good asking Tinkerbell for help. Tinkerbell had no time for Boys; she was concentrating on Girls. She was, let us not beat around the bush, let’s tell it as it was, she was—a Groomer. What Peter liked better than anything in the whole wide world was to be massaged by a naked young girl, one after another after another. It was Tinkerbell’s task to keep Peter happy: she gathered up the girls and brought them home and taught them how to please Peter and his friends – the princes and the sheiks and the presidents and the CEOs and the media tycoons.

Peter was an Influencer but Tinkerbell was a Socialite. She loved nothing better than parties, she was doing the heavy lifting, getting to know Everyone who was Anyone. With her family background in the Media and her love of Society and its gossip, she kept Peter supplied with all he needed for his lifestyle. As long as he had Tinkerbell, Peter didn’t have to grow up.

It was, though, a precarious business. With so many rich and powerful and royal and famous men visiting Peter’s places, in cities, in the countryside, by the sea, someone somewhere was bound to talk, word would get out and so would photographs.

Tinkerbell was not only a Socialite, she was also a fairy and if anyone objected and said they didn’t believe in fairies, she would shout and yell and tell everyone that they had to believe in fairies. And in order to keep her happy everyone would shout back in the affirmative. It was this false belief in a false concept that kept Tinkerbell alive. What a shaky foundation!

It came as no surprise when Peter got arrested and sent to prison and Tinkerbell, too, was charged with crimes.

Peter’s shadow had come back to him and Wendy had sewn it on but, since it had been separated from him for so long, it had become very heavy. He could no longer fly. And nor could he even pretend. And denial would no longer work.

Peter was never tried; he died in jail and no one knew how. Tinkerbell was sent down for a number of years.  

The Girls scattered and began to make lives for themselves. But the Lost Boys had become a problem. What was to become of them?

There was only one person to ask. Wendy. Wendy would take care of the Lost Boys.

Wendy was in fact, a bit busy. She was trying to run a country and it really wasn’t easy. Especially since the country was joined at the hip to another country. She had set herself the task of separating the two. She was getting along just fine and had all the support she needed to see things through.

She had worked at this project for years and had perfected the art of making speeches while wearing  brightly colored suits and six-inch heels. She was a wonder!

And now it looked as if the Lost Boys and their indeterminate needs were going to hijack all her efforts.

‘Just leave them alone,’ her advisers said. ‘They can look after themselves. You have more important things to do. Concentrate on Independence.’

But Wendy was bored with Independence; she had found a more interesting cause.

To everyone’s surprise and shock and even disgust, she put aside her plans while she attended to the pressing case of the Lost Boys.

Whatever the Lost Boys got up to, Wendy would be there, mopping up, supporting, affirming.

‘Of course you can do it’, she would say, ‘you can do anything, you can be anything, you can fly, you can change sex, you can be who you want.’

‘We can’t,’ wailed the Boys. ‘We can’t fly! We can’t do anything! We’re useless!’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Wendy. ‘Of course you can fly. You only have to believe you can. Be like Tinkerbell. Believe! Believe in fairies! Believe in whatever nonsense grabs you at this moment! By believing in it you will make it come true!’

Wendy was good at speeches. Even in her colorful six-inch heels she could make a good speech. But she had got so good at making them, she was so full of herself and the sound of her own voice that she had lost her grip on reality. This is the speech she made on behalf of the Lost Boys:

‘You must always remember,’ she said to them, ‘that you come first. You can run in other people’s competitions and not be accused of cheating, you can use other people’s bathrooms and not be arrested for trespassing, you can shower with young girls and not be reprimanded for voyeurism.

‘And if there should be any problem and it might seem that you could be sent back to where you came from, all you have to do is declare that you have gone through an unexpected and sudden miraculous change of identity!’

‘But that’s not possible,’ the Lost Boys muttered.

‘Oh yes it is!’ Wendy told them. ‘Oh yes it is! You can become another sex! You just have to believe it and it will be true!’

The Lost Boys muttered and looked a little doubtful, but Wendy blazed ahead with her speech:

‘You can do whatever you like and the Law can’t catch or challenge you! You have transcended the rules of society and the laws of all the lands! Yes, you are indeed Invincible! You have been affirmed beyond your wildest dreams. If Tinkerbell can make everyone say they believe in fairies, then you can make everyone say they believe that people can change sex!’

The Lost Boys were amazed.

‘That can’t be right!’ they said. ‘Surely you won’t change the laws to suit us!’

But Wendy assured them that she would.

‘If that is what you want,’ she said, ‘then who am I to get in your way!’

‘But we are bad people,’ said the Lost Boys. ‘We have committed crimes!’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Wendy.  

‘But we deserve to be punished!’

‘Nonsense,’ said Wendy. ‘You are good as gold’.

‘But we have attacked women,’ said the Lost Boys. ‘We have raped women.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Wendy. ‘How can you rape? You are women. Only males can rape!’

‘But we are not female,’ said the Lost Boys.

‘Nonsense’, said Wendy. ‘You may think that Peter Pan has exceptional powers. But in reality, it is I, it is I who have the ability to create whole new countries! If I can make new countries with new laws why shouldn’t I make new sexes and new laws to go with them?’

The Lost Boys were impressed.

‘You mean we can do whatever we like,’ they said, ‘all we have to do is wave a magic piece of paper to say we have changed sex?’

‘Yes,’ said Wendy. ‘And if it should be decided that prison is to be your punishment for your transgressions, who cares! Prison will be a hoot! It will be full of the people you want to hurt and abuse and they will be totally vulnerable and at your mercy! They will have no protection from you and you will have all the protection you could possibly desire from me and my laws.

‘I and my friends will affirm you and protect you and praise you and bow down before you! And you, with your serious personality disorders will be only too happy to receive affirmation that you are, all of you, indeed the Messiah and you will have your delusions not only ratified but promoted as a new Reality.’

What was happening to Wendy? Did she really believe she had the power to change the fundamental laws of nature? Had power gone to her head? Had she been carried away by the sound of her own voice and the nonsensical stream of her own logic?

‘The Dark shall be Light,’ she was saying, ‘the Low shall be High. Water will be turned to Fire and Earth to Air. Female shall be Male and Male shall be Female. Phrases like ‘A woman with male genitalia’ shall be heard on the BBC Today program early in the morning and not an eyelid will bat, and Heads of State such as I, will declare that women can be rapists and that rapists shall be housed in women’s prisons. And if I get challenged as to what I mean by that, I might get a bit muddled up and certain people might point out the inconsistencies but I shall push on regardless with my agenda, only conceding that I might hold back on certain laws while they are reviewed.

‘I am working on behalf of an oppressed group,’ she announced. ‘The Lost Boys need to be celebrated and granted their every wish.

‘Whole societies will change their ways of understanding the world in order to accommodate the Lost Boys with their disturbed and deviant ways and, because the Boys are suffering from delusions of grandeur which go hand in glove with schizophrenia (and are exacerbated by drug-taking), and because they demand total adherence to their way of seeing things and threaten anyone who disagrees with them (exactly as schizophrenics do), because of all this, everything will be changed to suit them, for they are the new Messiahs.

‘They can not only be the sex that they have been abusing all their life, they can steal its very identity and be more it than it is. We will change the laws so they come first and we will strip the real owners of that sex of their rights. They will not even have the right to complain about the theft of their identities let alone about an alien sex invading their spaces and threatening them.’

Power had gone to Wendy’s head. She realized now that setting up a whole new independent country and running it was not so interesting. More challenging and more rewarding was setting up a whole new sex.

Wendy had got everyone to believe or at least to say they believed that men were women and women were men, that black was white and white was black and had abandoned her desire to be in charge of an entire country in favor of being in charge of the fundamental workings of Life.

Wendy went on making excuses for all sorts of bizarre behaviors, always supporting the status quo and, when the status quo was exposed for its illogical, irrational and indefensible madnesses, she found ways to deny the cruelties she had connived with and continued blindly to support.

Bit by bit the trafficked girls came out of their closets and told their stories. Some of the Lost Boys were charged with various offenses. Tinkerbell was pinpointed as Peter’s accomplice and, in his absence, took on the full scale of the law.

We don’t know whether Peter took his own life or whether someone else did it for him. But the boy who had been invincible died an ignominious death.