#did you guys know that peyton actually swindled a nyt article out of that twitter thread?

[nedlittle]

genuine question: what is wrong with the peyton beachdeath lma trans thread? I know…too much about peyton himself so we don’t need to revisit that, but i’d love to see you rip into some shoddy scholarship and ways to (mis)understand historical queerness

oh god...

i mean aside from people taking the word of a notorious clout-chasing liar and conspiracy theorist at face value...peyton just doesn't understand or even really care about history when it does not directly benefit him. full disclosure i have not read the thread since it was first posted but it is burned into my memory unfortunately, i also don't know a lot about lma as a historical figure

aside from cherry picking quotes from lma's diaries there were no actual sources. nothing from her biographers, no secondary scholarship at all. it was just peyton presenting quotes purposefully stripped of their context in order to further a point that he wanted to be right.

this should be like. queer history for pre-schoolers but people in the past who were or may have been queer understood themselves and their queerness differently than people do today. peyton is incapable of looking at queerness outside of his very specific 21st century lens. could louisa may alcott have been a trans man? possibly! could she have also been cis and/or gnc? sure! could she have simply been writing in both her private and personal lives about how suffocating the experience of being a woman in the 19th century was? yeah. we have no way of knowing which of this could be true, and whether they overlapped at all. queer history exists in shades of possibility. in some cases (and we're going to use trans men contemporary to lma), like those of albert cashier and charley pankhurst, we can pretty definitely say that they were both men; that being a man was essential to their continued survival, that they would have wanted to be remembered as men. in other cases, it's more slippery because the taxonomy we use nowadays to classify ourselves and especially our differentiation of gender identity vs sexual acts is SO recent that it does a disservice to classify all historical queerness with it.

it's insane that there are MULTIPLE notable 19th century trans men in american history at the time lma was living and he still was like no this is not good enough for me i can only emotionally relate to something if i can force my own image onto it. that's really the problem here, not the shoddy history and the deliberately misleading language, but the fact that peyton is seemingly incapable of enjoying or relating to a piece of media or a person if he cannot find a direct comparison to his own life. he did the same oh "(x) was 100% absolutely a trans man if you tell me wrong you're transphobic" thing with katharine hepburn (iirc??) a few years back and this is a personal gripe but having read a 600+ page bio of hepburn that was very generous to several queer readings of her life: lol. lmao even. his insistence of flatting the experience of anyone with a moderately fucky gender into "you're either Like Me or your not" is so purposefully stupid.

like, do all the trans readings of little women you want! i myself made a deranged little women trans post a few weeks ago. but lma isn't a fictional character who you can apply different literary lenses to! she was a real human person whose relationship with her gender we will never fully understand because we were not there. at some point you just have to accept that it is not your business. why are you so desperate for any shred of historical representation that you are willing to exhume the dead in order to out them?

peyton relates to jo march, so he insists that reading jo as a trans man is the only (morally) correct reading. he likes little women but has to make it fit the public view of transness that he is made his personal brand. i actually followed him for longer than i'd care to admit, and it's a trend with any piece of media that he is publicly into that he has to make a character a trans man in order to relate to them.

he also has this deranged idea that any author writing with emotional depth about the """opposite sex""" must have been trans. see the article he wrote for the niche about how must have been a trans man because he gave dido's emotions and the collapse of her marriage to aeneas the same "dignified treatment as any sprawling, epic battlefield scenes." [direct quote] the article is literally called " vergil had a pussy and i'll prove it." no further comment.

one of his "proofs" is that lma was called "lou" by her family, which he then proceeds to call her for the rest of the thread. lou is....a very normal nickname for louisa both now and then. you know what else was a 19th century nickname for louisa? wheezy. imagine that same thread but he calls her wheezy alcott. thank you, good day.