Guardian: Pauli Murray

[transdimensional]

A Guardian article about an extraordinary radical activist: www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/17/how-is-pauli-murray-not-a-household-name-the-extraordinary-life-of-the-uss-most-radical-activist

According to the article:

"She often dressed and semi-identified as a man. She chose an androgynous-sounding name for herself (her given name was Anna Pauline Murray) and was attracted to, in her own words, “extremely feminine and heterosexual women” – a source of considerable anguish. Again, Murray was too far ahead of her time. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say their time."

Now, I found this a bit strange. It seems a bit of a stretch to reclassify as a man/half-man/nonbinary, given that she was clearly a woman and co-founded the National Organization for Women. She didn't call it the National Organization for Women and Half-Men, did she?

Lots of people used to go by their middle names, and Pauli is a perfectly natural abbreviation of Pauline.

Still, in its defence the paper eventually admits that it is "perilous" to retrospectively assign identities, and it does point out the following, which is pretty startling:

"Murray was convinced of an inner masculine aspect, describing herself in a note to one doctor as “a girl who should have been a boy”. She spent more than a decade seeking medical answers: reading the latest European research on “sexual deviance” by figures such as Havelock Ellis; going from doctor to doctor. She investigated hormone treatments and once requested surgical investigation for the presence of male internal sexual organs (none were found)."

That does sound reminiscent of transgenderism. On the other hand I am sure that someone born in 1910 was at least as subject to gender stereotypes as people are nowadays. Her aunt called her a boy-girl. I would have thought that hearing this message from society and from her own family was what made her question her identity. But even the article has to admit that she never used any other pronoun but "she".

She was gay.
She most likely thought she should have been a boy because homosexuaity was seen as sinful, was even illegal, and that must have been very painful. Only boys are supposed to like girls in "that" way.

Excellent point gncq.

Additionally there seems an underlying, highly regressive implication running through the article to the effect that because she didn't conform to gender stereotypes and wore "men's" clothing, she was probably "really" something other than a woman.

Wikipedia reports that some pro-TR academics insist on using "he" for her, and others "they", which is odd considering that the usual argument is that people choose their own pronouns. Once people are dead, I suppose they are considered fair game to have pronouns assigned by modern-day activists instead of by themselves?

Does anyone else think it feels like a secular and even more widespread version of the baptism of the dead?

www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/mormon/ritesrituals/baptismdead.shtml

That was a pretty common way to think about female homosexuality at that time, so I wouldn't say the Guardian has invented it wholesale.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_inversion_(sexology)

I was struck by how much Stevie, in this 1967 documentary, seemed to fit the characteristics of what we would now call a transman (or trans man) — I think with this level of documentary evidence, it would perhaps be fair to apply modern practices when talking about Stevie. And, of course, Stevie may well still be alive to have an opinion on the matter. But with most people from history, it's hard to know how much of what they were saying would map on to the current ways of talking about gender identity, and how much is metaphor, homophobia, scientific misunderstanding, a different model of understanding society, and so on.

I imagine that for many lesbians of that time it would have been hard to understand your sexuality with few if any cultural reference points available.

Murray died in 1985, so late enough that transsexualism would've crossed her radar, and yet it seems she didn't transition. Perhaps she would have, had circumstances been different — it's not an easy decision to take now, let alone late in life in the mid–late 20th century. But I think it's suspect to make that decision for Pauli after her death when she didn't make it for herself during her life.

According to this tweet Stevie is still alive (as of 2019) and doesn't now identify as transgender, interestingly. So going by the documentary and using male pronouns would be the wrong thing to do, even though the historical evidence that male pronouns would be appropriate would have seemed pretty strong from what they showed. I hope life improved for her.

I've seen both Stevie and Steve online, don't remember which version is used in the documentary. This article by a director who used the archive footage in her 2017 film is interesting when talking about Steve and the difficulties of the changing consensus in how to reflect identities in language.

I know I've gone off on a bit of a tangent with these posts but I think the few places Steve/Stevie — someone who's lived through all of these changes from the 1960s to present — is written about online really reflect some of the difficulties involved.

This is where gender identity ideology leads because that idea that a lesbian is a man in a woman's body makes more sense than the current form.

If you're desperate to find evidence of male brain or female brain, then the single most sex-typical behaviour is being attracted to the opposite sex. It's an entirely understandable conclusion that the 5% who aren't have an opposite-sex brain in the wrong body.

That's a real measurable 'gender identity' - which sex you're attracted to.

Now, this still isn't a useful or progressive model, and it isn't what the mass of heterosexual males in the movement want the model to be either, but it will inevitably keep going there at times, because the bad model they're using has no material reality - this is actual reality that could justify a bad model - homosexuality being a rare abberation.

It's still a bad model for the same reason - if attraction to females can occur in females at all, then it's not a specifically male trait, so is not evidence of being male. But the rarer a trait is in a sex, the easier it is for intuition to override that cold logic.

Does anyone else think it feels like a secular and even more widespread version of the baptism of the dead?
www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/mormon/ritesrituals/baptismdead.shtml

Wow! That’s exactly it. What a cheek, in both cases.

When homosexuality was considered a sin, it’s not surprising lesbians wanted to believe they were ‘really’ male heterosexuals.

Much early lesbian literature was really tragic and pretty upsetting, like the Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, as these women often found it easier to believe they were a man, than to understand themselves as a lesbian, for which there were hardly words yet.

It was a triumph for lesbian culture when women were able to say “I am a woman who loves women and I can be happy”.

Nothing about desiring heterosexual women makes someone a man, it doesn’t work that way. The heterosexual women she desired didn’t make her a man by the power of their heterosexuality. She was a woman who loved women in the time when that love did not dare to speak its own name.