Just relax, bitch
A Labour Party aide explains that women over 39 are just stupid and clueless:
One senior campaign aide said that the issue was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and could do long-term damage to the party in an area where it has traditionally been strong.
“I think we are all in a bit of a bind,” the aide said. “We want to be the party of equality but there is a risk that we are seen to be obsessed by this and are tearing ourselves apart. The tone on both sides has been blown out of all proportion.”
Be the party of equality by all means, but you have to be clear that “equality” doesn’t mean “everything I like.”
The aide added that the argument was, in part, born out of a “generational divide” on the left. “On one side you have women in their forties, fifties and sixties who identify with the feminist movement. They find the idea of self-identification very challenging. On the other you have women in their twenties and thirties who are much more relaxed about this and for whom it is an equalities issue.
Ah yes – we old bats are too rigid and unrelaxed to just lie back and enjoy it. That is what feminism has always been about, right? Relaxing?
Also, we don’t “identify with the feminist movement” – we are feminists. Not everything is about identifying as or with.
Also, we don’t find the idea of self-identification very challenging, we find it very wrong and stupid. We’re old enough to know that obfuscation and gibberish are worthless tools in any fight for equality or justice or rights. We’re also old enough to know that people sometimes lie about who they are, and sometimes get it wrong.
Also, if these relaxed young women do think men’s claims to be women are “an equalities issue” in the sense that we have to agree with those men, then they’re way too relaxed and not paying attention.
I find that statement as insidious as you do. They ‘find the idea challenging?’ That’s remarkably patronizing language. Poor old dears just can’t think too well anymore, they find the idea challenging.
On the other hand… you have impressionable young women who won’t see through the flim-flam if we ask them to hold a shovel while we dig a hole and bury feminism six feet under. They’ll just look around nervously and hope they seem sufficiently woke.
I don’t know if people read Betty Friedan these days and I haven’t got a copy of The Feminine Mystique at hand, but I do remember a bit where the older women are rolling their eyes at the 50s and early 6t0s women who are dying to be housewives, complete women, living for their children, being the total animal at childbirth. Friedan is appalled that the young women students are absorbed in their boyfriends rather than their studies and the intellectual life. Then these young women became mothers who were despised by their women’s liberation daughters for being stay-at-home mothers taking tranquillisers.
Just another manifestation of the othering of older women. It’s been part of society as long as I’ve been alive, and probably much longer. I’m sure they think we need to settle down to grandmothering, or nannying, or disappearing into the kitchen to take care of everyone else while the youngsters with their brilliance and experience do the “real” stuff.
Because having lived a lot of years doesn’t give a woman experience, apparently, it mushes her brain and makes her incapable of understanding anything about how the world works. Poor dears, we should all let our daughters (or granddaughters, depending on which of those groups – 40s, 50s, or 60s) we happen to be in.
Well, it depends on how you look at it.
I see this ‘aide’ (whose quote in the Times of Murdoch was there for 2 seconds before the paywall came down) as yet another manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One formulation of that law you will recall states that the Universe is running down and everything is in the process of finding its minimal potential energy.
I would say that the aide is pretty-well there. Already.
I knew a trans woman back in the nineties when treatment was hard to access and it was still listed in the DSM. She was a lovely person, I had no problem using female pronouns or her chosen new name. We talked often about her treatment at the hands of the medical profession and some of it made my hair curl.
But one thing that stuck with me was how she described what it felt like to be her. She would look in the mirror and be horrified with her body, that it looked wrong, alien even. Going to the toilet was a horrifying experience because it reminded her of the thing she couldn’t accept – that her body was male. She was depressed, often suicidal and had an anxiety disorder. She was basically struggling every day just to cope with the world.
It took her years to access hormones and even longer for surgery. The surgery was done rather poorly and frankly it didn’t help with her mental health issues. She died by suicide a year after her surgery.
I don’t know if transitioning more easily would have helped her. A more sympathetic attitude from doctors certainly would have. Who knows why she felt the way she did about her body and her life? But she would not have been impressed with the modern trans movement.
There were two people in the support group she attended that she called “pseuds”, men who seemed only to be interested in the performative aspects and didn’t share her bodily horror or crushing self-doubt about where she fit into the world. She felt they belittled her and her experiences and since they didn’t bother to engage with the medical profession at all, feeling no need for hormones or surgery, had nothing in common with her or the other members of the group. And, they were loud, always trying to take over the conversation. Sound familiar?
I can understand this, actually. I have always felt the same way. I do not look in mirrors unless it is unavoidable. I brush my hair by my own sense, and have my husband check if it is okay. I sympathize with anyone who hates their body and feels it is wrong. Mine has become even more of a horror to me as I age and it comes to resemble my mother more and more…I had a difficult (to underestimate) relationship with my mother, and it terrifies me to see her in my mirror.
I used anorexia to deal with that, even when I wasn’t overweight.It was like I was punishing my body for not being right. But the thing is, I didn’t feel like I should have a male body. I knew there was no surgery, no treatment, that could make it right. It took decades of therapy for me to be able to leave the house comfortably (not just because of my body; there were many other reasons) and I still do not look in the mirror.
I think these problems with our bodies may not have to do with gender dysphoria; they may be something else. Our total disconnect from our selves as we are, perhaps, or a hatred of the world we are part of. I don’t know. I only know it would not likely have helped to become male. Staying female hasn’t helped, either. Whatever the problem is, I have yet to identify it.
So in a way, I am sympathetic, at least with those who genuinely have body dysphoria. But I am not sympathetic with those who would dismiss my experience as cis-privilege, and deny that I have suffered…or that others like me have suffered. The problem is, there isn’t much evidence that gender reassignment surgery lowers the risk of suicide; I probably would have made my attempts even if I had become a male.
I have never told anyone this before. Not even my therapist. That probably made it harder to deal with, huh? Sorry for dumping.
Perfectly OK.
We each have to find a way to love ourselves and find the wealth within in order to find happiness in life. All those old sayings like ‘count your blessings’ and ‘you can always find someone worse off than yourself’ come readily to mind.
“Love your [whoever] as yourself” is based on that.
So I would suggest that you get rid of your mirrors and replace them all with framed examples of your writings and other achievements. Focus on what is there, rather than on that Cheshire Cat.
Graham Linehan recently tweeted about a piece in The Atlantic from way back in 2002 by Amy Bloom called “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses: The World of Cross-Dressers is for the Most Part a World of Traditional Men, Traditional Marriages, and Truths Turned Inside Out.”
The attitude of that Labour Party aide reminded me of this:
Bloom is talking about cross-dressers here, not full-blown transsexuals, but to use an old joke among transwomen according to Debbie Hayton, “What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual? …About five years.”
That whole article is very relevant to today’s trans debate. It’s all here: The bizarre over-representation of ex-military men in the transvestite/transsexual population. The “continuum of gender dysphoria” that links transvestites and transsexuals; the “narcissism” and “erotic self-absorption”; the fact that these are often conservative, not liberal, men. The erotic fantasy of imagining themselves as lesbians while they’re having sex with women. That this has nothing to do with “gender bending” or progressively breaking down gender barriers and everything to do with male sex-drive and traditional sex-roles — often in opposition to the idea of gender-bending, even sometimes veering into not-so-subtle homophobia. The barely-concealed, bitter resentment of women some of these men carry. That many of these men’s understanding of womanhood is completely superficial, regressive and transparently erotic and image-based, while their deeper behavioural traits and attitudes remain thoroughly masculine and male-privileged. It’s all here… Have another taste:
PDF link:
http://www.new-gallery-of-art.com/pdf/xdress/consmenconsdresses.pdf
I’m a bartender at a gay bar; I interact with trans people constantly. And it seems to be fairly common knowledge around here that trans people often spiral into depression and suicide after surgery, but we’re not supposed to talk too loudly about that because it’s taboo to treat trans as a condition of the mind rather than the body. A transwoman I knew relatively well died last summer and following her death, her friends agreed that the depression and alcoholism that killed her arose immediately following her genital surgery even though she had lived as a transwoman for years prior to it. She wasn’t the same person after the operation. It didn’t alleviate her distress; it enhanced it severely.
Trans allies want very badly to help trans people who are clearly in distress and they push for easier access to physical interventions — surgery, puberty blockers, etc — because they think it will help trans people, because they are constantly told by trans activists to fix the body and ignore the mind. But the truth is surgical procedures and puberty-halting pills aren’t a quick fix. Psychological distress requires psychological therapy.
Perhaps in my friend’s case, she came to that realization tragically too late: the end of the physical treatment path had been reached, her physical transition was complete, and it brought her no closer to resolving her psychological distress.
iknklast @ 6 – hey that’s not “dumping”; don’t be sorry. Also, damn, it sounds very distressing.
No, iknklast, it is not ‘dumping’. It is refreshingly honest and truthful, and helpful to others..
I don’t like looking in mirrors either. I’m older, fatter, and increasingly disabled. So I use a little trick — but only when I’m alone. I look in the mirror and pretend I just found out the most wonderful thing in the world. Widen my eyes, stretch out my lips, roll up my tongue, chatter my teeth, grin like a maniac, and start waving my hands back and forth in paroxysms of joy, panting and soundlessly squealing in absolute and unadulterated DELIGHT!!!!
Gives me something else to think about.
As for the OP, I’m thinking of adopting the word “struggling” when disagreeing with people — particularly on trans issues. “Oh, I see you’re really struggling to accept that,” I’ll say, when my definition of “woman” brings a torrent of abuse down on me. Good times ahead.
And speaking of painful and refreshing honesty, can I recommend to everybody the British poet and feminist thinker Denise Riley’s ‘Say Something Back & Time Lived, Without Flow’, which has just been published in the US by NYRB. ‘Say Something Back’ is a sequence of poems about the sudden death of her son, and ‘Time Lived Without Flow’ is a meditation on living through grief. I think she is the finest British poet writing. I hadn’t known of her until a few years ago, when a friend of mine who edits a literary review called SNOW published two or three of her poems. I was hugely taken with them, and at once laid my hands on everything of hers I could. She is remarkable, wonderfully intelligent, and is able to look at herself with humour even in distress.
@6 Iknklast, I can relate, I still have issues with this, I remember myself as I was in my 20’s and no matter what I do I will never be that again. I had a little epiphany in counseling, which was basically this: She asked me if I judge other people on physical appearance and how they measure up to some unrealistic standard of perfection? I answered that I did not. Then she asked me why I judge myself by these standards? I had no answer for that, but I did become less self critical.
Not to make light, but I try to see myself as who my dog thinks I am more often now. :)
I’m thinking now about trying to see myself as my cat thinks I am…but the cat probably thinks of me the same way I think of me–as a huge lumbering slow ungraceful body. As a former professional dancer I’m finding my ageing, painful, post-menopausal body very difficult to deal with, or even to believe is ‘me’.
I’m planning on taking up Sastra’s looking in the mirror regime.
I don’t know, Sastra’s sounds like fun, but Omar’s might be better. Though for some reason, every time my therapist urges me to remember my accomplishments, somehow all I can do is feel like a fraud. (I understand that’s common with women – the belief that any day now someone will see through us and realize what fakes we are).