There’s a Guardian series: Living in a woman’s body. Of course you know what comes next: they get a man to talk about living in a woman’s body.
For the most part, our bodies are arbitrary. We get the body we get at birth: our eye colour, our hair colour, our skin colour. We have no say in those things at the moment we are born but, talking to my friend, I realised that subsequent changes are within our grasp.
Some are, some aren’t. You can’t make yourself taller or shorter. (There are ways of adjusting height a little bit but they’re horribly drastic. Not recommended.) You can’t make yourself older or younger. You can’t add arms or legs. You can’t swap heads. You can’t change sex.
None of us are beholden to our bodies. That is not to say that our bodies aren’t vital; they are. Being a woman – cisgender or trans – can feel like you are being set up to fail from the start, and our bodies often affect how well we are able to function within society.
No. He’s not a woman, and if he felt as if he was being set up to fail from the start, it’s not because he’s a woman. It’s not a matter of “our bodies” because his is a man’s body.
But I believe in individual bodily autonomy; a refusal to let the system predetermine or limit your choices is one of the ways we attack patriarchal structures.
No. There is no “we” there, because he is not a woman. He accepted a slot in a series about women, and he talked about himself in a piece about women. We are not a “we” with Juno Dawson.
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10 responses to “Rebel against the system”
Yes, and contrast this article to the subject of the other articles in the series. Written by actual women. One woman wrote about the terrors of FGM as a negative thing, Juno writes about mutilitation as if it’s a treat.
Patageometry, n.: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants.
According to the Guardian, any body is a woman’s body, meaning ‘woman’s body’ is a construction without meaning. And TRAs wonder why use such a clumsy construction as ‘biological sex’ when simply saying sex ought to do.
What are those? Cutting off your feet and ankles, so that you be trans-short?
Removing some bone, I think. It’s probably forbidden to reputable doctors but I think there were some experiments along those lines.
A quick google indicates there is “height reduction surgery” but it’s for people with uneven legs (and very rare). Clearly frowned on.
Also lengthening surgery.
I stopped reading the BBC article when it got to the guy whose leg-lengthening went wrong. [shudder]
What I find most extraordinary about this sort of writing is the unexamined but boldly stated assumption that ‘you’ and ‘the body you get’ (whatever the latter may mean) are two separate things: that you own your body in the way you might own a bicycle or a Maserati. So that if you want to swap that rusty old bike for a gleaming new Maserati it somehow seems possible. It is the Western division between mind and body gone mad, or become infinitely adolescent.
Indeed. Philosopher types – Jones and Stock in particular – have been pointing this out all along: it’s just Cartesian dualism in new clothes.