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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

To feel incredibly sorry for Eddie Izzard

559 replies

ColdstreamAnnie · 27/10/2022 20:31

I don't want to pity Eddie but I felt a wave of sadness after reading that Rosie Duffield (MP) said she would rather be arrested than refer to Eddie as a woman.

OP posts:
Datun · 01/11/2022 11:45

WeeBisom · 01/11/2022 11:24

On the marathon point, izzard admitted in the guardian that he succumbs to magical thinking and feels if he does enough marathons his dead mother will come back to life. Which is very sad. I do wonder if this girl mode business is similarly magical thinking? It will be challenging for Eddie now he’s in full girl mode … no more lucrative male roles!

Yes, I believe he has said that everything he does is an attempt to bring his mother back.

I don't know how being a local MP relates to that.

AryaStarkWolf · 01/11/2022 11:48

isitginoclock · 29/10/2022 08:08

Whoops OP, you picked the wrong audience to share this particularly normal and empathetic view. MN is well known for being v TERF-y.

Eddie himself has no issue referring to himself as a man though when it benefits him, like for acting roles.

KatMcBundleFace · 01/11/2022 11:53

Datun · 01/11/2022 11:45

Yes, I believe he has said that everything he does is an attempt to bring his mother back.

I don't know how being a local MP relates to that.

Now I pity him again.
I was cross about the Rosie Duffield comments.

Eddie, they are lying to you. I guess it's very 21st century to lie to you, but there we go.

I wish Greyson Perry hadn't been frightened into silence by the TRAs

Moonatics · 01/11/2022 12:02

Eddie has an addictive streak

I watched Eddie doing umpty plonk marathons in as many days. Years ago, not the recent one on a treadmill.
I cant remember if Eddie's self said it or if I just thought it, but yes Eddie comes across as addictive. If it wasnt running, it could easily be drugs or sex or insert choice of material.
I definitely remember thinking it's a good job marathons were chosen as the vice, someone that addictive would not survive long on drugs.

nilsmousehammer · 01/11/2022 13:24

No, mentioning his mum doesn't activate my female socialisation nurture/enable mode. Not even taking my shoes off seems to work on that one.

Rampant attention seeking mode is the one I see at full blast all the time regardless of outfit.

Datun · 01/11/2022 13:29

nilsmousehammer · 01/11/2022 13:24

No, mentioning his mum doesn't activate my female socialisation nurture/enable mode. Not even taking my shoes off seems to work on that one.

Rampant attention seeking mode is the one I see at full blast all the time regardless of outfit.

Me neither.

If it is behind his motivation, I don't see why women should lose out on all their rights because he's sad.

nilsmousehammer · 01/11/2022 13:35

Framing female rights as some kind of therapeutic sacrifice to unhappy males is quite disturbing really. Particularly that so many politicians are not thinking 'do I really want to stand on a ticket of male supremacism?'

Shit, is your socialisation chip broken too, Datun? I think mine overloaded somewhere around the point I found out about the 'cotton ceiling'. 😖

RedToothBrush · 01/11/2022 14:44

Izzard has addiction issues and takes everything to the Nth degree past the range of normal.

Izzard gets plaudits and attention for doing so. The adoration is part of the actions undertaken.

Izzard can not just be sensible - even with the ref, Izzard had to go one step further and be more 'pro-eu' than everyone else, thus pissing off a lot of people 'on the same team' for frankly acting like a bloody extremist nutter.

Izzard is tone deaf, can't read the room and seems to be utterly unaware of how these actions upset others, because its all about the attention and positive feed back they get. The inability to know what to 'shut the fuck up' is a necessary one. There isn't an acknowledgement of boundaries. Shouting at people and refusing to listen to them nor even have a degree of respect is not an attribute that is helpful in anyone, but much less someone in a public office. If you read up on Izzard, you wonder when the word 'no' was ever used.

Izzard demands the respect of others without earning it, and wonders why its not always automatically forthcoming. Izzard screaming at Brexiteers was the clear example of this personality trait and nothing to do with gender.

This is a pattern repeated that predates standing for parliament by some margin and seems to be getting more apparent and more out of touch with those around with each new cycle.

If you want to be a parliamentary representative, then having empathy and a degree of self-awareness is a quality which is admirable and necessary if you are to be competent and good at the job of serving the public interest. Every politician who lacks this, tends to be utterly shit and a complete twat who is doing it for self serving reasons alone. (Hello Jacob Rees-Mogg).

Moreover, there are clearly some unresolved issues to do with his mother:

Izzard has said on numerous occasions that 'Everything I do in life is trying to get my mother back’. Izzard's mother died when Izzard was 6.

“Toward the end of the film, I started talking about my mother… ” he recalls. “And I said something revelatory: ‘I know why I’m doing all this,’ I said. ‘Everything I do in life is trying to get her back. I think if I do enough things… that maybe she’ll come back.’” When he said those words, he says, it felt like his unconscious speaking. The thought stayed with him that “I do believe I started performing and doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because on some level, on some childlike magical-thinking level, I thought doing those things might bring her back.”
www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/10/eddie-izzard-trying-to-get-mother-back-victoria-and-abdul

and

Is there some genetic explanation for his energy?
“Dad loved football, played until his late 30s. I don’t know about Mum. She liked singing and comedy and Flanders and Swann but I’m not sure about sport.”

I hear his voice break just slightly. Izzard still can’t really talk about his mother easily, at least not in an interview. In his book he describes how in the immediate aftermath of her death he and his dad and his brother cried together for half an hour and then stopped in case they went on for ever. In place of therapy dad bought his sons a model railway set and they built it in the spare room and immersed themselves in it. The set recently resurfaced when Izzard had it restored and donated it to a museum in their home town of Bexhill-on-Sea, another part of his excavation of that time.

“Dad encouraged us with it after Mum died,” he says, by way of explanation. “He made a table for us and we spent hours and hours building it. Then in 1975 my stepmother, Kate, came along and it was put away into boxes and never came out again. It went from Dad’s attic to my brother’s attic, and he didn’t know what to do with it. I thought, why not give it to the museum in Bexhill? I guessed there might be plenty of model railway enthusiasts in Bexhill, and they rebuilt this thing, it’s kind of a collector’s item. They are now going to build another one, a Christmas version. We had a grand opening and Dad came down to see it.”

Here is Izzard in 2016:
‘The greatest love of my life? My mother'
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/28/eddie-izzard-interview-love-of-life-mother-marathons

I must admit, I find this article on Izzard as having a whole bunch of things to unpack, which I won't comment on any further:
When Izzard was 13 he gained a step-mother — in aptly bizarre circumstances. His father Harold was a Samaritan and one night took a call from a depressed-sounding woman. Harold realised he knew her — in fact, she’d been married to his cousin. He made contact a few days later and they began courting.

His new step-mother had a well-stocked wardrobe, which young Edward soon began raiding. Plainly she realised that something was afoot — on one occasion she asked if he had adjusted the straps on her bra — but in characteristically British fashion the subject was never addressed head-on.
www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-4779684/Why-Eddie-Izzard-s-desperately-seeking-Mum.html

Also Izzard wasn't raised by his dad either:
But my mum died when I was there. March '68. So that was a killer, and rejigged everything. Before my mum died, they decided that me and my brother should go off to these boarding schools, because I think my dad had just got a career going. Having gone to Aden and whatever, he'd been promoted.

My gran used to work in a biscuit factory and cleaned houses and my granddad drove buses, so that was a very working-class background. They were from north Bexhill, Sidley. I've gone back and done benefits there. No hot water, no bathroom, baths in front of the fire, an outside loo, that's what my dad grew up in. He decided me and my brother should go to boarding schools. A single-parent male, that's how you keep it all going.
www.eddieizzard.com/en/early-years

Izzard left home to go to boarding school when age 6. No girls at first school. One of the schools he went to did have girls but for the most part, there wasn't contact with girls:
At my first Eastbourne school a fifth of the pupils were girls. Maybe a quarter. At this school, there were no girls for three years, and then there were girls. So it was just...odd. At sixteen there were girls again but only one girl to every ten boys, so packs of spotty boys would follow these girls around and carry their...everything. Literally put them on a litter and carry them around. So I didn't talk to girls for a whole year. I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to pull. I can't say I'm in the first team. 'Only by the end of the year I had started using my wit. I could say, 'Yes! I am from outer-space!' Or some such shit.

I believe in co-education all the way, although boys benefit more. Boys tend to say to girls, 'You're not working, are you?' and put them off.
www.eddieizzard.com/en/early-years

And this is quite the comment:
The SAS was advanced running, jumping and standing still. Blue berets and very secretive. They were all self-sufficient so if one member of a platoon got killed, then the others knew what to do. It wasn't like, 'Oh, he was the explosives guy. We're going to have to do explosives without him.' 'I don't know about explosives. They go bang, don't they?'

But it wasn't making any sense to me because I just wanted to do comedy. There was just an idea that performing comedy was crazy, but as I got closer and closer to sixteen, I just thought, this is possible. I wasn't running around anymore, so I wasn't fit, and I didn't get promoted so I thought, bugger that.

And after the course, I obviously thought, if merit isn't rewarded then, fuck it, I'll go and be a transvestite.

There's a whole bag of extreme masculinity, lack of female role contact and lack of parental love in there as well as a big dollop of unresolved trauma, which I won't comment on further.

Utterly fascinating...

But none of these things make Izzard a woman.

lifeturnsonadime · 01/11/2022 15:06

RedToothBrush

Wow what an insight into the reason for Izzard's fascination with women.

It makes me even more offended that we are demanded to accept that Izzard is one.

And note that I am no longer using pronouns to describe Izzard when I was able to at the start of the thread. It's insane that we are compelled in our speech by what an individual wants rather than what we know to be true. This thread really really highlights that point.

RedToothBrush · 01/11/2022 15:33

lifeturnsonadime · 01/11/2022 15:06

RedToothBrush

Wow what an insight into the reason for Izzard's fascination with women.

It makes me even more offended that we are demanded to accept that Izzard is one.

And note that I am no longer using pronouns to describe Izzard when I was able to at the start of the thread. It's insane that we are compelled in our speech by what an individual wants rather than what we know to be true. This thread really really highlights that point.

Isn't it just?

I don't think we need to comment further (indeed I think we risk deletion if we do). We can see it without commenting though. We can just use Izzard's own words, which are in the public domain, to highlight the point well enough.

stealtheatingtunnocks · 01/11/2022 20:20

Is Eddie still touring? I wonder what Eddie’s agent thinks of the recent shift?

Eddie WAS brilliant and innovative and had great charisma on stage. I saw Eddie a few times live, the last time was a political show about Brexit and it wasn’t funny, it was a manifesto.

people change and I suppose ageing makes us all concentrate on what we need or want. I hope Eddie is happy, but I have my doubts - if happiness relies on people lying to you then you will always find a child or drunk or disinhibited person who says what they see.

I see lots of things abkht Eddie, but none of them are the same as me.

fromorbit · 04/11/2022 11:29

Latest development in Sheffield is that Izzard is trailing in Labour branch votes. Think he might not make shortlist but we shall see.

Also Owen Jones has decided not to back Izzard and has thrown his support behind a woman Doctor instead, probably because she is a more authentic left, local woman.
www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4653015-sheffield-central-labour-candidate-abtisam-mohamed-vs-eddie-izzard?page=8

Jones let us remember thought that GC criticism of Izzard was proof of how evil they were:
twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1586797706944696321

Jones attitude to Izzard probably mimics what would happen if a transman chatted him up. All behind the theory of trans .... in actual practice not so much.

passport123 · 04/11/2022 11:31

fromorbit · 04/11/2022 11:29

Latest development in Sheffield is that Izzard is trailing in Labour branch votes. Think he might not make shortlist but we shall see.

Also Owen Jones has decided not to back Izzard and has thrown his support behind a woman Doctor instead, probably because she is a more authentic left, local woman.
www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4653015-sheffield-central-labour-candidate-abtisam-mohamed-vs-eddie-izzard?page=8

Jones let us remember thought that GC criticism of Izzard was proof of how evil they were:
twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1586797706944696321

Jones attitude to Izzard probably mimics what would happen if a transman chatted him up. All behind the theory of trans .... in actual practice not so much.

That would be so funny if Eddie doesn't get the Labour candidacy after all the effort he has put in!

JacquelinePot · 04/11/2022 11:56

Re OJ, to me this is the absolutely central issue:

"...there are, and always will be, a small number of people for whom life is unbearable unless their gender identity - which is completely central to their sense of self - is accepted"

What he actually means is:

"...there are, and always will be, a small number of people for whom life is unbearable unless their gender identity - which is completely central to their sense of self - is accepted other people pretend not to notice what sex they are"

If your life is "unbearable" because other people won't pretend they don't know what sex you are, that is very much a you problem and something you need to work on.

Lottapianos · 04/11/2022 12:44

'If your life is "unbearable" because other people won't pretend they don't know what sex you are, that is very much a you problem and something you need to work on.'

Big fat AMEN to that!

TheKeatingFive · 04/11/2022 13:33

Jones attitude to Izzard probably mimics what would happen if a transman chatted him up. All behind the theory of trans .... in actual practice not so much.

Classic TRA in the tweets, TERF in the sheets 😉

Datun · 04/11/2022 13:42

JacquelinePot · 04/11/2022 11:56

Re OJ, to me this is the absolutely central issue:

"...there are, and always will be, a small number of people for whom life is unbearable unless their gender identity - which is completely central to their sense of self - is accepted"

What he actually means is:

"...there are, and always will be, a small number of people for whom life is unbearable unless their gender identity - which is completely central to their sense of self - is accepted other people pretend not to notice what sex they are"

If your life is "unbearable" because other people won't pretend they don't know what sex you are, that is very much a you problem and something you need to work on.

Exactly.

It's a nonsense statement. He has no way of knowing how many his 'small number' of people is, or being able to confine it to a small number of people.

And any case, as you say, it's not confined to a small number of people. It's confined to every bloody person in case they are speaking to one of those small number of people.

mauvish · 04/11/2022 14:27

This has developed into a really fascinating thread.

What makes me laugh is that TRA shout loudly about how we should be non-binary in our thinking, yet what I see is an increasing push towards strict binary-ness (can't think of the word!) in society. You're a young girl but you like wearing trousers and playing in the mud, and have a crush on your female teacher? Then you're obviously trans. Well, that's a binary as you can get -- you've apparently got to be one if you don't fit conveniently into a box marked the other. And those boxes are so trammelled nowadays - the gender images are totally stereotyped. When I was a kid, girls like that were just called tomboys and no-one cared! The world was harsher towards young boys who were "feminine", but again it was pretty much accepted that that was the way some people were. It didn't make those boys more of a girl, it just made them a boy with different tastes from other men.

I really hope that EI doesn't get the nomination in Sheffield. I live here, though not in the relevant ward, and I feel he would make the city a laughing stock. And if I did live in the relevant ward, I'd vote for any party other than vote for him.

RedToothBrush · 04/11/2022 14:30

TheKeatingFive · 04/11/2022 13:33

Jones attitude to Izzard probably mimics what would happen if a transman chatted him up. All behind the theory of trans .... in actual practice not so much.

Classic TRA in the tweets, TERF in the sheets 😉

Or even Jones recognises that despite identifying as trans, Izzard would make a really shit MP.

NCFT0922 · 04/11/2022 15:01

@mauvish I’m with you; I live here too and wouldn’t vote him in if it was my ward. Absolute laughing stock.

ZuttZeVootEeeVo · 04/11/2022 15:03

The thing with izzard is that hes made a fortune out of taking glimmers of truths and creating a whole fantasy narative that people love to listen to. Hes charismatic on stage and audiences are willing to suspend disbelief to listen to the most absurd scenarios he imagines.

I dont think this has that much to do with his childhood, mother, father or anything much. His just using his skill in real life this time.

AryaStarkWolf · 04/11/2022 15:13

TheKeatingFive · 04/11/2022 13:33

Jones attitude to Izzard probably mimics what would happen if a transman chatted him up. All behind the theory of trans .... in actual practice not so much.

Classic TRA in the tweets, TERF in the sheets 😉

Bahahahahahaha I LOVE that

WeeBisom · 04/11/2022 15:14

I just saw Eddie's campaign video. There was the usual stuff about sticking it to the Tories, getting more doctors and police officers, better schools. Then Eddie starting talking about 'performing around the world in 45 different countries, spekaing 4 languages' and I was like 'oooh, what's that got to do with Sheffield?" Then more about how his comedy and performances bring people together and he has had an international career. Thought it was getting just too much about Eddie, and not enough about his plans if he was elected. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Then in the final three seconds of the video he gives a smug grin and states 'oh, and I'm TRANS by the way'. FFS Eddie, it's just self-centered and cringy as shit. You don't see disabled peoples saying 'oh and i'm DISABLED by the way'. The islamic woman who is running against him hasn't ended her video with 'i'M AN ISLAMIC WOMAN by the way.' It's just all about him, him, him.

BeenCounter · 04/11/2022 15:27

It's another power trip for Eddie.

The cult of personality, people using their profile to attract publicity. Will it be advantageous for the people of Sheffield to have Eddie representing them ?

He will attract attention, but I fear someone who relies so much on his public image is someone who will not be able to tell the adequate truth of a situation.
He will bow down to watever woke message is desirable.

Popular politics.

nilsmousehammer · 04/11/2022 15:47

Yeah when you're voting in a politician you're actually looking for someone with capacity to represent you, which necessitates room inside their/his/her/xie's head for thinking about other things and other people beside the magical wonderland of them.