“ “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was a transgender man”

Ah cool ok that makes me a gay trans man then.

I categorically know I'm not a TM. I can see how with my opinions on stereotypical girl things plus other factors in this day and age teenage me, even twenty something me would be absolutely convinced that i was a TM and that that was the route to all my issues being solved

However I grew up in an age when this wasn't a thing like it is now and all the issues that I had that would now lead to the TM outcome didn't lead me to the TM outcome.

Therefore I conclude that I am 100% a woman who just had a fucked up childhood and hated the effects of puberty on the female body, didn't like pink and could see men got a better deal.

I found decent therapy helped me immensely.

But that's just me!

I remember with fondness the poster here who came to tell the women of FWR that they were all TM in denial, as arguing back and not happily embracing oppression meant they weren't real women.

So very, very much to learn about women.

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I have long been of the view that many people who identify as trans are not really 'born in the wrong body' so much as keen to escape the stereotypes imposed on their sex. They're also very self-absorbed and instead of trying to change the system so things improve for everyone they focus on changing things just for themselves, because they also seem often to think that they are very special and precious and other people who just get on with things are dull and ordinary and less important, so don't really deserve any better.

If you're a boy from a very socially conservative family, you hate rough and tumble play and long to be allowed free rein with the dressing up box, you probably get used to hearing over and over again 'Put the princess dress down! You can't play with that. Dolls/dressing up clothes/pink t-shirts are for girls, not boys. You should be outside with the other boys, playing football. Oh, for goodness' sake, not tears again! You're a big boy now, you're nearly 5. Crying over every little thing is pathetic, it's the kind of thing girls do, and you're not a girl' etc etc. Doesn't take a great stretch of imagination to see why a little boy from a background like that might start to wish he was a girl, and see that as a solution to all his problems.

What is so horrifying is that instead of helping him and his family to accept that actually what he wants is OK and the sky won't fall in if he is allowed to do non-stereotypical things, medical and other professionals are now saying 'Quite right, obviously something wrong there, he needs treatment'.

Equally horrifying that girls having a bad time with puberty are also being told they can opt out of it all with drugs and surgery, instead of society trying to do something about predatory male behaviour, the toxic influence of porn and so on.

How are they getting their heads around Virginia Woolf?

The sexism and double standards are breathtaking. Transing women to rob them of their female agency. If they did all that, they must really be a man!

So they lose female power by being trans.

And when men transition, they gain power.

They get to dictate to women what 'womanhood'' is all about and colonise their spaces. They get to use their male agency - the first 'woman' to direct a trilogy, or fight on the front line, or break this record. And women mustn't talk about female biology.

The men gain power. One that is unavailable to women.

Transing empowers men and disempowers women whichever way round it happens.

Tbh it's so fucking trivial. Even if LMA had genuinely wanted to be a man and had lived as a man, which she didn't, she wouldn't have been. They're doing it because she's a female icon.

Gwen Raverat wrote that she wanted to be a boy growing up so much that she felt quite desperate about it, was always a boy in her dreams, and wrote in exquisitely painful detail about the restrictions she endured as a girl (her description of being forced to start wearing stays is tense and horrible). But hey, Gwen Raverat is too posh and too obscure now to be retrospectively transed, so we can keep her. She remains a really good writer about the incredible things that were done to impose the feminine role on girls in the Victorian period, and also a narrator of some of the joys of living and creating as a human being.

Ah, so this is where it's come from... I noticed Jake Graf had tweeted this last night and it was re-tweeted by Linda Riley.

That's interesting. Jake was a speaker at an event I attended. One thing that struck me was Jake's memory of being a small girl who was expected to be quiet and tidy like the other girls, and feeling how unfair it was not to be able to do the fun stuff the boys were doing.

Jake saw that as an example of being a boy rather than a girl but I very much wanted to ask if it had occurred to him that all the other little girls were probably just as frustrated about it! I was actually quite angry that as far as Jake was concerned that treatment was absolutely fine for "real" girls.

(Unfortunately it wasn't the sort of event where audience questions were invited.)

@SunnyLobelia 💐

sorry about your twat of an uncle.

Why can't men keep their hands off little girls?

What it actually is is not in any way of interest to this political agenda. The diversity and wonder and expression and lived experience of this half of the human race is absolutely irrelevant, in fact it's downright bloody inconvenient.

What matters is getting it successfully stuffed in the right little boxes to serve the Grand Plan. Hence all the complaints that they won't all get in the boxes and stay in them and restrict themselves strictly to being only what suits the purpose of that plan like what they've been told to.

All this shows is that transpeople & their so called allies have absolutely no idea of what a woman actually is.

[not to say that women who fall in love with women are not women, just to add! I was being clumsy but trying to get across that the TRAs are just completely beholden to stereotypes.]

Tomboy here too. My heroes were George from the FF and Jo March. I spent my time horseriding, cycling and catching reptiles to keep in my bedroom. I was horrified by puberty and bound my breasts with my horse's exercise bandages to keep them flat.

I rebelled against puberty because going through puberty as a girl was scary, smelly, painful and I could not bear the sexual attention I got from randomers on the street, my first boss when I was 14 and my uncle who used to put his hand inside my knickers. I rebelled against the idea that women had to be compliant.

I have only ever fallen in love with men. I have had 2 children and wear makeup every day.I reject male and female stereoptypes. But I am still a woman and I have never believed that I was a man. What is it about the Trans stuff that hobbles people to conformity? Most women I know have evolved well past that.

Well based on Peyton Thomas's effort about his musings on Louisa Alcott I am not holding my breath.

Will any current writers especially those who have bought the transideology, write something which will be considered a classic 100 years later? Or will people look back and wonder who wrote this tosh about women with penises?

It's reminiscent of the Mormons rebaptising their dead ancestors into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Ahistorical and disrespectful.

Yes, this. Transing the dead is often a way of erasing women who were prepared to fight their way past confinement in order to innovate and achieve.

We got a few years of media, historians, etc correcting the balance by trying to recognise the achievements of female historical figures, and then we get this. It's a fightback by men who are threatened by society's eventual, belated recognition of women as people.

@nightwakingmoon Yep - my first thought was 'The Female Malady'

We can surely be only inches away from Rosalind in AYLI and everyone in Twelfth Night being transed. FFS

As Helen Joyce writes in Chapter 7 ("She Who Must Not Be Named") of her excellent book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality:

In its erasure of sex categories, gender-identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who, by force, luck or guile, succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is now at risk of being retroactively transitioned. Boudicca and Joan of Arc are both often described as transmen. So is the Pharaoh Hatshepsut (who ‘was assigned female at birth but intermittently dressed and ruled as a King’, according to Amnesty UK). In 2019 the Washington Post removed mention of Jennie Hodgers, who cross-dressed in order to fight in the American Civil War, from a podcast entitled ‘Women who won wars’. In an apology, it said Hodgers’s inclusion had not been ‘in keeping with Washington Post style, which states that people should be referred to by their current identity’.

Lesbian icons are now routinely described as transmen, among them Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, a tragic story of Sapphic love, and Stormé DeLarverie, a professional drag king who was in the thick of the Stonewall riots that launched the modern gay-rights movement. Even fictional characters are not safe. George of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, a girl who hates dresses and long hair, and loves sailing and climbing; Jo of Little Women, who whistles, walks with her hands behind her back and promises her father to be the ‘man of the house’ while he is away at war; and Yentl, who cross-dresses to be allowed to study the Talmud: all are now often ‘reinterpreted’ as transmen.

(Apologies for the long quote and not indenting it for clarity. Is it possible to use blockquote on Mumsnet?!)

Noooooo! Wtf? 🙁 You’d think she could just revisit her own work - especially Women, Madness & English Culture and Hysterical Epidemics - just to see how much of a fashionable nonsense genderist ideology all is. It’s literally what she spent her career writing about 😟

Disappointed. I mean it’s tantamount to career suicide to out yourself as a terf/second-waver in US academia right now; but still. Genderism literally undoes everything she spent her career doing.

I saw a thread on Twitter declaring LMA a trans man a couple of months back. Rather depressingly, it had been 'liked' by Elaine Showalter...

Radcliffe Hall is perhaps the only lesbian writer who I wonder from her writing if she may have chosen to identify as a TM (had she lived in the 21st century during this time and been au fait with it all). But no one but Radcliffe Hall, in those circumstances, would be able to confirm or deny this.

Either we don't randomly label other people according to our personal choices and respect their personal identity, or we don't. It can't be one rule for some and one rule for others. Some who deserve that respect and some who are just to put up, shut up and obey. Because frankly fuck that.

In fact, I must be a man, I’m so angry!!

Oh ffs. I’m getting so fucking angry