Dr James Barry was trans, apparently

[RoyalCorgi]

For a taste of woke stupidity in full flow, read this thread:

twitter.com/RTEOne/status/1228673565324505089

Lots of TRAs angry at a television channel referring to pioneering surgeon James Barry as a woman. Even though she was, you know, a woman.

There’s a Disney live action version of Mulan coming out next month. I think it’s inevitable there will be screams of transphobia about it.

Goddess, the comments on that Twitter thread!
'Dr Barry wanted to be remembered a man, had a famous temper and fought a duel with a guy who suggested he (she*) was unmanly. You're all very lucky that ghosts aren't real.'

Cos women can't have bad tempers or fight duels? We're all meek and sweet tempered, (yeah right.)

*Corrected it. Also if ghosts were real I'm sure Dr Barry would be able to tell her story, and upset the TRAs.

There's even a wokebro in that thread who claims that women dressing up as men to go into a profession, the army, etc. NEVER happened and it's all a Hollywood invention... excuse me I'm laughing so hard I'm choking!

Ah the National Velvet argument...

Cos women can't have bad tempers or fight duels? We're all meek and sweet tempered, (yeah right.)

They’ll be claiming Boudicca next on the basis that no female could lead an army. I’m getting really annoyed about this regressive, sexist attitude that any woman who steps outside the TRAs’ narrow concept of femininity is somehow “other”. Nope, just women getting stuff done in amongst all the patriarchal bullshit. More and more I think we need to challenge men to reimagine their own masculinity rather than constraining women.

There were women pirates and I’m sure they weren’t just cooking the tea.

Also the women who hooked up with daesh and became the ‘morals police’ were reputed to be absolutely hideously violent bastards.

Aw - I’ve just realised my niece must be trans then. She is a firefighter and is always running into burning buildings, cutting bodies out of cars, dangling off the side of cliffs on a rope to retrieve bodies... I must tell her wife...

I came up against this years ago. I'm a historian and it absolutely infuriates me - we have no way of knowing whether Barry "felt male", but what we do know is that the context within which Margaret Bulkeley chose to live as a man was so vastly different from that of transmen today as to make it an utterly meaningless statement to say "James Barry was trans". Something that gets talked about in academic history is "actor's categories", basically the idea that we should try to present past individuals as they were most likely to have understood themselves and their world, and not impose modern-day categories upon them. As others have said, saying that Bulkeley's main reason for living as a man was because she felt like a man completely disregards the fact that she HAD to in order to be a doctor. Better to say that she identified as a doctor rather than a man. 😉

And, of course, rather than being one of the first (?) qualified women doctors she becomes the first qualified trans doctor. Erasure of women's history indeed.

Oh how we laughed when the theory was proposed a few years back that Beethoven was black...

There were women pirates and I’m sure they weren’t just cooking the tea.

Indeed! I'm particularly fond of Gráinne Ní Mháille (sometimes anglicised as Grace O'Malley, but that's a poor translation and not what she called herself).

16th century pirate captain from the west of Ireland, but also educated Gaelic nobility and acknowledged leader of her people (over her brother), she married one husband to gain control of a strategic castle and then divorced him (as allowed under Gaelic law), and played some complex politics with Elizabeth I (they apparently got on quite well when they met even though Gráinne greeted her as a fellow queen). She led a fleet of ships as a privateer mainly on the Ireland-Spain route and regularly fought alongside her crew. Legend has it she gave birth to one of her sons on board ship, and had to fight shortly afterwards when rival Algerian pirates attacked (she and her crew won).

Contemporary English sources regularly disparaged Gráinne as unwomanly and passing on womanhood. No doubt the TRAs would be claiming her as a transman if she hadn't left written records describing herself as a woman and a mother...

I'm a big fan of Gráinne since I visited her homeland in County Mayo and read the biography by Anne Chambers. I always imagined she and Elizabeth I had an empathy with each other as powerful women in a patriarchal society.

See also Ching Shih, a 19th century Chinese woman who was perhaps the most successful pirate ever. She ruled her huge fleet with an iron hand, and retired as a rich woman. Notably her code of laws included the death penalty for rape.

I wonder if they'll ever get round to transing Magaret Thatcher?
After all, look at her life - she took a science subject at uni; as soon as she had produced the required heir-and-spare for her husband, she left the (messy, boring) childcare and housework to the staff and took up politics full-time; she took elecution lessons to make her voice sound more masculine; she was bossy, cunning and ambitious. Finally, just like a man, she was famously dismissive of feminism and claimed that any woman could make it to the top if she only worked hard enough!
So she had to be a man!

Thought I'd dig out this user name after reading above 😉

Grainne was a total badass. She breastfed her days (possibly hours) old baby during a battle. She and Elizabeth I spoke in Latin when they met as neither spoke the other's native language. She was an intelligent and cunning strategist with the heart of a lioness. She will not be transed.

Dr Barry was and incredible pioneer. And a woman.

Sorry MarDhea, I didn't read your post properly and realise I repeated the baby story.