Guardian - Living in a Woman’s Body.

[PriamFarrl]

Interesting series of articles but we all know where it was heading.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/feb/11/living-in-a-womans-body-my-body-belongs-to-me-i-can-harness-and-shape-it-as-i-see-fit?CMP=twt_gu&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium#Echobox=1644591338

Not sure how she can simultaneously claim to understand biology and say she's living in a woman's body. Arrogant cultural appropriation again. Same old same old. I do hope people are getting more able to see this as the passive aggression it really is.

Shocking that the guardian feels it's appropriate to publish this in a series which includes a woman talking about her FGM experience.

Interesting Twitter replies.

twitter.com/guardian/status/1492250335888523266?s=21

[quote PriamFarrl]Interesting Twitter replies.

twitter.com/guardian/status/1492250335888523266?s=21[/quote]
The replies are very heartening. People see this for the insulting bullshit that it is.

I'm going to make a complaint about this. It's not OK to disrupt an important series about women's bodied experiences with a piece from a biological man.

Surely if you are “living in a woman’s body” then you are a woman. You don’t need to cut and tuck bits and pieces to become a woman

If you think that becoming a woman involves surgery, makeup, and putting on a dress then you have just taken a gender stereotype and decided that is what a woman is and missed the fact that women don’t feel like women. They know they are without having to dress a certain way to prove to themselves and the rest of the world that they are female.

I find the belief that they can 'harness and shape' their body 'as they see fit' delusional and childish. I have a life threatening illness. I would love to be able to 'harness and shape' it out of existence - but the reality is I can't. No more than Juno can become a woman.

All I'm seeing is Buffalo Bill dancing in front of the mirror. He would love our brave new world.

This series has been and is so powerful. Some of the pieces have made me thrum with a physical empathy, some with a profound sympathy.
Juno's piece gives me an intellectual understanding of her position, while at the same time knowing that the language she uses makes it clear that she understands that her claim on 'a woman's body' is fundamentally different to the authors of the other pieces in the series.
That tacit acknowledgement makes me more respecting of her than before. She always seemed so deliberately intransigent and demanding of women's space and voice before.

Amazed that you got that ODFox. I saw someone who had no right whatsoever to be occupying a space for women's voices, and whose presence is depriving a woman of a space. For a lot of women, Juno's presence is a painful insult.

Offs. I just knew there would be a trans woman along eventually, in this series.
They couldn't resist invading something so powerful as this series of brilliant essays about Women, the XX kind, you know, Women.

could they.

“Although the physical transformations I have made have increased my sense of self-ownership and self-worth, I have remained the same person, on a fundamental human level. With each act of bodily rebellion – some superficial, some life-changing – I have preferred my exterior, but it is not the greatest source of joy in my life. The interior – call it consciousness, soul, self or personality – has remained consistently me

Do we not all have an interior me?

None of us are beholden to our bodies.
This made me so angry. Such wilful trolling of women, and blatant privilege flaunting.

Tell that to people with disabilities, or chronic conditions, many of which affect women only, not those with biologically male bodies. Tell that to people who are raped and fall pregnant. Or who actually want to be pregnant but can't conceive. Or who are pregnant by choice and suffering multiple debilitating side effects...

Genuinely insulting.

@ScrollingLeaves

“Although the physical transformations I have made have increased my sense of self-ownership and self-worth, I have remained the same person, on a fundamental human level. With each act of bodily rebellion – some superficial, some life-changing – I have preferred my exterior, but it is not the greatest source of joy in my life. The interior – call it consciousness, soul, self or personality – has remained consistently me

Do we not all have an interior me?

Some have said no, we do not all have an interior me . For example, David Hume: "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself though I am certain there is no such principle in me."

[ A Treatise of Human Nature [1739-40], I, iv, 6]

I wonder where you think he goes wrong, if he does.

It was obviously a grooming effort from the first mention of "woman's body" in the Guardian, so I stayed well away from reading any of the series. Now that the expected gaslighting article has been launched and neutralized, I will go back and read the baiting articles, which I hear were good.

Gosh. That was unexpected.

This is the views of Juno 'A lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn't be women' Dawson, eh?

www.independent.co.uk/voices/juno-dawson-attitude-magazine-interview-transgender-gay-man-lgbt-trans-woman-a7752701.html

It's interesting that, in the 2017 article, Dawson talks about being a 8 or 9 year old boy and some sexual excitement at seeing an adult teacher's penis as he stripped off for swimming, confirming JD's burgeoning sexual orientation.

This, I am going to go out on a limb, would not be parallel in any shape or form to the experience of an 8 or 9 year girl faced with the same circumstance, regardless of potential sexual orientation because it encapsulates male rather than female sexuality.

Feels like The Guardian is trolling women at this point so, as I have absolutely nothing in common with Dawson or any kind of shared experience, I'll pass on this particular article, thanks but like you, serendipitea may now explore the rest of the series knowing this one is out of the way...

It is not Dawson talking in that 2017 article, it is the author, a gay man called Douglas Robertson, reporting his offence at Dawson’s views and expressing his own early experience of being same-sex attracted in the swimming pool changing rooms.

I know that Mumsnet rules state that we have to used pronouns not based on sex, but it's bizarre to see women complaining that "she is not a woman". It makes the argument very muddled.

I’ve been avoiding reading this series because I was dreading them doing a trans one.

I’m gutted that I was right.

It’s so sad that when I see a guardian article that hints that it might be feminist, I’m now looking at it with deep suspicion. They either shove trans in it or I can’t help but feel that it’s for show, so they can go ‘but look, we really care about women’.

Because she wants to be addressed as she. I have no issue with addressing people how they wish to be addressed. That's just respecting personal preferences.

@serendipitea

It was obviously a grooming effort from the first mention of "woman's body" in the Guardian, so I stayed well away from reading any of the series. Now that the expected gaslighting article has been launched and neutralized, I will go back and read the baiting articles, which I hear were good.

I felt similar. A cynical effort by the Guardian to lure people in knowing they’ll generate a load of traffic/engagement with the inevitable TW contribution

www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/media/guardian-thinks-women-are-a-team-20190305183179

This popped up on my Facebook.

A beyond insulting but completely predictable invitation by the Guardian to participate in a male's pseudo reality.

#NoThankYou