Margaret Atwood

[MummBRaaarrrTheEverLeaking]

twitter.com/MargaretAtwood/status/1450429768067846145?t=8q-A8MlvzZsx6pt4Vu1_LA&s=19

Has retweeted an article from the Toronto Star "why can't we say woman anymore" and bloody hell are they coming for the latest witch burning in the comments!

Ranging from disappointment to the usual sweary abuse. I thought oh how long till the capitulation begins, turns out I didn't have to wait long!

She's following it up with retweets about 'we can say people when it's accurate and inclusive' and then defending the article because the writer isn't "a terf"???

Not really sure what she's trying to achieve here, anyone?

🤣 at the claim that the feminist movement was 'built on the backs of transwomen'!

Honestly, the absolute shit that these people come out with is just astonishing. They will just say anything!

It's amazing the handwringing the whither Atwood discourse is generating compared to the crickets about a young girl raped in a school following tra policies and her dad smeared as a bigot and racist for getting mad about it.

@RoyalCorgi

I don't know about anyone else, but if a load of people sent me abusive messages telling me I was an evil, racist, transphobic bigot, and had always been an evil, racist, transphobic bigot, that wouldn't make me inclined to recant. In fact, it would make me dig my heels in.

Yes, but that's why you're in the viper pit, on the naughty step, with the rest of us.

@Zeev

The Assigned Male cartoonist has weighed in and people are sharing their Atwood comic strip. Seems like everyone has forgotten about that unfortunate little interlude with baby furries.

(not envy)

What if digging in would lose you your status as national treasure? And the highly elevated status going with it?

The interesting thing is that the mainstream Canadian media - who love to jump on anything deemed transphobic - have so far totally ignored her tweet. And no significant public figures have commented or taken her to task. Woke as Canada may be, Margaret Atwood is probably the closest thing we have to a national treasure. I think she is one of the only prominent people in the country who can actually get away with this unscathed. She got a lot more flack for defending a professor friend several years ago who was accused of sexual harassment. And ultimately she came out of that just fine too.

[quote trancepants]I can't believe she's done this and is soooo ungrateful to all the transwomen who have literally carried feminism for us!!!!
mobile.twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1450519904772370444?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1450744688995180546%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=[/quote]
Good heavens is there anything about being a woman they wont appropriate then claim they did it better

To which the answer is - of course there isn’t

How do they think this will help? The amount of hatred for sharing something is completely OTT. If I was Atwood I'd just think "they are all barking, what an over reaction" and dig in because I would feel bullied and she wrote about bullies in Cat's Eye. Most of the people getting so worked up aren't even trans. I don't understand why this issue matter so much to lefty liberals. The left is ignoring the major issues and focussing on rearranging the privilege hierarchy of middle class trendies and playing with words. I presume they think the world's other problems are sorted so we can naval gaze about pronouns and the problems of females who identify as men but not enough to change their bodies and who still want to use their female bodies to bear children but who want other people to say that they are somehow being very manly in doing this.

Really? All the stuff with Jordan Petersen and C-16 didn't make enough headlines to capture MA's attention? Didn't send her on a train of enquiry as to why a liberal professor thought free speech was under attack? A father being jailed for using the "wrong pronouns" for his own daughter didn't prick her interest? None of the JKR fallout made her wonder why a load of liberal lesbian feminists opposed her camp? Nothing. Nada. She just blindly listened to the state. This woman who writes about state sanctioned oppression. OK.

No, this is exactly what I mean. Peterson wasn't much of a name here at that time - he came to internet fame afterwards, and very few people saw or knew about his submission. And since his rise in popularity he's been very much spun not as a liberal but a member of the alt right. MA would tend to associate him with anti-trans rhetoric, anti-woman rhetoric, and support of Donald Trump, probably without hearing anything he had to say.

There are only a few major news sources here in Canada. All but the National Post are completely captured, and I'd be surprised to hear of Atwood reading the National Post as again, it's seen as right-wing. She will have trusted the CBC narrative completely and also that if they are not reporting on things, they aren't happening. And they don't tend to report on things that don't support the narrative, or they bury them.

This was the response of the CBC the other day to protests at women's prisons in Canada It's useful to look at the comments because you can see that even those who disagree don't have the kind of background people here on MN do on this question.

www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-transgender-rights-misinformation-campaign-charter-1.6207949

USA Today is completely rational:

'Such backlash could mean real-life violence, as research shows.

"It's not a far a step, in terms of thinking, from 'women means everyone born with a vagina' to the trans panic defense, an attempt at justifying or excusing violence against trans women under pretext that they were trying to 'trick' straight cisgender men into sleeping with them,"'

eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/10/20/handmaids-tale-author-margaret-atwood-and-passive-transphobia/8537487002/

So beware, if you say 'women have vaginas' you may as well actually literally be STABBING someone.

But she should be above all this non questioning spoonfeeding ! She questioned the narrative 50 years ago, why isn't she questioning it now, after making her living analysing society and power and all that jazz. It's frustrating.
But maybe she'll start to think on a bit more now. But I still think the revered elder stateswoman at the gala dinner role will be hard to give up

[quote ArabellaScott]USA Today is completely rational:

'Such backlash could mean real-life violence, as research shows.

"It's not a far a step, in terms of thinking, from 'women means everyone born with a vagina' to the trans panic defense, an attempt at justifying or excusing violence against trans women under pretext that they were trying to 'trick' straight cisgender men into sleeping with them,"'

eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/10/20/handmaids-tale-author-margaret-atwood-and-passive-transphobia/8537487002/[/quote]
It's utterly absurd.

Why the fuck can't anyone understand we are concerned about OUR safety.
EVERYONE ELSE is allowed the self preservation instinct.
Even on aeroplanes they tell you put on your own air mask first. Why on earth are we expected to shut up about harm coming to us, in case harm comes to someone else at the hands of another someone else.

Because a woman's job is to worry about everyone else's welfare first, 1week. Tsk tsk, you're failing at womaning there!

I know. I know. But sometimes it just hits you all over again.

Anyway off to iron my husbands shirt

@1Week

But she should be above all this non questioning spoonfeeding ! She questioned the narrative 50 years ago, why isn't she questioning it now, after making her living analysing society and power and all that jazz. It's frustrating. But maybe she'll start to think on a bit more now. But I still think the revered elder stateswoman at the gala dinner role will be hard to give up

Did she question the narrative? I'm not really convinced.

When she started writing in the mid sixties she definitely was challenging the mainstream.
Her first book The Edible Woman was about a girl who turned her back on the Perfect Fiance to stay single. A lot of it was interiority, compulsions, refusal.

The second wave was just kicking off at the time.

Though as the years went by it became much more acceptable to be a feminist, within limits of course, and you're right she didn't push too many boundaries in later years.
By the tine she wrote the Handmaid's Tale it was more than acceptable - even required- to rail against the religious right.

@1Week

But she should be above all this non questioning spoonfeeding ! She questioned the narrative 50 years ago, why isn't she questioning it now, after making her living analysing society and power and all that jazz. It's frustrating. But maybe she'll start to think on a bit more now. But I still think the revered elder stateswoman at the gala dinner role will be hard to give up

I don't want to be ageist but honestly, she's in her 80s. As we get older people can find it harder for a variety of reasons to change our long held beliefs. To realise we've gone too far in one direction. To realise that what's around us has changed so our views that were once quite right are now damaging. Especially when we are actually living in a culture that has been hoodwinked by professionals, like those in Stonewall. When the organisations that we fought alongside have essentially changed sides while pretending they were the same as ever.

When you have the conservatives who you fought against for decades, attacking Planned Parenthood and the ACLU who have been your heroes in that time, it's pretty natural to automatically assume the bad guys are attacking the good guys. For it to be that those organisations are the 'bad guys' now is fucking hard to get your head around. Especially when you still fundamentally disagree with the conservatives on so much. I find that hard to get my head around and I'm half her age.

What she did last year was shitty, but if she's on that difficult path to realising how very fucking warped everything is now, we should cut her some slack.

The real question for me is who is Margaret Atwood?

Is she Aunt Lydia? - Going along with it because shes not in the 'at risk' group of rape/ intimidation in a womens prison/ refuge/ public toilet etc. and wants to retain and protect her social status as best she can.

Is she Serena? - An advocate for the regime. She's powerful, ambitious, well educated and seemingly naive to the fact she's not exempt from her own erasure; deep down knows but chooses to protect their ego from the rigorous unpicking this examination would require.

Or is she Janine? Battered down and damaged with PTSD to the point she lives in her own chaotic reality. Swaying between modes of angst ridden dissidence and a strange infantilised self preservation mode.
Permanently living in a state of fear and as such has settled into going the route of least resistance.

Or is she the news printers hung pre-season who we sadly have no name for? She saw it coming, thought its irreversible and tried to hide in a cellar. Plucked up the courage to print and distribute a copy of the news. Flung their hands up and said 'no no read it, its not how you think, not my writing, I/They are not THE dissidents etc.' Charged and bailed, now in hiding again.

In The Times today

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/573b0fe8-31ec-11ec-afd6-aa3ee2eb8a34?shareToken=efa6196329a3c88c902cfbb083c099cc

@1Week

When she started writing in the mid sixties she definitely was challenging the mainstream. Her first book The Edible Woman was about a girl who turned her back on the Perfect Fiance to stay single. A lot of it was interiority, compulsions, refusal.

The second wave was just kicking off at the time.

Though as the years went by it became much more acceptable to be a feminist, within limits of course, and you're right she didn't push too many boundaries in later years.
By the tine she wrote the Handmaid's Tale it was more than acceptable - even required- to rail against the religious right.

I really disliked most of her books, including The Edible Woman, the characters always seem to me to be missing parts of themselves so they seem dead inside. But if I'd read it in the 60s maybe I'd have felt differently.

Also a mention of MA by Janice Turner today:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d1993982-31dc-11ec-afd6-aa3ee2eb8a34?shareToken=e46c2a8bb6b859de6c8e960458983790

And still, she fails to repent.

She retweeted an article about clownfish to prove that sex in humans isn't immutable?

She must realise the problem with that. I'm guessing, like other posters, that she was caught up in an ideology that she thought was merely supportive but harmless, and now it turns out to be the opposite.

www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/19659587.issue-day-acclaimed-author-atwood-online-storm-word-woman/

I feel bad for her because by quoting the article and agreeing with its precepts, but then using the word TERF as a slur, she's going to end up pissing off both sides.