Reflected everywhere
Time to grow up now, people.
The headline:
Why Emma Corrin is using a chest binder
Oh I bet I know the answer to that one – because, like many others, she’s found a new way to be special and attention-worthy.
Who is she? An actor. She played narcissistic PrinCess DiAna in The Crown. Typecasting, it seems. So a different woman, poshly named Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, instructs us on how meaningful all this is.
Your response to the above may be largely generational. In the middle of the millennial age bracket at 33, I didn’t know about non-binary pronouns at school or even at university…But it’s a very small adjustment for me, personally, to make, isn’t it? Just swapping one word for another. I don’t see the problem — any problem — with it. Do you?
Yes, of course. I see the problem of people making demands for special language to refer to Special Them. It’s not “just swapping one word for another,” it’s making the effort to contradict your own perceptions in order to avoid making a “mistake” that isn’t in fact a mistake. It’s also ratifying and flattering an exercise in narcissism and greed for attention.
It’s not even good for the people demanding it. This stupid nonsense isn’t going to flourish forever, especially not when more towns and cities burst into flames and burn to the ground in a matter of hours. We have serious shit to pay attention to, and some self-absorbed goon’s demand for reality-denying pronouns is not serious. It doesn’t matter. It’s trivial. It’s tiresome adolescent attention-seeking.
I’m a straight, white, cisgender woman and people’s assumptions of my sexuality, race and gender are always right. I have never been misgendered to my face, though people often assume from my name that I’m male when talking to me over email (they’re usually more respectful when they do so).
I find myself reflected everywhere: in books and songs, on TV, at the cinema. There are women who look and feel and identify as I do everywhere: broad reflections of me wherever I look for them. So I can’t imagine what it must be like when there are no yous visible in our culture, or how much it must mean to find out that this talented, award-winning actor is like you in some way.
Well lucky lucky you but not all women are as lucky or as smug as you are. There are some women and girls in the world who are oppressed as women and girls – kept out of school, ostracized when menstruating, married off at age 12, beaten, kidnapped, murdered. Women are not the dominant or privileged sex. Don’t wave some vanity-drunk actor in our faces as an emblem of pronoun oppression. Get a clue.
In other big news, Andrew Cuomo’s daughter Michaela “comes out” as demisexual, in honor of Pride Month:
https://www.today.com/news/andrew-cuomo-s-daughter-michaela-comes-out-demisexual-t224468
Over fifteen different news websites, including “serious” ones like The Independent, are reporting it. I stopped counting after fifteen.
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where she didn’t need to come out as demisexual, because her sexuality would be assumed fluid and none of our business. Can she still remember such a world? She’s only 23; it may be five or six years already since such a world existed (in first-world countries).
The whole concept of gender, the belief that people have an intangible essence that transcends the body, looks a whole lot to me like belief in a soul. It’s an entirely metaphysical proposition. Spiritual, in fact.
When you are asking that I use your special pronouns, you are asking that I acknowledge that spiritual belief as true. In fact there is even a special word for that acknowledgement: “validation”.
You have no more right than any other religious person to demand I validate your beliefs. Use your pronouns? Sure, any other leaps of faith you would like me to perform while we’re at it? Recite a manta? Maybe you’ve got some crackers and wine for me?
I know this is not an original thought. I have seen others on the blog say similar things in not so many words. But it never ceases to amaze that so few people out there make this connection.
This could have been written 20 years ago and nobody, including us, would have blinked an eye. Doesn’t it sound like she’s talking about gays, lesbians, and people who don’t conform to stereotypes? “Everyone’s sexuality will be assumed fluid and none of our business” would have simply been interpreted as a rather awkward way to say that sexual attraction and how we dress and behave isn’t fixed by convention and stop worrying about what other people wear or do in bed.
And I think that’s what it means today — with the bizarre addition of “sexuality” not just meaning how and with whom we have sex, but what sex we are. It’s all muddled together in rhetoric and concept. No wonder they believe the gender-critical aren’t just “transphobes,” but “homophobes” — even the gay ones. How can they think a thought they don’t even have the vocabulary to deal with?
I have the opposite problem (except that it’s not a problem for me). When unknown people telephone for some advertising purpose they nearly always think I’m a woman when I answer. Is that Mme. Cornish, they ask; no, I say, but it’s M. Cornish. Generally speaking they continue to say Madame in every third sentence. I don’t think I have particularly womanly voice (but you can judge here if you want to check: http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/Beilstein-interview.mp4 (I’m not the one with a German accent)), but they’re obviously judging from the name and can’t believe they’re wrong. I wonder if Valéry Giscard d’Estaing ran into that. Probably once he was President people had a pretty good idea of his sex, but before?
Just listened to a few seconds of the interview. Yes, you definitely sound like a man.
The idea that straight white women see themselves reflected in media is one that needs to be choked to death. The women reflected are usually middle-class, whether homemakers or professionals they are always well turned out, they have children that are perfectly turned out, and homes that are perfect. Many of them have help in the home, sometimes in the form of a live in maid. They work (if they do) professional level jobs.
I have never seen myself reflected, other than once: Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Even when they started showing working class families, or lower class families, most of them were not white. They were usually happy, able to overcome adversity together, and help each other. They didn’t scream hatred at other family members, and when they did, it was usually resolved in the course of the 30-minute to 2-hour show. They lived clean. Filth and squalor were not an ordinary part of their existence. They had friends. No one was abused.
The shows that “reflect” straight white women actually aren’t reflecting us; they’re instructing us. They’re telling us how women should be, not how we are. They are feeding us messages that make us feel bad about ourselves because we can’t measure up, not making us feel good about ourselves because we are the dominant combination of race, sex, and gender identity. They show us everything we are doing wrong in hopes that we will work to improve our lackluster womanhood performance.
These are not good role models, and they are not good mirrors. They reflect a societal strait jacket that women have spent years (centuries) trying to throw off.
@Athel – thanks for that link, I have now learned something fascinating about enzymes and biology.
As for how to refer to people: ~40 years ago when ordering parts from an electronics supplier I gave my name and was asked “Miss or Mrs”. Picking my jaw up off the floor, I said “Ms”, and got the response “I didn’t think anyone was using that any more”. Somehow, in order for me to get the correct diodes delivered to my workplace, they needed to know not only my sex, but also my marital status. Silly me, I thought that sort of thing would become *less* relevant over time, but apparently the opposite is happening.
At the moment, yes, but I’m wondering if I should identify as a woman so that I can use the women’s changing room at the physical therapy sessions. However, I don’t think that will work in France, which is quite backward when it comes to the woke orthodoxy.
That it is not original does not diminish it in the slightest. What’s amazing is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. This is the big reason that I am feeling a bit homeless in the skeptical-atheist milieu and why I am so dismayed at Steven Novella pounding any argument against his view into the dirt. It’s easy to be skeptical about bigfoot and fun to laugh at the ghost chasers. What is more difficult is to see and speak the truth about a concept that has so many implications to harm women’s rights, knowing that you will get blow-back that “feminism is for ALL women and transwomen are women.” PZ said it, I believe it, and that settles it.
If you point out the dualism aspect, the answer you get is that “MRI’s show that transwomen’s brains look more like women’s brains than like men’s brains,” and dismiss Rippon’s work.
ya know, I’m a white, straight, cisgender woman, and all my life I’ve had all of those three things casually misidentified. Strangely enough, it has never triggered an existential crisis, I literally couldn’t care less.
Climate change is hard, ruining someone’s life for calling someone “she” (or worse “he”) is easy, and cruelty is really, *really* fun.
Jib @3, This is a good way to think of it for me too actually. It’s like some inner magical essence that we can’t really find anywhere in the world, and only exists as an idea, and yes, there are some obvious problems with that. Not that ideas and beliefs aren’t real things, because we can see the effects they have in the real world no matter how untrue they are, but the way people who hold these beliefs force others to accept them is, well, unacceptable. If they have the right to hold these silly notions in their head, then surely I have the right to call bullshit. (I do anyway, whether they like it or not) :P
Sastra @4, I agree, and the way it is muddled together in rhetoric and concept is, I think, the only way they can get people to go along with them. If the ideas of their doctrine were clear, almost all of it could be rejected by most people fairly easily. It’s sleight of hand, and smarter people than I have fallen for it, which adds to the befuddlement.
You should count yourself fortunate. I guess they hadn’t yet escaped the gender studies laboratory yet. Ah, sweet days of innocence…
First of all, it’s not your gender that people are “assuming,” it is your sex, which millions of years of natural selection has made us very good at. Second, you sound disappointed.
You are disappointed! The motivation is laid bare. You have not yet received your fair measure of suffering as a victim of the imaginary/nonexistent crime of misgendering. You have not yet been handed the opportunity to rail in righteous indignation at the inhumanity of being mistaken for something you are not, driving you to suicidal ideation, but not before demanding the banning, shunning, and dismissal from all human society, of the evil scum who dared do this unspeakably vile thing to you. You’re just itching to be able to join the ranks of the militantly aggrieved, to stamp your feet and be seen as More and Better than mere mortals whom you will label “cis.” To make others bow and cower at your Awesome Singularity. It’s not a good look.
‘The shows that “reflect” straight white women actually aren’t reflecting us; they’re instructing us.’
Such a good and important point. Pretty much every image we see of us is didactic.
I just had a ridiculous conversation with a colleague who participated in a recent ‘women in X’ event (I declined to participate, as I think women in X are badly treated and I can’t summon up enough optimism to encourage women to go into X). Apparently one of the other participants on the ‘women in X’ panel was ‘nonbinary’, and made a big point toward the end of the event of being offended at how often she’d been ‘misgendered’ (eg when the panel was collectively referred to as ‘women’). I pointed out to colleague, who seemed to be trying to empathise, that if this person sincerely believed she wasn’t a woman then wtf was she doing on the panel? If she honestly believed she wasn’t a woman she’d have politely declined the invitation, pointing out that it wasn’t appropriate for such a special nongendered person as theirself. So this person clearly doesn’t even believe it. Colleague seems to have apprehended the point.
I hang out both professionally and recreationally mostly with researchers, technical consultants from multiple disciplines, teachers and owners of manufacturing businesses. We’re all late forties or above. The near universal opinion – and we appreciate this is a gross generalisation – is that anyone under about 35 seems to have utterly lost the ability to engage in critical thinking, and a plurality seem to have never developed theory of mind.
I’m not sure whether it’s how their parents raised them, or whether it’s the style of education they have received where learning is largely self directed, failure is not an option unless you work at it, and there are few consequences for being feckless.
Yes, grumpy old man.
Wait … So, um, why is she wearing a chest binder?
Fashion statement?
iknklast #7
Yes, that supposed reflection of white women in media always seemed more of a Fun House mirror to me. Oh, yes, white women could be anything they wanted as long as they were young, thin and gorgeous. And it was amazing how despite being young, thin, gorgeous and often wearing revealing clothes, the TV women professionals rarely dealt with harassment or belittlement from male colleagues. Those TV housewives that Gowans-Eglinton claims reflect us white women? More of the same — thin, dressed in expensive clothes and handling the silly antics of their silly families with ease while dwelling in perfectly decorated spacious houses.
At this time in my life, I can laugh at how white women’s portrayals in media would be so different if done accurately — the hiding how close to poverty the family was so that the kids would not be burdened with that knowledge. Being woken up at 2am more than a few times to deal with taking elderly relatives to the hospital and then adding their after hospital care on top of the work schedule and regular family obligations. The silent fuming rage as my Mother refused to ever ask my older brother to help as I was expected to help because “he has a job and he can’t handle stuff like this” so his time was sacrosanct.
Oh gosh, the workplaces where male coworkers could get away with stuff that would have me fired in a hot second. Going to some fancy store to pick up an order for a friend and having security follow me around because of my well-worn, gender non-conforming clothes.
Working my butt off to afford a used car the second I could legally drive because the 14 year old me made that a goal after telling a man who demanded I give him a blow job to go away. And then having him follow me from the bus to the street screaming “Yeah, it is because I’m black, you racist [expletive deleted][insert sexist slurs]” until I hid in a store and got a clerk to let me out a side door
I could go on and on but, yeah, Gowans-Eglinton can take her snotty take on how privileged white women are and take a flying leap with it.
I am very tired of “Karen” jokes. People who should know better are totally oblivious to the misogyny.
Jib Halyard @3 wrote:
I’m fascinated further by this special usage: “Nonbinary people are valid.” Ordinary usage might say, “Nonbinary is a valid gender identity.” Instead, the special usage applies valid to a person, as if a person is blessed, or saved, or belongs.
Hm.
Swapping one word for another isn’t a big deal.
Swapping one word for another is a big deal.
Hm?
Jib Halyard:
If you make this observation around believers, they will staunchly insist that their belief is entirely empirical and not at all metaphysical, spiritual, or religious. This is, of course, bollocks and objectively so.
I feel sympathetic to anyone who feels a dysphoria, but explaining a dysphoria by postulating a “gender identity” reminds me of phlogiston theory (explaining combustion by postulating a fire-like element) and caloric theory (explaining transmission of heat by postulating a self-repelling fluid that flows from hot to cold).
The American Psychological Association has a table of definitions that starts alphabetically with “cisgender” to mean a person has an “alignment” or a “match” between their sex and their gender identity.
I might accept “cisgender” if it meant the set of all people (A) minus a set of dysphoric people (D) defines a set of cisgender people (C ≡ A – D in set theory). That definition would only require defining a set of dysphoric people (D).
But the APA definition of “cisgender” seems unfalsifiable. I claim I do not have a gender identity. The APA definition would classify my denial as “alignment” so I do have “cisgender” identity. This is a red flag, that “cisgender” not existing and existing look exactly the same.