“ “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was a transgender man”

[FlatpackHater]

I try really hard to be open minded to transgender thinking.

But reading things like this baffles me.

How can you retrospectively identify that someone who can’t speak for themselves was “a transgender man”.

When half the evidence presented for them being trans is that they didn’t conform to archetypical gendered behaviours, and that being a “tomboy” is held up as evidence of being trans.

How can we be at all sure that someone was trans and not simply rejecting the society’s expectations of how a woman should present and behave?

www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/05/little-women-author-louisa-may-alcott-transgender-man/

What a lot of utter nonsense.

The historical role models for women are frequently posthumously transed now. Joan of Arc, George Eliot, George Sand, Hatshepsut, Rosa Bonheur etc. have all been transed after death.

I assume the idea is that once 'woman' is just an abstract feeling of femininity or a preference for retrogressive gender roles applied to the female sex, then that new type of 'women' probably wouldn't need any historical role models. Stepford Wives or Barbie dolls would suffice.

The transing of the famous women after death is one of the first things which made me start researching the gender identity ideology, because it angered me so much! What those doing this were really saying that almost any woman who did anything at all that made her famous must have really been a man.

The reason those women had to fight against additional obstacles was their female sex. It's irrelevant how they 'felt' inside their heads.

This ideology is extremely anti-feminist, bringing back outdated gender roles and rigid rules about proper ways to behave while also erasing all terms for our sex.

What a load of regressive bullshit.

Well if the author is a transgender male they will go trying to justify their life choices by finding and 'identifying' with historical figures to show they are justified in their actions and beliefs. Dead people cannot argue back.

Never mind Alcott fought for women's rights and is probably shuddering in her grave.

Any rush to claim Enid Blyton and Elinor M Brent-Dyer ?

Any rush to claim Enid Blyton and Elinor M Brent-Dyer ?

I was just about to post about Enid Blyton! George in the Famous Five doesn't use her full name, wears her hair short and is most definitely a tomboy. EB obviously can't have cared for women or girls because Anne is such a soppy character. But EB as a trans something or other? I don't think so.

Sudden realisation when caught sight of myself in the mirror that my current favourite outfit was a nod to Gentleman Jack - black jacket and very skirt-like culottes/baggy trousers. I love the style but am a straight woman who when much younger and skinnier used to scour second places for men’s suits that fitted over my hips. I also wore ridiculous ball dresses as day wear. Dress up is fun as is mucking around with stereotypes but nothing more

Her books were autobiographical. If she believed that she was a man, why would she use the title "little women"?

It’s particularly irritating because Alcott came from a reforming Transcendentalist family who were very active in mid-19th century American progressive social movements, including abolitionism, early Transcendentalist feminism, veganism, communitarianism, and so on. There was a first flowering of American feminism and women’s rights associated with progressive abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Fuller (who wrote one of the first feminist rights manifestos - and certainly the first serious American statement of women’s rights - Woman in the Nineteenth Century).

Alcott’s family was very much of that circle. Retrospectively transing Alcott is incredibly disrespectful to that significant intellectual and political tradition of women’s rights and education, and really massively writes out of history her links to progressive Christian and Transcendentalist women’s movements. It’s historically deceitful and mendacious, basically pretending that these complex intellectual and social histories didn’t exist. It proper boils my piss (as Jo March surely would have said if she had had the opportunity 😂)

The quote used “I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.” has been taken out of context. The whole thing is 'I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body.... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.'

I suspect she was attracted to women in an era when it was not accepted by society. She at no point says she wants to be a man...ffs

Jo March, Henny from All of a Kind Family, Caddie Woodlawn, Laura Ingalls...all girls who loved to defy convention and stereotypes. They were my childhood heroines who showed me I could have choices and independent thought, be rambunctious and adventurous...it's maddening to think that anyone would denigrate them like this...as if women are only true women if simpering, submissive and demure.

I'm just waiting for Radcliffe Hall and Gertrude Stein to be co-opted. I wonder what is keeping them?

Radcliffe Hall has been co-opted already. Haven't seen any chat about Stein yet.

Oh ffs. I’m getting so fucking angry

In fact, I must be a man, I’m so angry!!

Radcliffe Hall is perhaps the only lesbian writer who I wonder from her writing if she may have chosen to identify as a TM (had she lived in the 21st century during this time and been au fait with it all). But no one but Radcliffe Hall, in those circumstances, would be able to confirm or deny this.

Either we don't randomly label other people according to our personal choices and respect their personal identity, or we don't. It can't be one rule for some and one rule for others. Some who deserve that respect and some who are just to put up, shut up and obey. Because frankly fuck that.

I saw a thread on Twitter declaring LMA a trans man a couple of months back. Rather depressingly, it had been 'liked' by Elaine Showalter...

Noooooo! Wtf? 🙁 You’d think she could just revisit her own work - especially Women, Madness & English Culture and Hysterical Epidemics - just to see how much of a fashionable nonsense genderist ideology all is. It’s literally what she spent her career writing about 😟

Disappointed. I mean it’s tantamount to career suicide to out yourself as a terf/second-waver in US academia right now; but still. Genderism literally undoes everything she spent her career doing.

As Helen Joyce writes in Chapter 7 ("She Who Must Not Be Named") of her excellent book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality:

In its erasure of sex categories, gender-identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who, by force, luck or guile, succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is now at risk of being retroactively transitioned. Boudicca and Joan of Arc are both often described as transmen. So is the Pharaoh Hatshepsut (who ‘was assigned female at birth but intermittently dressed and ruled as a King’, according to Amnesty UK). In 2019 the Washington Post removed mention of Jennie Hodgers, who cross-dressed in order to fight in the American Civil War, from a podcast entitled ‘Women who won wars’. In an apology, it said Hodgers’s inclusion had not been ‘in keeping with Washington Post style, which states that people should be referred to by their current identity’.

Lesbian icons are now routinely described as transmen, among them Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, a tragic story of Sapphic love, and Stormé DeLarverie, a professional drag king who was in the thick of the Stonewall riots that launched the modern gay-rights movement. Even fictional characters are not safe. George of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, a girl who hates dresses and long hair, and loves sailing and climbing; Jo of Little Women, who whistles, walks with her hands behind her back and promises her father to be the ‘man of the house’ while he is away at war; and Yentl, who cross-dresses to be allowed to study the Talmud: all are now often ‘reinterpreted’ as transmen.

(Apologies for the long quote and not indenting it for clarity. Is it possible to use blockquote on Mumsnet?!)

We can surely be only inches away from Rosalind in AYLI and everyone in Twelfth Night being transed. FFS

@nightwakingmoon Yep - my first thought was 'The Female Malady'

Yes, this. Transing the dead is often a way of erasing women who were prepared to fight their way past confinement in order to innovate and achieve.

We got a few years of media, historians, etc correcting the balance by trying to recognise the achievements of female historical figures, and then we get this. It's a fightback by men who are threatened by society's eventual, belated recognition of women as people.

It's reminiscent of the Mormons rebaptising their dead ancestors into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Ahistorical and disrespectful.

Will any current writers especially those who have bought the transideology, write something which will be considered a classic 100 years later? Or will people look back and wonder who wrote this tosh about women with penises?

Well based on Peyton Thomas's effort about his musings on Louisa Alcott I am not holding my breath.