From The Series "Transing the Dead": Louisa May Alcott

[nepeta]

Peyton Thomas tells us on Twitter that the author of Little Women was transgender. twitter.com/peytonology/status/1516612189687324673

The current posthumous transitioning of many historical role models for women (Hathshepsut, Joan of Arc, Rosa Bonheur, Daphne du Maurier etc.) naturally follows once we adopt the gender identity ideology where 'woman' is re-defined as someone who is comfortable with the gender roles and norms the society she lives in has assigned the female sex.

So which famous women in history are we bog-standard women allowed to keep as role models under this new definition?

Yup. Someone on social media pointed out that the Ukrainian women fighting for their country (with weapons) right now would then have to be assumed to be trans men, too, even if they themselves said otherwise.

But yes, the TRAs are claiming most of the historical cases of women dressing up as men in order to do things they were not otherwise allowed to do (join the navy or the army etc.).

Ha. I agree with you all, especially those of you who have used lots of swear words. 😡

Some people are just bloody stupid. Infuriating comments about how Anne Shirley being clever means that she must actually be a boy meaning that L M Montgomery must have been trans. Have I just experienced a time slip?

If it's okey dokey now to coercively assign labels to someone regardless of how they may feel about it, can we all do that?

Or is this a case of the special people can and the scum can't again?

Especially when anyone who has actually read the books knows Anne Shirley being a girl is a huge HUGE part of her identity. Why is she almost rejected by Marilla? Because she is a girl. Why is she so desperate to do well at school? Because she wants to beat a boy and prove she’s as good/better than him. What’s her desperate wish all through the novel? To have puffed sleeves and fit in with the other girls.

It’s just so embarrassing. I see it constantly but it’s like, are only background characters allowed to be women? Female characters who do cool things aren’t instantly claimable by the trans community.

Of course, only boys can be clever. Fact.

I’m so angry at this shit and all the cringey, misogynistic comments from people who think they are uber academic and progressive and postmodern but actually think about women in the same way as patronising Victorian gentlemen.

Their poor, poor daughters.

Have they claimed the Suffragettes yet?

Every woman pioneer, in whatever field, has paved the way for the women following behind her. It has literally been women pretending to be men that has made it easier for women to gain the rights to do things.

Jo, Katy (Did) Anne, Judy (from Daddy Long Legs) are all learning to be women while keeping their moral centre, imagination, drive and personality. Thats the point of the books.
Oddly I've actually thought that one of the reasons why gender ideology has taken hold in the US rather than the UK is this notion of being a woman that is different (to men) but not subordinate or "girly". - I think it is possible that in the US living as a woman does not necessarily mean sexist stereotypes like in the UK. Think Anna Madrigal (Tales of the City)

Blog post that explores the idea of transing the dead as a (to me) secular extension of baptism of the dead:

Like most Christian faiths, the LDS Church believes that baptism is required for one to enter God’s presence after death. And since Mormons believe they're the only ones with divine authority to perform binding baptisms, they have built an elaborate missionary system to offer this to people throughout the world.
As for the millions of people who lived before founding Mormon prophet Joseph Smith restored God's church to the earth, they get posthumous baptisms. This is a way for Mormons to offer the "ordinances of salvation" to those on their family tree who never received them while they were alive and while this would be peculiar practice if left to just the immediate relatives of LDS members, it was discovered in 1995 that the LDS had performed these proxy baptisms on hundreds of thousands of Jews who had died in the Holocaust.

williamaferguson.substack.com/p/trans-out-your-dead

There's a particular horrible example and the author correctly identifies that one enthusiastic baptiser of the dead describes Turing as "one of the first Gay men to go on estrogen."

Turing was given DES as a form of chemical castration - and that was presented as an option to imprisonment.

Alan was prosecuted under the Labouchere Amendment of 1855, a law that made homosexuality (“gross indecency”) a crime. In an arranged plea deal, Alan accepted chemical castration by way of Diethylstilbestrol (DES) in lieu of prison and upon conviction he was stripped of all security clearances and forbidden entry into the United States.

The ignorance and indifference to the reality of history is breathtaking. It is an erasure of gay and lesbian figures in history and the general community to posthumously trans people in this manner.

interesting that these historical figures are all ftm “trans”

where are all the mtf historical trans figures?

compared to today’s figures adult mtf are way more common than teenage ftm, so why would it be any different historically.

one would think that maybe the women dressed as men to gain access to medical school, business opportunities and the like, yet as there was no such advantage for men, suddenly there are far fewer female souls trapped in male bodies.

Interesting indeed.

And yes, there is never any actual interest taken in the person and their achievements or purpose or self; only in how the poster can make use of them in their own ends.

I've seen one or two references to famous men who might have been non-binary, but you are correct in that the posthumous transitioning is almost always about women being turned into men or at least non-binary.

I sometimes wonder how people cannot see the glaring misogyny in the most fervent kind of trans activism.

It's the female body trans men and trans women don't want to be reminded of, and that is why our sex is in the process of being erased.

Even enbies with female bodies don't want those bodies to be called female as it conflicts with their identity, They do want access to female reproductive services, only those must now be called services for 'people'.

The logical outcome of this prioritising of gender identities over biological sex is that everyone who is still calling themselves women are also now assigned some weird gender identity, based on femininity or being appearance-conscious or other even more sexist stereotypes. Then when we protest these new rules we are the bigots..

compared to today’s figures adult mtf are way more common than teenage ftm, so why would it be any different historically.

There have been some earlier threads covering the Chevalier (mtf) of Beaumont Society fame.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3565232-100-students-request-gender-change-freedom-of-information-finding (R0wantrees 21/04/2019 12:15)

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3756530-Beaumont-Society

I would also throw in a grumble about the archaeological researchers who have attempted to trans or NB female warriors as transmasculine or Kleinefelter Syndrome. Finnish warrior buried in women's clothes is a "non-binary person with an extra X chromosome 🙄

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4312299-Warrior-buried-in-womens-clothes-DMA-test

@Aroundtheworldin80moves
"Have they claimed the Suffragettes yet?" - the window bashing tactics, anyway...

I would also throw in a grumble about the archaeological researchers who have attempted to trans or NB female warriors as transmasculine or Kleinefelter Syndrome. Finnish warrior buried in women's clothes is a "non-binary person with an extra X chromosome 🙄

Funny.

I missed that thread, but it does seem the 'non-binary' label is from the original paper and shows that the researchers don't quite understand the gender identity language, i.e., they may have confused intersex with non-binary. In any case, gender identity is such a recently created belief system that we cannot simply apply it backwards through the centuries.

I guess women can keep certain role models? Stepford Wives? The Barbie doll? What else? Maybe the properly submissive (but only those) women from the Bible?

I guess women can keep certain role models? Stepford Wives? The Barbie doll? What else? Maybe the properly submissive (but only those) women from the Bible?

I presume roles such as Diana from Anne of Green Gables, Meg from Little Women etc. Basically roles of little importance who mainly support the protagonist and validate them.

That’s pretty much the trans dream I think. You’re not a woman, you’re The Woman.

You see this a lot on Twitter. What a load of sexist bollocks. "Revisionist History". I CAPS LOCK my replies to those. Dickwads.

We are only allowed to keep the female heroes who wore skirts, had long hair (pinned up) and complied with traditional gender roles OF COURSE. Damn those women doing stuff the men should have been doing! 😫

Just remembered this classic Twitter post from the Ashmolean Museum Oxford on writer Vernon Lee. They got a lot of criticism over this one.

They can just fuck off.
LAM based Jo on herself and unless I’m misremembering Jo is much happier in her own skin when she realises (or society allows her) to be valued for something more than as a wife or mother. The whole of ‘Jo’s Boys’ covers that.
something you’d expect an academic studying LAM to realise. Unless of course they wanted to create a narrative that fits a pre existing agenda🤔

Just came across this sorry business on Twitter. In the same way you might come across a fetid mass of dog poo on a blazing hot day - rounding the corner straight into it, ground straight into soles of shoes/wheels of buggy/wheelchair tyres. The stench is arresting; you wonder how a single animal can have produced so much crap; & even though you thoroughly scrub everything as soon as you can, you are haunted by the foul odour…

Absolutely abhorrent behaviour, both in terms of the possible homophobia; & the utterly inappropriate application of modern concepts to a woman of the C19. Peyton’s degree might have been in political science & “sexual diversity studies” but it was still from Toronto, (currently ranked 18th in the world) so they have no excuse for this sort of shoddy work. Peyton is supposedly a journalist as well as an author: heaven help anyone involved in stories they cover if this is the standard of their “research” & the integrity they show.

Peyton’s first tweet:
when i began my research on louisa may alcott and little women i'd hedge a lot, like - the concept of transness hadn't been invented, the vocabulary didn't exist, who's to say - but standing on the other side of two years of archival research... lou alcott was trans. period.

I mean, for a start we’re always being told that trans people have ALWAYS existed (etc); & as PPs have noted, it is Literal Violence to misgender someone. Unless, of course, you are trans & either transing someone (thus far all FTM for obvious reasons) or insisting women who don’t have gender identities are cis. It’s quite astonishing that someone could have the incredible privilege of spending so long researching Alcott & they managed to produce no scholarship of value, simply a patchwork nonsense to try to prop up a desire so clearly projected that Peyton could help out multiple multiplexes. It’s genuinely quite embarrassing how obvious it is that Peyton wants Alcott to be trans because Peyton is trans & Alcott is Peyton’s favourite & actually basically they are just exactly the same person & everyone ELSE will have to see this once Peyton just explains the trans thing to them, right?

Peyton hoped to use exploit this comment from an 1882 interview - & it is indeed being flung about as gotcha: "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman's body." Of course, someone on Twitter pointed out that Peyton had omitted the quite crucial bit that when her interviewer had asked her why she felt this, Alcott replied “Because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man." This is one small element of the evidence that suggests Alcott may have been a lesbian, but nobody has any business to do anything other than suggest it. Unless Alcott herself pops back from the beyond to confirm or deny, nobody knows anything at all about how she thought or how she felt.

Peyton doesn’t want to believe that amazing women of the past were women. Peyton wants Role Models. Inspirational Trans People In History. And Peyton sees nothing unethical at all in just creating them. Because everything RadFems have to say must be set on fire, after all, so once all that feminist history has gone; & obviously there’s no question of considering sex when looking more widely… well, just imagine how many heroes have yet to be uncovered? All those suffrage campaigners who were doctors &/or pioneers of female education? Trans! (It’s going to be like those “Goodness Gracious Me” sketches where the dad says everything’s Indian… but, you know, not funny…)

Oh & Peyton believes in trans Vikings & is outraged that TV shows about them are not historically accurate in this regard. Viking shows need to be concerned about their ginger cat representation over & above trans Vikings. What with Viking Cats being ginger cats being an actual real thing (& how ginger cats arrived in the UK - the Romans brought tabbies), unlike trans vikings. It is more likely that the cats identified as warriors than the absurdities archaeologists have been suggesting & Peyton is all over.

Peyton is so relentlessly single-minded & demonstrates such a disregard for proper use of materials & that golden rule of not forcing modern concepts onto the people being studied; that I think they would have come to this conclusion regardless of what was in the archives. I think they would have disregarded Alcott having a propensity for writing lewd limericks about the male member (her attraction to & enjoyment of, not anything else) &/or a Sad Story about a hitherto-unknown engagement being tragically curtailed in Alcott’s youth leading to her forswearing (romantic) love & staying true to that oath all her life because they didn’t fit Peyton’s chosen narrative. Peyton had decided before they began the research that Alcott was trans, despite their tweet claiming caution. Peyton abused the opportunity they were given to access archival holdings relating to Alcott; & now they’re using very carefully selected - & then sneakily edited - sources to push their story. Because it is Peyton’s story, not Alcott’s - the latter has just been dragged along to validate Peyton et al.

Peyton should be ashamed. As should all the “oooh, so fascinating!” and “of course! it makes so much sense!” people falling over themselves to fail Peyton’s work as worthy weighty & of course valid[ating]. The staggering arrogance required to arbitrarily change another person’s pronouns doesn’t trouble them, because Peyton is not cruelly misgendering Alcott, no! Peyton is rescuing Alcott from the dreadful prison of cis-heteronormativity. Peyton is, of course, doing no such sodding thing - but is providing a stellar example of why “queering” things is a spectacularly bad idea…

@NitroNine
"It is more likely that the cats identified as warriors" - so now we know why TRAs want to cancel Gillian Philip!

NitroNine: Applause, stands up, more applause, yells Brava!

@NitroNine great post!

The dog turd analogy is brilliant; it describes my experience of TRA. I keep trying to not worry about it then it creeps back into my thoughts and boom I’m worried angry again.

Jo is much happier in her own skin when she realises (or society allows her) to be valued for something more than as a wife or mother. The whole of ‘Jo’s Boys’ covers that. something you’d expect an academic studying LAM to realise.

I think I may have said those words, plus a few perjoratives, as I read that sorry mess.

A defining characteristic of trans academics, as we have all noted over and over again, is a remarkable lack of academic rigour. And no bugger else holds them to the same standards as all other students. Which may be another good reason to become trans whilst at University, it seems to guarantee good grades and jobs for those of utterly mediocre intellect.

Adding my applause for Nitro
👏
👏