Human Barbie Valeria Lukyanova profiled in GQ

Take away the make up and… more vapid?

Uncanny Valley? She’s not just homesteading it, she’s bought the whole thing…

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You know what little boys like to do to Barbies? That’s right. Rip their arms and legs off.

My bet ?

In 20 years, Ms. Lukyanova (assuming she lives that long) will be UNIMAGINABLY hideous, a person so physically repulsive and pathetic as to make Michael Jackson and Jocelyn Wildenstein look like a bad hair day. She will probably be reduced to selling live webcam footage of her surgeries to pay for the next pointless butchery.

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I don’t want to pull respectability politics bull, or to speak for other trans folks, but, I’m doing what I’m doing to change how I feel physically, and how my body works. Testosterone poisoning, estrogen deficiency, and progesterone deficiency made me feel sick and dissociative. I’m also glad to be perceived as a womon rather than a freak. I’m also struggling with internalized body-image issues, social body-image norms, and I’ve had to struggle with the risk that characteristics which out me as trans would expose me to more violence. I’m not sure how what I’m doing, or what any trans people are doing, would really compare with what she’s doing.

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Get that poor girl a sammich. Too bad people age. She’s not going to take that well.

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ew ew ew ew ew ew ew

(ewe)

unicorn chaser, pleeeez

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If you want to see something that will really stretch your idea of what people do to their bodies, watch the movie Modify. It is mindbending. She’d fit right in.

As someone who’s biggest “mod” has been to color her hair shades of what was once my natural color with once or twice a red streak thrown in, I have got to admire her guts to do something this extreme with the one body she was given.

But she is an idiot. She’s got a schtick though, and she is working it.

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Post-op transsexual here agreeing with you.

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Body modding? Transhumanism? I see this as a rejection of what being human is. Toss in as many counterarguments from history or other cultures as you like (ritual scarification, tattooing, lip plates, Kayan Lahwi neck rings, etc) but this still seems…incredibly inhuman, even monsterous, to me. As does/do oh I dunno Furries, the guys who wear those latex women faces/suits, people giving themselves “real” vampire teeth, “real” elf ears, cat eyes, the plastic surgeries that have so many middle-aged women of a certain economic class (i,e, white, wealthy) looking almost identical to one another (until they overdo it and wind up looking like Jocelyn Wildenstein), etc.

Whenever I see stuff like this, I think of that scene from Natural Born Killers where Micky has the word “DEMON” projected onto his chest during the shaman / drug scene.

Maketh ye fun at my expense…starting… now!

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She could credibly claim at least this much of what you said, no? That’s why to me, these two fall in similar camps. Granted, because she is not trying to change some of the chemical underpinnings of her biology (so far as we know), your changes are different in some respects, but not so different that the rights afforded to one group should not be afforded to both.

Just a funny story to relate…I was taking a jewelry making class in the Hamptons. One day, a woman comes in with a broken necklace, a big hunk of quartz which has become unattached to the necklace. The jeweler had a hard time conveying how he wanted to reattach it until he started throwing in the term “natural” a lot to describe how he wanted it to hang.

After she left, he asked the students in his class what the heck was up with the woman’s face? She’d just had a dermabrasion and her face was all red and covered with some goo to help it heal. She’d also had plumper put into her lips. We explained about her procedures and he just laughed about how she had been so into the necklace being natural when she looked ridiculous.

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Well, yes, after you take out the most important stuff, there might be a few commonalities in the least important stuff.

Not saying people shouldn’t have the right to mod their bodies.

Just saying that people can have different reasons and trans people tend to have very different reasons than she seems to.

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So you’re claiming that all trans people think that this is the least important stuff? Or is it the least important stuff to you? If it is so insignificant, then why mention it at all? What about trans people who never undergo the things I removed? Are they somehow less legitimate in their trans status? Only those who undergo (for example) hormone therapy should have their rights protected?

I presume that’s not what you actually mean, but it seems to me that when you start going down that road, you create an uncomfortably narrow definition of what it “truly” means to be trans. But if you don’t go down that road, we seem (to me, at least) to be back to viewing things my way.

Person concerned with “degeneration” of humanity via “race mixing” has no qualms about mixing with non-human substances. Hmm. I guess there’s just no understanding some people.

Hypocrisy aside, I can only hope her racist vitriol doesn’t influence any one else into thinking the same way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if she were going to get any sort of surgery done, I would hope it would be to correct her myopia.

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And so it begins…

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I recall reading about experiments which determined that average (or perhaps I should say, “averaged-out”) faces were judged most attractive.

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I liked the part where Boing Boing kept defending a white supremacist.

I give her points for modding her body any way she likes, and take them all away for her racism.

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You certainly seem to be interested in policing other peoples’ definitions of the meaning of trans.

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