Publishers statement re E.J.Levy's book about a woman doctor. The nutters cry he was a transman not a woman you evil transphobes.

Imagine not being able to have a single "Bloody men, eh " conversation in your whole life, because you were stealth? No female solidarity, no way to organize with other women...

They'll be claiming Mulan for one of their own next.

www.pride.com/disney/2015/5/30/9-mulan-moments-defined-our-queer-childhoods

They'll be claiming Mulan for one of their own next.

I sure hope the twitterati don’t discover “Twelfth Night”!

I can hear the baying now: Shakespeare CANCELED.

You articulated just fine, SecondRow

There are 20th century parallels to this. Some light-skinned black people in the US 'passed' as white and trained as doctors. Dr. Albert Johnston was a famous example - and this was in the 1930s.

Can you imagine if an author wrote a book about this and tons of white nationalists had complete histrionics on twitter arguing that he pretended to be white, therefore he was white, and you are disrespecting him by revealing he wasn't white, even though he really was white because he was transracial?

bakingdemon, that part about the fashion pictures touches on something I've been struggling to articulate (the Twitter threads on this nearly sent me over the edge, I couldn't engage).

What gives me the rage about erasing Barry's femaleness is that it erases all that she (may have, must have) lost through her decision to present as male, while elevating what she supposedly gained - underlining that being male is the uppermost desirable state and suggesting there could be no regrets possible from ceasing (I know) to be female - there is nothing of value whatsoever attached to it that anyone could feel a sense of loss for.

Argh. Still not quite there with the articulating!

This tweet by Wade brilliantly sums it up:

The mistake is obvious; it turns her struggle into that of a man unlucky enough to be born into a woman's body instead of that of a woman unlucky enough to be born into a man's world.

twitter.com/phngluimglw13/status/1101068653901070336

There's s really good biography of Margaret Bulkley/James Barry published a couple of years ago: www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/10/dr-james-barry-a-woman-ahead-of-her-time-review

The authors don't dwell on the trans thing (for them it's quite clear she was a woman living as a man so she could be a doctor) and note that at the end of her life her trunk was found to contain dresses torn out of fashion magazines pasted on the inside lid, suggesting she missed being openly female. Barry was famously bad tempered and discouraged intimacy - when surely if she'd been happy as a man she'd have been rather easier company?

TLDR: ain't no way James Barry was trans.

And if people are so disgusted by a work of fiction using the female pronoun for Dr Barry they have the choice not to read it

If you think that's good enough for the TRA lobby you are mistaken. They demand instead that the book be pulped, that the author be blacklisted, and everyone use the correct pronouns they have assigned to Dr Barry. You know, the way genuinely oppressed people can make demands like that.

Here is a link to an English woman who masqueraded as a male physician for 70 years in the United States, and who did leave a will insisting that she be buried in men's clothes, and that the name engraved on the headstone be the one she had been known by for all that time, that of 'Victor Mayfield'. The reasons for her male deception were apparently for inheritance purposes, but life as a man obviously made it easier to train as a doctor, and she was very successful throughout her medical career and much appreciated by her patients.

Dr Mayfield's story is fascinating enough, but what I find really intriguing are the opening lines of the article:

During the past twelve months the world has been astounded by the masquerades of women in the guise of men but their exploits have been eclipsed another English woman, Dr Mary Victor Mayfield, who has just died at the age of eighty-three at Mena, Arkanas, United states.

Who were all these women whose stories were so astonishingly revealed in 1929? It would be nice to know.

paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LWM19291210.2.44?query=woman%20masquerades%20as%20man&page=9&snippet=true

(And if people are so disgusted by a work of fiction using the female pronoun for Dr Barry they have the choice not to read it, or they can read this work instead, written in 1999 by Patricia Dunckner, who did choose to use the male pronoun. I put this link on the Dr James Miranda Barry thread as well).

www.theguardian.com/world/1999/may/31/gender.uk1

I read that there was a request for no postmortem, for which there could have been many reasons.

Don't shoot me but here's a Guardian article on it. Suprisingly not a great big steaming pile of poo.

www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/18/new-novel-about-dr-james-barry-sparks-row-over-victorians-gender-identity

The shock revelation which is no shock at all.

''. However, the claim made online that Barry left a will asking to be remembered as a man is false. He left no statement of identity.''

Does this mean mulan is actually a trans man?

I love how that Twitter thread asks whether they’re planning to claim Joan of Arc, Mulan and George Eliot next.

They’ve already been claimed by the cult! It’s honestly like Mormons baptising the dead, but creepier.

The more I read about the doctor the angrier I get at way the story is being abused to prove a point.

And it is so tiresome calling anyone who doesn't agree with their argument a t*rf, but then there is no other argument, that is all they have.

They are completely and utterly unhinged. I worry that Little, Brown are going to back down though, as they are not necessarily hearing the people who are supportive of the book, and this statement is... dubious.

I will definitely buy the book. If there is a big MN support then we should let the publisher know that. Am thinking I will email the author (she has wisely abandoned twitter) too.

Yeps
Ther3 is a lot o& hurty feeling wailing going on there
If I was a guy I would call it hysterical wailing

Wow the hysteria on Twitter. How ludicrous. A severe untethering from reality in most of the tweets. I feel very sorry for the author.

Wasn't The Tempest reimagined with a female Prospero recently?
When Shakespeare wrote his plays, all the parts were played by men. And I think pretty well all of them have been recast with women.
All this hoo-hah is a replay of last year's fuss over casting a woman in a film bio of a transman; transactivists wanted the part to be played by a transman. The film had to be dropped as a result - the backers, I believe, wanted a big-name star.

The TAs obviously counted this as a success and are using the same tactics here; some of them are now demanding that the publishers hire a trans writer to write a Barry biography!

Amnesty International already got a pasting over her

mobile.twitter.com/amnestyuk_lgbti/status/1099218443222564864

There are some good quotes on the twitter feed.

Do better - the clarion call of the tedious and Anyone adhering to reality is labelled a TERF

I don’t think it’s anywhere close to being published -it only got acquired by Little Brown very recently, and that’s in the US so could be even longer till it hits the UK. At least a year, I would guess - she may not have even written the whole book yet!

When is the book out?

I imagine that, as it's a fictional account, it'll go far deeper than pronouns. Presumably the conflict driving the entire plot is about how Barry has to disguise her sex, and not how she has a deeply held belief that she really is a man. The author would have to write a whole different book.

On the book theme I listened to a radio 3 version of Virginia Wolf's Orlando earlier this week in the car and was disappointed they had a male playing Orlando all the way through. The male put on a camper voice when Orlando was supposed to have changed sex (it's VW's Dr Who attempt but with writing a poem rather than saving the universe as the aim) but still sounded very male.
I suppose Orlando has been done with a female playing the male version (Tilda Swinton) so maybe the men of the BBC thought they'd get their own back.
Considering VW based the novel on Vita Sackville West who was a bisexual mother and gardener (I love Sissinghurst) it seemed very bizarre.