On being young, tiny, and odd
Suzanne Moore on Laurie Penny’s attempt to claim oppression by Julie Bindel:
I do find it bizarre how an actual lesbian, à la Bindel, can be criticised by a person (I won’t use the offensive word woman) in a heterosexual marriage to a bloke for putting down “LGBTQ authors”. (I don’t know if said bloke is self-identified as a bloke, and care even less.) Penny plays as ever to their American audience; Bindel doesn’t play this game at all. She doesn’t have the time; she has actual feminism to do.
…
I do realise it is very “bio-essentialist” of me to refer to myself being the mother of an actual young person, because the Penny persona depends on being young, tiny, and odd when they is in fact 35 years old and a married, successful adult.
And here’s the thing: 35 is quite a lot too old to be still thinking of oneself as tiny and odd. Really. You should be getting over that the minute you’re out of high school, and all the way over it by…30? 29? 31? In there somewhere.
These people are increasingly desperate to find some way in which they are not privileged. But now you don’t even have to be gay and suffer the prejudice that goes with it, you can just declare oneself open to possibility. For Penny, it is this whole bollocky queer deal which is an utter confusion between sexual orientation and some contrived notion of innate gender ID. I think it just means they is bi.
Or, as Moore hinted, it just means she is Special.
Penny is not cis and nor am I. The very idea of one being what other people think you are is an anathema to me. I am my own special creation, yet at the same my body does all sorts of peculiar things I wish it wouldn’t. Blood leaks of out it, milk too, other people have been grown inside it. I have been raped because of it. I am paid less because of it. I am prone to certain illnesses because of it, and I understand had I been born in a different place all sexual pleasure would have been denied to me because of it.
None of this makes me transphobic, it simply makes me an embodied person. And when Penny speaks of their distress as an anorexic kid, I feel deeply for them. They write fantastically well about it. But feeling unhappy in your body always involves the fantasy of “the other”. That other who feels happy and comfortable in their body. Guess what? I have never met that woman.
This idea of a fit between the inside and the outside is a fantasy for trans people as it is for straight and gay people. It is how it is to be human in a culture of human mirrors.
On the inside everyone is odd.
In short, no one feels the things that others imagine they do. Penny is so invested in defending those they see as outsiders when there is a huge blind spot: women, boring, working-class people. Women who are utterly alienated in ways Penny projects onto her necessary “other”: trans people and sex workers. Who is more “genderqueer” I wonder, Katie Price or Caitlin Jenner?
You know it has become ridiculous when lesbians like Bindel have to kowtow to a white, bourgeois, married woman in the name of what, radicalism? Give over. You cannot misgender someone if you don’t believe in the concept of gender, however suck-ass the business of publishing now is.
And you can’t be “cis” if you never agreed to the gender rules in the first place.
So, under the new rules, my husband and I could identify as a lesbian couple if we wished. This is so senseless. BUT…could I identify as a lesbian couple of there is only one of me? If I announce my pronouns are they/them? And that all of me identify as female? And that we are married to each other? Why do I get the horrifying sense that many gender self-ID “folks” would be quite happy to allow me to self-ID as a lesbian couple?
Good illustration by Suzanne how pronoun misuse ruins perfectly good, flowing writing (or speaking for that matter). Laurie Penny is not a singular thing, it is a collective. Why else would anyone refer to it as “they/them/their”? It’s metaphysical components cannot be unified as a single personage, obviously. It is most likely a holy trinity of personage that cannot be referred to in the singular; the person, the myth, the legend type of thing. Laurie Penny may be clever for an attention hound and anti-feminist, but there is no doubt that it is an asshole.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
Anathema means abhorrent.
No-one says ‘an abhorrent to me’ so why do they put the unnecessary indefinite article in front of anathema?
Sorry, that abuse of language is anathema to me.
Wiktionary gives only the noun: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anathema
Perfectly put. And, by obliging Penny by using their preferred pronouns, it shows how silly and cringe-worthy the demand actually is. Well done!
That is very funny by Suzanne Moore, with a terrific punchline.
Laurie Penny will not be silenced. Right on, sibling!
https://twitter.com/MatHempell/status/1486803498176065537
Sure you can. “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (aka Multiple Personality Disorder) is fashionable again. I’ve seen more than one young woman claim that at least one of her “alters” is trans. One was a regular commenter on We Hunted the Mammoth; iirc her trans man alter was in a relationship with another alter. (She may still be commenting there, but I wouldn’t know. I was banned years ago for terfery.)
Exulansic did a piece on a very mentally ill teenaged girl who said that even though she was content to be cisgender female, the majority of the headmates in her multiple system were male, and for their sake, she was going to make the sacrifice and transition to male. I presume that the doctors will let her.
From what I can tell, “anathema” is a noun but it’s one that’s customarily used without “the” or “an”…maybe because people shied away from “an anathema” and then carried it over to “the” too. It doesn’t seem to be an adjective though.
[consults the Concise Oxford] Yes just a noun.
Goodness, one lives and learns!
I apologise for all the times I have winced at its use as a noun; I was taught that it most definitely wasn’t, and the emphatic teaching stuck for half a century. Thank you for correcting me!
Well I was curious, so I dug. You’re welcome! It apparently is quite customary not to use an article though – even the Concise Oxford amusingly says noun but then gives examples with no article. It gives no examples with an article. It’s easy to see how the confusion arose.
For the same reason I used to get the feeling that some atheist folks would be quite happy to allow Muslim prayers and Wiccan spell casting in the public schools: it pisses off the group of people they hate for telling other people what to do. And it’s possibly the same hated group in each case, the conservative Christians who seemed to dominate their childhood.
This subsection become Queer for the same reason they become Atheist. Yes, there’s lip service and possibly some sincere attachment to principles and reasons, but what drives them isn’t so much attraction to a cause as rejection of a dogma, an orthodox heterodoxy which always seems to loom in their heads as the Default Establishment regardless of whether their surrounding culture is sexually tolerant and secular. Out there, there be dragons. Inside, anything else goes.
Etymology of anathema:
There are two related but different meanings here: one is the act of excommunicating, and the other is the “thing accursed”. You can find examples online of anathema with an article (for example), but as far as I can tell those are constructed.
So, I dunno.
Thank you, What a Maroon.
So, would it then be the convention not to use the indefinite article because it’s a foreign noun that doesn’t usually use it? I didn’t study Greek (to the amusement of my brother, who speaks it fluently, and to my Greek nephews and nieces).
tigger,
I had a Greek professor (that is, a professor from Greece, not a professor of Greek) who pointed out that Greek speakers find it amusing when we refer to “the hoi polloi”, as “hoi” is a definite article in Greek. (And then there’s the baseball team known as The Los Angeles Angels.) Point being, for the most part we don’t care about the conventions of the languages we borrow from.
There are some more examples here (though they rather maddingly don’t provide sources for their examples). What I find interesting is that for the most part the examples where “anathema” means something like “thing accursed” “anathema” is usually (though not always) used without an article, while when it’s used to refer to the church’s actions, it always has an article or some other determiner (e.g., “God’s anathema”). I would’ve thought it would be the other way around.
“The hoi polloi” was a pet peeve of my grandmother’s (whom I never met) according to my mother.
The one that always bugs me (unreasonably, as I can barely speak any French) is the use of “a la” with any referent, regardless of sex. E.g., “a la Michael Jordan”. “It should be ‘au Michael Jordan!” I want to scream, but then the dog brings the newspaper and a hot cup of chamomile, and I relax*.
*That’s a lie. We don’t have a dog, and I don’t drink chamomile.