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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Dr James Miranda Barry

123 replies

mammoon · 14/02/2019 21:25

Never posted a thread before so apologies if I'm doing it wrong! Anyway, I thought this was of interest. A new book about Dr Barry is causing a meltdown on Twitter - twitter.com/EJLevy/status/1095759928667516928 . As far as I can see, all the books about Dr Barry consistently refer to them as a woman, but this latest book, unlike others, is being called transphobic, and the author and publisher are "cancelled".

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Melroses · 14/02/2019 21:39

Ooooh interesting. So many repetitions of 'he'.

Moonsick · 14/02/2019 21:40

I find this retrospective transing of the dead really depressing.

An individual has been removed from their socio-historical context and a veneer of modern identity politics has been applied without thought or consideration.

Dr Barry took on a male persona in part to access roles, education and opportunities that would otherwise have been denied to them. We have no idea how they would have identified if they lived today.

newtlover · 14/02/2019 21:50

these are people who have never heard of Occam's razor

newtlover · 14/02/2019 21:55

I mean what is more likely?
that in a time when women could not have a profession, or an independent life, a woman who had the ambition and skills to become a doctor would dress/present as a man- they might also need to protect their intimate partner by concealing their sex after death
OR
that a person would adopt an identity which didn't exist for another - what 250+ years

mammoon · 14/02/2019 21:55

There is a real pile on and it's just unbelievable - people are calling Levy a trf and transphobe and posting replies that just say he he he he he... It concerns me that we can't acknowledge one of the first female doctors, we have to say they're a man? We don't know how Barry "identified" but given the fact that even the notion of identity (as twitter understands it) is born out of postmodern theory then I think it's probably fair to say Barry knew fine well she was female (especially if she'd given birth, as speculated!).

Aargh I don't know if I'm allowed to say 'she' even!

Also I think the book is a novel, which kind of makes sense now that there's such a furore, as writer twitter is WOKE af.

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ItsAllGoingToBeFine · 14/02/2019 21:56

I love the way the TRAs are referring to Wikipedia as evidence. It does show though how easily history can be rewritten.

StrangeLookingParasite · 14/02/2019 21:56

God what a load of bullshit. (not the author)

SecondRow · 14/02/2019 21:57

These are also people who don't seem to know what a novel is!

The author seems fairly robust but will the publisher stand firm? Presumably they, too, knew what they were getting into... will be following with interest.

IrenetheQuaint · 14/02/2019 22:01

Yes those tweets are all rather hysterical, but as Dr Barry lived as a man for so many years, and wanted to be remembered as a man, then I don't have a problem with using male pronouns for the relevant period of his life (most of it).

We just don't know whether Dr Barry chose to live as a man purely for professional reasons, or partly for personal reasons too.

mammoon · 14/02/2019 22:01

Levy seems great - I hope she and her publisher were expecting this and are standing firm. Twitter TRAs are very vocal but I'm not sure how much sway they have in real life.

Although saying that, there was the YA author recently who withdrew her book after a twitter pile-on over alleged racism (despite the fact that she was an Asian writer and it was an 'own voices' book which nobody had even read yet.) So... I guess I don't know.

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Bittermints · 14/02/2019 22:02

I don't know enough about this case to pontificate, but there are so many obvious reasons why Dr Barry chose to pass herself off as a male all through her life. She may well have been unable to contemplate the horror of finally being unmasked in death, hence the request that the body not be examined. The Twitter pile on is very depressing. I hope LittleBrown holds strong.

mammoon · 14/02/2019 22:06

We also have to accept that after death, a person's life may be examined and understood differently than how they wished it to be seen. We don't just accept a person's own account of their life - we understand that their account is partial and limited by their circumstances. Not to say that an account of another's life should be disrespectful, but it should strive to be honest and give a fair account.

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FloralBuntingIsObnoxious · 14/02/2019 22:11

I'm reliably informed that the Egyptian pharoahs considered themselves to be Divinities. Therefore, I'm going to have a tantrum at any and all historians who dare to suggest they were actually mortal humans. It's not respecting their wishes, and could actually hinder their passage through the afterlife.

And don't nobody mention Hatshepsut!

mammoon · 14/02/2019 22:26

FloralBuntingIsObnoxious hahaha OMG so tempted to start a Hatshepsut thread on twitter... the first trans pharoah???

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DancelikeEmmaGoldman · 14/02/2019 23:06

There are many instances of women through history dressing and passing as men in order to access education and opportunities denied them as women.

You could probably argue that it was a risky, but intelligent course of action for women of energy and ambition who aspired to education and activities their sex denied them.

That didn’t make them men, but women doing everything they could, to express their capability in a world which was antithetical to women.

CharlieParley · 15/02/2019 00:15

This is a woman who was desperate to study medicine in the very early 1800s, enrolled in 1809 - 60 years before the first female medical students were allowed into Edinburgh University, leading to riots, protests, attempts to sabotage them, they were overcharged, tutors refused to teach them etc.

Barry had died of old age just four years earlier and would have known all the way to the end that admitting to being female in a world where female doctors simply were not allowed, everything she had worked for would have been lost. All the respect, the esteem, the success would have been gone.

Of course she remained hidden. And she knew also from the few other cases like hers that had been uncovered to great fanfare in her time, that if she was found to be female after her death, her legacy would have been reduced to the same kind of idle speculation, her achievements ignored over the same notoriety she would have gained instead.

From the little I know, many of her compatriots had an inkling that she wasn't entirely or really male, but because she was indeed a brilliant, passionate doctor, most of them didn't seem to care - and since she never seems to have let anyone come too close (she certainly seems to have had no significant other), it may not have been that hard for those who knew her to just leave her be - especially since she had powerful patrons.

This transing of the dead, a full 150 years afterwards is ridiculous, given that there are plenty of documented cases of women doing the same - pretend to be men to be allowed out of the restrictive sphere of women.

HawayMan · 15/02/2019 00:25

On the plus side, this author is getting loads of free publicity! Let's face it, none of us would be talking about this book if it wasn't for the controversy!

FloralBuntingIsObnoxious · 15/02/2019 00:29

I think they're just signalling, as they can't help doing, that they think that the only reason a woman in a strongly restrictive patriarchal society would seek to break that restraint is if, in fact, she was a man.

Therefore, along with all the delightful people telling women to stay at home if they don't want to share toilets and so forth, we must conclude that the aim of the trans movement is specifically to set back the freedom of women about 200 years.

You can blabble all the on trend buzz words you like, but the ideology is quite openly about sticking us back in corsets and crinolines and back in the home where we belong. With a few of us as surrogates.

Ereshkigal · 15/02/2019 00:50

twitter.com/ZREllor/status/1096103874404982785?s=20

Quite a stretch there.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine · 15/02/2019 08:21

Dr Barry took on a male persona in part to access roles, education and opportunities that would otherwise have been denied to them

One could potentially argue that this isn't an exclusively historical thing and is behind, for example, a lot of ROGD.

FloralBuntingIsObnoxious · 15/02/2019 08:36

That's an interesting Twitter thread. Dr Barry's friends offered to send her to South America where she could practice medicine openly as a woman and she refused!

This can only mean she was actually, really and truly, a man, because there was no reason for a woman to want to stay in her own country and not travel to a completely different country.

Confused
Bittermints · 15/02/2019 08:41

I would say so. You have to be very, very invested in the trans view of the world to see this as anything to celebrate. Dr Barry should have been able to study and practise medicine openly as a woman. She couldn't, and what the woke falling over themselves to declare 'him' a trans hero don't seem to be considering is that she wasn't openly transgender either. If her choice to live as a man had been done from some deep-seated belief that she had been born in the wrong body, surely she would have made little secret of her natal sex. But of course she had to because, guess what, she lived in a different era where she'd have put herself in danger by being open about what she was doing. Have any of them ever studied history? Don't they grasp that it's ridiculously over-simplifying to judge past societies and people by our modern standards?

mammoon · 15/02/2019 08:56

On the plus side, this author is getting loads of free publicity! Let's face it, none of us would be talking about this book if it wasn't for the controversy!

Honestly, I don't think it works that way. Publishers have been scared off from books that get this kind of negative attention. Bookshops refuse to stock them. Book deals have been cancelled over twitter outrage. I hope that it works in the writer's favour in this case, but I honestly don't think that's a given.

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DancelikeEmmaGoldman · 15/02/2019 08:57

This can only mean she was actually, really and truly, a man, because there was no reason for a woman to want to stay in her own country and not travel to a completely different country.

Well, of course Floral. After all, why wouldn’t she be keen to leave home, friends and family in order to undertake a lengthy sea journey to a foreign country where she had no connections and didn’t speak the language.

Oh yeah. And the first woman to graduate from medical school in Venezuela didn’t do so until 1936, so colour me dubious about the openly practicing medicine in Venezuela thing.

The first female Latin American doctor didn’t graduate until 1834, by which time Dr Barry was already 42 and well on in her career.

Do people making these ridiculous claims never stop and check their facts?

DancelikeEmmaGoldman · 15/02/2019 09:03

And the bit I missed there is the fact that if her friends believed her to be male, there would be no reason to suggest she travel to Latin America.

The only reason to suggest the trip was because they knew she was a woman.