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Post by kathryn on Jun 20, 2020 19:40:52 GMT
I’ve seen people confuse ‘drag queen names’ with gay men actually being trans. That’s why the ‘first brick thrown at Stonewall was by’ narrative changed from being ‘a drag queen’ to ‘a trans woman’.
Even though people who were there at the time say they weren’t trans.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 19, 2020 19:17:12 GMT
So this week the contestant with the best couture item got the boot? WTF? Though to be fair that invisible zip on the pattern challenge was a shocker.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 19, 2020 13:17:42 GMT
Not just that it's safe to travel but that we're allowed to make non-essential journeys by public transport. I suppose people must be doing it now that eg Oxford Street is back open, but I'm still under the impression that we should only be using the tube/busses to get to work if we have no other way of doing so, and not for any other reason. Article in WhatsOnStage about ALW doing something at the Palladium in July and whilst I would definitely want to go and can walk there from work, I wouldn't feel I had a way to get there at the weekend. You are allowed to use public transport not just for essential journeys - people are using trains to get to London all the time now to go shopping or to walk around or to go to the parks etc. Personally public transport wouldn’t bother me as I don’t think you can live your life In fear forever The guidance on public transport is here: www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-safer-travel-guidance-for-passengersIt has no been communicated very well.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 19, 2020 11:50:35 GMT
AlW was on the Today Programme this morning. He's going to start the trial at the Palladium next month and hoping to demonstrate to the government that theatres can operate safely without social distancing. Mentions things like temperature testing, disinfection, special door handles ect. He seems rather more proactive than CM who's simply decided to just close everything till next year and seemingly given up. I’d put money on this being a coordinated effort between the two of them. CM scares everyone with the consequences of the status quo, and then ALW comes along to offer a solution that avoids those consequences. Stick and carrot. Public transport is still going to be a major barrier though. Someone needs to come up with good evidence to show that it’s safe to travel. It’s the number one concern for getting people back into London.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 19, 2020 11:17:42 GMT
Hmm, yes. Everything is now viewed through the lens of gender identity. Witness the Bohemian Rhapsody film having Freddie Mercury trying on clothes from the ladies’ section and wearing his mum’s dress to perform as if he was somehow playing around with his gender identity on stage, rather than Queen deliberately chasing the glam rock trend because it was hugely popular when they first started out, and then dropping it with great relief as soon as it went out of fashion. (His friends report him saying ‘yes, I know I looked ridiculous in those leotards, darling, but we wanted the attention and it worked, didn’t it!’)
But having said that, Elton John was always more popular in the USA than the U.K., and he is plenty flamboyant.
Even the likes of Sam Smith doesn’t seem to know his gay and pop history - remember when he thought he was the first gay man to win an Oscar?! And he actually personally knows previous gay Oscar winners...
Maybe it’s just the tendency of the young to think that they are inventing everything rather then realising that they’re not the first to do it!
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Post by kathryn on Jun 19, 2020 8:31:16 GMT
Maybe the lack of a West End Aida is why people over here barely remember that Elton John is a musical theatre composer (based on the many ‘But why is Rocketman a musical?!’ conversations I had last year) though The Lion King has been running continuously for 20 years! And Billy Elliot did 10 years in the West End.
If the pandemic had not upended everything and Aida had gone to the West End next year, that would have been 3 musicals composed by Elton John running in London, with the new Tammy Faye one, and 2 on Broadway, with the new Devil Wears Prada. For a little while at least, even if they didn’t all manage to stay open for long.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 19, 2020 8:05:28 GMT
Like it or not the airlines are essential travel and delivery infrastructure and so expensive a market to enter for new companies that if you allow all the existing operators to go bust it’ll cause severe disruption far beyond people not being able to fly for their summer holidays. It takes weeks to do the same journeys by boat/road/train.
The theatre industry going under would be utterly horrible, but it wouldn’t stop food or medicine arriving in the country.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 17, 2020 16:02:43 GMT
Well said - the kneejerk reaction from people towards 'millionaires' and 'billionaires' shows literally no undertaking at all of how businesses work and the difference between personal wealth and that related to business. These people aren't there to pointlessly throw good money after bad. It's pure envy. It makes about as much sense as complaining that someone who has been furloughed is treating it as a 'free holiday', because you've continued to work. What else are they meant to do?!
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Post by kathryn on Jun 17, 2020 14:35:09 GMT
It’s why you’re always ‘worth’ more dead than alive.
The likes of a Michael Jackson was in crippling debt towards the end of his life, but as soon as he died and the value of his assets could be realised the debts were paid off, and his estate started generating income without the cost of supporting his lifestyle - it’s now incredibly valuable.
Net worth is only really useful for someone who is working out whether to lend you money and what interest rate to charge you. The more you are worth the more sure they are that they’ll get their money back if something disastrous happens. There’s a reason why Cam Mac doesn’t want to load his business down with debt - lots of businesses end up going under because their creditors get worried, and force a sale of assets to get their money back. If all the creditors do that at once and you can’t pay them all back then you’re bankrupt.
I hope this is part of a political push on the government.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 17, 2020 14:03:47 GMT
Yeah. People have this knee-jerk reaction that owners of a business should personally bail it out, but it’s financially illiterate. In most cases they can’t - hardly anyone has enough personal wealth to keep a loss-making business afloat for any length of time. And even if they could, why would they? They will end up with no money and a valueless business that will fail anyway. May as well pull the plug now and save your money to invest in a business that is viable.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 17, 2020 12:53:35 GMT
Isn't CM a billionaire? Leaves a sour taste in the mouth... He had a net worth of 1.1 billion. People really don’t understand what ‘net worth’ means. It’s the value of all of his businesses and assets, after running costs and minus the debt secured on it. It doesn’t mean he has a billion in the bank as cash. So no, while his businesses cannot operate - are literally making a net loss - he’s not a billionaire. The value of the theatre business at the moment is a negative against his personal wealth and assets. Typically the only way anyone realises their net worth in cash is if they sell up completely and retire. Or die, and have all their assets sold. No-one is going to buy a theatre business at the moment.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 17, 2020 8:47:13 GMT
Tim Rice has also mentioned he and Elton had been working on the revival and that they had hoped it would come to the West End at last.
Of course all bets are off now.
I’ve never seen it - I do recall that duet of Written In The Stars by Elton and LeAnn Rimes being on hard rotation on Magic FM of an evening, though. Takes me right back to having the radio on while I was doing my A Level homework.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 16:36:39 GMT
I looked the Lupin one up as it was being used as evidence of homophobia (because there’s a werewolf who attacks children) and it’s a partial misquote. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/jk-rowling-harry-potter-theory-debunked-remus-lupin-aids-david-thewlis-a7235751.htmlAs I say, there’s quite a bit of stretching going on to make some of the metaphorical readings of HP fit. They can be fun intellectual exercises for kids just discovering the concepts of allegory and metaphor, but they do tend to unravel if you look too closely at them. Jo Rowling was adopted by a generation as some sort of Yoda figure, the fount of all moral wisdom, rather than as quite a good writer of entertaining kids’ stories with basic moral messages. That’s part of why the howling is so extreme when she disagrees with them, and the need to brand her as actually bad all along.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 15:51:46 GMT
The whole mudblood storyline was about LGBTQ+ rights anyway, so there is allegories in the books anyway. I always interpreted that as a racism allegory. But as you say, there's lot of potential allegories and metaphors in the series, and they're generally flexible enough to be read in several different ways.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 14:20:20 GMT
Hmm. It could have been openly stated in book 7 - as I recall we were just starting to see openly gay characters in YA fiction at that point - but I am not sure that would have made much difference to the reaction. Still would have criticised as being a bit belated and as a distraction from the main story/ ‘PC pandering’.
Also we need to bear in mind that there has been a huge sea-change in attitudes since even 2007 (13 years ago - where did the time go?!). Gay marriage really does seem to have been a tipping point. Publishing can be a bit behind the curve just because it takes so long to write and produce a book, and children’s publishing tends towards the conservative because of who is actually buying the books. (Middle-aged adults! Harry Potter did so well in part because it hit the nostalgia nerve of everyone who grew up with Enid Blyton and Chalet School books. It’s just a mash-up of those boarding school shenanigans/kids solve mysteries books with a bit of basic good vs evil fantasy template grafted on. JK Rowling is a better mystery writer than fantasy world-builder, which is why you shouldn’t think to hard about her mythology - it starts to fall apart when you poke at the joins.)
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 11:44:10 GMT
Statistically trans sex workers are no more likely to be murdered than non-trans sex workers. Murder rates for all sex workers are extremely high. I just checked, and Statistically there’s no evidence that trans people have a higher murder rate than non-trans people in the U.K. (and I’ve seen similar breakdowns for the US). www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-many-trans-people-murdered-ukIt does seem that trans people experience a higher rate of domestic violence than non-trans. I really thought the rates were higher than that! It’s impossible to know what motivates any particular crime. But blaming a crime that happened in the 80s on JKR’s attitude is a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, there were all sorts of different factors at play in that time and place than there are now.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 11:06:44 GMT
They do. Unfortunately that appears to be linked to the overrepresentation of trans women among sex workers - sex work being an incredible high risk profession. Your example from Paris is Burning is one such case.
This is of course linked to being marginalised.
There is absolutely no question that trans women are among the most vulnerable to male violence due to the effects of marginalisation.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 9:03:41 GMT
I got INFJ-A / INFJ-T Advocate too. Which I think is probably a little flattering! Although evidently this is true, given my other posts in the trans issue thread.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 15, 2020 7:34:33 GMT
I don’t think there’s many women who haven’t wished they were a man at some point - but especially when going through puberty Men just seem to have it so much easier! But it does seem that women with autism spectrum disorders are over-represented among those seeking to transition after puberty. It’s a new enough phenomenon - and the follow-up procedures are lax enough - that no-one is quite sure how high the de-transition rate really is. ‘Lost to follow-up’ isn’t the same as discontinuing transition.
Unfortunately trying to ask the question about the number of de-transitioners and what that might mean about the validity of initial diagnosis gets people called transphobic.
And there's lots of evidence that gender non-conforming children often grow up to be same-sex attracted adults rather than trans adults. That has been well established over a number of studies. The rush to declare that such children are trans and should socially transition - rather than following the ‘watchful waiting’ method - is quite concerning.
Anyway, I just poked my head in this morning because his popped up in my Twitter timeline.
I seem to have ended up following a lot of theatre folks whose views on the trans issue are diametrically opposed to my own. I don’t quite know how to get the good theatre chat on my timeline without the frankly insulting accusations of white supremacy.
It’s a relief to see from this thread that I’m not as alone as Twitter makes me feel!
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Post by kathryn on Jun 14, 2020 17:11:50 GMT
Anyone else remember how they had to introduce a whole law to make ‘upskirting’ illegal because of men using smartphone cameras to perv on women in public?
In Japan the sexual harassment on trains is so bad that they’ve introduced women-only carriages.
It’s utterly depressing, but we’re not making these concerns up. I hate that the right-wingers are the only ones who have taken them seriously - I dislike intensely that I find myself reading The Times and The Spectator on this issue. I really think the trans lobby has shot itself in the foot by branding these valid concerns transphobic, and pushed potential allies away.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 14, 2020 10:16:02 GMT
Horrible fact: some people do things *because* they are unacceptable. Breaking a taboo is what excites them.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 14, 2020 10:05:49 GMT
If the world was as it ‘should’ be we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems that we have in the world today.
As I get older I increasingly believe that we won’t achieve a world as it should be. Humanity is fatally flawed, and all of our worst, most selfish impulses are too deeply ingrained.
We can’t even seem to resist those impulses for a full 3 months to stop thousands of people dying.
Oh, to be young and optimistic again....
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Post by kathryn on Jun 14, 2020 8:26:48 GMT
But it was never a girl who did it. It was always the boys. Always.
And it’s not like I ‘covered it up’ - I told teachers when it happened! The problem is when you’re in a busy corridor and someone grabs you from behind and you turn around to see 10 lads and they all say ‘what?! I didn’t do anything!’ you have absolutely no way to prove who did it. We didn’t have CCTV in every corridor.
Sheesh. Victim-blame much.
This is the reality of life - we don’t live in a lovely equal society where women are not preyed on by men in myriad ways. Wish we did, but we don’t. We have to deal with the world as it is.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 14, 2020 7:37:28 GMT
When I was at school, and the boys grabbed or slapped my backside in the corridor, I used to run into the girls’ loo to get away from them and cry.
I didn’t want them to see how much they’d upset me, so I needed some space to cry a bit and then clean myself back up before I had o face them again.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 13, 2020 11:35:33 GMT
Yes, really appreciate the insight and everyone’s hard work.
I think we’re all just chomping at the bit to get back to the theatre. The streamed stuff is great, but it really makes me miss actually being there!
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Post by kathryn on Jun 13, 2020 10:48:53 GMT
the ever-expanding 'trans umbrella' and the catch-all word 'queer' now allow pretty well anyone to claim membership of this group, Side note: Yesterday I saw a straight woman on Twitter describe herself as ‘queer’ because she is single, middle-aged and child-free. Now, being a single and child-free woman does have its occasional trials - I know that because I am one - but it certainly does not make one ‘queer’!
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Post by kathryn on Jun 13, 2020 10:19:17 GMT
So your issue is you are not allowed to say things without being attacked? This ain’t got nowt to do with the trans community. Eddie Izzard? Nowt to do with the trans community. The main argument I keep hearing is the toilet issue and that stems from transphobia Eddie Izzard was allowed on an all-woman shortlist because he falls within Stonewall’s definition of ‘trans woman’, and because Labour affirmed ‘tranwomen are women’. It’s nowt to do with most individual members of the trans community, I agree. I’ve never had an issue with individual trans people I have met. It’s to do with the trans activists who adhere to the most extreme gender ideology and who are driving policy by intimidating people who question them into silence. And THAT is why it was important for JK Rowling to make the statement she has made.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 13, 2020 9:41:56 GMT
My issue is with some trans activists - very far from all, a great many trans people will tell you that of course biological sex exists and is hugely important, otherwise they wouldn’t be trans in the first place - trying to convince everyone to ignore the reality of biological sex, and change the material reality of our society to match this pretence.
My issue is with ‘gender-neutral’ bathrooms and changing rooms and hospital wards - which force men and women to share the same spaces in intimate circumstances when most would rather not, and when doing so really does put vulnerable people at risk. I say vulnerable people because although biological women are most often vulnerable in these circumstances there are of course risks for men too.
My issue is with individual - usually Male-bodied - predators taking advantage of the loopholes. People like ‘Jessica Yaniv’ suing a beautician for discrimination for refusing to wax male genitalia, and threatening others who had declined to wax male genitalia with legal action.
My issue is with Eddie Izzard ending up on a ‘all-women’ shortlist of Labour candidates.
And my issue is obviously with the huge amount of actual abuse that comes the way of anyone who raises these concerns.
Note: very little of this is actually do do with trans people themselves. It’s the wider impact of attempting to make wholesale societal changes without thinking through the possible consequences, because just mentioning them is so fraught.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 13, 2020 9:12:21 GMT
Thank goodness she is using her platform and her position - one of the very few people who doesn’t have to worry about her career being ‘cancelled’ - to air the concerns of many in much more vulnerable positions. The trans rights lobby is so vicious in attacking anyone who refuses to toe the line and even raises the slightest hint of a concern about the importance of biology to women’s sex-based rights that people really are scared to do so.
If the trans activists were willing to have a reasonable conversation about the risk inherent in changing our society so dramatically - and pretending that sexual dimorphism doesn’t exist, and that anyone who proclaims themselves a woman should be considered the same as someone born biologically female is a dramatic change - we wouldn’t be in this position.
When just saying ‘err, hang on a minute, I think there could be some unintended consequences from that, can we just consider hat for a minute?’ gets you called a transphobe, and a TERF, and told to ‘suck my girldick’, then people are going to end up very concerned indeed about the impact on biological women. Because that’s already an impact on biological women that the trans activists are causing.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 12, 2020 21:38:52 GMT
It’d be illegal even to put people from separate households into a rehearsal space together. Tell that to the Old Vic, Claire Foy and Matt Smith! Using rehearsal space has never been illegal as it is work that arguably cannot be done from home. I’d assumed - since it’s a live-streamed production - that they’d been rehearsing that using video link. After all it needs to come across on camera, not to an audience in the same room, and need to socially distance the performance anyway.
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