March 12, 2021

"Eddie Izzard doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In December, it was reported that the standup comic/actor/campaigner/endurance runner had adopted the pronouns 'she' and 'her'..."

"... and wanted to be 'based in girl mode' from now on.... Actually, Izzard says, she had not intended to be so definitive about it. She had always talked about being in boy mode most of the time and girl mode part of the time, and she was still hoping to keep her options open. For her first half century, boy mode had dominated, and now it was time for girl mode to take centre stage, but on occasions she would still like the freedom to be a he. She soon discovered that wasn’t an option, though.... At the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman. Does she think she will ever physically transition? 'I might do. I feel that boy mode has had a good innings in this one life that we get. It would be great to get up in the morning and think I look like a woman so I’m going to throw on a tracksuit and have breakfast. It is getting better and better. I do feel I can express myself in a more feminine way, which may be the age thing.' Would she like boobs? 'Yeah! I’ve had boob envy since my teens. Just when teenage girls of my age were going "I want boobs," I was thinking yeah me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.'... I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer. 'I’m very happy to transition and I feel I have been transitioning,' she says. 'But I do feel I’ve told everybody everything in my life, so I’m going to keep a certain amount of privacy.'"

From "Eddie Izzard: 'I'm just trying to create a space for myself'/The actor and comic on making her female pronouns permanent, shouting down abuse, enduring a marathon a day – and running for Labour" (The Guardian).

58 comments:

Lucid-Ideas said...

He will never be a woman.

Shouting Thomas said...

This is stuff to do in a VR application.

Doing it outside of a VR app and expecting people to put up with your horseshit is childish.

Laurel said...

There is no reality with some people. It’s ALL pretend.

Would that their “pretend” stayed away from reality.

madAsHell said...

Eddie Izzard needs more attention, and cutting his dick off just might push him over the top.

tommyesq said...

Shades of Andy Kaufman?

donald said...

Eddie Izzard needs more attention, and cutting his dick off just might push him over the top.

He should do it on stage. That’ll get a laugh.

Joe Smith said...

Until she cuts it all off, she's not serious, just playing dress-up and playing for attention.

Call me after the surgery and I might care...

CWJ said...

I believe Eddie's just taking the fluidity concept to its illogical conclusion. He's playing with whoever rises to the bait. If so, good for him. The pronoun thing deserves to crumple under its own weight. Just like addin + to LGXYZ or whatever the letters currently are, shows societal exhaustion with trying to keep up.

Ann Althouse said...

Izzard runs many marathons (for charity). I find it hard to believe that someone with that intensity of interest in athletics would choose to take female hormones.

Robert Cook said...

"This is stuff to do in a VR application.

"Doing it outside of a VR app and expecting people to put up with your horseshit is childish."


He isn't asking for people to put up with anything. He's talking about what he's considering doing for himself in his life. No one else can live one's life, and one can only live the one life one has. One should try to make it the life one wants to live.

Jupiter said...

Oh, shut up.

Joe Smith said...

"Izzard runs many marathons (for charity). I find it hard to believe that someone with that intensity of interest in athletics would choose to take female hormones."

Maybe he's tired of winning : )

But seriously, ultra-long distance running and swimming are two things that I think women have a chance at being better at than men...maybe they already are.

stevew said...

Eddie Izzard, executive transvestite, is one of the funnier and more interesting comedians I've seen. This sounds and feels like an attempt to get back into the limelight. Rather like Milo. It's been years since I've seen or heard anything from Eddie in his role as comedian. Didn't he run for political office too?

Whatever, I don't get what is so controversial about this.

tim maguire said...

The trappings Izzard is exchanging are the cultural stuff. Men dress a certain way because our place and time says men dress that way. Other places and other times say men dress other ways. If he speaks English, he calls himself "he/him" because that's what English speaking men do. Other languages use different terms. So what?

Why anybody would care that Izzard fancies himself some girl stuff today when he fancied himself some boy stuff yesterday and he'll worry about tomorrow tomorrow is a mystery to me. The sin of transgenderism is not the embracing of another gender's stuff, it's the fascist forcing of their preferences down everybody else's throats.

To get upset that Izzard wears a dress and calls himself "her" is to commit precisely the same sin the trans people commit when they cancel people for saying a man in women's clothing shouldn't be allowed to beat up women in sporting events.

DavidUW said...

But seriously, ultra-long distance running and swimming are two things that I think women have a chance at being better at than men...maybe they already are.
>>
Only swimming, and of course, only because of the higher body fat that women have.

walter said...

"But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.'... I ask if she is taking hormone pills. She smiles and, for once, declines to answer"
A lady doesn't tell.
Shouldn't sHe be in a high profile running shoe commercial? Something about shoes being a constant foundation. Dissolve between slow-mo Eddie to Edie running..bouncing boobs optional.
"Life is a marathon, not a sprint"

rhhardin said...

Track shoes are the only thing that takes women seriously.

DavidUW said...

It's better for the mentally ill to reveal themselves before running for office.


tim maguire said...

I’ve always had breasts envy

Haven't we all?

Clayton Hennesey said...

Hopefully this is all a publicity stunt. Izzard has always been a transvestite as opposed to a transsexual, a crackerjack comic, and not bad as an actor as well.

tcrosse said...

The IMDB entry for Eddie Izzard calls him an actress, and uses his preferred female pronouns. But his filmography shows all male rôles.

MayBee said...

I like this approach so much more than the "dead name" and horror at referring to anyone as their previous (but not! Not allowed to say that!) gender.

Ken B said...

“Adopted” the pronouns? A more honest formulation: Izard starting demanding that other people refer to Izzard that way, and be punished if they do not.

Who gets to decide who else gets punished for not submitting to their referential demands? What if you had to refer to Trump as “a stable genius”? Would that fly?

PM said...

Meh aside, his stand-up act in the 90s was pretty funny. Not Sedaris-funny, but sharp.

effinayright said...

In the US, the government can't compel you to say anything---unless you have been given immunity in a criminal court procedure.

So what's with the idea that a private person can "compel" you to use the pronouns they prefer? How can the government punish you for not speaking according to the demands of a private person?

JaimeRoberto said...

"But seriously, ultra-long distance running and swimming are two things that I think women have a chance at being better at than men...maybe they already are."

I think there have been some women who have successfully competed against men in ultra-running. In endurance cycling Lael Wilcox has been successful too.

Robert Cook said...

"Hopefully this is all a publicity stunt. Izzard has always been a transvestite as opposed to a transsexual...."

Perhaps he was a transvestite as a compromise because he was uncertain if he was a transexual, or reluctant to accept that he might be.

Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...

That's fine for Eddy Izzard, but what about me? My choice is to be immune from the WuHanFlu and likewise not be an asymptotic carrier. I should not have to suffer all this nonsense mask wearing, social distancing, and reduced capacity in businesses.

And on the subject of diminished capacity, what about our elected "leaders?"

Thank you. I'll be here all week.

Sam L. said...

Shouldn't "she" now be going by "Edie"?

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

JaimeRoberto said...

I think there have been some women who have successfully competed against men in ultra-running. In endurance cycling Lael Wilcox has been successful too.

I saw Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying talking about on YouTube recently. When it comes to upper body strength there is a huge gap between the average man and woman, but in endurance matters the gap almost disappears. It makes sense from an evolutionary basis; when the tribe moved everyone had to keep up or be left behind with little chance of survival on their own.

The Crack Emcee said...

"I’ve had boob envy since my teens."

So we must suffer.

Jeff Vader said...

As an executive tranvestite, the she/her thing has been confusing. Is he transsexual now? Went to his show a couple of years back not nearly as funny as his older stuff, mostly it was trump was a big meany, very lazy for a comedian of caliber

Joe Smith said...

Boobs are good but moobs are bad.

Discuss.

KellyM said...

Eddie has been doing the transvestite thing in his onstage persona for years; it’s one of the things that got him attention to begin with, I'm sure. Then, people realized he was funny, sharp-witted and very observant. Eddie has branched out into other acting roles including a small but hilarious part in “Oceans Thirteen” and a bunch of voice-over work. I thought his marathon running was a great way to invest in a charity he felt strongly about. That’s a pretty big commitment.

As others have said here, it’s just the logical next step and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one big serious-faced troll. Kind of like the whole 'Super Straight' thing has the whack jobs on Twitter pearl-clutching and sputtering.

Tina Trent said...

I think there’s a difference between the old-school Izzard/Monty Python cross-dressing like dumpy cube-ish British housewives for laughs and the RuPaul (I almost wrote Ron Paul) parody of women as demented streetwalkers, which feels both hostile and self-loathing. In any case, two things the aging Izzard definitely cannot be again is a boy or a girl. However, good on him for running a marathon a day for weeks on end to raise money for charity. That’s definitely less expected than him changing his gender. So long as he keeps his politics to pounding the euro and doesn’t start telling little girls to cut their breasts off, he’s at least participating in a particularly British tradition.

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

I self-identify as Napoleon Bonaparte. You may call me "Your Imperial Majesty of the Hexagon and External Territories." Failure to use the full pronoun is an act of Lese-Majeste and is punishable by instant death.

Lurker21 said...

At the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman

He was sort of unique in the old days, a hetero cis male celebrity who loved to wear dresses and openly did so on in public. There may have been thousands of closet cross dressers, but he was the one who went public and was out and proud about it.

Or to look at another way, of all the Englishmen who crossed dressed in Christmas pantomimes and comedy skits, he was the one who admitted to loving it. If he's just another transwoman now with the usual transwoman complaints he's less interesting.

Still a bright guy, though, and one who can do stand-up in at least three languages.

Joe Smith said...

"Still a bright guy, though, and one who can do stand-up in at least three languages."

Big whoop...I'm illiterate in at least four languages...

Lewis Wetzel said...

This is a picture of an unwell mind.
Even if you accept what the trans activists say (which is not what the APA says) being trans is not about what you want, but about what you are.
The entire edifice of "gender identity" is a travesty of a mockery of a sham, and everybody knows it.

Lurker21 said...

Didn't he run for political office too?

He was on the Labour Party's National Executive Committee. He ran twice and was defeated but stepped up to fill the rest of the term of a member who quit.

Tony Robinson, who played Baldrick in Blackadder actually elected to Labour's NEC. It was appropriate in a way: Baldrick was always the little man who got stepped on throughout history, and the real-life Robinson made it into the governing circles and even got knighted.

I would have pegged Izzard, a second generation accountant who went to private schools, as more of a Tory, but I guess the LGBTQ thing pushed him further left.

The internet has already started using the "she/her" pronouns for Izzard, so I guess I will have to rewrite all this.

Howard said...

Is Breast envy a manifestation of tit elation?

n.n said...

Trans/social, perhaps trans/neo-gender. He can play with the physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation) attributes to simulate the feminine gender, but he will always be the male sex. Then again, with social progress, maybe he can abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too.

Gravel said...

I don't care if somebody wants to hitchhike across the USA, pluck her eyebrows and shave her legs; it's their business, and I'll make a reasonable attempt to be polite and call her a she. But if I make a mistake, that's just too goddamn bad. I'm not bound by anyone's delusions.

And I refuse to play along with using a plural pronoun for an individual.

The Crack Emcee said...

Joe Smith said...

"Still a bright guy, though, and one who can do stand-up in at least three languages."

My wife speaks four and believes in homeopathy - languages are NOT a sign of intelligence. I've heard fools in all of them.

Howard said...

Try A&D ointment for irritating Crack rash

Mark said...

It is absurd that ANYONE takes any of this seriously.

iowan2 said...

So its a choice. A preference depending on what mood he wakes up in.

" is this a long pants day or shorts day?"

Known Unknown said...

Very funny person. Wish him/her well in whatever mode they choose.

iowan2 said...

I self-identify as Napoleon Bonaparte. You may call me "Your Imperial Majesty of the Hexagon and External Territories." Failure to use the full pronoun is an act of Lese-Majeste and is punishable by instant death.

The Bob and Tom Show,(morning drive) has a routine they replay every so often. A man calls a car dealership(Rolls Royce?) and makes an appointment as a mega rich person to buy a car. The one stipulation, all must address him as El Conquistador. Commissions at risk, hilarity ensues.

Joe Smith said...

"Joe Smith said...

"Still a bright guy, though, and one who can do stand-up in at least three languages."


Once again, I did not say this. It was quoting someone else.

Please get it right.

Temujin said...

Eddie Izzard has been pretty brilliant, both as a comedian and as an actor (actress?) for years. In his stand-up acts he's more often than not dressed as a woman/man. That is, in a dress, full makeup, heels, and...very manly walk/stance/voice. In movies or TV series, he's been fully, convincingly male.

I don't think he's thinking going full woman will give him more spotlight, but perhaps that's all it is. I think he's had a very successful career for decades now, and I'm not sure that is needed. Nor is the run for political office. But that move speaks to the 'watch me...please watch me' neurosis in some actors and politicians.

Still, Izzard is, or was among the funniest individuals I ever saw. Though the last time I saw him, about 2 years ago, he was dull. Spent an hour giving us a tour of his marathon running and some other not so funny ramblings. He looked tired and spent when I saw him then.

Temujin said...

By the way, I guess I failed to refer to him as her. Hmm. My mind still considers him a man, I guess. Not that it matters.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

But seriously, ultra-long distance running and swimming are two things that I think women have a chance at being better at than men...maybe they already are.

Well, if by "ultra-long-distance" you mean a lot longer than a marathon, you're probably right. In the standard 26.2 miles, men are way ahead of women, but in 100 miles, I think women are ahead. This is one of the few areas where they arguably have got a flat-out advantage. Along with things like archery, shooting, dressage. Detail does matter in some sports. (Gymnastics is a whole different mess, b/c the men's and women's sports are already completely different.)

I like Eddie Izzard, always have. It was obvious that he was some kind of transperson, but it never mattered, any more than Walter-then-Wendy Carlos mattered. What's Dame Edna Everage? Why ought I to care?

The difference between these people -- very funny, very interesting, always aware of the world and themselves and what wacky confabulations we all do about sex -- and the current brood of woke scolds is just this: Eddie doesn't force me to do stuff. He says stuff, and sometimes it's poignant or even heartbreaking, and we both realize that, and we laugh. Simple, nyet? But the current lot will not let you laugh, because they themselves can't; the whole world is grey for them, and so they'll do their damnedest to make it so for you as well.

Not long ago, it wasn't like this. I recommend to you a book called "Out, Loud and Laughing," from 20 years ago or so. It's hilarious. It's also probably canceled, assuming it was still in print when the current wave crested.

The Vault Dweller said...

Similar to what others have said I kind of remember a stand-up bit Eddie Izzard did about 20 years ago or so. It might have been Dress to Kill. But in it Izzard stated that he (I only use he because I assume izzard was in Boy Mode back then), was a transvestite. Izzard went on to make a distinction between transvestite and transgender (he might have said transsexual I don't recall), stating that he was a transvestite because he didn't think he was a woman but only wanted to dress like a woman. Now maybe then Izzard really did think that way, but has since had a change of mind.

tim in vermont said...

The first thing Eddie Izzard has ever said or done that I have heard about anyway, that I have found disappointing.

DavidUW said...

100 mile record on a track
11 hours 19 minutes for a man

100 mile record on a track
12:42, for a woman.

1.5 hours slower.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

DavidUW, I hear you, but what happens off-track? I mean, actual terrain, with hills and bends and dips and the like? It's my recollection (and my recollection might easily be wrong, so bear with me) that women do better in extreme distance running over actual point-to-point courses, as opposed to tracks. Also, the longer the distance, the greater the difference.

Which is, of course, just a way of saying that, hey, here's this one tiny bit of sport where women do better; therefore women are just as good as men, woo-hoo! That's nonsense. Women are equal to men in areas where what matters is fine motor control, and behind them in essentially everything else. And trans women will outperform cis women in the "everything else." (Yes, individual transwomen will lose races to ciswomen. Individual transwomen would also lose to octogenarian men. What's your point?)

Lurker21 said...

I like Eddie, too, but Eddie may be the kind of person the TERFs warned us about: a man who got such an emotional or erotic or sexual charge out of wearing women's clothing that he took to wearing it so often that he started to act like a woman and eventually think he was a woman.

Someday, there will be trans comedians. There probably already are. But they'll come out with their transness* early on. It's harder to adjust to someone you know as a man becoming a woman (or vice versa). I suspect Eddie is going to be appearing less in public even after COVID. Which came first, withdrawal or the decision to reidentify himself, is hard to say. Was it COVID isolation and melancholy that led him to finally choose the new identity?

*No autocorrect for "transness" now. It's a word. Same for reidentify.