Malory Towers
All the tomboys are being converted into trans or enby.
Julie Bindel looks at a character of Enid Blyton’s who is getting the treatment:
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I took pleasure in rejecting feminine frippery such as frilly pink frills and girly shoes. I refused to have bows and ribbons in my hair, and I was not the only one in my friendship group that preferred dungarees to dresses.
I kept good company in a character from Enid Blyton, who was also a hard-core tomboy. Wilhelmina, better known as Bill, was the girl in Malory Towers – a series of books based on a fictitious all-girls boarding school, which chronicled the adventures of a group of friends getting up to high jinx.
A new stage version is now coming to the Bristol Old Vic, and has the Bill character played by a non-binary person. In today’s ‘woke’ parlance, non-binary, also known as genderqueer, is, according to Wikipedia, “a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine—identities that are outside the gender-binary”.
I thought that’s what feminism had fought for? To not have to acquiesce to sexist stereotypes because we are female? Should we not simply be encouraging girls to reject the rules imposed upon them as to how they should behave? As the director of the new production, Emma Rice, says in the Telegraph today: “feminism is at the heart of Malory Towers”.
Why then can we not just celebrate Bill as a girl who refuses to bow to convention?
Because we’re too sick of being screamed at by woke Twitter?
Now I’m worrying that somebody is going to do it to Nancy Blackett of Swallows and Amazons. Come at me, bro.
Is there any point in even wondering if the non-binary person playing Bill is male-bodied?
Ophelia,
I had a similar though about Scout Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird.
When my mom was a teen apparently everyone in her female friends group had a ‘masculine’ name or nickname–she used to joke that she once told her mom she was going to spend a weekend sleepover with (I can’t remember the exact names, but something like) Lou, Sam, Alex, and Chris, and her mom said ‘oh no you’re not!’.
Sorry this is not directly on this topic – but if Ophelia Benson makes an Blog on the Navratilova BBC Programme -please transfer this to that comments section – Thanks.
It was very sad to see on the BBC Prime Time, Martina Navratilova feeling sorry for the pain that Trans Women go through and she thinks perhaps she has to evolve in her feelings and allow them to compete against women in elite sport.
However two things are wrong with this, what about the feelings of women who they beat even if it is the 21st Placed Woman who would have otherwise been in the top twenty in the world. Secondly classification of female and male sports is not based on feelings and pain but Science, trans women are men.
If the Patriarchal society bullies women into accepting trans women in the bathrooms, prisons, rape refuges, as lesbians and in elite sport it will be the most shocking misogynist thing to have happened in the 22nd Century.
If women loose the use of the for words such Women and Lesbians to mean only them and which does not include Non Women of any flavour or feelings, surely men can not prevent women from inventing new words. Shakti to mean humans of the female sex. Kalisexuality for the sexual orientation of the attraction of same sex adult human female.
In 1994 there were may be a few million out and proud Gay humans but this was enough of a number to lead to the success of the first Gay Games that year. However if going forward Trans Women plus Intersex Women are any more then 0.3% of any Women’s Sport Competition participants or place finishers in elite sport or otherwise, this will lead to the demand for a Separate Category of sport classification called Shakti Sports. There are over Three Billion women currently surely a few million will not have been killed or bullied, who will be loud and proud.
So in the future if trans women are allowed into bathrooms, prisons etc, there will follow a period of extra and additional harm to women on top of the ones they suffer currently in a Sexist and Patriarchal Society. However as night follows day, women will fight back and new words will be invented and there will be demand for facilities and events which are only for the Shaktis and Kalis.
However in the intervening period a large number of women will be will have suffered and killed all for the sake that in this society men’s feelings and pain are more valuable then women’s feelings, life and science.