The thing about being an academic in English (the discipline) is that it’s pretty hard to say anything original, given the huge number of academic colleagues who precede you. So what do you do? In some cases you bullshit. Might as well, right?
“Unquestionably” – that’s rich. It’s questionable.
More:
Lavery told us that he was going to talk about a eugenicist (Marie Stopes) and a charlatan (L. Ron Hubbard) though ultimately [he] never gave us the lowdown on Stopes’ support for eugenics and Hubbard was given only a very passing mention in the Q&A.
… but if I confess to attempting to animate within realism, the erotic frisson that might derive from a fantasy of being brainwashed, I will feel myself safe, because George Eliot was unquestionably a trans author, and transition, whatever else it may be, can hardly escape the condition of brainwashing and those upon whom it does its work, would hardly wish it to.
Yep, you heard it here first (or maybe not). George Eliot was trans because she pretended to be a male author, the fact that women were not permitted to author books at the time is of course immaterial.
Yes but being trans is just that easy: you are if you say you are, and that’s all there is to it, and of course “being trans” means also being the sex you are not, which of course you are if you say you are, again, and that’s all there is to it, again. So, ya know, basically everyone was trans, because why not, right? So everybody was the other thing. And vice versa. So really nothing is different – only the labels. Have another glass?
Comments
23 responses to “Peak academicking”
When JK Rowling used her initials, was she pretending to be a male author?
Yes, Colin, she was hiding her female name to avoid her work being prejudged. It took quite a lot of tries to become published.
Mary Ann Evans had to do the same, and she also wanted to separate her fiction from her extensive body of scholarly work. Thus was born George Eliot. As she continued to publish under both names, she was the very modern definition of non-binary. She, of course, thought it a mere convenience.
So, since George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) married a man, does that mean she was a gay man? And what about John Cross, her husband? Was he a gay man? Or was all that for pretense?
I often use my first initial and middle name when submitting works. My first name is ambiguous; it could be male, could be female. My middle name is unquestionably not female. So am I trans? Even though I don’t claim to be a man?
The trans cult is systematically eradicating women’s history. So many women who pretended to be men to get jobs, to be allowed to do something other than being stifled as the wife of some man, because women were not allowed to do those things. Now we must turn all that history over to men? It was really men who did it? Because TMAM? Even if they don’t claim to be trans? Or men? If Grace Lavery says so, it must be so, right? Because if we don’t agree, we are committing genocide against all trans everywhere, and denying George Eliot’s existence.
(I accidentally typed tarns in the earlier sentence; I would never want to be guilty of eradicating tarns.)
And never considered the poor librarians who found name authority work more difficult. (I have that on good authority; I am married to a librarian who specialized in name authority work.)
We can get them back again. It’s called reintarnation.
Rowling is non-binary too because she used Robert Galbraith as a pen name…. See, self-hating trans or something…
The ultimate end (whether consciously aimed for or not) is that any woman who ‘behaves like a man’ _is_ a man, or any woman who ‘succeeds like a man’ _is_ a man. Thus leaving women as the people who don’t do ‘man’ things and don’t succeed like men do, i.e. dresses, makeup, staying at home blah blah. At the moment this logic is being applied to a hundred or more years in the past, but that’s just a line that can be redrawn as required.
Suddenly I am reminded of those MRA warz, where fedora-wearing arseholes would patronisingly claim that men have been generous and even magnanimous to women. Men did alllll the construction work, and the warring, and the road building, and the ditch digging, and the mining, and the farming, and every other demanding job… out of pure kindness! Men wanted to spare women that toil, you see.
Somehow they always neglect to mention that women were frequently pressed into the arduous work such as mining and farming anyway, and that there were always women willing to e.g. join the military and fight but were forbidden, and so on ad nauseum. And now we have the TRAs refreshing that same bullshit except for different reasons – everyone that engaged in that work was actually a man all along.
Mixed appocrypha or cross-wired wiki bookmark?
Are they maybe attributing stories of George Sand to George Elliot?
Maybe, but George Sand also never claimed to be a man, had male lovers, and so forth. She did dress in men’s clothes because she found them more comfortable, I suppose, or because she didn’t like all the baggage that went with being a woman. She didn’t change her name until she became a writer, and wanted to do things that weren’t allowed to women in those times. So, yeah, maybe cross-dressing makes her a man, and changing her name, but if it does, then they are acknowledging up front that it is simply the presentation (i.e. the gender stereotypes) that make you the gender you claim to be, and therefore they are lying when they say it isn’t (and they are, because we all know what they mean).
But I suspect Lavery did mean George Eliot. Probably thinks that of George Sand, too, but I imagine “she” is attributing trans status to George Eliot because it is beneficial for “her” cause, or at least “she” thinks it is. If I remember correctly, I think some TAs have said Jeanne d’Arc was trans because she wore men’s clothes and such.
Aren’t Mormons doing this all the time?
Hillbillies, possibly.
hard to eradicate tarns, the keep filling up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarn_(lake)
Oh to read George Eliot’s sarcasm on such foolishness.
” A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.”
The “gum or starch” stiffening does not come from tradition these days but from the latest academic ideology.
Ah I love that line. I probably have it marked and marked again and marked again.
It was a great disgruntlement to me today to open my email and find out that FFRF has jumped on the trans bandwagon. I also find it ironic that I, a scientist (a biologist, even), am being lectured by a lawyer on what is and isn’t good science…and the lawyer disagrees with me. I know there are scientists that buy into this delusion, but none of the ones I know personally, except PZ (and I’ve only met him about three times, so don’t know him well) are unwilling to accept that men can be actually women, just women with a penis.
I guess the entire movement is gone now. I have no home anywhere outside of B&W.
There are a lot of skeptic types, especially UK ones, who don’t believe the bullshit, and say so.
So, not free from religion after all.
I wonder how much of this is fueled by a faulty intuition that, if right-wing Christainists don’t like it, it must be okay? It doesn’t help that many of the states putting forward bills to prevent TIMs from playing on girls’ teams are also gung-ho on voter suppression. The fact that media reports are willfully misconstring the sports bills as “bans” against “trans kids” being allowed to participate in any sports at all is telling and infuriating. It’s strange how some of the media outlets that, in the interest of appearing “balanced,” were so reluctant to call out Trump on his outrageous behaviour, thereby helping to normalize it, now have no compunction to completely ignore the very real threats to the safety, well-being, and fair treatment of girls in sport. Being fair to the right wing is vital; being fair to girls and women, not so much. Studiously ignoring the intent to preserve fairness in girls’ sports will bring the unthinking, reflexive support of many who have no background (or real interest) in the issue, but will lump these bills into the general condemnation of conservative, Republican bigotry, with anyone speaking in favour of the measures being automatically branded a right-wing bigot who, because they’re sadistic assholes, want to see trans kids suffer.
Even awful people can be right. Sometimes the sky really is blue.
As is often the case, right wingers are correct but for either wrong or self-serving and hypocritical reasons.
What I found amusing (?) was that the FFRF blog post acknowledged that there are significant differences at the top level and then insisted that at the high school level there isn’t. Someone hasn’t noticed how insanely competitive high school sports are (and that high school athletes are already freaks).
Insanely competitive indeed. High school athletics is the place where college athletic scholarships are determined. Some people in some sports go directly into professional sports from high school. Colleges and professional teams recruit high school athletes. It makes no sense whatsoever for FFRF to claim that there are no issues with high school sports.
I suspect this is a lot of it, but another reason could be that their entire staff, except for about three people, are all very young. They seem to hire lawyers and other staff directly out of college, which is good because it gives people a chance to begin their career at a decent age, but it does have the effect of making your business “woke”. They were about the only one of the freethought groups I’m part of that hadn’t already gone there. When American Atheists went down the trans rabbit hole, their conferences started to be more about LGBTQ (with a heavy emphasis on T) than about their purported mission. In fact, David Silverman once told the gathered membership that if they weren’t accepting of any part of the alphabet soup (my word, not his), you were an awful person.
It’ll be interesting to see how this works for FFRF, since the average age of their membership is around 60, and young people don’t tend to join groups much, especially those with dues, and they don’t donate the big money like the older people do.
That’s an interesting point. I do get the impression that other major secularist organizations (CFI, American Atheists, AU) are aligned with “woke” gender ideology, but not necessarily to the same degree.
‘I guess the entire movement is gone now. I have no home anywhere outside of B&W.’
It feels like that a lot of the time, but look at this big long (and still increasing) list of women supporting sex-based rights (from a Spinster thread):
WoLF
WHRC
Victoria Smith
Vaishnavi Sundar
Stephanie Davis-Arai
Stella O’Malley
Sonia Poulton
Sheila Jeffries
Sasha Ayad
Sarah Stuart
Sarah Ditum
Rebecca Reilly-Cooper
Raquel Rosario-Sanchez
Pragna Patel
Posie Parker
Pilgrim Tucker
Ophelia Benson
Nina Paley
Mumsnet Feminist Chat
MK Fain
Meghan Murphy
Maya Forstater
Max Dashu
Magdalen Berns
Lisa Marchiano
Linda Blade
Linda Bellos
Lierre Keith
LGBAlliance
Keira Bell
Kathleen Stock
Kathleen Lowrey
Karen Ingala-Smith
Karen Davis
Kara Dansky
Julie Bindel
Joey Brite
Jo Bartosch
Jennifer Bilek
JD Robertson
Janice Turner
Janice Raymond
Jane Clare Jones
Hibo Wardere
Helen Joyce
Heather Mason
Heather Brunskell-Evans
Gallus Mag
Gail Dines
Dr. Donna Hughes
Dr Nicola Williams
Diana Shaw
Claire Heuchan
Caroline Criado Perez
Beth Stelzer
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
April Halley
Anna Slatz
Allison Bailey
all the Anonymous women in the struggle
JK Rowling
Abigail Schrier
4th Wave Now