Attributing value to the word "real"

“Nigerian novelist and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has sought to clarify her position after sparking outrage with comments about transgender women that she made in an interview with Channel 4 News. The author of Half of a Yellow Sun came under attack after she failed to call transgender women “real women” in response to a question.”

The paragraph above from a Guardian article made me think recently about the value we attribute to the word “real”.

As someone who was born a man, I’ll never understand what it’s like to be a woman.

I can read all the books I want, watch TV shows written for women and read articles written by women but all this will get me is possibly an appreciation for what it’s like to be a woman; I’ll never actually know what it’s like to be born one.

Which is why I agree with what Chimamanda Adichie said:

“I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”

It's clear someone who was born a man then became a woman has experienced a different life to someone who was born a woman. However, I’d go even further than that because the experience of being born a white woman is different to being born a black woman, the experience of being a woman who is six feet tall is different to one who is five feet tall.

All of our experiences are different, even if in some ways they are similar.

The issue here is the use of the word “real” – claiming trans women are or aren’t real women is about attributing a value to one experience above the other.

Personally, I feel no experience is more authentic than the other; they’re all just different.

A trans woman probably can’t ever understand what it’s like to be born in a woman’s body, the same as someone born in a woman’s body can’t understand what it’s like to feel like you were born in a body which doesn’t correlate to your inner gender.

Thoughts on Pixar’s Inside Out

I recently watched Pixar’s Inside Out, which “is set in the mind of a young girl named Riley Andersen where five personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust—try to lead her through life as her parents move from Minnesota to San Francisco and she has to adjust to her new life” (as described by Wikipedia).

It had some interesting ideas about how memories and emotions worked and really got me thinking, so I thought I’d write some of these down. Needless to say there will be spoilers.

One of the things I really liked from the movie was the idea of emotions being in control at different times, and there being one dominant emotion.

What resonated with me the most was that the dominant emotion goes a long way to determining our personalities. For instance, in the movie Joy is the dominant emotion as Riley grows up and therefore she’s a happy child. I’m sure we all know people who have different dominant emotions, from positive people, people who are constantly angry and those who seem to let everything get them down. However our personalities aren’t set in stone and if we start thinking about which emotion dominates we can consciously change our personality.

Another idea I hadn’t really considered before was that our memories have different emotions attached to them and that the emotion can change over time, especially as the memory itself changes.
For instance, a happy memory can change to anger if our feelings towards the person involved changes, or we look back at sad times in our lives and feel nostalgic for them as we forget the things which made us sad and only remember the good things.

Near the end of the movie Riley decides to get a bus back to Minnesota where she was happy.
The movie seemed to be suggesting that ideas can come from different emotions, in this example Anger came up with the idea. When deciding whether something is a good idea it’s worth considering where the idea is coming from. Ideas from anger and jealously for instance are rarely good ones.

Finally, at the end of the movie Joy and Sadness make it back to HQ and having spent most of the movie trying to keep Sadness out of the way, Joy let her take control.
It was only after Riley let herself feel her sadness and give in to it was she able to deal with what she was going through.
Although it’s generally good to try and stay positive, sometimes we need to give in to our feelings in order to process them and move on.

All in all, I got a lot out of this movie and made me view things differently; it was brave of Pixar and Disney to tackle a subject like this.

The Wild West vs the Modern World

There's a part in the game Red Dead Redemption where the main character, a bounty hunter by the name of John Marston, comes in from the  country into Blackwater,  a large and still growing city in the area.
Up until that point,  John Marston has spent most of his time in a fairly typical wild west environment; dusty towns,  mines and ranches.

Blackwater is the closet thing the game has to the modern world,  with it's paved streets, electricity and automobiles driving around.
In one mission John Marston finds himself in the back of one of these automobiles in his full cowboy gear.
It was watching this that it struck me that living in the West at this time must have been a strange experience.

On the one hand you still had most people using horses as their primary mode of transport, living in small towns and eking a living out of the land.
At the same time you started seeing national transport in the form of the railroads, which was helping create the beginnings of larger businesses.

John Marston finds himself between the two words, the rough,  dusty world of the stereotypical cowboy which he understood. A world where owning a gun wasn't a statement but more a necessity of serving.
The other world, the modern one with its rules, order and safety, was slowly creeping in.

It was thinking about what it must have been like to see the world change like this that made Mr appreciate what survivalists, bikers and ranchers are trying to hold onto in the modern world.

A sense of freedom, of being able to settle differences for yourself, not knowing what the next day would bring rather than the safe,  dull predictability of modern life.

While most people would prefer the safety of modern life over the anxiety and anarchy of freedom, when your alarm goes off on Tuesday morning at the same time it did on the Tuesday before and the Tuesday before that, you can definitely  see the appeal of frontier life.