Kathy Burke: I didn't want to be a boy but I didn't want to be a girlie girl either

[BonfireLady]

My jaw hit the floor several times reading this extract from Kathy Burke's book:

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/kathy-burke-book

In a parallel universe, I'd have been so happy to read this. She talks about being happy that she was mistaken for a boy, being delighted with her short hair, finding joy in punk rock as her answer to where she fitted in the world, recognising the risk of pregnancy when she was younger and didn't feel old enough for sex.

In that parallel would, she would have been an amazing role model for my daughter. Instead, Kathy Burke is one of many celebrities who represents a massive societal risk to my daughter who is: happy when being mistaken for a boy, delighted with her short hair, finding her confidence with the piano and bass guitar (she has a musical talent that hasn't come from me 😬), appalled at the idea of sex anyway (but thankfully understands that only females can get pregnant) and.... struggling with puberty (hates her breasts, hates periods, hates the way boys look at girls now that she and her peers are no longer young children).

If my daughter met someone like Kathy Burke, I would fully expect her to be told that if she feels like a boy, she is a boy... trapped in the wrong body.... but don't worry, you can remove those breasts and even take testosterone if it want. Etc.

How can Kathy Burke be so close to getting it... yet so far?

She never got over her desparation to be accepted by the 'cool girls' unlike many of us.

Its very sad.

eye-fucking-roll

I didn't either. So i did whatever i wanted. The end.

sigh.

She is one of the biggest disappointments for me when it comes to going along with GI. I thought better of her.
James Dreyfus, on the other hand is wonderful.

I used to love KB precisely because she wasn't a "girly girl" but a successful accomplished actress who just was herself

It's the short hair that I find baffling. I grew up in the 1970s, we nearly all had short hair as did everones mums and grans . I am struggling to think of many women in the public eye with long hair, Annie Lennox, but she had it cut and I suppose Siouxie wotsits might have been long considering how high it stood up. My mum has never had long hair is in her 90s and lives in trousers, and my grandmothers were delighted to get rid. 1980s big hair required hair but there were loads of alternatives.
Some of us just can't grow long hair and for a number of years DH had hair considerably longer than mine, as did my brother, as in halfway down their backs...
This daft woman is the same age as me, did she grow up in a weird Victorianesque enclave of long haired wims?

I remember Kathy Burke's response to Helena Bonham Carter way back when HBC was complaining about how hard it is being an actor if you're pretty and posh.

HBC: "If you're not pretty and you're working class you have an easier time in terms of people's attitudes to you"

KB: "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes, I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt"

I was right behind KB then, and I thought HBC was ridiculous and spoilt.

However...fast forward a couple of decades and it's HBC defending JK Rowling, calling the backlash "horrendous", saying JKR had been hounded and stating very clearly: "It’s been taken to the extreme, the judgementalism of people [...] she’s allowed her opinion, particularly if she’s suffered abuse."

Funny how things turn out.

You’re making a drama about nothing. The article about Kathy’s youth is fine.

You seem to have missed the point. Never mind.

I considered getting this book on pre-order as I always liked Kathy Burke but having read the excerpt linked, I won't bother now.

It's like a high school essay my 15 year old might do; very little flow between sentences or storylines. Feels like she had to meet a wordcount and just cut out a load of conjunctions.

Erm.

Yes, the article about Kathy's youth is great. That's what's so sad.

I didn't think my disappointment in her championing of gender identity belief could go to any greater depths... but yes, it could. The fact that her experience of growing up not feeling "girlie" has left her somehow believing that today's non-girlie girls aren't actually girls at all is breathingly sad.

This is how I want to feel about her ⬇️
I used to love KB precisely because she wasn't a "girly girl" but a successful accomplished actress who just was herself

You're free to think that ignorance/activism like Kathy's, that has encouraged thousands of girls worldwide to have their breasts removed and/or to permanently damage their bodies with testosterone, is me making a drama about nothing... but I'm afraid I disagree.

Thanks for saying this. I went back to the article to check whether she had a co-writer associated with the book and apparently not.

"we decided to catch our breath and hopefully a bus."

There's a few more phrases like this. As a short-haired, dungaree-wearing, 70's female very occasionally called son, I'm disappointed.

@BonfireLadyWhere in the article does she say that they aren’t actually non girly girls aren’t actually girls?

It doesn't say that in the article at all.

TBF, maybe you've not heard her talking about gender identity? If not, I can see why my disappointment in her might not make sense.

She believes transwomen are women and transmen are men. Obviously we live in a free country where we can all hold different beliefs but the key point here is that this belief radicalises and harms non-girlie girls... because some of these girls will assume that they aren't really girls at all. That's the issue here.

This is exactly how I remember the early 90s. As a tiny child who wanted to be a princess with an ice cream cone hat, I was so constantly disappointed that every ‘iconic’ woman had boyish short hair and shapeless blokey clothes. Even my age the bob was about as long as hair got until the mid-late-90s. It wasn’t weird or unusual, it was very much the preference of my parents’ generation and I hated how masculine everyone was. And now that’s seen as different and special? Come on, how short are people’s memories?!

That’s a lot. I think she’s just thick as mince.

'I remember Kathy Burke's response to Helena Bonham Carter way back when HBC was complaining about how hard it is being an actor if you're pretty and posh.
HBC: "If you're not pretty and you're working class you have an easier time in terms of people's attitudes to you"
KB: "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes, I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt"

I think that's a foul thing to say to another woman. It was a pretty stupid comment from HBC, but she didn't deserve that

I do find Kathy Burke to be a massive fraud and phony. She doesn't have much of a shtick apart from fuck this and cunt that. She can be a brilliant actress but I find her own persona very tiresome. She made a doc for Channel 4 a few years ago about women and (I think) feminism which was a real dud - she had nothing very interesting to say and just did a lot of nodding and 'right' when interviewing the women.

She's either not very bright or desperate to be 'cool', or both

I had long hair as a child in the seventies and I STILL got mistaken for a boy. Around 1976, I started to think my name was Son😅 Ah well.

I always loved Kathy Burke. Great actor. Irish heritage. Funny. Not your usual carbon copy celebrity. The disappointment set in a couple of years ago. I really wish she had kept her gob shut so that I could go on liking her.

I wish people would stop deciding that being a sex realist means you can’t be left wing.
It isn’t a club where you have to take an oath to all think the same.
I am and will always be on the left politically but I have never for one second believed that humans can change sex.
It is just as presumptive as saying all conservative voters are anti abortion.

I disagree. I don’t think short hair equals masculine - perhaps it’s a generational thing because I was a 70s/80s child. Most of the women and girls around me and on television had short hair. (Only notable exceptions for me were Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels, I liked them because they got shit done.) No way were they deemed masculine - just women with short hair.

I was another girl, like a PP, who wore trainers and dungarees and had short hair (got called a skinhead by my teacher once). I also wore hand me downs from my older brothers (or nicked their clothes). Still didn’t make me a boy.

[Edited for typos - so many]

I agree.

I'm left centrist on every political issue I can think of apart from this one.

And this issue only became political because enough people decided that biological sex didn't matter any more. It's as much an issue on the political right, albeit a different version of the problem e.g. where some conservative Christians/Muslims find homosexuality so abhorrent that they would rather believe (or pretend to believe) that a homosexual person has changed sex and is therefore now straight.

Love Kathy Burke, you, are scraping the barrel trying to find someone to hate.

What absolute bollocks

I may have missed things she has said elsewhere but I don’t see any problem here - she is basically saying she was a tomboy and possibly not very attractive.

Who's hating anyone? It's a discussion.