Femina by Janina Ramirez

[ChocolateMagnum]

Absolutely loved this book until right at the end... The last 'woman' explored in the book was a fucking man 😡

This is one of my biggest issues with the trans rights movement: That it erases women, even in a book meant to raise the voices of women who have been erased in history!

Very fed up with everyone kowtowing to men in this way, even those who I had hoped would know better.

She's often to be found making a fool of herself over this issue on Twitter. I like her writing, but she's definitely what you might call a TRA ally.

Oh yes she’s on the looooong list of supposedly deeply intelligent women who believe men are also women if they say so.

Sandy Toksvig did the same thing. Wrote an almanac listing women who have been erased or overlooked in history, due to sexism and included a man.

As you say, publicising women's erasure by including a man taking one of their places.

I don't know why these peoples heads don't explode

You wonder how they would respond by being asked exactly how many men should be included in this book. 20%, 50%, 90%?

because the concept of including men in a book about men erasing women seems to be absolutely fine.

So they would have to claim it's a numbers question. The concept is okay, just don't do it too often?

It's so PATHETIC overall, generally (not just talking about this post) - "we've" spent years and years and years and years fighting to be seen & heard as women. Just when things are becoming acceptable, we have to start all over again!

*I'm 20, I'm not pretending I've been personally fighting for this long but many women have, and I'm saying "acceptable" compared to what I've heard.

I once heard Ramirez talk at an academic event and she was about to say the word ‘female’ as in ‘fe …’ when she quickly corrected herself to say something else. She knows exactly what she is doing which is female erasure. Women are good enough for Ramirez to gain wealth and accolades but acknowledging femaleness (how icky!) is not part of the package.

I bought her book before I realised that she had drunk the Kool-Aid. Quite difficult to see how someone who claims to be interested in reclaiming women's history also believes that men can be women, but she's not the only one. I've see her Twitter pronouncements and they are embarrassing.

This reminds me I bought that book at the airport a few months ago, haven't got round to reading more than the intro yet. How disappointing.

If you read it, enjoy it, just stop before the last chapter 😂

Yes I remember a tweet from her that of COURSE she’s an “ally” / —genderist bandwagon-hopper and man-pleaser— - contrary to what some might assume! Yay well done Janina have a pat on the head for including everyone who wants to be included in your now indefinable concept of womanhood

It’s the ones who are female and make a living from “feminist” works that do my head in the most. There is no “woman” category if men can be it, it’s meaningless. Not just some special men (though that’s bad enough) but any man who fancies taking something from women, intimidating women or harming women. Come on in males! I’m a feminist so that means you’re all welcome to be included as women.

head.desk

There was a "women's writing" (fiction and non fiction) theme wall of books at my local bookshop recently. Two books were about the experiences of trans (born male, now wearing dresses, I have no idea of the terminology) and another was similar to Femina where it was mostly about just plain old fashioned women with one not-woman added for lolz, and the other was Femina.

Before anyone flames me- tra can have their section of the bookshop, I'm just saying does it have to also be "our" section of the bookshop? Oh, wait, yeah, it does.

Yep..same in this book by Lisa Congdon...all women...except the one man who says he's a woman

I don't know how she can write it with a straight face.

My work centres women in history because, as over 50% of the global population, they are the most obvious group that has been deliberately excluded from many historical narratives.

www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/women-history

The tag line thing should read
"Older women leading extraordinary lives, and one bloke living an extraordinary lie"

Oh my goodness the number of fiction books I’ve started where women’s experiences have supposedly been the central themes of the book and there are transwomen included. Drives me potty - the one that really made me angry was ‘When women were Dragons’

This, and the comment above it by @WhatterySquash, made me think very much about the ludicrousness of the whole argument, that if somebody feels the different sex to the one that they actually are then they are that. I remembered Germaine Greer giving a very memorable example of this ludicrousness, on Any Questions (BBC radio 4) in 2018.

My work centres women in history because, as over 50% of the global population, they are the most obvious group that has been deliberately excluded from many historical narratives.

What, even closeted trans women like Henry VIII and Richard III?

I think Katy Hessel’s book about women artists, The Story of Art Without Men, actually includes some men (who think they’re women). Pretty ironic, given the title…
And Cat Bohannon’s book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, includes males (who think they’re women). It makes a nonsense of her main point about the female body’s effect on evolution.

You might be please to know in my own tiny act of rebellion, I took off the main offending tomes and replaced them with a Bronte and a Harry Potter.

Interestingly the feminist fight has historically been for equal access to public spaces: polling booths, medical care, education, a seat at the table, a voice, a vote etc.

Now the spaces we're desperately clinging on to are our own: breastfeeding books, midwifery literature (chest feeding leaflets I'm looking at you), cervical screening, women's toilets, women's prisons, girls schools, our flipping tampons. Our place even in existence, in definition, in a philosophical point. If we were a species, we'd be on the bloody endangered list.

I bloody love Germaine Greer.

they are the most obvious group that has been deliberately excluded from many historical narratives

And now these “feminist” writers are excluding women who could have featured in their books, because it’s not cool if they don’t include male “women” - and can’t even see that they’ve been sold a totally patriarchal lie by the patriarchy. FGS.

Though being familiar with publishing I wonder if sometimes they are pressured into it by woke editors and go along with it to keep their publishing contract. Still, how anyone can think it’s appropriate in a book about the evolutionary history of the female body is bizarre.

I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but the TRA movement definitely has been swiftly and amazingly effective in making femaleness irrelevant. In such a short time span. Our words including ’mother’ now are meant to include men.

It’s been driven by misogynist men with issues but could not have been as successful as it’s been without the whole hearted embrace of (enough) women like Ramirez and others mentioned here.

Women’s natural? socialised? tendency to be nice has been spectacularly weaponised against us. To the point that the acceptance of men as women has rapidly become entrenched and embedded in education, medicine, media, corporate and government policy. With a range of successful and outrageous outcomes that the men probably never thought possible.

All made possible by women’s ‘niceness’ … almost as if those men knew that this was the one way to infiltrate and erase women only spaces.

I am pretty sure Henry VIII, of the many wives and mistresses, was not a closet anything. Richard III wielded a battle axe, which is about as unwomanly as you could get in 1485! **

My tongue was firmly in my cheek there @Grammarnut