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October 27, 2023 - 2:15pm
Few figures are as polarising as Eddie Izzard. There seems to be no limit to the number of interviews with and profiles of the actor, most of them admiring. The latest, an interview in the Guardian, includes his claim to have “both boy and girl genetics” while at the same time asking to be taken “seriously”. It’s hard to imagine any other subject where such nonsense would go unchallenged, but there is a bigger problem with the media’s fawning approach to transgender celebrities.
Referring to Izzard or any other trans-identified man as “she” is profoundly insulting to women. In this instance, it happens to be the Guardian talking to Izzard “ahead of the release of her new film”. The word “her” has no place in that sentence, creating an immediate sense of cognitive dissonance. We know that something is being waved in our faces, challenging us to object to our own erasure. Pronouns are only the beginning, which is why trans activists have made them such a central part of the demands they make on the rest of us.
Once you uncouple someone from biology, you’ve denied the age-old assumption that we are able to determine other people’s sex by looking at them. Man or woman? Her or him? Like most women, I know instantly, because the ability to identify a man is essential to assessing risk. It’s one of many reasons why I’m outraged when I see a man referred to as “she”, regardless of whether he’s a celebrity or a sex offender.
For years we were told that using someone’s preferred pronouns was a matter of “being kind”, when it’s nothing of the sort. “Look at this obvious man and dare to challenge a suffocating orthodoxy that insists he’s a woman,” is what it says. Suffocating and silencing, because once you accept that, everything else flows from it — men demanding to be in women’s refuges, changing rooms and prisons.
All those people adding “he/him” or “she/her” to their email signatures are telling us they accept the argument that someone’s sex is a matter of personal choice. If one challenges them, they will retreat into talking about something called “gender identity”, which is invisible and — for most purposes — irrelevant.
It’s a form of gaslighting, promoting an ideology that’s hugely controversial, not to say scientifically illiterate. When a newspaper or website does it, it’s making a conscious decision, lining up behind the idea that men can become women at will. It could only happen in a culture where women’s legitimate concerns are laughed at and disregarded.
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SubscribePronouns are actually quite useful. Any applicants I see using them are immediately binned and they/them are not even considered for interview when I’m hiring.
LOL….I DO THE SAME THING!!!
I hire about 40 ppl a year.
I see ANYTHING on a resume that looks remotely woke, I toss it in the bin.
Pronouns are just the most obvious example of woke trouble waiting clues.
If I see you minored, of God forbid, majored, in any xxxx-Studies course, you are not getting an interview. You put down that you were involved with some woke driven club or association, edited some lefty publication on campus for Non-Binary people, tossed. No interview for you.
Heck, I now look HARD at any resume coming from an Ivy League, CA or MA school. I doubt the kids are dumb, as in they lack intelligence, but I am convinced these schools, and perhaps these kids parents, just instilled the wrong moral compasses in them.
BTW….I AM going to ask recruiting to check out your social media. ANYTHING on there that gives me an indication that you are coming from a progressive/woke background and you will receive an email thanking you for applying, wishing you the best in your job hunt, and letting you know we found a more qualified candidate. PLEASE go virtue signal on social media, it makes it easier for me.
I’m not at all woke. The closest I have come to ‘pronouns’ is putting “Her Serene Highness / Madame la Comtesse” on an online job application because it was a mandatory field, and by that stage I’d decided I didn’t want the dratted job anyway, but thought I’d amuse myself. Tumbleweed, of course … what do you do??!
This is something I have wondered about in recruitment, and how it might be problematic for employers who value reason and common sense. It’s concerning to think about the possibility of having no control over organisational culture, alignment with values, due to certain employees with entrenched beliefs.
Apart from the issues with having such beliefs being imposed on others, they tell you a lot about an individual.
There is an implied correlation between wokeness and propensity for indoctrination, less inclination for thinking for themselves or common sense.
Also, the capacity for loyalty to the employer is hampered by conflicting loyalties to ‘the cause’, with the employer (and everyone else not in agreement) coming second.
It’s a long time since I was involvement with recruitment (before this craziness), but I imagine it would be a huge source of inner turmoil.
Can I ask if there is any legislation in your country with ‘discrimination’ that protect the woke folk? Where you have to demonstrate the reason for choice of successful candidate?
So, you believe in employment discrimination if applicants don’t have the same political views as you, then you must believe the Left’s cancel culture is a good thing. I don’t agree with Woke, but I don’t agree with hypocrites either. I wonder if you would be so quick to tell us that you don’t hire people with dark skin.
I can’t speak for AL, but I would do the same thing and do not consider it hypocritical. “Woke” is not just a political view with which one agrees or disagrees; it’s a fundamental way of seeing the world and interacting with people, and depending on how you run your business and what values you hold, such people are more likely to disrupt the working environment and productivity and potentially relationships with clients. You can’t review every applicant, so you choose what characteristics are important to your business and which are detrimental, and don’t waste time on blatant red flags. It is not at all comparable to color of skin, which says nothing by itself of character, cooperation, or other characteristics important to a business. “Discrimination” has become a dirty word, with only a negative connotation; it used to be seen as a positive skill, the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff for your particular requirements, and I resent the loss of that meaning, especially since there doesn’t seem to anything to replace it.
I understand what you’re saying, but pronoun narcissism — the presumption that one can dictate another’s speech — is not simply an alternate political view. It’s a boundary trespass, a requirement that the other satisfy my view of myself, rather than speaking from his or her own understanding. I would not want that attitude in an employee.
Haven’t you heard? Apparently, pronouns are the new reality. You won’t get any woke points for acknowledging that they are merely descriptive of a political view.
What you are so willfully ignoring is skin color is an immutable characteristic that tells us nothing about an individual’s beliefs and personality while being woke entails an extremely detailed (if incoherent and militantly illogical) and non-negotiable set of beliefs that tell us much indeed about an individual’s character, irregardless of their race, religion, sex or country of origin.
These people seem to not be thinking at all. You’re applying for a job — wanting to make a good impression, one would assume — and in your application presume to dictate your potential employer’s speech?
What is a 61 year old doing referring to themselves as a “boy” or a “girl” , or both? This individual is neither. Just infantile.
You jest but that is actually a thing which in some parts of the world they are now being asked to accept.
I was reading recently about a 50 year old man in Canada who identifies as a 13 year old girl and was allowed to enter a girls swimming event. Changing rooms and everything.
It all makes me wonder why anyone bothered with the effort of taking the Catholic Church to task for their behaviour all those years, when straight away apparently advanced societies were just going to wave creepy grown men through to have access to children.
The Catholic belief in Transubstantiation is a lot more credible than the belief that Eddie Izzard can transform into a girl.
Agreed. But Pink has managed to make herself look like the spitting image of Eddie Izzard.
I watched that on Rebel News!!! The official couldn’t deny it. There was an older man swimming with teenage girls!!!
And changing with them. Although he identifies as an adult as he sprints across the parking lot and drives of in his car. He’s a professor at York University in the psychology department.
Rebel News (an online newspaper) chased that b*****d around with a microphone asking him if he was pervert and he ran off saying he was “in danger”. PoS.
“both boy and girl genetics” ‘
Izzard has mutton dressed as lamb genetics.
It’s too bad because he’s very funny. Love his stand-up before he really played dress-up. He’s a talented actor as well.
Used to be funny. Used to be a good actor. Now he just plays Eddie Izzard as he sees Eddie Izzard or Susy Eddie Izzard on any given day.
One wonders what kind of doctor Eddie goes to, a urologist or a gynecologist.
A psychologist.
Thank you, Joan, for being the ‘dog with the bone’. Rhyme not intended but a compliment to you for not letting up on this endless nonsense. I saw an interview Izzard did on YT, with the director of a new film he is in. Both were saying that, in the future, opposition to trans ‘rights’ will be seen as dinosaur-like as opposition to gay rights. No, Eddie, they are polar opposites. In the future, when trans ‘specialists’ (i.e the people who promote this ideology through clinical means) face litigation and (hopefully) custodial sentences, promoters of this poisonous dogma will feel some degree of shame (an optimistic shout, but one can hope.) I agree with the author that the blind use of preferred pronouns by people who should know better is collusion. I know people who choose to use them – they are the useful idiots – so valuable for any ideology to prosper.
This shouldn’t need to be said, but you’ve either got XX or XY chromosomes.
Unless you’ve got something rare like Klinefelter’s Syndrome, that is.
The Guardian should have challenged him when he said it.
Now that is comedy gold!
“When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men. There will be but a fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation.”
-G.K. Chesterton
And we’ll all look back at that generation and say what idiots they were.
Who will “we” be? Under such circumstances “we” will not have been born.
Very prescient given falling birth rates. Although Chesterton could not have anticipated surrogacy, or the use of IVF and gene editing to manufacture babies for “modern families”.
But a fraternity? So, just men, then?
Chesterton lived from 1874 to 1936, so I’m curious what social phenomena he had in mind. First wave feminists, flappers, effeminate men? Equality between the sexes looks like the most likely target. Clearly it wasn’t trans!
From a quick bit of research, feminism (at least in its usual form) was his target. He was an early critic. Eg:
“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
I feel a bit sad about Eddie Izzard since I did like some his stand-up shows years ago. I also thought his whole “yes, I am a cross-dresser and like dressing up in high heels and lipstick, what of it?” seemed bracingly honest. Now he’s just very tiresome.
True. He’s gone from good cross-dresser to baffling and bewildering not-even-trans-person.
It seems he likes the whole kick of doing it. In the old days he would have been called a tranny. Dependent on how much of a kick, an autogynephile. And there’s the rub, all of these different motivations for cross-dressing have been lumped, together with hormonal, mentally ill teenagers, mostly girls, under the “Trans” grouping making trans seem far more common than true gender dysphoria is (a tiny minority deserving of genuine sympathy) and thereby givig the new trans a much louder voice. At the same time emboldening 40+ year old men whose habit used to be kept behind closed doors to parade them selves with pride on social media as part of this new group of abused victims. Its a bizarre world ….
He’s still a tranny.
He’s also on record very recently as saying ‘I came out [as trans] 38 years ago’. That’s historical revisionism at its finest. Or, as it’s sometimes known, lying.
COMEDIANS’ UNION: “We Demand To Be Taken Seriously!”
“My friends used to laugh at me when i said i wanted to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.”
[Bob Monkhouse]
It has come as something of a shock that Eddie Izzard gets away with still identifying as a comedian.
I’m a black lesbian refugee, trapped in a CIS-gay oppressors body who identifies as a wheelchair user. Why in God’s name won’t anybody take me seriously ?
Actor, comedian, commentator, politician – his self-definitions know no bounds, and his talent in each of those areas is mediocre at best – and i’m “being kind” there.
Claiming to have “male and female genetics” is simply his foray into self-defining as a biologist.
I disagree his stand-up used to have me belly laughing and he’s a fine actor. He was unrecognizable as George V opposite Judy Dench in Victoria.
He had some special gifts, sanity and sense not being among them.
I disagree, I used to find Eddie’s comedy hilarious, one of the few comics who made me belly laugh. And he’s a talented actor unrecognizable as Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, in ‘Victoria and Abdul” opposite Judy Dench. I find it very sad that he has deteriorated and is now unwatchable.
He may have been funny once; unfortunately, many celebrities seem to have sacrificed creativity and originality in order to lecture the masses on their politics.
He’s got Tos*er genetics
Well….I hate to be rude, but …DUH.
I’ve been saying this for years.
I have refused to play along which has gotten me barked at, yelled at, called all kinds of names.
Cannot say that bothers me much. I just kinda laugh and walk away. Not gonna waste my time trying to convince wild eyed ideologues of anything.
Just keep laughing at them, offending them, and refuse to play along with their stupidity.
Maximum respect for anyone who does as you do.
Good for you. Years ago we (3 people) shared a flat with a rabid left wing Marxist who sang the red flag at every opportunity. Being tolerant we put up with this until one of the others had enough and re wrote it as
“The peoples flag is slightly pink
They are more conservative than you think
The obnoxious Marxist can shout and rave
Their outdated views belong in the grave.”
Our Marxist friend left to find another flat
He probably left because of his flat mates obvious inability to write lines to a song that actually fit the tune!
The people’s flag is slightly pink
They’re far more sober than you think
The Marxist fools can shout and rave
The madmen should be in the grave
They think my hard-earned cash is theirs
I hope they tumble down the stairs
The people’s views are not so bad
But dear old Marxists, you’ve been had.
LOL
Better.
But what is wrong with the good old fashioned:
The working class can kiss my ass
I’ve got the foreman’s job at last
etc.
Izzard is a complete idiot. Giving him a platform is utter foolishness. “Boy and girl genetics?” Does he know even basic biology? This is simple: call his bluff. Have him do a DNA test. XX = Girl; XY = Boy.
( Yes, I know that there is the very rare XXY genotype. Kleinfelter’s Syndrome affects approximately 0.04% of males in the general population. )
One of the key findings of recent genetics is that things we take to be very simple (where we might expect one gene to be involved) turn out to be more complex (with multiple genes involved). Sex may be binary, but sex related behaviours (including sense of identity) may not be. So he may not be completely wrong. It’s not settled science though.
Our social ideas of what constitutes a man do not always match simply to having a Y chromosome. Genes may be involved in variation around social norms of what constitutes a man.
Actually, it is settled science, social norms are just that and nothing more. Sorry Morley but everything isn’t just some waffling, endless philosophical ‘question’ (point being the wrong term, being that this is just pointless wankery). Stop living in your head and try living in the real world with the rest of us. Who knows, you might actually learn a few things.
I think if you tot up the various physical medical conditions, the figure is nearer 0.3% i.e. one in three hundred. This excludes purely psychological identity cases and refers just to genetic, developmental or hormonal issues.
Good answer, but why have the number of self-identified trans people shot up in the last few years?
If the genetic, developmental or hormonal causes have increased in frequency or severity then surely this is a health crisis?
My (limited) understanding is that there is no reason to think the number of genetic etc abnormalities has increased so one is left with an increase in psychological cases i.e. genuine and imagined “Gender Dysphoria”.
Given the Tavistock and its overseas equivalents seem to have been allergic to collecting objective statistics on those who passed through their clinics, there is no hard evidence on the split – but my guess would be that the sudden surge in teenage self identified trans is mostly social media driven / peer group social contagion and that, at most, there is only another 0.3% who are “genuinely” psychologically misaligned with their gender/sex (and that this proportion has not changed).
If one wanted to make a case for a wider health crisis I suppose one could wonder about the impact of declining testosterone and male fertility rates across western society which is possibly caused by pollution – but I have never seen anything coherent written on this topic so this would be just speculation.
For over 60 years women who take the birth control pill have been peeing out higher levels of oestrogen & progesterone every morning. It is not filtered for when water is processed for consumption. Pill use is highest in the industrialised west.
There was a report in the late 70’s/early 80’s (it might have been Scientific America) where male fish near the effluent pipes of large cities developed `female’ characteristics and, it was speculated this development could be from the high levels hormones in the waste water (much like fish are effected by illicit drugs flushed down the toilet and micro plastics in the waste water).
This might not be The Only cause, but it should be definitely be looked into – not that big Pharma would allow the results to be published.
There’s money to be made for doctors and pharmaceutical companies in creating a lifetime patient.
Masses of young adults deciding they are trans might be part social contagion, much like anorexia, cutting, group pregnancies (yes, it’s a thing) were in previous generations. Also you get way more social clout and support being trans rather than being gay or lesbian. Rather than exploring possible underlying emotional or psychological motivations-now labelled `conversion therapy’ by activists, there seems to be a rush to confirm & label them transgender.
The detransitioner tales are harrowing
‘Some sections of the media are positively revelling in their own surrender to misogyny. And we shouldn’t be afraid to call it out’.
It’s not misogyny. It’s just a self-delusion that shouldn’t be indulged.
A significant proportion of journalists are semi-literate morons.
Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but it is economic inequality that is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but it is biological sex that is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line, but who instead followed Marxism Today in whoring after Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, are now unable to hold the second line, either. And those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first, no matter how devoted they might have been to Jeremy Corbyn. There are already signs of that, since without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by the people who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by the people who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth. It is no wonder, then, that Keir Starmer is so keen on the denial of material reality.
Hmmmm . . . first of all I have no hesitation in agreeing with Joan Smith that women-only spaces, based on sex, must be protected for legitimate purposes like safety, dignity, health, fairness, same sex attraction etc.
As far as the pronouns thing goes, don’t get me wrong, I find it all absolutely ridiculous. But the world is full of stuff I find absolutely ridiculous: a man in a funny hat talking in Latin to God, for example. But if he considers it a sign of respect to be referred to as Father, then I’m ok with it and I don’t think it implies my affirmation of his particular spaghetti monster.
In other words, if Eddie Izzard prefers to be referred to as “she” then I don’t have a problem with it, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t imply that I believe she has changed sex or has male and female DNA. (I just think she’s a bit of a t**t if that’s what she believes.) Nor should I be compelled to accept or affirm those fantasies.
To my mind, one way through all this could be to clarify and uncouple the concepts of sex and gender. Let’s all accept gender is just a term referring to cultural phenomena which are all made up anyway. So present as whatever gender you like. Just like being a Buddhist or Goth or Chelsea fan or whatever. But the law and society must be clear that certain rights, particularly for women, are based on sex not gender.
Being a woman (your sex) who identifies as a man (your gender) does not change your sex or entitle you to waste NHS time demanding a prostate check. Being a man (your sex) who identifies as a woman (again, your gender) does not mean you’ve changed sex or entitle you to invade women’s refuges.
I also doubt the argument over pronouns is winnable anyway, because most people aren’t going come across the issue that much in their daily life and therefore won’t care enough to risk a confrontation about it.
This is largely how I feel about it. I’m probably more ambivalent about the gender vs sex thing because these are merely labels. A woman is a woman and anything else is just word play IMO. I am more likely to use a person’s preferred pronoun if it’s a man that actually looks like a girl. Some of these people don’t even make an effort to look like the opposite sex. If you’re not interested in putting in the work to look like a girl, why should I call you one.
Inclined to agree. I see no point in being bloody minded about it. As to the beards and dresses thing: what is that all about.
I’m not sure but when I see a bearded guy in a dress it always makes me think of Kenny Everett’s character “Cupid Stunt”.
Just tell them that you identify as ”Thy Lord and Creator” and that all this gender identity talk is bollocks and that they will burn in Hell if they don’t quit.
If they don’t believe you just accuse them of being ”theophobes”.
This man is doing terrible harm to the transsexual community. He is a bigger threat than the religious right could ever be.
Excellent article. I agree 100%.
This should be about personal choice. If I want to call a man he or she, that’s my business and no one else. Speech should not be compelled either way.
By the time all this is over, journalism, education, public health, entertainment, medical care, and much of politics and government bureaucracy are going to be left in smoking ruins, destroyed in the public eye by people who intentionally deny the obvious and unchangeable difference between male and female.
All to the good. These institutions are beyond corrupt and need to be discarded and replaced.
Eddie Izzard used to be funny. Now he’s just laughable.
I’m old enough to remember Izzard saying he was a straight man who fancied women, who simply liked dressing in women’s clothes. In those days, we labelled him a transsexual, and raised an eyebrow. We have the receipts.
He is now a parody, lying about his past utterances, and no longer remotely funny. I’m not amused.
Thank you so much for this, Ms. Smith. You’ve stated clearly and decisively what the correct response to the trans madness is: give them nothing, because once you do, endless insanity follows.
Spot-on and well-articulated, Joan. Thank you.
Yet another article where the writer cannot quite bring themself to identify the trans-identifying man as “he” or “him”. She very carefully tiptoes around this essential point of her article. Unherd editors, we are watching and enumerating these farces. Ms Smith, I hope this is not cowardice on your part.
I read the article twice, just to make sure, but I believe i am right. It is late.
I think, Mr Gibbon, you’re being unfair to Joan Smith: she does use ‘his’ in the third paragraph of her article. There’s no need to use gendered pronouns for the the rest of the time, since Izzard is only the stimulus for the piece, not its main topic. (On a point of linguistic pedantry, ‘his’ is not a pronoun anyway: it’s a possessive determiner.)
Please could you provide where it says “his”? I have re-read and cannot see it in the first 3 paragraphs. The use of such turns of phrase such as “Izzard” (repeated) and “the actor” are rather jarring. My issue is with the article claiming to take a stand when it is not.
Few figures are as polarising as Eddie Izzard. There seems to be no limit to the number of interviews with and profiles of the actor, most of them admiring. The latest, an interview in the Guardian, includes his claim to have “both boy and girl genetics” while at the same time asking to be taken “seriously”.
Outrage withdrawn.
Are you sure you’re not Susie Dent?
He is offensive.
It’s embarrassing to be honest.
I didn’t want to read the article as ms izzard is a complete fiction to me.
Just tell them that you identify as ”Thy Lord and Creator” and that all this gender identity talk is bollocks and that they will burn in Hell if they don’t quit.
If they don’t believe you just accuse them of being ”theophobes”.
deleted
When he put on makeup, wig/heels/dress and prances around, he is merely acting. Badly for that matter. So we should just ignore him because the real world is a stage. Not his stage. Boycott his film too.
Transwomen are named as such for a reason. And now they’ve been renamed transgender instead of transsexual we have even more sense of a cosmetic, rather egotistical transformation that is not affecting the subject’s sex.
As for the cultural politics played by the media and academic class… well, there we have James Lindsay’s thesis that a strange new epoch has begun spinning Hegel and Marx”s dialectic of history off its axis He calls it Gnostic, others say it’s post-Christian I regard it as transhuman futurism.
I don’t follow this argument. Calling a man “she” does not impinge on your ability to instantly detect that the person is a man and therefore (apparently) a risk to your personal safety. I do wonder whether you find it similarly important to determine someone’s race and religion. If yes, do tell!
So we know what to expect as her first reaction if we are ever unfortunate enough to meet her.
The autogynophilic as##oles are perverts. Playing at being women makes them hor#y. For some odd reason, we (the world at large) are supposed to let them run wild with that. If I stood on the corner dressed as Napoleon and insisted I be given an army to invade Russia, people would say I’m nuts. If I stand on a corner dressed as a woman (I am a man) and insist on entry into little girls’ change rooms, Justin Trudeau will support me. What’s wrong with that picture?
I do not like the way that the word ‘woke’ is being used in some of the comments here. I consider myself woke in that I try to be empathic with the needs of others. But I do not consider it in the slightest bit woke to think you can change gender at will, ‘becoming a woman’ as and when it suits you. This is not fair on women. It is not fair to compete as a woman in a sport when you have developed strengths and muscles as a man. It is not fair to expect a lesbian to accept your p***s because you say that you are a lesbian too. It is not woke to send death threats to women who question the wisdom of letting obvious men into female spaces.
As a green voting feminist vegan who supports the BLM movement I wear the badge of ‘woke’ with pride. Men can dress and behave as femininely as they like – good luck to them – but I will not stand for men thinking this alone makes them women.
Politically she’s a bit embarrassing and vacuous.
But
Eddie, does great work for charity, more than anyone here will ever.do, if he wants to call himself female it’s alright with me.
They are after all just an actress and comedienne.
Not people known for down to earth reality.
I can understand you might disagree with this, but why is it “profoundly insulting” to women. And why talk of “erasure”? Izzard, or no Izzard, he or she, most normal women continue to go about their day, uninsulted and unerased.
When did it become so important to look like a man or a woman? Have we not learnt from our history that for generations people have been crossing that gendered look? Think about the golden age of the restoration where the rich wore wigs and makeup (okay to hide poor skin and not washing) and men still wore tights. Or the fact that most children have really only been dressed in boy/girl clothes since Edwardian times. Really crass article and full of such vitriol. To be honest pronouns should not define us, many countries don’t have pronouns and they still survive. This misnomer of equating any trans woman with threat for women (as a whole) misses those women out there that are predatory and out to harm. And most people who go in for this level of vitriol come from a place of ignorance, they don’t know anyone who is transgender, and most of the arguments against transgender people sound very much like the homophobic arguments from about 20 years ago.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
Let’s start with the above study, and a quote therefrom:
“MtF transitioners were over 6 times more likely to be convicted of an offence than female comparators and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent offence. The group had no statistically significant differences from other natal males, for convictions in general or for violent offending. The group examined were those who committed to surgery, and so were more tightly defined than a population based solely on self-declaration.”
To borrow from a renowned politician from across the pond: “You are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
When did it become so important to look like a man or a woman?
For more or less as long as we have written records and images, and in more or less every culture. There are some exceptions, but very, very few.
In the West, it’s only since (roughly) the early 20th century that women have adopted men’s clothing, and even then, with modifications that allow for their differing physiology. So your question should have been ‘Why has it recently become less important for one’s appearance to convey one’s sex?’
Have we not learnt from our history that for generations people have been crossing that gendered look? Think about the golden age of the restoration where the rich wore wigs and makeup (okay to hide poor skin and not washing) and men still wore tights.
Except that wigs and make-up have nothing much to do with gender. The fact that they’re now associated with women is a historical accident. And when tights (not called that, of course) were the rule for men, it would have been considered shocking for women to wear them. Now, when they’ve crossed the gender divide, it’s noticeable that men today don’t wear them.
Or the fact that most children have really only been dressed in boy/girl clothes since Edwardian times.
Define ‘children’. Once boys were of the age to cope with unfastening their nether garments, they were ‘breeched’ – generally by school age (as we would understand it). Little girls weren’t, so it was very easy to tell boys from girls. I get the impression that you know very little about history.
Really crass article and full of such vitriol. To be honest pronouns should not define us, many countries don’t have pronouns and they still survive.
Countries don’t generally have pronouns at all, apart from metaphorically: England was generally regarded as feminine, for instance. I think you mean ‘languages’. However, if you mean that some languages manage without the closed class of words we call ‘pronoun’, and other languages have non-gendered pronouns, that’s quite correct. But in those cases, the languages are frequently even more specific than English in indicating the person/number/gender/social class/relative standing, etc. I get the impression that you know very little about language.
This misnomer of equating any trans woman with threat for women (as a whole) misses those women out there that are predatory and out to harm.
See Tom Condray’s post below. Most ‘transwomen’ are not threats to anyone save themselves, but statistically, they show the same level of violence as men in general.
And most people who go in for this level of vitriol come from a place of ignorance, they don’t know anyone who is transgender, and most of the arguments against transgender people sound very much like the homophobic arguments from about 20 years ago.
In which case the arguments need to be addressed rationally and using facts, which you have failed to do. You come, therefore, from a place of ignorance.
Also a good reply.
I suspect that the specific clothing used to differentiate sex has changed over history, but the fact of differentiation has remained. Also the extent of differentiation has varied. Not so long ago long hair on men was seen not just as odd, but unnatural. At other times it was common.
An irony here, given the age and sexual politics of many on the anti trans side: no one was more opposed to female specific clothing (heels, lipstick, makeup, shaved legs etc etc), and sex differentiation generally, than second wave feminists. And some were keen for men to break out of their toxic patriarchal masculine straight jacket. Well, it seems some of them have.
Bravo, Ms. Sims.
Some really good points, as you can tell from all the downvotes. On this topic I always read the comments from the bottom up.