The Brontes have been 'queered'

If there's ever a qualification in Gender Bollocks, that would make an excellent exam task.

"Using the Mary Rose Nit Comb Template, write a blog post for the Bakewell Pudding Museum."

Give me strength. I haven't read the full thread but thoroughly enjoyed reading the FB comments. A further treat is the dismayed response from the museum i.e. 'These hostile comments are bullying our staff'. No, it is not 'bullying' it is people not agreeing with you, just the same as any other disagreement on a point of literary or historical interpretation. Live with the disagreement and/or refute their arguments if you choose to do so.

This comment was quite interesting:

'If "transwomen" have always existed, where were they when women were classed as property and weren't allowed to vote, own land, property or open bank accounts? Where were they when it was legal for a husband to rape his wife? If they've always been amongst us, why have they never shown any allyship to women and girls? Why are they only crawling out of the woodwork now all the hard graft in achieving equality has been done?'

tbf I just copied and pasted the original nit comb text and changed it to reference lawn mowers. It is all utterly bonkers.

In your opinion. And in 2024.

Sorry you are not.

This is such a dumb argument.

If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man I would be upset and freaked out because I have a lifetime's worth of memories of being a woman. I'd be devastated not to be able to breastfeed my daughter anymore. Fuck, maybe my kids wouldn't even recognise me. It would be awful.

This is not the position trans people are in.

Freaky Friday is fiction, not real life.

Trans women have spent their entire lives living as males. Troubled, gender non conforming males, perhaps, but males nonetheless. They have zero frame of reference for living in a female body. They are most certainly not women trapped in a man's body.

• It's a museum devoted to 3 women who were unable to go to university because of their sex, whose options for income were severely limited because of their sex, who weren't able to publish initially under their own names because of their sex, and one of whom died in pregnancy because of her sex.

The modern middle class luxury belief of gender identity has literally zero relevance to their lives and works. *

This is such a good summary of the issue IMO

Once I’d got over the shock (if indeed I ever did) I’d certainly be very fascinated by the willy between my legs - but maybe that’s not what they meant.

It’s so silly the way they try to argue their point. If I woke up as a different person regardless of sex I’d be freaked out. I’m not sure what conclusion has to be drawn from that.

I. Did see a thread (on threads) a few weeks ago claiming that what made JKRs TERFiness even worse was that she had previously claimed to be male by a) publishing the HP books as JK not Joanne. And b) using the pseudonym Robert.
I mean, on point a she never claimed to be male. IIRC she was told to publish as JK so people didn't know she was a woman as "boys wouldn't read books by a female author"
Point b, I guess she was "pretending" to be a man. But she never actually thought she was. Plenty of authors (especially female ones) have used male pen names. Because of the patriarchy. Not for gender ID reasons.

In a previous discussion about the validity of gender identity, I was genuinely asked "If you woke up as a different sex would you think or behave differently" as though this was some kind of gotcha, perhaps about the separation of my body from my "feelz".

In the unlikely event that this would actually happen I'm still not certain what difference it might make about anything at all.

She also lives for about 400 years if I remember correctly. It is not a book that is meant to be taken literally and it’s rather concerning that this needs pointing out!

That is utterly brilliant. You could get a job writing this shite.
Perhaps you have? 😁

Wuthering Heights was much praised as a tale of obsession when first published. When the author was revealed to be a woman, it was condemned in some quarters as the work of a diseased deranged mind. The Brontes were wise to understand that their work would be judged differently than men's.

They could go down the Mary Rose nit comb route to create an entirely forced relevance to gender ideology.

'These lawn mowers would have been mainly used by men to mow the lawn.
However, for many people today, how we cut our lawn is a central pillar of our identity. Lawns are often heavily gendered, following the gender norm that men like short grass, and women like longer grass with flowers in it. By ‘subverting’ and playing with gender norms, people can find the lawns that they feel comfortable having outside their house.'

Queering Keswick's Pencil Museum? Eek

Although, following the pattern of the Mary Rose museum and its queer hair combs...

"By drawing self-portraits which play with gender norms, people can experiment with looks that express their inner gender identity."

Glad you’re sufficiently self aware to acknowledge the inanity of your post.

Here are some of the more unusual museums in the UK:

British Lawnmower Museum, Southport
Dog Collar Museum, Leeds Castle (in Kent, not Leeds)
Sewing Machine Muesum, London
Narrow Guage Railway Museum, Tywyn
Museum of Scottish Lighthouses, Fraserburgh
Pencil Museum, Keswick

Spare a thought for their staff, who may have to rainbow up their exhibits in order to tick a box for funding.

It was common at that time that a baby boy might be given.as a first name the surname of his grandfather.

Much better explained. In each time period 'Orlando' is a different sex, and behaves as that sex, there is no suggestion that Orlando is female, or that the females he becomes are in any way male. Nicely put.

Ellis was a male personal name, from Elis, an Old French vernacular form of Elias, the Latin and New Testament Greek form of Elijah.

It came to be a surname also, with the meaning "child / servant of a man named Ellis".

"The only one which is more traditionally male is Ellis Bell, but Ellis is often used for girls as well, so it's a unisex name. "

It absolutely wasn't a unisex name at the time. It was entirely male.

Orlando is not a "trans character" FGS. Orlando naturally changes sex - much like a clownfish. She finds she has a different body - she doesn't have a female "gender identity" as a male, and she doesn't do anything to her body to simulate the opposite sex. She just changes sex, as a fantastical and metaphorical character.

The fact that gender ideology is appropriating this as being "trans" shows how ridiculous the whole concept is. It's taken magic and fantasy and is trying to make everyone believe that's what makes someone "really" the opposite sex.

What about Kafka's metamorphisis. Hey, a fantastical, allegorical character in a story turned into a giant insect. That must mean it really happens! Duh.

Basically yes. There is money around for this at the moment. Somewhere I worked is doing a queering of the collections project. There is zero evidence in the group they are looking to (apart from statistically some must have been gay) so basically are making it up. It’s poor practice.

You were indeed.