Literal stage violence

[AvocadoBathroom]

twitter.com/TheStage/status/1385194695274418181?s=20

"What you do when you cast a cis man – put him in a dress, and label him as trans – is you let violence happen to a transgender woman in the future. A member of your audience will see a man in a dress, read your programme, and will think: ‘Haha, that’s a man in a dress’, and you are allowing that violence."

If this is the case then drag is transphobic right unless it's a trans person dressing up as the opposite sex? And so are pantomime dames? Someone needs to complain asap to Drag Race and get that show canceled immediately because for years it has cis men dressing as women for the entertainment and laughs. Some of those men will be gay but they MUST say they are women now or they shouldn't be allowed to dress as women for cheap laughs and fabulous Mac makeup?

[AllThatisSolid]

As a famous director once said to me:

"It's called acting love"

[IvyTwines2]

It's money-saving, isn't it? Education is now a business and books take up space and care and require qualified librarians. And city libraries are junking thousands of books to make way for more lucrative cafe spaces and huge glassy atriums full of sweet FA. Now, on ebay, I'm buying what were once expensive, primary texts for buttons and many are 'withdrawn for sale' from city or university libraries. Reading a book, even a full text, online does not give you the same level of interaction as having a book in your hand, making notes, flipping back and forth, bookmarking pages.

[SmokedDuck]

The university professors I know struggle to get their students to read too, and even the younger faculty.

Something I've noticed a few times over the past ten years or so though is the claim that students should not ever have lecture type classes, these are too boring and are an inefficient way to give information, and too difficult to pay attention to for an hour or two.

Which to me suggests a complete misunderstanding of why the lecture has been a primary element of higher education as long as i has existed. It's not meant to be efficient, and it isn't meant to be easy to pay attention to - any more than many books are meant to be easy or entertaining to read.

The medium isn't an accident, it's a feature.

[ArcheryAnnie]

@cakedays

yy absolutely, SmokedDuck. I teach university students and one said to me that she wanted to write on feminism but didn't want to read any of that "transphobic" old feminism; only "modern" feminism. So I said, okay, what modern feminist writers have you been reading or are interested to read?

I shit you not, her reply was "well I think video essays are the form of the future, so I don't read books, but I've seen a lot of youtube videos."
[My literal face: ]

FFS when I was young we were happy to read any old shit on the internet in our spare time too, but we would have been fucking embarassed to actually say out loud to our lecturers that it was just the same as reading some actual books.

Jesus fucking christ. The idea that your argument will be improved if you have no idea what the opposition is saying, or have knowledge of any history at all - it's embarrassing for her that she'd think that.

[HopeClearwater]

@WoolOfBat Thoughts? Well, first, 9 year olds’ brains don’t need to be bothered by such considerations. Second, it’s reflexive, not reflective, so don’t go teaching her the wrong stuff.

Generally, though- what a pile of shite it all is...

[WarriorN]

I wonder if we have the first generation who copied and pasted from the Internet for the first few years of secondary school, possibly through to alevel too, and therefore have no critical thinking skills? Before teacher tech got savvy.

[peacefulVistas]

So it makes sense that it doesn't occur to them to read a book with a sustained or complex argument, or significant amounts of information

I have a suspicion that the nature of computing devices and the way the information is presented has a large impact.
The following is very much half baked musings that def need more work and research, but I do think there's something there

When we read a book, there's a a physical element and we can connect our understanding to both time and space

Reading from a screen removes the space (physical object and location) element.
Everything occurs in the same place with no external references to help us fix memories - it all blurs

Which is definitely not helped by the light of screens either, in that the eyes have to have a far more active role in mediating the message

(and to prevent further derailing I won't even start on how I belive that the horrendous behaviour we see online is also a function of communicating through these devices!!)

[cakedays]

yy absolutely, SmokedDuck. I teach university students and one said to me that she wanted to write on feminism but didn't want to read any of that "transphobic" old feminism; only "modern" feminism. So I said, okay, what modern feminist writers have you been reading or are interested to read?

I shit you not, her reply was "well I think video essays are the form of the future, so I don't read books, but I've seen a lot of youtube videos."
[My literal face: ]

FFS when I was young we were happy to read any old shit on the internet in our spare time too, but we would have been fucking embarassed to actually say out loud to our lecturers that it was just the same as reading some actual books.

[SmokedDuck]

@peacefulVistas

having mostly read them online rather than in any actual books, and certainly not have actually read any of the actual writings

I find this particular aspect of modern discourse heartbreaking
Every source imaginable is now just a few key presses away, there's just no excuse.
There's barely the need to have to physically sit in libraries anymore, waiting months for the inter-libray loan to arrive for that one thing you desperately need.
But we've ended up with sloppy thought and increasingly distorted messaging

Perhaps this is an aside, but I think an important one.

I've discovered that increasingly, school libraries don't have many books, and students are not expected to do research using books, they are expected to search the internet. The expectation of reading whole books is even far less in classes about literature, with the reading level below what it was, reading excepts, using audiobooks, and reading far fewer books in the course of a year.

They also tend not to have classes with anything resebling a lecture type lesson.

So it makes sense that it doesn't occur to them to read a book with a sustained or complex argument, or significant amounts of information. They often have little experience of what a sustained argument really is.

There is a reason young people are so vulnerable to bad ideas.

[ArcheryAnnie]

Purgatory that's priceless!

[WarriorN]

So much fucking drama.

[WarriorN]

What's with the threat at the end?

So many 'threats' involved in gender stuff, all the time. How do they think this is acceptable?

[WarriorN]

Christ, did these kids even do any Shakespeare at school?

Don't they get that young boys played girls and girls play Peter Pan and Shakespeare himself had all sorts of characters swapping costumes and sex.

It's acting ffs.

[FrankButchersDickieBow]

But Eddie Izzard who has pronouns she and her, will make his money by solely acting in boy mode. The roles he play, as far as I am aware, are cis men.

By their reckoning, EI should be banned from playing cis men and should only be able to play transgender roles?

[IvyTwines2]

@cakedays

Purgatory that is truly dotty. But of course when the "cis" people do do what they're told with all this convoluted and contradictory batshittery, and it produces effects no-one foresaw, then there's the inevitable chorus of "well I told you to do X, but it wasn't REALLY what I MEANT...."

Well if that 'cis' person had gone ahead and cast a 'non binary' as 'trans', the actor would probably have ended up facing a barrage of online hate and the 'cancellation' by Tabby and co. of whatever show they were in, so it's a lucky escape really.

[Ereshkigalangcleg]

But aren't trans men men? So how would a non binary person be able to play a man?

[cakedays]

Purgatory that is truly dotty. But of course when the "cis" people do do what they're told with all this convoluted and contradictory batshittery, and it produces effects no-one foresaw, then there's the inevitable chorus of "well I told you to do X, but it wasn't REALLY what I MEANT...."

[PurgatoryOfPotholes]

Casting seems to have become really difficult.

Quote from an actor's twitter thread this week:

found out I got declined to audition for a trans guy role bc my bio says "nonbinary" and I know we're allll trying to figure out how to cast trans roles respectfully but becoming so rigid that trans ppl LOSE opportunities is not it

[IvyTwines2]

Bit rich for a group who support an ideology that is currently rendering hundreds of neurodiverse young people infertile to talk about eugenics.

[DdraigGoch]

@EmbarrassingAdmissions

They mean that not respecting someone's gender identity inside your own head is metaphorical violence,

I've never found it (possibly a deletion) but 2 to 3 years ago there was a thread about diversity training (possibly recorded or reported by someone) with some interesting observations by the trainer. The trainer claimed to be able to detect when people might be using the 'right words' and respecting pronouns etc. but still enacting violence through wrong think inside their heads.

Presumably the eye-rolls give it away.

[terryleather]

Yet another power-play, this time of the "if you don't give me career ops, I will have a major tantrum and it will be literal violence because narcissism reasons."
Tiresome.

[DdraigGoch]

violence
/ˈvʌɪəl(ə)ns/
noun
behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

literal
/ˈlɪt(ə)r(ə)l/
adjective
taking words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or exaggeration.

How laughing at Christopher Biggins playing Widow Twankey constitutes "literal violence" is beyond me.

[peacefulVistas]

having mostly read them online rather than in any actual books, and certainly not have actually read any of the actual writings

I find this particular aspect of modern discourse heartbreaking
Every source imaginable is now just a few key presses away, there's just no excuse.
There's barely the need to have to physically sit in libraries anymore, waiting months for the inter-libray loan to arrive for that one thing you desperately need.
But we've ended up with sloppy thought and increasingly distorted messaging

[cakedays]

@peacefulVistas

Instead of the historical and well documented gender identities that pre-date notions of binary gender invented in the 19th century by white eugenicists

This particular line fascinates me.
It seems to be suggesting that the tying of gender to sexual dimorphism is a relatively new phenomena and prior to C19, people had a variety of established gender identities to choose from?
And these are well documented ?

Perhaps the scope of the statement is limited to the Theatre world though.
Which inherent in it's very nature is the dressing up and inhabiting lifes that are not ones own
And this along with the various prohibitions on the sex of actors through time has led to an accepted blurring of traditional gender roles for stage folk.

But I'd love an explanation from someone who understands what they mean

No, its all complete bollocks and completely confused.

As I said upthread, it was actually the white (genuinely eugenicist) sexologists of the late 19thc. and early 20thc. who were the main proponents of early varieties of gender identity theories like "inversion" (a proto-trans load of gobbledegook which claimed that homosexual people had been born with the souls of the other gender/sex).

Inversion theory was rightly dumped by later gay and lesbian activists and theories, but it's one of the main antecedents of gender ideology. Gender identity ideologues typically have a very confused sense of the history of these ideas (having mostly read them online rather than in any actual books, and certainly not have actually read any of the actual writings). So they do come out with some rubbish.

[BraveBananaBadge]

Elsewhere in the letter they say something along the lines of 'casting someone trans after being called out for transphobia is just optics', which somewhat suggests there's no good faith way of improving things to them save handing everything over to their minority of a minority group, which is untenable really. I don't see how this is helping to find the middle ground.

Also blaming 'white eugenicists' for the existence of a gender binary which didn't exist before (as is well documented!) is just setting up a handy way of being able to shut down anyone calling them out by accusing them of being racist on top of everything else, surely.

To be honest I understand the frustration in the letter about having given their time and experience at the R&D stage only for it to go no further. It can't be nice and it must take its toll, but it happens all the time in the industry and I hope these silly bullying tactics get the short shrift they deserve.