He is reducing being a woman down to make-up and sparkly shoes
Janice Turner wrote a piece at the Times titled The trans lobby peddles a pink and blue world. I expect that will get her added to The Index if she’s not there already, but it’s true.
A friend of hers commented that he thought she was gender fluid, and she was taken aback.
I’d never thought about my gender identity before. It hadn’t occurred to me that not being a “girly” girl meant I wasn’t 100 per cent woman. The point, I’ve always believed, is to expand the categories “man” and “woman”, to tear down pink and blue prisons. So a little girl can like trucks, spacemen, getting dirty and still be a girl; a boy can put on nail polish, play with dolls and be no less a boy.
Same here – and I still see this as the progressive approach. Why? Because it makes more room for everyone, men as well as women. Prisons are prisons; nobody wants to live in them.
We should, Turner says, oppose “a view of gender, spun off the trans movement, that is as conservative as the Mad Men 1950s.” Eddie Izzard used to say “These aren’t women’s clothes, they’re my clothes.” Now he says, “Being a transgender guy, I do like my nails.”
Men, I’ve found, can’t understand why this enrages women. Why are feminist ladies so mean to Eddie? Well, because he’s no longer saying “I’m a bloke who likes pretty nails”. He has declared: “Because I like pretty nails I am female.” He is reducing being a woman down to make-up and sparkly shoes.
And guess what: we don’t like being reduced down to that.
At heart the trans lobby upholds the same nonsense that underpins porn and men’s mags and the Tea Party right: that men are muscly hunks and women are passive pink fem-bots. To feel you are neither doesn’t make you gender fluid — or any of the other 72 crazy gender categories on Facebook — it just makes you human.
It’s not special, it’s not trans-anything, it’s just human.
I’ve never been a girly girl – give me jeans, trainers and t-shirts any day. I am still perceived as a woman by society and treated accordingly. So society seems able to cope with the idea of a woman who doesn’t do “girly” stuff. Looks like my reproductive potential is still a large part of what I am perceived as.
I don’t say I “identify” as a woman. I’m biologically female and I feel that I’m a person. My daughter is also not a girly girl (though, like Izzard, she does like her nail varnish – usually multicoloured and unmatching!) and she too is perceived as a young woman and considers herself gender non-conforming rather than trans.
So what is it? What is the thing that makes you trans? Just what you feel? In which case my gender identity is “person”.
I’m autistic; one of my sisters has ADD. She and I could both have been described as ‘tomboys’ when we were growing up. We played with a variety of toys that are gendered in this century, but weren’t back then, although she (and our ADD brother) liked dolls and I loathed them until I was given some dolls-for-boys, aka ‘action figures’, when I was 12.
What makes me trans and not her is the profound disconnect I feel with my body. It feels all wrong. It’s always been wrong. For example, while all the girls I knew were looking forward to it eagerly, I hated growing breasts, and didn’t see why I should have them at all (except when breastfeeding. I thought they should disappear the rest of the time).
I acknowledge that I am of the female sex. I also acknowledge that all the apparent behavioural differences between male and female brains (there are no intellectual differences between the sexes) can be accounted for by statistical noise, upbringing and hormones. In other words, environment, not genetics. Of course I know that brains aren’t born all the same. I wouldn’t be autistic if they were, and a great many of the trans people I know are autistic or neurodivergent in other ways.
So, as far as I can tell, trans-ness is in the brain, probably a fault in the ‘wiring’. Why that is perceived by us as being of a different sex to our body, I don’t know. Perhaps we have a body-map in our brains that was developed for one sex, then our bodies turned into the other one. Or vice-versa. I expect that the answer will be found one day.
Meantime, can we PLEASE stop this ridiculous new notion that ‘gender’ is anything other than the set of behavioural expectations bestowed on an individual by society according to their sex?! The ‘rules’ being invented, based on the idea that it is some innate essence, is making life very difficult for trans people and women.
I agree with Ms Turner’s reasoning. One gets the impression that for some transgendered a 40s or 50s pin-up poster represents the ultimate in feminine. Just look at what Jenner did when coming out as ‘female’. Way too much emphasis on ‘femalesque’ trappings and props.
The simple note: current pro-trans activism has hitched its wagon to a crude, essentialist, view of gender. One which is actually reactionary and every bit as rigid and confining as anything you could find in the Abrahamic religions.
I am a man. Being beaten up for insufficient machismo doesn’t change that, nor does in compel me to buy into the bullies’ notions of ‘maleness.’ And it certainly doesn’t make me female, or endow me with any special insight into the conditions of gay men, women, or real transgender folks.
Historically, it has only been possible for a person to transition if they can convince a lot of people that they are ‘living as the opposite sex’; and the criteria have been pretty much the stereotype. So a transwoman simply wouldn’t be given access to hormones or surgery unless she presented as way more feminine than other women have to.
I never see my transwomen friends in jeans, but I never see my female women friends in skirts or dresses.
The latter often go without makeup; the former, never.
I had a surreal experience in the bookshop last week. A small child, presenting as a girl, looked at me carefully, then asked the adult with her “Mam, is that a girl?” The adult looked like a stereotypical male.
Oops, pressed ‘Post’ instead of ‘Preview’.
If that child’s mother is a trans man, he’s passing way better than I am, and I don’t do too badly, considering that my health issues preclude me taking hormones or having surgery so I can only convey my transness with how I present.
I certainly wasn’t looking forward to breasts. One of my classmates got hers around 5th grade, and we laughed about it. And every kid knew jokes about Dolly Parton. Yeah, our culture is so misogynistic, I cannot understand how some girls can so look forward to puberty.
I certainly did look forward to it. I thought (and still think) being a woman is great, and misogyny is ridiculous (possibly rooted in part in envy.) It goes without saying that I never accepted limiting notions of womanhood.
I just read your post about women owning the space around them and the subtle policing of femininity that happens to women and girls all the damn time.
Men want to own ALL our spaces and this is the motive of the transactivists. Notice it’s not females who think they’re men that are demanding in on all men’s spaces but it’s the reverse. It’s men who wear dresses and makeup who are demanding in on every little space we women have managed to claim. These spaces are few and far between and I’m afraid with 3rd wave neoliberal fauxminism that women are going to lose everything, including themselves aka sisterhood.
I also have to agree with Lady M in that I looked forward to puberty and never saw much point in limiting notions but unfortunately, patriarchal society doesn’t agree with me and I was pushed and shoved into that gender prison of femininity nonetheless. I think one of the things that saved me, or shielded me, is that my parents weren’t so pushy about gendered behaviour. My father taught us girls to fish, to chop wood etc. We were spared a lot of the brunt of gender training early in life.
Just the other day, as I’m making videos again on Youtube, a man showed up on my comment section to directly police me in regards to how ‘feminine’ I am. I told him to fuck off.
My father taught us girls how to mow the lawn, but wouldn’t teach us how to start the lawnmower. Years later, after I had taught myself this not-too-difficult trick, I asked him why. He didn’t want us to think we could manage without men.
I looked forward to puberty because I badly wanted to be an adult. I saw how people speak to kids. I learned in early puberty that if you don’t act like a child then you are less likely to be treated like one.
I should add that I have never been a girly girl and that I get treated with a lot more respect when I demonstrate this. There is some sexism in this but when that means standing up for myself, being willing to argue, not trying to manipulate men using my sexuality and demonstrating an ability to carry heavy stuff (I am not strong and not healthy so if I can lift something, it’s not all that heavy and any healthy woman is capable of doing it), maybe there is a reason it gets more respect.