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

ErroltheDragon
I admit that realising that TRAs are confusing Chimeras with Chromosones was a bit of a lightbulb for me this afternoon.

It explains to me why such people link me to articles (that are usually behind paywalls and the abstract is vague)
saying they show that modern ideas of sex are different

but if they are just confusing chimeric attributes then their misunderstanding is much easier to refute

the literature on chimerics is fascinating
I got lost in Wikipedia for several days when I started reading
and desperately warrants a ton of research

but in no way at all does it undermine the fundamentals of XX and XY

Surely people are not that scientifically illiterate ?

Many people are, unfortunately- and it's particularly dangerous when the illiterates are clever with words.

She is sounding like the Uber misogynistic "I'm not like the other girls" types. You know the ones who say they never really got on with girls because they're all bitchy and vaccinia. One of those.

Just trying to get my head around the science of gender stuff

• as a TRA FB friend told me to educate myself

Am I right in thinking that the chimeric evidence

• that many people have the cells of their older siblings and mothers incorporated into their bodies -

Surely people are not that scientifically illiterate ?

She has always come across in interviews as holding herself above any concept of feminism tbh.

Of course trans women can’t identify with the show or book, it’s about biological abuse..

Seems appropriate, really -- we've entered the Gilead phase of Trans rights.

In reply to the comment about Atwood being slated for omitting trans women from The Handmaid's Tale, that's already happened:

www.advocate.com/commentary/2018/5/09/why-trans-woman-cant-identify-handmaids-tale

And of course the MSM is lapping this up and saying MA has come out in support of trans rights eg www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/margaret-atwood-transgender-comments-twitter-jk-rowling-a9605546.html

I have always felt she doesn't like confrontation so in interviews and whatever will resort to the sort of oh dead I'm just a bit fuzzy and introverted writer. But with her childhood and her father's science background this seems a bit contrived. She cant seriously be doing this because she wants to be liked.

Also the disappointment for me is that her early book the Edible Woman which if anything made or confirmed I was a feminist was all about feminist erasure. ie a young woman trying to play the role of a gender conforming woman and realising she just couldn't.

And allowing that she could just have an amazing imagination I have always taken from that that she understood about women being made to conform by society.

I never followed her later books but wasn't troubled that she seemed to have gone off on some other journey as I felt that early book spoke about something essentially real rather than later speculative writing.

Although she always claimed that everything in the Handmaid's Tale was based on things that actually happened or were done to women.

Maybe as someone up thread has said, being primarily in the atmosphere of Canada's totally woke culture she has hit upon this old and dicredited article to explain to herself as much as anybody else why the woke culture is right.

Also disturbed to read about her support for the male academic. Some women who see themselves as equal to men dont want to accept the reality of men being predatory and women being the prey, because it would mean that they would have to accept that the men she assumes she her as equal in fact retain their patriarchal attitudes that she is lesser - for being biologically female.

Atwood has always been pretty clear about free speech stuff. The fact that she hasn't really clued in to how much suppression is going on in Canada is interesting.

People think because humans all look different, simply are different, that this difference in phenotype means sex is a spectrum, backed up by the existence of intersex people. Sad appropriation. And by that logic we have 7+ billion sexes.

However, Jacqueline Wilson is setting herself up for a world of abuse. I somehow think she is well aware and is ready for them.

Thank you. Good on her for signing that, anyway.

Apologies if this has been posted but this is an interesting letter signed by both Atwood and Rowling as well as numerous others.

The book will always stand alone as an excellent work IMO - a cautionary tale of what happens when women lose their rights (or rather, men take women's rights away!).

Yes I agree.

Oh, and everything I've read that Atwood says on this subject, it's cleat that she is talking about the old-school transexuals - effeminate gay males - more likely to pass and empathise with women.

Not the ones who have autogynephilia - who (some of them) can be a different kettle of fish altogether.

Yes - The Handmaid's Tale (TV show) did go very strange at the end of the last series though, didn't it? Can't say I liked it much by then...

The book will always stand alone as an excellent work IMO - a cautionary tale of what happens when women lose their rights (or rather, men take women's rights away!).

And up until the past month she still believed the CBC was reliable and it was her main source of news. She still won't read the Globe and Mail, much less The National Post - too right wing. No real knowledge of alternate media like podcasts.

Atwood is still very much of the type who thinks that of course the progressive left is being honest and, well, progressive.

She's kind of a curmudgeon though, I think if she saw the right thing she might rethink just because she's cranky.

Yep. Surfacing. :)

I'm not buying her ignorance. Most of her books were deeply political. I don't think she is naive.

I think, reading these tweets, she actually really is at sea with this subject. She doesn't get the science, the whole idea that DSDs create a bellcurve just doesn't make sense, that's not how they fit together. She doesn't seem to understand the legal implications or have any real background for the larger discussion.

A lot might be down to her being a Canadian, the degree to which all this simply fails to be seen in the Canadian press is shocking. I've not been able to come to any conclusion other than it's actively being suppressed.

I used to be a big supporter of the CBC and still think as a concept it's important, in fact I still belong to Friends of the CBC. But I'm at a point now where I think they've become a sort of force for ignorance. They don't even question the orthodoxies of the progressive left any more, they don't seem to allow that it's possible to do so.

Surfacing, yes

Thank you. I was searching Google frantically and couldn't find it!

See this doesn't bother me because, after all, she is a fiction writer. Some of what she writes is speculative fiction and its often about matters of sex and gender. So for her to be playing with ideas about barracudas or whatever is a healthy part of her creative work.