Living azza
Hmm.
West Midlands PC Skye Morden is determined to blaze a trail for other transgender police officers. Skye knew that though she was assigned male at birth and had lived as a man for many years, she was, in fact, female.
What I’m wondering is, if you “live as a man” for many years (along with having a male body), how is it possible to “be, in fact, female”? Even if you believed in the whole magic internal gender-soul thing, once you’ve put in many years of “living as a man” while also having a male body…how would that work? Wouldn’t the two things working in combination end up over time making the magic internal gender-soul so attenuated as to be undetectable?
I don’t know, maybe guys like Skye Morden are constantly saying to themselves (sotto voce) “I am a woman I am a woman I am a woman” ad infinitum. It sounds horribly distracting, but maybe it does the trick.
Those are not the arms of a female.
Not the face of one, either.
Which is another thing. Living as a person with the bigger stronger male body is just that. It means you have no idea what it’s like to live as a person with the smaller weaker body.
I believe the formula is most effective when repeated in ALL CAPS, like the preferred repetition of TWAW. I also am of the understanding that the minimum number of reps is five for best results.
Distraction is of no consequence, so long as one achieves confirmation and validation (or at least compliance/acquiescence), which is a much higher priority than actual policing. Perhaps PC Morden will be put onto limerick duty on twitter, to ensure Purity ond Orthodoxy in all publicly expressed thought.
Why do I fail to see it as healthy or normal for a police force to humour and encourage somebody’s delusion or paraphilia in this way? Would a police force recruit and accept an officer who’d come out as Otherkin, or Furry, and allow them to patrol the streets in fluffy tail and ears? What if they were to shoot Jolyon Maugham in self defence? Assignment to the K-9 unit might result in unintended struggles for dominance and territory. Mind you, it might also give new subject material for the BBC natural history unit, or be the basis for a truly unique police procedural programme.
As a rule, if a woman or girl is arrested and the circumstances require her to undergo either a strip-search or cavity search, the search will be carried out by female officers, and the woman cannot refuse to be searched. If she does refuse to allow female officers to search her, she will be forcibly restrained tlo allow the search to take place. She can, however, refuse an intimate search by male officers except under certain circumstances (if there is good reason to believe she has a concealed weapon, for example), but otherwise a search can wait until a female officer is present, although the detainee may be placed under constant observation in the meantime.
All of that means that if the WMP accept PC Morden as a woman, he will be allowed to carry out the most intimate of searches on girls and women and there is nothing they can do about it. It wouldn’t matter how frightened, freaked out or simply indignant they may be about having this obvious man watching them strip or pulling on his latex gloves, because if they object he will still be the one to do the search, only this time with other officers forcibly restraining them.
One gets fed up with the constant drip of little news items like this: they seem intended to advertise how splendidly enlightened the British police force has become, and to take people’s eyes off infinitely more serious issues, such as the institutional racism of the police. Useful correctives to this sort of thing are the recent films of Steve McQueen.
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AoS, the worst of it is, some of them may not even be people who have (or are suspected to have) committed a crime. I don’t know how it works in England, but in the US, if someone is suicidal or tries suicide, they can be treated the same way. For many of us, that would only add further trauma, as many depressed women haven’t been treated well by men.
The whole thing about a gender shift to X meaning that one was always an X is utterly incomprehensible, incoherent, and insane. It’s the sort of inchoate thing we hear from the religious when they’re challenged for the first time, something they come up with off the top of their heads in haste without considering all that it entails. In this case, even with all kinds of time to reflect, everyone just kind of went with it.
Re Ophelia and Nullius’s remarks, here are two quotations from two different obituaries, both, oddly, from the Guardian, for Jan Morris:
“I was a member of two clubs in London, one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes change my identity in a taxi between the two.”
Reflecting on her own history in 2018, Morris said her transition no longer felt like the defining moment of her life, telling the Financial Times that it hadn’t changed her writing “in the slightest. It changed me far less than I thought it had.” As she approached her final years she thought of herself as “both man and woman … or a mixture of both.” Her transition may have overshadowed her books at first, she admitted, “but it’s faded now.”
#10, just another example of how woman is a costume they put on. And because they can take it off at will, or only put on those parts they like, they don’t have a clue what living as a woman really means. They are not taking on the bulk of the childcare, they are not being asked to make coffee in an office where they have as many credentials as (or more than) the men, they are not being treated like “breeders” or “bleeders”. They don’t get mansplained most of the time (but apparently are pretty good mansplainers themselves) and they often have jobs and careers that benefited from them being male and having male privilege before they transitioned (Caitlyn Jenner comes to mind here). They also are not required to “do femininity” in the same way as women; they can be brutal, violent, nasty, entitled, and for some reason, people don’t go around telling them they aren’t feminine enough. I wonder how many times these TW get told to smile by random strangers on the street or in the grocery store (or the office) or are told to “accommodate” men who have fewer credentials by not “acting smart” or being “haughty” or “uppity” or whatever other word is used for smart, independent women.
#1, #2
Nor the penis of one, if we were to get right to it. (I know I know, you were just going for the visible features in the photo)
Excellent comments here (the otherkin remark was hilarious, btw), but one caveat/concern I have with the discussion here is we should not constantly emphasize the “weak woman versus strong man” meme. Because it is not always true. I am not denying the inherent advantage testosterone gives to males w/r/t strength, but there are a lot of powerful women athletes just as there are a lot of fat, out of shape men. I would bet the average woman soccer player would destroy Donald Trump, for instance.
(Carry on. Just something that has bothered me a bit, and I agree overall with your skepticism towards the transc community. No, I am not transphobic. Just transskeptical).
Yes, iknklast, I wholly agree. There is clearly a very strong performative aspect to this. There are also clearly many performative aspects in ordinary life, but not at this level – unless you’re a psychopath or narcissist like Donald Trump or, say, Kayleigh McEnany, who supposes that it is perfectly fine to put on a show and spout lies and evasions because that is ‘doing your job’ (which seems to be a common justification these days, as though ‘doing one’s job’ is a moral justification for anything – one recalls Nazi camp guards defending themselves by saying they were only following orders).
I suppose these things are connected with acting on the stage, but on stage one is projecting a representation for wholly different reasons. One is not seeking to deceive – but I do remember, now with a bit of a sense of shame, the odd shot of power I felt in my youth when, as a person brought up in the middle class, I was working as a labourer on a building site with thieves and murderers (really! – I discovered that the painters were mostly petty, and sometimes not so petty criminals) and was taken by some wealthy and very pleasant Kensington woman who struck up a conversation with me to be a working-class boy. I imagine that that sense of power that goes with not in fact being what you appear to be, or with insisting despite appearances that you are something that you are not, is the kind of drug that allowed those British police informers who infiltrated themselves into groups that were regarded, wrongly in the main, as politically dangerous, to go so far as to have pretend (on their side) love affairs with women members of those groups to the extent of agreeing to marriage. There were rather more than one or two of them, it seems.
Interesting if this is the current version of the tweet; they must have realised that the image accompanying the original tweet wasn’t doing the subject, or the police force, any favours:
https://twitter.com/westmidspolfed/status/1334757327858176002/photo/1
(It appears to still be on Google–so I don’t know if the tweet in this post is a different one with the same text and a different image.) I still don’t think it’s great PR for the police to highlight an image of someone pointing a weapon (even though in this version he’s not pointing it directly at the viewer with a manic grin on his face, at least).
What is the weapon? A stapler?
#15 guest – Yep, I feel so much better with the loony grin while a taser is pointed at me. So reassured that I am about to be electrocuted by a crazy woman.
Have we even collectively figured out what ‘living as a woman’ even means? Wearing a wig, makeup and dresses isn’t it. Going into ‘women only’ spaces isn’t it–they’re the same spaces, so what’s the big deal? I know we’ve had the conversation before that at least as far as I’m concerned (and I think iknklast concurred) ‘living as a woman’ means being talked over, ignored, criticised, condescended to, threatened, bullied, expected to do all the boring unthanked work without complaint or reward of any kind, expected to defer to and support men, etc. etc. Doubt that’s what this guy had in mind, somehow.
@Brian #13,
I think people here are generally speaking in shorthand when they describe relative differences in strength between the sexes. In this case, the man in a terrible wig in the twit-pic has powerfully muscled forearms one is very unlikely to see on a woman.
I explained the difference in sex (and gender) to my son thusly: every single characteristic that one could cite which divides the sexes (and genders) is not distributed such that all of it falls in one box and none of it in the other. Instead, it’s distributed in bell curves, significantly overlapping bell curves.
Take height: the average man is taller than the average woman. But the tallest women are taller than the average man, and the shortest men are shorter than the average woman. Not just that, but the tallest women are taller than fairly tall men. I’m 6’3, and I’ve met more than one woman taller than I am. The same goes for strength: I am rather to the strong side of the curve when it goes for men, such that I delight in hauling wood for splitting about the yard, but I have no doubt that the strongest women could best me in any contest of strength.
Name any characteristic that one attributes to men or to women, and the overlapping bell curve explanation will fit. Nurturing? Combative? Pretty? Independent? The means for the distributions of these characteristics may not match, but the distributions overlap. The trans cult does great damage to children by insisting that if they occupy an overlapping tail they belong on the other curve. Once upon a time we were all moving away from such assertions.
My son accuses me of understanding the world through statistics, and I don’t argue… except to tell him he ought to take more statistics classes.
Papito: All good points, of course. I just dislike a bit the emphasis on women as weak. :)
We don’t love it either, of course, but it is reality. And it’s no good trying to hide the reality, because men exploit it to bully us all the time, so we’re forced to keep pointing out that that is in fact bullying.