The Brontes have been 'queered'

played with gender

Shakespeare like many other writers, and of course the panto tradition, addressed the fact that males were playing females on stage (also vice versa in panto), using it to make jokes and asides. He also, like many writers, raised questions about the things that are expected of males and females via social stereotypes and expectations, and because of their bodies - eg Lady Macbeth talking about her behaviour not matching her role as woman, mother etc.

If that is "playing with gender" (i.e. interrogating and studying stereotypes and how they affect characters, and having characters who don't fit every gender norm like a cardboard cutout) then pretty much any writer worth bothering with will have done that. That's normal and is nothing to do with queer theory or people not accepting themselves for the actual sex they are.

In 'Silkworm' a transman is very sympathetically portrayed as both troubled and deserving of help and consideration - the detectives strive to find the truth about the horrible book which has been published about the transman and her friend, and do so. It is only with 'Troubled Blood' that JKR came under threat from trans activists (the murderer is not trans) because she had stood up for women.

It’s for Pride month. The implication could not be clearer.

Since I do not know your sex I don't see the point of that comment. But you were making unhistorical assumptions about Shakespeare, that have no traction in the world he inhabited.

Because Robert Galbraith is really JK Rowling, who doesn't believe in the female penis.

I decided to do something with more real world relevance for my second degree.

I was encouraged to develop critical thinking skills. Something the people who peddle gender nonsense are sadly lacking.

Thanks for that nice little bit of womansplaining @Grammarnut.

I do hope you don't teach either history or Shakespeare. In sixteenth-century England (not mainland Europe) the convention existed that women did not act in plays (stems from mystery plays perhaps, again an English convention, for it is probable that Hildergard of Bingen's morality play 'Circle of Virtyue' was performed by women - + one man who was likely the chaplain and played the Devil). Boys played women's parts. There were companies of boy actors, the most famous being those of St Paul's School. They were trained to act like women as well as dress as women (and there was traffic in them as rent boys dressed as women, part of the brothel and prostitution side of theatre) and played the women's parts. There is no gender-bending, they are playing women because women are not allowed to play themselves - 'cross-dressing' made it easier to carry off the part if the boy who was pretending to be a woman played a part in which the 'woman' pretended to be a man. No trans characters at all.
I wonder, do you also not realise that all WS's plays were performed in modern dress? Togas on top for the Roman ones, I think.
I've read 'Orlando' (and seen a film of it) and it is a fantasy, involving transmutation of matter AFAICS. The story takes place over several hundred years and has nothing to do with saying a man can be a woman. It's a magical fantasy written by a woman who wished heartily that women were allowed the same ability to meld into the world that men have. Woolf does not think that Orlando is a woman.

So why do TRAs have such an issue with Robert Galbraith?

I have a degree in English literature

As do I. Two in fact. We were encouraged to explore ideas, not shut them down.

It's literally not relevant to anything.

The character in Orlando who "changed sex" also lived for 300 years.

Different author, different genre, different century.

Nothing to do with what is being discussed here.

I have a degree in English literature and if my tutors had been spouting this kind of nonsense I'd have dropped out. There was enough bullshit already without genderwoo, and that was nearly 20 years ago.

And I have the relevance of my posts questioned. 😂

I was obviously wrong when I thought this was an intelligent discussion.

Was “A Room of Own’s Own” all about a special pad for a transman, or about how women of that time were socially held back because of their sex?

The irritating thing is that those who support this have probably never even read the Brontes. You see it all the time - woke lunatics demanding that libraries be ‘de-colonised’, or that Kipling novels be removed, or that parts of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf be edited, etc, when they actually have no interest in serious literature at all. In truth, they’re motivated by a mixture of spite and attention-seeking. They also love the sense of power. (Though obviously they hide all that behind a mask of self-righteousness.)

I hate that ugly phrase ‘gender identity’. Ugghh, it’s so typical of the way academics think and talk. The Brontes were artists. Their books are beautiful and profound works of art, not sociology essays. I’m sick of people using great works of art to back up their particular grievance. You see this especially in literature departments. The canon is now treated as raw material for psychoanalysts, Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists, race theorists, post-structuralists, gay rights activists, Jungians, and so on. So Hamlet, for example, is reduced to an Oedipal crisis. Or Dickens’ Hard Times becomes a ‘Marxist study of Labour relations’. No one seems interested in how beautiful the works are, or how deep and original and profound.

I wish those with an axe to grind would f- off and leave the arts alone. I wouldn’t mind so much if they genuinely loved great and beautiful art, but they often don’t. Anthony Burgess once said that there are two kinds of good - ethical good and aesthetic good. I doubt the people who built the Taj Mahal were ethically good. They probably beat their wives and owned slaves. But the Taj Mahal itself is still a beautiful work of art. If you want to theorise about ‘gender identity’ write a flippin book on gender identity. And if you’re interested in gender identity in the 19th-century, read contemporary diaries and newspapers and autobiographies. Don’t project your ideas onto classic works of art.

I told you what it’s relevant to. I hope you don’t either.

Not much. I seem to remember that Ursula le Guin, first published only using her initials. And there is James Tiptree Jnr - who all Sci-Fi pundits happily accepted was a man (because women do not write Sc-Fi) until she turned up at a convention.
The eighteenth century allowed publication by 'a lady' quite often, but members of the Bluestocking Group tended to publish anonymously, which they had no problems with most of them being either independently well-off or married to well-off men - none of which detracts from their bravery and spirit in publishing on 'male' topics at all, misogyny was big business in the 1700s!

By being the very last of the Tudor line.

I'm not seeing how what is essentially a science fiction book from 100 years ago is relevant to the Brontes, or to your revisionist interpretation of Shakespeare.

I hope you don't teach literature.

Not the Brontes, but have the trans activist narcissistic historians done Elizabeth 1 yet?

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,

According to the gingerbread recipe she must have had a Blue Brain in a Pink Body. How ever did she manage without T, Top Surgery, and Bottom Surgery?

Entirely relevant to the assertion that gender fluidity and the trans issue have emerged only during the 21st century.

Shakespeare did not "play with gender".

Characters disguising themselves in various ways was an important facet of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

In Henry IV Part 2 Prince Hal and his companion Poins disguise themselves to observe Falstaff, for instance.

Female characters disguising themselves as males is part of that aspect.

And again, no-one believed that the young male actors were women, any more than they believed that all the characters in Hamlet were actually dead at the end of the play.

Picking up on your last point, some groups are imposing disabilities on the past. I'm thinking of some recent neurodivereity training at church. Lots of useful practical tips but also asked us to identify autistic characters from the Bible, my brain was boggled. Autism especially is being read into a lot of older books and individuals from the past.

'They're not queering the Brontes'
Also
'Shakespeake was gender fluiding all over theatres back in the day'.

Gender Derangement Syndrome. Don't do it kids.

So...irrelevant then?

Virginia Woolf is a completely different author who was writing more than 300 years after Shakespeare.

No shit. 😂