Professional comedy
I just want to underline this trendy new brand of feminism.
What she says:
I’m so baffled by terfs – trans exclusionary radical feminists. I don’t understand how anyone takes them seriously when they’re so fucking ugly.
How much more feminist can you be?
So ugly people have no opinions worth hearing? Wow. That’s putting it right out there on the line. Pretty women matter, and if a woman is pretty, she won’t be a TERF (except…not all ‘TERFs’ are ugly, and even if they were, truth doesn’t give a damn what you look like.
But but but… beauty is truth, and truth beauty. So it follows that ugliness is lies, and so ugly people are liars, and that’s all you need to know. (That’s all I need to remember from high school English class, right?)
She calls others ugly as if she’s some kind of lovely person. There are a few (very few?) good comedians who find things funny and share these things with us, and then there are the ones who think they themselves are funny. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell, but with Mary Beth it is — she’s the latter, i.e., boring.
twililter, she also forgets that many of the older feminists she thinks are ugly were once young feminists, and at least some of them were beautiful. I know how difficult it is at her age to realize she will be old before she realizes it, but she should hope no one else treats her the way she is treating the rest of us. She probably can expect they will, though. Hence the book Hags, written by a woman who discovered what it meant to become middle aged while female.
I have seen you make the same argument many times about unattractive trans women.
No you haven’t.
Thanks ikn, that sounds like an interesting read. There’s an aspect of superficiality in our culture, I don’t know, maybe because the TV generation saw everything so perfect, or that people see beauty only in symmetry and the mean, rather than the little (or not so little) imperfections that make us different? I sure wouldn’t want to hear Mary Beth’s theory of aesthetics, if she’s even clever enough to understand such things. I have found feminism to be a facet of inner beauty that shines very bright. Also, berating people for accidents of birth is cruel and childish, and in this case, as Mr. Menno points out, sexist.
I hope she looks back at some point, when her superficial beauty has failed her, and see what an asshole she was, assuming she doesn’t get much stupider between now and then. :)
Citations?
There is also quite a difference between labeling someone ugly and finding someone unattractive. I have a number of female friends who, in my eyes, are beautiful, and yet I do not find myself attracted to them.
Furthermore, a “trans woman” is just a man in drag, and as a straight male I am not attracted to other males. But I do not call them “ugly”.
I don’t believe Ophelia has ever said we shouldn’t listen to trans women because they are ugly. She has noted that many of them, most of them, are obviously men. Unless you consider all men ugly, that isn’t the same thing. She has also noted their larger size, their muscles, etc, but that is because in an argument about transwomen in women’s sports, it is relevant.
She isn’t saying they aren’t telling the truth, she’s saying they are men. Which they are.
Many TiMs don’t pass as women, but whether they do or not, women are supposed to ignore that, as these men force their way into female only spaces. Now that’s ugly. And those men who have had enough work to fool some/most/all people are forcing themselves into places they don’t belong. Men can’t become women. Ever. It’s not about imperfect “performance” of “femininity”: it’s about being male. The whole “We’ve been using women’s toilets for years” isn’t the winning argument they think it is. It is a triumphant crow of male victory over women’s rights, and appropriation of female spaces and facilities. Also ugly.
I think I’ve probably remarked that some man looks silly roleplaying a woman, and perhaps that a dress isn’t particularly becoming on a beefy man, but “they’re so fucking ugly” I don’t think so.
Not just silly but grotesque. Once you see the lie you can’t unsee it and lies are, I think, a form of ugliness (and if not, humour). And, yes, women can be grotesque in the same way – indeed it’s a staple of the culture. But show me one grotesque GC woman, Mark. The only way you’d do that is by inventing her.
No.
The argument is
i. TERFs are ugly.
ii. Ugly people shouldn’t be taken seriously.
iii. Therefore TERFs shouldn’t be taken seriously.
No one here has made that argument. Stop lying for trans Jesus.
The argument against larping men isn’t that they are unattractive, and therefore should be ignored – it’s that they aren’t women, and nobody should be forced to pretend that we think that they are. Whatever a man might project onto our screens as an alleged portrait of himself, filtered, manipulated and often stolen or entirely faked, in the flesh he is unmistakably a man – and even if you were able to produce the archetypically beautiful faker who ‘passed’ convincingly, this mythical person would still be a man, and will never be a woman.