Dennis is pissed off.
I won’t be cow’ed by them. This is anti-homosexual campaigning and surprise, surprise, the target is, yet again, lesbians. The fact they are selected over gay men tells you everything one needs to about how this movement regards sexually non compliant women. This is rape culture. It is a pathetic attempt at shaming. It is anti gay and it is two scruffy ugly kids who hate lesbians. They are both scum. Utter scum.
He’s right you know.
Sex Matters goes on to note how Stonewall has also moved the goalposts.
Stonewall also responded, publishing a statement that presents “misgendering” as akin to criticising religion.
“The PM, and high-profile commentators, are incorrect when they suggest that misgendering or ‘stating facts on biology’ would be criminalised. This is no more true than stating that the existing law has criminalised the criticism of religion. This kind of misrepresentation about the Act and its purpose only serves to trivialise the violence committed against us in the name of hate.”
This is a big shift in position.
To put it mildly. What does “terf” even mean now?
In Stonewall’s hate-crime resource, it defines being “insulted, pestered, intimidated or harassed” as a hate crime. In its Transphobic Hate Crime Report in 2020, Galop UK, a partner organisation of Stonewall, stated that the top three hate crimes against trans people were “invasive questioning”, “deadnaming” and “verbal abuse” (vaguely defined).
But now they’re all “Don’t be so silly, of course stating facts won’t be criminialised.”
As Sex Matters wrote in February, even before the Scottish hate-crime law, women and men were being investigated, questioned and arrested for gender-critical speech. Stonewall has never previously stated that “misgendering” is not abuse, or that gender-critical people’s freedom of expression should be protected. In fact, it has said quite the contrary.
Sex Matters provides a string of examples.
The reality is they’re all winging it, so they won’t arrest you if you happen to be JK Rowling but they will arrest you if you’re some boring nobody woman while no one is paying attention.
The new act states that a person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”. Defenders of the law cite the “reasonable person” as a safeguard for free speech. It is worth considering, then, whether an employee of Stonewall would be considered a “reasonable person”. Stonewall continues to be considered an authority by many on issues relating to sex and gender – including, until recently at least, both Police Scotland and the Scottish government.
I suppose “reasonable person” is like “reasonable doubt”? A legal term of art? But…fuzzy? How do we know what’s a reasonable doubt and what isn’t? Ditto person? Is the answer “That’s what judges are for”? But how do we civilians know how to avoid committing the crime of abusive speech as opposed to the non-crime of offensive speech? Should we all keep a judge on speed-dial in case we need to ask mid-conversation? Are there enough judges to handle the calls, and are they willing to?
Within political parties as elsewhere, there is much disagreement over what constitutes “transphobia”, and whether gender-critical speech is a matter of disciplinary action. In 2022, Scottish Green Party MSP Patrick Harvie accused “high-profile people within the SNP” of being “allowed” to “get away with promoting transphobia,” and spoke of reforming internal disciplinary processes.
…
During the process of drafting the new law, several MSPs put forward amendments intended to protect freedom of expression. These were dismissed. As documented by policy analysts MurrayBlackburnMackenzie (MBM), the amendments were described by Harvie as hostile and as legitimising attacks on trans rights.
Maybe one or more of those dismissed amendments explained the difference between “abusive” and “offensive.”
Another Scottish Green Party MSP, John Finnie, approvingly cited a briefing by the Equality Network, a Scottish charity. This briefing responded to one of the dismissed amendments – which listed several straightforward gender-critical statements as examples of what would not be caught by the new law, such as that sex is a physical binary characteristic that cannot be changed – characterising it as undermining the Act’s purpose: “To add into legislation a list of ‘approved’ statements that include attacks on the fundamental rights of one group of people is entirely wrong.”
There’s another one of those contested terms. What exactly are “the fundamental rights” of trans people? What does John Finnie think they are? Is it a “fundamental right” of trans people to force everyone to agree that they are the sex that does not match their bodies? What other fundamental right is like that? Who else has a fundamental right to force other people to agree that an impossible thing is possible?
Despite promising that it would do so, the Scottish government failed to meet with MBM to discuss concerns regarding the law’s impact on gender-critical people, apparently because it did not want to “upset the transgender lobby”.
But apparently the Scottish government is fine with upsetting the women lobby, the people who know a man when they see one lobby, the reality lobby.
Women’s fears concerning the new law’s implementation have not come from nowhere. In a briefing submitted to MSPs as the bill was going through the Scottish Parliament, MBM provided evidence of women across the UK having already lost jobs, faced disciplinary action, been interviewed by the police or had details recorded on police databases simply for asserting that biological sex matters.
But don’t worry about that, it was conclusively established in all cases that those women were abusive as opposed to merely offensive. The evidence for this conclusive establishing is in a locked drawer in a filing cabinet behind a boxcar in a locked room in a locked basement of a building that fell down yesterday.
Sex Matters wrote a post yesterday about the same glaring unknown that I wrote about: how the hell do we know what is “abusive” as opposed to “offensive” or “insulting” or “upsetting”? Hamza Yousaf says his shiny new law applies only to “abusive” content, not merely “offensive” or “insulting” or “upsetting” content, but he doesn’t spell out which is which and how we all know.
Sex Matters says:
One of the most controversial aspects is the extension of so-called “stirring up” provisions to characteristics other than race, including transgender identities (which expressly covers non-binary identities and cross-dressers). The threshold for what counts as hateful is set low – at a single act of speech that is merely “abusive” and not threatening or violent.
But also, Yousaf said, not “offensive” or “insulting” or “upsetting”. Not merely offensive but abusive; not merely insulting but abusive; not merely upsetting but abusive. How do we know? How do we distinguish among those? Are they defined so narrowly that everyone knows which is which, with no doubt or ambiguity? Like hell they are.
After years in which transactivist lobby groups have trained police forces and judges to embrace gender ideology, and to view “misgendering” as offensive, women’s-rights groups have feared that simply mentioning the biological sex of trans individuals could result in investigation and even prosecution.
Which of course was their goal.
JK Rowling marked the new law by tweeting that certain high-profile “transwomen” are in fact men, daring Police Scotland to charge her.
The force has confirmed that there were complaints, but it will not take them further and they will not be recorded as a non-crime hate incident. First Minister Humza Yousaf said Rowling’s posts on X were a “perfect example” of the distinction between stirring up hatred and people “being offended or upset or insulted”. He added: “Anybody who read the act will not have been surprised at all that there’s no arrests made.”
Which is completely ridiculous. Is there a clear, obvious, widely understood distinction between stirring up hatred and people “being offended or upset or insulted”? There is one such distinction, which is if you say the thing to one person, with no witnesses, it can’t be stirring up hatred. But that doesn’t get us an inch closer to a general distinction, because the Act is of course about public speech.
As far as I can tell the reality is that Yousaf was just bullshitting, and there is zero reason to be confident that Police Scotland won’t be seeing “abuse” where the rest of us see “being upset” on hearing the truth.
Huh. It turns out the people really harmed by climate change are trans sex workers. I did not know that. The Independent informs us:
Joya Patiha, a 43-year-old Indonesian transgender woman, first started to notice that changing weather patterns in the mountain-ringed city of Bandung were affecting her income as a sex worker a decade ago.
Her income as a sex worker? He had a fixed income “as a sex worker”? I think what the reporter probably meant is that Patiha can’t get as many paying customers as he could a decade ago. So no one told him that men think women are old hags at age 25? He thinks it’s the weather that’s the problem? And the reporter takes him seriously?
The rainy season was lasting longer across the West Java province, winds were stronger and in some particularly bad years Patiha lost up to 80% of her earnings.
What “her earnings”? What lost? He earned less than he had before because it was rainy; he didn’t “lose” some percentage of a fixed salary.
Trans women like Patiha are among the most affected by extreme weather linked to climate change, as well as suffering disproportionately when disasters strike.
How? Why? Who says?
“No one is coming out during the longer rainy season,” said Patiha. “It is very hard to make money during that unpredictable weather.”
Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and trans women, who tend to face more stigma and marginalisation than trans men or other LGBTQ+ Indonesians, are also among those hardest hit by extreme weather.
Are they? Or is this dim-witted reporter just claiming they are because it’s The Done Thing?
Finally we do get something of an explanation:
The Indonesian government has a five-year plan setting out its development objectives and how it will manage the impacts of climate change and although this includes provisions for vulnerable groups, trans people are not listed among them.
“Women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are mentioned, but there is no provision for sexual and gender minorities,” Darmawan said. The lack of government recognition of their precarity means trans people have few social safety nets, he added.
That is at least specific as opposed to vague hand-wavey. On the other hand it’s not clear why “sexual and gender minorities” particularly need “provision” more than the population at large. Women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are not as strong as young able-bodied males, so it makes sense to provide for them but not necessarily for young able-bodied male trans people.
Whatever. Climate change is going to drag everyone down, so it’s a little pointless to try to score trans ally points by pretending it’s worse for our trans siblings.
Suzanne Moore on JKR v Humza Yousaf:
Humza Yousaf had been warned that this legislation was unworkable by numerous women’s groups. Men who identified as women were protected but women weren’t. How on earth were the police going to deal with this?
Who would blink first? Rowling or the police? When what she said was not deemed a hate crime, everything began to fall apart. “Oh, it’s OK for her with her wealth” some said and there she was again, asserting that if any other woman was arrested, she would repeat those words and be arrested alongside them.
Here was a lesson in solidarity, in sisterhood and the simple but incendiary power of saying no.
Much of this fight has been about just that. Women saying no and women having boundaries and that is why the liberal left has been so fundamentally useless with their blurry “be kind” mantras, which mean be kind only to men. Or anyone who claims a minority identity.
Or when you get right down to it anyone except women.
Yousaf pretends his thrilling new law is not aimed at defiant women:
Humza Yousaf said he was “not surprised” police had assessed JK Rowling’s online posts challenging the new hate crime law to be non-criminal.
Well no, I’m sure he wasn’t surprised, because I’m sure he knew that the police know better than to tangle with JKR as opposed to women who are not rich and famous.
Mr Yousaf told BBC Scotland News: “Those new offences that have been created by the act have a very high threshold for criminality. The behaviour has to be threatening or abusive and intends to stir up hatred. So it doesn’t deal with people just being offended or upset or insulted.”
That’s nice; now explain to us exactly what the difference is between threatening or abusive or intended to stir up hatred, and offensive or upsetting or insulting. Explain exactly what the difference is and how we know what the difference is and how we detect the difference and how we demonstrate the difference to the police when they turn up at the door.
The first minister added: “Anybody who read the act will not have been surprised at all that there’s no arrests made. JK Rowling’s tweets may well be offensive, upsetting and insulting to trans people. But it doesn’t mean that they meet a threshold of criminality of being threatening or abusive and intending to stir up hatred.”
But how do we know? How do we know? No, seriously, how do we know? Especially given the history of the police and uppity women in Scotland? How will women who aren’t JK Rowling know for sure that what they say is “offensive” but not “abusive”? When the police in Scotland have in fact pursued and hounded women for saying things that don’t strike most of us as even offensive?
The BBC reports that phones teach boys to be aggressive misogynist little piggies.
Sexism is on the rise in schools because of harmful content on children’s phones, according to the National Education Union’s (NEU) general secretary. Daniel Kebede said boys watched “aggressive and violent pornography” and influencer content that “completely distorts their view of women”.
…
Mr Kebede’s comments come as teachers at the NEU conference, in Bournemouth, prepare to debate a motion about the rise of online misogyny and its impact in the classroom.
Kaspar Zeta-Skeet said there was an “assumption” among some teenagers he taught “that women are things just to be observed” and he had heard words such as “slut” and “whore” being used about female pupils and staff. “We know where this is coming from in terms of the social-media content surrounding… what it is to be a ‘real man’,” he said.
Yes yes yes but the important question is how does this harm our trans siblings?
Um. I don’t much want to promote Jonathan Choe, who is a Discovery Institute honcho of some kind, but I can’t just ignore this…eccentric public defender.
I don’t understand why it’s allowed. Courts wouldn’t allow a guy in a fuzzy bear costume to do the public defender thing would they? Or, more parallel to this guy’s prank, courts wouldn’t allow someone dressed up like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer to play public defender would they?
I’m baffled.
The Taliban promises to torture women to death:
The Taliban’s Supreme Leader has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.
“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials. “But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public,” he declared in his harshest comments since taking over Kabul in August 2021.
“Harshest”? Careful, Telegraph, you don’t want to be too…er…harsh.
Also “comments”? I don’t call a promise to torture women to death in public a “comment.”
The news media seem not to have the language to talk about items like murderous hatred of women.
This isn’t a “harsh comment”; this is a vow to torture women to death for the pleasure of an audience of men. This is peak genocidal loathing of women, but the news media are too busy trying to soothe the tantrums of men in lipstick to report on it properly.
His remarks have incited outrage among Afghans, with some calling on the international community to increase pressure on the Taliban. “The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” Tala, a former civil servant, told The Telegraph from the capital Kabul. “As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future,” she added. “We, the women, are living in prison,” Tala said, “And the Taliban are making it smaller for us every passing day.”
Smaller and more deadly.
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Well knock me down with a feather.
How have so many of them managed to convince themselves that children who “have doubts about their gender identity” are in touch with a great truth as opposed to just being uncomfortable in an ordinary way that dissipates over time? How have so many managed to convince themselves that it’s better to tamper with children’s sexes rather than watch and wait?
Nobody likes Nazi Germany analogies, but the phenomenon where everybody remains complicit even in the face of the worst atrocities under certain circumstances when the social system is arranged just-so… I suspect this has to be some kind of vestigial behavioural trait from our bygone tribal apehood. (As so much of human irrational behaviour is.)
The tell that there’s something deeply primitive going on, to me, is that over and over again I hear the same thing: those of us with our eyes open make a good-faith effort to try and show our friends what’s going on, and they flat-out refuse to see or hear it, often on the verge of panic while doing so. Repeatedly, from different people on different continents, I’ve heard about lifelong friends or relatives literally putting their fingers in their ears rather than hearing us, usually right at the point when the listeners seem to know that they’re about to hear something they can’t disprove or ignore. Same with the strange phenomenon of people being less likely to read articles about transgender if they’re presented as more likely to change their minds about it.
A Hannah Arendt-ian view might say that on the matter of transgender, these people prefer to be nobodies rather than somebodies. They place the locus of responsibility outside themselves and they refuse to be persons. Their moral framework rests fundamentally on their sense of obligation to fit into the social groups they’re in. This is in contrast to the “upstanders” (as therapist Stella O’Malley calls them) for whom their moral framework rests on an inner dialogue about right and wrong, who will naturally deviate from the group if their inner moral compasses direct them to. The first group can’t bear the idea that they might have to build up a moral framework about transgenderism out of a sense of right and wrong that comes from inside their own minds — this is completely alien to them. For the second group, the locus of right and wrong already resides inside their own inner dialogue with themselves, so it comes naturally.
…they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them. Hence their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said, ‘This I can’t do,’ rather than, ‘This I ought not to do.’
It’s strange; there are parallels between Arendt’s philosophical ideas about individuals’ morality and ideas from anthopology and sociology about how societies are organized overall. They both come into play around the subject of gender. Arendt says that people seem to naturally gravitate towards one of two internal moral frameworks: most people rely on obligations to their in-group collective, but a minority rely on their individual, internally-constructed sense of right and wrong instead. Anthropologists say that societies tend to be organized around collectivist values or individualist ones. And furthermore, collectivistic cultures teach people to fit into the gender roles prescribed by the culture they’re in, and individualistic cultures teach people to follow their individual sense of self, which comes from within. See the parallel? People with collectivistic moral frameworks don’t see the problem with transgender, and people with individualistic moral frameworks do, just as societies with collectivistic frameworks foster gender norms and rigid gender roles, and individualistic ones don’t.
If the age of enlightenment was ushered in when individualistic thinkers with individualistic internal moral frameworks took leadership over societies — I’m thinking of the Founding Fathers, specifically — and established that the values of individualism would dominate in society, perhaps our current age, which has suddenly lurched regressively back to old collectivist gender roles, reflects a fundamental shift back to a dominance of collectivistic values over individualistic ones.
You could probably argue that we as a society have rapidly become more influenced by our social interactions with social media apps than we are by social interactions within our local communities. Social media is a collectivist as it gets: an endless popularity contest of likes, on literally a global scale.
Maybe the drug of social media is rewiring everyone’s brains to be less capable of formulating their own sense of right from wrong anymore.
Upstanders just don’t get enough likes.
Originally a comment by Sastra on Well knock me down with a feather.
I think adults have accepted Great Truth Gender Pediatrics in part because of the popularity of child-centered parenting (which may also involve child-centered schooling, child-centered therapy, and, ultimately, child-centered spirituality.) Though we need an antidote to the authoritarian “obey me without question” boogeyman-man method of parental control, the belief that children are fragile, unique flowers needing mostly love and acceptance to bloom can deteriorate rapidly into nonsense. In our rush to validate their feelings, we treat kids like miniature adults— which, as you point out, they aren’t.
Our own recollections of what it was like to be a child might actually be part of the problem here, since it’s not uncommon for us to read our adult emotions and knowledge back into our memories. That we “always knew” or “deeply felt” such-and-such is often influenced by hindsight. Our recollections aren’t pure records from the time, but reconstructions. Child-centered parenting seems to me to be centered on “what I would have wanted/needed when I was a child” and the Mini-Me result of that isn’t necessarily accurate.
Enter the cultural narrative. Just as Lady Catherine De Bourgh confidently knew that “if I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient” on the piano, we might confidently predict that “if I had ever identified as transgender, I would have been the real thing.” By centering the innate wisdom of the child in our view of the world, we subtly place our wise and all-knowing selves in their place. It feels like other-directed sensitivity and kindness — and it’s very tempting.
Five men on a women’s team. Not one not two not three not four but five.
Reduxx can confirm that a trans activist YouTuber is among five trans-identified males currently participating on a women’s football team in North West Sydney, Australia. Riley Dennis, who was previously accused of severely injuring women while participating on another women’s team, is now playing for The Flying Bats, which has been dominating women’s football in the region.
Gee, I wonder why.
The Flying Bats Football Club secured a 4-0 victory against the Macquarie Dragons on March 24, and of their five trans-identified players, the highest goal-scorer is a male trans activist who injured two female players during a match last year.
The team was awarded a $1,000 prize after winning the North West Sydney League pre-season Beryl Ackroyd Cup, following a season of winning every game they played in the Women’s Premier League matches, 10-0.
They would, wouldn’t they.
Reduxx has now learned the identities of the five trans-identified male athletes, and among them is a former YouTuber who drew criticism last year after injuring at least two female players. Riley Dennis, born Justin, 31, currently plays for The Flying Bats, but last year was a member of the Inter Lions team in New South Wales.
On May 21, 2023, during a game between the Inter Lions and the St. George football clubs at the Majors Bay Reserve, Dennis launched his smaller female opponent towards a metal fence using an aggressive tackle as the two chased down the ball.
Reduxx was provided footage of the match, which showed the female player lying on her side, unmoving, as the transgender player casually walked away.
The month prior, Dennis was said to have injured another female player, who reportedly had to seek hospital attention as a result of her injury. A letter-writing campaign was launched by Kirralie Smith, a spokeswoman with Binary Australia, encouraging concerned individuals to contact Football New South Wales, which reportedly then received over 12,000 submissions.
For her role in bringing awareness to the injuries sustained by female athletes, Smith was visited by New South Wales Police and handed an Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) on March 30 that year requiring that she neither discuss nor approach Dennis.
Riley Dennis’s actual violence is fine. Women who object to Riley Dennis’s violence are visited by the police.
The Times on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre hearing:
A rape crisis centre run by a trans woman has been “illegitimately” hiding the biological sex of its counsellors from victims of sexual assault, an employment tribunal has heard.
Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, whose chief executive is Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman and activist, was said to have used “disciplinary processes to enforce its extreme and uncompromising version of gender identity theory”.
Isn’t that what rape crisis centres are for, though?
No, it damn well is not.
The dispute began when [support worker Roz Adams] consulted colleagues about a rape victim who had asked if her counsellor would be a “man or a woman” because she would feel “uncomfortable talking to a man”. It intensified when a non-binary member of the centre’s staff copied Wadhwa into an email chain and an investigation was launched into Adams’s conduct.
Her “conduct” – the conduct of asking what sex her counsellor at a rape crisis centre would be.
The tribunal had previously been told that Wadhwa told an audience that the “best way” to get staff to support trans inclusion policies was to “fire them”. Nicole Jones, a former student, told the hearing that the word “transphobes” was used in a “disparaging way”, adding: “She was asked what’s the best way to get staff on board with inclusion policies and she responded bluntly, ‘Fire them.’”
Exclude women who are not on board with “inclusion policies” that include men as bosses of rape crisis centers. Inclusion of perps at the expense of victims. Mad as a box of frogs.
A study finds what we pretty much knew already:
Most gender-confused children grow out of it.
The majority of gender-confused children grow out of that feeling by the time they are fully grown adults, according to a long-term study. Researchers in the Netherlands tracked more than 2,700 children from age 11 to their mid-twenties, asking them every three years of feelings about their gender.
Results showed at the start of the research, around one-in-10 children (11 percent) expressed ‘gender non-contentedness‘ to varying degrees. But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ were discontent with their gender.
The researchers concluded: ‘The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.’
Because duh. Children are children; they’re still getting used to being human. Lots of changes seem weird or repellent or both when you’re a child, and then over time you get used to them. Some you may still want to fix or reject, but others you don’t. Trying to change your sex is actually worse than getting used to it and figuring out that you can, to a considerable extent, decide for yourself how to live in your sex [gender].
It’s pretty horrifying that a lot of adult people forgot all that in the stampede to be allies to our trans siblings. Many of those adults have children themselves, many more of them know children via friends and relatives and jobs such as teaching, and all of them, without exception, were once children themselves. How have so many of them managed to convince themselves that children who “have doubts about their gender identity” are in touch with a great truth as opposed to just being uncomfortable in an ordinary way that dissipates over time? How have so many managed to convince themselves that it’s better to tamper with children’s sexes rather than watch and wait?
I have no idea how.
The Guardian taking care to insult women right in the headline:
‘I’m as baffled as the next ovary-owner’: navigating the science of treating menopause
The subhead:
Conversations about menopause have matured but the question of when and how to treat perimenopausal symptoms remains confusing – even to a science journalist
Conversations about menopause have matured but we’re calling women “ovary-owners”? How do you square those two items?
I wonder how often The Guardian calls men “testicle-owners.”
They ran out of time.
You see it’s like this. When a guy like India Willoughby publicly fantasizes about kidnapping Joanna Cherry, Maya Forstater, and JK Rowling, it’s social justice. When we talk about guys like India Willoughby fantasizing about kidnapping women who make him angry, it’s transphobia, and deserving of harsh punishment, like kidnapping for example. Head Willoughby wins, tails women lose.
Originally a comment by Artymorty on And finally move on.
The corollary of the argument that only trans people should be allowed to play trans characters is that trans isn’t a neutral attribute that can be ignored.
Speaking to GQ magazine, Schafer said being known simply as a “trans actress” was “ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do”. She continued: “I’ve been offered tons of trans roles, and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
In a sense I get what he means, or what he thinks he means: something like how, say, Black actors were tired of playing “Black” characters, instead of just regular characters who happened to be Black. When Nichelle Nichols played Uhura on Star Trek, for example: here was a capable officer whose Blackness wasn’t front-and-centre in her character, and this earned praise from MLK and made Nichols a role model to many future Black actors.
Or perhaps it’s like how actors who were born with achondroplastic dwarfism might get tired of playing “dwarf characters” instead of just regular characters who happen to be dwarves. Peter Dinklage has broken that barrier somewhat, beginning to take on roles that aren’t explicitly written for dwarves, following his star turn in Game of Thrones.
But here we run into a bit of a problem: because dwarfism is kind of a major life changer, so it’s not easy to have characters who just happen to be dwarves leading films meant to have wide appeal, where their dwarfism never comes up in the story, or if it does, it’s mostly peripheral to the story.
I would argue trans is more analagous to the second than the first: a major life-changer that can’t easily be ignored in a story. This is in part because the transgender movement can’t decide whether transness is the most special thing in the world and must be advertised at all times, or if the movement’s goal is for trans-identifying people to integrate and settle into the population at large. Within the “transgender umbrella” there are members of both camps, the ones who are at least trying to move past their dysphoria via medical “transition” (however misguided they might be about the efficacy of that line of treatment), and the ones who live for their oh-so-special trans status and won’t shut up about it.
I think that tension, the inability to agree on whether trans should be highly visible or not so visible, is a result of the fact that the theory behind transgender doesn’t really work — that humans don’t really change sex, and trans people can never fully transcend their sex. Sex plays a huge part in their lives, in a fundamental, material way that isn’t analagous to having a minority racial or ethnic background that’s only an issue because people haven’t familiarized themselves enough with it.
But even the dwarf analogy isn’t perfect, and I would argue it doesn’t go far enough, because there’s another factor that makes “transness” different from ethicinity or disability or congenital abnormality: audiences cannot really see beyond sex, and most people are tired of being told they have to pretend that they can, and they’re only getting more tired of it. Choosing not to discriminate against women or men (or any other attribute) in, say, roles where their sex (or other attribute) isn’t typically represented, isn’t the same thing as pretending not to see what sex they are.
It’s not the same thing to appreciate Sigourney Weaver playing a strong, confident woman holding her own alongside a group of Marines in Aliens as it would be if we were instructed to pretend she was really a man all along. Her femaleness is integral to the character.
Likewise, when Jaye Davidson played the transgender character in The Crying Game, it wouldn’t have been the same if we were insructed to pretend he was a woman all along. His maleness is integral to the character.
When Hunter Schafer says he feels transgender roles are “demeaning to me”, he means he wants roles that don’t merely downplay his transgenderism, he means he wants roles that pretend he isn’t male with a transgender identity and a history of cosmetic surgeries, at all.
I feel bad for him, though. I looked at his Wikipedia entry, and he is among the cohort of gay boys who got infected with gender dysphoria after he immersed himself in teen trans social media culture.
If Hunter truly wants his trans status not to matter in the roles he plays, he has to acknowledge that he’s not an “actress” at all, and it’s not going to be easy to find lead roles for males who’ve undergone medical transition therapies, in which that isn’t a major part of their character.
Sounds like it’s going to be a while before he learns this.
Wait what century is this?
Woman removed from flight for not wearing a bra
Lisa Archbold was due to fly from Salt Lake City to San Francisco when airline staff, she said, took issue with her clothing — a loose white T-shirt.
The incident was in January and received some media attention, but Archbold now has legal representation. Her attorney is Gloria Allred, who has been involved in several high-profile women’s rights cases — including representing women who accused Donald Trump and R. Kelly of sexual misconduct.
In a recent letter to the airline’s president, Allred said Archbold wasn’t questioned when she boarded the plane but was later escorted off the flight by a Delta gate agent.
For wearing a T shirt while in possession of breasts?
Maybe Delta should keep a supply of binders on hand.
Euphoria actress Hunter Schafer has said she no longer wants to play transgender roles. The 25-year-old transgender star shot to fame playing a trans character, Jules Vaughn, in HBO’s hit teen drama.
But Schafer said she felt she could go further as an actress by “not making it the centrepiece to what I’m doing”. She said: “I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on.”
That’s not going to happen. The entertainment industry is about making money, it’s not about showing off one’s trans-allyship. The people who make movies and tv dramas aren’t going to choose a man instead of the thousands of eager women available to them.
Speaking to GQ magazine, Schafer said being known simply as a “trans actress” was “ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do”. She continued: “I’ve been offered tons of trans roles, and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Then don’t. Find a different line of work.
Willoughby longs for a trans woman to be murdered so that he can claim they are Uniquely Vulnerable.
Labour MP Jess Phillips took more than five minutes to read a list of women killed over the past 12 months where the perpetrator or suspect was a man.
Before entering the Commons chamber on Thursday, she had to add another name to the list in pen – that of Helen Harrison, who was found dead in Yorkshire on Sunday.
Bereaved families, including the newly formed group Killed Women, reacted angrily to the fact that just three male MPs were present for the reading of the names a day after International Women’s Day.
Well, you know how it is: they’re just women. The boring kind, not the glamorous exciting trans kind that we can all be so thrillingly ProGressive about.
