Philippa Gregory thinks that two sexes, male and female, is a "myth"

[Fenlandia]

According to journalist Susan Dalgety's Substack (a good read), the author Philippa Gregory, who has sold gazillions of historical fiction novels, thinks there are more sexes than we first thought!

https://susandalgety.substack.com/p/philippa-gregory-may-be-a-bestselling

Here is the quote from Dalgety:

"Philippa Gregory, who prides herself as a feminist, does not believe in the “myth of two sexes.” She writes glowingly of a modern world where it is impossible to divide humans into two categories, male and female. “It is as fictional as a sorting hat – we are more diverse than and more varied, and more changeable over time, in a richer multiple word than the binary model…” And she points out that in the 1990s, American sexologist, Anne Fausto-Sterling, counted five sexes (male, female, merm, ferm and herm), while French scientist Eric Vilain suggested an “infinite number of biological genders.” It was at this point I dropped my coffee cup."

And yet again with the tedious trope that in order for people to be interesting and the world to be diverse, we must dispense with the fact of the sex binary by which every single human has been produced, ever.

and yet for literally centuries we managed without ppl flailing around going ‘oooooh it’s soooooo hard to telllll who is a man and who is a woman’.

it wasn’t confusing when women weren’t able to vote was it? Or couldn’t take out a mortgage or a credit card? Or when people are looking for a surrogate? Suddenly it’s very easy to tell who the women are

Anne Boleyn could have just opted out of her ishoos by telling Henry she was transitioning.

She should just have told him Elizabeth was a boy, surely. I think Liz 1 would have cheerfully gone along with that.

Out of curiosity, I searched for ‘Philippa Gregory’ to see what the general response to this interview was. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on her website to find he’s written a book about ‘Normal Women’

“Normal Women is a radical reframing of our nation’s story, told not with the rise and fall of kings and the occasional queen, but through social and cultural transition, showing the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of women in society – from 1066 to modern times.”

-about everyday women flying spitfires, farming etc.

From the review, there only seems to be two sexes mentioned in the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Normal-Women-Hundred-Making-History/dp/0063304325

Oh she'd have grabbed the option with both hands, wouldn't she?!

No more risk of ending up being the birthing side attachment to some bloke who had become king and ruler in her place, or ending up with her head cut off when said bloke got bored of her.

Would have saved her decades of pretending to think about marriage with various men and stalling a court full of other really annoying men wanting to control her, and so much stress and harassment.

To have been able to escape her material reality would have taken so many of the problems out of her life.

Ah.

So this view works great for men who want to use women's spaces, but no plan about what happens to all the women who end up with no access to society at all so that men can have all the choosy choices? Gosh. And no concerns about the racism/sexism/religious intolerance/ableism yada yada either? Gosh again. Shocked I tell you.

Sexed spaces have worked just fine with no one being confused on this: the point of arguing that it's all soooooo complicated is to let men get into spaces where women, who don't want them, are getting undressed. That's pretty much it.

If it wasn't, then everyone would be going 'third spaces, because obvs everyone matters and the undressed non consenting women aren't essentials'.

But they are.

Philippa Gregory should constrain her fiction to her novels, and leave it out of biology.

And “It is as fictional as a sorting hat" sounds like a nice little dig in Rowling's direction, does it not?

it wasn’t confusing when women weren’t able to vote was it? Or couldn’t take out a mortgage or a credit card? Or when people are looking for a surrogate? Suddenly it’s very easy to tell who the women are

You remind me of a classic piece from a banned Medium account, reproduced here:

https://genderarguments.com/openletterbiologicalsex/

Thanks @NecessaryScene Ive always loved that piece!

That piece is awesome!

I've never seen "who'se" before @Lemonlemonlemonapple. What does it mean?

It’s a new word I’ve invented; precise meaning to be determined, lol

I came across Fausto-Sterling's Tweets on her '5 sexes' thing a couple of years ago (you can find it at https://twitter.com/Fausto_Sterling/status/1229806457165623297). I've screenshot it for those not on Twitter.

In tweet 6 she says
"Some people "got" that mine was a "Modest Proposal" (and no, I do not think Swift really wanted people to eat children)"

A Modest Proposal was a satirical essay written by Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels was another of his satires). By calling her The Five Sexes a modest proposal, she's saying it was satire - not to be taken literally, but allegorically. The treatment of children with DSDs back then was pretty shocking - genital surgery and a veil of secrecy thereafter as if their medical conditions were shameful, all done to them as young as possible so they themselves often didn't know this had been done to them, but all of them living as life-long medical patients.

She wrote The Five Sexes with the intention that it should shock people into examining the standard treatment of these children, just as Swift wanted rich people to actually think about the plight of the children of the poor. She didn't think there were five sexes - she thought children with DSDs should be treated more compassionately than the medical regime of the time did treat them.

That's my reading of this thread of tweets. I've never read The Five Sexes itself, just this thread, by the author, commenting on her own work. And to me, this thread sounds a little exasperated with those people who took it literally ("ONLY I get to state my intention-others can say that I did not succeed in communicating my intent").

So Philippa Gregory is a credulous fool if she actually thinks that Fausto-Sterling "counted five sexes (male, female, merm, ferm and herm"; I suspect Fausto-Sterling would tell her that to her face (were she as exasperated by this misreading of her work as I am).

But the Sorting Hat assigns which Hogwarts House the new pupil is in, although the criteria are somewhat obscure. So isn't it "assignment at birth" which is like a Sorting Hat? And just as fictional.

I hadn't picked up on the sorting hat comment but I was driving while listening so the effort for my eyes not to be constantly rolling to the back of my head was all consuming!

I'd love to understand the cognitive dissonance that goes on in people's heads, is it wanting to be kind or is it a misunderstanding of biology?

As an ex nurse I was always constantly surprised how poor people's understanding of their own bodies is people still believe so many myths and half truths even those with high levels of education.

Easy way to tell.

Genetically test every single female who goes into a maternity ward to give birth.

The results wont be ambiguous.
They wont be as "fictional as a sorting hat".
100% of those people will have something in common, I wonder if she can guess what that would be?

Are people this insane?

When he saw her, the water lapping on her scales, head down in the bath he had built especially for her, thinking that she would like to wash—not to revert to fish—he had that instant revulsion that some men feel when they understand, perhaps for the first time, that a woman is truly “other.” She is not a boy though she is weak like a boy, nor a fool though he has seen her tremble with feeling like a fool. She is not a villain in her capacity to hold a grudge, nor a saint in her flashes of generosity. She is not any of these male qualities. She is a woman. A thing quite different to a man. What he saw was a half fish, but what frightened him to his soul was the being which was a woman.

Philippa Gregory, The White Queen (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #2)

I think you missed the point.

All your very sensible recommendations will not be welcome by people bent on "proving" that biological hard facts are "a myth". When they're obfuscating and gaslighting, for them it's a feature, not a bug.

They use exactly the kind of "arguments" that are to be expected from those not on speaking terms with reality, who're trying to impose their view by means of "alternative logic".