Alive and free, up among the goats
Janice Turner prefers brave goats to placid sheep.
How must it feel to have your name airbrushed from the $8 billion film franchise born of your scribbling in a coffee shop, penniless, while your baby napped? Or to watch the trio of child actors you chose and nurtured 20 years ago recall the stories which made them many times richer and more celebrated than their ho-hum talents deserve, yet not once uttering your name? Or have fools who run around with broomsticks up their backsides in college leagues change the name of quidditch, the sport you invented for wizards?
That’s putting aside the threats. Just search for JK Rowling on Twitter and see the stream of invective, the gun memes, the intent to rape and kill, the address of her family home handily displayed for passing stalkers online. For what? I’d bet few of those denouncing her even know and have certainly never read her long, thoughtful, compassionate essay.
But it turns out an author told to publish under gender-neutral initials, since boys won’t read books by girls, was a woman all along. One of the bothersome, old-fashioned types, who won’t jettison all they’ve learnt from motherhood or sexual trauma to assuage bullies or cultural fads.
Or men who claim to be women but still feel utterly entitled to stomp all over actual women.
Just as Galileo refused to bow to the Inquisition and affirm the Earth is the centre of the universe, many women just don’t, won’t, can’t believe gender is real but sex is not.
Or that men are women just as we are, that men know just as much about being women as we do, that men are subject to bullying and abuse just as we are, that men get to take everything we have while we are obliged to shut up and take it.
Only the goats stand their ground. And this has been the year of the goat. A succession of women have upended their lives, been cast out and despised just to uphold a fundamental belief. Keira Bell, who took a judicial review against the Tavistock gender service which irreversibly medicated her teenage body rather than healed her troubled mind; Sonia Appleby, who exposed safeguarding failures at that clinic; Jess de Wahls, an embroidery artist, whose work was summarily removed from the Royal Academy shop; Professor Kathleen Stock, hounded out of academia by masked protesters while her colleagues and union stood by; choreographer Rosie Kay who lost her eponymous company because she refused to disavow the intricacies of the female body she inhabits in dance.
I’ve interviewed most of these women and prior to speaking out, all experienced long nights of the soul. Fear (of losing political allies, friends and peers) battled against a burning urge for truth. But in the end, they couldn’t not speak out. It didn’t matter what happened next. They were not prepared to deny material reality, even if they never worked again. They were happy to ascend that rock face, cold and alone. But instead they found themselves alive and free, up among the goats.
Goats forever!
Dino-goats?
The sex/gender distinction, largely promulgated by villainous garbage human being John Money, continues to perplex me.
Gender is real? So you can switch genders but not sexes?
And what are these genders called you can switch between? Male and female? Men and women? Something else?
How about no?
We have 2 sexes, with some real differences grounded in biology, and then some fake stereotype differences imposed by society. Why is any legitimacy given to the latter? A girl who likes dinosaurs and trucks is still a girl. We’re going to say she’s a different gender, so a sex-girl but a gender-boy? And a boy that likes dolls is likewise a sex-boy but a gender-girl?
The terms I’m using sound stupid, but I haven’t heard any better ones.
Meanwhile 95+% of society uses “sex” and “gender” as synonyms, because they’re not aware of the distinction imposed by John “lol let’s just chop his damaged penis off and raise him as a girl” Money. So when you agree that people can change genders, they think you’ve agreed to everything.
The sex/gender distinction may be the most anti-feminist concept in existence.
Clown fish can change sex. But they’ve only been able to do it since around 1850, when European imperialist scientists invented the classifications for the “male” and the “female” of the species in order to divide and conquer them.
On an unrelated note:
MAN: “You gotta help my brother Doc! He thinks he’s a woman!”
PSYCHIATRIST: “How long has he thought like this?”
MAN: “About five years.”
PSYCHIATRIST: “Five years?!? Why did you let this go on for so long? Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”
MAN: “We needed the eggs.”
I think that since she has not shown any public bitterness for the way she has been treated by Warner Bros. and the ungrateful trio, she has displayed the depth of her character. Like Ceri Black, who says that her childhood was worse than anything that DP could ever do to her, she is not bending to the pressure. I like that analogy to goats.
@skeletor – I shared a paper with someone who was convinced that he changed sex and it discussed the aspects of sex and cardiac health that differ between males and females. Everything from causes, to early detection, symptoms of a cardiac event, and recovery from an actual heart attack, shows that there are major differences due to sex. Someone chimed in “where does that paper say anything about if a man takes estrogen and gets the testosterone level down to zero?” Some people think that hormone treatment “washes away the male.” People are ignorant about sex beyond getting hard, it seems.
Michael Haubrich, I’m mostly just exasperated by statements that you can switch genders but not sexes. What are these genders you can switch between?
In the case you mentioned, yeah, hormones won’t make someone female, although they can feminize parts of his body to some extent. Maybe they’ll give a male more female-level heart health odds. Or maybe they’ll cause some systemic-level weakness as they’re starting to see for people who “transition” early. Radically messing with hormones when not medically necessary is playing dice.
She’s insisting that the only thing to watch for is prostate cancer and that only .01% of trans ID males get it.