Of all people....Margaret Atwood ‘we’re all part of a flowing bellcurve’

The testament was worth it for me because it reached a logical conclusion on Aunt Lydia of how women who are oppressors eventually reach the outer confines of their own oppression and subvert.

There were also really interesting analogies for me of how Gilead started to be received by the rest of the world and how that is truthful.

I completely disliked the second daughter storyline from beginning to end.

I honestly cannot fathom her agenda here.

Why was my post deleted? It didn't have anything controversial in it I am pretty sure?

In an article titled 'Am I A Bad Feminist?' in The Globe and Mail, in 2018, Margaret Atwood wrote "In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated."

Bone marrow transplant results in chimerism because the recipient essentially has the donors immune system replace their own, leading to a mixed DNA profile, depending on where the sample tests comes from (tissue, blood, saliva, sperm etc).

www.elynsgroup.com/journal/article/chimerism-in-humans-after-bone-marrow-transplantation-a-new-challenge-for-forensic-dna-experts

BMT is not without massive risk though as the new immune system can attempt to kill the body it’s been transplanted into.

www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/coping/physically/gvhd/about

Not that any of this is relevant to the trans debate though - a woman with a male donor’s immune system is still a woman and vice versa.

Funnily enough, loads of the people I know who have had BMT (which is loads more than average due to having lived on the kiddy cancer ward on and off for a year) have had German donors...

... but having new German DNA doesn’t mean the recipients can apply for German citizenship!

(I guess joining the donor list must be more common amongst German citizens?)

Emma Hilton made some fascinating comments about chimerism on Twitter a week or so ago but I can’t find them now! She said something about the cells sometimes behaving like stem cells and seeking out damage in the mother’s body to repair it. She mentioned damaged heart cells but me, the non-scientist, might have misunderstood what she was saying!

Only women who have given birth could have male DNA from having given birth. FFS.

I thought it was quite well known that women who have ever given birth (which is a biologically FEMALE process) have bits of male DNA in their bodies? There is an exchange of DNA between the fetus and the mother's body. Fascinating stuff. But it has nothing to do with being intersex or whatever. Silly, silly.

I agree with others that the sheer deadening silence being observed in the Canadian media is probably part of the issue here. She is not seeing the whole picture here.

She is not a stupid woman and she may well have her epiphany moment. Remember, many of us here went along with the lib-fem version of events until something happened that caused us to hit peak trans on the whole thing.

I honestly still see it as mischievously malicious.

Ugh that thread is a disaster of TRAs believing That when feminists point out that sex based oppression exists, that we are saying that it is good. They can’t be that disingenuous surely?

There's an AIBU thread with posters saying exactly the same. They really don't get what we think.

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/amiibeingunreasonable/3961161-To-think-Margaret-Atwood-is-amazing

Ugh that thread is a disaster of TRAs believing That when feminists point out that sex based oppression exists, that we are saying that it is good. They can’t be that disingenuous surely?

Disappointing cowardice. But it now seems this was to head off her having singed the Harper's letter on Open Debate.

Oh - and her point about coming up with a solution to the bathroom issue was also interesting. It necessarily acknowledges that a conflict of rights must exist - not exactly in accordance with the TWAW mantra. Her position all just seems incredibly confused and poorly thought through when you look at it as a whole.

Her tweets don’t even make much sense to me. If you look at the tweets and replies on her timeline, they seem quite bizarre. On the one hand she is arguing for biology as a “bell curve” and on the other hand she is acknowledging that women are oppressed by sex. Her response to the question about The Handmaid’s Tale also seemed deliberately disingenuous and obtuse.

She is an incredibly clever woman so must know what she is doing (and she has expressed similar views previously) but it all seems slightly odd. Almost as though she is being deliberately mischievous while not really engaging properly with the issues which she must know are important.

The Testaments was the first book of hers which I have read and been incredibly disappointed in. There wasn’t much trace of the clever, funny, subversive author who I wrote a thesis on (except in some aspects of the Aunt Lydia parts).

Ultimately, it won’t affect my enjoyment of her earlier work. They were written in a different time and deal with contemporary feminist issues in a brilliant and important way. I would just have more respect for her now if she actually engaged properly and intelligently - even if I disagreed with her!

For the person who said upthread that TRAs will probably go after her for not having trans people in Handmaid’s Tale, one tweeter says they were there - but were either executed or they passed. SMH.

As in they passed as female? Even though all the women that became handmaids literally had their ovaries checked?

Thanks for refreshing my memory!
Here's another thing she's trying to posit: the idea that we should all be astonished/amazed/come on guys, open your minds! at the idea that people might want to "express their gender" in different ways. As if that was not exactly what women want to do. She should try reading her own damned book. In it, women were all forced to "express their gender" in the same way. Being able to express yourself in ANY way means that you have the power to make the definitions--and the rules. Even meekly saying "please don't call me cis" is just about enough to draw on the death threats these days.

The testaments is a pile of shit too. Emperors new clothes.

Fucking hell.
I’m so pissed off I've deleted two of her audiobooks off my phone. Publicity hungry sell-out. What the hell has happened to critical thinking these days?

@Durgasarrow Offred’s husband was married to someone else when they got together (Well, in the tv series anyway).. so she was viewed as a homebreaker

Offred’s husband had been married before and Gilead didn’t recognise divorce so by their rules that made them both adulterers and their marriage invalid.

I'm confused about something--on Twitter, Atwood says that the fertile women who were used to make babies "In the novel, they had to be: divorced (Gilead doesn't allow divorce) +fertile. Or "immoral."(Though these might be Jezebels.) Women married only once would be Wives (high status) or Econowives. Some could choose celibacy+ be Aunts or Marthas." But wasn't Offred married? I thought she and her husband were trying to flee together and didn't succeed.

I couldn’t go on reading that thread. The stupidity made my head hurt. For the person who said upthread that TRAs will probably go after her for not having trans people in Handmaid’s Tale, one tweeter says they were there - but were either executed or they passed. SMH.