Thursday Reads

Subscription required to read article, but there is nothing worse than distorting history to score political points.

"Transgenderism" did not exist as a concept until the late 1970s. The Guardian article is bullshit.

Snip:

Backdating modern categories to historical figures is a perilous occupation. This Guardian article claiming Albert Cashier – an 19th-century private in the Union army who, though female, served as a man undetected – as a "trans soldier" is a case in point. The word "trans" was first applied to cross-sex identification in the 1990s. "Transgender" emerged in the 1970s, and "transsexual" (now often considered offensive) in the 1950s, when it started to displace terms such as "inversion" and "Eonism" from the vocabulary of early sexology. Cashier could not have thought of herself as trans, because trans did not exist as a concept, and there's no evidence that Cashier had the self-perception of being "essentially male" that's implied by the word trans today.

This is all about erasing women and not about truth.

Someone decided to set the record straight:

Back in 1862, when Jennie Hodgers first made the decision to tuck away her skirts and don trousers instead, the medical examination only required her to show her eyes, ears, hands and feet. From that day on, she would live a life outside the bounds of a sexist society. Jennie Hodgers was a heroine of the best kind—she defied all limitations.

“At the time, women weren’t perceived as equals by any stretch of the imagination. It was the Victorian era and women were mostly confined to the domestic sphere. Both the Union and Confederate armies actually forbade the enlistment of women.” —Smithsonian Magazine

Historians have uncovered accounts of hundreds of women who ‘passed’ as men to fight in wars. Some of whom had begun ‘passing’ before enlisting as a practical way to avoid poverty, or in the case lesbians, psychiatric imprisonment and torture. Instead, women like Jennie chose a life of empowerment, honor and adventure.

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As long as white male dudes keep voting against their economic self-interest and have an inflated sense of their entitlement, I am not going to give a shit about their "plight."

The time to have done something was back in the 1980s, when neoliberalism started polluting political discourse and jobs were being outsourced and ruinous trade agreements put in.
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What a load of b.s. Nobody is owed bringing a guest to a wedding. That is completely self-centered.
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