Terry Pratchett - Twitter

[Baystard]

Terry Pratchett and Monstrous Regiment trending on twitter this morning, claims that GC community trying to posthumously recruit Sir Terry, and his daughter saying he would be appalled, etc.

As a Pratchett enthusiast I'm a bit lost. Some people are quoting about dwarves, but I thought in their culture it was unacceptable to be anything but male, and that Cherry was biologically female but repressed by culture into hiding it. I didn't interpret Pratchett as meaning that dwarves were all biologically male and that Cheery was trans. Have I missed something?

[quote MummBraTheEverLeaking]@NecessaryScene from what I've read on the thread so far, no she doesn't and she isn't interested either. Happy to accept the "a transphobe" definition which is lazy arsed BS but there you go 🤷‍♀️[/quote]
Just seen Emma Hilton deploy this meme effectively:

But to underline again, in the saddest voice I can express, because it still makes me sad - TERRY PRATCHETT IS DEAD.

This.
With the greatest sadness, he is dead. We don't know his thoughts on this. No one has the right to voice what his views were because he isn't here to voice them himself.

Gnu Terry Pratchett.

I think it's rather daft to take a work of fiction about creatures that don't actually exist and try to prove or disprove anything about trans issues in the real, modern world and what people, especially people who are no longer alive, might think about them. Seems a real storm in a teacup.

Also that Shaun guy you've quoted, Bunmei? His female work partner Jen cut ties with him as she was doing the vast majority of the research etc work for his shitty videos, but he of course was getting the bulk of the credit

The series is interesting. It's a while since I read the books and I'd forgotten Cheery's backstory and it isn't helped by Cheery in the series being human sized. But I think Cheery's backstory does come back into it and actually the character worked very well. I was initially a bit sniffy "typical, they've transed Cheery, way too miss the point" but I don't think they did.

As an aside, I really got into the series after the the first couple of episodes - you have to put aside some of the departures from the books. The only character I didn't think worked well was Anna Chancellor as the Patrician. She wasn't quite politely menacing enough for me.

I don’t think Sir Terry Pratchett would have been vocally in support of either side. He wasn’t one to stick his oar in on topics that didn’t impact him. Personally, I think he was gender critical in his work, and his portrayal of what makes us men, women or somewhere in between. Gender and gender identity is quite a prevalent theme in his works, along with a good dose of live and let live. But I don’t think it’s fair for any of us to try to say what he would have believed.

I don’t think Sir Terry Pratchett would have been vocally in support of either side.

I tend to agree. I think he'd have been somewhere in the Stephen Fry area - supporting JKR, not directly addressing the topic, but maybe saying broader things about people's behaviour.

As an aside, I am so disappointed in Neil Gaiman

I tried to like NG because he worked with the lovely Terry Pratchett. But I always found something cold, even cruel, in his writing. So his fashionable misogyny doesn’t really surprise me.

Well, fwiw, I still enjoy Pratchett, Fry and Gaiman, and JKR and all sorts of creators with whom I may or may not have agreed with when they were alive or not. Heck, when I fell in love with Good Omens I believed in a god.

This whole thing is an utter nonsense.

And you're just making up strawmen, trans people don't say you "must've been wrong in the wrong body" if you don't like dresses

Well dresses and combat trousers certainly figured high in mermaids 'education about gender'.

Not sure you've read all the memos bunmei.

I doubt that any of them understand or care what GC means. (Except for Laurie Penny who is just deliberately trying to smear Helen Joyce).

If you asked any of them whether they thought people should be confined to rigid gender identities they would probably say no, and if you asked them which sex couldn’t vote in 1917 they would say women and wouldn’t pretend that anyone was interested in their gender identity.

However, I think that lots of men just aren’t interested because they don’t think it affects them. They hear something about right wing Americans and loosely associate themselves with a tribe without really thinking about it.

To be fair lots of people have this approach to politics. It’s easier to pick a tribe than understand the ins and outs of a topic, particularly when it’s a bit uncomfortable and people are talking about things you don’t really understand.

And you're just making up strawmen, trans people don't say you "must've been wrong in the wrong body" if you don't like dresses.

Except this is often how parents with strict views on gender roles describe coming to terms with their child’s non conformity.

www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a43702/transgender-child-kimberly-shappley/

I don’t think every trans person believes this, but it is often used to justify treatment and surgery given to children, the theory being that life will not be worth living if they can’t create the appearance of being gender conforming.

Other people identify as trans but have completely different views on gender conformity.

The trans umbrella is very wide and also includes people who occasionally cross dress.

People on this board also have different views. The one thing we tend to agree on @is that sex has unavoidable consequences and is therefore relevant to women’s rights.

If you want to learn about the consequences of sex, you might like to look around the rest of the site.

Is deriding trans women as "men in dresses" (which is definitely used as a pejorative) and shaming them for expressing any joy in feminine expression how you express your "support" for people "wearing whatever they want"?

Joy in a flouncy dress? Cool, my youngest loved something floaty or glittery to twirl in. Telling people that that joy is part of being a woman or a girl? No, not so good.

My read is that TP was a great analyser and humourist, but was still a man raised in a patriarchal world. As much as all his female characters are great, they still reflect that, there is still a bit of 'other' to them compared to the male characters. And that's fine, and understandable, and I still love it all and his observations.

Also.. Nanny Ogg FTW.

twitter.com/tainkirrahe/status/1421387068131975170
How is "gender norms are stupid" NOT a Gender Critical position? All these people just showing they either don't understand what words mean, or they're willing to embrace cognitive dissonance rather than reassess their political position.

@Bunmei

Pratchett was humane, intelligent and intellectually curious so I doubt he'd have been as unquestioningly incurious

I don't think he'd have been obstinately incurious and inhumane towards trans people.

There's nothing intellectually curious about obsessively clinging to rigid gender binary, even if you call it "sex-based" instead.

This.

Also, if nothing else, surely we can agree his own daughter knew him and his views better than any of us, so it seems a bit weird to dispute her perspective (and a bit patronising to be like, poor dear must not understand what GC means - plenty of women are thoroughly aware what GC means and still don't agree with it).

Also, if nothing else, surely we can agree his own daughter knew him and his views better than any of us, so it seems a bit weird to dispute her perspective

We're not doubting she knows him.

We're doubting she knows us.

I don't think there's much point in anybody speculating what a deceased person may have thought about anything (that they didn't discuss when alive). We can't ever know so there's zero point having the argument.

That probably knocks out whole areas of academia, then.

No tras (or even mainstream progressive types) understand what the GC position is. They assume it is flat out bigotry and 'reinforcing the gender binary' because that's what their news sources tell them it is. I am a friend of a close friend of Terry Pratchett and the circles they move in are very much TWAW.

I'm coming at this from another direction. I think that he wasn't GC because I think he did think that women and men were fundamentally different, with occasional exceptions.

And to be honest, I think I might be a tad the same way. There's no way (for instance) that the fact that if I and a man bump uglies, only I have the risk of getting pregnant, can't affect my behaviour and how I think about sex. The fact that I grew the children inside me, I suspect, might make me susceptible to being a little more attached to them than someone who stood and watched it.

Life experiences as well as treatment affect our personalities. If that makes me not entirely GC then so be it.

If the trans ideologues can claim Pratchett's Cherry, and Joan of Arc, and Storme Delarverie, and every other gender-non-conforming woman as theirs, I have no difficulties claiming Pratchett as one of ours. His actions in the way he writes female characters and demolishes faith-woo, speak volumes louder than his daughter's "Ooooh dad would Be Kind".

No, I don't think Pratchett was 'Kind' in that sense. He was bitingly ascerbic about any kind of blind following of ideology or faith, and about narcissism. His heroes may not be Kind (Granny Weatherwax?) but they protect and support the vulnerable.

Sorry I'm lost.

There's bickering over what a man who is sadly no longer with us meant by the dwarves in his books that were written... Years ago...

What the hell? Why? Who started this utterly pointless argument?!

First appeared 1996 Google tells me.

He was actively commenting on trans issues 25 years ago?!

Come off it.

Is Angua trans-species, then?

She is genuinely non-binary. The binary being human/non-human. She doesn't change sex when she takes her werewolf form.

I reckon it's just trying to boost the unbelievably rubbish TV series on iplayer - which mis-reads every character, jumbles up every plot and is just honestly, terrible - and not even in a good way, just in a really awful way. Bad writing, no understanding of plot or character (let alone the actual plot or characters available).

I watched it, so you can watch the first 10 minutes and be confident that it doesn't get any better at all.

(Oh, and casting would have been GREATLY improved if they'd swapped the bloke playing Cheery with the woman playing Angua... not least because at least the the heights would have been more realistic)

@NiceGerbil

First appeared 1996 Google tells me.

He was actively commenting on trans issues 25 years ago?!

Come off it.

No, he was commenting on the fact that society constrains women and prevents them doing/accessing things that are seen as unfeminine.