Here in the UK, a trans author has had her brilliant book nominated by the Women's Prize for Fiction and the UK's embarrassing cohort of TERFs in the literary and publishing industry have assembled to write a disgusting open letter denouncing her nomination and misgendering her. As gross as this is, it's actually just another day on TERF Island (aka Britain).
No, the absurd thing about this particular open letter is that they have added the signatures of authors who are long dead, I guess in some desperate attempt to legitimise their bullshit. Those signatories include Aphra Behn, a queer 17th century playwright who wrote a poem about a lover who switches their sex during love-making and is of indeterminate gender, and Daphne du Maurier, who is an icon for queer people and who also quite famously struggled with her gender identity (it's fully fucking on her Wiki page, a cursory googling would've sufficed to show you that lol). Other famously gender conforming cishet women (/s) signatories include George Eliot, Willa Cather, and Emily Dickinson. Bizarrely, Charlotte Brontë has been put down as Curer Bell, whilst George Eliot has been put down as Mary Ann Evans. The most ironic thing about this being that Brontë rid herself of her Curer Bell pseudonym as soon as she possibly could, whereas Eliot (who was born Mary Ann Evans) was adamant that her chosen name and persona for her literary work was George Eliot. Ah, choice and autonomy, famously anathema to feminism (/s).
In conclusion, I'm not sure how radical or feminist it is to be completely ignorant about the dead women authors (as they've been posited in this letter) you evoke to add credence to a mess of a letter than is both transphobic and quite patently jealous. Write a better book if you want to be shortlisted next time.
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
areudirty
origamiaround
