So British anti-trans attention seeker (and friend of Joanne) Maya Forstater has been engaged in a very strange Twitter meltdown over a cartoon alien for the past four days. And when I say “weird” I mean really, really, really weird. So I’ve taken the liberty of assembling all of Forstater’s best tweets — by which I mean worst tweets — in one place. With commentary.
Forstater began her Twitter rampage on September 29, noting that a “mother w her baby daughter” had messaged her, upset that the mascot of her local library’s reading program had been changed from a cisgender anthropomorphic bear to, well, another anthropomorphic bear, only a trans one this time.
The Hertfordshire Libraries corrected her: “Tala” was actually a space alien that was neither male nor female. This didn’t assuage Forstater, who continued on tweeting.
But the strange thing about her tweets — aside from an adult human being getting so mad about a cute cartoon alien that she tweets about it for four days in a row — is that Forstater seemed to think that this cartoon character was a real living thing, with bones and a reproductive system and all the other accoutrements of your typical mammal, and she demanded answers about it.
She declared that it was clearly just a baby:
It’s also got big pink spots on its green skin. Do most babies have those?
Anyway, as anyone who has ever watched a cartoon in their life can tell you, MOST cartoon characters have big eyes and/or big heads. I mean, this character seems to be meant to be read as young, but not necessarily a literal baby.
So why, you might ask, does it matter if the cartoon alien is a baby? Because then WHERE’S ITS MOMMY?
And did mommy space alien fuck?
That’s because you are, Maya. You’re asking if this cartoon alien reproduces sexually. Sexual reproduction involves genitals of some kind, except maybe with snails or seahorses or something, I don’t know, do snails have genitals? Anyway, the answer is that the cartoon creature does not have genitals, because it is a cartoon character for children, not a real living creature or a representation of one. Does Donald Duck have a penis? He runs around pantsless all the time but I’ve never seen one. Does Winnie the Pooh?
But she’s pretty adamant about this: anthropomorphic cartoon characters have spines, and they fuck.
I can’t believe we’re now talking about cartoon spines. What are you, Maya, a frustrated chiropractor? Ha HA! (That’s not really much of a joke, I know.)
Since she’s decided that the cartoon alien is basically a human toddler — if you set aside the ears and the green skin and the weird stubby blue fingers and toes — she thinks its existence is part of a plot to, I guess, turn toddlers trans.
I’m pretty sure the library people aren’t giving the alien a regular gender because they want both boys and girls to be able to identify with the character. And I imagine that most parents, who don’t spend much of their time obsessing over alien junk, will probably be fine with that. You don’t rule the world, Maya.
Anyway, if you want to know how cartoon characters reproduce, they do it by having someone draw another one of them.
Glad I could clear that up, at least.
PS: Oh, and while this is going on, another anti-trans attention seeker, former funnyman Graham Linehan, is getting mad about Donkey Kong memes and the alleged threat that the UK’s Mermaids charity poses to trans teens — oh, sorry, “nascent homosexual children.”
So that’s going on.
Endless drama with these anti-trans goofballs.
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Donald Duck regrows his penis. It falls off after it’s needed.
And I can’t help but notice how transphobes and other bigots like to act like a general behavior problem, political harassment, can be pinned on their targets. Also I didn’t see the Donkey Kong memes. I can’t judge yet.
I heard about this. Kind of figured it would… I dunno, have more nuance or be more sophisticated or something.
Maybe this woman should check into the sexuality of that Paper Clip assistant nobody uses from Microsoft Word.
You can tell gender criticals are on the right of the political spectrum because they really can’t bear to call each other out on pure nonsense. Everyone left of centre is a few bad tweets away from forming a circular firing squad. Only rightwingers can look at their leader having a five day meltdown about a cute cartoon and make an “I Stand” hashtag for her.
@magnesium
That’s not a bad observation, actually, given that “right wing” consistently correlates with deference to and support of established authority.
If someone in their movement is an “established authority” within the group per the meaning employed in psychological research, then “right wing” persons would be more likely than “left wing” persons to support the EA even during a complete meltdumpsterfiredown.
It might do them better to not go for something as ridiculous as trying to heckle a library over an agender alien mascot.
My head cannon is they reproduce the same way as the Drac from the movie/novel ‘Enemy Mine’
Presumably it’s also spring-loaded and corkscrew shaped. Duck penises are terrifying.
Actually the various methods animals here on earth have evolved for making babies are fascinating in their diversity, and make Maya’s contention that “if it’s kind of human shaped, it must reproduce like a human” look even more ridiculous than it does at first sight.
My question is, What about Olive Oyl? Is she Swee’Pea’s mother? If so, who is this child’s father? Popeye? Brutus? Wait, that’s five questions.
Well, it doesn’t have genitals now, but once Rule 34 kicks in, it will.
A bit less than 40 years ago our littlies were dismayed, actually in tears, about Astroboy. Not that boys get all the good stuff but they (both of them in turn) truly honestly thought that they would be able to fly like him, with him, when they grew up.
Around the same time, a lot of people got their knickers in a twist about Teletubbies. Looking back I distinctly remember a couple of religious/political types fussing that one of these innocent pastel characters was “effeminate” and therefore dangerous because they carried a handbag. A clearer case of presuming all characters to be male has never been made. You’d think someone so steeped in rigid differences would have had no problem in stating that the handbag character was female, but no. The fact that there was the slightest chance of ambiguity was enough to feed hours of ranting on tv.
OTOH, what does this look like:
https://archive.ph/tBdqb
A trustee of the transgender charity Mermaids resigned last night after it emerged that he had spoken at a conference hosted by an organisation that promotes services to paedophiles.
Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student in gender research at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based B4U-ACT in 2011.
According to its website, B4U-ACT promotes services and resources “for self-identified individuals . . . who are sexually attracted to children and desire such assistance”.
Breslow’s presentation appeared to be a critique of how paedophiles were understood.
Records show that the academic, who is now assistant professor of gender and sexuality at LSE, became a trustee of Mermaids, a transgender youth support charity, in July thisyear.
After The Times approached Mermaids about Breslow’s talk, he tendered his resignation as a trustee. Mermaids said that it was unaware of his historic appearance at the conference until contacted by this newspaper. B4U-ACT calls itself a “unique collaborative effort between minor-attracted people and mental health professionals to promote communication and understanding between the two groups”.
Its “scientific symposium” was hosted in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 2011, to address concerns about the way paedophilia was addressed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a publication by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for the classification of mental disorders.
Breslow’s presentation was titled Sexual Alignment: Critiquing Sexual Orientation, The Pedophile, and the DSM V. A brief extract of the presentation, still available online, said: “This paper works through the DSM’s struggle to understand ‘the pedophile’ through an investigation of the highly questionable and deeply assumptive clinical, empirical and theoretical studies it cites.”
In parts, the presentation used the phrase “minor attracted persons”, a phrase used by some instead of paedophile.
Breslow was contacted for comment last night.
Last week Mermaids became the subject of a Charity Commission investigation following claims that it was handing out chest binders to children as young as 13 and 14.
The charity has, in the past, won the support of celebrities such as Emma Watson and Prince Harry, and been handed grants from the National Lottery and the government.
The charities watchdog is now investigating Mermaids’ safeguarding practices. The Timesalso revealed parents’ concerns last week after it emerged that children on Mermaids’ online forum were arranging to move conversations about experimental drug treatments and medical transition onto less closely supervised platforms.
I’m not sure if seahorses have external genitalia, but you can tell the males by their brood pouches.
Snails have genitalia that come out of their heads after one snail fires a hormone-tipped dart into the other in order to decide which of them gets to be the male this time.
@ Kat, I believe Swee’Pea is a foundling adopted by Olive Oyl. I realize this doesn’t actually explain their origin.
@Moon Custafer:
@ Kat, I believe Swee’Pea is a foundling adopted by Olive Oyl. I realize this doesn’t actually explain their origin.
Making Swee’Pea one of the rare fictional adoptees whose biological parentage never turns out to be a heaping pile of narrativium. (Po from Kung Fu Panda and Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy were refreshing in that regard—and then the rest of the plot happened.)
Another member of that category is Bamm-Bamm from the Flintstones—I don’t think they ever revealed his biological parentage or explained his super-strength; the latter ceased to be a plot point anyway once he reached adolescence, Maybe he simply grew into it.
I hope her brain hurts.
Moon Custafer beat me to it, but did want to warn: the images one comes across searching some variation of “do snails have genitals” are a stark example fuck-around-and-find-out. Quite literally for the gastropods involved.
@oncewasmagnificent:
That seems doubtful. I was young enough not to have grown out of those shows when Astroboy aired, but not when Teletubbies did. I think there was at least a decade between them.
They don’t fixate on their rigid rules, though; they fixate on their fears, and then use rigid rules and their subsequent rantings as a refuge. Think “brandishing a cross and shouting YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” at what they perceive to be a vampire out for the blood of them or theirs. Combined with Don Quixote level confusion of mundane windmills for fantastical beasts.
And they didn’t fear the teletubby was female; they feared he was gay.
I remember another conservative gay panic because one of them was lavender-colored and had a triangular shape in a little antenna up top. Pretty sure that meltdown lasted days. Maybe even weeks. Lots of “don’t let your kids watch this or the purple one will turn them gay” type nonsense.
@Mimi Haha:
Objection: assumes brain not in evidence.
What’s especially aggravating (oh, it’s all especially aggravating) is that these anti-gender-neutrality meltdowns on the part of transphobes are directly contradicting their own rhetoric about eschewing rigid gender norms.
On the one hand, the transphobes are arguing that transgender identity is just kids feeling restricted by gender stereotypes and deluding themselves into thinking that they “must” be a boy if they like sports, or a girl if they like sewing, or whatever. So if we get rid of these sexist gender-expression expectations then boom, “transgenderism” will just go away because all the girls and boys can express themselves however they want!
On the other hand, whenever anybody does something that DOES actually de-emphasize stereotypical gender norms, like having gender-neutral restrooms or non-gendered alien cartoon mascots, the transphobes freak out that it’s “indoctrinating” children into “transgender acceptance” and “denying the reality of sex” and whatever.
What they really want, of course, is for cisgender people to be able to disregard rigid gender norms in favor of their own self-expression, while transgender people get policed and punished for violating them.
Has this woman never heard of parthenogenesis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis
Lots of vertebrates out there capable of asexual reproduction.
She does understand that toddlers don’t know what sex and reproduction is right. And they don’t care. They get distracted by a cool box
That’s true and besides there’s plenty of there who DO freak out when a cis woman chooses a life like mine and has desires and finds fulfillment the way I do.
@ Surplus to Requirements
I never saw it myself, as my mother forbid most TV, but concerning Teletubbies, I remember other children finding great amusement in saying Tinky-Winky was gay.
Not claiming that touch of homophobia was a good thing, but it never turned any of said children gay that I know of, regardless of how scary that thought might have been to parents across the world.
You don’t want to know about snails genitals.
They are hermaphrodites, who duel for the male role (because it’s less energy intensive;and when they are making eggs they don’t make sperm, so they can’t fertilise), but seeing which of them can shoot the most penis-darts into the other snail.
Surplus. I reckon you’re right. Mainly because I don’t recall actually _watching_ the dreaded Teletubbies with either of the girls. Letting my memory go there shows that there were heaps and heaps of non-gendered/neutral/alien-fantasy characters all over the place.
Dork Avenger,
So what you’re saying is Mermaids made a guy resign when they found out he had a problematic past? And that’s a mark against them?
Seems to me this makes Mermaids a safer place for kids than the Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention. Or a variety of different sporting organizations. Two organizations the “okay groomer” set seem to have no issue with.
@ fabe
I love that film; it’s just so sweet.
“In your heart, in your soul, you are alone. That is why you separated your sexes, for that brief union.”