Latest stunning and brave article in my feed

[emerencealwayshopeful]

www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/3/18647615/coming-out-transgender-handmaids-tale-emily-todd-vanderwerff

I'm really lost this time. It seems this person is female because that's the best way to oppose trump?

Or our gender is defined by the book/tv character we most identify with? In which case - who are you really inside? If you identified as Jay Gatsby you must be male?

Not read the article yet but is this a crossover with fictionkin - currently only really a 'thing' on sites like Tumblr?

Is this going to be the next rabbit hole of insanity?

Jesus, can't be arsed with that self-serving crap. When I was 13 I thought I was Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.

I was wrong.

I struggle to get a handle on what the article was really about.

It isn't the first time I've seen issues around The Handmaiden's Tale in articles from TW writers who feel excluded and discomforted by it, it's wholly women focused (problem) and it's focused on the key issues women experience and cannot escape due to their biology (huge problem). I see here it's told off for not being intersectional enough. Sigh.

Just read the JCJones article about Hall of Mirrors, it fits quite well.

I think this person watched the Handmaid's Tale, had some weird dreams, and decided that they were actually a woman and always had been. They want to be a woman now, and Trump's sort of against men identifying into women's places, so if you don't agree that men can become women then you're on Trump's side, and you don't want that do you?

The bloody gall of a male writing that the Handmaid's Tale goes too far, when it's all based on real incidents in real life though. You know, being too focused on "women":

"It can sometimes fetishize suffering, becoming too lost in the idea that the birthright of a woman is to be stripped of her humanity by a society that has long studied how not to care."

And once again it's someone who's religious childhood portrayed such negative gender roles that they've struggled with them their whole life.

Jesus. The narcissism in that blog is unbearable.

Lorit that bit struck me too.

Total inability to empathise or engage with women's experiences, if they're not useful to men or relevant to men they're dismissed as 'fetishizing suffering'.

Karen Ingala Smith could certainly introduce the writer to males who identify as trans and have entered women's refuges and rape support groups because they have a sexual fetish on listening to women describing those experiences and enacting the role themselves. And the groups that closed because it became obvious that males who identified as trans were listening to abused and raped women talking about their experiences and were actively copying their mannerisms and using and incorporating bits of the women's stories into their newly created fictional history.

So the writer can fuck off with that point really.

I used to think I wanted to see June and the other women on the show persevere in the face of suffering, because on some level, I believed that to embrace my own womanhood was to embrace suffering. Now I realize that I do want to see Gilead burn. I don’t want suffering anymore. I want catharsis. And not just for me.

This quote is a peach. I don't watch the dramatisation because I think it misses a lot of the power and purpose of the book, but I cannot think of any woman who watches or reads about Gilead who didn't want the main character to escape and Gilead to be destroyed. The fetishization of woman's suffering belongs solely to the author of this article.

And how nice that the author here 'realizes' that they want suffering to end, and, as an afterthought, 'not just for me'. How magnanimous. How gracious. What a load of shit.

Quote from the now defunct 'bornnotmade' blog.
Seems apposite.

Is there a prize for reading right through to the end of this glop? Because if there is I want a dozen of them! It really was hard work - like wading through a sea of angry kittens.

Anyway, to save everybody the trouble, here's my translation:
"I was raised in a strict religious family; troubled about why I never felt like a real man, I spent ten years in therapy. I watched The Handmaidens Tale and had some strange dreams about it. I thought a lot about a woollen sweater starting to unravel, so decided to stop wearing sweaters so that people wouldn't have to turn on the aircon for me.
My doctor warned me that I should take more care of my health. That made me realise that I would die before 50 if I stayed as I was. I thought a bit about death.
Watching and analysing the TV show further, I saw that all those women characters who were suffering horribly - rape, mutilation, death - were, at the same time, united in a wonderful, close, warm womanly community that I had never had.
So I then fully accepted that I was really a woman inside and had been all along. I am now on hormones, and all my wonderful woman friends are being absolutely lovely to me.Which makes me feel absolutely lovely too.
The End"

Thank you barracker. That quote is perfect for this.

The part that got me was him witnessing the violent man in the car and then dismissing that piece of casual violence because it didn't serve a purpose. But was worth mentioning?

So this is 'uncomfortable with gender roles I grew up with, part of woke LA, trump says biology matters and so does this show I'm sort of obsessed with, but I'm somehow better informed than both and influenced by both so now I know that I must be female. But the kind that overcomes the oppression because it isn't actually mine.'?

I twitched every time the writer mentioned 'my womanhood'.

Criiiiiiinge.

Ah - read this article the other day, thought what was that all about? I haven't read 'The Handmaid's Tale', or seen the TV adaption so the allusions were wasted on me, but like you StrangeLookingParasite I winced at the allusions to the writer's 'womanhood'. It reminded me of David Thomas, and his journey to 'womanhood' as recently related in the Telegraph, -is he there yet I wonder?
As far as I am concerned it's arrogant nonsense for a man to talk about discovering his inner 'womanhood', and I am tired of all these breathless, gushy 'coming out' stories which peddle such a delusion.

Thank you GrumpyGran8 for your pithy translation - it made me laugh out loud.

I wish I could ask Margaret Atwood for her view.

Can you imagine