A Deal with God was Kate Bush’s preferred title for her 1985 hit, Running Up That Hill. In Wrong Bodies, Skirt Go Spinny’s brilliant exposé of the trans cult, samples from instrumental and vocal cover versions of the song provide subtle comments on the trans cult’s very different ‘deal with God’. Towards the end of the film, a begowned Dylan Mulvaney sings a saccharine imitation of the song (thankfully truncated), and puts on a performance oozing with narcissism, which totally destroys the meaning of Bush’s lyrics.
And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places
I loved singing Running Up That Hill in my choir, before Covid brought that to an end. Perhaps this explains my visceral reaction to Mulvaney’s version. Singing the “ee yeh yeh yo” responses to the lines “see how deep the bullet lies’’ and “there’s so much hate for the ones we love” took me straight back to the decade and more before 1985, when, for many of us influenced by second wave feminism, the personal truly was political.
Some of the issues that we felt we needed to address were raised in Ingrid Bengis’ 1972 book, Combat in the Erogenous Zone. Before real human contact becomes possible, she suggested, “it is first necessary to deal with all of those things which obstruct contact: with the tendency to hatred and destructiveness as it exists in all of us, the need for love and the fear of it, the social barriers, the personal barriers, the desires and frustrations and expectations and disappointments … All of those things that turn relations between men and women into a war zone.”
Confronting power inequalities in relationships between women and men was part of that. It’s something Angela, my late wife, explored in her contribution to the 1983 anthology Sex and Love: “Feminists in heterosexual relationships have to grapple with male definitions, male assumptions and male power in one of the most intimate areas of our lives, involving some of our deepest feelings, at times when we often feel at our most vulnerable. It is not an easy task.”
Kate Bush’s song, when it came out, had seemed to speak to those concerns.
When rehearsing Running Up That Hill in 2019, our choir leader suggested we view an arrangement by a women’s choir, Lips, here, as a guide to the energy she was aiming for. It’s a powerful performance, the polar opposite of Mulvaney’s. I was surprised, though, to see on the Lips website that it described itself as a ‘trans-inclusive women’s choir’. I have nothing against mixed choirs (I was in one, after all). But a women’s choir that includes men shouldn’t claim to be a women’s choir. Did this indicate that a ‘trans’ interpretation of the song’s lyrics had become a thing? Had the choir absorbed Stonewall’s misinterpretation of the Equality Act, and assumed, wrongly, that to stay within the law they had to treat men who claimed to be women as if they were women? (This Lips concert was in 2015, the year Arcus Foundation funded Stonewall specifically to push ‘trans’ inclusion). Or was this just another example of the boundary violation that so often results from a desire to be compassionate nowadays?
I had assumed that Bush’s lyrics were about the need for men and women to understand each other at a deeper level, and experience the healing potential of intimacy and empathy. But hearing them again in Wrong Bodies I wondered if I had misunderstood. Was the line “get us to change our places” actually some sort of prayer for God to change our sex, a potential anthem for the trans cult? Only Kate Bush herself could answer that.
Running Up That Hill topped the charts in 2022 after it had been resurrected, as Max’s song, in the Netflix cult drama series Stranger Things. One of the many radio programmes to celebrate its unexpected appeal to teenagers that year was an episode of the BBC Soul Music programme, exploring what the song meant to different people. This included an interview with Kate Bush herself, in which she explains what she wanted her lyrics to achieve: “I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman, and if we could swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place, for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised, and I think it would lead to greater understanding.”
That was clear enough - Bush intended her song to improve understanding between women and men, not to affirm men who claim to be women. Yet the interview is followed by Bush’s biographer, Graeme Thompson, who claims that the song’s renewed popularity is due to its lyrics reflecting a younger generation’s “sense of binaries dissolving, and a much greater fluidity in the way they see things .. . Of course, it’s always been there in the song, but it does sometimes just take a different time, and a different place, and a different generation to kind of locate the song in the new meaning.” Which sounds a lot like the now commonplace rewriting of history to make it ‘trans inclusive’.
True to form, the BBC programme brought in next a man who thinks he has become a woman. This man describes his ‘trans’ journey in prose so inane it might well have come from one of the trans cult influencers in Wrong Bodies: “My relationship to my own identity has really changed over the years. I’m a transwoman and it’s taken me, you know, a long time to realise that and move towards that. For me that’s been a process of discovery, moving from a place of feeling quite restricted, like during my teenage years, towards being able to start exploring my own queerness. I think that Kate Bush has really reflected that journey that I’ve been through myself and that a lot of other queer people kind of grow through which is that constant sort of like unfolding process of discovering you know different layers of who you are. She is one of those artists that really kind of embodies that sort of transformation and rebirth within her work and she does that in quite a playful and performative and sometimes provocative way.” Quite.
“I really like people to hear a song and take from it what they want” is how Kate Bush reacted to the role played by her song in Stranger Things. Whether she would feel the same way about what Dylan Mulvaney takes from her song is doubtful. His interpretation, shown briefly in Wrong Bodies, and in full here, counters the meaning in Bush’s lyrics rather than throwing new light on them. Far from challenging restrictive sex roles Mulvaney glorifies them, and far from espousing mutual understanding he manipulates others into indulging his mimicry of womanhood.
Had Mulvaney really listened to and understood Kate Bush’s lyrics, rather than appropriating them, he might have sought to empathise with how women could be affected by his appropriation of their bodies. That wouldn’t appeal to his ten million TikTok followers, though. And there certainly wouldn’t be any money in it.
The corporate and political conglomerate of pressure that is “tran$” will colonize everything, including us, if we let it.