Guest post: Crude decoys of women
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Oh no she compared a man to a man.
Transition is literally about the self. It’s definitionally a self-centered phenomenon, based on an assumption of entitlement to not just spaces and benefits and language, but to the perceptions and thoughts of others.
Excellent points. But there’s still the issue of how to explain the acceptance of their pretense of womanhood by so many. How does the thinnest application of stereotypical “womanface” make up for the complete lack of the basic, and again stereotypical, markers of female socialization?
In World War Two, in the run-up to D-Day, the Allies used crude decoy trucks, tanks, and aircraft to fool the Germans into thinking that the imminent invasion of France would be launched across the Pas de Calais rather than in Normandy. These phantom units looked convincing from thousands of feet, and were good enough to pass for the real thing in high altitude photos, but would have fooled nobody on the battlefield.
Flash forward eighty years, and somehow, governments and corporations have surrendered to crude decoys of women. Institutions which have always known exactly who and what women were have now, seemingly, been taken in by lipstick and bad wigs, giving away women’s rights, with a wink and a nod, to any guy effecting a pout and a tilted head, even as they indulged in aggressively assertive behaviour that would have traditionally been condemned as “unwomanly”.
Slightly OT, but the decoy tanks reminded me of a similar attempt by the Germans in WWII. They spent weeks erecting a small-scale forward air base complete with wooden aircraft, vehicles and buildings. From the air it would be impossible to tell that everything was half the size of the real thing.
Unfortunately for the Germans, the British were watching them from the start and waited until it was completed. Then, an RAF bomber flew overhead and dropped a single wooden dummy bomb.
Amusing but disputed. Could be apocryphal. The RAF wasn’t generally keen to waste fuel and risk lives and planes for a joke.
Not to mention that it would seem poor strategy to let your enemy know that their ruse isn’t working. Sure, the Germans would have figured it out eventually if the fake airfields weren’t bombed at all, but in the meantime they might have wasted more resources building additional fakes.
Hahahahaha so it would.
There was a very serious program of deception that included fake materiel in the runup to D-Day, because the secret of where the allies were going to attack was, obviously, crucial.
As ludicrous as it sounds, there is evidence, albeit mostly anecdotal, that it happened more than once, and was done by both sides.
https://www.forces.net/heritage/history/did-allied-pilots-really-drop-fake-wooden-bombs-fake-wooden-decoy-airfields
If nothing else, it does add another book to my ‘to read’ list, ‘The Riddle Of The Wooden Bombs’ by historian Pierre-Antoine Courouble, who collected 303 testimonies in his research of the story.