Truly brave and stunning piece by Sarah Phillimore: What My Artificial Leg Taught Me About Artiface

[GrinitchSpinach]

Brava, Spero! You have been and continue to be such an important, expert voice challenging gender identity ideology in the law.

This is going much further into the personal nature of your own challenges, and it’s something none of us could ask of you to share, but you did. Actual fucking stunning courage there.

My lack of leg does not prove that humans exist on some exciting spectrum of available legs. We are a bi-ped species. Any deviation from that does not disprove the binary — it is defined by reference to it.

medium.com/@SVPhillimore/what-my-artifical-leg-taught-me-about-artifice-a64ca6f3b658

Oh god so embarrassed about typo in title, but unable to edit.

The always brilliant Spero

THIS is what should be taught in schools to children.

THIS is about accepting difference. We are all different.

Excellent and thoughtful piece

@Spero Thank you for all your hard work. Much appreciated!

I think it's a great article but one where the TRAs will just respond with the standard rejection around it not being the same thing.

I've just been reading some tweets by a guy on Twitter who calls himself a real feminist and makes scathing and mocking comments about GC women, telling them to get back to MN. He is the type that refuses to entertain the kind of argument put forward in the article. So busy pushing for the rights of trans women he is blind to the needs and rights of females.

Fantastic article.

Great article

What a lovely article. Thank you Spero

Nail. Head.

That’s a great piece of writing.

Brava Spero as brilliantly clear and incisive as always

Oh I love that @Spero. Thank you.

"But what needs to change is rarely your body — because it rarely can. What needs to change is your ability to love and accept yourself, to look those who judge you unfairly straight in the eye and say ‘fuck you’."

❤️

Sarah, I salute you. For everything.

This is exactly what should be taught in schools.

Absolutely brilliant article, thank you for sharing!

Brava Sarah. I'm so glad she added the postscript, it's my favourite part of the article.

Thank you very much @GrinitchSpinach for posting and everyone else for their kind comments.

I was asked to comment on the Alex Sharpe article and I thought it was really important to set out where I am coming from. This whole 'debate' has become so personal - and deliberately so I think, to make us 'feel bad' about challenging someone's personal pain.

But to tell anyone that the answer to any unhappiness or shame that they feel is to attempt to change their body, to make their identity dependent upon what they can get other people to accept is such a stupid, damaging thing to do. That we are teaching this to our children, as young as four years old, makes me despair.

What I NEEDED as a teenager, so desperately, was for someone to sit with me and discuss the reality of my life. That I would always need a prosthetic, that yes, it would limit what I could do and yes, some people would be unkind to me because of it. But. having come to terms with that I could then have directed my energies into living the life I have not the life I wished I could have.

What I see now in the whole trans debate is some kind of mass scale delusion. That the way to deal with the sadness and confusion of some teenagers or the unexpressed sexual fetish of some older men, is to attempt to shape the whole world to accommodate them or to mutilate their bodies to support a fantasy.

I think this is wrong and hurtful, to so many on so many levels and I will never grow tired of saying so.

And PS don't worry about the typo. I once made the infamous 'pubic' typo when I meant 'public' with hilarious (for other people) consequences.

But to tell anyone that the answer to any unhappiness or shame that they feel is to attempt to change their body, to make their identity dependent upon what they can get other people to accept is such a stupid, damaging thing to do. That we are teaching this to our children, as young as four years old, makes me despair.

Spero Ive just read your article. Thank you, its so important.

That is a really great article. Thanks for being willing to share such deeply personal issues.

Absolutely agree with coming to terms with reality and our limitations and learning to value and accept and love our bodies as they are.

Thank you

I am not suggesting that we never do things to make our bodies the best they can be - eating well, exercise, get enough sleep etc! taking pride in our appearance, buying nice clothes etc.

But what I think is really important is to not let our sense of self be determined by what other people think, and to waste our time trying to conform to the image that we think will please them.

this to me explains much of the really deep rooted anger of some in the TRA movement - without other people affirming them, they feel lost.

without other people affirming them, they feel lost.

I can't think of any other situation in which it would be regarded as a positive thing (mental health or anything else) to rely wholly on the affirmation and approval of others for a sense of self.

It embeds vulnerability and helplessness while removing all taking of responsibility for one's own feelings and actions. It's fundamentally unhealthy. Not to mention wholly unrealistic as it is impossible to control the perceptions and reactions of others to maintain uninterrupted affirmation. And a warped perception of other people as independent thinking beings as opposed to service providers.

Wonderful article Spero, I hope it gets shared far and wide.

Once we learn to accept the reality of things we can't change, we can focus of making the most of all the things we have.

It embeds vulnerability and helplessness while removing all taking of responsibility for one's own feelings and actions. It's fundamentally unhealthy. Not to mention wholly unrealistic as it is impossible to control the perceptions and reactions of others to maintain uninterrupted affirmation. And a warped perception of other people as independent thinking beings as opposed to service providers.

I wish I could have had this guidance as a teenager and 20 something. It may be of course that I would have been just too overwhelmed by the desire to 'fit in' to listen, but something may have sunk in which could have made my road to enlightenment less rocky and certainly a lot shorter!

The advice to 'be the person you needed when you were younger' is so spot on I think.

Oh, so glad you stopped by, Spero! Any chance you'll be doing another Fair Cop podcast soon? You were so wonderfully clear on the earlier one.

All digits crossed for success in Harry's case...the wait for a decision must be driving everyone bonkers!

without other people affirming them, they feel lost

It doesn't help that the therapists they see tell them that this is what they need for their cure. I think that is sometimes why they enter into a blind panic and lash out when someone "misgenders" them.

Lovely article Spero, thanks.

This is an utterly brilliant article.

Children have so much pressure on them for the way they look. I'm trying to help my daughter appreciate her body for what it can do, not what it can't, or focussing on how it doesn't 'fit' the media image of beauty -but it's really hard to push back against so much negative messaging for girls.

I think articles like this are so important even beyond the trans debate. Yes, we can do things to make our bodies the best they can be, but we can't change them entirely they are still uniquely our physical reality. It's all about loving yourself for who you are really.

Miranda Yardley once said something along the lines of it's not really a friendly thing to lie to people - and the whole trans ideology relies on forcing people to lie to you all the time. Against their will. Against the biological instinct that has been honed by millennia of evolution and is so ingrained even other species can tell human sexes apart. It's doomed to failure for this reason, eventually. The question is how many lives will be ruined, how many children sterilised, and how far back gay and women's rights will be rolled before everyone comes to their senses.