Long time lurker on these boards and NC for this post.
Margaret Atwood is trending on twitter because of her nonsensical conflation of sex and gender and her invocation of fish science to prove humans can change sex.
I am pretty surprised at the outrage tbh. From the feminist response on Twitter, it would appear that few have actually read The Handmaid’s Tale. Whilst the recent dramatisation has entered into the public consciousness, and ensure ‘Gilead’,’ Handmaid’, ‘Aunt Lydia’ have all become common terms, the original book is underpinned by unconscious racism.
At the heart of the book is the issue that falling fertility rates affect white women only. Black and Native women are not affected by this fictional disease and the policing of white women’s fertility is in order to ensure the continuation of the white race. Atwood makes no comment on this, nor offers any scientific/ medical theory as to why only white women are affected. This would suggest to me a grotesque dehumanisation of Black women as ‘other’.
In fact, the story is so inherently racist that the producers of the TV adaptation had to enage in ‘colourblind casting’ to prevent the show being blindsided by the racist ideology.
It would seem that Atwood is no friend of women, and is particularly dismissive of the lived experiences of Black and Indigenous women. The very notion of a disease that only affects white women, whilst scientifically nonsensical, is also racist AF.