JK Rowling - Thread 2

But how do they distinguish a Damehood from a Knighthood I wonder?

The responses have slowed, but are still coming in! and considering this tweet is so last week / year / decade ok ok 19/12/10 (v old by twitter standards) it’s amazing.

I heart JKR

#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
4:57 AM - 19 Dec 2019
37,747 Retweets 197,695 Likes

Damehood? she should be the next Queen.

Watching the Star Wars prequels and was struck by how relevant Obi-Wan's statement is in the current climate: "Only a Sith deals in absolutes".

JK getting a Damehood in the NY Honours list.

Ooh fingers crossed! That would be the best present ever.

I would put good money on JK getting a Damehood in the NY Honours list.

In context this would be pretty much the best thing ever. Just imagine the tantrums!

"In a move that must have been shocking to GLAAD, Rowling herself ignored them. Her representatives declined GLAAD’s offer of re-education."

They actually used the word "re-education"?

That's Chilling

I have seen JKR and the text on three different forum sites now and they have all been locked by about page 2
All three sites were unrelated apart from all the mods getting the same memo, especially when people start posting Posy Parker interviews from YT.
It's like the words gone out to close down debate on this.

I am grateful to have learned of the term 'Wokescold' and may need to deploy it with family members.

I am willing to embrace being a 'Scoffwoke' (I'm adapting this from scofflaw which is a favourite word).

I would put good money on JK getting a Damehood in the NY Honours list.

From Lamahaha link
"In a move that must have been shocking to GLAAD, Rowling herself ignored them. Her representatives declined GLAAD’s offer of re-education."

@BarbaraStrozzi have you ever seen the film Osama? Set in Afghanastan and about one such girl who needed to pretend to be a boy or her mother (who was alone) was stuffed. Actually it's a very sad film and I'm not recommending it, but it was very moving indeed.

I just read this on Facebook. She's standing firm. What does GLAAD stand for? Whatever, I'm glaaaaad!
dlvr.it/RLrTl9

BTW, back to literature, I suddenly remember a novel I'd read eons ago, which had to to with intersex. I couldn't even remember the name, I just knew that the author was a Greek man (or at least had a Greek name), and was able to find it on Amazon.
It is Middlesex, by Jeefrey Eugenides.
To got a lot of allocades at the time of its release, but that's because it was a very well written literary novel which won the Pulitzer prize. I myself wasn't too enamoured of it; I can't remember why.
The blurb says this:

The book's wily narrator and central character, Calliope Stephanides (named after the muse of epic poetry) is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who comes to realise she is happier as a boy and is now living as a man in contemporary Berlin.

I haven't got time to reread it right now but it might be interesting in light of what we are now going through.

www.amazon.co.uk/Middlesex-Jeffrey-Eugenides-ebook/dp/B00BVT5WKM/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&keywords=intersex+novel&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&qid=1577185288&sr=1-3

Yes, Horse. It's less well known, but in addition to Bacha Posh (girls being passed off as boys within the family), Afghanistan has a tradition of Bacha Bazhi (boys being dressed as girls then trafficked into sex slavery). But in both cases, the group benefiting is men.

Ladyboys. Whatever.

"Ooh! I went to that Thailand and the bars there were full of gentleman-girls.."

Said nobody ever.

It's always a bloody man thing isn't it?

There are female "third genders" out there - Bacha Posh in Afghanistan, Sworn Virgins in Albania. But again, they exist to prop up patriarchy.

Bacha posh, for e.g., allow families with only female children to carry out basic tasks like having a child who can be sent to the market to buy vegetables in a society where women and girls aren't allowed outside the house without a female chaperone. And they have the massive shock of having to revert to "womanly" roles after puberty.

Sworn Virgins (now largely dying out) were allowed to role-play as men, but (as the name suggests) had to forego any sexual or romantic relationships as the price they paid for more freedom, again against the backdrop of an immensely repressive society.

I too got a response from Jk Rowlings office thanking me for support

Email address is [email protected]

Ladyboys and hijra are exclusively male too

Third genders seem to occur as a safety valve in societies where sex stereotypes (and externally enforced homophobia) would otherwise keep things so tightly constrained you'd get an explosion

Yes, as outlets for more feminised male behaviour....'Ladyboys' often end up in prostitution too.

I have a gay male friend who lives in Cambodia - and is in fact one of the lynchpins of the growing gay scene there. Homosexuality has only just started to come out of the shadows in Cambodia, but gay men are still expected to marry women, and they do. Drag is a huge thing.

Yup, Tocopherol. I have an anthropologist friend wh points out that as a general rule (not always - she's very careful to discuss counterexamples) third genders arise mostly in societies with very strictly demarcated and very strictly enforced gender roles (in the old fashioned social sciences sense of gender as culturally and socially constructed roles, behaviours and dress codes deemed appropriate for one sex or the other). Third genders seem to occur as a safety valve in societies where sex stereotypes (and externally enforced homophobia) would otherwise keep things so tightly constrained you'd get an explosion.

A woke friend on Facebook constantly brings up two-spirit people, hijra and ladyboys as evidence non-european cultures recognise a 3rd 'sex'* .I don't know anything about Native American cultures but it strikes me as odd that they like to use India and Thailand to support this idea of 2 sexes being repressive because modern Thailand and India are largely conservative, patriarchal countries with strictly defined gender roles

The "colonial" thing drives me up the wall. No, TRAs, people outside of Europe did not need Europeans to explain to them that humans come in two sexes and you need one of each to make a baby. To nobody's surprise except yours they'd figured that out all by themselves before your ancestors ever arrived on their shores.

What I've gathered is this:

It's simplistic and bioessentialist to try to fit humans into just 2 narrowly defined physical sex categories. Very exclusionary and transphobic and colonial. Doesn't tell us anything about which humans have which needs!

Whereas actually, numerous human sexes can be sorted using sets of narrowly defined physical markers. This is inclusive and very useful and tells us which humans need a gynecologist and which do not. Down with the binary!

Am I following?

Do we need to break it down for them? You can't have polycystic ovary syndrome if you don't have ovaries, and if you have ovaries then you are female.

Would glove puppets help?