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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Terry Pratchett - Twitter

222 replies

Baystard · 31/07/2021 12:45

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?

OP posts:
ScreamingMeMe · 01/08/2021 08:14

Yep, TRAs were calling the alr right protesters at WiSpa "gender critical", and the trans actor from Hollyoaks said that her character was beaten up in prison by "GCs".

It's the latest attempt to paint us as "transphobic bigots" rather than, you know...critical of gender.

rabbitwoman · 01/08/2021 08:46

...... Whatever his views might have been had he been alive to see 2021, Terry's aim in writing books was to entertain. Make them funny - thought provoking, poignant, bathetic, inspiring, some social commentary, yes, but overall, funny. Funny situations - cheery, a traditional hairy dwarf, wearing lipstick. Funny.

His strong and charismatic female protagonists - notably nanny ogg - hilarious. Granny weatherwax's withering put downs. The visual comedy of a huge and powerful presence like Sybil marrying a small man like vimes - funny imagery, comedy from awkward situations.

And another iconic comedy writer who IS alive today, Graham linehan, has said its IMPOSSIBLE to write comedy in the current climate. Comedy like this, anyway.

Apparently he is right.

And dads don't always align with their daughter's views - Jonathan Ross..... And the poor man in prison in Canada for not using his child's preferred pronouns..... But no one can know what Terry would have thought because he's not around to ask.

He was brilliant, I am a huge fan ( and am loving all the resurgence of discworld discourse since The Watch) but ultimately he wrote books with the main objective of being funny.

He did that very well.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 01/08/2021 08:57

I think "a GC" is like "pin number", i.e. personal identification number... number. Grin

A GC? A what? A gender-critical? No-one says that. A gender critic? No-one says that! Gender critical is an adjective. Not the end of the world, any more than "pin number" is, but it's a language development that is mildly vexing/entertaining, depending on your frame of mind.

One of the things I liked about Pratchett is that he takes aim at people being assumed to be good people because they are also oppressed minorities. In one book, Vimes is explicitly told that he must allow them to be complete people, his equal in every way, including the capacity to be absolute bastards.

Blibbyblobby · 01/08/2021 09:21

the TRA echo-chamber has redefined gender critical as "transphobic and in favour of rigid sex-based gender roles". You couldn't make it up, except that they did.

So of course STP would not be gender critical by that warped definition.

One thing I do know for sure is that the man who wrote Small Gods would not be ok with the gaslighting, cancelling, pile-ons and DARVO of the modern TRA movement.

merrymouse · 01/08/2021 09:28

A GC? A what? A gender-critical? No-one says that. A gender critic? No-one says that! Gender critical is an adjective. Not the end of the world, any more than "pin number" is, but it's a language development that is mildly vexing/entertaining, depending on your frame of mind.

I think it’s worse than than that. There is a deliberate attempt to obscure what ‘gender critical’ means and widen its meaning to cover a range of beliefs that are sometimes the opposite of gender critical.

The goal is to take the debate away from discussion of real issues and instead just use ad hominem attacks.

I can’t help thinking that if there was interest in any of the issues discussed the standard of debate not just from ‘ploppers’ but in the Guardian and political parties would be higher. I keep thinking about that IOC official talking about inclusivity without appearing to register that trans men exist.

IvyTwines2 · 01/08/2021 09:44

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

LadyVymes, take heart. The most vocal on Twitter on this issue seem to me to be very young or at any rate lacking in life experiences. They are convinced that gender critical is a synonym for transphobic. They have swallowed whole the idea that gender matters and sex doesn't and anyway sex is a spectrum and who knows what sex they are? In most cases they will eventually learn, possibly as a result of having a child. Tiresome for now, though.
@LadyVymes as another comment points out, Jonathan Ross and his daughters don't agree on this issue. Someone who is a fully grown adult with decades of life experience, lived through the AIDS and Section 28 eras and knew what the world was like before the internet and social media and selfie-culture has a different outlook on the world than their relatively inexperienced children. I'm middle-aged now and I cringe at some of the things I fervently believed right into my 30s.

Pratchett died in 2015, before Stonewall became a Trans Rights organisation and before the definition of trans and then of women had expanded to include fully male bodied, male-presenting, bearded self-ID-ers, sissy-porn writers and has (shall we say) other groups pushing in at the fringes. He didn't live to see choking and other forms of violence and misogynistic degradation become normalised to teenagers as sex acts, or the thousands-per-cent rise in teenage girls trying to identify out of femaleness, or little girls who like active play and dinosaurs being told that means they're really boys, or little boys who like Frozen being told that means they're really girls. He didn't see the loss of female-only safe spaces, mixed sex toilets, even naked spas. He didn't see rushed affirmation replace watchful waiting for children, or the thousands of crowdfunders by young women to 'delete the teets'. He didn't see organisations rename women as a mechanical bunch of body parts, 'woman' and 'homosexual' become taboo terms, and the attempts to remove sex as a protected characteristic, even a category at all. He didn't see the blanket of silence from the mainstream TV channels on an issue that is making so many families, especially with daughters, distraught, or the lies and cheerleading from the once reputable broadsheets on the Left, the deletions of female accounts on Twitter and Reddit, female university lecturers and MPs needing security protection, or the normalisation of death and rape threats as a form of discourse towards women online.

This and so much more. If you took many of this year's trans-and-gender-ideology-related news stories back in time to 2015 or 2010 people would think you were showing them pages from something like Black Mirror: they wouldn't think it was something mainstream society was nodding along to.

No, we can't actually know what Pratchett would have thought of it all, but I can't imagine he'd have sat there like the meme dog in the house on fire saying 'this is fine'.

Coconutmeg · 01/08/2021 11:02

IvyTwines2 Great post!

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 01/08/2021 11:05

What a good post, Ivy.

Coconutmeg · 01/08/2021 11:05

Reading the Atwooding hobbydrama online is so disappointing

Ratonastick · 01/08/2021 11:16

IvyTwines2. You took the words right out of my mouth. Terry Pratchett lived and wrote before the current Trans Rights agenda existed. I sometimes forget that this whole furore is only 5 years or so old. His work exists in a world where TWAW etc was unheard of. Retrospectively transing characters or trying to apply a TRA lens to his work is as pointless as transing Joan of Arc. In my view it is part of the wider attempt to pretend the current perception of trans identity is a widely prevalent historical phenomenon and therefore more valid.

On his daughter, I really feel for her. So many people try and co-opt her Dad or take some kind of ownership over him for a whole variety of reasons. I think she has just lashed out with a fairly unconsidered “No my Dad was nice and kind” to get everyone to back the fuck off rather than a thought through analysis of GC vs TRA positions.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Bargainchunter · 01/08/2021 11:23

I don’t comment here much, but being such a huge Pratchett fan, this co-opting of the stories has left me dumbfounded. I’d like to suggest that Granny Weatherwax’s first sight (seeing what is really there, not what you’re expecting to see) and second thoughts (questioning why you’re thinking what you are) goes against the ‘be kind’ and TWAW mantras so often thrown this way.

Waitwhat23 · 01/08/2021 11:31

In my view it is part of the wider attempt to pretend the current perception of trans identity is a widely prevalent historical phenomenon and therefore more valid.

I would add that it's also an attempt to minimise women's oppression due to their sex (historically and currently) to paint women as the oppressors.

rabbitwoman · 01/08/2021 11:32

Granny weather wax would never wheesht

rabbitwoman · 01/08/2021 11:33

Nanny ogg would probably have a trans grandson by now, be cool with it but not take any nonsense.....

rabbitwoman · 01/08/2021 11:35

Reg shoe would be full on TRA, coopting cheery's struggles and all the while cheery would be saying 'I am not even trans. I just want to pee.'

SnoopyLights · 01/08/2021 11:35

@WineAcademy

I'm a casual TP fan, so can't comment too much on characters or plot, but I do find it fascinating that the language around these issues has morphed and changed (again) to the point of obfuscating the obvious. (Perhaps TP would have been interested, too)

"GC" stands for Gender Critical but it now seems synonymous with "terf" and has lost all meaning.

It also interests me that people are saying things like "she's a GC" which also makes it seem synonymous with an insult rather than as a description of specific points of view.

Language is interesting.

It is interesting, and very strange.

I am in my mid-forties now. I would have said that all my life I have been accepting of other people and dismissive of gender stereotypes.

As a child I was probably described as a tomboy but I think I was a fairly typical example of any child who is just left alone to get on with what they like and enjoy without being told "but that's for boys and this is for girls" and even before I had the words to describe how I felt about stereotypes, I think I might have come up with "stupid" as the best way to describe them. My best male friend would come to my house and we would go from playing with Lego to playing with the Sindy house, to prancing around in a conga line of two singing the "somebody at the door" song from the Pink Windmill until we drove my mum crazy and then we'd go outside and ride bikes or skip.

But I also recognised the physical differences between sexes. I didn't want to be in the bath with my brother, I didn't want to get changed with the boys at school, or use the boys toilet. I knew I was glad that the older boy at school who scared girls by asking them to take down their underwear had to use a different room to change in and a different toilet block to pee in. I knew if he got into the girls block, it wouldn't be good for whichever girl was in there at the time, even if I wasn't old enough to fully understand why.

As I grew up I've felt I've always been open minded and accepting of other people's feelings, their choices, their sexuality, and they way they express themselves.

And yet somehow, it's like we've gone through the looking glass and only a rigid belief in gender stereotypes and what they mean for a persons sex / gender is acceptable now.

It breaks my heart that six years ago, my friend was raging at her daughter's teacher because they suggested that her love of superheroes, the way she dressed, and her preference for playing with boys and 'boys things' might mean she was trans rather than just a perfectly normal girl with interests outside of an ever narrowing stereotype of things that girls are allowed to like.

And yet just six years later, they are heading down the road of medication, name changes, and are both posting videos on social media about conversion therapy and how anything but 100% affirmation every second of the day will lead to suicide.

It makes me wonder what would have happened to me and my best male friend (now happily married to his husband) had we been those children but growing up now. What would school and society have said and done to us to make us fit the stereotypes they would have pushed us into. Which of us would be on medication? Which of us would have been on the list for surgery? Would either of us still have our own birth names? Would we both have someone convincing us that our choices were to transition or die? Would I now be a 'gay' man, and my friend be a 'heterosexual' woman?

I wouldn't have called myself gender-critical back then, but I can look back and see that I was. And how is it that now, the meaning of gender critical has been changed so much, because we've embraced stereotypes to the point that we will turn children into lifelong medical patients to fit them and at the same time admit grown adults who have done nothing to fit them into previously safer single sex spaces? As you say, language is interesting, and I feel like we are living in the curse Terry Pratchett mentioned, we are living in Interesting Times.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 01/08/2021 11:37

I can't see Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg having much truck with #bekind! Grin

SnoopyLights · 01/08/2021 11:51

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

I can't see Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg having much truck with #bekind! Grin
I would love to see what the pair of them might do to Be Kind if they had the opportunity.

Magrat might once have fallen for it, but I think she's had enough experience now to want to tell Be Kind where it can stick itself.

LadyVymes · 01/08/2021 12:52

Thank you Gaspode and Ivy. You have both (along with everyone else) managed to be clear in all the thoughts I was ranting at my husband today as I was so distressed at the thought my absolute hero/life saver would find me a reprehensible human.

I have had to mute my fan pages on Facebook because certain members are relishing the chance to call me a t**f and try to beat me with names.

I think I preferred it when I thought I was the only fan and that he was writing these books just for me (before the internet). I didn’t have to put up with people getting names wrong and now putting words in to the mouth of a dead man.

The biggest and best thing of his books were the layers. How every time you read them you came away with a different experience. One day you would literally (in my case) piss yourself with laughter. Another day have the heart torn from your chest and every emotion in between. What made the books for everyone and so popular is that Terry left it to us to take what we needed from his work. He didn’t tell anyone that they were evil and shouldn’t be allowed to read his books. He just seemed to hope his books left you feeling better than when you found them.

To have this turned into a vile pile on of women defending their rights and protection of children is absolutely reprehensible and the “fandom” can do without me for a while.

SnoopyLights · 01/08/2021 13:26

@LadyVymes

Thank you Gaspode and Ivy. You have both (along with everyone else) managed to be clear in all the thoughts I was ranting at my husband today as I was so distressed at the thought my absolute hero/life saver would find me a reprehensible human.

I have had to mute my fan pages on Facebook because certain members are relishing the chance to call me a t**f and try to beat me with names.

I think I preferred it when I thought I was the only fan and that he was writing these books just for me (before the internet). I didn’t have to put up with people getting names wrong and now putting words in to the mouth of a dead man.

The biggest and best thing of his books were the layers. How every time you read them you came away with a different experience. One day you would literally (in my case) piss yourself with laughter. Another day have the heart torn from your chest and every emotion in between. What made the books for everyone and so popular is that Terry left it to us to take what we needed from his work. He didn’t tell anyone that they were evil and shouldn’t be allowed to read his books. He just seemed to hope his books left you feeling better than when you found them.

To have this turned into a vile pile on of women defending their rights and protection of children is absolutely reprehensible and the “fandom” can do without me for a while.

I'm sorry those people in the fan group are being so cruel to you.

I left a general reading group (on Facebook but predominately USA, so very much down the rabbit hole so even though it was a group for women, it included anyone who identified, and in the end it descended into a group of people just shrieking "Karen! TERF! Racist!" at pretty much anyone for any reason. Mention you were reading JKR or American Dirt and you might as well just leave immediately.

I also left a Stephen King readers group after he signed the letter and made that tweet. I argued long and loud first, about how anyone using the RIP Hashtag against JKR or anyone else when they are alive is wrong. A number of people tried to convince me that it's not a death threat (if someone sent me an RIP message that's how I would read it, as a threat) and that I just don't understand lauguage anymore because the meaning of RIP has changed and no longer means Rest In Peace, it means We Won't Buy Your Book.

Well there are (sadly) more and more authors whose books I won't buy anymore, and I've managed not to send a single one of them a barely disguised death threat to let them know about it.

Try to consider that there will have been a lot of people in the group silently agreeing with you, wondering what the hell is going on, and staying out of the firing line of some of the more vocal TRA's posting this nonsense. You won't have been on your own in leaving or hiding the groups, even if you felt like it. But be gentle with yourself because I can see how important they were to you.

I think TP would be disgusted by some of this, whether privately or publicly we will never know. But I am sure that he would not want you feeling this way. I think you've said exactly what he would want people to take from his books - He didn’t tell anyone that they were evil and shouldn’t be allowed to read his books. He just seemed to hope his books left you feeling better than when you found them. - and I think he would be delighted and proud that this is the feeling his books gave you and hope that this would be something every reader took away.

What you've said is a lovely tribute to him. Far better than the hate-filled screeching coming from some so called fans.

I am absolutely convinced that if you were able to talk to him about this issue as it is today, if he were still here to talk about it, he would not ever, not for one minute, find you reprehensible even if in the end you didn't both agree (and I do suspect he would be more in agreement with you than not) because I don't think he was an extremist who believed that you had to 100% agree with him or be damned as a racist TERF anti-semitic right-wing hater of everybody.

He knew the difference between personal and important after all.

LadyVymes · 01/08/2021 13:43

Oh my. Thank you so much Snoopy. You have brought tears to my eyes and brought comfort. As I believe true Terry Pratchett fans do for each other.

Waitwhat23 · 01/08/2021 13:49

@SnoopyLights lovely Post. And entirely agree about 'He knew the difference between personal and important after all.'

It's quite sad how ideology is infiltrating groups which had once been a source of great support to people. A geeky group I'm part of (and have been for years) has recently had posts asking for recommendations for courses to retrain their brain to use 'correct' pronouns and has one poster who is obviously using a captive audience for his own ends and validation. On the other hand, John Barrowman's past indecent sexual behaviour was handwaved away as 'controversial' as 'He's a great guy!' and any mention of JKR comes with a disclaimer.

I'm now leaning towards leaving the group which is sad for me. I've always valued it but I can see which direction it's going.

Signalbox · 01/08/2021 14:07

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

I can't see Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg having much truck with #bekind! Grin
Yes Granny was definitely more interested in truth than kindness...

“Haven’t you got any romance in your soul?’ said Magrat plaintively.
‘No,’ said Granny. 'I ain’t. And stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.”

Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

NecessaryScene · 01/08/2021 16:21

This is the first subject on today's The Mess We're In, with Helen talking about some of these people like Rhianna Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, suggesting they should subject themselves to "the intellectual Turing Test": do you understand your opponents' position well enough that you could express them in a way that would fool them into thinking you were on their side?

It seems clear that many "anti-GC" people are a very long way away from this.

UtopiaPlanitia · 01/08/2021 17:48

Many adult children of famous, talented parents install themselves in a fandom as protectors of the parent's legacy but aren't self-abnegating enough to stop themselves from claiming to be the ultimate authority on the mind/intentions of the dead artist, or from claiming to represent the intentions or reputation of the dead artist by curating or expanding on the legacy (often in suboptimal ways) e.g. Rod Roddenberry, Christopher Tolkien, Brian Herbert, Sean Lennon.