Years and Years - some light relief

[MermaidUnicorn]

Not only is it a fantastic TV series, it's also addressing the trans kids issue in an excellent way - one of Rosie's sons likes wearing dresses and pigtails, but it's made VERY clear that he's a boy: "your brother", "good boy" etc etc. Really nice to find gender non-conformity being addressed in a sensible way.

Wasn't sure whether to watch this or not.

I struggle with dystopian type stuff. I can find it quite disturbing and it plays on my mind.

Still trying to build up to watching Season 2 of Handmaid's Tale.

I was waiting for this

It was an excellent series, although gave me the chills.

Dr Harrop was moaning about the first episode. Because he's a dick. Anything he doesn't like is ok with me

But have the TRA been attacking Russel T Davies for "misgendering" ? After the flack the guy who wrote My Brother's Name is Jessica got for misgendering- I'm surprised Russel's not being hounded out of the BBC.

YES that struck me. Especially in the last episode where he was extremely feminised with a dress and I think breasts and was still called Lincoln.

Yes I'm the same Popchyk - I don't normally watch this kind of thing, but I really like Russell T Davies and a lot of the cast. There is a very upsetting scene in episode 4 I think, so you may want to give it a miss.

I was a bit confused by the Lincoln storyline (although it wasn't strictly a storyline he was mostly just there in the background).

He started off presenting as male until his environmental activist Aunt dressed him as girl to sneak into a bring your daughters to work day for a bit of espionage. After that he just kept the ribbons and the dresses but it wasn't specifically addressed whether he identified as trans.

It was positive in one sense that boys can wear dresses and ribbons and still use male pronouns etc... but the starting point with the Aunt made it seem forced. I was slightly confused as to what point was trying to be made.

I love dystopia (though this one actually gave me nightmares) and I generally liked RTD and think he's pretty sane. I choose to interpret the fact that he had a major storyline about 'transhumans' (eg. people who want to become digitised and identify as part digital) as him gently parodying the current identity politics mess (NOT just the gender id thing but all of it) - but who knows?

Having said that, I thought the Lincoln storyline was a bit 'let's have one character in this that could be described as trans' - but as OP has said, he's not defined as trans or as female. He just wears what he likes. Fine.

So the possible 'top surgery' in the final episode really threw me.

However, I don't think it was a huge part of the series. I think RTD was trying to tick some inclusion boxes, show how this sort of thing will be perfectly accepted (even by nonagenarians apparently) in another decade. Fairly predictable. But I enjoyed the series as a whole and I didn't find it detracted.

Yes, it was clear that there was no issue referring to Lincoln as a boy whilst Lincoln presented as a girl. Perhaps the message is that when the shit really hits the fan the nonsense of pronouns and caring about what people wear is not a real issue.

Yes, I noticed that they referred to Lincoln as 'he'

What I did notice was when Bethany was going through her experience with the cowboy operators when her friend's eye transplant went wrong they mentioned similar cowboy operations taking place in the 2000s with transgenderism and something else similar taking place in the 1990s.

I can't remember exactly what they said but it hinted at fads and carelessness with people cashing in on them

So the programme is suggesting that in the future people might be able to present however they want, but they still won't be able to change sex. Have the genderists been complaining how regressive this is yet?

Yes I noticed that too Hulo. The nurse said in the 90s it was facelifts, in the 2000s it was sex changes, then it was transhumans. The implication being they were all fads and she was angry about the damage they caused.

Yes, I noticed that Hulo.

In the final episode Lincoln as an adult is presented by the BBC very good looking/petite/reserved/sweet/gentle/

Not sure if he did self ID as female, but this is not like the majority of hairy, bearded TRAs we see on Twitter.
Instead, presented differently so you know, women have nothing to fear about accepting males in our spaces.

He’s 15 at the end though? So not likely to look like a hairy bearded TRA...

True...maybe I'm just cynical but it was no coincidence they chose a beautiful person for the role.

Is he only 15? I kept seeing the counter going up on Years and Years and felt like we'd gone further. Gran was doing very well!

I guess if language has to change it makes more sense for names to become genderless than words like 'women' become meaningless.

Subtle GC point made in the last episode. Ribbons in hair, wearing a dress, referred to as 'he', not a problem which as it should be.

I’ve not been watching this, but yesterday evening a gay man I know wrote a cryptic status on Facebook saying something like ‘the matriarch made an important statement and I agree whole heartedly.’ He’s not usually so vague, quite the opposite in fact, so I did wonder whether it might be related to the subject of which we are not permitted to speak openly. Do you think this could be the subject of his unusually cryptic post?

I only watched the last two episodes, but I’m going to watch from the start. I really enjoyed it. I was a bit puzzled because the gran called him he, but then realised that it actually made sense, that ideas of what it takes to be a man or woman will change in the future. Everyone accepting non conformity makes more sense that people in the future being told they’re in the wrong body. I thought it was a very subtle way of putting it across. He may have wore the clothes, but still looked like a young boy, which was good.

I have to confess that I haven't watched all of the last episode yet, so was unaware of possible 'top surgery' I don't think that will spoil my enjoyment. It was just so nice seeing a boy playing dress up without any comment that he must actually be a girl.

Light relief?? You must be made of sterner stuff than me! I've watched four episodes and have found it way too close to the bone and heartbreaking.

When they say "remember in the 90s/2000s we used to complain the news was boring? We didn't realise how lucky we were." Horribly true.

If I had to guess at the relevance of the happily non conforming boy, I'd say its to show how that kind of worry about clothes/presentation isn't really a big deal compared to all the stuff happening while we look the other way/ naval gaze.

I really enjoyed the series. I loved the fact that they addressed transhumanism, because I see this as the number one threat to humanity and it has concerned me for some time. They did tend to shine a fairly positive light on it overall and especially in the last episode, which I don't agree with, but I am glad it was addressed. It's a topic we should all be very concerned about.

The transsexual debate has never interested me at all. I don't think it's important in the grand scheme of things. I think it has deliberately been placed in the public arena as a decoy. Glad this series only paid it lip service.

I loved Gran. She said a lot of things I often say.

I have to gird my loins to watch Years and Years (I'm a couple of epis behind), because the dystopian thing is sooooo close to the reality now. Which is the point.

And yes, they deal beautifully with a boy who likes to wear dresses, and the earlier episode with the daughter who wants to be transhuman showed just how risky permanent body modifications could be.

But I can't help feeling the populist politics is awfully like the earlier BBC series with Helen McCrory Mother Father Son (thinly disguised roman a clef about Rupert Murdoch, I thought), in which Sarah Lancaster played another straight-talking politician who basically took the vote away from everyone.

These series are scary, they're so close to what we're living through. I wonder if this is what it was like to live in Europe in the 1930s?

I'm obsessively watching reruns of Poirot and Miss Marple at the moment.

Oh, and after the first epi of the first series of The Handmaid's Tale, I decided I had better things to do with my time than watch the dehumanisation of women, and violence against women, even in a fiction which purports to be critical of such things. I think sometimes there's a fine line between criticism and complicity and Handmaid's Tale (the television adaptation) crossed it for me.

No problems with the book - but the book makes it clear that women get away from Gilead, and write from a place of safety and freedom (Canada). The novel is founded on hope, and told backwards.

I never used to be this squeamish, but maybe a lifetime of seeing women represented as slightly less than fully human is taking its toll.

@GlomOfNit Fancy a bit of now historical dystopia?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/streamed_tv/3567778-BBC-1977-78-dystopian-drama-1990-1984-SIX-Written-by-Wilfred-Greatorexx