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.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@Alan Robertshaw
… and when, in the fullness of time, Zammis brought its own child before the Holy Council, the name of ‘Willis Davidge’ was added to the line of Jareeba.”
Oh great, now I’m crying.
“your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope”
(That bit made me happy again)
Lou Gossett Jr should have got the Oscar for that performance.
Also cried at the end of “Enemy Mine”.
But listen, WHO KNOWS how aliens might reproduce. Could make snails look like a not-nightmare. Or maybe they just fission.
About the “toddler’s clothing”, IIRC every few years colorful overalls become popular for women.
You gotta wonder about people who worry so much about underage genitals, right?
Regarding Donald Duck, even though he’s been walking around sans trou for going on a century, you don’t see regular duck penises when they’re just swimming around and eating. But when they do come out, it’s a true horror show, particularly for the female ducks. Spiral-shaped. Heck, they breed outside their species, which is why you sometimes see ducks that are part livestock-white and part mallard green/brown. Miscegenation!
@GoddessStacey: The best thing about aging was when people quit asking me about baay-beeezzzz. We married young so of course it must have been to pop out sprogs. No. We wanted to be together always. It’s been 40 years so I guess it was a good idea.
At no time has anyone I know felt the need to have public hysterics over a cartoon alien’s possible gender.
If that film had been as successful as it deserved to be, I wonder if the usual suspects would have been up in arms about it?
“When women get pregnant..”
“I am not a woman.”
“Ok then, when people get pregnant…”
Although I do love the bit when Jerri announces they are pregnant:
“Well don’t look at me!!!”
But, just to get us all sniffling again.
“Uncle, what did my parent look like?
“Your parent looked like…my friend.”
@GSS ex-noob
This. This. This. That is the soooo divine element.
It’s strange. It’s not like there’s any shortage of real, actual, real-world drama, what with monster warming-fuelled hurricanes, will-he-or-won’t-he-attempt-a-coup-d’etat-in-Brazil, Putin’s nuclear saber rattling, the suspense watching all of the various state and federal legal investigations gradually encircling Trump, and Amber Heardgate. :/
Here we are, living in a bizarre Hollywood crossover of The Day After Tomorrow, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: First Class (for the Cuban Missile Crisis), The Sum Of All Fears, every single Black Mirror episode, and The Terminator, and they need to invent something to make a fuss about?
Meanwhile, I’m just hoping that they threw Inception into the blender as well, so when inevitably I eventually take a drone bullet, super-hurricane, or hydrogen bomb to the face I wake up in the real world in December of 2016 rather than actually die, and turn on the TV to find the news discussing mundane Gingrich-esque token Republican efforts to throw sand in the gears of Clinton’s transition team. 😛
The only Barry Longyear book I’ve read is Infinity Hold, (the omnibus edition) which was engaging, well crafted, gripping, and one of the most harrowing books I have ever read, a category which includes holocaust memoirs and histories of war criminals.
I interviewed Barry Longyear once, and I cheerfully admit I’d reached out to him because I’d adored Enemy Mine. (I managed to keep the fangirling in check for the interview.) He was quite gracious and I got some good quotes from him.
Anyway, if you want to know how cartoon characters reproduce, they do it by having someone draw another one of them.
Not in front of any children, I hope!
@Kimstu
And they’ll conveniently ignore those of us who wanted to be a different gender than what we were assigned before we were even fully cognizant of gender stereotypes. Y’know, like a sizable plurality of transgender people?
I was discussing the reproductive cycle of pierogis with my kids. We concluded they reproduced by being tasty and therefore causing people to want to make / buy more of them.
To my embarrassment I have just learned that Roevember is a campaign against the SCOTUS decision and not Scooby Doo trying to pronounce the month.
In my defence this cropped up in a discussion about the new Scooby Doo movie; so you can see why my brain went there.
Seahorses technically do not have sex, though it looks like it. The female lays the eggs into the pouch, and the male then vents sperm into the water such that it pretty much all ends up in the pouch. But that counts as external reproduction, as the eggs are fertilized after they are laid, and the inside of the pouch is technically considered outside the male’s body.
@SpecialFFrog:
I was discussing the reproductive cycle of pierogis with my kids. We concluded they reproduced by being tasty and therefore causing people to want to make / buy more of them.
…Less facetiously, it occurs to me that that’s true of navel oranges—which can be perpetuated only through human grafting intervention.
@ Full Metal Oxx
It’s true of most citrus fruit, of all varieties of apples, pears, plums, cherries etc. Potato varieties are also spread through growing new plants from potatoes of each variety. Humans have been messing around with the reproduction of the plants we eat for a very very long time.
@Jazzlet: true dat. I’ve got an apple and lemon tree, both of which are the yummy sweet fruit producing part grafted onto hardier rootstock. And both of those have been selectively bred for thousands of years besides. Even the rootstock’s probably from older varieties that used to produce fruit that was good enough for people to propagate it. And an ornamental pear grafted onto a different pear stock. The ornamental part mostly died off, but the rootstock has come up and produced a vigorous shrub/tree thing.
@Alan: You mean the new Scooby Doo movie that finally admits what everyone’s known for decades, that Velma’s a lesbian?
“Rut-roh”, say the usual conservative talking heads.
What will happen if any of these nut jobs learn about the biology of sex for other species on our planet. Fish that can change gender depending on the temperature. Or the eusocial insects. Or seahorses. Or the hermaphrodites. Or hell even the animals that can reproduce asexually/parthenogenesis. Who the hell are we to say what number of genders aliens would have.
ContraPoints summed it up best: “I need to know how the alien fucks, right now. I said, I need to know how the alien fucks before I can show it to my child!”