Wizard Book Lady is, again, not like Catholic Oxford Linguist Fantasy Book Writer. She is not a bigot typical of her class and time. She is like Squid Monster That Will Awaken to Eat Us Horror Man. Her views are, while not atypical in her specific nation right now, unusual.
-
-
Show this thread
-
This is not to paint a rosy picture of overall tolerance; it is to note that hatred of this level is a recent phenomenon on this particular issue and that even when she was writing the books it's likely her prejudice was no more than casual. This is a recent social phenomenon.
Show this thread -
Like, the bigotry she expresses isn't analogous to casual racism. It's not "haha trans people, what delusional idiots, lol". It's a set of memes and ideas and phrasings very similar to what neo-Nazi groups do with seven times two followed by eleven times eight, and the 6+8 words
Show this thread -
In "her time" (the mid-00s) the types of in-depth beliefs Wizard Book Lady now professes to hold about trans people were only really thought out to that extent by academics and members of certain r a d ical feminist organizations - quite obscure.
Show this thread -
Casually transphobic stuff like associating genitals with identity, or the scene in the books where the barrier magically throws people of the wrong gender out of the dorms, were common among ordinary people. These complex ideas about chromosomes and menstruation etc were not.
Show this thread -
Mostly these ideas stem from a freakout internal to feminism that occurred in the 1980s, which has continued to propagate itself online but largely lay dormant at the time Wizard Book Lady was actually writing her books.
Show this thread -
Which is to say, she was probably transphobic when she wrote those books, but she was probably not thinking about phrases like"p e o ple who men str uate"as some kind of existential threat, or at all.That was not in the public eye outside of like a couple of women's studies depts
Show this thread -
I'm not saying this as any sort of defense, but just to counter the idea that this is about an old woman stuck in the past. She's not that old, and these ideas were only common in the part of the past where she was a young child, and even then were not as mainstream as now.
Show this thread -
Until the past decade, if you hadn't heard of J a n i c e R a y m o n d you probably weren't going to say transphobia the way the Wizard Book Lady is saying it. This is a phenomenon which has been in large but not entire part driven by British tabloids.
Show this thread -
(and for the record, if you haven't heard of J a n i c e R a y m o n d, she was an academic writer who published "The Transsexual Em pire" in the early 1980s [the title was probably an intentional Star Wars reference])
Show this thread -
She is the source of the vast majority of the ideas that have been articulated by people like Wizard Book Lady, especially in the UK, recently, but also, even she didn't phrase them in precisely the same way. There is a precise linguistic trend that has emerged among these bigots
Show this thread -
The UK-driven kind of transphobia that is at hand here did not exist in its present form a decade ago, which is not to say that transphobia didn't exist a decade ago, but it's very clear that people are being sucked into that mindset. It's NOT about being set in your ways.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.