With Terry Pratchett dead, it appears that pronoun wankers like Neil Gaiman feel free to disparage him. This posthumous hit-job is outrageous. There is no indication that Pratchett would have supported the sterilisation of gender-nonconforming children
I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan and SO angry about 'Neil Himself' presuming to speak on his behalf. How dare he? Interpreting the characters and situations in Pratchett's stories to assume a support for this baseless and dangerous ideology is stooping pretty bloody low. (I can imagine what Nanny Ogg might tell Gaiman he can go do to 'Himself' and concur wholeheartedly.)
"Luxury beliefs" is exactly it. Neither they nor anyone they know is going to be locked up 24/7 with an HIV positive rapist like the women in California prisons. It makes me furious that none of these "be kind" drones can get it through their thick heads that kindness doesn't mean letting people do whatever they want. Sometimes kindness looks like holding down your wailing, sobbing baby while a nurse innoculates them for a disease that would be much, much worse than their momentary distress. It might look and feel cruel, but most everyone accepts that it isn't. Meanwhile one of those California women is going to die. Because these idiots and other idiots like them were self-rightous enough to insist on being "kind".
It does seem to be TP's daughter who is saying he'd have no time for GC views, with Gaiman backing her. Though she may well be mistaken as to what GC views actually are, given the vicious misrepresentation of them in the media.
Gender Critical at this point just means having the understanding that biological sex exists in humans. It is now seen as absolute heresy by the over priviledged who have too much time to ruminate and no sense of purpose in their lives. Luckily, Twitter does not represent the real world. I believe most people are tired of revisionist history and biology denialism.
My moment has arrived. I am both a knowledgeable GC feminist and a Discworld fan. I have read most of the book several times.
Pratchett died in 2015 after a long decline associated with a rare form of dementia. Some of the novels he completed with the aid of an amanuensis following diagnosis are admirable. But two, Snuff (2011) and Raising Steam (2013) are excrable. Pterry may have had a hand in them -- some old notes, some key scenes -- but the coarse, repetitive voice that abruptly takes over isn't the author in his prime. I, personally, don't think it's the author at all but only those closest to him during his last years will know the truth of that.
A cynical person might argue that those controlling the Pratchett estate in those final years set themselves the task of squeezing the last drop of value out of it. This explanation is congruent with releasing these final novels (ignoring The Shepherd's Crown which I haven't the heart to take up) irrespective of their substandard nature. And I'm not talking 'slightly off the pace' here. I'm talking someone without much writing talent knocking them out to a deadline with the aid of a Discworld Thesaurus. I would rather believe this than that they were by the great man himself in his final decline.
I can wholly believe that retrofitting Pratchett's gender playfulness to suit an ideology whose ugly symptoms only began to manifest in the round world during the year he died is the work of those same arrogant cloth-ears who thought sensitive readers wouldn't notice the issues with Snuff and Raising Steam. And it's for the same reason. Money.
I noted how much Good Omens has been 'rewritten' since his death. In the early 2000s, Terry and Neil said that they couldn't imagine why fanfic writers wanted to imagine Crowley and Az were in a relationship - now in the tv series it's 99% canon that they are, and the actors have said as much. Nothing wrong with them being gay, but the smugness of retrofitting it in and saying "Oh yes this was always here in this book I wrote in 1991 because I was woke even back then" always got my back up.
Is there an address of some kind for Neil Gaiman. I'd love to sponsor a copy of Helen Joyce's book 'Trans', via the Sex Matters website. In fact are there others who might benefit. How about Eddy too?
People point to the dwarfs & Cheery Littlebottom “coming out” as female. I always thought that was stone gender critical.
Dwarfs don’t have gender roles (just sex). In a gender-role society like Ankh-Morpork, things the dwarfs code as ‘dwarf’ are coded as ‘masculine’ while other, undwarfy, stuff is coded ‘feminine’.
Cheery - and a number of other dwarfs who might be male or female - decide they like that stuff & adopt it (some of it: wearing a skirt yes, abandoning the beard & axe nope).
It makes no difference to what sex they are, or who they fancy. They are still dwarfs & still whatever sex.
So - this is making fun of “the default is male” fallacy, and making it clear that gender roles are culturally specific & have no bearing on reality.
100% agree. I immediately thought of Cheery and how that surely shows a GC standpoint. Plus the myriad of female characters who just get in and do their own thing.
It frustrates me that TRAs and the be kind brigade throw GC about with evidently no understanding of what it actually means or what we believe. Argh!
Woww! I had no idea Gaiman was a Scientologist! Holy Moly, explains everything. I wonder if he 'allowed' Amanda Palmer to scream out in pain when giving birth to their son, since Scientology says women must be silent when they give birth so they don't scare away the freaking aliens... Euuughhh.
I couldn’t believe he was a Scientologist so I looked it up to check. He denies it and says it’s the religion of his family. Not sure if it’s true but who knows.
I saw Charlie Stross and his bunch of sycophants similarly deciding that pTerry would support genderwoo. They were also trying to claim Iain Banks, who would have laughed at them endlessly, I think.
I've only read Consider Phlebas, and it was some time ago, but my impression was that the Culture was awful and Banks was painting an sad vision of humanities future with regard to all the modification, not an enviable one.
I agree with this comment ... you cannot speak for others.
Mark O. Martin
@neilhimself
and
@rhipratchett
I so dislike it when people try to insist that another person would believe a particular way…especially when they had never known that person, and that person had passed away and thus cannot respond. People who want to put others into boxes have an agenda. Seldom a kind one.
"Gaiman has family ties to the Church of Scientology. His childhood religious upbringing was quite unusual; his Jewish great-grandfather immigrated from Poland to England in the early 1900s, and his immediate (and extended) family were practicing Jews until Gaiman was around 4 years old. That was when his parents became interested in Scientology.
Gaiman himself does not like to talk about his religious beliefs, although he has been clear in saying he is not a Scientologist."
Oh, interesting. Are you actually allowed to leave Scientology? They always seemed to me to the the sort of organisation that wouldn't permit such things.
There's a whole enormous thing about leaving COS. Too complex to explain here, but if you're interested, I thoroughly recommend Scientology and the Aftermath with Leah Remini, or her podcast with Mike Rinder, if that's more your kind of thing.
Do people understand that Terry Pratchett wrote fiction. I have read every book he wrote and I get the fiction. In fiction, real life can be anything the author wants ( look at JK Rowling and her fiction) and it does not have to make sense out with the novels. I have never met a dwarf or a werewolf or a trunk that bounds about the environment.
I have met plenty wise women. Many have been castigated and sworn at on Twitter for being exactly that... Wise women.
Terry Pratchett was astute. He read people well. But he wrote about a place that only existed in his own head and peopled it with the same. We cannot read any more into Discworld.
Margaret Atwood, I have been told, wrote many amazing books (I cannot read any of them as I don't like her prose) but her attitude towards other women stinks.
Maybe leave the fiction as it is... fiction. And look to living people as champions or no.
I thought Monstrous Regiment was the most GC book I read in my whole childhood. I saw this Twitter thread earlier and was grossed out. "Terry was kind" so he wouldn't believe that gender roles are crap? No one in the thread seemed to know what gender critical even was, they seemed to be using it as shorthand for 'literally kills trans people'.
I looked into the Twitter feed and what astonishes me most is the misunderstanding of GC /gender critical. It is primarily seen as anti-trans...well that's not a surprise, but no-one could explain the term. Is it not too late to change it to what it means? 'gender-stereotype critical'. and be called GSC. Because denying that gender exists is as daft as denying sex does. They are both real in different spheres. So can we not fix that? and of course Pratchett was against gender stereotypes...he was oppositional and anti-authoritarian , a contrarian, the last thing he would have tolerated would have been the dictats of trans activists and stonewall and the cancelling of debate. I have successfully been publishing cards against gender stereotypes for decades commissioning Angela Martin and Jack Fleming who excelled in their art and wit. Laughing at the stereotypes was a very effective weapon. It just shows how short and fragile feminist advances are, perhaps we thought too easily in the 80's...great, everyone will wear doc martins and trainers now bye bye 4" stilettos.... for them to come back with a vengeance and are now embedded in corporate law! how fast the stone rolls down the hill and how hard it is to push it back up again. So any gain must be guarded. Pratchett must be guarded against this new conformity or he will be captured.
How on earth did all of this start? That Anne Senot or whatever is quite an unsavoury character, so I wouldn't trust "her" . This is all quite unseemly.
I'm a huge Terry Pratchett fan and SO angry about 'Neil Himself' presuming to speak on his behalf. How dare he? Interpreting the characters and situations in Pratchett's stories to assume a support for this baseless and dangerous ideology is stooping pretty bloody low. (I can imagine what Nanny Ogg might tell Gaiman he can go do to 'Himself' and concur wholeheartedly.)
"Luxury beliefs" is exactly it. Neither they nor anyone they know is going to be locked up 24/7 with an HIV positive rapist like the women in California prisons. It makes me furious that none of these "be kind" drones can get it through their thick heads that kindness doesn't mean letting people do whatever they want. Sometimes kindness looks like holding down your wailing, sobbing baby while a nurse innoculates them for a disease that would be much, much worse than their momentary distress. It might look and feel cruel, but most everyone accepts that it isn't. Meanwhile one of those California women is going to die. Because these idiots and other idiots like them were self-rightous enough to insist on being "kind".
It does seem to be TP's daughter who is saying he'd have no time for GC views, with Gaiman backing her. Though she may well be mistaken as to what GC views actually are, given the vicious misrepresentation of them in the media.
Gender Critical at this point just means having the understanding that biological sex exists in humans. It is now seen as absolute heresy by the over priviledged who have too much time to ruminate and no sense of purpose in their lives. Luckily, Twitter does not represent the real world. I believe most people are tired of revisionist history and biology denialism.
My moment has arrived. I am both a knowledgeable GC feminist and a Discworld fan. I have read most of the book several times.
Pratchett died in 2015 after a long decline associated with a rare form of dementia. Some of the novels he completed with the aid of an amanuensis following diagnosis are admirable. But two, Snuff (2011) and Raising Steam (2013) are excrable. Pterry may have had a hand in them -- some old notes, some key scenes -- but the coarse, repetitive voice that abruptly takes over isn't the author in his prime. I, personally, don't think it's the author at all but only those closest to him during his last years will know the truth of that.
A cynical person might argue that those controlling the Pratchett estate in those final years set themselves the task of squeezing the last drop of value out of it. This explanation is congruent with releasing these final novels (ignoring The Shepherd's Crown which I haven't the heart to take up) irrespective of their substandard nature. And I'm not talking 'slightly off the pace' here. I'm talking someone without much writing talent knocking them out to a deadline with the aid of a Discworld Thesaurus. I would rather believe this than that they were by the great man himself in his final decline.
I can wholly believe that retrofitting Pratchett's gender playfulness to suit an ideology whose ugly symptoms only began to manifest in the round world during the year he died is the work of those same arrogant cloth-ears who thought sensitive readers wouldn't notice the issues with Snuff and Raising Steam. And it's for the same reason. Money.
I noted how much Good Omens has been 'rewritten' since his death. In the early 2000s, Terry and Neil said that they couldn't imagine why fanfic writers wanted to imagine Crowley and Az were in a relationship - now in the tv series it's 99% canon that they are, and the actors have said as much. Nothing wrong with them being gay, but the smugness of retrofitting it in and saying "Oh yes this was always here in this book I wrote in 1991 because I was woke even back then" always got my back up.
Is there an address of some kind for Neil Gaiman. I'd love to sponsor a copy of Helen Joyce's book 'Trans', via the Sex Matters website. In fact are there others who might benefit. How about Eddy too?
(They send books to MP's /MSP 's direct)
Great idea! This might work:
https://www.neilgaiman.com/FAQs/Contacting,_Contracting,_Inviting,_Interviewing,_or_Mailing_Neil
Many thanks for this. I'll have a look to see if Sex Matters post abroad. If not I can get it on amazon and post myself.
You could always post to his house in Scotland as I think he is likely to be there from time to time in the next few months.
People point to the dwarfs & Cheery Littlebottom “coming out” as female. I always thought that was stone gender critical.
Dwarfs don’t have gender roles (just sex). In a gender-role society like Ankh-Morpork, things the dwarfs code as ‘dwarf’ are coded as ‘masculine’ while other, undwarfy, stuff is coded ‘feminine’.
Cheery - and a number of other dwarfs who might be male or female - decide they like that stuff & adopt it (some of it: wearing a skirt yes, abandoning the beard & axe nope).
It makes no difference to what sex they are, or who they fancy. They are still dwarfs & still whatever sex.
So - this is making fun of “the default is male” fallacy, and making it clear that gender roles are culturally specific & have no bearing on reality.
Sounds exceedingly GC to me.
Yes. Similar things going on with Monstrous Regiment, also cited. He's mocking strict gender roles in a society dominated by fundamentalist religion.
100% agree. I immediately thought of Cheery and how that surely shows a GC standpoint. Plus the myriad of female characters who just get in and do their own thing.
It frustrates me that TRAs and the be kind brigade throw GC about with evidently no understanding of what it actually means or what we believe. Argh!
Woww! I had no idea Gaiman was a Scientologist! Holy Moly, explains everything. I wonder if he 'allowed' Amanda Palmer to scream out in pain when giving birth to their son, since Scientology says women must be silent when they give birth so they don't scare away the freaking aliens... Euuughhh.
I couldn’t believe he was a Scientologist so I looked it up to check. He denies it and says it’s the religion of his family. Not sure if it’s true but who knows.
I saw Charlie Stross and his bunch of sycophants similarly deciding that pTerry would support genderwoo. They were also trying to claim Iain Banks, who would have laughed at them endlessly, I think.
Yes, Banks would most certainly have had nothing to do with the gender woo brigade.
It’s the Culture’s idea that anyone can change sex or modify their bodies that’s the Banks thing, I suspect.
I've only read Consider Phlebas, and it was some time ago, but my impression was that the Culture was awful and Banks was painting an sad vision of humanities future with regard to all the modification, not an enviable one.
True, but all his stories are really strong on gender following sex.
I agree with this comment ... you cannot speak for others.
Mark O. Martin
@neilhimself
and
@rhipratchett
I so dislike it when people try to insist that another person would believe a particular way…especially when they had never known that person, and that person had passed away and thus cannot respond. People who want to put others into boxes have an agenda. Seldom a kind one.
Apparently Gaiman is no longer a Scientologist.
"Gaiman has family ties to the Church of Scientology. His childhood religious upbringing was quite unusual; his Jewish great-grandfather immigrated from Poland to England in the early 1900s, and his immediate (and extended) family were practicing Jews until Gaiman was around 4 years old. That was when his parents became interested in Scientology.
Gaiman himself does not like to talk about his religious beliefs, although he has been clear in saying he is not a Scientologist."
https://www.bookbrowse.com/blogs/editor/index.cfm/2013/7/17/Five-Things-You-Might-Not-Know-About-Neil-Gaiman
Oh, interesting. Are you actually allowed to leave Scientology? They always seemed to me to the the sort of organisation that wouldn't permit such things.
There's a whole enormous thing about leaving COS. Too complex to explain here, but if you're interested, I thoroughly recommend Scientology and the Aftermath with Leah Remini, or her podcast with Mike Rinder, if that's more your kind of thing.
Do people understand that Terry Pratchett wrote fiction. I have read every book he wrote and I get the fiction. In fiction, real life can be anything the author wants ( look at JK Rowling and her fiction) and it does not have to make sense out with the novels. I have never met a dwarf or a werewolf or a trunk that bounds about the environment.
I have met plenty wise women. Many have been castigated and sworn at on Twitter for being exactly that... Wise women.
Terry Pratchett was astute. He read people well. But he wrote about a place that only existed in his own head and peopled it with the same. We cannot read any more into Discworld.
Margaret Atwood, I have been told, wrote many amazing books (I cannot read any of them as I don't like her prose) but her attitude towards other women stinks.
Maybe leave the fiction as it is... fiction. And look to living people as champions or no.
I thought Monstrous Regiment was the most GC book I read in my whole childhood. I saw this Twitter thread earlier and was grossed out. "Terry was kind" so he wouldn't believe that gender roles are crap? No one in the thread seemed to know what gender critical even was, they seemed to be using it as shorthand for 'literally kills trans people'.
I looked into the Twitter feed and what astonishes me most is the misunderstanding of GC /gender critical. It is primarily seen as anti-trans...well that's not a surprise, but no-one could explain the term. Is it not too late to change it to what it means? 'gender-stereotype critical'. and be called GSC. Because denying that gender exists is as daft as denying sex does. They are both real in different spheres. So can we not fix that? and of course Pratchett was against gender stereotypes...he was oppositional and anti-authoritarian , a contrarian, the last thing he would have tolerated would have been the dictats of trans activists and stonewall and the cancelling of debate. I have successfully been publishing cards against gender stereotypes for decades commissioning Angela Martin and Jack Fleming who excelled in their art and wit. Laughing at the stereotypes was a very effective weapon. It just shows how short and fragile feminist advances are, perhaps we thought too easily in the 80's...great, everyone will wear doc martins and trainers now bye bye 4" stilettos.... for them to come back with a vengeance and are now embedded in corporate law! how fast the stone rolls down the hill and how hard it is to push it back up again. So any gain must be guarded. Pratchett must be guarded against this new conformity or he will be captured.
My reading of those tweets is Gaiman saying Pratchett would be gender critical and Pratchetts daughter replying saying he wouldn't be
How on earth did all of this start? That Anne Senot or whatever is quite an unsavoury character, so I wouldn't trust "her" . This is all quite unseemly.