Wrong
No, that’s wrong.
No, feminists are not “whipping up fear about ‘manly’ looking folk in toilets.” We’re defending our right to have some spaces away from men, toilets being one such space. Not ‘manly’ looking folk, but men. It’s not about the appearance, it’s about the reality. Has Willoughby never heard the old saw that Appearances Can Be Deceiving? More seriously, is he genuinely unaware that such a distinction exists?
He keeps reminding us that some men are good at appearing like women. We know. It’s unfortunate that some men are able to use that talent to gain the trust of women in order to rape or kill them, or both. Willoughby however seems to be arguing that because some men can fake it, therefore it’s impossible to have any rules about women’s spaces. That’s a stupid argument.
Another stupid argument of Willoughby’s goes like this: “I’m hot.”
What’s the deal with the arm over the head? Same in the profile picture.
Good question. Sheer overwhelming sex appeal? I guess?
Just guessing: could be a ploy to drag the clothing upwards, to help conceal the genital bulge. Could perhaps even help cover up a somewhat botched bit of home-crafted genital-alteration surgery.
Who the hell cares whether he is ‘hot’ or not? Why this fascination with mere appearance, with looking like a Barbie doll or one of those infantilised Japanese anime girls with their designedly vacuous faces? It is pathetic. I’ve never cared about the ‘hotness’ of people’s appearances or faces. It is not what attracts me to someone, whether male or female. It is personality and expressiveness. I might add that for all the dressing up, he comes across in his picture as irredeemably male – it is the shape and bearing of the body.
“I’m not the one judging appearances. On an unrelated note, aren’t you jealous that I’m so hot?”
Send in the clowns! Don’t bother, they’re here.
God, he’s just so fucking thick. Will he EVER figure out that it doesn’t matter how men look, because the problem is that they are male in women’s spaces?! Absolutely nobody is “whipping up fear” about appearances.
‘why is it OK for a woman to use a [woman’s] toilet, but not a man’…he’s not the only one, but I just can’t figure out how people like this are determined to be so stupid in public where everyone can see, on this particular issue.
He and Katy are two very stupid people, which amazes me that India gets any air time from the Beeb.
Besides, take away the filters/photoshop and he doesn’t even look like that, except in his imagination.
Just take a gander at any interview with him as the spokesman for everything ‘trans’; apart from his appalling behaviour, which make him the worst possible representative of his position, he looks exactly like what he is – a man in drag.
This is a typical example of his thickitude.
So it looks like GC Law (whatever that is, maybe a new TV series) is compatable with biological reality. That’s nice. According to Jonathan then, life is about appearances, obviously. Ain’t he dashing though in all his glorious female stereotype artificiality. :P
I should say trollop stereotype rather, that’s what he’s going for, the “hotness.” He’s probably jealous because he put that much work into it and could have just gone around as a butch lesbian, with nothing more than pronouns and a padded bra. :P
iknklast:
The raised arm poses the implant on that side.
Re the raised arm:
I was in a theater group as a teenager, and the director was a professional songwriter who was experienced in the ways of the entertainment industry. He spoke occasionally about sexism, and one of the bits I remember was him mimicking what an aspiring actress might be asked to do in an interview. Among them: “pull your hair back”. Why? Because lifting the arms behind the head (to pull the hair back) pushes the chest out further and makes the breasts more prominent. But the sly request sounds like it has something to do with revealing the face. Nope.
I am certain that Willoughby is lifting his arm to help emphasize his breasts.
(Are they implants? I don’t know; I’d assumed they were the results of estrogen treatments, but others undoubtedly have more information.)
Ya, the breast thing is what I decided it was when I looked at it more patiently. It’s SUCH an irritating photo – everything about it is irritating. The smirk, the half-stride calling our attention to the crotch, the lines or wrinkles or whatever those are on the dress, THE SMIRK, the goldilocks, the smirk…
I have to say though I think he does “pass” pretty well. I think that’s an utterly stupid and malevolent ambition, but on the success or failure side of it he wins. Even the voice. Quite unlike “Grace” Lavery’s unabashed dude voice on Woman’s Hour last week.
OK, so the voice coaching (plus vocal cord shaving, perhaps?) has given him a less masculine voice; but his behaviour is still pure misogynist dudebro. He always shouts over the women he’s with, and never lets them complete what they’re going to say. He’s aggressive and intimidating; his body language (other than in posed photos) is pure male; and in posed photos it is pure male fantasy.
Oh I know.
It occurs to me to wonder how much of this originates in just feeling he looked too girly. I googled him yesterday to find out when and why he transitioned, and photos of him before he tried to flee being male are kind of appealingly baby-faced. Maybe he got teased about it for years. Maybe that’s why he’s so obsessed with appearance.
I don’t think he “passes” at all, there are subtle cues, head shape, brow, jawline…body structure…hands are telling… Maybe posed and photoshopped, but in person I doubt I would mistake him for the real thing. Better than some, but worse than others. It’s pretty subjective.
That’s what I said – better than some. I didn’t say he would fool everyone on every occasion no matter what, just that he’s comparatively good at it.
Well, being “womanly” is completely foreign to a guy like me, so I don’t know, but he does fail at being “manly” so I guess we can call that a definite win. :D (how I started sounding so sexist I’ll never know…) :P
So IW claims to be female, in addition to being a woman. Whatever happened to the standard statement that “sex is not gender”? It’s obviously part of a strategy to change language so that sex becomes completely irrelevant, but it doesn’t seem that long ago that I heard “Sex is not gender; educate yourself”. Anyway, this would leave women only with “cis AFAB” as a way of identifying themselves. If I recall correctly, IW has also claimed to be “cis female”, since he has fully medically transitioned (or something like that). I suppose the next step is to claim to be retroactively AFAB, though I’m not sure how that would work – not that reality is an impediment to these folx. Disclaimer: I do not use or accept “cis”, “AFAB”, etc. as legitimate terms myself; just putting it in the language that TIAs are trying to force onto the general population, until the next ratcheting revision.
Consistancy and coherence are hard to come by. You’ve also got the contradiction between those, like IW, who believe that if they can “pass”, then they should be allowed to join the “womaning club”, and those who claim that it doesn’t matter in the least how you look on the outside at all, you’re still a “woman.” What with divisions like this, the forced teaming with DSD people, drag queens and other unwilling groups under the v
umbrella”, it’s a wonder the movement doesn’t collapse or explode from the tensions and contradictions.
I believe that he claims this on the basis that “all the official documents say so”, as he’s often mentioned. Obviously, having a legal body state something by legislative fiat doesn’t make it true, just legal, but IW being the goon that he is seems to think otherwise.
Helicam:
That was always just a rhetorical wedge. The desire was never to be “seen as” conforming to social rules associated with the sex not one’s own; i.e., John Money’s “gender”. It was never to “live as” someone whose preferences align with cultural stereotypes about the sex not one’s own. It was always and ever and only to have others profess belief that one is of the sex not one’s own. After all, even without the concept “transgender”, a man who wears dresses and fancies other men conforms to rules associated with females and has preferences aligning with traditional stereotypes of females, and acknowledging that is easy for anyone. Inventing “gender identity” and”transgender” is superfluous to the end of being so recognized.
It is only the desire to be perceived as the other sex that makes any sense of the transgender notion. Therefore, invocation of a distinction between sex and gender is a straight-up shell game.