Upton Rugby Club in skirts
A GROUP of men who dress in women’s clothing to raise money claim they have been told their fundraising is potentially offensive by charity bosses.
I bet I know which set of people they were told it’s potentially offensive to, and I bet it’s not women. It’s been seen as perfectly fine for centuries, whether women saw it as offensive or not, but now…well there are more important people who might find it offensive. Women, you see, aren’t important. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
Members and supporters of Upton Rugby Club have dressed in drag for the Leo Sayer All Dayer, and also held other fundraisers for 18 years, to raise more than £40,000 for St Richard’s Hospice.
But times have changed, amirite?
But the group claim they have been told their latest efforts cannot by promoted by the hospice because it might offend the LGBT community.
June Patel, St Richard’s chief executive, said they appreciated the group’s fundraising but were “striving to be mindful of equality, diversity and inclusion.”
When it comes to men, that is. Obviously not women.
I think they look ever so nice, I do reely.
Also, seriously? This is stupid. They’re now looking for fundraise for a different organization.
Well, you see, performing parodies of ciswomanhood is punching UP, because ciswomen control all the power and the government and the banks. But performing parodies of transwomanhood is punching DOWN, because transwomen (sorry: trans women, of course) are the most marginalized minority EVER.
Oops, didn’t meant to put my real name there.
It’s ok GW, I still use my deadname too. ;)
We had a group of boys who did this in high school as a joke at an assembly. It was all in good fun and I’m sure no one was offended in the least, in fact most of us thought it was amusing and they got a standing ovation. They were imitating women, with flattery in mind, but now it’s insulting mockery? Get a grip, snowflakes. :P
You can be damn sure there wouldn’t be a fuss if it were women dressing in suits and fake mustaches.
Gender nonconformity is forbidden for men who acknowledge they are men.
@3: Ha!
Yeah Sack, you can’t play at it anymore, or cross dress part time. You have to go all in, full time, with the end goal of getting your genitals hacked away by a “surgeon” with dubious credentials. It’s gross.
I think the TIMs are just mad because most of those guys have a better shot at “passing” than the average TIM.
I just received a notice about Dramatist Guild’s “inclusiveness rider”. Guess that’s another organization down the tubes…and then who will protect me against producers and directors who mangle my words?
But I thought self ID meant never having to say you’re sorry you got your bits lopped off?
I do see some good head-tilt being displayed by a number of them.
Inclusiveness Rider and Woke Warrior, Heroes on Horses. Heading across the rainbow toward the sunset of women’s rights.
I noticed that, too! :-D Gave me a good chuckle.
This statement is a lie. Why would the L, or G, or B be offended by men wearing dresses? They lose nothing. This is solely about the T. T hates people crossing the line of gendered clothing unless it is accompanied by a trans or queer identity claim. If a person can cross gender lines and not be trans/queer, the concept of a gendered identity is weakened.
So men wearing dresses are offensive to men who wear dresses, unless the men who are wearing dresses are wearing dresses to express their inner dress-wearing essence, or they are wearing dresses on stage as part of a paid performance? (But only if they keep the money, not if it goes to charity.) Got it.
Now what’s the rule on eye liner?
The fanatical policing of gender and racial boundaries by the incoming Maoists is really something to observe; some, perhaps many, cases are understandable. The taboo on blackface is likely a net positive, though even that is more nuanced than most people give it credit for; initially, it was a requirement that *black people* wear blackface along with other kinds of makeup on minstrel show stages, in order to live down to the expectations of a white audience and the white show runners — essentially black people having to perform a parody of blackness for white people’s entertainment.
It is true that racist directors had white actors in blackface to play black people for certain productions, like Birth of a Nation, but for several decades the vast majority of blackface was worn by black actors fulfilling hyper-stylised black roles. This expectation, enforced through systemic incentives, was a great burden and an indignity upon the black actors who were induced to participate in its fulfilment, along with the wider black communities whose images those black actors were complicit in tarnishing by their participation in the minstrel shows.
These days, however, people have almost entirely forgotten this aspect of blackface, and they have internalised a norm that “wearing makeup which implies you are another race” is a grievous harm worthy of taboo. The concept has been abstracted and applied to “brownface” and “yellowface”, and in spirit if not in name to “redface”, all of which certainly have plenty of distasteful examples where white people play roles of Southwest Asian, East Asian, and Native American extraction. I am amenable to the argument that most, if not all, of these cross-racial depictions are worthy of dismissal, though I still maintain that the indignity of the original application of blackface in minstrel shows was a far more monstrous crime upon American black people than, say, that time the guy from Cheers showed up in blackface alongside Whoopie Goldberg a couple of decades back.
Anyway, we have now a very firm cultural norm against depicting a member of another race in any capacity which requires prosthetics or makeup, and we tell ourselves that this will reduce the salience of racial categories to our cultural and private lives, especially if we are all hypervigilant to such offences to good taste. In a closely-related way, young progressives are attempting to establish (or at least reinforce) firm cultural norms around gendered clothing or other expressions, where one is not allowed to cross an arbitrary gender line without receiving opprobrium.
One absolutely cannot “identify” their way out of the racial category of their birth or even seriously discuss the prospect of doing so without receiving blackface-levels of public shaming and professional ruination (see Rachel Dolezal for an example of the former, Rebecca Tuval for one of the second). Initially, as noted here, the idea behind “transness” was that one wished to change sex, either superficially (transvestitism) or physiologically (transexualism). But these modes of changing ran into the blackface problem and were vulnerable to accusations of undignified imitation.
Cue “gendered souls” and “gender identity”, unfalsifiable inner states of being. Thus when a man wears earrings and makeup and dresses, he does so not in order to transgress social norms of gendered expression, but because he is really a woman and is fulfilling those social norms. Therefore it is in their interests to reinforce these social categories, rather than to break them down, in the same way it is in our interests to reinforce racial categories by making transgressing racial lines a strict taboo. This also accounts for the proliferation of innumerable “non-binary” “identities”, which allow people to shave half their heads and dye the remaining hair and wear whatever they like (or more often whatever they think will offend non-likeminded people) while claiming they are simply expressing their own inner selves in the same way that trans people do, and thus can avoid accusations of transgression.
The men in this story are nothing special, however. They are not under the delusion that their bodies and minds are different systems; they simply think that playing with gendered social norms is a worthwhile activity, especially when coupled with a charitable cause. Thus they are guilty of wearing womanface, in stark contradistinction to transwomen, who are authentically women and consequently express a deep truth about themselves by wearing women’s clothes and accessories. Therefore the former group of men must be shunned and ostracised and made example of, in order to preserve the dignity and humanity of the latter.
This state of affairs seems deeply suboptimal and inefficient to me.
Notice that they are not dressed as pornified parodies of women. That, presumably, would be fine.
Perhaps they should just identify as drag queens.
I guess it’s just as well that Monty Python isn’t around any more.
Hairy blokes dressed in women’s clothing who are obviously doing it for a laugh are not offensive at all. I live near a rugby stadium and one year a bunch of fans from the North of England came dressed in nuns’ headdresses and fishnet tights. They were like the Irish fans who dress up as leprechauns in silly hats.