franz kafka’s writings are often analyzed in a trans lens the person who wrote that was almost definitely a trans person who related. people who call kafka a trans woman are almost entirely trans women. there is also a huge subset of literature shitposter girls who use kafka and the metamorphosis specifically to talk about their experiences with womanhood. so while i agree that the trope you are talking about is antisemitic i don’t think that applies here. he’s not being called a woman in a disparaging way.
It. Literally. Doesn't. Matter.
Spoiler alert: trans people can be antisemitic!
Franz Kafka was a real person who died not too long ago, and just because a trans person relates to his writings doesn't mean they can claim he's trans. It's not the same as relating to a fictional character. You can't 'headcanon' an actual person. I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman. He was an actual person, not a fictional character you can project on. An treating Franz Kafka like a fictional character you can project any label onto and separate him from his actual life is dehumanization and *also* antisemitic.
It's no different than queer people co-opting Anne Frank's memory and erasing her story to just herald her as a "bi icon" when she never had the chance to live long enough to label herself. Queer gentiles need to stop dehumanizing Jewish people and turning them into blank slates they can project onto.
Kafka's Metamorphosis and writings about his depression are from the viewpoint of a disabled Jewish man who was watching as antisemitism was slowly escalating around him and Jews were becoming insects in the minds of society. And "he's not being called a woman in a disparaging way" is the dumbest excuse ever- antisemitism is antisemitism. I've seen trans people infantilize Jewish men, calling them "different breed of man" or "scrunkly" and then insist they meant it positively. Intent doesn't matter. Calling a Jewish man, who never ever indicated having any gender identity otherwise, a woman, or implying he's somehow not a full man, is antisemitic.
I hope I'm not derailing here (please tell me if I am and I'll delete this), but I'd like to especially call attention to this line (which I love, btw):
I don't care how much you relate- he wasn't trans, don't call him a woman.
At some point relatively recently, people seem to have come to the conclusion that you can't empathize with a character (or real fucking person, in this case, and I cannot stress how gross that is) unless you're just like them. "Oh, I, a nonbinary person can identify with this cishet man? He must actually be nonbinary!" "Oh, I, an autistic person, can identify with this Ambiguously Quirky™ person? She must actually be autistic!"
Being able to relate to a person--real or fictional--who isn't just like you is a good thing. It's good that you see yourself in the writings of a cisgender man! Maybe it will teach you that cis people aren't the enemy. It's good that an autistic character resonates with NT people! Maybe they'll gain new insight into their autistic friends and family!
It's called empathy, and it's so important to understand that you are going to see your experiences reflected in people who are unlike you. Those connections are important. Deciding that Kafka must be a trans woman because you're a trans woman is missing the entire fucking point. It means that you do, in fact, have some things in common with a cisgender man, and conversely, it means that cisgender men have things in common with you. To flatten them out so they're just like you is missing out on so much of what they have to say.
People are beautiful and rich and layered and the fact that we can connect with other people and share experiences despite how different we are? That's the whole fucking point. That's what makes life worth living.
OP, I'm sorry I only spoke on being transgender and autistic. Those are the only two points that I could speak on from experience. Talking about real people like they're fictional pisses me off, and I sort of... got off on a thing.
I'm not OP, but one thing that's frightening about this from a Jewish perspective (especially in the context of discussing someone who was alive in the interwar period) is the recurring idea that Jews only matter as lenses for other people's stories. That we can be empathized with, but only if our narratives can be twisted to someone else's.
Because we've seen that before. We see it very often because it's a fundamental premise of some incredibly antisemitic forms of Christianity, and when it turns out that we're real people with real opinions and real beliefs and real feelings who don't just exist to validate someone else's perception of who and how we could be, people don't just abandon their pretense at allyship, they get violent.
It's also a common failing in how the Holocaust is taught. People like to present this lens of "it was random violence that came out of nowhere and could've happened to anyone. It could've happened to you! Imagine if you'd been one of the victims! That would've been a tragedy wouldn't it?" And the thing is, that's bullshit. If you were just a random German citizen at the time? You would've been one of the perpetrators. And it was a tragedy in and of itself; it doesn't become a tragedy by imaging a scenario in which people who were perfectly safe would've actually been potentially in danger (never killed, of course, because Holocaust education is also commonly sanitized, which is a different rant).
Edited to take out a rant that was in drafts and got added to this by mistake, but. Well, the Tl;dr, since that's been reblogged
Well. I'm a cis woman. GNC, perhaps, but cis. And I get misgendered (and degendered) a lot because of how people read Jewish features. And... when friends insist that any discomfort I have with feminine stuff is because I'm an egg... I get that they're trying to be helpful for a journey of self-discovery. But I've done that introspection. I check in with myself periodically just in case. And "oh, you're really nonbinary/a trans man because you're [insert list of stereotypically Jewish features//personality traits commonly ascribed to Jews [whether or not I have them]" -it hurts. Because not only are they minimizing my actual identity and my self-knowledge, and deciding that they're the experts on my life, rather than me, they're doing it in a way that's constantly used to hurt me.
another thing! Jewish men are (pretty often) seen as feminine/unmasculine and like they could never be 'true men'. In a lot of media they're the awkward nerds, the virgins, the weirdos. Point is this is not just misgendering anybody (which would be awful enough), this is misgendering a group that's known to be seen as less masculine than a white man for example
*this is a bit of derailing but it reminds me of how black men face the opposite issue of being seen as hyper masculine & in turn hyper violent. None of us can win in this racist ass society my g-d
I agree with all this but I don't think anyone ever said kafka was a trans woman, more that they interpreted Gregor samsa as one.
Nope. I have personally seen people call Franz Kafka a trans woman and refer to him in feminine terms.
Okay well that's just weird. I didn't think anyone would actually come to that consensus since it's just not true??
Antisemitism is a hell of a drug
@historysweeth3art Trigger warning: antisemitism via the feminization of a Jewish cis male.
And these are just what I got by using the tumblr search feature. Imagine if I used something that worked.
I don't want to take away from @terulakimban's excellent point centering actual empathy. That is a BIG trend I see when taking about anything Jewish in popular culture (I cannot tell you how many times as a theater person I've heard "Fiddler on the Roof is a story about all of us, tradition vs modernization" NO! IT IS ABOUT A JEWISH COMMUNITY IN VERY ANTISEMITIC RUSSIA AT A TIME WHEN POGROMS WE'RE SO COMMON PLACE 250,000-300,000 JEWS FLED OR WE'RE KICKED OUT over the course of 40 years. The tradition aspect is uniquely Jewish - how do we maintain our identity when we keep getting scattered and settled elsewhere? It lasted this long but HOW do we keep doing it? Can it continue?)
But in the Kafka conversation there is an element I think so many non-Jews just straight up refuse to understand. That is the fact that Jews have our own culture.
The societal gender ideals non-Jews in the West grow up with ... Aren't really in Jewish communities the same way. (Though cultural osmosis means we've picked up a lot along the way).
ALL our masculine role models, the ones we're told to admire, are shepherds. That's important bc shepherds lead the heard from behind, not in front. It speaks to a different leadership mindset. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Solomon, etc. we're soft spoken, humble, slow to action, intellectually inclined. Even when they have tempers or are warriors, those aspects are critiqued or minimized. (It's why when Jews depict King David, he's playing his harp or herding sheep. When non-Jews depict him, he's fighting Goliath.)
Compared to the very Roman/Western ideal of masculine power might-makes-right, Jewish masculinity is inherently softer.
That's not to say we DON'T value male strength. But it's just one factor and mostly understood that physical prowess has a time and place. It's not the ultimate standard for our masculinity.
Especially when you consider femininity in Jewish communities. Our matriarchs were all outspoken, all defied their husbands/men at key moments without punishment (some were even rewarded by God.) Some were prophets, judges and leaders (Miriam, Judith, Devorah, Hannah) in their own rights. Jewish women certainly do not fit the mold of a Roman/Western quiet, docile, submissive woman.
And don't forget, while there very much is misogyny in Jewish communities, our traditions often challenge it. Men are expected to praise their wives every Friday night in front of the family (Eshet Chail), men are halacically responsible for their wives' physical pleasure, Rabbis have denounced marital rape as a sin far longer than it's been illegal in MOST modern nations and women are excempt from time based religious obligations as they are considered closer to God (though that comes with it own problems).
In short, religious or not, Kafka would have grown up with that different understanding of gender norms and what it means to perform gender. He would have understood gender completely different to how a modern non-Jew in the West would.
To erase his Jewishness from the conversation - to ignore the cultural difference between how you see gender and how he likely would have - is a pretty severe historical distortion. And makes this weird history AU even more problematic.
Its exactly why historians always say "there's evidence of this type of attraction/relationship/behavior but we cannot assign an identity to a dead person who would not have had our cultural understanding." We need to bring that back.
Is now a good time to point out that the "Uwu Progressive One of the Good TRVE women" is just straight up centuries-old demasculizing antisemitism practically from bigoted christian sources? But it's ok when it's benevolently oriented towards Jews right? Especially dead Jews they like and want to claim, right?
The Jews in Western Europe during the middle ages were often perceived as distinct from other people not only in their religion, but also by virtue of peculiar physical characteristics. Male Jews were circumcised, which made them physically distinct in the sexual realm. They were believed to have a flux of blood due to hemorrhoids that was thought to more abound in Jews because they consumed salty foods and gross undigested blood, and were melancholic. By the late medieval and early modern periods, the male menstruation motif had become closely connected to the theory of the four humors and the balance between bodily fluids. Men in general were thought of as emitting extra heat, whereas women were considered to be physically cooler. While most men were generally able to reduce their heat naturally, there was a perception that womanish Jewish males were unable to do so, and thereby required “menstruation” (i.e. a literal discharge of blood) in order to achieve bodily equilibrium. The Jewish male image as having menses due to bleeding hemorrhoids was an anti-Semitic claim that had a religious explanation: Jews menstruated because they had been beaten in their hindquarters for having crucified Jesus Christ. This reflection is one of the first biological-racial motifs that were used by the Christians. Preceding this, anti-Semitic rationalizations were mostly religious. However, once these Christians mixed anti-Semitism with science, by emphasizing the metaphorical moral impurity of Jews, the subsequent belief that Jewish men “menstruated” developed—a belief that would have dire historical consequences for the Jewish communities of Europe until even the mid-twentieth century. This topic has direct applicability to current medical practice. The anti-Semitic perspective of Jewish male menstruation would never have taken hold if the medical community had not ignored the facts, and if the population in general had had a knowledge of the facts. In the same way, it is important for present-day scientists and healthcare professionals to understand thoroughly a topic and not to deliberately ignore the facts, which can affect professional and public thought, thereby leading to incorrect and at times immoral conclusions.
The Jews in Western Europe during the middle ages were often perceived as distinct from other people not only in their religion, but also by
Wow you're so progressive congratulations. Fandom-tier dumbfucks like this will believe anything. Including debunked racial pseudoscience. Anything to feel closer to the fandom blorbo-dolls they've constructed from real historical figures except actually being normal about Jews.
I'm surprised they didn't do a Miku-binder Kafka, but that's about 5 levels above the level of moral and intellectual rigor I expect from these idiots.
