Eddie Izzard...

[Mrsmorton]

Has announced new pronouns.

Again, apologies if this is being discussed already.

"They're not women's clothes, they're my clothes" seems to have been lost in the mists of time.

Interesting people bring up ‘1984’; ‘newspeak’ was an attempt to reduce language, literally to destroy words; “the destruction of language is beautiful” etc. This is the expansion of language, the invention of new ways of talking about things that were always there but which there were no words for. Now there are more words there are more ways to express things

No, Newspeak was all about perverting language for a political ideology. Changing the meaning of “she” to include people of the Male sex is very Newspeak.

It’s incredibly conservative and old-fashioned, and not at all the progressive idea you seem to think it is.

• sense of aggression, obv

It's a bit of a backwards step.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Eddie's quite involved in Labour Party politics, I believe. I wonder if the next step is to apply to go on an All Women's shortlist.

What is the latest re the AWS? Eddie wouldn't be the first to try that.

www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/23/leftist-women-uk-refuse-accept-labours-attempts-silence-critiques-gender-identity/

I’m so cross about Eddie. He was genuinely groundbreaking back in the 90s. How did that person effectively become so self absorbed he now doesn’t care about how he makes women and girls feel in their own spaces? Is the power of the fetish that strong to override all reasonable thought?

Is the power of the fetish that strong to override all reasonable thought?

I suspect that it's more likely the allure of validation.

That Glinner article is brilliant. This line nails it:

So, Eddie, don’t be so fucking stupid. You’re not a woman, you’re just a man with oddly low levels of empathy for the sex you’re appropriating

Quite. That article where Izzard is being critical of those teenage girls is an exercise in self-absorption. All he can see is his discomfort - he has no understanding for theirs, as girls, with a man acting oddly visiting multiple toilet stalls, and how they, as children tried to assert themselves, against a man they were clearly concerned by and ultimately ran away screaming from. It was all about his feelings and none about theirs. One of the most self-absorbed things I have ever read, especially when he has had an entire adulthood to reflect on it.

And case anyone missed it, in that memoir is Eddie failing to understand appropriate boundaries for women again, this time lesbians:
At the help group I had been talking to a young lesbian woman I liked and I had thought, Hey, can I have a relationship with a lesbian woman? Does that work?

And as Glinner also says, the only way women can tell the difference between nice men in their spaces and predatory ones is by being assaulted.

It's not exactly uncommon for middle-aged crossdressers to decide they are female,

On one of Grayson Perry's programmers he interviewed a group of cross-dressers who meet in up in a private house. He joked with them "what's the difference between a cross dresser and a transwoman?" "About 2 years".

Izzard has actually taken his time.

Ridiculous, of course. I can't understand why anyone would pretend a successful middle-aged man was a woman.

It feels like he's jumping on a bandwagon now when he used to be really different and interesting.

Eddie was far more interesting when Eddie knew the only thing clothes said about a person is that they like certain styles.

How dull and predictable that Eddie now believes in gender stereotypes, so regressive.

I also wonder about womens shortlists, eddie has already failed to be elected as a 'he'

Of the two high profile celebrities whose pronouns have recently been updated on wikipedia, only one will be able to benefit from male privilege.

@immortalstone

That Glinner article is brilliant. This line nails it:

So, Eddie, don’t be so fucking stupid. You’re not a woman, you’re just a man with oddly low levels of empathy for the sex you’re appropriating

Quite. That article where Izzard is being critical of those teenage girls is an exercise in self-absorption. All he can see is his discomfort - he has no understanding for theirs, as girls, with a man acting oddly visiting multiple toilet stalls, and how they, as children tried to assert themselves, against a man they were clearly concerned by and ultimately ran away screaming from. It was all about his feelings and none about theirs. One of the most self-absorbed things I have ever read, especially when he has had an entire adulthood to reflect on it.

And case anyone missed it, in that memoir is Eddie failing to understand appropriate boundaries for women again, this time lesbians:
At the help group I had been talking to a young lesbian woman I liked and I had thought, Hey, can I have a relationship with a lesbian woman? Does that work?

"At the help group I had been talking to a young lesbian woman I liked and I had thought, Hey, can I have a relationship with a lesbian woman? Does that work?"

Oh wow! Well this is telling.
His male privilege is screaming out in this little excerpt. He's thinking of ways he can force his way into an exclusively female domain because he can't stand the thought of not being centred in something.
He has no respect for women. Glinner has him nailed.

I can't understand why anyone would pretend a successful middle-aged man was a woman.

Yet if they claim to be a girl........I wish there was a way to supersize emoticons.

This is the expansion of language

Has the meaning of 'expansion' changed too? Does it now mean 'hide the fact that some males want to use the same spaces where teenage girls might be undressing'?

The glinner piece is excellent. I've really had enough of this now.

I also wonder about womens shortlists, eddie has already failed to be elected as a 'he'

I don't doubt it. Izzard's memoir shows a complete lack of respect for women or understanding of the lived experiences of women and girls. So I'm sure Izzard's a shoe in for the progressive left's understanding of what all women shortlists are for.

This is the expansion of language

Yes, the same sort of expansion of language that Britain used during the c19th when it used the word "liberty" to describe the benefits that it was bringing to its imperial subjects.

One form of colonisation looks very much like another, I find.

Invading women’s identity like this is appalling.

If I suddenly claimed to be black (I’m not) I’d be told to fuck off. And rightly so.

Why does Eddie’s insulting, patronising invasion of our identity as women get lauded instead? Why isn’t Eddie seen as a privileged, insulting invader who demeans what we are with this silly, self - indulgent pretence?

Female pronouns are earnt by being a woman. By growing up as a girl, with all that that entails. Men do not deserve them. They insult us & our lives by stealing them in this way. Eddie’s just another an insulting, privileged misogynist with too much time, who demeans us with this pretence.

And that dress? Jesus. It’s appalling.

Yeah, I lost all respect for Izzard when I read the part about using the women's toilets to change out of his dress and makeup and three teenage girls were in there. The tone off it gets my back up. Like the girls were in the wrong being in the women's toilet because they were smoking and bunking off school, but Izzard was justified using the ladies because Izzard only wanted to change clothes

Izzard can piss off with this bit. I think that was the first time I was overtly intimidated because of my sexuality.

You assume older people intimidate younger people, but those three thirteen-year-old girls had power over a twenty-three-year-old man.

Won't somebody think of all the poor male bodied people out there being intimidated by them nasty teenage girls in women's toilets.

www.vulture.com/2017/06/eddie-izzard-memoir-believe-me.html

"Action transvestite" was actually an expansion of language. "Woman" or "girl" is not.

Never mind that the specific point I was making about Orwellian language was the rewriting of history to comply with the present - and done so eagerly, too. As PPs have noted, Izzard's own website details, for example, "an account of his childhood in his own words", while random internet users are jumping onto Wikipedia to amend a biography so that it now refers to Izzard as female throughout - despite a public profile as a cross-dressing man.

The demand being made is not just 'please use these pronouns for me when speaking/writing about me in public', but 'please readjust your memories - every time you watched me perform as a cross-dressing man, a male lesbian, a bloke in makeup, terms I was using, you were wrong I was actually a woman'. This demand hasn't been made explicitly by Izzard but it has been made within a culture where keyboard warrior trans rights activists will enforce and police this.

Is there any other kind of personal rights issue that asks this much of other people - that demands they be so careful when discussing their own experience of something? (e.g. "I saw Eddie Izzard in that, he was great" is now misgendering and wrongthink)

This is the expansion of language, the invention of new ways of talking about things that were always there but which there were no words for. Now there are more words there are more ways to express things

Where is the expansion of language? This is about colonising language and identity which already exists to describe an existing group of people (women). Did you make the same argument about Rachel Dolezal? That she was 'expanding' what it meant to be black? Thought not.

And we did and do have words to describe those existing things - cross dresser/ transvestite/ transwoman. Why do you feel the need to pretend we didn't? If you feel they are not sufficient - create new words, don't take the identity and words of another group. That's colonisation and like all colonisation, it harms those being colonised.

You’re not a woman, you’re just a man with oddly low levels of empathy for the sex you’re appropriating

Good point from Glinner article, othering a group (women) off into fantasy land is fairly key component of being able to enjoy your mental image of yourself as a member of that group; because everyone really knows that fully human people can’t change sex. Reality can be a major buzzkill. So a high level of disregard for other humans is necessary to believe (or just argue it because it suits you) that humans can change sex.

Eddie Izzard or anyone else is absolutely free to invent and define new words for how they regard themselves, but as others have said the word woman is already taken and already has a clear definition. So it can’t be woman.

There’s also a dictionary word and definition for the phenomenon of biologically male people getting very focused in imagining themselves to be biologically female.. but from experience on here, we get deleted for writing about it and I don’t want the thread to be pulled.

I think that was the first time I was overtly intimidated because of my sexuality.

This is confusing - I thought gender identity and sexuality were supposed to be very much not the same thing?

Oh, Eddie. You utter, utter twonk.

It's always so disappointing when people one admired in one's youth turn out to be massive bellends.

This is the expansion of language, the invention of new ways of talking about things that were always there but which there were no words for.

On the contrary - we are losing the means to talk about ourselves as a distinct class, of which Eddie is not a member.

This is the expansion of language, the invention of new ways of talking about things that were always there but which there were no words for. Now there are more words there are more ways to express things

Rendering words such as 'woman', 'girl', and 'lesbian' functionally meaningless isn't an 'expansion of language', it's a degradation of it. There are new words available e.g. transwoman, transbian - by all means use those.