Guardian interview with Juno Dawson

[RoyalCorgi]

The Guardian is once more peddling male fantasies of what a teenage girl is:

www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/11/juno-dawson-trans-alice-wonderland-interview-spice-girls

Dawson has written a novel based on Alice in Wonderland, but with a trans lead character:

'Wonderland is also a wake-up call to anyone who believes gender reassignment might be a happy-ever-after. Alice has recently returned to school after three months in hospital following a suicide attempt. “While I’m delighted with my perky little boobs,” she says, “I was profoundly disappointed that my urge to cut myself didn’t vanish with the first milligram of oestrogen to pass my lips.” Her problems, Dawson points out, are those of all too many young women. “When I’m at the Hay book festival or at Yale, these teenagers come into my signing queues and they are scarred. It must be talked about because it permanently affects girls.”'

Yes, teenage girls are really delighted with their perky little boobs, you misogynist little creep.

Monday the first review of that Alice book, “lost girls” is “intelligent pornographry”. whereas this Juno book is supposed to be “young adult fiction”!

Sorry, dunno what happened there.

Is it the complaint I've heard a number of times, that straight men will have ONS with TW but won't have any sort of relationship or be seen publicly with them? Because it doesn't appear that most young TW find it at all easy to meet sexual partners. Gay men prefer men, whereas straight men prefer women.

The interview is a depressing read. JD is writing about a trans fantasy of a teenage girl, presumably from the POV of the teenage boys who identify as girls from the group JD hangs out on. I agree with PP that knowing that JD used to be a teacher is discomforting. Even creepy.

Eventually my dad took all my Barbies away.

"Same thing happened to Paris Lees."

Some thing happened to Jackie Green.

I hated Barbie and gave the one I had, to my sister. I saved up and bought a train set. Does that mean I’m confused about who I am?

Awful. Not even technically proficient writing. Such a token book deal.

I do feel a genuine sense of conflicted sympathy for trans women who fit the narc profile. It’s such a huge upheaval of identity for someone that will never have enough extendable validation to be happy. It must be massively destabilising. (And yes, I know that given the narcissism, it will be other people that suffer the most for that)

*external - not extendable.

I genuinely hope Juno has a happy marriage. I just wish they would be a more self-aware about the sexism that underpins this ideology, and why it's not a good idea, in that case, to write for teenage girls.

(Also, if any boys/men are reading, please don't go 'pulling' on girls nipples (like udders?) for many women that will be painful and at certain times of the month excruciating and a very risky thing to do!)

Did any of the deleted posts contain the g-word?

If it's the word I'm thinking of, one of them said that and not much more. Interesting. Why would that word be banned on a forum aimed at parents?

Can someone say the word. I don't know what you're referring to.

G

testing - I think MN has to be cautious about any potentially defamatory content. We might not like it, but it's not unreasonable.

The issue I have with expicit YA content is the way it can be distributed privately away from parental control.
Nothing new there, but we do know boundaries are being pushed.

We really need to read this stuff to make an informed judgement on what is being introduced to young adults.
Much as I don't want to buy Dawsons book, I feel I should read it to understand what they are trying to put across. Its the same with Paris Lees book coming out soon.

Book club anyone?

There was period, maybe around the late 80s and early 90s, that a lot of popular adult market books had some pretty silly sexual content. It seemed like every publisher wanted writers to include two sex scenes.

I used to read a fair bit of the better YA stuff around that time because the stories were as good without the irrelevant and often poorly written sex scenes. It seemed to me as if the writers had more freedom to think about the stories without having to shoehorn in things to sex up the book.

It's almost reversed now - many adult books don't bother with gratuitous sex, and it seems like a large number of YA ones do. I've seen people, parents, librarians, writers, talk about how great this is. Apparently it is a good way for youth to learn about sex, and also to see their own lives mirrored in the books they read (though that seems like quite a stretch in most cases.)

I think it goes along with a more general trend in thinking about youth. And it's not that I think no sex would or should happen in stories directed to them - but this is pretty clearly to me more meant to be a type of pornography than an important story element.

I saw her give a talk a couple of years ago. The women before talked about their subject, the way middle aged women tend to give talks, then Juno came on, and it was like the whole modus operandi was that we find them attractive. It was like they'd learnt how to be a woman from Playboy. It pissed me off - not that they'd learnt how to be a woman from Playboy but that they seemed to think they were talking for all of us. They certainly weren't speaking for me.
They also have talked about how sex is different for them as a man and now as a woman - the crux seems to be that as a woman, you spend hours and hours getting yourself beautiful for it.

Gads. This is really creepy.

Shit - I never had barbies, and there was me thinking I was a woman. How wrong am I
You and me both. I had Lego and was into fixing stuff, must be a bloke I guess?

I had Lego and a sindy house, am I non binary

The issue I have with expicit YA content is the way it can be distributed privately away from parental control.

This. I have little objection to sex being dealt with in YA books. As someone said upthread, it can be a great way for young people to read about and get to grips with issues that affect them.
But there's a big difference between writing story-related sex and writing purposely explicit and over-the-top sexual content that relies on shock value (the tweedledum thread to the story seems to do that for example).
If it were just bad writing,that would be one thing but its YA. There are a lot of precocious young readers who'd use that as a stepping stone from middle grade to adult fiction. My DS is one and I would have been too. I started reading my first books from the adult section of the library at 12.
There may well be parents out there seeing the 'Y' of YA and thinking that means it's probably fine when its actually pretty explicit.

What it's like for a girl by Paris Lees.

It's just so completely desperate.

Well there you have it, right there.