It was the hair extensions wot did it
From fatuous drivel like this good lord deliver us. The BBC yesterday:
Like many little girls, nine-year-old Autumn Norris loves dressing up and experimenting with make-up.
She has identified as a girl for the past two years, after telling her mother she felt she was in the “wrong body”.
Autumn had just had a bath when she first spoke about these feelings. She wanted two towels, one for the hair and one for the body, “like a woman”.
“She then came out of the bathroom with her two towels, saying: ‘I’ve got something to tell you Mum, I’m not Anthony, I’m not a boy, I’m a girl’,” says Fran Norris.
Fran Norris, bizarrely, was struck all of a heap. I guess she’d never heard of “pretending” and “fantasy” and “play”?
Ms Norris, from Shifnal in Shropshire, believes it had been on Autumn’s mind for a long time and she had engaged in “feminine role-play” to explore her identity.
She would often come to her and ask to wear her clothes, put on make-up, do her nails or wear hair extensions.
tears hair
I know we’ve all said this a bazillion times but honest to fuck! Trivial external arbitrary conventions of dress do not make people this sex or that. Putting on lipstick does not magically make a boy into a girl and wearing jeans does not magically transform a woman into a man. Clothes, makeup, nails, hair extensions are just bits of flotsam that people put on and take off. I could put sour cream and chives on my head, it wouldn’t make me a fucking baked potato.
There’s more of the same bullshit and similar bullshit, for paragraph after paragraph.
I think the BBC is being held hostage.
Vintage OB; bottled and cellared.
;-)
Thank you. It made me laugh too.
Omar, you pegged the very sentence. I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Thanks, Ophelia, I needed that. I may have to steal it (as a frequent writer of comedy, I always need something new).
For a kid, I think girl stuff is more fun. Clothes are more colorful and fancier, you can put things in your hair, you can paint colors on your face and nails, etc. When kids are too young to realize this is seen as making a statement of any sort, of course boys are going to be interested in girl stuff.
Many a boy with older sisters has happily let them dress him up, put makeup on him, put bows in his hair, paint his fingernails. The boy doesn’t realize this is “wrong” and the older girls find it hilarious for that very reason. Later they’ll probably tease him about it and he’ll probably be embarrassed.
This is not a reason to attempt to change the boy’s gender.
Here’s the part I find interesting–and actually rather hinky–about this story:
Just two weeks ago, Tavistock’s GIDs clinic received some devastating publicity:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/staff-at-trans-clinic-fear-damage-to-children-as-activists-pile-on-pressure-c5k655nq9
And here’s the Beeb talking them up, and taking care to point out that Tavistock is in no hurry to medically transition little Autumn (one of the criticisms was that they are too quick to transition children).
Why is the BBC carrying water for a gender clinic?
P.S. Re Tavistock and puberty blockers – –
https://www.transgendertrend.com/tavistock-experiment-puberty-blockers/
All this fuss, when it is glaringly obvious that the child’s body is not the problem, gendered stereotypes are.
I still wonder what is so wrong about trying to build a world where male-bodied people can wear all the makeup and dresses and nail polish they like without fear of getting victimized by other male-bodied people, *without* throwing away all of the progress we’ve made since Emmeline Pankhurst and Mary Wollstonecraft. In short, I guess I’m not so much a gender abolitionist as a “gender expression” abolitionist. Let people dress and act in any way that pleases them personally, but don’t force them (or the rest of us) to deny our perceptions and disavow what we know to be true.