Fuss
Oh the bravery, oh the courage, oh the heroism.
Headline: Eddie Izzard to use the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’
Wot? Everyone uses those pronouns. Dialogue: “Alice forgot her coat, can you take it to her? She’s down the hall.”
Subhead: Stonewall praises comedian for her bravery after announcement on Sky Arts show
“Bravery” for using words we all use?
Eddie Izzard has adopted the pronouns “she” and “her”, saying she wants “to be based in girl mode from now on”.
You can’t “adopt” pronouns. They never had parents, so you can’t adopt them.
Journalists and “activists” have to use this stupid baby-talk for this subject because of the fundamental absurdity of it. What they mean is that Izzard is now ordering the rest of the world to use bespoke pronouns to talk about him, which is a good wheeze because it will force everyone to pay more attention to him if they talk or write about him at all. Like right there – I didn’t deliberately decide to say “him” the first time, it was just automatic, because I know he’s a man. Then I noticed I’d done it and the second two were not automatic. To avoid calling him (there it is again) “him” I would have to devote extra thought to him (deliberate that time). It’s not easy to contradict your own ingrained knowledge that way – Izzard is ordering everyone to make a huge effort if they decide to mention him (deliberate that time).
That’s not courage, it’s just greedy ego.
The actor and comedian made the announcement during an appearance on the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist Of The Year last week in which she described herself as gender-fluid, prompting the LGBT charity Stonewall to praise her for her bravery.
The announcement? How pompous. “Listen up everyone, I have orders for you all about how you are to refer to me from now on.”
But more annoying, what I started out to say before I got distracted by the extra effort issue, is this burbling about “bravery” and “courage” when what we’re talking about is a man demanding attention for Special Order Pronouns. He’s a man! A rich man! A rich white man who is not an immigrant or the wrong religion! I don’t think it should be headline news that he’s telling us to refer to him as “her” and I don’t think his doing that should be called “courage.”
Why, Izzard had NO IDEA that he’d be praised. Figured the world would turn on him. All his gigs would be canceled. All the liberal organizations would denounce him. What else could he think?
THAT’S why it’s so brave and courageous.
(He makes a pikachu face of surprise, then blushes modestly, flutters his lashes, puts his hand to his neck, and sinks gracefully, eyes lowered, girl mode, onto the tufted velvet chaise.)
Maybe it’s brave and courageous “for a girl.”
I saw Izzard live once, at the Sunderland Empire in Newcastle, during his Glorious tour. It was funny and I enjoyed it, but when he was signing autographs after the show, he wasn’t nearly as personable as I expected. He came across as a bit of a git, frankly.
Anyway, I was always on the fence about him. On the one hand, I liked some of his witty comebacks on his sartorial choices (“they’re not women’s dresses, they’re my dresses”) but the whole “male lesbian” schtick I absolutely hated. I don’t think he realized how offensive it was. The weird part is, over the years his presentation has actually been less flamboyantly non-conforming – little to no makeup, no painted nails, more unremarkable (for a generic man) clothing choices, growing a beard/mustache. So turning around and decided that you’re not a cross-dresser, you’re actually “gender-fluid” is just a punch in the face for fans who have supported him over the years and defended his defiant rejection of gender stereotypes.
Eddie Izzard can fuck off.
P.S. WTF is gender-fluid anyway? Is it different from non-binary?
Ya know, Eddie Izzard used to be one of my favorite comedians. I don’t know how many times my brother and I watched his Dress To Kill special, but it has to have been in the triple digits.
So this is what it feels like to lose someone to a cult. Interesting.
I don’t like it.
@Claire:
I decided to look it up. This is from Healthline:
Gender-fluid people are people whose gender changes over time. A gender-fluid person might identify as a woman one day and a man the next.
They might also identify as agender, bigender, or another nonbinary identity.
Some gender-fluid people feel that the changes in their identity are extreme, while others might feel that they’re arbitrary.
Their gender might change quickly — in a matter of hours — or slowly, over months or even years.
When they realize their gender identity has changed, they might or might not change their gender expression — how they dress and present themselves, for example — and their pronouns.
For many gender-fluid people, it’s an internal shift they might not want to express outwardly.
This is supported by science.
Claire: “Genderfluid” is exactly what it says on the tin: the person’s gender is fluid, as in changing. (Sense 1b.)
Funnily, accepting that someone can be genderfluid is at odds with the typically proffered trans notion of gender identity. Consider, we are often told that Timmy, who has just come out as trans and will be known as Tammy, was always a girl. This is held true because someone’s gender identity is fixed. If Tammy later desists and returns to being Timmy, then Timmy was “never really trans”. Because, again, gender identity is fixed. But if genderfluidity is a real thing, then that conclusion is unwarranted, as Timmy could be genderfluid. (And, of course, still under the trans umbrella.)
It’s all just a bunch of insecure narcissists, anxious adolescents, and feckin’ fetishists coming up with rationalizations for their fantasies and mashing them all together in one huge, self-contradictory melange of moronic nonsense.
Am I alone in thinking that 58 is a touch too old to refer to oneself as a girl? Not to mention finding it somewhat creepy when it’s a 58-year-old man doing so.
Re #6
I learned emphatically that one never referred to women as “girls”, but then I moved to the (US) South, where it appears to be somewhat common both for self-identification and identification of others.
Nullius @5,
I had the same thought. If gender identity is so very important and fundamental, and male and female gender identities are so very different that very serious medical and surgical interventions are necessary to conform one’s body to one’s gender identity, then it’s hard to see how someone who can fluctuate on a daily basis between such important and different identities isn’t suffering from some kind of mental illness or personality disorder.
The question was rhetorical, but thank you to those who chose to answer. I am now suitably enlightened and not at all irritated that I learned that there were 64 different terms to express gender.
My favorite was Novigender: A gender identity used by people who experience having a gender that can’t be described using existing language due to its complex and unique nature.
I am reminded of Charles Mackay, who in his book detailed during the South Sea Bubble, someone sold shares in a “company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” https://www.usagold.com/cpmforum/southseasbubble-mackay/
The rest of the list including appalling racism (two-spirit and third gender), confusing terms that all seem to mean the same thing and words like bigender which I originally mispronounced “big ender” and then couldn’t stop laughing.
“bigender”: it’s NOT pronounced that way? Oh dear. I thought it had connections to Gulliver’s Travels or computer bit/byte ordering. That might have made more sense.
Claire, I have a copy of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds which is now rather dog-eared and has started shedding pages through repeated readings. I still dip into it regularly just to remind myself that there is nothing unique about the current wave of fashionable nonsense: it has merely replaced the last one and will in turn be replaced by something equally outlandish.
This season’s gender fanatics were last season’s alien abductees or reincarnated historical figures (Cleopatra was a particularly popular former life, the possession of her spirit being claimed by hundreds of people at the same time. Oddly, very few claimed to be the reincarnations of common-or-garden nobodies: maybe only the great and good get to go again), and next season ‘identifying as’ will be dropped like a hot stone when the next ego-boosting shiny new bauble comes along to bedazzle the more-special-than-everybody-else, the terminably gullible and the desperate-for-attention.
Genderfluid is what I use in my car’s tranny. :P
twiliter, I remember the days when ‘I’m coming in a tranny’ meant I’d be arriving in my Ford Transit van.
It’s that red stuff you use for an automatic. You just can’t call it tranny fluid anymore. :P
Another good one AoS. How times have changed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Big Ender, lol
But can bigender exist if, as ‘they’ claim, there are more than 2 genders? Or are they limited to just the 2? Trigender? Quadragender? So confounding…
I think that’s the best definition of the trans movement that I’ve ever seen.
“Girl” is not a mode.
And, of course, the most special of the special, because of its complex and unique nature. And utter BS, if you ask me. (No one ever asks me.)
https://www.healthline.com/health/different-genders#why-it-matters if you’re interested. Enjoy such terms as “maverique” and “aporogender”.
@twiliter Trigender was there. :-/
@AoS oh lord yes. We had one partly converted into a minibus – my dad installed “seats” by which I mean unsanded wooden benches but there were no windows. Honestly, it looked like a serial killer’s van. Later he did add windows (holes covered in some sort of clear plastic sheeting) and cut the roof off to install a concertina-type roof made out of fiberglass but he didn’t secure it properly. One day, on the Redheugh Bridge, most of the bolts snapped and it almost flew off. My mother had to jump in the back and hold it on by the vents until there was a place to stop. She looked like she’d been handcuffed to the ceiling. We got some looks, let’s put it that way.
What a coincidence, I have a unicorn named Maverique. Really. I swear to God. :P
It identified as a minibus.
iknklast #18:
‘Novigender’ – which reminds me that ‘Novichok’, the generic euphemism for those nerve agents that Russian scientists have been working so assiduously on and that the Putin & his pals have been so assiduously using, means, it appears, ‘newcomer’ in ordinary Russian.
Oh, Claire #19, that is wonderfully funny.
If I had an automatic (not common in France*) that’s exactly what I’d call it.
*European drivers don’t think it’s manly to drive an automatic.
I like Izzard whether I agree with him or not. He is talented and he seems to mean well most of the time but he also seems pretty insecure. I’d be interested in a psychologist’s opinion on his excessive marathon running. Yes it gets him attention and feeds his ego, sure, and also raises money for charity – but is there also an element of him feeling like he has to prove himself worthy because he’s not sure he is? I don’t know. I know he’s had high political ambitions but his political views are vague and he hasn’t got very far with that. Basically the left wing Labour membership has rejected him. He seems to have wanted to be mayor of London for personal reasons rather than for the public good.
I liked it when he used to say “I’ve been a transvestite since I was a child and I don’t know why”. That seemed pretty honest to me. It could be that he’s a fetishist or a sexist or has dysphoria or any number of things – he used to seem neutral and open minded about those different explanations. Now he’s using the modern language that’s both controversial and also kind of safe and mainstream. Which is not very surprising.
If the tide turns and gender critical ideas go mainstream instead, I bet Izzard will just swim with the tide. And I don’t know if I really blame him to be honest. He’s just a comedian who likes wearing women’s clothing, probably doesn’t really know why, and he wants to be liked.
I have come to the conclusion that I am omni-gender. I am every gender that is, has been, or will be. You may think of me as any gender, but realize that, in doing so, you are seeing only one facet of the brilliant, beautiful diamond that is me. Likewise, you may use any pronouns you like in referring to me, but you will fail to capture the totality that is I.
To avoid any confusion, I strongly recommend that you do not use any pronouns in referring to me, but rather use only my true identity, which for the purposes of anonymity I will not reveal here. In the meantime, you may refer to me as “Their Omniness.”
@WaM Your Omniness,
I am honored to meet you. I myself am Schrodinger’s gender. You can measure which gender I am right now but not the degree to which I am traveling to the smugness singularity or my smugness but my gender remains unknown. I can also pop in and out of existence in women’s separated spaces and always turn on the charm.
Dare I open the box?
My pedantic side was stimulated by this story. As Ophelia Benson mentioned Eddie Izzard isn’t going to adopt these pronouns – unless Eddie has adopted the irritating habit of referring to herself in the third person. What’s required here is that everybody else should follow instructions on what pronouns they should use discussing her.
As you can see it’s worked on me because I’m a weak willed soul, not given to causing offence even in absentia.
Like some others, I also saw Eddie Izzard perform and though he was OK but nothing more. I might have been influenced, though, by the vertical banners he had spelling out his name. As I was in the cheap seats at the back the balcony cut the top off these and I spent the whole show watching Eddie perform flanked by the legend “DIE IZZARD”.
Athel @23 I actually call it ATF. Unmanly to drive an automatic? My mother learned to drive in a WW2 Jeep that my grandfather had, and I taught my daughter how to drive in a full size pickup truck with a manual gearbox as well. Not sure what you folks are on about with the ‘manly’ business. lol ;)