The Barbie-GI Joe scale
Mermaids is doing “gender training”:
@ACCJulieCooke opening our third day of training sessions delivered by @Mermaids_Gender. Fantastic trans awareness and education for our staff and partners! @MerPolCEU @MerpolLGBT pic.twitter.com/m5nmJdfH2p
— Christian Owens (@genderspaceuk) February 12, 2019
At the top of this image the slide informs us: Gender identity is also on a spectrum. We all have our own unique identity.
Do your arms stick out a little bit? Have you measured how far? That measurement would be your exact unique gender identity. If that’s too hard to measure you can check to see if you have things flapping out at the sides of your head, or if you have a waist, or if you wear a triangle. That is, those of you lucky enough to be 1 through 5. You unfortunates who are 6-12 are a good deal more limited. To tell the truth I can’t see a whole lot of difference between you.
This is, obviously, nonsense. How adults can take it seriously is quite beyond me.
GI Joe. Honest-fucking-ly.
Perhaps most strikingly, the only difference between 8-12 is that they become slightly taller and broader, indicative not of clothing or hairstyle changes but rather differences in physical bodies. I guess maleness is built-in physicality, and femaleness is simpering with pigtails. For a movement that is definitely absolutely not about reinforcing female-gendered stereotypes and how dare you suggest that, it sure does reinforce a lot of female-gendered stereotypes.
#1
This definitely looks like something designed for a kindergarten class rather than for adults.
I play a lot of videogames. You know what this reminds me of?
The sort of sliders you get when designing your character, except instead of the slider defining how long your nose is, or how froglike your eyes are, its here defining your whole personality.
There are these traits that are necessarily masculine or feminine and if you show some of them we can place you somewhere along this continuum – except of course that’s all rubbish.
I mean you can tell its bullcrap when to reference their nebulous ideal of male and female, they’re using fucking action figures. You’re somewhere between Barbie and GI Joe according to this graph, except you know what?
Some of us are fat, some of us don’t appreciate militarism sold as some sort of masculine ideal, or anorexia being sold as the feminine one.
Some of us may in fact, be Ninja Turtles.
You all laugh, but this stuff is serious — look at poor #7, who has obviously had xir’s arms broken by some angry sevenphobic thug.
#5’s problems are less dire, but it looks like zee’s shorts are really riding up on zhim. I’m also a little confused as to why 5’s hairbun is more manly than 4’s man hairdo but less manly than 6’s apparently identical male do. Or is that a sideways baseball cap? I always thought the sideways-cap-wearers were a unique bunch, but I never knew it was an entire gender identity. This really is educational.
And I really don’t think the Scots will react well to the news that a kilt can transform even the manliest of manly 12s into a somewhat feminine 4. And if they grow out their hair….
This just goes to show how feminists have been getting it wrong. All this complaining about Barbie being an unrealistic model of femininity, but now Gender Science has proved that she is actually the paradigm of womanhood!
It’s all good news for me, though, as apparently I’ve grown manlier as I age. I’ll be sure to tell my doctor that. “This isn’t fat, it’s manliness!”
This is all VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS. I don’t think you people are taking it seriously enough. I have a disturb.
I’m expecting a call from the UK police any minute now.
Nope. Can’t be. There are no turtles on this graphic. Therefore, you cannot be any kind of turtle, mutant, ninja, or otherwise. NO TURTLES!
I also find it interesting that as the men head toward the G.I. Joe part of the scale, the bodies get bigger, but the heads do not. Oops. Tiny little head, great big macho body…no brains, all brawn. Stereotypical much?
What happened to the “two-spirit” people? What if some days I’m a 4, and others a 10? You can’t just average me out to a 7, that erases my bimodal identity! What happened to INTERSECTIONALITY?
Fascinating that the fatter a person gets, the less of that magical “female/feminine/whatever” essence they seem to have. What a shitshow.
But how are we supposed to purchase gender appropriate toys at Target for transgender girls now?
And the trans theorists and the non-binary theorists see eye-to-eye… how?
GI Joe? This is Britain. We have Action Man, not GI Joe. Ironically, neither figure has a penis. In fact, neither GI Joe / Action Man nor Barbie /Cindy have any ‘downstairs furniture’, although Barbie / Cindy do have breasts, albeit nipple-less and weirdly artificial-looking in terms of shape and size. Where’s GI Jane and metrosexual Ken?
And why no trans-dolly-people in wheelchairs or missing limbs? Aren’t the physically disabled aesthetically pleasing enough to be allowed in the trans-club? What about colour? Can I be a 10 if my skin isn’t green enough? Does my non-violet hue disqualify me from being a 4?
So what’s the message? It’s fine to be ableist and to practice segregation by colour as long as one is fully wide-awoke to gender, apparently.
I couldn’t help but notice that the top-right pic shows that they’ve been very careful to compare and contrast gender and sexuality, thus ignoring the oh-so sticky problem of trying to define the one tangible, physical characteristic that should be, but isn’t at the heart of the trans-debate – a person’s actual, physiological sex. Seems rather disingenuous to omit that, if not outright cowardice.
AoS,
Yes, there seems to be a huge conflict between the dogma that “identity is based purely on what’s in your head, not bodies,” and the depiction of the gender identity spectrum as being purely physical differences (plus some clothing/hairstyle details). Compare 1 and 3. The hair and clothing appear identical, so it’s not a matter of presentation — 1 just seems to be thinner and more hourglass-shaped than 3. Aside from the troubling implications that skinny women are “more feminine” than others, what’s the difference between identifying as a 1 versus a 3?
If I said something like “I’m a skinny person trapped in a fat person’s body,” I would probably be bashed for transphobia. But that’s sure what this looks like to me.
Now, if these slides were just from some undergraduate’s gender studies class presentation or some obscure blog, this would all be piling on. But I’m given to understand that Mermaids is considered a serious and respectable LGBTQ organization, and that this is actually being taught to police? In other words, when they tell us to “shut up and listen and educate yourself,” this is what we’re supposed to be learning? I really don’t think trans people are well-served by this kind of obviously flawed doctrine.
FFS. Graphs plotting political spectrum usually use at least two axes and sometimes three, offering a lot more subtlety, shading and nuance to any individual’s placement on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
And they manage to do it without using action figures of Hitler, Stalin, Rand and Kropotkin in the corners.
That’ll take a cage match to sort out.
#11 Ben
I think this lot must be experts a ignoring glaring contradictions.
This is SCIENCE, people.
Definitely not ideology or politics. SCIENCE!
That’s why it’s taken seriously and being taught to educators and the police. That’s why I must report all of you so that you may be lovingly re-educated* by the proper authorities.
* Screechy’s re-education may take a while. *squints eyes at Screechy*
Hey look, the figure exactly in the middle between male and female is…. male.
#17
I’d go so far as to say that only a third of those are “women” in the stick figure sense. By which I mean, the kind of image you might find on a bathroom door. Of course, in stick figure code, “man” is represented with the shape of person and “woman” by the shape of a person wearing a triangle so that’s always been a weird one.
Well, the one at number 5 is wearing a pot on its head, so, male that cooks? Drunken female who sampled the cooking sherry too boldly? Or maybe that’s Olive Oyl with that peculiar sticking out hair?
Yeah, that’s what I was going for. Default human is man-shaped, apparently, and woke visions of humanity do not upset the apple cart.
Since apparently we have to choose, I’m going for 7. Weird, thick legs, frequently broken and poorly reset bones and oddly truncated crotch, that’s me all right. If only I could be my gracile friend mr blue or one of his more chadly friends.
I think we can count on the internet for some things. For example, someone is bound to animate those toilet door figures fighting. My money is on broken number 7.
9 and 10 have suddenly-appearing shorts?
The hairsplitting care taken to differentiate 1-5 is telling. Women are being policed here, not men.
And why does 5 appear to have a tumor on her left side? Or is that meant to be a purse?
#22; I see 5 as being a masculine-looking female, simply because it’s the first figure not wearing a triangle (odd, really, that only 4 of 12, or one-third of the gender spectrum is clearly intended to be seen as female, as opposed to over half of the population as a whole. Hmmm), and because they don’t do stereotyping, Mermaids seem to have represented said masculine-looking female as a baseball cap- and shapeless dungarees or work clothes-wearing, thick-set figure not unlike the stereotypical butch lesbian trope. The ‘tumor’ on her left is probably her cellphone, ‘cos those butch lesbians always carry their phones in holsters (just like male construction workers or truckers, not at all coincidentally), and below that at about hip level is a smaller lump, obviously the bunch of keys that this type of woman wears all of the time.
But I repeat, Mermaids do not do stereotyping. Not ever. Never. No siree Bob.
AoS, now that you delineate that, I’m afraid I may have to be #5, ’cause I don’t wear triangles, I often have keys in my pocket, and I’m not exactly slim. The cellphone, though, I’ll have to reject, because I never have one on me unless I’m traveling; maybe that could be my camera? For taking pictures of things that butch women take pictures of? Whatever that is? Me, it’s botany, entomology, trash, and occasional mammals/birds if one catches my eye. Is that butch enough? Or do I need to nix the Botany, because that implies flowers, which implies woman, which moves me back toward fourish?
I don’t often wear a baseball cap, though, so I still don’t know how to fit me on this graphic.
Mermaids might be woke and all, but they could sure do with some remedial Photoshop training. I think the appearance of “sudden shorts” on 11 & 12 is the result of trying to make the upper body of each a little beefier without doing the same with the legs.
& looks like it might have started off as something closer to 4, given the angle of the arms and what might be the remains of the dress between the legs. The football shoulder pads are a bit of a mystery, unless it’s an attempt to mimic the studly biceps of 12.
And Number 5? It’s a nose! 5 is looking towards 1-4, wondering how they got better wardrobes than the wrinkled, shapeless thing she’s got, yet thankful that she escaped the fates of 1-3, who have been inexplicably burdened with tusks.
Mermaids is not as woke as it thinks, though. It is, in fact, guilty of denying the existence of a very specific set of gender non-cons, the exact thing that anybody who questions the slightest detail of trans-ideology is automatically declared guilty of and punished for.
Their gender spectrum graphic starts at left with a presumably 100% female and ends at right with a 100% male, the female/male balance shifting with each step. Therefore there should be a 50:50 representation smack in the middle, but with 12 figures there is no centre figure, no 6.5 (latsot’s comment #17 got me thinking about this).
Mermaids has managed to deny the existence of those people who consider themselves gender neutral, neither male nor female, but exactly in the centre. Mermaids has committed diagramattical genocide on the 50:50s. FIRE UP THE TWITTER! DE-PLATFORM THEM EVERYWHERE!! CALL THE POLICE!!!
Tusks hahahahaha
Barbie and GI Joe are both dolls, created exclusively on the basis of gender stereotypes, and quite unlike real people.
Reminds of a case I studied in tax law or federal law, having to do iirc with import duties. “Dolls” were subject to one rate of duties, but other goods were assessed at a different, and presumably more favorable rate. The GI Joe importers argued strenuously that boy-action-figures were *not* the inferior category of “dolls,” and shouldn’t be assessed as dolls. They lost. For purposes of import duties, GI Joes are dolls. Tax code sexism in toy imports was alive and well in the 70’s.