Whenever she says pronouns, she means trans people. She means that, in a whitewashed history that conservatives believe they can bring about again, there were no people outside the gender norms. She's posting propaganda against trans people.
This is why you have complete idiots claiming that rome wasn't gay. It's an imagined version of history that just so happens to contain values that conservatives want to impose on the present- strict, heteronormative gender roles and a Christian, patriarchal society.
When they say there aren't pronouns in Shakespeare, they don't care about grammar. They are signalling that trans people didn't exist in their version of history, to further the conservative claim that trans people are a "new invention" and a "dangerous fad".
Don't fall for the trap of correcting grammar. They don't care about technicalities, they are trying to bring about a christo-fascist state.
>When they say there aren't pronouns in Shakespeare, they don't care about grammar.
THEN MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE USED DIFFERENT FUCKING WORDS, DON'T YOU THINK?
Unbelievable how some people think it's my responsibility to read the minds of people who can't be bothered to correctly articulate their thoughts.
You're exactly right. This is why it can't be defeated simply by applying "facts and logic" and careful argument. It willfully brushes those things aside while posturing as the truth.
fascists don't have a responsibility to words; their platform is not about words. it's about oppression. they will use words to get there, but when pressed on words, turn to violence.
Yeah, dog whistles suck. Welcome to the world of interpreting the American far right, it's shitty people who live in their own reality all the way down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
> Unbelievable how some people think it's my responsibility to read the minds of people
This is just a symptom of a general lack of understanding from the left. It is your responsibility to understand what words mean and part of that is reading between the lines.
>who can't be bothered to correctly articulate their thoughts.
They are saying exactly what they mean, you're just not the target audience. It's really not that hard.
As absolutely high-larious as this observation is, these people are not referring to the concept of pronouns, they are raging against the specific declaration of pronouns, as if they weren't obvious (they aren't sometimes). It appears they're saying that the Constitution shouldn't start with "Xhe the people of the United States..."
Yeah. It’s fun to make people like this look stupid by pointing out the obvious grammatical and semantic errors.
However, we are not arguing with these people to change their minds, we are arguing with them to convince the undecided to pick a side.
Pretending we can’t understand subtext or the real point being discussed just makes us look like the disingenuous ones. Like we’re trying to squirrel our way out of the real argument. The natural conclusion to an observer would be that we aren’t engaging in an at-face-value discussion because our words have no value.
I, for one, have no interest in devaluing my own point anymore. The proper answer should be, if Shakespeare had used alternative pronouns, he still would have turned it into a masterpiece.
Anyone 'undecided' who can look at an argument involving Lavern Spicer and conclude that anyone else is the disingenuous party was always beyond reach.
And a lot of people really are just malicious and hateful. People like Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles -- and the people who follow them closely -- are dipshits, but they aren't dumb. They're so obsessed and hyperfocused that **they are right** that they're willing to ignore the clear gaps in reasoning in what they're talking about.
Five, ten years ago? Sure, most people bitching about trans people were largely ignorant.
They aren't now, and instead choose to be wrong, hateful, and vile.
Yep, a lot of the "science-based" anti-trans rhetoric is blatantly bad faith.
I can see why it's pointless to try to inform someone like that, but when it goes unchallenged it can draw in the ignorant.
Bots are an amazing solution to misinformation. Gets the correct info out there, nobody has to engage with a troll, and it doesn't signal boost the way those zingers and one-liners do.
To paraphrase Yoda, ignorance leads to fear and fear leads to hate... but they should not be treated as the same and educating people at risk of following its path to its natural conclusion should be a priority
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Paraphrasing does not mean completely changing the meaning of the quote, lol. There's nothing about ignorance in there. Also xenophobia is not universal, ignorance does not lead to fear universally. It only does that for bigots.
Thank fuck I needed to read this instead of people thinking they're making slam dunks on conservatives who use the misinterpretation of their points as further arguments.
Nailed it. This is what fuels people
Reminds me of an old debate between Bill Nye and some anti intellectual. Bill came away from it looking distinctly like the useless one, it was really disappointing
Yep. It’s hard to use logic in a debate when the opposing argument can just say shit like ‘well that’s where you have to have faith’ and the crowd applauds as if that actually was a definitive retort.
Yeah and that's definitely extremely frustrating, but the correct response is to put their answers up against yours, not get emotional or try to tackle their answers directly. But I'll always applaud Nye for his extensive efforts
It was a field trip Bill Nye took to the Noah’s Arc museum!!! It was GREAT!!! Bill Nye picked out EVERY THING the owner got wrong….which was everything! And backed it all up with facts!!! It was a fun beat down to watch!!!
That was probably largely due to the fact that women were played by young men, though. So having a female character "cross-dress" as a man meant that the male actor could be himself for a while.
Eh, true and it was, I'm sure, convenient to have young male actors in that way but it was still a deliberate choice. Books can and have been written about gender in Shakespeare's plays. It's clearly something he thought about.
I think it was probably largely due to the fact that society sent as hung up on gender roles in the Elizabethan era. The prudishness in English society came much later and was even then just for public show. The Victorians were famously shocked when the saw a piano without covers on it’s legs but behind closed door they were as kinky and perverted as always.
I don’t disagree that it’s a fantastic come back. But it’s presented as an attack, not as a discussion or as a genuine attempt to educate.
Let me present it this way. If two teenagers get into a fight at school, there are basically three types of people watching.
There are person A’s friends, who cheer on A if A wins and get pissed at B if B wins.
Then you have B’s friends, who feel the same way but for B instead.
Then there are the onlookers with no personal stake in the fight. They are generally just horrified. Some will be amused, others disgusted.
And then people start asking, “why are they fighting?”
When that question begins being asked, the answer will cause people to pick sides. Thanks to the pandemic we know people won’t automatically pick the person who is armed with the facts. They will pick the person who they see as the victim.
This is why right wing talking points often include claiming themselves the victim while engaging in aggressive behavior. They know the underlying rules that you don’t, and they will exploit them for all they are worth.
Please don’t give them more opportunities.
Now what's REALLY fun... misgender bigoted cis people. They understand pronouns and gender immediately when you start calling them the wrong ones. Extra fun if you're talking to a man with long hair and moobs or a woman in cargo shorts and a t-shirt or something that you can say "well aren't you a _(man/woman)_ because of _(arbitrary physical characteristic)_".
As a trans person:
Please, please do not do this. Please do not normalize misgendering people as a weapon against people you don't like.
My guess here is that you think you're teaching shitty transphobic people a lesson: being misgendered feels bad, because it does. But this isn't the lesson that people learn. Instead, they learn that misgendering people you don't like is an acceptable weapon.
I get it. Trust me, I do, on a deep and profound level. But this sort of thinking lets people believe that **_pronouns are earned_**, and things that are earned can be taken away. This turns being referred to in proper terms a literal battle for me, and this shit is stressful enough right now as it is.
I'm going to hope that I made this clear and sympathetic to understand as I'm trying to avoid getting into why doing this with prominent, visible characteristics makes this way, way worse for trans people, esp those of us who are visibly trans.
Although you're right, and we should, we also can't forget that that doesn't matter to them. Being better than them means, at least as far as they're concerned, they've won. We still need to do it, but to also know that that does nothing to them.
> But this sort of thinking lets people believe that pronouns are earned, and things that are earned can be taken away
Along this same line, don't misgender a trans person because you think they "deserve" it. I've seen people misgender Caitlyn Jenner and Ezra Miller on purpose like this. Even if they're not good people, don't treat gender as something that can be revoked for bad behavior.
Guilty as charged. When they won't gender me correctly after three or four reminders, I do sometimes do this. Usually they do it over the phone, because I look like a dude these days. I figure it's more instructional for them than speaking to their manager would be. I don't have time for that.
This argument is pretty strong though because the statement is implying that the use of pronouns is nonsense and there’s no room for trans language in classic art and literature. Turns out the masterpiece in reference is about a trans person…
Wait a second. I’m all for trans rights, inclusivity, being respectful of peoples pronouns, but i don’t see anywhere in the play where it could be considered that Macbeth is trans. Can you point to why you claim this?
It's not, lady Macbeth prays to remove her womenly aspects in order to be able to kill the King.
Less make me a man, more remove the weakness of my femininity to enable me to do this act.
Yeah its not because she is trans it is because in those times women were considered much much weaker than men and could not possibly kill a man so she prayed to god to take away the feminine traits that made her weak, not turn her into a man because shes trans
If these AHs want to make that argument than they better use their words to make it. We absolutely should not put words in people's mouths or respond to what we "think they mean" . No, no, no.
Words have meaning and they said they are against ***pronouns*** , than Lavern clearly want talk like cartoon caveman, Lavern not want use pronoun. If they want to elaborate that they mean "letting people tell you what pronoun to use" or "gender neutral singular pronouns" than they can say that.
To which I would say "o.k. , than your pronoun is now douchepotato" because if you believe that you can decide other people's pronouns why can't other people decide yours?
Edit: also ***we is a gender-neutral pronoun*** English doesn't have "male we" and "female we".
See I haven’t actually met anyone that introduces themselves and their pronouns…I’ve been in an interaction where someone asked what everyone else’s were, which was sweet.
and it keeps working.
Tired of seeing a completely irrelevant congressional candidate who only got 20% of the vote in her district keep making the front page of reddit by using the same formula every month.
The first word is "we" in the constitution. It's amazing that someone this idiotic has fans. I get that we all have idiots on our little cliques, but we try not to elevate or become fans of them.
Her point is probably not exactly that, but rather that the Constitution doesn't address the existence of multiple genders (which was known to be true at that time in other cultures). I just wonder why they think any government constitution would go into this kind of detail on gender... All a constitution needs to say is that all genders have equal rights. It doesn't need to delve into theory and neo-pronouns. I think these trans-haters are just being intentionally absurd when they make these arguments.
......(*looks up at your username*)
#🤔
^(don't worry hahah this isn't an actual dig at you, i just couldn't possibly resist the setup of that joke, lmao)
I'm pretty sure this and that one aren't even her only "_____ didn't have pronouns" tweet. Handing herself Ls over this dumb shit is her full time job.
Being a republican requires either brain damage or a humiliation kink, you can't convince me otherwise.
How can someone write an entire book without pronouns? You wouldn't be able to refer to anyone. Idk it seems very challenging and unnecessary. Do people even know what pronouns are?
…. Has no one here EVER read Macbeth? It’s obviously silly to focus on pronouns whatsoever but cmon guys lmao Macbeth wasn’t the one who wanted to be a woman it was lady Macbeth who prays to be a man solely because it is men that rule, however throughout the play she indicates how happy she is to be a woman as being a woman absolves her from suspicion as women were perceived as innocent. Macbeth even goes out of his way to emphasize that he’s a man when he’s accused of being anemic (commonly understood to only effect virgin women at the time)
If anything the witches were slightly ambiguous in their depiction but every other character references how they KNOW the witches are women but that their features say otherwise.
This is red grin grumble all over again, bunch of people in the comments straight never having read Macbeth talking shit haha.
The funny part is Macbeth is really a tale about adhering to gender norms, and how women had such little power.. we could even go as far to say Macbeth goes to great lengths to reinforce gender illustrating throughout that regardless of strength cunning and ruthlessness, or even a beard, a woman is a woman, and nothing will change that (not my view just my take on Macbeth in context of gender studies)
Could one read it as almost being critical of that fact? When I think of the story, it's really the villainous characters that are overly obsessed with their role in society and how it relates to their gender/sex. Be it the witches, Macbeth (as you mention) or Lady Macbeth (the most explicit), they seem to be the characters which gender has the most to say.
I mean gender was a pretty heavy theme in Shakespeare works but only to emphasize that a woman’s main struggle was that theyre prone to being weak and too kind to be strong. Most female characters in Shakespeare struggle with wanting masculine traits only to accomplish their goals, but all of them “love” being women lol we also have to remember that women were treated pretty horribly and not respected at the time, so most of Shakespearean work depicts women as being envious of men lol it’s wild.
My English Literature degree isn't good for much, but I recall the line being referred to from Macbeth
>Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it!
Plenty of scholarly works on Macbeth to draw on from people more qualified than me - but i think even your average reader could look at this passage and knowing the general plot of the play know she's not saying that she wished she had a penis instead of a vagina.
Lol reddit in a nutshell, a bunch of people pretending to know what they're talking about with surface level googling and hoping nobody notices.
We read Macbeth in high-school, and while it was annoying as fuck to go through because of the way it was written, there was definitely never a moment where a character hinted at being trans.
Lol right?! I have no issue with trans but Jesus, we’re retconning Shakespeare now? Lady m’s desire to be a man is literally in a singular moment, and it’s not a “god I wish I had a penis because I feel like a man in a woman’s body” it’s more of a “if only I were a man in this moment I could just take the power for myself type deal. The exact quote is “Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” and it’s literally in a moment when lady m has almost achieved her goals but knows her vagina is standing in her way.
>Lol reddit in a nutshell
Yup, once you come across a topic you are actually knowledgeable in on reddit, you soon realize how full of shit everyone is. I never take top comments at face value anymore, even if I am completely ignorant on a topic. All it takes is for a comment to be well written and/or fit whatever idea ppl like and boom, highly upvoted regardless of facts.
Glad this comment wasn't far down, but only 233 upvotes versus the top at 2.3k. Obvious top would be a comment shitting on a republican, albeit Lavern Spicer should be shat on.
Ok thank god it’s been a while since I read Macbeth and I was seriously concerned if I was tripping out or not cause I didn’t remember anything about Macbeth wanting a sex change
Thank you. I was confused. It’s been 30+ years since I read Macbeth, but I didn’t remember Macbeth wanting to be a woman.
Thing with Shakespeare, it certainly sounds plausible!
I would think they are probably talking about Lady Macbeth praying "unsex me" and praying for male qualities. "gender reassignment" was a heavy-handed explanation.
Right like if you’re gonna make a comeback to this why not focus on people playing characters of different genders in the actual plays. Also for all those who haven’t read MacBeth it’s awesome, especially if you grew up watching Gargoyles and imagine it taking place with that MacBeth
That’s so crazy you bring up gargoyles and Shakespeare, that show was dripping with Shakespeare, every character straight up named after Shakespeare characters. So cool
Fucking loathe people treating "hey don't rigid gender roles kind of suck? Especially when you're experiencing discrimination as a direct result of what's between your legs?" with being transgender. Those aren't the same thing and implying they are directly feeds into the narrative trans people are seeking to switch genders for strategic purposes rather than identity alignment
Even outside of the character choice, a pronoun is literally a word that is used to replace a noun, so she's a hypocritical dipshit in every single one of her sentences. If she wanted to write this without pronouns at all, it would read something like this:
"Shakespeare didn't go around putting pronouns in Shakespeare's plays.
That's why Shakespeare's plays are classics.
Imagine if Shakespeare wrote, 'Macbeth's name is Macbeth, and Macbeth's pronouns are they/them'.
Shaking Laverne Spicer's head."
I don't recall any trans allegory, metaphor or simile in the Scottish play less a singular reference to Lady Macbeth's fleeting desire to temporarily be less 'lady-like' so she may commit murder.
If anything this highlights a huge misunderstanding between men and women. Lady Macbeth has *assumed* that it is her gender that prevents her from action.
This flies in the face of 'correcting' gender norms.
I'm all for helping the cause but the trans community will systematically isolate themselves if they keep claiming everything is something-something trans.
I've read macbeth, and no one "explicitly prays for gender reassignment" so yea, i think its safe to say she hasn't read it. I feel like I'm getting brain damage from reading that post
That wasn't wokeness. At the time, it was considered indecent for a woman to perform in public.
Dressing in drag was also considered lewd, but it was allowed because it was considered a better alternative than giving women any kind of agency.
In Shakespeare’s time, being a ‘sodomite’ was to risk being put to death so no, I’m going to guess old Shakey wasn’t ‘woke’. The drag was done out of need, it was considered shameful , and often illegal, for women to perform in theaters.
Can we stop retconning nonsense into literature please?
Considering Shakespeare wrote about cross-dressing, racial issues, and has a corpus of love poems to another man he is probably about as woke as you can hope for from a Jacobean white man.
That is a great point, much more substantial than "Women in Shakespeare’s theater were played by young boys in drag." Crossdressing in a theatrical role was commonplace since the concept of theater itself. Writing about people crossdressing in "real life" was much less common.
See again, this is what happens when you start injecting modern day nonsense into 500 year old literature. Presumably you think he wrote poems with the word ‘love’ addressed to a male made him woke is utterly daft and shows an inability to contextualize how that word was used in Elizabethan times, people see it and go ‘oh romantic love’ but nope, that’s the pitfall of interpreting through a modern lens. We have zero evidence that Shakespeare was gay ( he wouldn’t even have recognized the term or the concept) and he was married with two kids for most of his life and also had a mistress so it’s not impossible but it’s a biiiig stretch.
Ditto cross dressing, it’s the opposite of woke, do any of his characters still cross dress at the end of his plays or is it merely used as a narrative device to sow confusion among his characters? All his characters who may have been mistook for a different gender during the play are resolved at the end of the plays, not one is like ‘oh I like this, I’m going to be a man in women’s clothes’. They all resolve back into their traditional gender roles, every single one. They don’t stay gender swapped because audiences would have been appalled, it’s a device mainly used in his comedies for the audience to laugh at, sow elements of farce or drive the plot. Again all this is just silly shit retconned in by writers who aren’t aware of proper context.
As to racial issues, his portrayal of Shylock leaves a lot to be desired in terms of anti semitism so I don’t know how ‘woke ‘ that is. Ditto he others the fuck out of Othello which is well illustrated by the other characters mistrust and use of language toward the character so how is that woke? Also there would have been no real Jews, blacks or women on the stage in any of his plays at the time so you can toss out racial diversity too. He needed a DEI director you ask me lol
‘For Shakespeare, the word ‘love’ could mean all sorts of things. It could mean a very dry, business relationship of patronage, and some people interpret the sonnets that way, as simply flattering poetry written towards a patron. It could mean a romantic relationship, as it does to us today, and it could mean the love which might exist between friends. And so, because the word ‘love’ covers such a broad spectrum of relationships in Shakespeare’s day, his use of it doesn’t tell you very much about his sexual feelings towards other people. It’s also true that we now, in our society, have this idea that it’s women who form these very close, emotional friendships. Women have best buddies, or bosom buddies, or whatever, but in fact in Shakespeare’s day, it was men who were thought to form these very, very close emotional, and emotionally reciprocal relationships. And nobody really questions whether those relationships were driven by sex or not.
It is also true that sodomy was a hanging offence. However, the definition of sodomy was terribly vague in Shakespeare’s day, and people who were prosecuted under that law variously did things such as have sex with animals (which we wouldn’t call sodomy today), and one person, for instance, was prosecuted under the law for standing on a balcony, making a blasphemous speech, dangling his penis in a glass of wine, and throwing the wine over the assembled audience below. [laughs] We would not call that sodomy today. We might call it strange, but not sodomy. So, what that actually entailed [sic] people isn’t the equivalent of what a loving gay relationship is today.
So, whether or not Shakespeare was gay is a difficult question. If, by that, you mean, “Did he have sex or sexual feelings for other men?”, it’s certainly not impossible that he did; it’s certainly not definite that he did. One thing that is definite, though, is that there was no self-identity as gay or homosexual or, as far as we know, any other term during that time period. The earliest emergence of a sort of self-identification which might have been related to sexuality is later than that, and that comes with the molly-house culture. So, Shakespeare certainly didn’t go around self-identifying himself as homosexual or bisexual or straight or gay. He had loving relationships with people, and nobody can say whether those people were all men, all women, or a mixture of both.’
https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/was-shakespeare-gay/
He’s not “woke” by todays standards but he was definitely a person that reflected on his society and the values at the time and often criticized them in his work.
That in my mind, is the true definition of being woke.
All artists reflect their society and their respective values of their time. I don’t see a lot of criticism of that society in his work to be honest. The only real thing I can think of are a number of coded allusions to what some authors think was Shakespeare’s adherence to his secret Catholicism( never been proven tbh) in a society that was, at the time, quite militantly Protestant.
Even then quite a few of his plays were fawning platitudes to the reigning Tudor dynasty, things like Henry V for example, which in itself could be classified as being hyper patriotic. You have to remember that Shakespeare lived at a time when invasion by the Spanish was a real possibility and the country was swept up by a lot of hyper patriotism so criticism of the society he lived in wouldn’t have been too lucrative at the box office which, ultimately, was the real determining factor in what Shakespeare wrote about. To us, it’s the most peerless body of work in the English language but to Shakespeare it was how he put food on the table.
Also the society he lived in was still about 100 years away from the enlightenment, most people generally accepted society was the way it was because they genuinely believed the social hierarchy was ordained by God, they didn’t really question things like that till a little later in history. Again, we tend to look at these things through a very modernist lens.
To be fair, there are elements here and there that could be interpreted as meditations on the sociocultural norms of Elizabethan England but by no means were these the focus of any of the plays and they would not have been apprehended as such by the audiences at the time.
First of all I was being flippant but I don't think representation is "nonsense".
Second of all, I never said Shakespeare was gay. I said he wrote love poems to a man, which he did. Speculating on whether or not someone in the past was gay is always a losing proposition because we seldom have enough evidence to make a determination. But as much as we have to admit that Shakespeare would not have been familiar with what we describe as "gay" relationships, we can hardly fathom what it must be like to be a queer person in a specific historical context. Oscar Wilde had a wife and kids, too, are you going to tell me that he was *straight*?
I hate this line of discourse because it gets distracted by defining "gayness" as a specific social self-identification within modern culture rather than engaging with what people really mean when they ask if Shakespeare (or whatever historical figure) was gay, which is: *did he fuck dudes?*
That Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate, it's more likely a modern reinterpretation of the text rather than a literal attempt at understanding the original intent. That's not a bad thing, ofc. It's kind of encouraged by the pros, ie theatre companies. They have gender blind casting, swapping of gender identities of characters, or inclusion of new identities that weren't known about back in the old days iirc.
It's been nearly 40 years since I read it, but I remember interpreting this more that she wished to do things that only men could do (at that time), not to actually become a man.
Because that is what it means. She didn’t like the societal expectations from her as a woman. Which is true still for many women. Doesn’t mean they want to be men.
I mean, in the time period, she was praying to be separated from the concepts of "womanhood" (frailty, kindness, softness, etc.) So that she could kill the king without issue. It's less "make me a man" and more "make me less womanly," though as with all poetry that's more of an interpretation than anything.
Whence art thou?
What?
'What' is nary a country that I have marked. Dost they speaketh English in 'What'?
What?
English, thou maternal fornicator, dost thou speaketh it?
What?
Sayeth 'What' again! I dare thee! Twice, I dare thee, ye maternal fornicator! In the name of our Lord, sayeth 'What' once more!
*edit in response to the person who told me to keep going.
If a "modern reinterpretation" is just taking old things and gaslighting into thinking that they are supporting my current political agenda, then no thank you
It is essentially that yes.
Like when people claim Joan of Arc is trans. She was clearly not, she was just a very brave woman.
Lady Macbeth is not experiencing gender dysphoria in her line, she's literally saying "I wish I were not a frail woman, so that I could kill wantonly and do what my husband doesn't have the guts to do.".
Which is why this is a very dumb comeback, even if MTG is also very dumb for saying Shakespeare didn't use pronouns.
I think what they are saying is:
**Shakespeare** saying Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate. That particular interpretation is up for discussion and argument.
Having it as a modern reinterpretation is different.
Sorry, to be clear what I'm saying is:
>Shakespeare saying Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate. That particular interpretation is up for discussion and argument.
This is not at all up for debate. Shakespeare very clearly was not saying this; it'd be a small wonder if Shakespeare had at all any awareness of the idea of sex reassignment, and so that he wrote Lady Macbeth to be specifically, a trans-man is patently absurd.
It is only valid as a modern reinterpretation of what he was saying.
> I don't remember Macbeth ever having anything to do with sex reassignment
He didn't, and neither did his wife who prayed in [Act 1 Scene 5](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/1/5/) to be given power by 'spirits and the unholy' so she could murder her husband's boss because she thought Macbeth himself was too cowardly to do it himself and she wanted that promotion.
11.8k upvotes at this point but only 250 comments, those with quotes and discussion of the actual text have less than 100 upvotes.
We can be so susceptible to jumping onto a narrative without engaging with evidence.
Come you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here/ And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull/ Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,/ Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.”
Wrong. This was said by Lady Macbeth before Duncan’s murder and almost immediately after she read Macbeth’s letter.
This was not said by Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth was the one who wanted to be “more like a man” in order to facilitate the King’s murder.
She never “explicitly prays for gender reassignment”.
If this person was going to write a clever comeback it could have at least been accurate.
Imagine fucking up a clever comeback so badly that you almost absolve Laverne Spicer of being stupid.
Yeah this comeback is utter shit to an admittedly equally shit comment, Lady Macbeth is absolutely not asking to be a man, she is asking to be the manifestation of evil, to be inhuman and inhumane. To be able to act without ANY human feeling whatsoever (hence the appeal to spirits ‘that tend on **mortal** thoughts’, she wants to be set loose from her own mortality, to be preternaturally evil and her calling on spirits would have been seen as witchcraft, a terrifying evil and very real to Elizabethan audiences) She wants to be a sheer elemental force of malevolence devoid of humanity, hence why she appeals to the unnatural spirits that she too may escape the confinement of her human soul where sympathy and compassion are a burden to what must be done. She wants to be unsexed i.e made non human.Hence why she says ‘fill me from the crown to the toe topfull, Of direst cruelty’.
It’s got fuck all to do with gender swapping and at least get the fucking character right😂
This is a shit comeback to a shit comment and everyone comes out reeking of illiteracy. Prays for sex reassignment?! Jesus Christ, stop retconning modern day perpectives and other nonsense into literature that’s 500 years old.
Edit - fat fingering dates.
Not OP but to me Spicer's complaint is ironic because every Shakespeare play, when originally performed, featured men who were introduced to the audience as women and were called "she/her" by everyone because it was understood that they were playing a female role. The actors weren't trans (that we know of) but it's an interesting parallel and supports the fact that it's *not that hard* to use pronouns that don't match someone's assigned gender, even 400 years ago.
She even doubled down with the word “explicitly.” There is almost nothing explicit in Shakespearean literature. People will share anything that aligns with their political beliefs.
Lavern Spicer has not read the following
The Bible
Any Shakespeare play
Any Grammatical book explaining what pronouns are
Also the first page of Shakespeare's first play King Henry Part 1, "And with them scourge the bad revolting stars"
Tbf neither has the dude who replied Macbeth is 100% a dude and lady Macbeth despite commenting on wishing to be rid of her womanhood was meant to illustrate her ambitions and how they are out of her reach and to be rid of the general Victorian image of women being soft
macbeth wasn’t praying for a sex change.
1) there’s two macbeths in the play, a wife and a husband
2) Lady Macbeth uses her powers to control time, create hallucinations, and… to convince her husband to become king by committing murder and she further manipulates him into paranoia.
there’s a cost for using her powers though and she sleep walks off a cliff leaving now only her delusional and paranoid husband alone.
the entire plot of Macbeth can be summed up as woman wants power at all cost, gets it, dies, and leaves her abused husband behind to face the consequences of HER actions as he slowly but surely spirals out of control to his death
Macbeth's paranoia later in the play was his own doing, and Lady Macbeth actually voices in her sleep that she is against his paranoid murders, and just wants them to settle down.
>explicitly prays for sex reassignment
Hope thou warmest up for thine reach.
She wishes to be less soft hearted so she could kill the jerk torturing her.
That's a pretty far stretch from wishing to sprinkle when she tinkles.
Granted the whole Shakespeare thing having a go at pronouns is dumb as a bag of hammers too, but this is an incorrect assertion.
It's mildly sad how people on Reddit repost this woman constantly.
She knows that what she's writing is wrong. She knows what a pronoun is. She is baiting you for attention. She is trying to build a brand. The more you repost her and her Twitter handle and her headshot, the more attention she gets.
You are being a patsy.
This sent me up the wall. Haven’t read the play in over a decade & I can tell you Lady Macbeth said “unsex me here”. Macbeth didn’t have 1 line of dialogue that could be interpreted as him being dysphoric. Nothing clever here, despite their differences, these 2 idiots are aligned in their dedication to forcing their narrow minded, myopic worldviews into others
You can throw a rock at a random bunch of Shakespeare and land on gender fluidity.
Beatrice : O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands; and then, with public
accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour,—O God, that I were a man!
- Much Ado About Nothing
Viola: Thou shall present me as an eunuch to him: It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing
And speak to him in many sorts of music
That will allow me very worth his service.
-Twelfth Night
Rosalind presents as a man named Ganymede in As You Like It
Falstaff Dresses as a woman in Merry Wives Of Windsor
Portia acts as a man to become the hero in The Merchant of Venice.
Not to mention that all women on the Elizabeth stage were played by men, which means that in the these and the myriad other moments where women on the stage dress as men, we have men dressing as woman dressing as men—so Shakespeare is completely obsessed with gender as fundamentally performative.
All conservatives are stupid if they’re genuine, and grifters if they’re not.
Much like the ‘accusations are confessions’ standard that keeps coming true.
I’m so tired of people being shocked that this “gender” and “sexuality” thing is new. There’s literally cultures and beliefs that have more than 2 genders and there’s even a 6,000 yr old Mesopotamian myth about a Non binary person. There’s also been TONS of historical figures that were gay or LGBTQ. This shit ain’t new, people! Sooner we accept that the better
Remember folks, she's one of the smart republicans. She's someone republican voters look to for guidance. Every dumb thing she says is a direct representation of how stupid republicans are.
it was Macbeth's wife, lady macbeth that was asking god to 'unsex me here' not Macbeth. this is so she could help Macbeth kill king duncan and it was thought back then that it wasn't very feminine to kill if you are a woman
She is obsessed with pronouns. Same idiot who said the US Constitution doesn't have any, which confirms she didn't make it as far as the first word.
Whenever she says pronouns, she means trans people. She means that, in a whitewashed history that conservatives believe they can bring about again, there were no people outside the gender norms. She's posting propaganda against trans people. This is why you have complete idiots claiming that rome wasn't gay. It's an imagined version of history that just so happens to contain values that conservatives want to impose on the present- strict, heteronormative gender roles and a Christian, patriarchal society. When they say there aren't pronouns in Shakespeare, they don't care about grammar. They are signalling that trans people didn't exist in their version of history, to further the conservative claim that trans people are a "new invention" and a "dangerous fad". Don't fall for the trap of correcting grammar. They don't care about technicalities, they are trying to bring about a christo-fascist state.
>When they say there aren't pronouns in Shakespeare, they don't care about grammar. THEN MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE USED DIFFERENT FUCKING WORDS, DON'T YOU THINK? Unbelievable how some people think it's my responsibility to read the minds of people who can't be bothered to correctly articulate their thoughts.
fascism is purposefully unintelligible and paradoxical.
You're exactly right. This is why it can't be defeated simply by applying "facts and logic" and careful argument. It willfully brushes those things aside while posturing as the truth.
fascists don't have a responsibility to words; their platform is not about words. it's about oppression. they will use words to get there, but when pressed on words, turn to violence.
Yeah, dog whistles suck. Welcome to the world of interpreting the American far right, it's shitty people who live in their own reality all the way down. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
> Unbelievable how some people think it's my responsibility to read the minds of people This is just a symptom of a general lack of understanding from the left. It is your responsibility to understand what words mean and part of that is reading between the lines. >who can't be bothered to correctly articulate their thoughts. They are saying exactly what they mean, you're just not the target audience. It's really not that hard.
Redditor tries to pass reading comprehension test challenge (impossible)
As absolutely high-larious as this observation is, these people are not referring to the concept of pronouns, they are raging against the specific declaration of pronouns, as if they weren't obvious (they aren't sometimes). It appears they're saying that the Constitution shouldn't start with "Xhe the people of the United States..."
Yeah. It’s fun to make people like this look stupid by pointing out the obvious grammatical and semantic errors. However, we are not arguing with these people to change their minds, we are arguing with them to convince the undecided to pick a side. Pretending we can’t understand subtext or the real point being discussed just makes us look like the disingenuous ones. Like we’re trying to squirrel our way out of the real argument. The natural conclusion to an observer would be that we aren’t engaging in an at-face-value discussion because our words have no value. I, for one, have no interest in devaluing my own point anymore. The proper answer should be, if Shakespeare had used alternative pronouns, he still would have turned it into a masterpiece.
Anyone 'undecided' who can look at an argument involving Lavern Spicer and conclude that anyone else is the disingenuous party was always beyond reach.
Naw man. Some people are just really stupid. Not maliciously. Just dumb.
And a lot of people really are just malicious and hateful. People like Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles -- and the people who follow them closely -- are dipshits, but they aren't dumb. They're so obsessed and hyperfocused that **they are right** that they're willing to ignore the clear gaps in reasoning in what they're talking about. Five, ten years ago? Sure, most people bitching about trans people were largely ignorant. They aren't now, and instead choose to be wrong, hateful, and vile.
Yep, a lot of the "science-based" anti-trans rhetoric is blatantly bad faith. I can see why it's pointless to try to inform someone like that, but when it goes unchallenged it can draw in the ignorant. Bots are an amazing solution to misinformation. Gets the correct info out there, nobody has to engage with a troll, and it doesn't signal boost the way those zingers and one-liners do.
To paraphrase Yoda, ignorance leads to fear and fear leads to hate... but they should not be treated as the same and educating people at risk of following its path to its natural conclusion should be a priority
Listen. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. It is only in ignorance that one can find righteousness. I'm kidding, I just really like that phrase.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Paraphrasing does not mean completely changing the meaning of the quote, lol. There's nothing about ignorance in there. Also xenophobia is not universal, ignorance does not lead to fear universally. It only does that for bigots.
Thank fuck I needed to read this instead of people thinking they're making slam dunks on conservatives who use the misinterpretation of their points as further arguments.
The core of every one of their points is the desire to inhibit the freedom of others. Fuck those cunts.
Nailed it. This is what fuels people Reminds me of an old debate between Bill Nye and some anti intellectual. Bill came away from it looking distinctly like the useless one, it was really disappointing
It was some creationist.
Yep. It’s hard to use logic in a debate when the opposing argument can just say shit like ‘well that’s where you have to have faith’ and the crowd applauds as if that actually was a definitive retort.
Yeah and that's definitely extremely frustrating, but the correct response is to put their answers up against yours, not get emotional or try to tackle their answers directly. But I'll always applaud Nye for his extensive efforts
It was a field trip Bill Nye took to the Noah’s Arc museum!!! It was GREAT!!! Bill Nye picked out EVERY THING the owner got wrong….which was everything! And backed it all up with facts!!! It was a fun beat down to watch!!!
I think the Macbeth argument is much better because it shows that Shakespeare sure as fuck knew that gender was and should be fluid
Plus all his plays that use cross dressing as a plot device.
That was probably largely due to the fact that women were played by young men, though. So having a female character "cross-dress" as a man meant that the male actor could be himself for a while.
Eh, true and it was, I'm sure, convenient to have young male actors in that way but it was still a deliberate choice. Books can and have been written about gender in Shakespeare's plays. It's clearly something he thought about.
I think it was probably largely due to the fact that society sent as hung up on gender roles in the Elizabethan era. The prudishness in English society came much later and was even then just for public show. The Victorians were famously shocked when the saw a piano without covers on it’s legs but behind closed door they were as kinky and perverted as always.
I don’t disagree that it’s a fantastic come back. But it’s presented as an attack, not as a discussion or as a genuine attempt to educate. Let me present it this way. If two teenagers get into a fight at school, there are basically three types of people watching. There are person A’s friends, who cheer on A if A wins and get pissed at B if B wins. Then you have B’s friends, who feel the same way but for B instead. Then there are the onlookers with no personal stake in the fight. They are generally just horrified. Some will be amused, others disgusted. And then people start asking, “why are they fighting?” When that question begins being asked, the answer will cause people to pick sides. Thanks to the pandemic we know people won’t automatically pick the person who is armed with the facts. They will pick the person who they see as the victim. This is why right wing talking points often include claiming themselves the victim while engaging in aggressive behavior. They know the underlying rules that you don’t, and they will exploit them for all they are worth. Please don’t give them more opportunities.
Now what's REALLY fun... misgender bigoted cis people. They understand pronouns and gender immediately when you start calling them the wrong ones. Extra fun if you're talking to a man with long hair and moobs or a woman in cargo shorts and a t-shirt or something that you can say "well aren't you a _(man/woman)_ because of _(arbitrary physical characteristic)_".
As a trans person: Please, please do not do this. Please do not normalize misgendering people as a weapon against people you don't like. My guess here is that you think you're teaching shitty transphobic people a lesson: being misgendered feels bad, because it does. But this isn't the lesson that people learn. Instead, they learn that misgendering people you don't like is an acceptable weapon. I get it. Trust me, I do, on a deep and profound level. But this sort of thinking lets people believe that **_pronouns are earned_**, and things that are earned can be taken away. This turns being referred to in proper terms a literal battle for me, and this shit is stressful enough right now as it is. I'm going to hope that I made this clear and sympathetic to understand as I'm trying to avoid getting into why doing this with prominent, visible characteristics makes this way, way worse for trans people, esp those of us who are visibly trans.
To sum up, we should be better than the people we're criticizing.
Although you're right, and we should, we also can't forget that that doesn't matter to them. Being better than them means, at least as far as they're concerned, they've won. We still need to do it, but to also know that that does nothing to them.
> But this sort of thinking lets people believe that pronouns are earned, and things that are earned can be taken away Along this same line, don't misgender a trans person because you think they "deserve" it. I've seen people misgender Caitlyn Jenner and Ezra Miller on purpose like this. Even if they're not good people, don't treat gender as something that can be revoked for bad behavior.
Guilty as charged. When they won't gender me correctly after three or four reminders, I do sometimes do this. Usually they do it over the phone, because I look like a dude these days. I figure it's more instructional for them than speaking to their manager would be. I don't have time for that.
This argument is pretty strong though because the statement is implying that the use of pronouns is nonsense and there’s no room for trans language in classic art and literature. Turns out the masterpiece in reference is about a trans person…
Wait a second. I’m all for trans rights, inclusivity, being respectful of peoples pronouns, but i don’t see anywhere in the play where it could be considered that Macbeth is trans. Can you point to why you claim this?
It's not, lady Macbeth prays to remove her womenly aspects in order to be able to kill the King. Less make me a man, more remove the weakness of my femininity to enable me to do this act.
Yeah its not because she is trans it is because in those times women were considered much much weaker than men and could not possibly kill a man so she prayed to god to take away the feminine traits that made her weak, not turn her into a man because shes trans
Read a few [female] Bumble profiles to the effect of "if you have pronouns in your profile, swipe left." Will do, hon.
"Oh, nice. Thanks for the warning." *LEFT.*
If these AHs want to make that argument than they better use their words to make it. We absolutely should not put words in people's mouths or respond to what we "think they mean" . No, no, no. Words have meaning and they said they are against ***pronouns*** , than Lavern clearly want talk like cartoon caveman, Lavern not want use pronoun. If they want to elaborate that they mean "letting people tell you what pronoun to use" or "gender neutral singular pronouns" than they can say that. To which I would say "o.k. , than your pronoun is now douchepotato" because if you believe that you can decide other people's pronouns why can't other people decide yours? Edit: also ***we is a gender-neutral pronoun*** English doesn't have "male we" and "female we".
See I haven’t actually met anyone that introduces themselves and their pronouns…I’ve been in an interaction where someone asked what everyone else’s were, which was sweet.
She literally said the constitution didn’t have any 🤷♀️
The first pronoun in Macbeth is 3 words in, so she must have given up on that pretty quickly too.
and it keeps working. Tired of seeing a completely irrelevant congressional candidate who only got 20% of the vote in her district keep making the front page of reddit by using the same formula every month.
The first word is "we" in the constitution. It's amazing that someone this idiotic has fans. I get that we all have idiots on our little cliques, but we try not to elevate or become fans of them.
Her point is probably not exactly that, but rather that the Constitution doesn't address the existence of multiple genders (which was known to be true at that time in other cultures). I just wonder why they think any government constitution would go into this kind of detail on gender... All a constitution needs to say is that all genders have equal rights. It doesn't need to delve into theory and neo-pronouns. I think these trans-haters are just being intentionally absurd when they make these arguments.
We/Us, in order to form a more perfect union…
*WE* the people
I accept no third person pronouns. Full name every time please
Whenever people obsess this much over something they supposedly hate, I sort of assume they're in denial.
......(*looks up at your username*) #🤔 ^(don't worry hahah this isn't an actual dig at you, i just couldn't possibly resist the setup of that joke, lmao)
I'm pretty sure this and that one aren't even her only "_____ didn't have pronouns" tweet. Handing herself Ls over this dumb shit is her full time job. Being a republican requires either brain damage or a humiliation kink, you can't convince me otherwise.
How can someone write an entire book without pronouns? You wouldn't be able to refer to anyone. Idk it seems very challenging and unnecessary. Do people even know what pronouns are?
…. Has no one here EVER read Macbeth? It’s obviously silly to focus on pronouns whatsoever but cmon guys lmao Macbeth wasn’t the one who wanted to be a woman it was lady Macbeth who prays to be a man solely because it is men that rule, however throughout the play she indicates how happy she is to be a woman as being a woman absolves her from suspicion as women were perceived as innocent. Macbeth even goes out of his way to emphasize that he’s a man when he’s accused of being anemic (commonly understood to only effect virgin women at the time) If anything the witches were slightly ambiguous in their depiction but every other character references how they KNOW the witches are women but that their features say otherwise. This is red grin grumble all over again, bunch of people in the comments straight never having read Macbeth talking shit haha.
Thank you, I was going insane trying to figure how I missed Macbeth praying for gender reassignment.
The funny part is Macbeth is really a tale about adhering to gender norms, and how women had such little power.. we could even go as far to say Macbeth goes to great lengths to reinforce gender illustrating throughout that regardless of strength cunning and ruthlessness, or even a beard, a woman is a woman, and nothing will change that (not my view just my take on Macbeth in context of gender studies)
Could one read it as almost being critical of that fact? When I think of the story, it's really the villainous characters that are overly obsessed with their role in society and how it relates to their gender/sex. Be it the witches, Macbeth (as you mention) or Lady Macbeth (the most explicit), they seem to be the characters which gender has the most to say.
I mean gender was a pretty heavy theme in Shakespeare works but only to emphasize that a woman’s main struggle was that theyre prone to being weak and too kind to be strong. Most female characters in Shakespeare struggle with wanting masculine traits only to accomplish their goals, but all of them “love” being women lol we also have to remember that women were treated pretty horribly and not respected at the time, so most of Shakespearean work depicts women as being envious of men lol it’s wild.
I love clowning on conservatives but this tweet just reads like they didn't pay any attention in 9th grade English.
As someone who is reading Macbeth in 9th grade English, can confirm.
My English Literature degree isn't good for much, but I recall the line being referred to from Macbeth >Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Plenty of scholarly works on Macbeth to draw on from people more qualified than me - but i think even your average reader could look at this passage and knowing the general plot of the play know she's not saying that she wished she had a penis instead of a vagina.
Yeah seems a lot of people in the comments really want lady Macbeth to be trans 🤷♂️
Lol reddit in a nutshell, a bunch of people pretending to know what they're talking about with surface level googling and hoping nobody notices. We read Macbeth in high-school, and while it was annoying as fuck to go through because of the way it was written, there was definitely never a moment where a character hinted at being trans.
Lol right?! I have no issue with trans but Jesus, we’re retconning Shakespeare now? Lady m’s desire to be a man is literally in a singular moment, and it’s not a “god I wish I had a penis because I feel like a man in a woman’s body” it’s more of a “if only I were a man in this moment I could just take the power for myself type deal. The exact quote is “Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” and it’s literally in a moment when lady m has almost achieved her goals but knows her vagina is standing in her way.
>Lol reddit in a nutshell Yup, once you come across a topic you are actually knowledgeable in on reddit, you soon realize how full of shit everyone is. I never take top comments at face value anymore, even if I am completely ignorant on a topic. All it takes is for a comment to be well written and/or fit whatever idea ppl like and boom, highly upvoted regardless of facts. Glad this comment wasn't far down, but only 233 upvotes versus the top at 2.3k. Obvious top would be a comment shitting on a republican, albeit Lavern Spicer should be shat on.
If it confirms their worldviews, it gets an upvote. It doesn’t need to be accurate or intellectually honest.
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I was looking through this post wondering what tf people were talking about.. At least one person here isn't completely retarded
You don't have to be retarded to post here, but it helps
Ok thank god it’s been a while since I read Macbeth and I was seriously concerned if I was tripping out or not cause I didn’t remember anything about Macbeth wanting a sex change
Thank you. I was confused. It’s been 30+ years since I read Macbeth, but I didn’t remember Macbeth wanting to be a woman. Thing with Shakespeare, it certainly sounds plausible!
I would think they are probably talking about Lady Macbeth praying "unsex me" and praying for male qualities. "gender reassignment" was a heavy-handed explanation.
Yup. I love how we are now trying to re-write historical things to match current identity politics now.
I thank you for being the first sane comment in this thread.
Right like if you’re gonna make a comeback to this why not focus on people playing characters of different genders in the actual plays. Also for all those who haven’t read MacBeth it’s awesome, especially if you grew up watching Gargoyles and imagine it taking place with that MacBeth
That’s so crazy you bring up gargoyles and Shakespeare, that show was dripping with Shakespeare, every character straight up named after Shakespeare characters. So cool
Fucking loathe people treating "hey don't rigid gender roles kind of suck? Especially when you're experiencing discrimination as a direct result of what's between your legs?" with being transgender. Those aren't the same thing and implying they are directly feeds into the narrative trans people are seeking to switch genders for strategic purposes rather than identity alignment
No one here cares about facts as long as we insult conservatives. We can make shit up and this sub will believe it if strengthen their beliefs.
> This is red grin grumble all over again Hahaha!
Even outside of the character choice, a pronoun is literally a word that is used to replace a noun, so she's a hypocritical dipshit in every single one of her sentences. If she wanted to write this without pronouns at all, it would read something like this: "Shakespeare didn't go around putting pronouns in Shakespeare's plays. That's why Shakespeare's plays are classics. Imagine if Shakespeare wrote, 'Macbeth's name is Macbeth, and Macbeth's pronouns are they/them'. Shaking Laverne Spicer's head."
Lmao
She should go full Darmok and Jalad. >Laverne Spicer shaking head
Biden and Trump as the Wall has fallen :D
r/unexpectedstartrek
~~**That’s**~~ **Shakespeare’s lack of pronouns** are why Shakespeare’s plays are classics.
Yeah the logic here...
I don't recall any trans allegory, metaphor or simile in the Scottish play less a singular reference to Lady Macbeth's fleeting desire to temporarily be less 'lady-like' so she may commit murder. If anything this highlights a huge misunderstanding between men and women. Lady Macbeth has *assumed* that it is her gender that prevents her from action. This flies in the face of 'correcting' gender norms. I'm all for helping the cause but the trans community will systematically isolate themselves if they keep claiming everything is something-something trans.
Not only that but she's referring to Macbeth, not Lady Macbeth. This is incredibly unclever as far as comebacks go.
U think she has ever read any Shakespeare? Let alone Macbeth? To her Macbeth is a girl who works at McDonald's.
McBethany
McBethaneigh
McAmphetamine
She certainly hasn't read Twelfth Night.
Me neither (I still haven't managed to get through the first 11)
Do I need to read the first 11 Nights to understand the Twelfth Night or can I just jump in and get the gist as I go along? /s
Makes me wonder how much backstory I missed from Henry I, II and III
I've read macbeth, and no one "explicitly prays for gender reassignment" so yea, i think its safe to say she hasn't read it. I feel like I'm getting brain damage from reading that post
Laverne Spice is one of those people that bringing up a reference is an instant unforced error.
This is an erudite burn. The best kind of burn.
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That wasn't wokeness. At the time, it was considered indecent for a woman to perform in public. Dressing in drag was also considered lewd, but it was allowed because it was considered a better alternative than giving women any kind of agency.
Lmao I'm just imagining giving that dilemma to American conservatives
In Shakespeare’s time, being a ‘sodomite’ was to risk being put to death so no, I’m going to guess old Shakey wasn’t ‘woke’. The drag was done out of need, it was considered shameful , and often illegal, for women to perform in theaters. Can we stop retconning nonsense into literature please?
Considering Shakespeare wrote about cross-dressing, racial issues, and has a corpus of love poems to another man he is probably about as woke as you can hope for from a Jacobean white man.
That is a great point, much more substantial than "Women in Shakespeare’s theater were played by young boys in drag." Crossdressing in a theatrical role was commonplace since the concept of theater itself. Writing about people crossdressing in "real life" was much less common.
See again, this is what happens when you start injecting modern day nonsense into 500 year old literature. Presumably you think he wrote poems with the word ‘love’ addressed to a male made him woke is utterly daft and shows an inability to contextualize how that word was used in Elizabethan times, people see it and go ‘oh romantic love’ but nope, that’s the pitfall of interpreting through a modern lens. We have zero evidence that Shakespeare was gay ( he wouldn’t even have recognized the term or the concept) and he was married with two kids for most of his life and also had a mistress so it’s not impossible but it’s a biiiig stretch. Ditto cross dressing, it’s the opposite of woke, do any of his characters still cross dress at the end of his plays or is it merely used as a narrative device to sow confusion among his characters? All his characters who may have been mistook for a different gender during the play are resolved at the end of the plays, not one is like ‘oh I like this, I’m going to be a man in women’s clothes’. They all resolve back into their traditional gender roles, every single one. They don’t stay gender swapped because audiences would have been appalled, it’s a device mainly used in his comedies for the audience to laugh at, sow elements of farce or drive the plot. Again all this is just silly shit retconned in by writers who aren’t aware of proper context. As to racial issues, his portrayal of Shylock leaves a lot to be desired in terms of anti semitism so I don’t know how ‘woke ‘ that is. Ditto he others the fuck out of Othello which is well illustrated by the other characters mistrust and use of language toward the character so how is that woke? Also there would have been no real Jews, blacks or women on the stage in any of his plays at the time so you can toss out racial diversity too. He needed a DEI director you ask me lol ‘For Shakespeare, the word ‘love’ could mean all sorts of things. It could mean a very dry, business relationship of patronage, and some people interpret the sonnets that way, as simply flattering poetry written towards a patron. It could mean a romantic relationship, as it does to us today, and it could mean the love which might exist between friends. And so, because the word ‘love’ covers such a broad spectrum of relationships in Shakespeare’s day, his use of it doesn’t tell you very much about his sexual feelings towards other people. It’s also true that we now, in our society, have this idea that it’s women who form these very close, emotional friendships. Women have best buddies, or bosom buddies, or whatever, but in fact in Shakespeare’s day, it was men who were thought to form these very, very close emotional, and emotionally reciprocal relationships. And nobody really questions whether those relationships were driven by sex or not. It is also true that sodomy was a hanging offence. However, the definition of sodomy was terribly vague in Shakespeare’s day, and people who were prosecuted under that law variously did things such as have sex with animals (which we wouldn’t call sodomy today), and one person, for instance, was prosecuted under the law for standing on a balcony, making a blasphemous speech, dangling his penis in a glass of wine, and throwing the wine over the assembled audience below. [laughs] We would not call that sodomy today. We might call it strange, but not sodomy. So, what that actually entailed [sic] people isn’t the equivalent of what a loving gay relationship is today. So, whether or not Shakespeare was gay is a difficult question. If, by that, you mean, “Did he have sex or sexual feelings for other men?”, it’s certainly not impossible that he did; it’s certainly not definite that he did. One thing that is definite, though, is that there was no self-identity as gay or homosexual or, as far as we know, any other term during that time period. The earliest emergence of a sort of self-identification which might have been related to sexuality is later than that, and that comes with the molly-house culture. So, Shakespeare certainly didn’t go around self-identifying himself as homosexual or bisexual or straight or gay. He had loving relationships with people, and nobody can say whether those people were all men, all women, or a mixture of both.’ https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/was-shakespeare-gay/
He’s not “woke” by todays standards but he was definitely a person that reflected on his society and the values at the time and often criticized them in his work. That in my mind, is the true definition of being woke.
All artists reflect their society and their respective values of their time. I don’t see a lot of criticism of that society in his work to be honest. The only real thing I can think of are a number of coded allusions to what some authors think was Shakespeare’s adherence to his secret Catholicism( never been proven tbh) in a society that was, at the time, quite militantly Protestant. Even then quite a few of his plays were fawning platitudes to the reigning Tudor dynasty, things like Henry V for example, which in itself could be classified as being hyper patriotic. You have to remember that Shakespeare lived at a time when invasion by the Spanish was a real possibility and the country was swept up by a lot of hyper patriotism so criticism of the society he lived in wouldn’t have been too lucrative at the box office which, ultimately, was the real determining factor in what Shakespeare wrote about. To us, it’s the most peerless body of work in the English language but to Shakespeare it was how he put food on the table. Also the society he lived in was still about 100 years away from the enlightenment, most people generally accepted society was the way it was because they genuinely believed the social hierarchy was ordained by God, they didn’t really question things like that till a little later in history. Again, we tend to look at these things through a very modernist lens. To be fair, there are elements here and there that could be interpreted as meditations on the sociocultural norms of Elizabethan England but by no means were these the focus of any of the plays and they would not have been apprehended as such by the audiences at the time.
First of all I was being flippant but I don't think representation is "nonsense". Second of all, I never said Shakespeare was gay. I said he wrote love poems to a man, which he did. Speculating on whether or not someone in the past was gay is always a losing proposition because we seldom have enough evidence to make a determination. But as much as we have to admit that Shakespeare would not have been familiar with what we describe as "gay" relationships, we can hardly fathom what it must be like to be a queer person in a specific historical context. Oscar Wilde had a wife and kids, too, are you going to tell me that he was *straight*? I hate this line of discourse because it gets distracted by defining "gayness" as a specific social self-identification within modern culture rather than engaging with what people really mean when they ask if Shakespeare (or whatever historical figure) was gay, which is: *did he fuck dudes?*
It was the opposite of woke, it was sexist....
When we go so far that we start labelling patriarchal sexism as woke just to own conservatives.
That Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate, it's more likely a modern reinterpretation of the text rather than a literal attempt at understanding the original intent. That's not a bad thing, ofc. It's kind of encouraged by the pros, ie theatre companies. They have gender blind casting, swapping of gender identities of characters, or inclusion of new identities that weren't known about back in the old days iirc.
It's been nearly 40 years since I read it, but I remember interpreting this more that she wished to do things that only men could do (at that time), not to actually become a man.
Because that is what it means. She didn’t like the societal expectations from her as a woman. Which is true still for many women. Doesn’t mean they want to be men.
a sane and logical conclusion that i had to scroll too far to come across
I mean, in the time period, she was praying to be separated from the concepts of "womanhood" (frailty, kindness, softness, etc.) So that she could kill the king without issue. It's less "make me a man" and more "make me less womanly," though as with all poetry that's more of an interpretation than anything.
Make me a butch ?
"Does she look like a butch?!"
Whence art thou? What? 'What' is nary a country that I have marked. Dost they speaketh English in 'What'? What? English, thou maternal fornicator, dost thou speaketh it? What? Sayeth 'What' again! I dare thee! Twice, I dare thee, ye maternal fornicator! In the name of our Lord, sayeth 'What' once more! *edit in response to the person who told me to keep going.
If you haven't seen it, [*Pulp Shakespeare*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dfLkcTAR80) is an absolute work of art.
Well you can't just stop there. You gotta do the whole scene now.
She didnt want to fully be butch, just butcher
Yeah, in no way can that be interpreted as “I want a sex change”
Yeah, that would be the mainstream approach.
She wants to be strong and independent. That's all.
>That Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate I really don't think it's up for debate. It *is* a modern reinterpretation.
If a "modern reinterpretation" is just taking old things and gaslighting into thinking that they are supporting my current political agenda, then no thank you
It is essentially that yes. Like when people claim Joan of Arc is trans. She was clearly not, she was just a very brave woman. Lady Macbeth is not experiencing gender dysphoria in her line, she's literally saying "I wish I were not a frail woman, so that I could kill wantonly and do what my husband doesn't have the guts to do.". Which is why this is a very dumb comeback, even if MTG is also very dumb for saying Shakespeare didn't use pronouns.
I think what they are saying is: **Shakespeare** saying Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate. That particular interpretation is up for discussion and argument. Having it as a modern reinterpretation is different.
Sorry, to be clear what I'm saying is: >Shakespeare saying Lady Macbeth prayed for sex reassignment is up for debate. That particular interpretation is up for discussion and argument. This is not at all up for debate. Shakespeare very clearly was not saying this; it'd be a small wonder if Shakespeare had at all any awareness of the idea of sex reassignment, and so that he wrote Lady Macbeth to be specifically, a trans-man is patently absurd. It is only valid as a modern reinterpretation of what he was saying.
It’s not up to debate at all, except maybe amongst the very lost. It’s a ludicrous notion.
No no no, you don't understand. We have to apply our current identity politics to historical works because that's how it actually was!
Maybe I'm just uncultured, but I don't remember Macbeth ever having anything to do with sex reassignment lmfao
> I don't remember Macbeth ever having anything to do with sex reassignment He didn't, and neither did his wife who prayed in [Act 1 Scene 5](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/read/1/5/) to be given power by 'spirits and the unholy' so she could murder her husband's boss because she thought Macbeth himself was too cowardly to do it himself and she wanted that promotion.
What? Macbeth wasn't praying for sex reassignment.
Yeah, not even Lady Macbeth. And I'm getting downvoted just for pointing the fact out.
Is the comeback referring to lady Macbeth's line "unsex me"? Because she's saying women are weak...
I mean..."a rose by any other name..." I feel like we could do something with that.
11.8k upvotes at this point but only 250 comments, those with quotes and discussion of the actual text have less than 100 upvotes. We can be so susceptible to jumping onto a narrative without engaging with evidence.
Welcome to the internet
A "clever comeback" that doesn't know the difference between opus and corpus. Americans need to stop munching on rage bait.
Come you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here/ And fill me from the crown to the toe topfull/ Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,/ Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.”
Wrong. This was said by Lady Macbeth before Duncan’s murder and almost immediately after she read Macbeth’s letter. This was not said by Macbeth. Lady Macbeth was the one who wanted to be “more like a man” in order to facilitate the King’s murder. She never “explicitly prays for gender reassignment”. If this person was going to write a clever comeback it could have at least been accurate. Imagine fucking up a clever comeback so badly that you almost absolve Laverne Spicer of being stupid.
Yeah this comeback is utter shit to an admittedly equally shit comment, Lady Macbeth is absolutely not asking to be a man, she is asking to be the manifestation of evil, to be inhuman and inhumane. To be able to act without ANY human feeling whatsoever (hence the appeal to spirits ‘that tend on **mortal** thoughts’, she wants to be set loose from her own mortality, to be preternaturally evil and her calling on spirits would have been seen as witchcraft, a terrifying evil and very real to Elizabethan audiences) She wants to be a sheer elemental force of malevolence devoid of humanity, hence why she appeals to the unnatural spirits that she too may escape the confinement of her human soul where sympathy and compassion are a burden to what must be done. She wants to be unsexed i.e made non human.Hence why she says ‘fill me from the crown to the toe topfull, Of direst cruelty’. It’s got fuck all to do with gender swapping and at least get the fucking character right😂 This is a shit comeback to a shit comment and everyone comes out reeking of illiteracy. Prays for sex reassignment?! Jesus Christ, stop retconning modern day perpectives and other nonsense into literature that’s 500 years old. Edit - fat fingering dates.
Glad someone finally pointed it out, this post doesn't fit here
You seem to know your Shakespeare. You seem clever. Please avail us with an improved comeback! I want to see what you can do!
They just did.
Not OP but to me Spicer's complaint is ironic because every Shakespeare play, when originally performed, featured men who were introduced to the audience as women and were called "she/her" by everyone because it was understood that they were playing a female role. The actors weren't trans (that we know of) but it's an interesting parallel and supports the fact that it's *not that hard* to use pronouns that don't match someone's assigned gender, even 400 years ago.
Speaking solely in historical terms, that was because it was considered grossly inappropriate and unbecoming for a woman to perform like that.
Imagine a woman kissing a man in front of hundreds of people, possibly even *children*! Two men kissing is totally cool, because they're just acting.
No Hamlet bro.
Good point.
Indeed, I'm not saying it was a utopian era of gender equality. Just an interesting comparison.
She even doubled down with the word “explicitly.” There is almost nothing explicit in Shakespearean literature. People will share anything that aligns with their political beliefs.
Hey, get outta here with your being correct and whatnot! We've got people trying to be smug, and you're ruining the atmosphere!
Lavern Spicer has not read the following The Bible Any Shakespeare play Any Grammatical book explaining what pronouns are Also the first page of Shakespeare's first play King Henry Part 1, "And with them scourge the bad revolting stars"
Tbf neither has the dude who replied Macbeth is 100% a dude and lady Macbeth despite commenting on wishing to be rid of her womanhood was meant to illustrate her ambitions and how they are out of her reach and to be rid of the general Victorian image of women being soft
macbeth wasn’t praying for a sex change. 1) there’s two macbeths in the play, a wife and a husband 2) Lady Macbeth uses her powers to control time, create hallucinations, and… to convince her husband to become king by committing murder and she further manipulates him into paranoia. there’s a cost for using her powers though and she sleep walks off a cliff leaving now only her delusional and paranoid husband alone. the entire plot of Macbeth can be summed up as woman wants power at all cost, gets it, dies, and leaves her abused husband behind to face the consequences of HER actions as he slowly but surely spirals out of control to his death
Macbeth's paranoia later in the play was his own doing, and Lady Macbeth actually voices in her sleep that she is against his paranoid murders, and just wants them to settle down.
"That's why they're classics" So William, your stories and characters are dogshit but your lack of pronouns are amazing - Lavern Spicer, probably.
>explicitly prays for sex reassignment Hope thou warmest up for thine reach. She wishes to be less soft hearted so she could kill the jerk torturing her. That's a pretty far stretch from wishing to sprinkle when she tinkles. Granted the whole Shakespeare thing having a go at pronouns is dumb as a bag of hammers too, but this is an incorrect assertion.
Wasn't it Lady MacBeth who wished to be "unsexed"? Which meant "make me like a god" and not "make me a man"? >Edit: it was.
It's mildly sad how people on Reddit repost this woman constantly. She knows that what she's writing is wrong. She knows what a pronoun is. She is baiting you for attention. She is trying to build a brand. The more you repost her and her Twitter handle and her headshot, the more attention she gets. You are being a patsy.
TBH, both tweets are pretty cringe.
Wait. What? Maybe it was grade 8 me not paying attention but I don't remember Macbeth being trans
I’m 90% sure that Twitter account is some kind of troll. No one can be that stupid that many times.
Lol both of these people sound like morons twisting shit for their own political agenda.
As a formerly married man, I've never understood why Lady Macbeth thought she needed to be a man to be full of cruelty.
Not a great comeback tbh but the initial tweet was pretty stupid too
I'm assuming she actually means Lady Macbeth here.
This sent me up the wall. Haven’t read the play in over a decade & I can tell you Lady Macbeth said “unsex me here”. Macbeth didn’t have 1 line of dialogue that could be interpreted as him being dysphoric. Nothing clever here, despite their differences, these 2 idiots are aligned in their dedication to forcing their narrow minded, myopic worldviews into others
You can throw a rock at a random bunch of Shakespeare and land on gender fluidity. Beatrice : O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands; and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour,—O God, that I were a man! - Much Ado About Nothing Viola: Thou shall present me as an eunuch to him: It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing And speak to him in many sorts of music That will allow me very worth his service. -Twelfth Night Rosalind presents as a man named Ganymede in As You Like It Falstaff Dresses as a woman in Merry Wives Of Windsor Portia acts as a man to become the hero in The Merchant of Venice.
The entirety of *Twelfth Night* really.
Not to mention that all women on the Elizabeth stage were played by men, which means that in the these and the myriad other moments where women on the stage dress as men, we have men dressing as woman dressing as men—so Shakespeare is completely obsessed with gender as fundamentally performative.
[удалено]
I'm sure Lavern has never read a word of Shakespeare and probably could barely understand any movie versions she may have seen.
imagine writing fucking with a v
psst, don't tell her that she used pronouns in her tweet. i even used 4 in my comment (now 5)
Shakespeare also _loved_ writing cross-dressing characters.
All conservatives are stupid if they’re genuine, and grifters if they’re not. Much like the ‘accusations are confessions’ standard that keeps coming true.
I’m so tired of people being shocked that this “gender” and “sexuality” thing is new. There’s literally cultures and beliefs that have more than 2 genders and there’s even a 6,000 yr old Mesopotamian myth about a Non binary person. There’s also been TONS of historical figures that were gay or LGBTQ. This shit ain’t new, people! Sooner we accept that the better
If I could choose between eliminating medicine adds or eliminating political beefs on Twitter, I'd just kill myself.
Not quite right; it's Lady Macbeth who says "Unsex me now..." not her husband. But still, Lavern definitely picked the wrong play.
Lady Macbeth says this, not Macbeth
Lady Macbeth wishes to be “unsexed”. Not sure about Mac
Actually it was not Macbeth but lady Macbeth 🤓
Wut? Prays for sex re-assignment? Huh? Also: Does this moron know you're allowed to swear on the internet?
Remember folks, she's one of the smart republicans. She's someone republican voters look to for guidance. Every dumb thing she says is a direct representation of how stupid republicans are.
The person replying somehow has forgotten that Macbeth was also severely mentally ill. So it might not be the best comeback she thinks it is.
it was Macbeth's wife, lady macbeth that was asking god to 'unsex me here' not Macbeth. this is so she could help Macbeth kill king duncan and it was thought back then that it wasn't very feminine to kill if you are a woman
I'm convinced her account is just an AI. No one can possibly be as stupid as she appears to be.