Paris Lees Interview in the Sunday Times

[Igneococcus]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vogue-columnist-paris-lees-im-the-acceptable-face-of-trans-i-dont-frighten-the-horses-9hfbk0nx5?shareToken=e82b1c4ee7e8f2d5a794438688f8d626

I wish the author would have challenged Lees a bit more. It's all a bit fluffy.
No comments. so readers can't ask the questions the interviewer didn't ask.

Paris has a very good pr team

Of course Paris has been chooses because of being passable at first glance and has a good story behind them and education

So we shall see the softer womanly side of Paris from now on

I’m sure many of us will remember Paris from a few years ago a transwomen who appeared to despise women which Paris isn’t no matter what Paris claims to be

Paris can fuck off with the bad hair thing.

Caricactaure of a woman. Paris wants to be seen as a "bimbo". Paris enjoys street harassment (except when they don't?). Harassment they get by those who perceive them to be women is brilliant. Women who don't enjoy street harassment from men are prudes, and should shut up and stop complaining. Because Paris enjoys it. That's right, I remember the article. Paris doesn't like any harassment they get from people who perceive them as male though. As a man dressed as a woman- homophobia. That sort of harassment should be stamped out.

Again, fuck off paris.

Obviously homophobia should be stamped out!

So should men sexually harassing women and girls while they are just going about their business.

When I'm late for a work meeting I always say "oh bad hair day simper giggle" and all the men smile and say ok that's fine as all men know that women are just not as reliable as men, and they pay more attention to their looks than to anything else.

This is definitely how I have got on at work and it really helps me to be taken seriously.

“Too frightened to live in communal halls”, at university, in Brighton?

Or busy communal halls filled with students not particularly conducive to carrying out sex work?

These constant implications that all their questionable choices are driven by fear but they bravely press ahead and do What Needs To Be Done Anyway even if it means they have to get their hands dirty. Just like Lily.

Agree that paris obviosuly had a horrible childhood and incredibly difficult teen / twenties years.

The fact that they were working as a prostitute as a child is never examined in these articles is it. It's just presented as an unremarkable fact. I would be much more interested in hearing who got them into it, where they met the men who paid to abuse them etc. It bothers me that this is presented as not only a fact of life, but a difficult but sensible decision a child might make.

This person is not a good candidate to see as any kind of authority on safeguarding children. In my opinion.

I agree with LikeDust.

Bad hair day, right, I’ll remember that for next time I’m late.

Not so very long ago, I was actually told to my face, by a person who knows me, in person, that it was surprising I’d had street harassment and sexual comments and assaults off men, because, you know, I’m not very feminine. Soz Paris, you’re nowt special. Even an ugly old butch dyke like me gets sexual harassment. You like the way you look so you take it as a compliment, and I quite like the way I look, and it’s not a compliment. I couldn’t imagine putting ‘a bit more effort’ in to get more sexual harassment, if you know what I mean. Maybe there in lies the difference. You want it, and you’ve had to have a lot done to get it, where as us women, we get it by default, but we really don’t want it. I don’t know a single woman, and I have known a lot, who goes out of her way to invite street harassment. You like sexist, sexual abuse, that’s not being a woman, that’s just being a pervy fuck.

As for all the other crap Paris comes out with, well I just use the above as a baseline and judge everything else based on that.

As for all the other crap Paris comes out with, well I just use the above as a baseline and judge everything else based on that

Yes. Like when Paris recently said in response to people saying that women were afraid of male violence that "some people are afraid of escalators" because Paris can't imagine how a fear of male violence to a woman could be rational.

Sorry - italic fail with your quote, Bad!

I was feminine in apperance (if not in personality :D) and also was comfortable with how I looked and also hated hated hated all street harrassment.

One of the reasons I have had feminist ideas from a young age.

Street harrassment is not a compliment and anyone who thinks so is incredibly dim.

I have told my DD (11) that if (when) she gets men saying "rude things" to her or shouting at her, they do it to anyone, she shouldn't feel that they have picked on her for some reason.

That interview made my skin crawl, so Paris was a child prostitute which in the space of one short interview is characterised as:

1. problematic (I went off the rails), though it’s the transphobes fault for not medicalising me aged 11.

1. A great source of income for the otherwise prohibitively expensive cosmetic surgery she obtained.

I can see why Vogue hired her, whore yourselves out for the pricey stuff kids, there is no other route to happiness.

I have also given her "permission" to be "rude" (ie not feel she has to engage in conversation and can just leave) and also methods to get away / put a persistant man or men off.

In age appropriate terms and also saying it's not likely to happen but if it does...

Do parents of boys even have to think about this stuff?

I bet Paris thinks it would have been awesome to be sexually harrassed by adult men when a child, if they had been allowed the blockers and surgery at the age they wanted them.

Street harrassment is not a compliment and anyone who thinks so is incredibly dim.

Or male. It's quite a common belief of MRAs of all stripes.

true

When men imagine street harrassment they always imagine a very attractive woman coyly saying ooh you're very handsome

They never imagine being 13 and in school uniform and having a man 3 times their size ask them for oral sex.

Wow, I think Paris comes off terribly. Incredibly shallow ("I didn't know how good I was going to look") and rebutting obviously serious concerns and factual statistics with contentless, empty assurances. I like that the article raises those serious concerns too, it doesn't pretend they don't exist.

Plus the undercutting of the victim narrative with the Downing Street visit. And "I'm a professional trans person" is pretty damning. I think an uninformed person reading that article is not going to come away with a good impression of Paris or of the trans lobby.

When I was 13 and in school uniform a man dragged me into a gateway and tried to rape me. I suppose I should've been flattered by Paris' reasoning.

I think Paris would agree that was not very nice.

They would put it in a different "box" to street hararssment.

Women and girls tend to be well aware it all comes from the same place >> that the wolf whistle or the shouted "gissa blow job" comes from the same place, it's aggression, sexual aggression and entitlement. The statement is "I want to fuck you and I do not care what you think about that as you are nothing more than an object" >> whether he actually tries to touch or not.

Women and girls (do I need to put a NAWALT for the few that say they love it?) understans this at an innate level as we have grown up with it. We understand that they often target more vulnerable >> which is why girls about 12-20 get such a lot of shit, far less likely to do anything, far more likey to react in a pleasing way (and of course any reaction is good for them > crying, blushing, shouting, running etc).

Paris loves it because Paris was never a 13yo girl getting aggressively propositioned by older, bigger, stronger, random men while walking home from school.

Although as Paris was working as a prostitute at 14, you'd think maybe they'd have some insight into what bastards men can be? They seem to come down hard on the side of the men, male entitlement though. So. Whatever.

Paris is very keen on 'passing' for a woman, but the first time I saw her in a telly documentary, I knew instantly that she was biologically male.
The same as when I walked past a trans woman in M&S a few weeks back. We caught each others eye for a nanosecond, as we passed the till. She looked lovely and was beautifully dressed, but in that nanosecond, it registered that she was biologically male. Our brain registers it, whatever pronoun we use out of politeness (and I do)

I wonder if in fact Paris as a male child did get street harassment. I think often the message of all street harassment is less 'I want to fuck you' and more 'I can do this and there's nothing you can do about it' but done to males and females it is slightly different? As a female I haven't experienced the male version directly so if there are males reading this, please feel free to correct me. To effeminate men and boys it may be more 'oi arsebender' 'you could turn me' 'does your boyfriend like it when you suck him'. I'd certainly experience it as terrifying as a boy, and if I were used to an abusive homophobic father to whom I was never male enough, I'd find it brought back all that in public, without a safe space to be at at home. Then escaping from home, and escaping from your male body which has never been male enough or good enough, and suddenly being perceived as a woman and experiencing street harassment as women get it, might be genuinely more positive - you would see women as getting this attention just for being female, without having to live up to the physical standards demonstrated by sport/fighting/toughness/tearlessness/emotionlessness that men are supposed to reach.

An awful lot of prominent TRAs seem to have this pattern of a homophobic abusive father and a mother who in some form did not protect them (was not a good enough woman?)

A friend said a pedo stopped him on his bike and offered him £50 to show him his willy. A long time ago. That was a specific targeting by a pedo. I hear a lot of boys get targeted at arcades and places where they like to play like that.

It's not the same as having 'ordinary' dudes shouting, winking, gesturing, blowing kisses, etc constantly while you are just walking about on the streets. For girls it is ridiculous the frequency of it. I remember as a teen it seemed like every third car would beep.