Transient

Outside Looking In: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show

2012-01-11T12:08:00.000-05:00

Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of my most favorite writers. It's hard for me to describe how wonderful she is. Her work consists of cutting and polishing a diamond until it shines out in all its facets, cold, burning, phosphorescent. And funny. Moreover, I admire her life as much as her work. She is very much like a queer Communist Jane Austen.

Her novel Summer Will Show tells the story of a love affair between two women, who to a certain extent resemble herself and her life partner, Valentine Ackland. (Interestingly, she imagined the two characters long before meeting Ackland, but didn't write the book until after they were together.) As much as I enjoy the book, I couldn't help but recognize, upon re-reading it recently, that it has some flaws in its approach to race.

Sophia Willoughby (rather like Emma Woodhouse) is young, handsome, rich, and mistress of all she surveys. She lives contentedly on her country estate with her two children. It doesn't really bother her that her husband has run off to Paris to live with another woman - she doesn't want him back - although her conventional mind is rather unsettled by the discovery that this woman (whom she's never met) is not only older than Mr. Willoughby, but also Jewish.

Sophia always knows the right thing to do on all occasions. As the story opens she is taking her children to breathe the fumes from the lime-kiln. It's a sure cure for their whooping-cough; she underwent the same treatment as a child and it fixed her right up. Unfortunately, the lime-kiln man is infected with smallpox, and within a month her children are dead.

Deranged by grief, Sophia decides that the best thing to do is to seek out her husband and conceive another child with him. She heads off to Paris, but her carefully-laid plans go awry when it turns out that her husband's mistress - now his former mistress - is much more fascinating than he is. Moreover, she arrives in February, 1848, and gets caught up in the revolution. (Friedrich Engels appears as a supporting character.)

This "other woman," Minna Lemuel, is Jewish, as I mentioned above. Warner clearly delineates her as a person of color. More than once, her skin is said to be the color of "milk-coffee." Her hair is jet-black, blacker than any white person's hair. She's exotic. (Of course, to a proper Englishwoman like Sophia, all these Europeans are exotic.) Minna is a revolutionary, because she believes that will bring more freedom for her people. Incidentally, Summer Will Show was published in 1936 - when it was no small thing for Warner to remind her readers that Jews had always been part of European history, or to declare that when the revolution comes she wants to be on the Jewish side.

There is also another person of color in the book, named Caspar, Sophia's cousin. Sophia's uncle is a plantation owner in the West Indies. He has a child with one of his slaves, and sends the boy to be educated in England. (Apparently Warner's own great-great-uncle did the same thing.) Sophia finds a school for him, and he stays at her house briefly, before her children come down with smallpox. (How he manages to avoid catching the disease I don't know.) Later he shows up again. Caspar is problematic.

When discussing Minna, Warner trots out all the Jewish stereotypes, and dispels most of them. The easiest way to dispel a stereotype is to present someone as an individual, and Minna certainly is that. Most importantly, she gets to speak for herself - in fact, she rarely stops talking. By contrast, Caspar has only two or three lines in the whole book. He never truly expresses himself.

Warner has a talent for describing people in terms that are both superficial and significant. But with Caspar it's all superficiality - she never gets below the surface. She also habitually points out her characters' foolishness. What this means is that, although everyone in the book is prejudiced against Caspar, Warner doesn't necessarily condone their prejudice. Unfortunately, she doesn't argue against it either.

Warner loves outsiders, and she loves being an outsider. I think that's part of the reason why she put Caspar in the book. Unfortunately, he is too much of an outsider for her. What she enjoys most about being an outsider is the ability to critique her society, as an outsider looking in. But in order to understand Caspar she would have to be an outsider looking out. That's too uncomfortable.

The people of color in her earlier book, Mr Fortune's Maggot, are more realistic. I think that's because they are rooted in a stable culture - they live on a Polynesian island, and Mr Fortune is the white outsider who comes to visit them there. Warner understands that they have a traditional society of their own, and she knows how to depict a traditional society. There is not much difference between her small Polynesian village and her small English village, except for the lack of sexual repression.

But Caspar is rootless. He doesn't fit into white society, and as for black society, which in this case means slave society - I don't think Warner could face it. She never denied that white people were capable of injustice and oppression. In many of her stories she unflinchingly describes cruelty and suffering. But for some reason this is too much.

She liked to write about people escaping their fetters, or failing to escape, or choosing not to, but as far as I can recall her fetters were always metaphorical. What would she have done with real ones?

Bearing the Weight of One's Allies (Part 1)

2011-12-21T11:52:00.000-05:00

This post got started when, once again, a homosexual person said something transphobic and a trans person somewhere on the Internet, once again, responded by saying that this is why trans people should disassociate themselves from the queer community. In short, take the T out of LGBT.

My first response to that was, "And are you going to stop associating with the straight community because straight people can also be transphobic?" Transphobia is a sad fact of life. But if we refused to associate with all cis people we wouldn't get very far. (I admit that I'm biased on the subject of LGBT. I knew I was queer long before I knew I was trans, so for me the two things naturally go together. That is my community. I can't just leave.)

Anyway, I was all set to write a preachy little post on the importance of working with one's allies: which means both holding them accountable and making allowances for their ignorance and ingrained social prejudices. I used to believe all the bad things that society said about trans people. I know what it's like to be ignorant. I can't judge other people for that. Moreover, allies, by definition, are people who don't get it. Allies, by definition, are people who don't share your experience. But if they are true allies then they want to learn. They can't ever really live it or understand it the way that you do. But they can make room in their souls for people who are different from them.

That's what I was going to say. And then I made the mistake of posting a story about a murdered trans girl in an online community I frequent, which is about 99% cis. I call it a mistake because if I'd known it would get the response it did, I would never have posted it. The response was not hostile - no one said anything openly transphobic. But it was completely lacking in sympathy and comprehension.

My first reaction was the desire to leave and never come back. I was shocked and frightened. I no longer felt welcome there. Forget all this crap about "working with our allies." They didn't deserve it. And I don't stick around where I'm not wanted. That's not my style.

Well, I didn't leave. I did post a followup, articulating my concerns. Several people replied, expressing sympathy and apologizing for not getting involved in the earlier conversation (or for neglecting to mention that it is in fact a shame when a trans kid gets killed at school.) A couple people maintained their previous position. We'll see what happens. I expect to write more on this subject.

I am not the only trans person over there. We have talked about our experiences before and met with sympathy. But a general ignorance of trans issues was also apparent, and occasionally I would think to myself, "This is going to cause problems someday." I had absolutely no intention of being the person who stepped on that landmine. But these things happen.

Bullying in Schools

2011-12-12T14:59:00.001-05:00

Here's an article about a trans girl who, with the support of her parents, started attending school as a female in fifth grade. There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but I was especially struck by this description of how bullying gets started:

When fifth grade started, Wyatt was gone. Nicole showed up for school, sometimes wearing a dress and sporting shoulder-length hair. She began using the girls’ bathroom. Nikki’s friends didn’t have a problem with the transformation; there were playdates and sleepovers.

“They said, ‘It was about time!’ ’’ Nicole says. She was elected vice president of her class and excelled academically.

But one day a boy called her a “faggot,’’ objected to her using the girls’ bathroom, and reported the matter to his grandfather, who is his legal guardian. The grandfather complained to the Orono School Committee, with the Christian Civic League of Maine backing him. The superintendent of schools then decided Nicole should use a staff bathroom.

“It was like a switch had been turned on, saying it is now OK to question Nicole’s choice to be transgender and it was OK to pursue behavior that was not OK before,’’ [her father] says. “Every day she was reminded that she was different, and the other kids picked up on it.’’

According to a 2009 study by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, 90 percent of transgender youth report being verbally harassed and more than half physically harassed. Two-thirds of them said they felt unsafe in school.

To protect her from bullying at school, Nicole was assigned an adult to watch her at all times between classes, following her to the cafeteria, to the bathroom. She found it intrusive and stressful. It made her feel like even more of an outsider.

“Separate but equal does not work,’’ she says.

It was a burden that [her brother] Jonas shouldered as well. The same boy who in fifth grade objected to her using the girls bathroom made the mistake of saying to Jonas in sixth grade that “freaking gay people’’ shouldn’t be allowed in the school. Jonas jumped on him and a scuffle ensued.

I also want to point out that the school did try to help Nicole (although unfortunately the family ended up having to move to another town, where no one knew she was trans.) I've been involved in some discussions lately about whether or not it's possible for schools to prevent bullying, and what their options are. Too often they don't try to protect LGBT students at all.

"I wanted to show America a different kind of man."

2011-10-28T11:53:00.000-04:00

Chaz Bono on his “Dancing with the Stars” stint:

I came on this show because I wanted to show America a different kind of man. If there was somebody like me on TV when I was growing up, my whole life would have been different. And so I dedicated everything I did to all the people out there like me and especially to kids and teens who are struggling. You can have a wonderful, great life and be successful and happy.

I have to say that I've never paid much attention to Chaz (despite hearing about him now and then over the years.) But that really expresses how I feel.

Swallows and Amazons and Narnia

2011-10-27T11:59:00.000-04:00

I love children's books. Have I mentioned that before? The best ones can be read over and over, by people of any age.

As a child I liked the Narnia books. I didn't recognize the Christian allegory, and when I figured it out I thought it showed a gross lack of imagination on Lewis' part. Couldn't he come up with his own ideas? Nonetheless, I still read them occasionally, even though in the process I have to shut off parts of my brain and pretend that a white Oxbridge man's view of the world is the only one that matters. But I digress. I wanted to write about Swallows and Amazons.

In 1930 Arthur Ransome published Swallows and Amazons, the first book in the series. In a later foreword, he wrote:

I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago, when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston [a large lake in the north of England] . . .

To a modern reader, one of the surprising things about the book is that the children spend most of their time without any adult supervision. They go sailing up and down the lake - in a sailboat! By themselves! No adults on board! They camp out on an island in the lake for several weeks - the grownups come by to check on them every so often, but really they're on their own. They generally wander around. And they have lots of fun.

The lake isn't just a lake - it has the North Pole at one end, the South Pole at the other, and in between are such points of interest as the Amazon River, Rio de Janeiro and "a peak in Darien." (Not that they visit all of those places in just one book - the North Pole expedition comes in a later book. If there's a South Pole expedition, it's in a book I haven't read yet.) The children are daring explorers and the grownups with whom they interact are always "natives" - which has some interesting colonial implications, actually. Natives are kind of stupid, but they also have strange sources of knowledge and their own type of power. Also they supply most of the food.

I didn't discover Swallows and Amazons until I was grown up. As a child I wasn't interested in "messing about in boats" (despite reading another book on the subject) but maybe if I'd had Swallows and Amazons I would have been.

Another cool thing about the books, which I can appreciate now that I'm older, is that the female characters are just as active and adventurous as the boys. The Swallows are a set of two brothers and two sisters ("Swallow" is the name of their boat.) The Amazons are another set of sisters, who live by the lake year-round and are usually pirates. The explanation for their name is that they live on the Amazon River, but I think the idea of Amazons as female warriors must be in there too.

Recently I began to think about the parallels between Swallows and Amazons and Narnia. For right now I'll focus on the first books in both series: Swallows and Amazons and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Both books deal with a set of four siblings - two boys, two girls - who discover an enchanted world. In fact, in both cases the second-oldest sibling is a girl named Susan. (Lewis began writing the Narnia books in 1949. He would certainly have been aware of Swallows and Amazons, although he was already an adult when the first book was published and at this time I can't find any record of what he thought of Ransome's books.)

Lewis' attitude towards women is especially noteworthy - for example, the differences between Lewis' Susan and Ransome's Susan. Susan Walker (the Swallow) is perhaps the least adventurous of the bunch. She can sail a boat as well as anyone, but mostly she's in charge of cooking and as much housekeeping as can be done on a desert island. Being the second-oldest, she is the first mate of the good ship Swallow. The oldest child, John, is the captain - one assumes that if the oldest child had been a girl, she would have been captain, whereas in Narnia the girls kind of get shuffled out of the chain of command. Susan is the sensible one - when she says something, she's usually right. When Susan Pevensie (Lewis' Susan) says something, it's usually dismissed as nagging or cowardice or arrogance. Nor does she, or her sister, get to do anything especially heroic, but in Swallows and Amazons . . . oops, spoilers!

I mentioned that Susan Walker does the cooking. Food is another subject that's handled differently - and rather fascinatingly - in the two books. I believe that food is very important to children. Certainly lavish descriptions of food were always one of my favorite parts in the books I read as a child. Ransome discusses how much food the children have to bring while they're camping, how they get more supplies, and often describes the cooking in a fair amount of detail. (He also has Susan's mother remind her to make the others help with washing dishes.)

By comparison, Lewis doesn't pay as much attention to food . . . and the two most significant scenes about food in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in fact involve imaginary food. There's the Turkish Delight which the witch gives to Edmund, and the dinner brought later on by Father Christmas. (Please note that magical food is evil when it comes from a woman, but good when it comes from the old man with the long white beard whose job is to decide "who's naughty or nice" and give presents to the good people. Can Lewis actually tell the difference between Santa Claus and God? Okay, I'll stop now.)

I hope I've made it clear how cool the Swallows and Amazons books are. I haven't read all of them - there are quite a few. Swallows and Amazons was not even the first of the series that I read. Anyway, in my opinion you will be doing yourself a favor to get hold of them, no matter how old you are.

Feminism and Transphobia

2011-09-28T10:14:00.000-04:00

I used to be a feminist. There, I said it. I've been putting off writing this post, because to me people who say "I used to be a feminist" have always seemed ungrateful. But the plain fact is that feminism does not meet my needs as a trans person.

Feminism has always been about questioning traditional notions of gender. I believe it's not going too far to say that the fundamental axiom of feminism is that everything society teaches us about gender is wrong. And yet most feminists, upon encountering the word "transgender," suddenly become extremely conventional. Suddenly society's definitions of gender are not to be questioned. Why is that?

It occurs to me that feminism doesn't appear to have any concept of "gender identity." I never heard that phrase until I started learning about trans stuff. Gender identity is one's internal sense of one's own gender. But feminist definitions of gender, as far as I know, focus on socialization, and to a lesser extent on biology.

Probably the reason feminism ignores the concept of gender identity is that in the past, it was used to denigrate women. Our socially-constructed gender roles were believed to be innate and instinctual. Moreover, one's genitals influenced everything. To be born with a penis didn't just make you physically stronger, it also made you smarter, more honest, and more courageous. Meanwhile, if you were born with a vagina, then the only thing you ever wanted to do was stay home, have babies, and cater to your man. That is what "gender identity" used to mean. No wonder feminists don't want any part of it. And indeed, as a modern trans person I would be reluctant to base my gender identity on any particular characteristic. Like everyone else, I am a mixture of "masculine" and "feminine" traits. But I still maintain that gender identity exists.

The impression I got from years of feminist studies is that society teaches people how to be male or female, that fundamentally we're all just human and gender is only a set of learned behaviors. There is some truth to this, of course. But it does erase the notion of gender identity. Furthermore, it erases the existence of trans people.

Feminism taught me transphobia. It taught me that trans women are really "men who want to invade women's space." It taught me that trans men either don't exist, or that they're women who disguised themselves as men in order to benefit from male privilege. The truth is that I was unaware of the existence of trans men until quite recently. Everyone has heard of Christine Jorgenson and drag queens. No one has heard of men like Michael Dillon or Alan Hart (whose stories I link to in the sidebar.)

There is a certain kind of anger which sweeps over women when they find that men are trying to get into women's space. I've felt it. It's not entirely unfounded. It goes like this: "You want to have the best of both worlds. You've had all the privileges which I was denied and now you want to come into our ghetto and pick up whatever little scraps of treasure we've managed to accumulate. Is this another aspect of men's sense of entitlement? You think you can just take whatever you want?"

There's no question in my mind that people who were socialized to be male don't really understand what it's like to be female in this culture. One can find examples of this in the memoirs of trans women - Jan Morris and Jennifer Boylan have both mentioned it.

And yet, feminists are wrong when they say that trans women are not really women. They're wrong when they say that trans women are a threat to other women, or to women's space. Trans women's experience is radically different from cis women's experience - and feminism has often had trouble processing differences between women. More work in this area is called for.

As for trans men - I don't know where they fit into feminism. I don't know where I, as a transmasculine person, fit into feminism. I've always believed that feminism was "the women's movement." It's not that I object to feminism - it's a great thing for women. Well, right now it's a great thing for cis women and maybe someday it will be a great thing for trans women too. But it's not for me, and even if I were allowed into the club I would think of my trans sisters who are excluded.

The sad truth is that women who campaign viciously to keep trans women out of feminism are often silent on the question of trans men. Some of them are imaginative enough to condemn trans women on the grounds that they will always be male, while simultaneously arguing that trans men should be kicked out of feminism because we've stopped being female. But generally it seems like feminism hasn't figured out the whole trans male thing at all.

Feminists are wrong when they say that society creates gender and we have no choice but to stick with the gender we were assigned. It is the last holdout of traditional gender rules. No feminist would say that a little girl can only do girl things and a little boy can only do boy things. They would say that we all have the right to act in whatever way feels natural to us. And yet traditional feminists deny us the right to name our own gender, the right to assert a gender expression which feels natural to us.

I want to hammer down on this one more time: feminists have always argued that women can't be defined by their biology. "Don't judge people by what's between their legs," they say. Trans people say the exact same thing. Don't judge me by my genitals.

Why do cis feminists cling to gender essentialism and biological determinism? Part of it is sheer ignorance - and yet that's not good enough, because trans people have been associated with the feminist movement since at least the 1970s. Part of it, I honestly believe, is pragmatism. Trans people are the minority. Feminism has always tried to focus its efforts on things which would benefit a majority of women. But on the other hand, lesbians are a minority too and they've definitely taken over feminism. I don't know.

There is one aspect of feminism which has stayed with me, which I still consider to be valuable. Ironically, it's what feminism taught me about the body. Most trans people have issues with their bodies.* I was in denial about my gender for a long time, but once I came out it took a surprisingly short time for me to realize that my gender identity doesn't match my perceived biological sex - and I'm fine with that. I don't see why they have to match. Feminism didn't teach me this, obviously, but it did teach me that we live in a body-hating culture. For me, the next logical deduction is that it's not my body that's the problem. It's society.

Feminism also revealed to me that in our culture, if you inhabit a female body it doesn't matter what you are on the inside. You could be smart, courageous, aggressive, talented in one way or another. You could even be a guy. None of that matters, because society defines women in terms of their bodies alone. So in a back-handed way feminism did help me to understand: there's something inside me which is the real me, not what anyone sees on the outside, and the best thing I can do is to be true to the real me. I'm sure it wasn't on purpose.

* Note: the official medical terms used to describe transgender/transsexuality are "gender dysphoria" and "body dysmorphia." (I mention these terms here because I got confused about them while writing this article.) Body dysmorphia means that you feel there's something seriously wrong with your body, with the shape of your body. "Dysmorphia" means "wrong shape" in Greek. It doesn't apply only to trans people - people who believe they're too fat, for example, often suffer from dysmorphia. There are even some people who take a dislike to one of their arms or legs and want to have it amputated.

"Dysphoria" is the opposite of "euphoria." Someone with gender dysphoria feels that their gender is wrong. This is actually kind of a problematic diagnosis. If you have "body dysmorphia" then your body is wrong. If you have "gender dysphoria"then your gender is wrong. So which is it?

Moreover, I personally do not have gender dysphoria. I have gender euphoria: the awareness of my true gender makes me feel happier than just about anything else in the world. In fact I think I have social dysphoria. Because society has messed with me an awful lot.

Here is some stuff other people have written about gender euphoria. Unfortunately, whoever owns "gendereuphoria.com" does not seem to be doing anything constructive with it.

Spiritual Nourishment

2011-09-08T11:40:00.001-04:00

The sermon at my Unitarian Universalist church one recent Sunday was on the topic of addictive behaviors and spiritual nourishment. The general idea was that people stuff themselves with food, alcohol, etc. because they feel an emptiness inside - and it may be true that spiritual practice helps to fill that void better than addictive substances.

While listening to the speakers, I felt like I was looking in a mirror: and by that I mean, I saw my own image reversed. For some reason I don't have an addictive personality. As I've mentioned here before, the closest I come to any kind of compulsive behavior is undereating, rather than overeating; and even that has always seemed to me like a semi-instinctive response to stress, not a choice I make in order to make myself feel better. Also I've done a lot of spiritual exploration. If there is a void inside each one of us that can only be filled by spirituality, then my void has been pretty much taken care of. I believe it is fair to say that I preferred spiritual practice to alcohol, or ice cream, or whatever else the people around me were using.

Nonetheless - and this is what struck me on that Sunday - even genuine spiritual nourishment didn't help me feel connected to other human beings. The spiritual world and the human world seemed to be completely separate from each other. I felt the love of the spirit, I felt compassion and universal connectedness - I knew it was real. But when I looked into the human world I saw none of those things.

During my formative years, I don't recall ever hearing anyone say the word "compassion." Even the word "love" was in short supply. As for the idea that all life is sacred, that we are all connected in the web of life - I don't believe those concepts are part of traditional Western culture. Of course, those are big ideas. The people I knew were focused on daily events, the mundane world, the struggle to provide the necessities of life. Maybe some of them were aware of the existence of compassion, and just didn't bother to mention it to me.

And yet, at the Unitarian Universalist church I heard people speak who were thoroughly familiar with the words "compassion," "love," "connectedness," "social justice," "sacred community." They had devoted many years of their lives to speaking those words and trying, with others, to enact those concepts in the world. They were experts and I was less than a novice - and yet they still couldn't bridge the gap between the human world and the spiritual world. They still felt something which they called "an emptiness inside." This actually encouraged me. It really is hard, I thought. It's not just me.

It would seem that spiritual practice and social practice are two different things.

Santa Olivia, by Jacqueline Carey

2011-08-22T10:14:00.000-04:00

I have enjoyed Jacqueline Carey's books for many years now. One of the things I admire most about her writing is that she doesn't write the same thing over and over. She hit the big time with Kushiel's Dart, and she could have dined out on that genre for the rest of her life, but in each of her subsequent series she has tried new things. Many otherwise-good writers don't bother to do that.

Now with Santa Olivia she has made an even bigger leap: from faux-medieval fantasy to near-future science fiction. And she pulls it off pretty well. For some reason it's difficult for people who got started in a different genre to switch to SF. I can't really think of anyone who's done it successfully. Walter Mosley is an example of a great writer whose SF writing sucks. (I have only read his first SF book, and I am not going to read any more.) Some people have started out doing SF and later produced good work in another field, such as Nicola Griffith (mystery) and Lois M. Bujold (fantasy.) But apparently SF is tricky to get right.

The mistake most people make is to show off how much they know about science by inserting too many details. I once read the first two pages of an SF novel by Felice Picano. He devotes a long paragraph to explaining how the automatic door works. Hello? Doors that open automatically have not been unusual since 1966, when they appeared on Star Trek.

Carey avoids that mistake. In fact I would say that she errs in the opposite direction and doesn't put in enough detail. Her Terre d'Ange books are all loaded with intricate descriptions of food, fabrics, buildings, landscapes, and people. She doesn't do that here. For example, she barely describes the town of Santa Olivia at all, and therefore it doesn't exactly come off like a real place. I kind of wish she had chosen a real Texas town and described that. As it is, I had to rely on whatever generic Southwestern images I have in my head, which is not sufficient.

The other big change in Santa Olivia is that there's a lot more swearing. Faux-medieval worlds have very little swearing in them for some reason, and when people do swear they never use the words to which we have become accustomed. (I seem to remember that Mary Gentle's Ash series is an exception to this rule.) Carey appears to have decided to drop the F-bomb as often as possible. And I guess that's okay. But I'm afraid that her language still sounds a little stilted.

So what do I like about the book? It was interesting to see Carey grappling with real-world problems, instead of mythic quests with the required happy endings. I was totally pulled into the book, and at the climatic moment I was all excited, even though as you can tell from this review I had been having some reservations. I also like the way Carey takes her usual themes - sex, religion, angels, war - and turns them upside down.

For example, Carey switched from writing about a sex-positive culture to a culture that more closely resembles our own. She does it with subtlety - anyone who has read her earlier books knows how she feels, and yet she manages to avoid getting up on a soapbox. Here's an example: the town of Santa Olivia has been turned into a military base. Lots of soldiers live there; that means prostitution is a major industry. In Carey's near-future world, the US military has become an all-male institution once again. (She mentions that without dwelling on it; that's one.) So the military will only provide one form of contraception: condoms. Santa Olivia has been cut off from the rest of the world, and it appears that no other forms of contraception are allowed in. Think about that for a bit. She mentions it and then she moves on.

There was one other thing that seemed odd to me: in addition to being sex-positive, Carey has always been queer-positive. Loup, the protagonist of Santa Olivia, gets involved in a same-sex romance. But I never realized while reading Carey's other books that she writes queer romance from a heterosexual point of view. Loup becomes a female boxer; her lover is an ultra-feminine woman. In a lesbian novel someone would have pointed out that they're a butch-femme couple, even if it were only mentioned as a joke. Nothing like that happens here. In fact Loup and Pilar don't even identify as lesbians. Loup is more or less asexual outside of this one relationship; Pilar thought of herself as straight and is very nervous about getting into a lesbian relationship. That's realistic but it's also, I have to say, kind of a cheat. It comes across as pandering to a straight audience that enjoys girl-on-girl. I still admire Carey's work but that bothers me.

Nonetheless, if you want to see a talented writer branch out into a new genre, read Santa Olivia. The sequel, Saints Astray, came out just recently and I am looking forward to reading it. (Incidentally, a fan on Carey's Facebook page came up with the sequel's title.)

Infighting, Part 2: Internalized Transphobia

2011-08-15T13:02:00.002-04:00

These are things that trans people say about each other. I believe they are all examples of internalized transphobia:

I hate cross-dressers.
We need to conform to society's gender rules.
My closet is better than your closet.
In order to prove that you're trans, you have to suffer.
I'm not trans anymore (but I have to keep coming back to the trans community in order to announce how much I don't belong to the trans community.)
Everyone should do what I did.
Take the T out of LGBT.

To go into detail:

1. I hate cross-dressers. At first I didn't understand why some trans people feel this way. I've never cross-dressed. What's the big deal? Then I realized that the stereotype of the cross-dresser is what all trans people fear. Someone who is "confused" about their gender. Someone who likes to wear the clothing of the opposite sex for perverse reasons. Someone who can't handle being a real man - or a real woman. (It does seem to be male-to-female cross-dressers who attract the most hatred. Quite possibly this is because our modern society allows women to wear pants.) By the way, I want to make it clear that I'm referring to stereotypes here. I don't know much about cross-dressers, but I don't intend any insult to them.

This is why it's insulting to call a transgender person a cross-dresser: not because there's anything wrong with cross-dressing, but because it denies our gender identity. A cross-dresser wears the clothes of the other gender. Transgender people wear clothes which are appropriate for their gender. Personally, I support people's right to wear whatever clothes they want.

2. We need to conform to society's gender rules. This one still baffles me. Trans people by definition are not conforming to society's gender rules, because the number one rule is, you're assigned a gender at birth, that's your gender and you can't change it. Generally what people mean when they say this is that you have to be either a man or a woman, none of that in-between stuff. I've even seen people claim that the goal of the genderqueer movement is to destroy society (just like the feminist and same-sex marriage movements.) That's very interesting. I think it's closely tied into #3.

3. My closet is better than your closet. To speak in very broad terms, trans people fall into one of two closets; or to put it another way, they have two ways of passing for cis. (For those who don't know, "cis" or "cisgendered" is the opposite of "trans.") People who have completed their medical transition are usually indistinguishable from cis people. Many of them want to live "stealth," as it's called - meaning that no one knows they were born transsexual. On the other end of the spectrum are people who don't seek medical treatment and often have the option of passing for their socially-assigned gender. Then there are trans people who can't pass at all, for whatever reason, but right now I'm discussing the closet.

The closet. Oy. Does anybody really like the closet? Do people who live stealth think of themselves as living in the closet? Often it seems like they don't. They say, "I'm a real woman (or a real man), that's it, end of story." Then, if they're playing the "my closet is better than your closet" card, they complain about people who don't seek medical treatment, who haven't gone all the way, because they're "just pretending" and they can go back to being cis any time they want. Or else they complain about the people who can't pass for cis, the obvious ones, the ones who make trans people look bad. Why do they have to flaunt it?

The reason we stay in the closet is because there are times when it's either necessary or convenient to not attract attention. And in fact I don't begrudge anyone a necessary closet. It would be nice if we could all be out all the time - but this is the real world. All the same, I don't believe that anyone who intends to spend the rest of their life in the closet has the right to criticize anyone else's choices.

4. In order to prove that you're trans, you have to suffer. This one, I think, relates most closely to my earlier post. First there's the idea that you have to prove you're trans. This mostly applies to people who seek medical treatment - there's a Standard of Care to which you have to conform. I have never gone through this process myself, but I've heard stories. It also relates back to item #2 - as I understand it, the SOC is based on an outdated model of appropriate gender behavior. You can't just be trans, you have to bake cookies or repair cars or whatever the "correct" behavior for your gender is. Also, traditionally the doctors wanted you to be either asexual or heterosexual before transition - homosexual activity would disqualify you - and heterosexual after transition. The fact that this requires a complete switch in object choice does not seem to bother them. The goal is to create healthy, well-adjusted members of society. Queers need not apply.

That kind of thing is horribly invasive. Allegedly it's to prevent people who aren't really trans from embarking on irreversible medical procedures which they will later regret. I guess some kind of evaluation is necessary. I haven't thought it through. But I do know that in a sense it affects all of us, whether we get involved with the medical community or not. We aren't just being asked to prove that we're trans. In many cases we have to prove that "trans" is really a thing. First you have to say, "it's possible to be trans and it's not a mental illness." Then you have to say, "And I'm trans." Then you have to answer all the questions about "What is this trans thing anyway?" And usually you have to answer them multiple times. Society is ignorant and prejudiced. That's not our fault.

I also know that there's a certain prejudice against people who might not "really" be trans. But so what? Are there people out there who say they're trans when they're really not? I believe that there are. The same way there are people who say they're gay when they're really bisexual, people who say they're bisexual when they're really straight, people who say they're straight when they're really gay. People who say they're cis when they're really trans. People naturally experiment with their sexuality and their gender. Plus in a society like ours, which has such unreasonable expectations, it's understandable to me that people would be confused about their gender. Oh, I like to bake cookies, does that mean I'm a girl? Oh, I'm attracted to girls, so I must really be a guy.

So. Being trans in our culture means that you have to constantly explain yourself, which comes across as "proving" yourself, and it's an unpleasant experience. Being trans in our culture means that you run the risk of losing your job, your apartment, your kids, your access to medical care, and your life. Yes, being trans in our culture means that you have to suffer. But it shouldn't be that way.

Sometimes I get the impression that some trans people think, "I've suffered so much and legal recognition is my reward. If you haven't run the gauntlet then you don't qualify as trans. " No. That's not how it works. Trans people deserve human rights because we are human beings. No other reason. Moreover, I don't want anyone to have to suffer because they're trans. Maybe someday, when we're old, we can tell the young people, "Back in my day it was really hard. You don't know how lucky you are." I hope that day will come.

5. I'm not trans anymore (but I can't stay away from the trans community.) I had to mention this in my earlier post, because I'm just completely amazed at the people who keep coming back to the trans community in order to announce that they're not part of the trans community. They want everyone to know they're not trans. But guess what? They can't tell their friends and co-workers that they're not trans, because no cis person ever goes around saying "I'm not trans." They can't tell anyone how much they fear being mistaken for a cross-dresser, because . . . well, you know. They're not trans. Okay. But they're not cis either.

I do feel a tiny bit of sympathy. I'm not sure how I fit into the trans community either. But my sympathy vanishes when I read Internet comments such as "I'm not trans anymore so I don't care about trans people's rights."

6. Everyone should do what I did. This is the problem that we all have. One of the things I realized after coming out as trans is that I really do have to respect other people's choices, even when they're different from mine. I don't respect rudeness and "these rights are for me but not for you." But even though I spent this whole blog post complaining, I really do want to be open-minded.

7. Take the T out of LGBT. GLBT. GL(B)t. LGBTIQQAAA. Call it what you will. A lot of people don't want the "T" in there. Some of them are homosexuals who don't want to ally themselves with trans people. Or they don't want to be taken for drag queens, I'm a little unsure. Some of them are transsexuals who don't want to be associated with the gay community. Or they don't want to be taken for drag queens, I'm a little unsure.

If you're trans but you don't identify as homosexual, that's fine. It's perfectly okay to be straight. A heterosexual transsexual alliance would be a great thing. Personally, I knew I was queer long before I knew I was trans, so the LGBT alliance makes perfect sense to me. Furthermore, I believe that it's a good idea to take allies wherever you find them - assuming they can bring themselves to associate with perverts like you.

Now, here's a story that demonstrates why we need to stick together. Remember George Rekers? The anti-gay activist who hired a rent boy to carry his luggage on a trip to Europe? Earlier in his illustrious career, he made a living by performing aversion therapy on children:

"Well, I was becoming a little concerned, I guess, when he was playing with dolls and stuff," [Kirk's mother] said. "Playing with the girls' toys, and probably picking up little effeminate, well, like stroking the hair, the long hair and stuff. It just bothered me that maybe he was picking up maybe too many feminine traits."

At home, the punishment for feminine behavior would become more severe. The therapists instructed Kirk's parents to use poker chips as a system of rewards and punishments.

According to Rekers' case study, blue chips were given for masculine behavior and would bring rewards, such as candy. But the red chips, given for effeminate behavior, resulted in "physical punishment by spanking from the father."

The family said the spankings were severe. [Kirk's sister] remembers "lots of belt incidents." She escaped the screaming by going to her bed to "lay in the room with my pillow on my head." Later, she would go to Kirk's bedroom and "lay down and hug him and we would just lay there, and the thing that I remember is that he never even showed anger. He was just numb."

During one particularly harsh punishment, their mother recalls, her husband "spanked" Kirk "so hard that he had welts up and down his back and on his buttocks."

She remembers her son Mark saying, "Cry harder, and he won't hit so hard." She says, "Today, it would be abuse."

Sometimes Mark would try to protect his brother, to make his beatings less severe.

"I took some of the red chips and I put them on my side," said Mark, as tears came to his eyes. But he said the beatings were still frequent.

The number of stacked red chips became a telltale sign about the level of tension in the house. When he returned home each day, Mark often looked for the chips in their easily visible location between the living room and the kitchen.

"You looked and were like, 'What's the chip count today? What happened? What changed? How bad is it going to be?' And it was always bad. There was whipping every Friday night. There was no way out of it."

The thing is, that even though Kirk was being punished for feminine behavior, everyone - Rekers and his family - seems to have thought that they were curing him of homosexuality. After Kirk committed suicide, his sister said "he was gay." Nonetheless, he wasn't being punished for homosexual acts. He was being punished for gender-nonconformity. As long as those two things are confused in people's minds, then LGBT people have the same enemies.

Poetry Appreciation Segment

2011-07-27T12:16:00.002-04:00

I have a guest post up at The Rumpus. Very happy that someone else found it worthy of displaying on their blog. (Incidentally, my original title was "Hafez: The Persistence of Poetry.")

Wilfred Owen: "In poetry we call them the most glorious."

2011-06-19T10:47:00.000-04:00

Wilfred Owen was a poet who was killed in the First World War, at the age of 25. If you're familiar with his poems I don't need to tell you about them. If you're not, I don't know what to say. I suppose his most famous poem is "Dulce et Decorum Est."

Recently I came across a collection of his letters, edited by John Bell (who published Owen's complete letters in 1967, and these selected letters thirty years later.) Owen's war poetry is so bitter, sharp as bayonets, shaking with rage, that I was surprised to find another side to him in his letters: light-hearted, enthusiastic, and frequently funny. Most of them were written to his mother.

When war broke out in 1914, Owen was living in France, working as an English tutor. He did not want to do this for the rest of his life; in fact, he had no clear plan for his life at all. He wrote poetry but barely allowed himself to dream of making it his career. He did not enlist until 1915, and spent over a year in officers' training. Although he had been in no hurry to join up, military life seems to have suited him well. His letters home are invariably cheerful.

On his first day in France (before reaching the front lines), he cut his thumb and joked about it being his first war wound: "I could only squeeze out a single drop of blood." Once he arrived at the Somme, the tone of his letters changes completely:

16 Jan. 1917

I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell.
I have not been at the front.
I have been in front of it.
I held an advanced post, that is a "dug-out" in the middle of No Man's Land.

We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them. Many stuck in the mud & only got out by leaving their waders, equipment and in some cases their clothes.

High explosives were dropping all around out, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes. But it was so dark that even the German flares did not reveal us.

My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.
One entrance had been blown in & blocked.
So far, the other remained.
The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn't.
Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life.
I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now slowly rising over my knees.

In the Platoon on my left the sentries over the dug-out were blown to nothing. One of these poor fellows was my first servant whom I rejected. If I had kept him he would have lived, for [officers'] servants don't do Sentry Duty.

The short, choppy sentences are also atypical for him. About a month later he wrote:

4 Feb. 1917

I have no mind to describe all the horrors of this last Tour. But it was almost [worse] than the first, because in this place my Platoon had no Dug-Outs, but had to lie in the snow under the deadly wind. By day it was impossible to stand up or even crawl about because we were behind only a little ridge screening us from the Bosches' periscope.

We had 5 Tommy's cookers between the Platoon, but they did not serve to melt the ice in the water-cans. So we suffered cruelly from thirst.

The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have landed in hospital.

. . . My feet ached until they could ache no more, and so they temporarily died. . . . The intensity of your Love reached me and kept me living. I thought of you and Mary [his sister] without a break all the time. I cannot say I felt any fear. We were all half-crazed by the buffetting of the High Explosives. I think the most unpleasant reflection that weighed on me was the impossibility of getting back any wounded, a total impossibility all day and frightfully difficult by night.

. . . I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one's own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. But to sit with them all day, all night . . . and a week later to come back and find them still sitting there, in motionless groups, THAT is what saps the "soldierly spirit."

A footnote informs us that he wrote the poem "Exposure" based on this experience. His toes gave him trouble for the rest of his life (which means, about a year and a half.)

This was the incident that got him officially diagnosed with shell-shock:

25 Apr. 1917

For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes, where at any moment a shell might put us out. I think the worst incident was one wet night when we lay up against a railway embankment. A big shell lit on the top of the bank, just 2 yards from my head. Before I awoke, I was blown in the air right away from the bank! I passed most of the following days in a railway Cutting, in a hole just big enough to lie in, and covered with corrugated iron. My brother officer of B Coy [Company], 2/Lt Gaukroger lay opposite in a similar hole. But he was covered with earth, and no relief will ever relieve him, nor will his Rest be a 9-days Rest. I think that the terribly long time we stayed unrelieved was unavoidable; yet it makes us feel bitterly towards those in England who might relieve us, and will not.

After this he remained in hospital for several months and was eventually sent back to England. Nonetheless, he tries to downplay his "illness" in his letters. This one is to his sister:

8 May 1917

You must not entertain the least concern about me because I am here. I certainly was shaky when I first arrived. But today Dr. Browne was hammering at my knees without any response whatever. (At first I used to execute the High Kick whenever he touched them) i.e. Reflex Actions quite normal. You know it was not the Bosche that worked me up, nor the explosives, but it was living so long by poor old Cock Robin (as we used to call 2/Lt Gaukroger), who lay not only near by, but in various places around and about, if you understand. I hope you don't!

In June 1917 he was sent to Craiglockhart, an old hospital near Edinburgh which was used for cases of severe shell-shock. (I recommend Pat Barker's historical novel Regeneration for a description of the Craiglockhart experience - Owen is a minor character.) At Craiglockhart occurred the defining event of Owen's life: he met poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon was seven years older than Owen; he had enlisted even before war was declared, and his berserker courage and ferocity in combat had earned him the nickname "Mad Jack" and the Military Cross (Britain's third-highest medal.) In 1917 he turned against the war and wrote an open letter condemning it ("I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest.") He would have been court-martialed for treason if his friend, fellow poet Robert Graves, hadn't convinced the higher-ups that Sassoon was temporarily insane - suffering from shell-shock - so they sent him to Craiglockhart instead.

Very soon Owen came to idolize him. He showed Sassoon his poems; the great man liked some of them! and arranged for him to meet various publishing figures, including Robert Ross (friend of Oscar Wilde, whom I've blogged about before.) Soon a book of Owen's poetry was underway, although it did not get published until after his death. We're told that five of his poems were published in magazines during his lifetime; moreover, when he attended Robert Graves' wedding he was introduced to everyone as "Owen, the poet." On a later visit to London he writes to his mother that he had "more invitations to lunch & dinner than I could manage!"

Despite his joy and pride, he was still in the Army, and his shell-shock had been pronounced cured. Various people were trying to get him non-combat assignments . . . but it seems that he wanted to go back to the front. He felt it would give his anti-war statements credibility; or, as he once put it: "I hate washy pacifists as temperamentally as I hate whiskied prussianists [i.e., war-mongers]. Therefore I feel that I must first get some reputation of gallantry before I could successfully and usefully declare my principles."

On August 31, 1918 he was sent back to France. His letters to his mother insist that he is happy and safe (when he was safe), but to Sassoon he writes:

You said it would be a good thing for my poetry if I went back.
That is my consolation for feeling a fool. This is what shells scream at me every time: Haven't you got the wits to keep out of this?

(Sassoon had already been sent back to France, wounded again, and sent back home.)

On October 3, 1918 Owen was awarded the Military Cross for "conspicuous gallantry," which in this case included capturing a German machine-gun nest. He wrote to his mother:

I came out in order to help these boys - directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first.

Once again, his letter to Sassoon strikes a slightly different note:

I cannot say I suffered anything; having let my brain grow dull: That is to say my nerves are in perfect order.
It is a strange truth: that your [poem] Counter-Attack frightened me much more than the real one: though the boy by my side, shot through the head, lay on top of me, soaking my shoulder, for half an hour.
. . . I shall feel again as soon as I dare, but now I must not. I don't take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters.

His last letter to his mother, written October 31, 1918, is not much different from his other letters. He tells her that he's safe and happy:

There is no danger down here, or if any, it will be well over before you read these lines.
I hope you are as warm as I am; as serene in your room as I am here; . . . Of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.

Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918. His family received news of his death one week later, while the bells were ringing for the Armistice.

This is why I'm anti-war.

Infighting, Part 1: Transsexual vs. Transgender

2011-06-09T13:15:00.001-04:00

Visitors to my blog may notice that it's described as "a transgender blog." You may also notice that I often don't write about trans-related stuff. There are two or three reasons for this:

I spend a lot of time thinking about my gender. But my thoughts and feelings have not yet been organized into words.
I spend a lot of time thinking about my gender, but I almost wish I didn't have to. I wish I could take it for granted. Non-trans people don't have to constantly interrogate their gender.
I spend a lot of time thinking about my gender, but I recognize that it is more interesting to me than it is to anyone else. And since this blog is a public document, I do try to write about things that other people might possibly be interested in.

Now that I have finally come out as trans, I want to be out. But I know that doesn't mean I have to only talk about trans stuff. I'm still working this all out.

Nonetheless, there are times when I have something to say about transgender. And reading this article generated one of those times. The basis of the article is the question, "What is the difference between 'transgender' and 'transsexual'?" (Incidentally, the word "transsexual" was originally spelled wrong in the headline. Kind of a bad sign.)

Obviously there is a difference between "transgender" and "transsexual." But the definitions given in this article do not sit well with me at all. Basically we are told that "transsexual" denotes real trans people (except when they're not - more on this below) and "transgender" denotes people who are faking it, who aren't serious, who are just playing dress-up games and don't deserve any respect. This is where I have a problem.

The official author of the article is one Tammye Nash, but the main content - the actual explanation of the difference between "transsexual" and "transgender" - is a letter written to her by Michi Eyre. Ms. Eyre is notably polite and restrained in her comments. Many "transsexual" people get a lot ruder than this. I do want to give her credit for that. Here is her definition:

A transsexual is someone who IDENTIFIES as the gender that is different than their gender assigned at birth and is currently going through medical processes, not necessarily surgical, to live their life in their identified gender.

Someone who is transgender may or may not identify as their birth gender but may contain some kind of gender variant aspect to them. This includes crossdressers, transvestites, drag performers, femme boys, butch women and gender queers.

First of all, there's a problem with lumping all those people under the "transgender" umbrella. For example, many butch women do not identify as trans. Second, I would be inclined to say that someone who is transgender does not identify as their [socially-assigned] birth gender. But I could be wrong. Finally, I want you to note her inclusion of "gender [sic] queers." Usually it's spelled "genderqueer," and it generally refers to people who don't identify as either male or female. Nowhere in her article does she acknowledge the existence of more than two genders.

Anyway, she goes on to say:

As a writer, the general rule I use to identify someone as transsexual is:
The person has stated they have obtained gender reassignment surgery, or
The person has stated they are on a hormone replacement therapy, or
The person has obtained a legal name change to a name congruent with their gender, or
The person has changed the gender marker on their state identification or passport card.

I have done one of those things (number 3.) At this time in my life I have no interest in doing numbers 1 and 2. It would be cool to do number 4, but unfortunately the correct gender marker for my gender does not exist in our culture. However, I don't identify as "transsexual" and her guidelines make me a little nervous. I also find it a little odd that she makes a distinction between people who are on "hormone replacement therapy" and people who take hormones without medical supervision. According to her, it is mostly "cross-dressers" who do this . . . and somehow it proves that they're not serious.

She goes on to make a distinction between "gender identity" and "gender expression." Those are two terms which often get used in anti-discrimination legislation. According to her, transsexual people have a "gender identity" (which is why she capitalized "identifies" in her definition.) Transgender people only have "gender expression," which is just pretending. So she advocates throwing those people under the bus:

Most of the objection we hear from legislators and from employers to trans protections laws is around the “gender expression” section, especially where it comes to access to sex-segregated public accommodations (public restrooms and locker rooms) as well as transitioning on the job and the impact such a transition can have on the workplace. One of the biggest objections from employers are employees who decide to change their gender of dress and mannerism back and forth (or “flip flopping” as I call it).

I wonder how she thinks that transsexual people will be able to transition if employers have the right to object to their employees transitioning. Also, anti-discrimination legislation would prevent things like people getting fired for cross-dressing in private. No matter what you think about cross-dressing, employers should have no right to fire people for things they do on their own time.

And then there's the "flip flopping." Let me quote Ms. Eyre's description of herself from her website:

Michi is transsexual due to medical reasons. She has lived for many years in a mixed role and is now living and working fully in her female identity. [italics mine]

A mixed role? How exactly is that different from "flip-flopping?" Or indeed, how is that different from cross-dressing, which Ms. Eyre goes on about at length. Transsexual people do not want to be mistaken for cross-dressers. Got it. The thing is, that at any time while she was living her "mixed role," Ms. Eyre could have been told that she was just pretending, that she didn't really mean it, that this was just her "gender expression" and not her "gender identity." Not only that, but she also mentions that she is pre-op. In some circles that would disqualify her from being an authentic transsexual.

My point is that you can't go around telling people that their gender is inauthentic. You just can't. Ms. Eyre wants to believe that a person's gender identity can be proved with a piece of paper, a revised birth certificate, a doctor's note, or maybe a physical inspection (oops, not for pre-ops! Or most trans men.) But your gender identity is how you feel on the inside. It ain't no piece of paper. Anyone's gender identity can be challenged. So if you don't want your own gender to be questioned, you should respect the gender of others.

Furthermore, what's the problem with "gender expression" anyway? What's the problem with "gender variance?" What's the problem with cross-dressing? (For the record, I never cross-dressed.) So a guy wants to put on a dress, big deal. Women are allowed to wear pants. I think we would all be better off if our society's gender roles were less restrictive.

The funny thing is that there are a certain number of transsexual people who have very restrictive views of gender. And as I mentioned above, many of them are much ruder about it than Michi Eyre was in her letter. I could list the anti-transgender attitudes I've encountered from transsexual people on the Internet, but that would turn into a whole other blog post.

I'll just mention one, since I referred to it above: when is a transsexual not a transsexual? There are some people who have completed their medical transition and proclaim that now they're "real women" (as far as I know it's always women who say this), they're not trans anymore and anyone who does identify as trans has something wrong with them. At the same time, some of them insist that they are the only real trans people and anybody who doesn't go through complete medical treatment is faking it. It's kind of sad.

Why I'm Not an Atheist

2011-06-03T15:06:00.000-04:00

Recently a friend caused me to watch an episode of Bill Moyers' show on PBS, Faith and Reason. It was an interview with Dutch writer Anne Provoost, whom I had never heard of before, but she brought up some thought-provoking stuff. The specific topic of this interview was her retelling of the Noah's Ark story. She wants to know why God would destroy almost all life on earth, just because he didn't like the way people were behaving. Didn't he create all these humans and animals? If they don't function according to spec, isn't that a flaw in the original design?

At one point Moyers asks, "can you trust a God who doesn't get it right?" and Provoost replies:

Why would you trust a God that at this moment, doesn't come back to give us the right book. You know, through history, he's given the Jewish people a book. And he's given the Christians a book. And he's given the Muslim books, and so there's big similarities between these books, but there's also contradictions. I would think that, you know, he needs to come back and create clarity and not let... he shouldn't let us fight over who's right. He should make it clear. So, my personal answer to your question, "Should we trust," I wouldn't.

She has a good point. All the same, I'm not an atheist. (Incidentally, Provoost is not an atheist either.) Nor am I Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. I don't have to believe in that god (and yes, the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god is pretty much all the same god.) Some people say, if he doesn't come back and tell us which of those religions has his personal seal of approval, that proves there is no god. I say, maybe it's not "his" job to provide a book with all the answers.

The other point that people use to disprove the existence of god is the question, why does he let good people suffer? I actually think that this is an example of anthropomorphism. God is not human. God is not a person. We don't ask, "why does god allow trees to be cut down?" "Why does god allow our pets to run away and get hit by cars?" "Why does god allow factory farming?" Most of us accept those as valid forms of destruction . . . and even if we don't, there still seems to be an assumption that god is supposed to look out for people first. If god were a tree, or a cat, or a cow (and god has been all of those things), wouldn't it have to protect those above all?

We think of ourselves as the Chosen People, or rather the Chosen Species. Which brings up another comment by Provoost:

Now what strikes me is that never ever in history do you have a group of people that says well here's us, but that group there, these other people, they are chosen. So, whenever you have a proclamation of being chosen, it's always a self-defining process. It's always the people who are chosen who say they are chosen. They never say that about the other. They always say that about themselves.

I find that very interesting because in my experience, we as individuals do often feel that other people are better than us, other people are special and we are sinners, we are the bad ones. And yet she's right that no group of people, as far as I know, have defined themselves as the un-Chosen. It's as if we can only be rejected by God individually. (Now, in the recent Rapture-that-didn't-happen many of us identified with those who would not be saved. But if we really believed in that stuff we wouldn't say that, I don't think.)

I'm actually a Daoist. The Dao fulfills many of the same functions as what people call "God," but it's not a person. It's not an old white man with a long beard who lives up in the sky. It doesn't talk. There is an official book of Daoism - the Dao De Jing, which means "Book of the Way (Dao) and the Power (De)" - but it doesn't feel right to call it a "Bible." And although Daoists are just as attached to their own religion as everybody else, I don't think any Daoist would say that the Dao De Jing contains The One and Only Truth. In fact the very first line of the book says "the Dao that can be put into words is not the real Dao," thereby casting doubt on its own validity as a sacred text.

Like all religions, Daoism clearly defines right and wrong. But one thing it's lacking is punishment. The Dao (being neither a vengeful nor a jealous god) never sets out to punish anybody. Perhaps the best Daoist metaphor for evil is "swimming against the current." If you're out of harmony with the Dao, that's bad. If you're out of harmony with the Dao, bad things are more likely to happen to you - but not because you are bad, just because you're not behaving the right way. Here's another good analogy: if you drop a rock on your foot, it hurts. That's not a punishment. It's just gravity.

So. I'm not an atheist because I believe that there is something out there, a guiding force in the universe. A power that is the universe. It's not all random. But it's not focused on humanity either - neither to exalt us nor to punish us. It's bigger than that.

Here are the video and transcript of the Provoost interview.

Starvation

2011-05-29T14:46:00.000-04:00

I have a slightly unusual eating disorder: when I get stressed out, I can't eat. It seems unusual because when I hear people talk about anorexia, they define it as the false belief that one needs to lose weight. I don't believe that I'm fat. I've never "dieted" in my life. I'm just not hungry. Nor do I have issues about certain foods (known as orthorexia.) I'm not disturbed by the sight of other people eating (although I guess it is a little bit gross, when you think about it.)

It's only recently that I realized this is an eating disorder - and ironically, the thing that tipped me off is reading some blog posts by people who eat more when they're stressed out, instead of less. They acknowledge that it's not just about the food, or about feeling hungry - there's something else going on. And I thought, "Yeah, obviously I am hungry. And when I'm not in a bad mood I eat well. So there's something overriding my natural desire to eat."

One of my cats died recently, and as he became seriously ill he stopped eating. It made me think about my own loss of appetite and my suicidal tendencies. It's a means of cutting myself off from the world, going on strike, refusing to engage. It's an act of rebellion but also . . . a capitulation.

My poor little kitty really was on his way out. There was no reason for him to eat. But I'm still here and I have as much right to be here as anyone, although it's hard sometimes for me to remember that. I want to stay on top of this thing.

Animal Stories

2011-05-17T14:22:00.000-04:00

I grew up with animals - mainly goats, but pigs, cats, chickens, and sheep also played formative roles in my childhood. Imaginary animals did too; that is to say, animals which I had never met in real life.

One of the first books I remember reading showed all the different varieties of cat, and I made up a long series of stories about the Queen of the Cats. She was half Persian and half Angora (based on the pictures in the book, those seemed to me to be the most regal species of cats.) I had heard that cats had nine lives, so I decided that the Queen of the Cats should have nine times nine lives, and the magic of this concept was in no way impeded by the fact that I didn't know how much "nine times nine" actually was. Most of my stories dealt with her running through her nine-times-nine lives: dying in various ways and then coming back to life and triumphing over her enemies. Children do have gruesome imaginations, don't they?

Goats also featured in these stories somehow, although I can't remember if I took the goats that I knew and turned them into cats, or if they were still goats. As a matter of fact, goats and cats have very similar personalities: independent, stubborn, curious, and determined to get to the other side of whatever door or fence happens to be standing in their way.

Later I read The Jungle Book, and that transformed my fantasy life again. I don't recall ever pretending to be a cat, or a goat, at least not in any serious way, but I pretended to be a wolf seriously and with dedication, for a long time. At this moment I can't remember why wolves, of all animals, fascinated me so much. I should read that book again.

Animals appealed to me more than people because they never gave me shit. Also they were my role models in a way that the people around me (for whatever reasons) couldn't be. It occurs to me now that they had more personality, or more attractive personalities, than the people that I knew. I could communicate with animals much better than with people . . . and I still find that people have some extra layer of consciousness, or something, that doesn't resonate with me. I feel as if I can understand an animal simply by looking at it. People have something else going on. Or maybe it's my fear of people that stands in the way.

I also find it significant that animals seemed to have greater variety. That book of cats depicted so many different breeds of cat; The Jungle Book features several other animals besides wolves. I felt as if the human world was barren, monotonous,and at its worst, hostile. But animals came in all shapes and sizes, all different kinds. The humans I knew didn't have that much diversity.

Of course, identifying with animals was also my way of escaping gender. Gender seems to be less important for animals. I've never heard of anyone trying to force an animal to conform to strict gender roles. They have gender, as everyone knows, but they're not defined first and foremost in terms of gender. They're animals first and gendered second - so it seems to me.

In preadolescence I went from a fascination with wolves to a fascination with foxes. Sly, cunning creatures who are good at escaping from the hounds, good at practicing deception. I wanted that then; I couldn't be a wolf anymore. And in adolescence, as I recall, I gave up my animal stories altogether.

Some people seem to disapprove of "fantasy worlds." They're unrealistic? But my imaginary life with animals was realistic in its own way. Animals are real. I had never seen a wolf or an Angora cat in person - that doesn't make them any less real. We are supposed to learn, aren't we, about things outside our daily existence, our own little spot of the planet. And I needed to know that other possibilities existed.

Bosie

2011-04-15T13:04:00.000-04:00

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not a huge fan of Oscar Wilde. I think he was a damned fool. While I was reading Richard Ellmann's biography of him, I kept wondering, "What's Bosie's side of the story?" Finally I sought out a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. In fact, I ended up reading two of them, both very partial to their subject, and I have to say it's a sad state of affairs when reading a biography by an author who is totally on the person's side leaves you disliking that person even more than you did formerly.

The two biographies I read are the ones by H. Montgomery Hyde and Douglas Murray. They don't actually spend much time discussing Douglas' relationship with Wilde, and so in a sense I don't entirely feel as if I got Bosie's side of the story after all. These books devote most of their pages to Douglas' life after Wilde . . . but in a very real way there never was an "after." Wilde haunted Douglas all his life.

Well, I figured that since I read those two books I might as well get a blog post out of it. And in order to keep this post to a reasonable length I decided to focus exclusively, despite extensive temptation, on the trials with which Douglas was involved. I'm not going to tell you about his early gay activism, his eventual marriage (to a woman who may well have been bisexual), his rather dubious poetry, or the habit his rich friends had of buying magazines for him to edit and use as a vehicle for his politics, even when they completely disagreed with said politics. Nope. Just the trials. Well, most of the trials. I don't think I have room for the fake obituary trial.

Fortunately he was a litigious bastard, just like his father, so this should give a good overview of his life and attitudes.

Wilde vs. Queensberry, 1895

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas met in 1891. By 1895 they had become inseparable companions and Douglas' father, the Marquis of Queensberry, was bothered by this. Ostensibly he wanted to save his son from the depraved influence of an older homosexual man; and by the standards of his time he was justified in doing anything that might achieve this end. This is a crucial point. It doesn't matter that Queensberry was violent, abusive, and quite possibly insane. It doesn't matter that he believed himself to be surrounded by homosexuals: his father-in-law, at least two of his sons, and the patron of his older son Francis. It doesn't matter that he wrote letters to his son Alfred such as the following:

If you are my son, it is only confirming proof to me, if I needed any, how right I was to face every horror and misery I have done rather than run the risk of bringing more creatures into the world like yourself, and that was the entire and only reason of my breaking with your mother as a wife, so intensely was I dissatisfied with her as the mother of you children, and particularly yourself, whom, when quite a baby, I cried over you the bitterest tears a man ever shed, that I had brought such a creature into this world, and unwittingly had committed such a crime.

The only thing that matters is that homosexuality was "the worst of all crimes" - a phrase which is used over and over again during the Wilde trials. Or, as Queensberry put it in another letter to his son:

With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never, in my experience, have I seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. It is no wonder people are talking as they are.

To the modern mind (at least, to mine) both of those quotes are the ravings of a madman. Queensberry goes on to say that if he knew for sure that Wilde was a practicing sodomite, he would be "quite justified in shooting him on sight." He was fond of making such threats, but in this case he probably spoke the absolute truth: society considered death to be an appropriate punishment for homosexuality. (In fact, in England it was the legal punishment for sodomy until 1861.)

After harassing Wilde for several months, Queensberry finally left a card for him at his club with the words "For Oscar Wilde posing somdomite [sic]" written on it, and Wilde decided to sue him for libel. For those who don't already know, this was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Wilde was a practicing sodomite; so first of all, that meant that Queensberry's statement was not libel. And second of all, if Wilde's sexual activity became publicly known, he would go to jail for it. Which he did. What was he thinking?

Lord Alfred Douglas was eager to testify against his father, but he never really seems to have understood the nature of the case, or indeed the meaning of the term "libel." (It strikes me as strange that the abusive letters quoted above, from a father to his son, don't count as libel but the two words "posing sodomite" do.) What could he have said to help Wilde win his case? "My father is a horrible person" would have done no good, even if it were true. "Oscar Wilde and I love each other" would not have been helpful either.

There is no doubt that he saw this trial as an attack on his father, that he hoped it would provide him with some sort of vengeance, and so he egged Wilde on. But he was not allowed to testify - in fact, his name was barely mentioned at the trial, even though there's no question that the trial was all about him, and logic would suggest that he was just as guilty of sodomy as Wilde. Wilde and Douglas were inseparable companions; Wilde spent a great deal of time associating with rent boys; therefore, wouldn't Douglas have been present at many of these encounters? (Some of the rent boys did in fact testify that he participated.) Nonetheless, the magistrates all agreed that Douglas was an innocent victim who had been introduced to homosexuality by Wilde and could still be saved, if only he were removed from that pernicious influence. Douglas insisted that this was not the case, but no one wanted to listen to him. Only to his father.

Judging by Douglas' subsequent career, he believed that the courts are an appropriate venue in which to fight your personal conflicts. I gather that many people feel this way. But it is not a likeable trait.

De Profundis and Ransome 1913, Ross 1914

While he was in prison, Oscar Wilde wrote a long letter to Douglas, which he entitled De Profundis ("out of the depths.") I haven't read it, but apparently it consists of complaints and reproaches, mixed in with a sort of Christian forgiveness and sanctification of suffering. Wilde never sent this letter to Douglas; instead he gave it to Robert Ross, his friend and literary executor, with instructions that the original manuscript be sent to Douglas and a copy be retained.

In 1905, five years after Wilde's death, Ross published an abridged version of De Profundis with all references to Douglas removed. Ironically, Douglas reviewed this edition (for the magazine Motorist and Traveller, of all things) without realizing that it originated in a letter written to him. The height of irony appears in this comment:

He says that if he had been released a year sooner, as in fact he very nearly was, he would have left his prison full of rage and bitterness, and without the treasure of his new-found "Humility." I am unregenerate enough to wish that he had brought his rage and bitterness with him out of prison.

It seems that Douglas was an admirer of rage and bitterness - and in this case he did not realize how much of that rage and bitterness had been directed at him. At some point, however, he found out that De Profundis had been a letter addressed to him, which he had never seen in its entirety. He went after Robert Ross with a fury, accusing him of never sending the letter. Ross stated that he had sent Douglas a copy (not the original.) Douglas replied that he once received a letter, forwarded by Ross from Wilde, which he read a little of and then destroyed (presumably because it contained complaints about him.) Some Douglas partisans insist that this letter was not De Profundis at all. I suppose we will never know.

But in any case Douglas began an obsessive vendetta against Ross - or, to put it in his terms, he was being mistreated by Ross, partly because of their long-standing rivalry over Wilde, and partly because Ross was still a practicing homosexual, whereas Douglas had renounced homosexuality. It's interesting to note that both Douglas and his father believed they were being persecuted by a homosexual conspiracy, but Douglas was explicit about the fact that "Ross and his friends hate me because I used to be gay but now I've seen the light."

In 1913 Arthur Ransome (later to become known as the author of a charming series of children's books, Swallows and Amazons) published a book about Oscar Wilde. He received quite a bit of assistance from Ross, and described the full contents of De Profundis - without naming Douglas, merely saying that it referred to a friend whom Wilde felt had betrayed him.

Douglas sued Ransome for libel. He was caught between a rock and a hard place. He was upset because De Profundis portrayed him as the man who had destroyed Oscar Wilde. He wanted to assert that he loved Wilde and Wilde loved him - but unfortunately, he couldn't prove that without opening himself up to accusations of homosexuality. He lost the libel case against Ransome and redoubled his attacks on Robert Ross. To make matters worse, Ross had donated the original manuscript of De Profundis to the British Museum, and when Douglas tried to get them to hand it over to him, on the grounds that it was a letter to him and therefore his property, they would not play.

Douglas had begun channeling his father, harassing Ross the same way Queensbury had harassed Wilde, threatening to "horsewhip" him (an expression his father loved to use) and telling everyone that Ross was a sodomite and child molester. Ross finally sued him for libel in 1914. But, like Wilde, he could not convincingly deny that he really was a practicing homosexual, and he lost the libel case. Douglas was jubilant; but there were a few clouds on his happiness. For one thing, Ross, unlike Wilde, did not get sent to prison, even though sodomy was still illegal. For another thing, Ross' friends and admirers rallied around him, paying his court costs (in England the loser of a libel suit usually has to pay the winner's costs as well as his own) and presenting him with a testimonial prize of £700. Douglas was incensed by this example of the homosexual mafia protecting one of their own. (Despite his friends' support, Ross died in 1918 at the early age of 49.)

The Trial that Wasn't: Aleister Crowley, 1913

I do have to mention one trial that didn't happen. Douglas found out that the notorious Aleister Crowley had written a fairly explicit poem about his relationship with Wilde. He wanted to sue him for libel but was dissuaded. Douglas' nephew later wrote, "In this he was well advised. Aleister Crowley was a rich man and an experienced litigant, with a power of invective that left nothing to be desired." Crowley and Douglas had a lot in common: they were poets, bisexuals, full of invective, and eager to sue people. Furthermore, both of them inherited large amounts of money, spent it all in a relatively short period of time, and spent the rest of their lives scrambling for a source of income which didn't involve doing any actual work.

Salomé, 1918

When Oscar Wilde was first sent to prison, Douglas defended their love in many letters written to public figures and newspapers. He stood by him . . . in his own way. But later on, as I've mentioned, he renounced homosexuality and gradually came to hate Wilde. De Profundis must have had a lot to do with it. Never one to do things by halves, Douglas began denouncing Wilde and unnatural sexual practices at every possible opportunity, even testifying in a trial that had nothing to do with him personally.

Unfortunately I can't take the time to go into detail about the case of Maud Allan vs. Noel Pemberton Billing. I really regret this, because it's a fascinating story, combining wartime propaganda, homophobia, and outright lies of the sort so dear to today's homophobic, jingoistic conservatives. Suffice it to say that Billing accused Allan of sexual perversion, based on the fact that she was performing in Oscar Wilde's Salomé, and she sued him for libel.

Douglas turned up to testify as an expert witness that yes, anyone who admired Wilde or his work was a pervert. Then he announced:

I think he had a diabolical influence on everyone he met. I think he is the greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years. He was the agent of the devil in every possible way.

He also published a book called Oscar Wilde and Myself, his reply to De Profundis, which was filled with insults and contumely.

Winston Churchill vs. Douglas, 1923

Lord Alfred Douglas had other things to worry about besides the Lavender Menace. He also fought bravely against that equally devious and malevolent foe, the Jews. (It's interesting to note that his two biographers express different levels of condemnation for his anti-Semitism. Hyde, who was born in 1907, writes that Douglas was not anti-Semitic "in the sense that the term is commonly understood today. . . . [it was] a belief in financial conspiracies, and not a rabidly racial matter as under the Nazis." Meanwhile, Murray, who appears to have been born around 1980, flatly states that "one particular aspect of Douglas's [writing] shocks today far more than it did then and that is its anti-Semitism. Douglas was convinced by such stories as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion . . .")

In any case, Douglas believed that certain high-ranking government figures were in the pay of the Jews. One of the people he accused of being a Zionist patsy was Winston Churchill, and he repeated his conspiracy theories until Churchill finally sued him for libel. Douglas lost the case and the legal system appears to have lost patience with him. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

When he went to prison, Douglas was 53 years old. Oscar Wilde had been 41 when he served two years in prison. They both were sentenced to hard labor, and both found their health severely damaged by the experience. Wilde lived for only two years after he was released, but Douglas stuck around for another 20 years. He was a changed man though, much less combative (which does not mean "not combative at all.") Like Wilde, Douglas wrote a long piece of work in prison, but he named his composition In Excelsis - "in the highest" - a counterpoint to Wilde's De Profundis.

At the end of his life, Douglas' feelings about Wilde softened again. In his last book on the subject, Oscar Wilde, A Summing-Up, published in 1940, he returned to the 1895 trial and stated that "if he had had the courage he and Wilde should have stood up together in the box, openly witnessing to what they believed in: homosexual passion." (This is Murray's paraphrase; I have not been able to read the book myself.) It is a touching declaration of loyalty. But it demonstrates that Douglas still, despite all his experience, had not the faintest idea of what a libel trial was about. He thought only of the tragic theatrical gesture. Or, as he put it:

Between the two of us, neither of us being without brains and courage, we might have made a certain amount of history. I don't believe he would have got off even so, but we would have at least "put up a terrific show," and the result could not possibly have been worse than it was.

Brains!

In this book Douglas also argued that homosexuality should be decriminalized (this did not happen in England until 1967), and he closed the book with a sonnet he had written to Wilde in 1903, three years after his death:

Forgetfulness

Alas! that Time should war against Distress,
And numb the sweet ache of remembered loss,
And give for sorrow's gold the indifferent dross
Of calm regret or stark forgetfulness.
I should have worn eternal mourning dress
And nailed my soul to some perennial cross.
And made my thoughts like restless waves that toss
On the wild sea's intemperate wilderness.

But lo! came Life, and with its painted toys
Lured me to play again like any child.
O pardon me this weak inconstancy.
May my soul die if in all present joys,
Lapped in forgetfulness or sense-beguiled
Yea, in my mirth, if I prefer not thee.

"Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold"

2011-04-05T11:17:00.000-04:00

One of my top three favorite writers, Diana Wynne Jones, died recently. She was 76 years old and had been fighting lung cancer for over a year. It's sad to think that we will have no more of her books, but at least her reputation is assured. Aside from the slight problem of no one having heard of her. I wrote about her books on my old blog.

For some reason the book that I found myself turning to is a favorite, but not the favorite of her works. Maybe reading my favorite one (Fire and Hemlock) would be too sad. Instead I picked up A Tale of Time City.

Time City exists outside of time. The inhabitants can travel to any time period, and they keep records of all human history. They also sell information to people who live 'in history," such as weather forecasts, and arrange family reunions in Time City, where you can meet your ancestors and your descendants. For a fee, of course.

Time City is a peaceful place, but it has a problem. The technology that keeps the city separate from the rest of time and space was created so long ago that nobody remembers how it works, and now it appears to be breaking down. But that's not where the book starts:

The train journey was horrible. There was a heat wave that September in 1939, and the railway authorities had fastened all the windows shut so that none of the children packed onto the train could fall out. There were several hundred of them, and nearly all of them screamed when they saw a cow. They were being sent away from London from the bombing, and most of them had no idea where milk came from.

One of the children on that train is eleven-year-old Vivian Smith. Her parents are sending her to stay with a relative she's never met before. She's terrified . . . but she "had thought of every single thing that possibly could go wrong except the one that actually did." Suddenly she finds herself in Time City, kidnapped by two boys who believe she's the key to repairing their technology. Vivian swears she knows nothing about it. But does she?

I don't know why I like this book so much. (Incidentally, Jones herself was only five when World War II broke out, but according to Wikipedia she was also evacuated from London.) Probably it's the way she keeps the suspense going continually, while at the same time throwing in all kinds of little world-building details, like when the boys decide to give Vivian a bedroom that will make her feel at home, and put her in the Ancient Egyptian suite. Her characters for the most part muddle through - I do enjoy books where nobody knows what they're doing. Or maybe it's the fact that there are no cows in Time City or in London.

As a writer Diana Wynne Jones did have one flaw, and that was endings. Even in her published works it took her a while to get the hang of an ending. In this book it's not so much the ending itself that bothers me as the explanation. I believe that I understand how it all worked, but the explanation given by the characters makes no sense at all. (There's actually a typo near the end, which makes me think that whole passage was affected by an editing glitch.) But that just goes to show what a good writer she was, in my opinion, that even with this flaw her books are still wonderful.

The title of this post is a quote from Milton; it doesn't appear in the book but it is definitely related. Rest in peace, Diana.

Gay Poetry

2011-03-29T11:30:00.001-04:00

Recently I came across my battered copy of The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, edited by Stephen Coote. It's a striking collection. The introduction is also worth reading, as an overview of the LGB experience in Western history. (He doesn't really mention the T's.) For example, the early Christian era was surprisingly tolerant of homosexuality. Coote tells this amusing story about a certain Archbishop of Canterbury:

In 1102 the Council of London wanted to make the public aware of how serious 'sodomy' was (evidently they weren't) and to insist on it being confessed as a sin. This was the edict Anselm quashed, declaring, rather oddly for an archbishop, that sodomy was so widespread that nobody was embarrassed by it anyway.

Many of the poems in this book I cannot share with you, because I don't want this blog to be X-rated. The ancient Greek and Roman ones are perhaps the most shocking - if you had any doubts, understand now that "Platonic" love does not mean what everybody thinks it means. When I hear people say that true civilization originated in classical Greece, I wonder if they've ever read any of these poems. Although to be fair, the Romans (not so much the Greeks) spent a lot of time complaining about the increase in sexual perversion and the loss of good old-fashioned family values. And they described these sexual perversions in minute and accurate detail, almost as if they had personal experience in the matter. (Incidentally, one of Juvenal's satires, aka rants, describes a marriage between two men.)

Anyway. Here is a poem by Meleager, a Greek who was born in what is now the country of Jordan, in the 1st century BCE (translated by Peter Whigham):

At 12 o'clock in the afternoon

in the middle of the street -

Alexis.

Summer had all but brought the fruit

to its perilous end:

& the summer sun & that boy's look

did their work on me.

Night hid the sun.

Your face consumes my dreams.

Others feel sleep as feathered rest;

mine but in flame refigures

your image lit in me.

Most of the poems in this book were written by men, but I do think the editor made an effort to include women. The second poet listed is Sappho (Homer being the first) but then he has to skip almost 2,000 years to present us with some love poems by anonymous medieval women, and a lesbian Troubadour named Bieris de Romans. Unfortunately he doesn't include the multi-talented Aphra Behn, who lived in the 17th century. Here's one of her most well-known poems:

To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me,
Imagined More Than Woman

Fair lovely Maid, or if that Title be
Too weak, too Feminine for Nobler thee,
Permit a Name that more Approaches Truth:
And let me call thee, Lovely Charming Youth.
This last will justifie my soft complaint,
While that may serve to lessen my constraint;
And without Blushes I the Youth persue,
When so much beauteous Woman is in view.
Against thy Charms we struggle but in vain
With thy deluding Form thou giv'st us pain,
While the bright Nymph betrays us to the Swain.
In pity to our Sex sure thou wert sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou'd - thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest Flowers believes
A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.

Thou beauteous Wonder of a different kind,
Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis join'd;
When e'er the Manly part of thee, wou'd plead
Thou tempts us with the Image of the Maid,
While we the noblest Passions do extend
The Love to Hermes, Aphrodite the Friend.

Another one he doesn't mention is Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720). Here's an amusing excerpt from:

The white mouse's petition to Lamira the Right Hon'ble
The Lady Ann Tufton now Countess of Salisbury

With all respect and humble duty
And passing every mouse in Beauty
With fur more white than garden lillies
And eyes as bright as any Phillis
I sue to wear Lamira's fetters
And live the envy of my betters
When I receive her soft caresses
And creeping near her lovely tresses
Their glossy brown from my reflection
Shall gain more lustre and perfection
And to her bosom if admitted
My color there will be so fitted
That no distinction could discover
My station to a jealous Lover.

(The full text can be found here.)

I encountered Behn and Finch in Emma Donoghue's book Passions Between Women. Although I haven't read it, Donoghue has also edited a collection of lesbian poetry called What Sappho Would Have Said: Four Centuries Of Love Poems Between Women. (That is actually the UK title; the US title is the much less poetic Poems Between Women: Four Centuries Of Love, Romantic Friendship And Desire.)

As I mentioned above, Greece and Rome, the cradle of Western civilization, celebrated the sexual love of men for beautiful teenage boys. (Coote discusses the problematic aspects of this, as well as the concurrent condemnation of sexual activity between women.) Christianity gradually criminalized homosexuality, but still tolerated passionate expressions of non-sexual love between men or women. This continued for the next five hundred years. As always, Shakespeare is a good example:

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The 19th century was a strange era. At its beginning, same-gender love was still revered. When Tennyson wrote "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," in 1849, he was thinking of a man he had loved. Characters as different as Lord Byron (best known for his scandalous intrigues with women, including his half-sister) and Henry Thoreau wrote love poems to young men. In 1869 the word "homosexual" was invented, and by century's end the new science of psychology had "proved" that all same-gender love was tainted with sexuality and therefore evil. From then on (which has really only been about one hundred years), one could only proclaim one's love for someone of the same gender if one was willing to be seen as openly, flamboyantly, or at least predominately, "homosexual."

However, the good news is that the gay rights movement started in the 19th century as well. As far as I know, its progenitor in the English-speaking world was Edward Carpenter. I've written about him before. Although it's rather preachy, I have to include a section of his long prose poem, Towards Democracy:

The love of men for each other - so tender, heroic, constant ;

That has come all down the ages, in every clime, in every nation,

Always so true, so well assured of itself, overleaping barriers of age, of rank, of distance,

Flag of the camp of Freedom;

The love of women for each other - so rapt, intense, so confiding-close, so burning-passionate,

To unheard deeds of sacrifice, of daring and devotion, prompting;

And (not less) the love of men for women, and of women for men - on a newer greater scale than it has hitherto been conceived;

Grand, free and equal - gracious yet ever incommensurable -

The soul of Comradeship glides in.

[here follow some romantic vignettes of same-sex affection]

And this is of a boy who sat in school.

The masters talked about Greek accidence and quadratic equations, and the boys talked about lobs and byes and bases and goals; but of that which was nearest to his heart no one said a word.

It was laughed at - or left unspoken.

Yet when the boy stood near some of his comrades in the cricket-field or sat next them in school, he stocked and stammered, because of some winged glorious thing which stood or sat between him and them.

And again the laughter came, because he had forgotten what he was doing; and he shrank into himself, and the walls round him grew, so that he was pent and lonely like a prisoner.

Till one day to him weeping, Love full-grown, all-glorious, pure, unashamed, unshackled, came like a god into his little cell, and swore to break the barriers.

And when the boy through his tears asked him how he would do that, Love answered not, but turning drew with his finger on the walls of the cell.

And as he drew, lo! beneath his finger sprang all forms of beauty, an endless host - outlines and colors of all that is, transfigured:

And, as he drew, the cell-walls widened - a new world rose - and folk came trooping in to gaze,

And the barriers had vanished.

Wonderful, beautiful, the Soul that knits the Body's life passed in,

And the barriers had vanished.

Everywhere a new motive of life dawns.

With the liberation of Love, and with it of Sex, with the sense that these are things - and the joy of them - not to be dreaded or barred, but to be made use of, wisely and freely, as a man makes use of his most honored possession,

Comes a new gladness:

The liberation of a Motive greater than Money,

And the only motive perhaps that can finally take precedence of Money.

(The full text can be found here.)

For a less idealistic view of gay life, here's C.P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard):

He Asked About the Quality

He left the office where he’d been given
a trivial, poorly paid job
(something like eight pounds a month, including bonuses) —
left at the end of the dreary work
that kept him bent all afternoon,
came out at seven and walked off slowly,
idling his way down the street. Good-looking,
and interesting: showing as he did that he’d reached
his full sensual capacity.
He’d turned twenty-nine the month before.

He idled his way down the main street
and the poor side-streets that led to his home.

Passing in front of a small shop that sold
cheap and flimsy things for workers,
he saw a face inside, a figure
that compelled him to go in, and he pretended
he wanted to look at some colored handkerchiefs.

He asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs
and how much they cost, his voice choking,
almost silenced by desire.
And the answers came back in the same mood,
distracted, the voice hushed,
offering hidden consent.

They kept on talking about the merchandise —
but the only purpose: that their hands might touch
over the handkerchiefs, that their faces, their lips,
might move close together as though by chance —
a moment’s meeting of limb against limb.

Quickly, secretly, so the shop owner sitting at the back
wouldn’t realize what was going on.

And last of all, I present Christopher Isherwood:

On His Queerness

When I was young and wanted to see the sights,
They told me: 'Cast an eye over the Roman Camp
If you care to.
But plan to spend most of your day at the Aquarium -
Because, after all, the Aquarium -
Well, I mean to say, the Aquarium -
Till you've seen the Aquarium you ain't seen nothing.'

So I cast my eye over
The Roman Camp -
And that old Roman Camp,
That old, old Roman Camp
Got me
Interested.

So that now, near closing-time,
I find that I still know nothing -
And am not even sorry that I know nothing -
About fish.

Carnival

2011-03-15T13:38:00.000-04:00

Someone asked me why I didn't blog about Mardi Gras. As far as I can tell, if you're doing it right you have no clear memories of Mardi Gras. It's all a blur of brightly colored beads, screaming, slightly less brightly colored floats, music, and multicolored flashing lights. I didn't attain that level of Nirvana, but I had enough fun to be thoroughly tired out long before the Blue Parade rolled. Got some good throws though, including two strings of glass beads.

I hear that permanent residents of New Orleans hate Mardi Gras. This was only my second Carnival season as a resident, but I foresee trouble ahead. Or, as my boyfriend put it, staring at the huge pile of beads on our living room floor, "If we continue to live here I don't see how I can keep doing this every year."

Krazy Kat: "Watta woil, watta woil."

2011-03-10T16:22:00.000-05:00

I'm here to share with you another of my favorite things: the Krazy Kat comic strip, by George Herriman. It's hard for me to describe things that I love. I mean, squee!!! The surrealistic art, the gentle yet twisted sense of humor, the unique dialect . . . I don't know how he did it. Maybe that's why I can't describe it? Anyway.

Krazy Kat was created around 1913 and ran until the artist's death in 1944. The thing that really endears Krazy to me is that s/he is androgynous. As far as I can recall, Herriman always referred to the Kat as "he." However, the editor of the book Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman says that it was sometimes "he" and sometimes "she." He also gives this quote from Herriman, discussing the Kat's gender:

I don't know. I fooled around with it once; began to think the Kat is a girl - even drew up some strips with her being pregnant. It wasn't the Kat any longer . . . Then I realized Krazy was something like a sprite, an elf. They have no sex. So that Kat can't be a he or a she.

The central theme of Krazy Kat is the love triangle between Kat, mouse and dog. Incidentally, mouse and dog are definitely male - so if Krazy were male too, that makes them all queer. And since the expression of love in the comic consists of mouse hitting Kat in the head with a brick, it's kinky too.

The characters in Krazy Kat have their own unique language - for example, "what a world" is pronounced "watta woil." Krazy might have more of an accent than the others, but they do it too. George Herriman was born in New Orleans, and some people have suggested that this is a New Orleanian accent. I don't know if it is or not. But one thing is true: in New Orleans the Herriman family was black. When George was six years old they moved to California and somewhere along the way they became white.

I believe that six is old enough to understand the concept of race, to know what race you are - and more importantly, to remember any darker-skinned members of your family who might have been around. There has been a lot of speculation as to whether or not Herriman knew he was passing for white. His daughter wrote on his death certificate that both of George Herriman's parents were born in France, but this is false. Did he lie to his own children about his background? Had his parents lied to him?

A black man would not have been hired as a newspaper cartoonist in the early 20th century. A black man could not have worked alongside white newspaper men: they seem to have been a rowdy bunch but some things were beyond the pale (as it were.) Herriman's co-workers thought of him as an eccentric guy who didn't talk much about himself and always kept his hat on indoors. (He did that in order to hide his possibly-kinky hair, which suggests to me that he must have known what he was hiding.) They called him "The Greek," which was meant to indicate that no one knew what his ethnic background was.

Apparently he did once tell someone that his family was Creole in origin and he thought he might have had some Negro blood. What would it have been like to make that admission? Was it the equivalent of hinting at homosexuality, or transsexuality? There's no question in my mind that one of the things that draws me to Krazy Kat is the unspoken secrets.

The other arresting aspect of Krazy Kat is the scenery. Many people have believed that Herriman made it up; but no. It is based on Coconino County, Arizona, where Herriman frequently stayed on the Navajo reservation. He said it was his favorite place on earth. I wonder if he was aware of the Native American tradtions of transgendered, "two-spirit" people - certainly Krazy is one of them. I also wonder if the reason he liked the reservation so much is that it was an escape from the white world, where he could go without revealing his black ancestry.

The great thing about art is that people can read into it whatever they want. It's never just one thing. Which also means that it has an existence of its own, beyond any single interpretation. Like that story about the blind men and the elephant. Art is an elephant. So is life.

From Wikimedia Commons. (Krazy Kat, not being owned by Walt Disney, is in the public domain.)

Attis, Agdistis, and Kybele

2011-02-25T13:31:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned before, I love mythology. These stories which have endured for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, so old in most cases that their authors are no longer known . . . stripped down to their most basic elements, like stones polished by the ocean. All that's left is meaning; some deep significance that speaks to us, even if we don't know why.

They have endured and they have also changed. When you think of fairy tales, do you think of Walt Disney? Or have you sought out the older versions, full of sex, violence, proactive heroines, and various other things of which the censors don't approve?

The purpose of mythology is not to teach conformity: this I believe. It is to open up to us another world - call it the collective unconscious, sacred space, the Dreaming, the shamanistic world of magic, what you will. The purpose of mythology is to say there is another world. And the fact that we feel drawn to it - those of us who feel drawn to it - proves that there is something there of value. It is not "real" but it is real.

Recently I discovered the myth of Attis and Agdistis and it has stayed with me. Here is the oldest version that we have (from Theoi.com):

"The local [Phrygian] legend about him [Attis] being this. Zeus [equated here with the Phrygian sky-god], it is said, let fall in his sleep seed upon the ground, which in course of time sent up a Daimon, with two sexual organs, male and female. They call the daimon Agdistis. But the gods, fearing Agdistis, cut off the male organ. There grew up from it an almond-tree with its fruit ripe, and a daughter of the river Sangarios, they say, took the fruit and laid it in her bosom, when it at once disappeared, but she was with child. A boy was born, and exposed, but was tended by a he-goat. As he grew up his beauty was more than human, and Agdistis fell in love with him. When he had grown up, Attis was sent by his relatives to Pessinos, that he might wed the king’s daughter. The marriage-song was being sung, when Agdistis appeared, and Attis went mad and cut off his genitals, as also did he who was giving him his daughter in marriage. But Agdistis repented of what she had done to Attis, and persuaded Zeus to grant the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay. These are the most popular forms of the legend of Attis." - Pausanias, Guide to Greece 7.17.8

So. What is it, you ask, that I like about this myth? First of all, I like it because it's transgendered. The birth of an hermaphrodite sends the gods into a tizzy. Why do they care? I don't know. Second, I like it because Agdistis suffers, but endures. And third, I like it because it is the basis of a major religious movement.

Agdistis was associated with the goddess Kybele (also spelled Cybele.) Some say that after Agdistis was castrated "she" became Kybele. But Kybele was widely known as a mother goddess; the Greeks identified her with Rhea. Does that mean that Rhea was once androgynous? One source says that Cybele was the mother of Agdistis, which makes sense insofar as she is the Great Mother, but I'm not sure if they got that right. Worship of Kybele and Attis spread from Turkey (Phrygia was in what is now Turkey) to Greece and then to Rome.

There are a couple different versions of the myth of Kybele (as opposed to Agdistis) and Attis. One says that Attis was born a "eunuch" (which probably means in modern terms that he had some kind of intersex condition) and became a priest of Kybele. He was killed by a wild boar and Kybele mourned for him. This motif is widespread throughout mythology. In any case, eunuchs - persons of unconventional gender - have always served as priests of Kybele. They were considered to be men who dressed in women's clothing and behaved in an "effeminate" way.

In 204 BCE the Sibylline oracle announced that Rome would be victorious against Hannibal if the statue of Kybele was brought from Phrygia to Rome. So they did that, and some of Kybele's eunuch priests came with her. Rome had very strict gender roles, and many people were uncomfortable with the whole idea of eunuchs and castration and all the rest of it. But they instituted the worship of Kybele and Attis nonetheless, and kept it up for at least 400 years. What did it mean to them? Why was it so popular?

Last of all, I like this story because it is only one version of the story. It is a Greek interpretation of a Turkish myth. Maybe it leaves some stuff out. Maybe it got some stuff wrong. It's not the one and only version of The Truth. It's just a story - one that resonates across time. It doesn't explain everything. It stands on its own terms.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons. This statue is from the mid 6th c. BCE and is currently located in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey.

Butch Homage: "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself"

2011-02-04T13:35:00.000-05:00

Oh, Radclyffe, Radclyffe, Radclyffe Hall. I've never read The Well of Loneliness. Is it okay for me to reject you because of your conservative political beliefs? Guess I don't get to call you John, the way your friends did.

Hall wrote "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" in 1926, shortly before starting work on The Well, and apparently it is rather like a short version of the novel. Wilhelmina Ogilvy is what Hall called a "sexually inverted woman" and what we today would call a "gender-non-conforming individual," or "transgendered." As a child she (Hall always refers to her with female pronouns) was a tomboy, which many girls are, but "she remembered insisting with tears and some temper that her real name was William and not Wilhelmina," which is not common, unless you're trans.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when this story is set, women's lives were so restricted that it's hard to tell sometimes if a woman is rebelling against her socially assigned gender role because she's trans, or because she just wants to do more than get married and have children. Of course, by the same token, "inverts" often took up the cause of feminism, not necessarily because they identified as female, but because it gave them an opportunity to demand more freedom. (Radclyffe Hall flirted briefly with feminism but I believe she ultimately rejected it.)

In the fictional Ogilvy family, William (shouldn't I call her William, if she said that was her name?) rejects the marriage market utterly. Her two feminine sisters attempt to get married and fail. After their father dies, William's womenfolk - her mother and sisters - encourage her to take over the male role and deal with all the things they don't want to be bothered with, like finances. Not that they really approve of her butchness; it's just convenient for them. She has no friends, no lovers, no one who understands her.

The years go by without any particular pleasure, and when war breaks out (World War I) William is fifty-six. She realizes that now she has a chance to do things women are not normally allowed to do: she cuts her hair short, goes up to London, and pesters the authorities until they allow her to go to France and form an ambulance brigade.

During those years Miss Ogilvy forgot the bad joke that Nature seemed to have played her. She was given the rank of a French lieutenant and she lived in a kind of blissful illusion; appalling reality lay on all sides and yet she managed to live in illusion.

Because war work is such a liberation for William, and because Hall would not have dreamed of criticizing the war, it's all presented as a great lark. There are no descriptions of battle, no deaths, none of the horrific details you can learn about in any book on the Great War. Ambulances are mentioned - because that's the only way she could experience the danger and excitement of the front - but casualties are not. (By the way, Hall based this plot point on the real-life exploits of her friend Toupie Lowther; she herself was extremely patriotic about the war, but not to the extent of risking her life for her country.)

After the war William sinks back into uselessness and misery. One day she decides to take a vacation, and chooses, seemingly at random, to visit an island off the coast of Devon. When she gets there she seems to recognize the place, and has a dream about her past life on the island, when she was a man and had a female lover. I won't give away the ending.

Trans people have two choices: to try to be as much like other people as possible, or not.

For Miss Ogilvy had found as her life went on that in this world it is better to be one with the herd, that the world has no wish to understand those who cannot conform to its stereotyped pattern.

Certainly Radclyffe Hall tried to conform as much as possible - or rather, she made a bargain with society: if I agree with you about everything else, can I live my life as a butch and lover of women? That was her choice, and I can't disagree with other people's opinions on what they personally need to do in order to survive. Hall wanted more tolerance for herself and people like her - that was her aim in writing works such as The Well of Loneliness. And yet I don't believe that conformity is what will save us.

"Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself" is the first story in The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle and published in 1992. That's 66 years after the story was written - almost a lifetime. Ironically, in 1992 lesbian publications were frequent and uncensored (usually) but butch and femme were verboten and transsexuality was still a perversion, according to lesbian-feminism and the world at large. One wonders why that is.

Here's to the day when someone who insists that their name is William and not Wilhelmina gets taken at their word.

Recommended Reading: if you're interested in the intersection of queer experience and World War I, I highly recommend the book Lesbian Empire by Gay Wachman. It is primarily about the work of lesbian writers, including Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, and the person who is probably my most favorite writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, but it discusses history and wartime propaganda too. Did you know that the Germans recruited all the homosexuals in Britain to spy for them?

Also, here's some more information on Toupie Lowther: tennis champion, fencer, decorated with the Croix de Guerre for her war work. Lowther and Hall definitely lived more active - and hopefully happier - lives than fictional characters such as Miss Ogilvy.

Life in the Trenches

2011-01-20T15:22:00.000-05:00

I was happy about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, even though it is unlikely to benefit me as a trans person. (And I have serious moral reservations about the military, but that's a separate issue.) Trans people are still banned from serving openly in the US military.

There is only one way in which this makes sense to me: if you've just had, or are planning to have, major surgery then you are probably unfit for service. However, if your transition is completed, or you're not planning to have surgery then why can't you serve? Yes, you might still have certain medical needs. But in general you would be perfectly healthy. I've been trying to find out what kinds of medical conditions you can have and still be allowed to serve. It's easy to find lists of what will disqualify you; not so easy to find out what is allowed. One thing I did learn is that being HIV positive does not seem to automatically result in a discharge. They won't allow you to enlist if you're HIV+ but if you contract it while in the service they will let you stay as long as you're medically fit. If that is true then I really don't understand why other medical needs would necessarily disqualify you. (Incidentally, according to their website, the Department of Veterans Affairs "is the largest single provider of medical care to people with HIV in the United States." Why might that be?)

As the military sees it, being trans is more of a mental health issue than a physical one. In other words, "transsexualism" is classified as a mental illness and they don't want mentally ill people. Of course, it has been more than thirty years since homosexuality was classified as a mental illness, and only now is the US military reluctantly admitting that it might be okay to let homosexual people serve. So it's not about mental illness as such - it's only about what's socially acceptable. Our society creates its own definition of "mental illness," and that definition has more to do with cultural norms than actual psychological well-being.

Even knowing all this, I was surprised to learn that military personnel can be court-martialed for cross-dressing. Yes, that's right, the US military has nothing more important to worry about than whether or not some guys like to wear dresses while off-duty. (Other court-martial offenses include "Jumping from vessel into the water" and "abusing [a] public animal.") Now, if it turns out that the military is founded on the principle of not transgressing gender norms . . . I wouldn't be at all surprised. But seriously, what difference does it make?

So, I wouldn't be allowed to serve in the literal trenches even if I wanted to. But it's okay. I've got trenches of my own. Here's a story about transphobia in the workplace. The good news is that this blogger, who gives good advice on a variety of employment-related issues, is trans-friendly and supportive of dignity and respect for all. The bad news is that somebody thought it was okay to come and ask her an ignorant question about a transwoman using the "wrong" bathroom. The worse news is that this woman is being gossiped about and made fun of by her co-workers behind her back because someone, somehow, found out she was trans. Not because she's done anything in that bathroom that anyone could find inappropriate. Not because anyone looking at her can tell that she's trans. No, it's simply because being trans is wrong, wrong, wrong, and making fun of people who are different is a wonderful thing, just like we all learned in elementary school.

I try to be understanding when my family and friends express a lack of comprehension about my transgender. I know where they're coming from, because it was a hard thing for me to understand and accept about myself. Plus, I've had more time to think about it than they have. But it's stuff like this that causes me to despair. It's stuff like this that makes me afraid. It's stuff like this that makes me angry, because life is hard enough as it is.

Solstice Poem

2011-01-10T14:49:00.000-05:00

Throughout the year the sun and moon
tack back and forth across the sky.
They tapestry of heaven weave,
the web that binds us all.

Nature, some say, is full of senseless rage.
She lashes out in fire, floods and storm.
Her only work is to destroy -
just ask The Weather Channel.

The calm eternal patterns of the sky
are not the story that they want to tell.
And peaceful sleep upon the breast of nature,
the starry breast of over-arching heaven,
Egyptian Nut who gazes down upon us,
is no fit background for their tale of woe.

Joyful all ye nations rise

2011-01-06T12:09:00.000-05:00

I just came back from my grandmother's funeral. Because she died on Christmas Day, one of the hymns played was "Hark the Herald Angels Sing." Although it might seem like a discordant choice, I'm here to say that it was very beautiful and powerful to hear a song celebrating birth at a funeral.

Henry James: Burned Before Reading

2010-12-27T11:54:00.000-05:00

I was required to read Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw in school. I didn't like the former and didn't understand the latter. But over the last few years I've discovered that writers whom I enjoy reading have said good things about Henry James.

Granted, these were more likely to be good things about him as a person than good things about his elephantine verbal style. E.F. Benson has a great story, told by James, about how he went out to run some errands and when he came home and opened his front door, something advanced towards him down the hallway. He said it was "something black, something canine." As Benson points out, anyone else would have just called it a black dog. (A friend of James' housekeeper had come to visit and brought her dog.)

Be that as it may, I finally braced myself and plunged into Henry James. And I'm glad I did. Of course, the real reason I wanted to read him is that I found out he was queer. When I referred to "writers whom I enjoy reading," the two I mainly had in mind are Benson and Gore Vidal, who presents Henry James as a character in his novel Empire and makes him seem charming, if long-winded. Benson knew James personally and bought his house sometime after he died. And of course, Vidal is openly gay and Benson and James . . . give off very strong signals, shall we say.

In fact, I don't understand how anyone could enjoy James' writing, or even comprehend what he's on about, without interpreting it as coded homosexual content. Why is he so allusive, so elusive, so reluctant to come right out and call a black dog a black dog? What is the unspoken thing, buried under tons of words? Thomas Hardy once said that James had "a ponderously warm way of saying nothing in infinite sentences." But the truth is that nobody says "nothing," especially not someone who wrote at such length and with such care. There is meaning in those infinite sentences: so what was it?

The James story that most struck me is "The Jolly Corner." It was written close to the end of his life. It's about a man named Spencer Brydon, who returns to his childhood home in New York City after spending thirty-three years abroad. Everyone else in his family has died, and he inherits the big old house. Although he refers to this house as "the jolly corner," he also believes that it's haunted, and one of the ghosts is his own: the ghost of the person he could have been, if things had been different. (What things? Here James is elusive again.)

The passage in "The Jolly Corner" that really caught my attention occurs when Brydon is wondering what he could have been:

Only I can’t make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened. I’ve been sorry, I’ve hated it—I’ve never known what was in the letter.

I want to know: who destroys important letters without reading them? How often does that happen in real life? Moreover, how would you know it's important without reading it? The only clue you might have is knowing who it was from. And so we have the image of a man receiving messages from some significant person - messages which he knows are important although he refuses to read them, messages which he has some knowledge of even without reading them - messages which must be deleted. Messages about himself, which he regrets not reading. These letters burned unopened are the quintessential symbol of life in the closet.

Brydon starts going back to his old house at night. But he doesn't want anyone to know what he's doing. When he leaves his hotel, he says he's going out to dinner: but he goes to his house. Other nights, he leaves the restaurant, saying he's going to his hotel: but he goes to his house. And even though he has a key, he's afraid of the cop on the beat seeing him enter or leave his own house. He spends the dark, lonely hours hoping and fearing to encounter the ghost of himself.

James wrote another short story, "The Beast in the Jungle," which many people have interpreted as being about a closeted gay man. In that story, the main character believes that someday something special will happen to him, or he'll do something extraordinary. He doesn't know what, or if it will be good or bad, but he spends his life waiting for it. I find it interesting that a story about what someone might do is more likely to be classified as "homosexual" than a story about what someone might be.

But these two stories have something else in common: the presence of a sympathetic female character. In "The Jolly Corner" she is so attuned to the male protagonist that she dreams about his ghost before he has ever seen it (and this despite the fact that they have been separated for thirty years; she stayed in New York while he went to Europe.) Her affection for him is almost maternal; she seems to represent a refuge from the frightening, fascinating male figure that haunts him.

Critics of "The Beast in the Jungle" have theorized that she stands in for a close female friend of James' in real life. But I have a different theory. One of James' close male friends was a young sculptor named Hendrik Andersen. James wrote the following words to him, as part of a letter of condolence on the death of his brother:

Let yourself go and live, even as a lacerated, mutilated lover, with your grief, your loss, your sore, unforgettable consciousness. Possess them and let them possess you, and life, so, will still hold you in her arms, and press you to her breast, and keep you, like the great merciless but still most enfolding and never disowning mighty Mother, on and on for things to come.

The woman in "The Jolly Corner" saw Brydon's alter ego in her dream. She pitied him and didn't hate him, even though Brydon himself is sure that he is a "wretch" and a "horror." "'[To] me,' she said, 'he was no horror. I had accepted him.'" Those are the words of the Great Mother.

Recommended Reading

The Henry James collection I've been reading is The Portable Henry James, published by Penguin. It contains a wide assortment of his work: fiction, travel writings, literary criticism, letters, memoir. Also for some reason a list of character names which we are supposed to find amusing. I could not stay focused on the travel writing at all (although it was interesting to observe his different writing styles,) but I really liked his essay on "The Art of Fiction." It was a bit of a shock to discover that he apparently thought of himself as a realist writer. What is realistic about The Turn of the Screw? That one still baffles me.

E.F. Benson's story about Henry James and the black dog is found in his book As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show.

Henry James on Project Gutenberg

An Unusual Family

2010-12-10T15:33:00.001-05:00

(Or, how many eccentric people can I fit into one blog post?)

I own a book, a sort of Who's Who, which lists a large number of movie stars and their spouses and children. (It lives in my bathroom.) I was flipping through it one day and came across the entry for Dame Margaret Rutherford. It said that she and her husband adopted several adult children, one of whom later turned out to be transsexual. This naturally interested me and I wanted to know more.

According to Wikipedia, Rutherford's father was mentally ill. He spent a number of years in an insane asylum. While on vacation from the asylum, he killed his father and was recommitted. Later he was released and started a family, with the woman he got married to before his first mental breakdown. When Rutherford was only three, her mother committed suicide. About ten years later her father went back into an asylum and seemingly remained there for the rest of his life.

With this background of violence and tragedy, it is not entirely surprising that Rutherford became a comedienne, playing such parts as Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest. She married a fellow actor whom Wikipedia describes as "openly bisexual" and as mentioned above, they adopted four adults. Why, I do not know. One of them was the writer and transwoman Dawn Langley Hall.

Dawn was born to an unmarried teenager in England in 1922. Later her mother married and her parents became servants at Sissinghurst Castle, owned by Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. Thereby hangs a tale. The Sackville-Wests were scandalous aristocrats. Vita's mother was the illegitimate child of the second Lord Sackville and a Spanish dancer called Pepita. Somebody on the Internet claims that Dawn and Vita bear a strong resemblance to each other and speculates that Dawn was Vita's child. This is implausible. Vita had no reason to conceal a pregnancy and more importantly, aside from her husband she preferred women. But there were other Sackville-Wests around and Dawn did feel a connection to the family.

In 1968 Dawn changed her name to Dawn Pepita Langley Hall, got sex reassignment surgery and began presenting herself as female. "Pepita" obviously harks back to the Sackville-Wests. Either Dawn believed herself to be related to them or she wanted to invoke their history of illegitimacy. (Pepita herself was once believed to be illegitimate but apparently this was not the case.) The fact that Vita's mother and her four siblings were illegitimate was widely known, for reasons which I won't go into here. But if you haven't read Portrait of a Marriage, Vita's memoir which was edited by her son, Nigel Nicolson, then you really should.

In 1928, Virginia Woolf fell in love with Vita Sackville-West and wrote a book for her called Orlando, about a boy who turns into a woman. We are told that Dawn later saw herself in the story of Orlando, but I have to mention that Vita was well aware of her own androgyny (as was Woolf) and she was the original Orlando.

Well. Dawn roamed around England, Canada and America and had various adventures. She spent a year teaching on a Canadian Ojibwe Indian reservation and wrote a book about it with the completely politically incorrect title of Me Papoose Sitter. In 1969 she was living in South Carolina and married a black man, John-Paul Simmons. This was the first interracial marriage ever performed in that state and naturally it caused a lot of uproar.

In 1971 she gave birth to a daughter. Or at least, she said she did. In reality, no transwoman has ever been able to conceive and bear a child. (Medical science hasn't advanced that far.) In her first autobiography Dawn said she was intersexed and had both male and female genitalia. I don't know if someone with that condition can conceive a child or not. It does seem more likely that the baby was her husband's child by another woman.

It was not a happy marriage, unfortunately. Simmons was physically abusive and was eventually committed to a mental institution (like Margaret Rutherford's father.) Dawn died in 2000. She wrote three autobiographies, none of which I have read.

Illegitimacy. Mental illness. Sexual transgression. Gender transgression. Dawn was doubly illegitimate: once for the circumstances of her birth and once for her transsexuality. One gathers that she told a lot of stories about herself which were not true. She had to create her own reality, because the "reality" society had assigned her to was unacceptable.

Illegitimacy has lost much of its stigma these days. "Bastard" is now a minor insult. It's okay to use the word on television. And if I call someone a bastard I don't literally mean that their parents were not married to each other. (I wonder how many people are unaware of what "bastard" really means?) Maybe someday the stigma of transgender will be diminished as well. And what we now think of as "reality" will be gone.

References: This post here about Dawn Langley Simmons. I'll let you look her up on Wikipedia yourself.

Butch Homage: The Middle Mist

2010-11-24T15:54:00.001-05:00

Like many people, I enjoy reading about people who resemble me. Like many people who are members of marginalized groups, it's hard for me to find representations of people like myself, in fiction or non-fiction. Like many people, I will put up with some lack of resemblance, or some problematic elements in a book, just to read about someone like me. For that reason, I have a soft spot for the book The Middle Mist by Mary Renault.

Mary Renault is best known for her Greek historical novels. She also wrote a few novels set in the modern era, of which I have read The Charioteer and The Middle Mist (which was originally published under the title The Friendly Young Ladies. But my American edition calls it The Middle Mist and that title is appropriate too.)

The Middle Mist centers around the adventures of a young butch called Leo. Because at the time this book was published (1943 - set in 1937) gender-nonconformity and lesbianism were held to be shocking, almost unspeakable subjects, there is a certain amount of equivocation in the way the story is told. The main character is Leo's younger sister, Elsie, who has been brought up with no knowledge of any facts of life and lives in a romantic dream. Somehow she decides to run away from home and join her older sister, who also ran away from home a few years earlier, under circumstances which Elsie never understood.

Elsie finds her way to a pub near Leo's house (which is actually a houseboat) and starts asking around for her sister. It turns out that one of the young men playing darts in the pub is in fact, Leo. Leo takes her baby sister home to the houseboat where she lives with a beautiful young lady named Helen (who is, in fact, so perfect that she might have been born from a swan's egg.) Elsie never figures out that the two women are lovers. Actually Elsie gets hold of the wrong end of the stick about pretty much everything. I wonder if the readers of this book were supposed to be as ignorant as she is. But I digress.

Leo lives her life exactly as she pleases (with a few concessions to the closet.) She makes her living by writing cheesy cowboy stories about a place (the American West) she's never been. She hates to put any female characters or any touch of "romance" into these books. In some ways she is like a little boy who never grew up. But, although it's dangerous to do so, Renault also portrays her confident sexuality - and her sexual fears. Leo is happy as a lesbian . . . but she's also a little obsessed about trying to have sex with men. That is to say, she tries to have sex with men, but she always panics and refuses to go through with it. Then she tries again. It appears that she's trying to confront her fears: that the butch thing to do is to have sex with men, precisely because it's so frightening.

Many lesbians hate this book, because it's so coy about homosexuality, and because Leo ends up going off with a man. But I don't really see the ending as some kind of generalization about lesbians going straight. For one thing, the man Leo goes off with is not a man. He's way too perfect to be human. He's some sort of god.

Joe, the leading male character, is an English intellectual and also a cowboy: he was brought up on an American ranch, later went to Oxbridge, and gives Leo plenty of tips on her stories while at the same time writing novels of his own which we're told are deep and meaningful and much better than her stuff (we don't get any actual quotes.) He's caring, sensitive, and knowledgeable about people. He may in fact know everything. He's been friends with Leo and Helen for a long time and is not homophobic about them at all. If he has any flaw I can't recall it. He and Leo are best buddies - he enjoys her masculinity (and if two masculine people fall in love with each other, isn't that a little queer?) By contrast, the other male character, Peter, is a self-centered doctor who believes he's God's gift to women. The scenes where he attempts to seduce Leo, for her own good of course, are hilarious, and certainly cast doubt on the idea that the author accepted unquestioningly the superiority of the heterosexual male.

There are some things I don't like about Mary Renault's writing. But one thing I do like is her depiction of characters struggling with the complexities of life, with things they don't understand, with their own inexplicable selves. Does Leo make the right choices? Maybe not. But she's vibrant, courageous, and determined to live her own life. Those things make her an admirable butch.

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Mr. Stevenson

2010-11-17T13:06:00.002-05:00

I finally got around to reading the original story of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I became interested in it when someone on a blog I visit commented that the story is badly written. Personally I would not say it is badly written, but the author's goal is quite different from the goal (for example) of the many film adaptations. Stevenson wanted to conceal as long as possible the knowledge that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. So the story is told from the point of view of various characters who see Hyde coming and going from Jekyll's house, but they don't know who he is and they're afraid to ask. It's not until the very end that we read Jekyll's explanation of what was going on. (Hyde never gets to speak for himself at all.)

Many years ago I read someone's theory that the theme of Jekyll and Hyde was homosexuality. Either Hyde and Jekyll were lovers, or Hyde represented Jekyll's closeted gay side; I don't remember which. But I didn't see either of those in the story. It's true that when one of Jekyll's friends tries to tactfully find out what the bond is between Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll says "it isn't what you fancy; it is not so bad as that" - which might suggest homosexuality. But the major reason why Jekyll and Hyde cannot be lovers is that they can never spend any time together. In the real world, everyone knew that Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas were inseparable companions. Many people knew that Edward Carpenter and George Merrill were life partners - you could visit their house and see them together. But Jekyll and Hyde are forever separated.

As for Jekyll's sexuality - he admits freely that he wanted to liberate his "evil" self. To many of us that suggests sexual indulgence. Naturally he provides no details about his exploits. He writes, "The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term." Does "undignified" mean "sexual?" I don't know. More importantly, we see Hyde performing two or three acts of violence. We don't see him in any situation that directly implies a sexual encounter. (Although of course you can read sex into anything. Quite possibly Jekyll/Hyde were sadomasochists.)

To me the tragedy of Jekyll and Hyde is one of isolation. No one was intimate enough with Jekyll to be able to figure out what was going on. His friends didn't really want to know. (When one of them discovers the secret, the shock of it kills him.) Jekyll has a houseful of servants, but even they can't put two and two together. We're told that everyone found Hyde repulsive; no one wanted to get to know him. But in the final analysis no one wanted to know Jekyll either. This is why Stevenson structured the story in such a seemingly-awkward way: we always see Jekyll and Hyde from a distance.

There is no homoeroticism in Jekyll and Hyde. There is no eroticism of any kind, because there is no human connection. Stevenson was actually capable of writing about sex (within Victorian constraints) but he didn't do it in this story. I do recommend his short stories. They cover a wide range - funny, scary, happy endings, sad endings - but almost always with a touch of the macabre. Isolation is also a major theme. Interestingly, his liveliest and most confident character is Prince Florizel of Bohemia, who benefits from the devoted service of a trusty sidekick, Colonel Geraldine. (Geraldine, you ask? He is a man, and a brave one, although in one story he is described as effeminate.) They have each other to rely on; they are not isolated. But their favorite pastime is to disguise themselves as ordinary people and wander the streets of London or Paris. They don't want anyone to know who they are.

The one interesting thing about the original story of Jekyll and Hyde is that Jekyll points out that his goal was to separate the "good" and "evil" sides of a person. In theory, he could have liberated his good side instead of his evil side. Mr. Angel instead of Mr. Hyde? That would make an unusual story.

Recommended reading: the works of Robert Louis Stevenson on Project Gutenberg, especially the stories about Prince Florizel of Bohemia, which are collected in The New Arabian Nights.

More Musings on Anger

2010-11-08T14:29:00.000-05:00

I recently blogged about my anger. It was a short piece, partly because I didn't want to get carried away. But I've been thinking about anger, and my changing relationship with it, for a while now.

Let me start off by saying that I believe anger is fundamentally a response to injustice. Sometimes it covers up another emotion, as when we get angry because we don't want to feel sad, or afraid. But the root cause of anger is, something happened that made us angry. And I tend to believe that that root cause is valid.

The problem with anger is that we often express our anger at people, or things, who are not the root cause of our anger and don't deserve our hostility. "I got into an argument about X because I was really angry about Y" - that happens a lot. I also believe that most of us are discouraged, or forbidden, to express our anger. Anger is a privilege reserved for the few, the higher-ranking members of a group (unless you can sneak onto the Internet and express your anger there without anyone finding out it's you.) Or unless you've been given permission to get angry at a certain Really Bad person, or group of people. We've been hearing a lot about anger in the media recently. How much of that anger is misdirected? Is [fill in the blank] really responsible for whatever those people are angry about?

I once read a story about a man who was in jail for attacking women. I can't remember now if he killed them or what, but the prison psychiatrist provided this reason for his behavior: he was angry at women because his father used to beat him up and his mother and sister never tried to stop it. It seems to me that the person you're most likely to be angry at is the person who's actually hitting you. But for whatever reason, this boy felt that his father was not an acceptable target for his anger. Women - all women - were an acceptable target instead. (And the prison psychiatrist didn't question this!)

That's an extreme example of a case in which anger was diverted onto innocent bystanders. Anger is a dangerous thing, there's no doubt about it. And many people try to repress their anger . . . but that's not really a good thing either, if only because repressed emotion does have a habit of erupting in uncontrollable ways.

When I was younger, I believed it was okay for me to get angry at people; that expressing anger was healthy. But now I regret the way I behaved; I feel that I took my anger to extremes, and certainly I got excessively angry about things that really weren't that important. I indulged myself by getting angry and I hurt people's feelings. Then in another phase of my life I found myself getting uncontrollably angry about one particular thing. Whenever I thought about it, I got angry and lost the ability to do anything else or think about anything else. It was sucking up all my energy and I finally had to make myself stop. Was my anger justified? I believe that it was. But it was too much for me. It wasn't doing any good.

I took a break from anger for a while, until just a few months ago when I realized that I was angry again, about something different this time. And now I will admit that I am always angry. I'm not getting angry at the people I love anymore - I think I can honestly say that. It's not them. I'm angry at the injustice in this world and the lies I was led to believe. Getting angry at individuals does no good. But denying my anger would do no good either.

Anger is like fire. It's hot and bright. There's something beautiful about it. It can be more destructive than anything else. But it also keeps us alive. I have lit the votive candle of my anger. And that tiny flame shows no sign of going out.

Arab Folktales

2010-11-03T18:35:00.000-04:00

I've been reading the book Arab Folktales, edited by Inea Bushnaq, which is part of the excellent Pantheon Fairy Tale Library series. I'm crazy about fairy tales, folk tales, and mythology of all sorts. And although it's not fashionable to say so, I've always had a certain admiration for Islam and Arab culture. Perhaps it started with Lawrence of Arabia, whose exploits I read about as a child, with no understanding of their colonial agenda.* (Standard disclaimer: "Arabic" and "Muslim" are not exactly the same. Not all Arabs are Muslim, and tons of Muslims throughout the world are not Arab. But in general - and throughout most of this book - they do go together.)

Bushnaq finds it appropriate to start off the book with tales of the Beduin (also spelled "Bedouin,") the desert nomads, who are the real, most authentic Arabs, in both their own eyes and those of the rest of the Arab world. Camels, oases, the harsh beauties of the desert . . . we've all been there, at least in our imaginations.

Generosity is the primary virtue of the Beduin. It is usually expressed in terms of food: feeding the stranger, the visitor to your tent, or the members of your community who have less than you do. Some people are rich, owning vast herds of camels, sheep and goats, large tents and fine tent furnishings. Of course, since everything they own has to be carried on camelback, they probably don't have much of the kinds of possessions we house-dwellers have learned to value. And wealth is measured, not by how much money you have in the bank or how many houses you own, but by how much you are willing to give away.

Bushnaq points out that any Beduin, even the wealthiest, can be impoverished in one season if his animals are wiped out by drought or disease. I think it's significant that in these stories there are no examples of such natural disasters. Instead, people impoverish themselves through generosity, by feeding everyone who comes to their tent even if they have to kill their last camel in order to provide hospitality. If misfortune can strike at any moment, you might as well preempt it by giving away your wealth before it can be taken from you. At least that way someone will benefit.

In our world, the world of Western materialism, the world where people live in houses and hope to save for retirement, there are two moral guidelines that don't exist in these Beduin tales. One is the myth of the deserving poor. The other is the myth of the deserving rich. A prince of the desert doesn't ask, "Are you really hungry? Did you lose all your money betting on the camel races? Why should I give you anything?" He serves up the best food that he has, and takes his guests under his protection. In these stories there are no undeserving poor.

Likewise, in this world we expect people to continue on an upward trajectory. You work hard and you are rewarded with financial success. You get to keep your house and your 401k. The stock market only ever goes up . . . right? You get to hold onto your possessions. And therefore, by the same logic, you don't have to share them with anyone. You don't have to be generous, because you have what you deserve, and the poor have what they deserve, which is nothing.

The truth is that no matter where you live, or in what era, misfortune can strike you. You can lose everything. Here in America that fact is becoming more and more apparent. Good fortune can also strike you, whether you deserve it or not. That's why most of the folktales in this book have happy endings, and the impoverished sheiks end up rich again. Because Allah is generous too.

*Even at that young age, however, when his biographer tried to defend him from insinuations of homosexuality on the grounds that "he has many women friends," I knew that was a dubious line of reasoning. But I digress.

Three Rules

2010-09-29T11:34:00.000-04:00

Everyone's truth is valid.
No one's truth is universal. (In other words, no one's truth is anyone else's truth.)
People are frequently mistaken. But when you find your truth, you will know it.

Exploring a Small Library

2010-09-21T12:55:00.001-04:00

My regular library is closed for renovation, so I've been going to a different one. It's quite small - only one room - but as Jane Rule says, every library has its treasures, and I found some entertainment just by checking a few shelves.

I found a Diana Wynne Jones book I had never read before (wonder if I should add it to the Super DWJ List on my old blog) and a novel by one Gyles Brandreth, featuring Oscar Wilde as a detective. It's always enjoyable to read about one of my favorite historical eras, and I have no doubt that Mr Brandreth adores the late 19th century as much as I do. However, he and I don't always see eye to eye. I don't really like Wilde as a person (so I suppose it's my own fault if I dislike a book about him.) He was intelligent but Brandreth has turned him into another Sherlock Holmes, all observant and logical and stuff. I don't really see the point of that.

Ironically, Arthur Conan Doyle also appears in the book - he and Wilde are portrayed as friends, which again I'm not sure is historically accurate. They met at least once, and in fact The Picture of Dorian Gray would have appeared in the same magazine as Conan Doyle's second Holmes story if Wilde had been interested in making the deadline, which he wasn't. Brandreth crams as many unusual Victorians into the book as he can. Sometimes he exaggerates their eccentricities, as when he describes Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper as a pair of cross-dressers. It's true that they were lovers, sometimes addressed each other with male nicknames, and wrote together under the name of Michael Field, but their biographer Emma Donoghue does not mention that they did any literal, as opposed to spiritual, cross-dressing.

Brandreth also brings another interesting fellow into the story: Ernest Hornung. He married Conan Doyle's sister, and in what appears to be a spirit of friendly rivalry, set out to surpass the popularity of Sherlock Holmes by creating the character of master thief A.J. Raffles. Raffles has his Watson - a bumbling accomplice - and the Raffles stories are definitely fun to read. They're also more homoerotic than I remember Holmes and Watson being, although I started reading them when I was fairly young and oblivious. Watson is protected by his heterosexuality, as demonstrated in frequent references to his wife (or wives - Sherlockians disagree on how many there were) and Holmes is too cerebral to be interested in sex. Raffles "seduces" his old school chum (always referred to by his school nickname, "Bunny") into a life of crime . . . but I don't actually believe that Hornung put a double meaning into those passages. They sound suspicious to a biased ear, but not like they were written by someone with something to hide.

This brings up the oddest thing about Brandreth's Oscar Wilde mystery novels. I gather he's written several of them by now and never does more than hint at Wilde's homosexual tendencies. Lord Alfred Douglas appears frequently - so does Wilde's wife Constance - and Wilde spends a lot of time proclaiming his love for his wife, and not coming home at night because he's off gallivanting with Lord Alfred. What are we to think? Maybe it's meant to be a realistic portrait of Victorian life. But there is a certain lack of honesty in it, which I believe would have appealed to Wilde, and seems to appeal to Brandreth, but is no longer fashionable in the 21st century.

Incidentally, the back cover of this book informs us that Brandreth wrote "a much-admired biography of Oscar Wilde," but I cannot find this biography listed on Amazon or anywhere else. He did, however, write a play about The Trials of Oscar Wilde, in which Tom Baker (of Doctor Who fame) played the lead in 1974. That would have been something to see.

How Much Do I Have to Lie?

2010-09-15T11:01:00.000-04:00

At a very young age I decided that the only way to be safe was to avoid attracting attention. And I got really good at it. I believe I'm better at blending into the wallpaper than anyone else I know. Hopefully it helped. It did not protect me from all unpleasantness, and certainly as I grew older it became more and more of a problem. You cannot get jobs, friends or lovers without attracting attention from someone.

Is concealment the same as "lying?" I don't really know. What I do know is that the best way to lie is to believe what you're saying: to conceal the facts even from yourself. Of course, I didn't know I was doing that. It was a perfect cover-up.

For years I believed that I didn't care what people thought of me. And it's true that even though I never talked to anyone, I still set out to go my own way and do my own thing. The big secret was still a secret. Other things I never told anyone but I knew they were true. It seemed to me that I had enough issues to work on. The most persistent and ongoing problem that I was consciously aware of is the question: "Do I have any right to exist at all?" And maybe that still is more important than the question: "Do I have the right to be trans?"

I was trying to carve out a space for myself . . . and considering where I started from I've done pretty well. At last I felt safe enough to reveal the big secret. To myself, I mean. As soon as I realized I was trans, I instantly understood what a huge coward I am. I thought I was this big non-conformist. Ha. I thought I was honest. I thought I cared about honesty more than anything else. But I had been lying to myself for years. And I didn't see any way that I could tell anyone. Horrible things would happen if I did.

So. This blog is, among other things, an attempt to explore what it means to be trans. (Terminology management: I identify as transgendered. Some people identify as transsexual. "Trans" is short for both of those. Some people write "trans*" but please. I save my geekiness for where it might do some good.) I admit I still get distracted sometimes. I spent years thinking about other things . . . and a lot of those things are still important.

My transgender is central to me, in the sense that I carry it around in my heart. But it's not the only thing about me. And of course, I do want people to understand that trans people are, as we all keep saying, Just. Like. Everyone. Else. So it doesn't hurt to write about other things too.

I'm digressing. To get back to the title of this post: how much do I have to lie? We all have things to conceal. We all encounter situations where it's socially advisable not to say what you really believe. So perfect honesty is not desirable (if only because it gives the false impression that someone who is always honest is always right.) But speaking as someone who learned never to admit anything to anybody . . . expressing yourself is a good thing too. When it's safe. Perhaps it's cynical of me to believe that the only function of society is to keep us all lying to each other. But really: what's the point of that?

Sanditon and other stories

2010-09-12T15:00:00.000-04:00

For all aficionados of Jane Austen, I heartily recommend the "Everyman's Library" edition of Sanditon and other stories, comprising what appears to be all of her unpublished works: two unfinished novels (which will drive you mad with frustration and outrage, since they stop just as things are getting interesting,) juvenilia, the novella Lady Susan (which is available elsewhere, and I have written about it before,) etc. They are all much racier than her published work. The juvenilia especially feature mercenary young women marrying unpleasant old men for their money, a form of immorality which Austen almost never allowed into her published novels. We also discover that as a teenager she had a major crush on Mary Queen of Scots.

I will conclude by giving you an example of how much fun the writer was having, with a story she wrote for (one may even say "about") her older sister Cassandra.

THE BEAUTIFULL CASSANDRA

A NOVEL IN TWELVE CHAPTERS

Dedicated by permission to Miss Austen.
Dedication

MADAM

You are a Phoenix. Your taste is refined, your Sentiments are noble, & your Virtues innumerable. Your Person is lovely, your Figure, elegant, & your Form, magestic. Your Manners are polished, your Conversation is rational & your appearance singular. If, therefore, the following Tale will afford one moment's amusement to you, every wish will be gratified of

Your most obedient humble servant
THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CASSANDRA was the Daughter & the only Daughter of a celebrated Millener in Bond Street. Her father was of noble Birth, being the near relation of the Dutchess of ----'s Butler.

CHAPTER THE 2d

WHEN Cassandra had attained her 16th year, she was lovely & amiable, & chancing to fall in love with an elegant Bonnet her Mother had just compleated, bespoke by the Countess of ----, she placed it on her gentle Head & walked from her Mother's shop to make her Fortune.

CHAPTER THE 3d

THE first person she met, was the Viscount of ----, a young Man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments & Virtues, than for his Elegance & Beauty. She curtseyed & walked on.

CHAPTER THE 4th

SHE then proceeded to a Pastry-cook's, where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry Cook & walked away.

CHAPTER THE 5th

SHE next ascended a Hackney Coach & ordered it to Hampstead, where she was no sooner arrived than she ordered the Coachman to turn round & drive her back again.

CHAPTER THE 6th

BEING returned to the same spot of the same Street she had set out from, the Coachman demanded his Pay.

CHAPTER THE 7th

SHE searched her pockets over again & again; but every search was unsuccessfull. No money could she find. The man grew peremptory. She placed her bonnet on his head & ran away.

CHAPTER THE 8th

THRO' many a street she then proceeded & met in none the least Adventure, till on turning a Corner of Bloomsbury Square, she met Maria.

CHAPTER THE 9th

CASSANDRA started & Maria seemed surprised; they trembled, blushed, turned pale & passed each other in a mutual silence.

CHAPTER THE 10th

CASSANDRA was next accosted by her freind the Widow, who squeezing out her little Head thro' her less window, asked her how she did? Cassandra curtseyed & went on.

CHAPTER THE 11th

A QUARTER of a mile brought her to her paternal roof in Bond Street, from which she had now been absent nearly 7 hours.

CHAPTER THE 12th

SHE entered it & was pressed to her Mother's bosom by that worthy Woman. Cassandra smiled & whispered to herself "This is a day well spent."

FINIS

Text from The Republic of Pemberley

Early Human History in Africa

2010-09-07T13:09:00.001-04:00

So a few months ago there was this guy on Jon Stewart, he had written a book about evolution or something. I don't actually remember what the book was but at one point he said, "The human race has lived in Africa longer than it has lived anywhere else. We lived there for about a million years."

Technically I knew that, in the sense of, I knew the human race evolved in Africa. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the number of million years involved. But somehow that comment made me think about the actual history involved, and I wanted to learn more. It's hard to find information on this period though.

These are the books that I read:

Origins Reconsidered, by Richard Leakey, 1993 (a sequel to Origins, published 1982.) This book is an overview of evolution, and it's not what I actually wanted to read about. Like I said, I already know about evolution. I want to know what happened afterwards. But it's still a fascinating book, especially when he talks about all the things we don't know. Apparently we have found just enough fossils to be able to say that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa but we don't have anything like a complete timeline - there are huge gaps - and the fossils that have been found have not all been categorized into species. There were a series of species between the non-human ancestor of apes and humans, and Homo sapiens itself, and all of the other hominid species died out. Anyway, paleoanthropologists say things like "We don't know which of these species was an ancestor of Homo sapiens" and "We don't know if these two fossils come from the same species or not." You'd think they would know. One problem is that everybody wants to discover a new species.

Leakey himself makes interesting reading. He went through a long period of rebellion against his parents' legacy, he wasn't going to follow in their footsteps, but then he did. And I agree with most of his opinions, which is always pleasant.
I read some book about African rock paintings, because I know rock paintings are old, but the problem was that this book was old too. It resolutely refused to date anything, except the most recent paintings. The most informative part of it was some gruesome descriptions of genocide practiced against native South Africans by the Boers.

Then I discovered the works of Graham Connah, an archeologist based in Australia who has been studying Africa for at least four decades. Even his stuff didn't go back much further than three or four thousand years, but it was still completely amazing. His goal is to show, as he puts it in one of his books, that "Africans didn't all live in huts." He also addresses the related myth that when there was any sign of civilization in Africa it must have come from outside.

Having said that, one of the signs of a vibrant civilization is that it interacts with its neighbors, and the history of interaction between Africa and the rest of the world is also fascinating. The third myth about Africa is that it was "undiscovered" until Europeans (which in this case means Christians) found it. This is an injustice to other parts of the world besides Africa. One of the things I learned from reading these books is that most of the coast of East Africa engaged in trade with Arabia, India and even with China. I was also reminded that North Africa has long been part of the Mediterranean community.

I liked these books, not only for the reasons above, but also because I like reading about stuff. Physical objects. They built dams. They worked in iron, bronze, gold, copper and silver. They had elaborate burials. They had coinage! (Some African cultures made their own coins. Other sites yielded coins from as far away as China.) They had houses with indoor toilets! (Connah is very conscientious about mentioning places that had good sanitary facilities.)

These are the books by Graham Connah that I read, in order of how relevant they were to my subject:

Forgotten Africa: an introduction to its archaeology, 2004. In some ways this book is unavoidably superficial. It sets out to cover 4 million years of history, on a huge continent, in less than 200 pages. But it was the only book I could get ahold of which contained any information on the time period I was interested in. And although it is a series of vignettes, they are magnificent vignettes.

I will mention only two bits. First, giraffes in China! About 600 years ago the Chinese sent an expedition to Africa and brought back a giraffe. You can see a picture of it here. Second, on page 43 Connah gives this example of the limitations of archeological evidence:

"It is remarkable that the earliest evidence for cultivated sorghum [in Africa] is only about 2000 years old. This indigenous African cereal must have been domesticated much earlier, because it was already being cultivated in Saudi Arabia and India, where it was not indigenous, some 4500 years ago."

African Civilizations: an archaeological perspective, 1st ed., 1987 (a second edition was published in 2001, but InterLibrary Loan sent me the old one.) This is a slightly more focused version of the book listed above, in that it covers only 3,000 years and eight specific areas, in about the same number of pages. If you are impressed by cultures that were able to build huge buildings, you should read about Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe. The country Zimbabwe was named after some large towers, called "zimbabwes," built of unmortared stone on a plateau in southeast Africa. Fans of Egypt (and who doesn't love Ancient Egypt?) might be interested to learn about Meroe, a city-state that existed at about the same time somewhat further up the Nile.
Three thousand years in Africa: man and his environment in the Lake Chad region of Nigeria, 1981. This was the most "academic" of the three books and I have to admit that I only skimmed it. He does mention that even though the area he excavated contained nothing that was older than 3,000 years, nearby sites yielded artifacts that were at least 39,000 years old, and he's certain that his area must have been inhabited by humans for just as long.

Obviously I cannot do justice to the history of the human race in Africa in one blog post. But there was one other thing that struck me. According to Graham Connah, one of Africa's major exports has always been slaves. I have the impression that the European slave trade decimated Africa - how is it, then, that thousands of years of human trafficking apparently didn't make much of a dent? Were the numbers not really that large? We're told that the Christians needed slaves for labor on their American colonies. But the interesting thing about that is that Islam colonized Asia too. Did they not need slaves? Was there some essential difference between Christian and Muslim colonization? That question applies to Africa too, of course.

I hope to do more research on the topic of Africa. There seems to be an awful lot we don't know.

Coming Out

2010-09-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

The recent story about Ken Mehlman, formerly George Bush's campaign manager and one-time chairman of the RNC, announcing that he's gay has caused me to reflect. Some people have doubted his assertion that he didn't know he was gay. I didn't know I was trans - or rather, I knew but I didn't want to know. It was a thought in my mind, never consciously acknowledged, free-floating like some scary shadowy thing in the depths of the ocean. And even though I never made a living out of demonizing GLBT people and denying their human rights, I used to believe a lot of transphobic stuff.

Mehlman wants people to "understand" the plight he was in, and I do understand. I know how hard it is to come out. How terrifying it is to come out. I know that he was afraid of losing his livelihood, his friends, and the love of his family. I know that he may even have feared for his life. I can believe that he believed that homosexuality is wrong.

Nor do I envy him for coming out in public. It's not because of the anger and disdain he's gotten from gay people - he deserves that. It's because coming out is a long process. First you admit it to yourself. Then you think about telling other people. Then you actually do start telling people, which is a huge step, but it's not the end. Probably Mehlman will continue to adjust his views.

In fact, the stages of coming out are kind of like the well-known "five stages of grief:" denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Maybe they don't go in the same order. Denial comes first, obviously . . . but I'm inclined to think that bargaining is an essential stage, both before and after the official announcement. Mehlman says "I'm gay but I'm still a Republican." That's bargaining. He's trying to compromise with the world, and especially, I suspect, with his personal and professional associates. He's saying "You can still approve of me, I haven't changed all that much!"

And it's true that he's still the same person. It's true that all of us make compromises with society between our desires and what is socially acceptable. Many people, for example, work at jobs they hate when they'd really rather run off to Tahiti and paint naked people. Maybe they compromise by covering their bedroom walls with Gauguin prints. But for GLBT people it's a lot harder to negotiate our social compromise, because until recently everything we want to do, everything we are, was completely forbidden. The answer was always "No!" and there really weren't any valid tradeoffs. In a lot of cases the answer is still no. You can't do that, you can't be that, no sane person would want to do that, you must be sick. But we're trying.

One last note: when I compare coming out to the stages of grief, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just that no one likes change.

"What trans means to me"

2010-08-26T18:23:00.003-04:00

This person's experience is not the same as mine, but still I like her post a lot:

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/11/28/what-trans-means-to-me/

I'm Angry

2010-08-23T12:44:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, I heard about Alan Hart for the first time. He was an American doctor who helped to solve the problem of diagnosing and curing tuberculosis. His work saved thousands of lives. As it happens, he also wrote fiction.

The reason I'm angry is that Alan Hart was a transsexual. The reason I'm angry is that I never heard of him before. The reason I'm angry is that on the rare occasions when we learn anything about trans people, they're always depicted as freaks, living ineffectual and unhappy lives (like Michael Dillon, whom I blogged about previously.)

The reason I'm angry is that I had to live my life, first in ignorance and then in shame.

Alan Hart lived from 1890 to 1962. There is reason to believe that he was happy. His professional life was certainly fulfilling. He was married twice - the first marriage ended in divorce, the second marriage lasted 37 years (until his death.)

Maybe someday that will not be unheard of.

Towards a new model of mental health

2010-07-29T12:19:00.000-04:00

This is another thing I've been thinking about for a while. Would it be better if we thought of mental illness the same way we think of physical illness? Some examples:

Everybody gets sick. We catch colds, sometimes we come down with more serious diseases or injuries. It's part of life. And it seems to me that mental illnesses are acquired in much the same way. But the common stereotype is that everyone is always in perfect mental health, except for crazy people. And they always seem to be incurable. Perhaps we make an exception for bereavement - that's seen as something that pretty much unhinges people while they are grieving, but eventually, hopefully, they get over it.
The importance of first aid. We all have some basic knowledge of first aid and triage (how to distinguish between serious injuries vs. minor ones.) What constitutes mental first aid? I don't know. I don't think anyone else knows either.
Healthy diet and exercise. I don't just mean that diet and exercise can have an effect on your moods, although that is true. I mean, what constitutes a healthy mental diet? What constitutes psychological exercise? Prevention falls into this category as well. The only form of mental-illness prevention I've ever heard of is, "don't think about bad stuff." But in fact that doesn't work.
Regular checkups. How come we don't go for regular psychological checkups, along with physical and dental checkups? I have occasionally had medical doctors ask me about my mental state (somehow, just typing those words makes it sound like they saw something suspicious in my behavior) but of course they were not mental health professionals, and not really qualified to diagnose or treat mental disorders.

Might it be possible to develop tests for mental illness, to "catch these things early," the way doctors hope to catch cancers early? There is some work being done with brain scans to detect signs of mental illness, but of course these scans are only run on people who have already flipped out. If mental illness could be detected sooner, that would help a lot of people, and even save lives.
The immune system. As I mentioned about grief, above, sometimes we feel bad about stuff, and sometimes we get over it. Sometimes, as with chronic depression, we can't heal ourselves without extra help. But I do in fact believe that our psyches have a natural immune system, a natural sense of what's right, what's best for us. It doesn't always work perfectly. (In fact, it seems to have a tendency to overcompensate, like physical autoimmune diseases in which the body starts attacking its own cells.) But if, as I hope, good physical health is our natural state, then good psychological health ought to be our natural state too.

Of course, the big difference between mental health and physical health is the stigma attached to mental illness. That's why people are reluctant to seek treatment until things get really bad. (That's why, in America, health insurance does not always cover mental health issues.) That's why people who are seeing therapists or taking medication are often reluctant to let anyone else know. Can you imagine not telling anyone that you had to have your appendix removed?

The other difference is that our notions of what constitute good mental health are somewhat skewed. Our definition of physical health is straightforward: if we feel good, we're in good health. We rely on our bodies to tell us how they feel. But good mental health is defined, not by how we actually feel, but by how we're supposed to feel. Certain feelings and thoughts are off limits.

Our mental health is constrained by our culture's morality. There are numerous examples of this: I'll pick one that I've used before. When homosexuality was considered to be a mental illness, it didn't matter how well-adjusted you were - it didn't even matter how decent, upstanding and generally moral you were. Homosexual equaled crazy, end of story. (And you better not be well-adjusted either, in fact, you should be as neurotic as possible, because homosexuals should be unhappy.)

I strongly believe that our model of mental health needs to change. And this is my suggested replacement.

The Model of the World Inside Your Head

2010-07-12T14:28:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking for a couple years now, off and on, about the fact that we rarely interact with the real world. Instead, we construct a mental model of the world, and base our behavior on that model.

Here's an example: the first time you travel to someplace you've never been before, you pay a lot of attention to the route and the things that you see along the way. You don't want to get lost, and you have to be able to find your way back. Once the route becomes familiar to you, however, you stop paying as much attention. You've constructed a mental model of the route, and you follow that.

Some philosophers have argued that, since the world only exists for us insofar as we can perceive it, the model of the world inside our head is actually the "real" world. If a tree falls in the forest, etc. (This is also my understanding of Buddhism: that the world we think we perceive is only an illusion.) It's a fascinating idea, but ultimately, I think, unhelpful, for this reason: our model of the world is frequently inaccurate.

In some cases, it's due to sheer ignorance. I've never been to Australia; my model of Australia is therefore incomplete. Not only that, but I've heard people talk about Australia, and I've seen lots of pictures, but that doesn't mean Australia is real, now does it? It's not real to me. In fact, our experience of the world is so very limited, in time and space, that anyone with a little intelligence must realize just how little they know. How limited our models of the world are.

In other cases, our false models of the world are created when we are fed false information. If someone told you every day, for example, that you were stupid, you'd start to believe it, whether it was true or not. If you lived in a country where black people and white people were required to use separate bathrooms, separate restaurants, even (as I learned recently) separate parking lots, and your parents told you there were good reasons for this segregation, you'd believe them. Maybe at some point you'd start to question. Maybe not. Your model of the world would be a segregated world.

Is it possible to change your model of the world? I believe so, but it is incredibly hard work. The mind is a stubborn thing.

How can we live with these unavoidably flawed mental models? I've come up with two guidelines:

Accept that your mental model is imperfect.
Realize that, limited though it is, your mental model is actually more complex than you are consciously aware of.

That second one may seem like a non-sequitur. Let me talk about some of the ways our mental models are more complex than we usually realize.

We often subconsciously notice things that we weren't aware of at the time. We may remember them later, or we may not - but either way, they do enter our subconscious and they do form part of our mental model of the world. To go back to my first example: once you've created your mental model of the route you take on your daily commute, you usually notice when something has changed. Maybe you never consciously noticed that detail until did change, but it attracts your attention because your subconscious mind is in fact keeping an eye on things.

Another example: dreams. Have you ever had a really weird dream? Where did that come from? In many cases, your subconscious assembles a number of details from the recent (or not so recent) past, "juggles" them and comes up with an amusing, or perhaps significant dream. It seems likely to me that this mental activity is somehow related to our models of the world.

It's because our models of the world exist largely on a subconscious level that they can be so hard to change. The conscious mind simply doesn't have the ability to alter the subconscious. But I also, personally, find it hopeful to imagine the subconscious mind constantly processing its model of the world. It never stops and it will keep ingesting all the new data it comes across. As we know, there are infinite possibilities out there . . . and infinite possibilities inside as well.

To welcome hurricane season

2010-07-06T10:41:00.000-04:00

Someday the marshes will return
bright emerald green, floating land, white herons

Someday, the trees of the upland:
red oak, shortleaf pine, magnolia

Someday the rain-bearing winds will come roaring, soaking the land that is already wet. The reeds and palmettos will tremble, lie down, and come back again.

Someday the world of water: the swamp, full of strange noises and hot shade.

The dry land floods; the wet lands only get wetter.
That may sound like a joke, but it's not.
The world of water is not our world.

Someday all the work of the bulldozers will have been for nothing.

What it Means to be Irrational

2010-06-24T11:21:00.000-04:00

First of all, I have a confession to make: I've been going to church. But it's okay. It's just the Unitarian Universalists. It's not a real church. And by that I mean, that they don't require you to subscribe to their beliefs (whatever those may be.) Essentially you can bring your own beliefs.

Last Sunday, a member of the congregation shared with us his thoughts on Father's Day, and related issues. Father's Day is, to put it mildly, not my favorite holiday. But nonetheless I enjoyed this guy's sermon. One of the things it made me think about is different types of irrationality.

Here are two of the anecdotes he shared with us:

One day he was visiting . . . Colorado I think? . . . and, sitting on top of a mesa at sunset, he had a mystical experience. You know the drill, surrounded by nature, huge expanses of sky and desert, one human being seems so small out there. And yet he felt there was a presence there with him; he was alone and not alone.

People find these sorts of experiences very memorable. And in his case, it became extra memorable when he found out that, at approximately the same time he was having this beautiful experience, his father was dying of the heart disease that had troubled him for many years. He could not help but feel that there was a connection.

He then went on to tell us that his father's father died prematurely, and to share a story about that. His father was then twelve years old, and he said to God, "I will give you my new bicycle if you keep my father alive."

These are examples of two different types of irrationality. Mystical experiences are irrational because they cannot be explained to anyone. They cannot be reproduced at will, especially not in a laboratory. They have no objective reality.

The idea that God (if god exists) would be at all interested in possessing a bicycle, or a sheep, or one's firstborn child, that God ever would, or ever has, make bargains with people, is irrational because it's simply not true. If it happened on a regular basis, we would know about it. Where do people get this idea from, anyway?

Some people say that mystical experiences are imaginary. Some even say they're a form of mental illness. Personally, of those two types of irrationality, I prefer the subjective, internal experience to the flat-out lie. There's a difference between things that cannot be proved to be true, and things that can easily be proved false.

A Non-Trans Privilege Checklist

2010-06-14T12:16:00.000-04:00

Privilege checklists make a lot of people uncomfortable. They usually start in about how "I have that problem too" or "that's not a real problem" or "you have no right to complain!" (What is a privilege checklist? Basically, it's meant to be a list of privileges that you don't get to have unless you're one or more of the following: white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, etc. This is said to be the first privilege checklist.) I got the list below from Ampersand's blog.

The purpose of a privilege checklist is not to make you feel guilty. Nor am I posting it because I want everyone to know how oppressed I am, poor me, my problems are worse than everyone else's. The purpose of a privilege checklist is to make you think about your life experience, and hopefully to recognise that a) other people have problems too and b) if you had to put up with this sh*t, you'd think it was totally unfair.

A Non-Trans Privilege Checklist
1) Strangers don’t assume they can ask me what my genitals look like and how I have sex.
2) My validity as a man/woman/human is not based upon how much surgery I’ve had or how well I “pass” as a non-Trans person.
3) When initiating sex with someone, I do not have to worry that they won’t be able to deal with my parts or that having sex with me will cause my partner to question his or her own sexual orientation.
4) I am not excluded from events which are either explicitly or de facto* men-born-men or women-born-women only. (*basically anything involving nudity)
5) My politics are not questioned based on the choices I make with regard to my body.
6) I don’t have to hear “so have you had THE surgery?” or “oh, so you’re REALLY a [incorrect sex or gender]?” each time I come out to someone.
7) I am not expected to constantly defend my medical decisions.
8) Strangers do not ask me what my “real name” [birth name] is and then assume that they have a right to call me by that name.
9) People do not disrespect me by using incorrect pronouns even after they’ve been corrected.
10) I do not have to worry that someone wants to be my friend or have sex with me in order to prove his or her “hipness” or good politics.
11) I do not have to worry about whether I will be able to find a bathroom to use or whether I will be safe changing in a locker room.
12) When engaging in political action, I do not have to worry about the *gendered* repurcussions of being arrested. (i.e. what will happen to me if the cops find out that my genitals do not match my gendered appearance? Will I end up in a cell with people of my own gender?)
13) I do not have to defend my right to be a part of “Queer” and gays and lesbians will not try to exclude me from OUR movement in order to gain political legitimacy for themselves.
14) My experience of gender (or gendered spaces) is not viewed as “baggage” by others of the gender in which I live.
15) I do not have to choose between either invisibility (”passing”) or being consistently “othered” and/or tokenized based on my gender.
16) I am not told that my sexual orientation and gender identity are mutually exclusive.
17) When I go to the gym or a public pool, I can use the showers.
18) If I end up in the emergency room, I do not have to worry that my gender will keep me from receiving appropriate treatment nor will all of my medical issues be seen as a product of my gender. (”Your nose is running and your throat hurts? Must be due to the hormones!”)
19) My health insurance provider (or public health system) does not specifically exclude me from receiving benefits or treatments available to others because of my gender.
20) When I express my internal identities in my daily life, I am not considered “mentally ill” by the medical establishment.
21) I am not required to undergo extensive psychological evaluation in order to receive basic medical care.
22) The medical establishment does not serve as a “gatekeeper” which disallows self-determination of what happens to my body.
23) People do not use me as a scapegoat for their own unresolved gender issues.

Out of the Silent Planet

2010-06-08T16:20:00.000-04:00

C.S. Lewis is one of those writers whose talent I admire, while finding their ideas more or less repugnant. (Other examples include Robert Heinlein and Joss Whedon.) Lewis' writing style was so very original that I can't understand why he relied so much on Christianity for his themes and plots. Did he not want to be original?

I up and read a biography of him, by A. N. Wilson, who makes the very interesting assertion that Lewis was completely lacking in "self-awareness" and "introspection." I do not quite understand how Wilson deduces this, but if true it would explain why I dislike Lewis so much. "Introspection" means a lot of things. To lack introspection is not to lack imagination, which Lewis certainly had. And one can be thoughtful without being introspective . . . although it's interesting to consider the things that Lewis was not very thoughtful about.

For example, although he wrote several books about Christianity, according to Wilson he was no Biblical scholar. So, when he says in The Problem of Pain that Jesus "was either a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, then you must submit to the second," he is referring to "records" that don't actually exist. There is no proof either way - there cannot be - and the Bible is not a historical document. (Not to mention that Jesus was often reluctant to proclaim himself the Son of God.) But Lewis didn't care about any of that. He constructed an argument and he stuck to it. It's an odd combination of logic and pure irrationality; add in his hectoring insistence that he is right - "there is no middle way" - and you have something that I find completely distasteful.

And yet. The novels. I recently returned to the Silent Planet trilogy, not having read them since my teenage years. The plots are as follows:

Out of the Silent Planet: our hero accidentally travels to the planet Mars and meets the various inhabitants.
Perelandra: our hero travels to the planet Venus and fights the (Christian) Devil.
That Hideous Strength: our hero fights evil here on Earth.

You'll notice that the first book is very different from its successors. It is still about good and evil, but the protagonist is a lot more passive . . . and as far as I can tell, there is nothing explicitly Christian in the first book. We learn that each planet has its own ruling spirit, or incorporeal entity, and above them all is the great being called Maleldil. Earth is called the "silent planet" because its ruler rebelled against Maleldil and it was put under a sort of blockade. (The idea that Earth is under the control of an evil demigod actually reminds me of the Gnostic version of Genesis, which I'm willing to bet Lewis did not do on purpose.)

When I was younger, That Hideous Strength was my favorite of the three. I still think that it has some great writing, although the plot and, again, some of the ideas are a bit dubious. Now I appreciate Silent Planet more, for its imagination, lack of pretentiousness and anti-colonialist critique. I mentioned that the protagonist arrives on Mars accidentally. The two men who travel there first discover gold and intelligent life. They plan to take the gold and kill the inhabitants so that "Man" will have a new planet to live on when he renders the Earth uninhabitable. But they get the impression that the natives want a human sacrifice, so they go back to Earth and kidnap one Elwin Ransom, with the intention of trading him for gold-mining rights.

On Mars, Ransom escapes and meets up with some of the inhabitants on his own. He's a philologist, and when he discovers that they have language, his first thought is how exciting it would be to publish an English-Martian dictionary. I am not making this up. He also gets seasick when riding in one of their boats . . . none of this is very heroic. In the later books he gets more and more . . . special. He's not some bumbling fool anymore, which appeals to me a lot less.

Indeed, in the later books Ransom gets more and more saintly and the bad guys get more and more evil; also more powerful. In Silent Planet, they have the technology to travel to another planet but they don't really understand anything about the world they've discovered. They assume the natives are backwards and stupid, and they are easily defeated. (Hope that's not a spoiler.) In subsequent books Lewis raises the stakes; maybe it's just a fictional convention, to create antagonists who are pure evil and almost omnipotent, but I dislike it. And from a theological point of view. . . Lewis seems to me to spend more time dwelling on the power and malevolence of the Devil than on the power and benevolence of God.

In fact, the whole point of the last two books is that the Devil makes people do bad things. Or rather, they choose to work with him, but he has powers of his own and he's constantly tempting and manipulating people. I don't believe in an external Devil; I think it's irresponsible to promote the idea that "the Devil made me do it;" and I believe that this actually gets back to Lewis' lack of introspection which I mentioned at the top of the page. He didn't want to examine his own unconscious motives, or admit that he had unconscious motives, or an unconscious mind at all. All of that stuff is not part of him - it has to be moved elsewhere, and the Devil makes a handy receptacle for those parts of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge.

Ironically, That Hideous Strength depicts two characters going through tremendous amounts of self-examination. It's as if Lewis was willing to dip his toe in the wading pool, but not to go any deeper. And his conclusions are, for the most part, so perfectly conventional. At one point, one of the characters says, "Anything might be true. Heaven, Hell, the afterlife . . ." It's odd that even though anything might be true, the only possible truths these people can think of are the Christian ones.

In both That Hideous Strength and in the biography, it says that Lewis was very fond of the Normal, the plain, ordinary, boring comforts of an uneventful life. (One might speculate as to the ways in which he had been deprived of the Normal, leading him to appreciate it so much.) As the novel puts it, the Normal is a man's cosy memories of his wife, "fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing . . . he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal." And it just so happens that the Normal is synonymous with the moral, the good, the Will of God. According to Lewis, science, psychology, Progress and progressive ideas of any sort are not Normal. He was deliberately and anachronistically old-fashioned. (And yet he wrote three science-fiction novels.)

Science and technology do have their drawbacks; in that much I can agree with him. Although I suspect that for him, for example, destroying the environment is bad simply because the environment is something that already existed, and we're not supposed to change stuff. I'm not sure if he was aware of the extent to which damage to the environment damages humans too. He criticizes science for its hubris . . . but he also almost seems to take science at its word, to believe that it has all the know-how it claimed to have.

C.S. Lewis seems to be one of those people who never really grew up and never wanted to. Again, that's not me. There is something charming about the simplicity of childhood . . . of safe and happy childhoods, anyway . . . but there comes a time to put away childish things. Especially if you're going to go around claiming to Know the Truth. You can be simple-minded, or you can be smarter than everyone else. Can't be both.

Walt Whitman: Even Stranger Than You Thought

2010-05-11T17:03:00.005-04:00

So I noticed that the author of the Mark Twain biography I read recently, Justin Kaplan, also wrote a biography of Walt Whitman. And I liked Kaplan's style well enough that I decided to read that book too. What do Twain and Whitman have in common? They were both banned in Boston. That's about it. It says something about American puritanism that sex (Whitman's stock-in-trade) and laughter (Twain was known in his own time as a "humorist") are considered to be equally reprehensible.

I already knew that, when John Addington Symonds (about whom I blogged a couple months ago) pressured Whitman to declare he was gay, Whitman not only denied it but boasted about his illegitimate children as proof of his heterosexuality. I was, perhaps, even more astonished to discover from Kaplan's book that these children may never have existed.

Walt Whitman wrote poems about sexuality and the body that were outrageous at the time, and still shocking today. But he also fiercely protected his privacy, burning most of his letters and papers before he died. We know a few of the people he was close to, but very little about their actual relationships; nor do we know which relationships were sexual and which were not. He never married and never lived very long with anyone outside of his family.

Whitman's family was a little unusual. As Kaplan says, "Of the eight Whitman children who survived infancy one was a mental defective and three were psychic disasters; three were normal . . ." and one was Walt Whitman. In later years his brother (one of the normal ones) said that none of them had ever known what to make of Walt. They apparently didn't read his poems. Nonetheless, the people Whitman was closest to were his mother and his favorite brother, Jeff.

As a young man, for reasons that are not clear to me, Whitman began to think of himself as a surrogate father to his younger siblings. (Their father was alive and living with the family.) In 1844, when he was twenty-five, he published an essay called "My Boys and Girls," describing six of his siblings. (He left out his older brother, whom he seems to have disliked, and his retarded brother, but included a mention of one who died in infancy.) The first sentence of this essay is "Though a bachelor, I have several boys and girls that I consider my own." Kaplan notes that he echoed this sentence when he wrote to Symonds in 1890, "Tho' always unmarried I have had six children," but he doesn't explicitly make the connection between the six siblings and the six children. As I said, we have no other information about these alleged children: he never named them or their mothers, and no one has ever come forward claiming to be Whitman's child.

Women who had read Leaves of Grass wrote love letters to Whitman, in some cases offering to have his children. He does not appear to have taken any of them up on their offers. I haven't read all of Leaves of Grass myself (it's a bit overwhelming) but it seems clear to me that his affections for women were not sexual, and that he lingers on descriptions of men's bodies and "the love of comrades."

At the age of twelve, in 1831, Whitman began working for a Long Island newspaper, the Patriot. He spent much of his life involved in journalism and politics. At that time the two political parties in America were the Democrats and the Whigs, and the issue of slavery was dividing the country. Whitman's attitude towards slavery seems paradoxical today. He believed in "Free Soil" - which meant that as new states were added to the Union, they should not have slavery - but he was not an abolitionist. Why was it okay for the Southern states to have slaves? I don't know and this book doesn't explain it.

On more than one occasion Whitman said, "Slavery is bad but lots of things are bad. Why should I get more upset about slavery than anything else?" and he vehemently opposed letting black men vote. He believed that whites were superior. (Incidentally, Kaplan doesn't mention Whitman's views on female suffrage, but it wouldn't surprise me if he supported white women's right to vote. He was definitely a feminist ally.) Kaplan tells us that Whitman's great-grandparents owned slaves, and that slavery was abolished in New York state when Whitman was eight, but he doesn't tell us when or how the Whitmans divested themselves of their slaves.* He does mention, however, that some of these slaves were Native American as well as African-American, and that Whitman referred to both races as "degraded, shiftless, and intemperate."

When his brother was wounded in the Civil War and sent to a hospital in Washington DC, Whitman came down to look after him and ended up staying to take care of many more wounded soldiers. After the war ended, he got a government job and formed a close friendship with a former Confederate soldier named Peter Doyle who was twenty-eight years younger than himself. It seems that Whitman was afraid of his own feelings for this young man, his own "adhesiveness," a term used in the nineteenth century, probably corresponding to what we today would call "desire for intimacy." I can't believe that the man who wrote, published, and assiduously promoted the blatantly sexual poems in Leaves of Grass would have been afraid to express sexual feelings. I believe it was love which tormented him.

He did not censor Leaves of Grass as much as he censored himself in this passage from his notebook:

To give up absolutely & for good, from the present hour, this feverish, fluctuating, useless undignified pursuit of 16.4—too long, (much too long) persevered in,—so humiliating——it must come at last & had better come now—(It cannot possibly be a success.)

Let there from this hour be no faltering, no getting [word erased] at all henceforth, (not once, under any circumstances)—avoid seeing her, or meeting her, or any talk or explanations—or any meeting whatever, from this hour forth, for life.

The original manuscript shows that Whitman changed "him" to "her" on this page. "16.4", the sixteenth and fourth letters of the alphabet, are "P.D." Despite this feverish resolution, Doyle and Whitman remained friends until the poet's death. However, in later years Whitman moved from DC back to Camden, New Jersey and there became attached to another young man, Henry Stafford. They also had a tumultuous relationship. At one point Whitman offered Stafford a ring. He refused it but later wrote, "I wish you would put the ring on my finger again, it seems to me there is something that is wanting to compleete our friendship when I am with you. I have tride to studdy it out but cannot find out what it is. You know when you put it on ther was but one thing to part it from me and that was death." (The spelling mistakes are in the original. Stafford was largely uneducated.) Whitman gave him the ring again but a few years later Stafford got married.

Walt Whitman died in 1892. Three years later Oscar Wilde had his little run-in with the law. It's interesting to compare the two. Whitman pursued fame but also guarded his privacy. He said that he only wanted his poetry to be famous, not himself. Wilde, on the other hand, was all about self-promotion, and he was sadly lacking in caution. Incidentally, Wilde came to pay homage to Whitman in 1882,while on his American lecture tour, and later boasted to a friend, "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips."

Whitman was arguably more famous in England, especially among gentlemen of a certain persuasion, than in America. William Michael Rossetti (brother of the poets Dante Gabriel and Christina) published an expurgated edition of Leaves of Grass in England, leaving out the obscene poems and also the "tedious" ones. It seems a little sad that Whitman never went to England. I believe that he never left the American continent. He wrote poems about California but never saw it in person. He also wrote many poems about the ocean and sailing ships, but as far as I can tell he never saw the open ocean.

O to sail to sea in a ship!
To leave this steady unendurable land,
To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the houses,
To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,
To sail and sail and sail!

Relevant Links:

Leaves of Grass on Project Gutenberg
A Biography of Peter Doyle
Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan

* Update: some info on emancipation in 19th century New York, from What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe.

The state of New York had adopted a program of gradual emancipation decreeing that slaves born after the Fourth of July 1799 should become free at age twenty-eight (for males) or twenty-five (for females). This is would allow the owner who bore the cost of rearing the children reimbursement with several of their prime working years. . . . But in 1817, the New York legislature sped up the emancipation process and decreed that on July 4, 1827, all remaining slaves, whenever born, should become free. Masters would receive no financial compensation from the state but did have one more decade to exploit their chattels unpaid labor.

Mark Twain's Dream: a Cautionary Tale

2010-05-03T14:44:00.004-04:00

I've been reading a biography of Mark Twain (by Justin Kaplan.) He was a very angry man. It's not clear to me exactly what the sources of his anger were, but he was angry at society, at certain individuals, and at himself. Many people described him as meek, mild, and apologetic—most of the time—but prone to sudden eruptions of absolute rage. In 1886 he wrote, "Yesterday a thunderstroke fell on me. I found that all their lives my children have been afraid of me! have stood all their days in uneasy dread of my sharp tongue and uncertain temper."

His enemies list contained people who had cheated him, but also those who had committed such crimes as being more successful than himself, or failing to cope with his incessant and unreasonable demands. As for society, he hated it, or claimed to hate it, because it would not let him speak the "truth." But he censored his own writing on several occasions (for example, when he chose not to publish a book on lynching because he didn't want to lose his white Southern audience) and, even more frequently, told various lies of one kind or another: humorous or self-justifying, as he saw fit. His commitment to the truth was variable at best.

I came to the conclusion that he had no strong understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality. This is also demonstrated by his susceptibility to con artists and get-rich-quick schemes. Even though he was a great writer, he spent much of his life not writing, but chasing after diamond mines, faith healers (he was a Christian Scientist briefly, before adding Mary Baker Eddy to his list of villains), and superb inventions. Even after his writing had made him rich, he was still looking for "the sure thing" (which writing was not, apparently) and he poured unbelievable amounts of money into a mechanical typesetter which never worked correctly and was superseded by the Linotype machine. It almost seemed that he wanted to be taken advantage of; even in his writing career. After discovering that his first publisher had been cheating him, Twain nonetheless stayed with him until he died, at which point Twain signed a new deal with a man whom many of his fellow writers complained about. He could have found someone with a good reputation . . . but for whatever reason, he didn't. (I will add here that Twain's father and older brother were also addicted to get-rich-quick schemes.)

In 1896, at the age of 61, after his oldest daughter had died (at the age of 24, of meningitis) and he had, thanks to years of diligent effort, finally achieved bankruptcy, Twain began writing about and exploring his dreams. He had always been fascinated by the notion of "the shadow self," the forbidden self, Siamese twins (representing the two sides of a person), and impostors. Obviously, his dual existence as "Mark Twain" and "Samuel Clemens" brings up the question, who were these two men? The biographer also remarks on the interesting similarity between the words "twain" and "twin," as well as "Clemens" and "claimants" (as in, false claimants to an estate, another of Twain's favorite subjects.)

This was his dream:

I was suddenly in the presence of a negro wench who was sitting in grassy open country, with her left arm resting on the arm of one of those long park-sofas that are made of broad slats with cracks between, and a curve-over back. She was very vivid to me—round black face, shiny black eyes, thick lips, very white regular teeth showing through her smile. She was about 22, and plump—not fleshy, not fat, merely rounded and plump; and good-natured and not at all bad-looking. She had but one garment on—a coarse tow-linen shirt that reached from her neck to her ankles without break. She sold me a pie, a mushy apple pie—hot. She was eating one herself with a tin teaspoon. She made a disgusting proposition to me. Although it was disgusting it did not surprise me—for I was young (I was never old in a dream yet) and it seemed quite natural that it should come from her. It was disgusting, but I did not say so; I merely made a chaffing remark, brushing aside the matter—a little jeeringly—and this embarrassed her, and she made an awkward pretence that I had misunderstood her. I made a sarcastic remark about this pretence, and asked for a spoon to eat my pie with. She had but the one, and she took it out of her mouth, in a quite matter-of-course way, and offered it to me. My stomach rose—there everything vanished. (from Mark Twain's Notebook, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, pp. 351-352)

This beautiful black woman is a perfect example of a Jungian archetype. She is the Earth Mother, the ground of being, sitting in a grassy field, providing nourishment (in the form of apple pies—surely a nod to Eve.) She is also, of course, the symbol of all that Twain's society defined as despicable: black and female, sexual and happy, the source of all evil. And even in a dream (where, supposedly, nothing is forbidden), he rejects her offer, which is so "disgusting" he has to use the adjective three times. He enters into a battle of words with her; in both dreams and real life, words were his weapons—if only we could know what they actually said to each other.

Or indeed, what currency he used to pay for the pie with. Somehow the pie is acceptable, because he did pay for it, the nourishment that he wanted, just as he wanted love, fame, and social approval from his fellow humans. But the Black Goddess reminds him again that the only way to enjoy these things is through her. He still needs that spoon, and it emerges from her mouth, just as other things emerge from other orifices, and this "disgusts" him so much that he has to wake up.

Twain recovered from bankruptcy (by which I mean that he paid off all his creditors, 100 cents on the dollar, and became rich again.) Nothing could bring back his daughter, or his youngest daughter, or his wife, all of whom predeceased him. But he still had plenty of enemies, one or two friends, and a huge number of fans. He had his writing, his anger, and his bitterness, and as the years went by he constructed an increasingly fictional version of his life.

Personally, when people in dreams offer me things, I usually say yes.

Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM

2010-04-29T15:52:00.000-04:00

Okay, time to demonstrate that this is a transgender blog, after our recent foray into fantasy. You may not be aware that rejecting one's biological sex is officially a form of mental illness. Here is the DSM listing.

There is a double standard in place regarding children with GID vs. adults with GID. Essentially, when children announce that they are really the opposite sex, many parents and therapists believe that this is a delusion which can be cured, and they implement "reparative therapy" in an attempt to make the children conform to their socially assigned gender. Kenneth Zucker is perhaps the best-known reparative therapist practicing today. It's important to note that, back when homosexuality was listed in the DSM as a mental disorder, similar techniques were used to eradicate patients' homosexual tendencies. Most people now consider this to be unacceptable.

However, when adults announce that they are really the opposite sex, the official "therapeutic" position is that this is a delusion which has become incurable. At this point the gender-nonconforming person is granted the right to modify their bodies to match their personal gender identity. Why is it that adults are allowed to choose their gender, while children are explicitly discouraged from gender experimentation? Is this fair?

Ironically, despite the highly controversial, not to mention insulting, nature of the DSM diagnosis, many adult transsexuals want GID to remain as an official disorder, because it allows them to get insurance coverage for their sex-reassignment surgery.

The newest version of the DSM - version 5 - is currently under review. Many people are actively trying to reframe the definition of GID; but there are two camps, one which wants to make it less punitive and the other which, as far as I can tell, wants to solidify gender roles and gender-conformity prejudice. My attention was recently directed to this organization, GID Reform Advocates, whose motto is "our identities are not disordered." That is something I can get behind.

One last thing: when being transgendered is considered to be a mental illness, you get arguments like this one against ENDA:

Similar problems abound in this bill, which treats a conscious decision to choose a new or different sexual identity as if it were an inherent, unavoidable condition. But it's not. It's actually a psychological disorder, officially listed as such by the current American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Our children and our co-workers should not be forced by law to be held hostage to such disorders, nor should employers be forced to have psychologically troubled persons as the public face of their businesses.

I would not want to work with anyone who thought I was mentally ill. And many people still consider homosexuality to be a mental illness, even though it's been removed from the DSM. But it would make me happy if transphobes, as well as homophobes, had one less leg to stand on.

The Problem of Community

2010-04-22T15:50:00.001-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about community lately. People always seem to talk about it as though it's a good thing, all comforting and supportive and "one big happy family." But much of my experience has been with communities that ostracize, that enforce conformity, that give certain people special privileges and expect unquestioning obedience to authority.

In these modern times, communities which value diversity, tolerance, and individual freedom do exist. (I've even heard that there's a very large community which was founded on the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.) However, communities do not become diverse and tolerant just because people in the community say, "We are diverse and tolerant." It takes more than lip service, more than an intellectual belief in equality. I believe that even an honest desire to be tolerant is not enough.

Way back in 1981, Bernice Johnson Reagon delivered a speech which probably said all there is to say about community and diversity. She referred to it as "coalition" and made it clear that it's hard work. I can't even choose my favorite quote from that speech - go read it yourself.

When I think about community, I find myself asking the question: "How does this community handle difference?" Different life experiences, different sexual orientations, different races, different genders and gender identities, plain old differences of opinion of every sort. The sad fact is that even if you could surround yourself with people who look exactly like you, who profess the same religious and political beliefs, who grew up in the same town, went to the same schools and read all the same books as you, you would still find differences of opinion and some of those people would still refuse to behave the way you think they ought to behave.

Difference is inescapable. You have to either reject it or respect it. The means of rejection are many: if anyone disagrees with you, they're wrong/lying/stupid/crazy/immoral/selfish/out to destroy civilization. Or maybe they just hate you personally and are trying to make you look bad. In any case, their opinions don't count. Some people find difference to be extremely threatening . . . as if the presence of another opinion in the universe completely invalidates their own worldview. As if their own sense of self is so fragile that it can't sustain the notion of other ways to live one's life. (And in many cases it seems to be pure jealousy that other people get to do things that are supposedly "forbidden.") I bet people like that hope and pray that they never have to pay attention to anyone who's different from them.

I just realized today that all my life I've had to deal with people who were very different from me. I've always felt like a freak. It's easy to sit around and complain that "nobody understands me." Today it dawned on me that I never understood them either. That causes just as much difficulty as being misunderstood - maybe more. On the one hand, I got really tired of people expecting me to conform to their rules. On the other hand, I had to face the fact that we're all different. They're not going to change their ways. I'm not either. And if I want to be respected for who I am, then I have to somehow find a way to respect them too.

Ironically, respecting difference entails the recognition of what we have in common: we're all human.

A Transgender Fairy Tale

2010-04-21T17:24:00.006-04:00

This is from The Violet Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, first published in 1901. (He got it from a book which was published in French in 1894, and it appears that he modified it freely, but it's still a great story.) I'm so happy that it occurred to me to go over to Project Gutenberg and look for this book.

THE GIRL WHO PRETENDED TO BE A BOY

Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a great conqueror, and reigned over more countries than anyone in the world. And whenever he subdued a fresh kingdom, he only granted peace on condition that the king should deliver him one of his sons for ten years' service.

Now on the borders of his kingdom lay a country whose emperor was as brave as his neighbour, and as long as he was young he was the victor in every war. But as years passed away, his head grew weary of making plans of campaign, and his people wanted to stay at home and till their fields, and at last he too felt that he must do homage to the other emperor.

One thing, however, held him back from this step which day by day he saw more clearly was the only one possible. His new overlord would demand the service of one of his sons. And the old emperor had no son; only three daughters.

Look on which side he would, nothing but ruin seemed to lie before him, and he became so gloomy, that his daughters were frightened, and did everything they could think of to cheer him up, but all to no purpose.

At length one day when they were at dinner, the eldest of the three summoned up all her courage and said to her father:

'What secret grief is troubling you? Are your subjects discontented? or have we given you cause for displeasure? To smooth away your wrinkles, we would gladly shed our blood, for our lives are bound up in yours; and this you know.'

'My daughter,' answered the emperor, 'what you say is true. Never have you given me one moment's pain. Yet now you cannot help me. Ah! why is not one of you a boy!'

'I don't understand,' she answered in surprise. 'Tell us what is wrong: and though we are not boys, we are not quite useless!'

'But what can you do, my dear children? Spin, sew, and weave-that is all your learning. Only a warrior can deliver me now, a young giant who is strong to wield the battle-axe: whose sword deals deadly blows.'

'But why do you need a son so much at present? Tell us all about it! It will not make matters worse if we know!'

'Listen then, my daughters, and learn the reason of my sorrow. You have heard that as long as I was young no man ever brought an army against me without it costing him dear. But the years have chilled my blood and drunk my strength. And now the deer can roam the forest, my arrows will never pierce his heart; strange soldiers will set fire to my houses and water their horses at my wells, and my arm cannot hinder them. No, my day is past, and the time has come when I too must bow my head under the yoke of my foe! But who is to give him the ten years' service that is part of the price which the vanquished must pay?'

'I will,' cried the eldest girl, springing to her feet. But her father only shook his head sadly.

'Never will I bring shame upon you,' urged the girl. 'Let me go. Am I not a princess, and the daughter of an emperor?'

'Go then!' he said.

The brave girl's heart almost stopped beating from joy, as she set about her preparations. She was not still for a single moment, but danced about the house, turning chests and wardrobes upside down. She set aside enough things for a whole year-dresses embroidered with gold and precious stones, and a great store of provisions. And she chose the most spirited horse in the stable, with eyes of flame, and a coat of shining silver.

When her father saw her mounted and curvetting about the court, he gave her much wise advice, as to how she was to behave like the young man she appeared to be, and also how to behave as the girl she really was. Then he gave her his blessing, and she touched her horse with the spur.

The silver armour of herself and her steed dazzled the eyes of the people as she darted past. She was soon out of sight, and if after a few miles she had not pulled up to allow her escort to join her, the rest of the journey would have been performed alone.

But though none of his daughters were aware of the fact, the old emperor was a magician, and had laid his plans accordingly. He managed, unseen, to overtake his daughter, and throw a bridge of copper over a stream which she would have to cross. Then, changing himself into a wolf, he lay down under one of the arches, and waited.

He had chosen his time well, and in about half an hour the sound of a horse's hoofs was heard. His feet were almost on the bridge, when a big grey wolf with grinning teeth appeared before the princess. With a deep growl that froze the blood, he drew himself up, and prepared to spring.

The appearance of the wolf was so sudden and so unexpected, that the girl was almost paralysed, and never even dreamt of flight, till the horse leaped violently to one side. Then she turned him round, and urging him to his fullest speed, never drew rein till she saw the gates of the palace rising before her.

The old emperor, who had got back long since, came to the door to meet her, and touching her shining armour, he said, 'Did I not tell you, my child, that flies do not make honey?'

The days passed on, and one morning the second princess implored her father to allow her to try the adventure in which her sister had made such a failure. He listened unwillingly, feeling sure it was no use, but she begged so hard that in the end he consented, and having chosen her arms, she rode away.

But though, unlike her sister, she was quite prepared for the appearance of the wolf when she reached the copper bridge, she showed no greater courage, and galloped home as fast as her horse could carry her. On the steps of the castle her father was standing, and as still trembling with fright she knelt at his feet, he said gently, 'Did I not tell you, my child, that every bird is not caught in a net?'

The three girls stayed quietly in the palace for a little while, embroidering, spinning, weaving, and tending their birds and flowers, when early one morning, the youngest princess entered the door of the emperor's private apartments. 'My father, it is my turn now. Perhaps I shall get the better of that wolf!'

'What, do you think you are braver than your sisters, vain little one? You who have hardly left your long clothes behind you!' but she did not mind being laughed at, and answered,

'For your sake, father, I would cut the devil himself into small bits, or even become a devil myself. I think I shall succeed, but if I fail, I shall come home without more shame than my sisters.'

Still the emperor hesitated, but the girl petted and coaxed him till at last he said,

'Well, well, if you must go, you must. It remains to be seen what I shall get by it, except perhaps a good laugh when I see you come back with your head bent and your eyes on the ground.'

'He laughs best who laughs last,' said the princess.

Happy at having got her way, the princess decided that the first thing to be done was to find some old white-haired boyard, whose advice she could trust, and then to be very careful in choosing her horse. So she went straight to the stables where the most beautiful horses in the empire were feeding in the stalls, but none of them seemed quite what she wanted. Almost in despair she reached the last box of all, which was occupied by her father's ancient war-horse, old and worn like himself, stretched sadly out on the straw.

The girl's eyes filled with tears, and she stood gazing at him. The horse lifted his head, gave a little neigh, and said softly, 'You look gentle and pitiful, but I know it is your love for your father which makes you tender to me. Ah, what a warrior he was, and what good times we shared together! But now I too have grown old, and my master has forgotten me, and there is no reason to care whether my coat is dull or shining. Yet, it is not too late, and if I were properly tended, in a week I could vie with any horse in the stables!'

'And how should you be tended?' asked the girl.

'I must be rubbed down morning and evening with rain water, my barley must be boiled in milk, because of my bad teeth, and my feet must be washed in oil.'

'I should like to try the treatment, as you might help me in carrying out my scheme.'

'Try it then, mistress, and I promise you will never repent.'

So in a week's time the horse woke up one morning with a sudden shiver through all his limbs; and when it had passed away, he found his skin shining like a mirror, his body as fat as a water melon, his movement light as a chamois.

Then looking at the princess who had come early to the stable, he said joyfully,

'May success await on the steps of my master's daughter, for she has given me back my life. Tell me what I can do for you, princess, and I will do it.'

'I want to go to the emperor who is our over-lord, and I have no one to advise me. Which of all the white-headed boyards shall I choose as counsellor?'

'If you have me, you need no one else: I will serve you as I served your father, if you will only listen to what I say.'

'I will listen to everything. Can you start in three days?'

'This moment, if you like,' said the horse.

The preparations of the emperor's youngest daughter were much fewer and simpler than those of her sisters. They only consisted of some boy's clothes, a small quantity of linen and food, and a little money in case of necessity. Then she bade farewell to her father, and rode away.

A day's journey from the palace, she reached the copper bridge, but before they came in sight of it, the horse, who was a magician, had warned her of the means her father would take to prove her courage.

Still in spite of his warning she trembled all over when a huge wolf, as thin as if he had fasted for a month, with claws like saws, and mouth as wide as an oven, bounded howling towards her. For a moment her heart failed her, but the next, touching the horse lightly with her spur, she drew her sword from its sheath, ready to separate the wolf's head from its body at a single blow.

The beast saw the sword, and shrank back, which was the best thing it could do, as now the girl's blood was up, and the light of battle in her eyes. Then without looking round, she rode across the bridge.

The emperor, proud of this first victory, took a short cut, and waited for her at the end of another day's journey, close to a river, over which he threw a bridge of silver. And this time he took the shape of a lion.

But the horse guessed this new danger and told the princess how to escape it. But it is one thing to receive advice when we feel safe and comfortable, and quite another to be able to carry it out when some awful peril is threatening us. And if the wolf had made the girl quake with terror, it seemed like a lamb beside this dreadful lion.

At the sound of his roar the very trees quivered and his claws were so large that every one of them looked like a cutlass.

The breath of the princess came and went, and her feet rattled in the stirrups. Suddenly the remembrance flashed across her of the wolf whom she had put to flight, and waving her sword, she rushed so violently on the lion that he had barely time to spring on one side, so as to avoid the blow. Then, like a flash, she crossed this bridge also.

Now during her whole life, the princess had been so carefully brought up, that she had never left the gardens of the palace, so that the sight of the hills and valleys and tinkling streams, and the song of the larks and blackbirds, made her almost beside herself with wonder and delight. She longed to get down and bathe her face in the clear pools, and pick the brilliant flowers, but the horse said 'No,' and quickened his pace, neither turning to the right or the left.

'Warriors,' he told her, 'only rest when they have won the victory. You have still another battle to fight, and it is the hardest of all.'

This time it was neither a wolf nor a lion that was waiting for her at the end of the third day's journey, but a dragon with twelve heads, and a golden bridge behind it.

The princess rode up without seeing anything to frighten her, when a sudden puff of smoke and flame from beneath her feet, caused her to look down, and there was the horrible creature twisted and writhing, its twelve heads reared up as if to seize her between them.

The bridle fell from her hand: and the sword which she had just grasped slid back into its sheath, but the horse bade her fear nothing, and with a mighty effort she sat upright and spurred straight on the dragon.

The fight lasted an hour and the dragon pressed her hard. But in the end, by a well-directed side blow, she cut off one of the heads, and with a roar that seemed to rend the heavens in two, the dragon fell back on the ground, and rose as a man before her.

Although the horse had informed the princess the dragon was really her own father, the girl had hardly believed him, and stared in amazement at the transformation. But he flung his arms round her and pressed her to his heart saying, 'Now I see that you are as brave as the bravest, and as wise as the wisest. You have chosen the right horse, for without his help you would have returned with a bent head and downcast eyes. You have filled me with the hope that you may carry out the task you have undertaken, but be careful to forget none of my counsels, and above all to listen to those of your horse.'

When he had done speaking, the princess knelt down to receive his blessing, and they went their different ways.

The princess rode on and on, till at last she came to the mountains which hold up the roof of the world. There she met two Genii who had been fighting fiercely for two years, without one having got the least advantage over the other. Seeing what they took to be a young man seeking adventures, one of the combatants called out, 'Fet-Fruners! deliver me from my enemy, and I will give you the horn that can be heard the distance of a three days' journey;' while the other cried, 'Fet-Fruners! help me to conquer this pagan thief, and you shall have my horse, Sunlight.'

Before answering, the princess consulted her own horse as to which offer she should accept, and he advised her to side with the genius who was master of Sunlight, his own younger brother, and still more active than himself.

So the girl at once attacked the other genius, and soon clove his skull; then the one who was left victor begged her to come back with him to his house and he would hand her over Sunlight, as he had promised.

The mother of the genius was rejoiced to see her son return safe and sound, and prepared her best room for the princess, who, after so much fatigue, needed rest badly. But the girl declared that she must first make her horse comfortable in his stable; but this was really only an excuse, as she wanted to ask his advice on several matters.

But the old woman had suspected from the very first that the boy who had come to the rescue of her son was a girl in disguise, and told the genius that she was exactly the wife he needed. The genius scoffed, and inquired what female hand could ever wield a sabre like that; but, in spite of his sneers, his mother persisted, and as a proof of what she said, laid at night on each of their pillows a handful of magic flowers, that fade at the touch of man, but remain eternally fresh in the fingers of a woman.

It was very clever of her, but unluckily the horse had warned the princess what to expect, and when the house was silent, she stole very softly to the genius's room, and exchanged his faded flowers for those she held. Then she crept back to her own bed and fell fast asleep.

At break of day, the old woman ran to see her son, and found, as she knew she would, a bunch of dead flowers in his hand. She next passed on to the bedside of the princess, who still lay asleep grasping the withered flowers. But she did not believe any the more that her guest was a man, and so she told her son. So they put their heads together and laid another trap for her.

After breakfast the genius gave his arm to his guest, and asked her to come with him into the garden. For some time they walked about looking at the flowers, the genius all the while pressing her to pick any she fancied. But the princess, suspecting a trap, inquired roughly why they were wasting the precious hours in the garden, when, as men, they should be in the stables looking after their horses. Then the genius told his mother that she was quite wrong, and his deliverer was certainly a man. But the old woman was not convinced for all that.

She would try once more she said, and her son must lead his visitor into the armoury, where hung every kind of weapon used all over the world-some plain and bare, others ornamented with precious stones-and beg her to make choice of one of them. The princess looked at them closely, and felt the edges and points of their blades, then she hung at her belt an old sword with a curved blade, that would have done credit to an ancient warrior. After this she informed the genius that she would start early next day and take Sunlight with her.

And there was nothing for the mother to do but to submit, though she still stuck to her own opinion.

The princess mounted Sunlight, and touched him with her spur, when the old horse, who was galloping at her side, suddenly said:

'Up to this time, mistress, you have obeyed my counsels and all has gone well. Listen to me once more, and do what I tell you. I am old, and-now that there is someone to take my place, I will confess it-I am afraid that my strength is not equal to the task that lies before me. Give me leave, therefore, to return home, and do you continue your journey under the care of my brother. Put your faith in him as you put it in me, and you will never repent. Wisdom has come early to Sunlight.'

'Yes, my old comrade, you have served me well; and it is only through your help that up to now I have been victorious. So grieved though I am to say farewell, I will obey you yet once more, and will listen to your brother as I would to yourself. Only, I must have a proof that he loves me as well as you do.'

'How should I not love you?' answered Sunlight; 'how should I not be proud to serve a warrior such as you? Trust me, mistress, and you shall never regret the absence of my brother. I know there will be difficulties in our path, but we will face them together.'

Then, with tears in her eyes, the princess took leave of her old horse, who galloped back to her father.

She had ridden only a few miles further, when she saw a golden curl lying on the road before her. Checking her horse, she asked whether it would be better to take it or let it lie.

'If you take it,' said Sunlight, 'you will repent, and if you don't, you will repent too: so take it.' On this the girl dismounted, and picking up the curl, wound it round her neck for safety.

They passed by hills, they passed by mountains, they passed through valleys, leaving behind them thick forests, and fields covered with flowers; and at length they reached the court of the over-lord.

He was sitting on his throne, surrounded by the sons of the other emperors, who served him as pages. These youths came forward to greet their new companion, and wondered why they felt so attracted towards him.

However, there was no time for talking and concealing her fright.

The princess was led straight up to the throne, and explained, in a low voice, the reason of her coming. The emperor received her kindly, and declared himself fortunate at finding a vassal so brave and so charming, and begged the princess to remain in attendance on his person.

She was, however, very careful in her behaviour towards the other pages, whose way of life did not please her. One day, however, she had been amusing herself by making sweetmeats, when two of the young princes looked in to pay her a visit. She offered them some of the food which was already on the table, and they thought it so delicious that they even licked their fingers so as not to lose a morsel. Of course they did not keep the news of their discovery to themselves, but told all their companions that they had just been enjoying the best supper they had had since they were born. And from that moment the princess was left no peace, till she had promised to cook them all a dinner.

Now it happened that, on the very day fixed, all the cooks in the palace became intoxicated, and there was no one to make up the fire.

When the pages heard of this shocking state of things, they went to their companion and implored her to come to the rescue.

The princess was fond of cooking, and was, besides, very good-natured; so she put on an apron and went down to the kitchen without delay. When the dinner was placed before the emperor he found it so nice that he ate much more than was good for him. The next morning, as soon as he woke, he sent for his head cook, and told him to send up the same dishes as before. The cook, seized with fright at this command, which he knew he could not fulfil, fell on his knees, and confessed the truth.

The emperor was so astonished that he forgot to scold, and while he was thinking over the matter, some of his pages came in and said that their new companion had been heard to boast that he knew where Iliane was to be found-the celebrated Iliane of the song which begins:

'Golden Hair
The fields are green,'

and that to their certain knowledge he had a curl of her hair in his possession.

When he heard that, the emperor desired the page to be brought before him, and, as soon as the princess obeyed his summons, he said to her abruptly:

'Fet-Fruners, you have hidden from me the fact that you knew the golden-haired Iliane! Why did you do this? for I have treated you more kindly than all my other pages.'

Then, after making the princess show him the golden curl which she wore round her neck, he added: 'Listen to me; unless by some means or other you bring me the owner of this lock, I will have your head cut off in the place where you stand. Now go!'

In vain the poor girl tried to explain how the lock of hair came into her possession; the emperor would listen to nothing, and, bowing low, she left his presence and went to consult Sunlight what she was to do.

At his first words she brightened up. 'Do not be afraid, mistress; only last night my brother appeared to me in a dream and told me that a genius had carried off Iliane, whose hair you picked up on the road. But Iliane declares that, before she marries her captor, he must bring her, as a present, the whole stud of mares which belong to her. The genius, half crazy with love, thinks of nothing night and day but how this can be done, and meanwhile she is quite safe in the island swamps of the sea. Go back to the emperor and ask him for twenty ships filled with precious merchandise. The rest you shall know by-and-by.'

On hearing this advice, the princess went at once into the emperor's presence.

'May a long life be yours, O Sovereign all mighty!' said she. 'I have come to tell you that I can do as you command if you will give me twenty ships, and load them with the most precious wares in your kingdom.'

'You shall have all that I possess if you will bring me the golden-haired Iliane,' said the emperor.

The ships were soon ready, and the princess entered the largest and finest, with Sunlight at her side. Then the sails were spread and the voyage began.

For seven weeks the wind blew them straight towards the west, and early one morning they caught sight of the island swamps of the sea.

They cast anchor in a little bay, and the princess made haste to disembark with Sunlight, but, before leaving the ship, she tied to her belt a pair of tiny gold slippers, adorned with precious stones. Then mounting Sunlight, she rode about till she came to several palaces, built on hinges, so that they could always turn towards the sun.

The most splendid of these was guarded by three slaves, whose greedy eyes were caught by the glistening gold of the slippers. They hastened up to the owner of these treasures, and inquired who he was. 'A merchant,' replied the princess, 'who had somehow missed his road, and lost himself among the island swamps of the sea.'

Not knowing if it was proper to receive him or not, the slaves returned to their mistress and told her all they had seen, but not before she had caught sight of the merchant from the roof of her palace. Luckily her gaoler was away, always trying to catch the stud of mares, so for the moment she was free and alone.

The slaves told their tale so well that their mistress insisted on going down to the shore and seeing the beautiful slippers for herself. They were even lovelier than she expected, and when the merchant besought her to come on board, and inspect some that he thought were finer still, her curiosity was too great to refuse, and she went.

Once on board ship, she was so busy turning over all the precious things stored there, that she never knew that the sails were spread, and that they were flying along with the wind behind them; and when she did know, she rejoiced in her heart, though she pretended to weep and lament at being carried captive a second time. Thus they arrived at the court of the emperor.

They were just about to land, when the mother of the genius stood before them. She had learnt that Iliane had fled from her prison in company with a merchant, and, as her son was absent, had come herself in pursuit. Striding over the blue waters, hopping from wave to wave, one foot reaching to heaven, and the other planted in the foam, she was close at their heels, breathing fire and flame, when they stepped on shore from the ship. One glance told Iliane who the horrible old woman was, and she whispered hastily to her companion. Without saying a word, the princess swung her into Sunlight's saddle, and leaping up behind her, they were off like a flash.

It was not till they drew near the town that the princess stooped and asked Sunlight what they should do. 'Put your hand into my left ear,' said he, 'and take out a sharp stone, which you must throw behind you.'

The princess did as she was told, and a huge mountain sprang up behind them. The mother of the genius began to climb up it, and though they galloped quickly, she was quicker still.

They heard her coming, faster, faster; and again the princess stooped to ask what was to be done now. 'Put your hand into my right ear,' said the horse, 'and throw the brush you will find there behind you.' The princess did so, and a great forest sprang up behind them, and, so thick were its leaves, that even a wren could not get through. But the old woman seized hold of the branches and flung herself like a monkey from one to the others, and always she drew nearer-always, always-till their hair was singed by the flames of her mouth.

Then, in despair, the princess again bent down and asked if there was nothing more to be done, and Sunlight replied 'Quick, quick, take off the betrothal ring on the finger of Iliane and throw it behind you.'

This time there sprang up a great tower of stone, smooth as ivory, hard as steel, which reached up to heaven itself. And the mother of the genius gave a howl of rage, knowing that she could neither climb it nor get through it. But she was not beaten yet, and gathering herself together, she made a prodigious leap, which landed her on the top of the tower, right in the middle of Iliane's ring which lay there, and held her tight. Only her claws could be seen grasping the battlements.

All that could be done the old witch did; but the fire that poured from her mouth never reached the fugitives, though it laid waste the country a hundred miles round the tower, like the flames of a volcano. Then, with one last effort to free herself, her hands gave way, and, falling down to the bottom of the tower, she was broken in pieces.

When the flying princess saw what had happened she rode back to the spot, as Sunlight counselled her, and placed her finger on the top of the tower, which was gradually shrinking into the earth. In an instant the tower had vanished as if it had never been, and in its place was the finger of the princess with a ring round it.

The emperor received Iliane with all the respect that was due to her, and fell in love at first sight besides.

But this did not seem to please Iliane, whose face was sad as she walked about the palace or gardens, wondering how it was that, while other girls did as they liked, she was always in the power of someone whom she hated.

So when the emperor asked her to share his throne Iliane answered:

'Noble Sovereign, I may not think of marriage till my stud of horses has been brought me, with their trappings all complete.'

When he heard this, the emperor once more sent for Fet-Fruners, and said:

'Fet-Fruners, fetch me instantly the stud of mares, with their trappings all complete. If not, your head shall pay the forfeit.'

'Mighty Emperor, I kiss your hands! I have but just returned from doing your bidding, and, behold, you send me on another mission, and stake my head on its fulfilment, when your court is full of valiant young men, pining to win their spurs. They say you are a just man; then why not entrust this quest to one of them? Where am I to seek these mares that I am to bring you?'

'How do I know? They may be anywhere in heaven or earth; but, wherever they are, you will have to find them.'

The princess bowed and went to consult Sunlight. He listened while she told her tale, and then said:

'Fetch quickly nine buffalo skins; smear them well with tar, and lay them on my back. Do not fear; you will succeed in this also; but, in the end, the emperor's desires will be his undoing.'

The buffalo skins were soon got, and the princess started off with Sunlight. The way was long and difficult, but at length they reached the place where the mares were grazing. Here the genius who had carried off Iliane was wandering about, trying to discover how to capture them, all the while believing that Iliane was safe in the palace where he had left her.

As soon as she caught sight of him, the princess went up and told him that Iliane had escaped, and that his mother, in her efforts to recapture her, had died of rage. At this news a blind fury took possession of the genius, and he rushed madly upon the princess, who awaited his onslaught with perfect calmness. As he came on, with his sabre lifted high in the air, Sunlight bounded right over his head, so that the sword fell harmless. And when in her turn the princess prepared to strike, the horse sank upon his knees, so that the blade pierced the genius's thigh.

The fight was so fierce that it seemed as if the earth would give way under them, and for twenty miles round the beasts in the forests fled to their caves for shelter. At last, when her strength was almost gone, the genius lowered his sword for an instant. The princess saw her chance, and, with one swoop of her arm, severed her enemy's head from his body. Still trembling from the long struggle, she turned away, and went to the meadow where the stud were feeding.

By the advice of Sunlight, she took care not to let them see her, and climbed a thick tree, where she could see and hear without being seen herself. Then he neighed, and the mares came galloping up, eager to see the new comer-all but one horse, who did not like strangers, and thought they were very well as they were. As Sunlight stood his ground, well pleased with the attention paid him, this sulky creature suddenly advanced to the charge, and bit so violently that had it not been for the nine buffalo skins Sunlight's last moment would have come. When the fight was ended, the buffalo skins were in ribbons, and the beaten animal writhing with pain on the grass.

Nothing now remained to be done but to drive the whole stud to the emperor's court. So the princess came down from the tree and mounted Sunlight, while the stud followed meekly after, the wounded horse bringing up the rear. On reaching the palace, she drove them into a yard, and went to inform the emperor of her arrival.

The news was told at once to Iliane, who ran down directly and called them to her one by one, each mare by its name. And at the first sight of her the wounded animal shook itself quickly, and in a moment its wounds were healed, and there was not even a mark on its glossy skin.

By this time the emperor, on hearing where she was, joined her in the yard, and at her request ordered the mares to be milked, so that both he and she might bathe in the milk and keep young for ever. But they would suffer no one to come near them, and the princess was commanded to perform this service also.

At this, the heart of the girl swelled within her. The hardest tasks were always given to her, and long before the two years were up, she would be worn out and useless. But while these thoughts passed through her mind, a fearful rain fell, such as no man remembered before, and rose till the mares were standing up to their knees in water. Then as suddenly it stopped, and, behold! the water was ice, which held the animals firmly in its grasp. And the princess's heart grew light again, and she sat down gaily to milk them, as if she had done it every morning of her life.

The love of the emperor for Iliane waxed greater day by day, but she paid no heed to him, and always had an excuse ready to put off their marriage. At length, when she had come to the end of everything she could think of, she said to him one day: 'Grant me, Sire, just one request more, and then I will really marry you; for you have waited patiently this long time.'

'My beautiful dove,' replied the emperor, 'both I and all I possess are yours, so ask your will, and you shall have it.'

'Get me, then,' she said, 'a flask of the holy water that is kept in a little church beyond the river Jordan, and I will be your wife.'

Then the emperor ordered Fet-Fruners to ride without delay to the river Jordan, and to bring back, at whatever cost, the holy water for Iliane.

'This, my mistress,' said Sunlight, when she was saddling him, 'is the last and most difficult of your tasks. But fear nothing, for the hour of the emperor has struck.'

So they started; and the horse, who was not a wizard for nothing, told the princess exactly where she was to look for the holy water.

'It stands,' he said, 'on the altar of a little church, and is guarded by a troop of nuns. They never sleep, night or day, but every now and then a hermit comes to visit them, and from him they learn certain things it is needful for them to know. When this happens, only one of the nuns remains on guard at a time, and if we are lucky enough to hit upon this moment, we may get hold of the vase at once; if not, we shall have to wait the arrival of the hermit, however long it may be; for there is no other means of obtaining the holy water.'

They came in sight of the church beyond the Jordan, and, to their great joy, beheld the hermit just arriving at the door. They could hear him calling the nuns around him, and saw them settle themselves under a tree, with the hermit in their midst-all but one, who remained on guard, as was the custom.

The hermit had a great deal to say, and the day was very hot, so the nun, tired of sitting by herself, lay down right across the threshold, and fell sound asleep.

Then Sunlight told the princess what she was to do, and the girl stepped softly over the sleeping nun, and crept like a cat along the dark aisle, feeling the wall with her fingers, lest she should fall over something and ruin it all by a noise. But she reached the altar in safety, and found the vase of holy water standing on it. This she thrust into her dress, and went back with the same care as she came. With a bound she was in the saddle, and seizing the reins bade Sunlight take her home as fast as his legs could carry him.

The sound of the flying hoofs aroused the nun, who understood instantly that the precious treasure was stolen, and her shrieks were so loud and piercing that all the rest came flying to see what was the matter. The hermit followed at their heels, but seeing it was impossible to overtake the thief, he fell on his knees and called his most deadly curse down on her head, praying that if the thief was a man, he might become a woman; and if she was a woman, that she might become a man. In either case he thought that the punishment would be severe.

But punishments are things about which people do not always agree, and when the princess suddenly felt she was really the man she had pretended to be, she was delighted, and if the hermit had only been within reach she would have thanked him from her heart.

By the time she reached the emperor's court, Fet-Fruners looked a young man all over in the eyes of everyone; and even the mother of the genius would now have had her doubts set at rest. He drew forth the vase from his tunic and held it up to the emperor, saying: 'Mighty Sovereign, all hail! I have fulfilled this task also, and I hope it is the last you have for me; let another now take his turn.'

'I am content, Fet-Fruners,' replied the emperor, 'and when I am dead it is you who will sit upon my throne; for I have yet no son to come after me. But if one is given me, and my dearest wish is accomplished, then you shall be his right hand, and guide him with your counsels.'

But though the emperor was satisfied, Iliane was not, and she determined to revenge herself on the emperor for the dangers which he had caused Fet-Fruners to run. And as for the vase of holy water, she thought that, in common politeness, her suitor ought to have fetched it himself, which he could have done without any risk at all.

So she ordered the great bath to be filled with the milk of her mares, and begged the emperor to clothe himself in white robes, and enter the bath with her, an invitation he accepted with joy. Then, when both were standing with the milk reaching to their necks, she sent for the horse which had fought Sunlight, and made a secret sign to him. The horse understood what he was to do, and from one nostril he breathed fresh air over Iliane, and from the other, he snorted a burning wind which shrivelled up the emperor where he stood, leaving only a little heap of ashes.

His strange death, which no one could explain, made a great sensation throughout the country, and the funeral his people gave him was the most splendid ever known. When it was over, Iliane summoned Fet-Fruners before her, and addressed him thus:

'Fet-Fruners! it is you who brought me and have saved my life, and obeyed my wishes. It is you who gave me back my stud; you who killed the genius, and the old witch his mother; you who brought me the holy water. And you, and none other, shall be my husband.'

'Yes, I will marry you,' said the young man, with a voice almost as soft as when he was a princess. 'But know that in OUR house, it will be the cock who sings and not the hen!'

(From Sept Contes Roumains, Jules Brun and Leo Bachelin.)

Emily and Charlotte Bronte

2010-04-07T14:39:00.002-04:00

I wanted to write about the life of Emily Bronte. But that's pretty much impossible. As far as I can recall, she had no friends outside of her family. She left few if any letters, never kept a regular diary, and much of her unpublished writing was destroyed at her death. Most of what we know about her, outside of Wuthering Heights and her poems, comes from her sister Charlotte. And Charlotte was not objective; she may even have been deliberately untruthful.

Nonetheless, Katherine Frank has published a biography of Emily Bronte, and if she can create a whole book on the subject I can create a blog post. So. I do recommend her book; it's unavoidably weak in spots but some of her insights and deductions are quite penetrating.

Her most interesting deduction is that Emily Bronte (and probably her sisters too) had an eating disorder. Once it was pointed out to me, I reread Wuthering Heights and realized that on almost every page, one of the characters is refusing to eat. They're too angry, or too sad, or distracted, or have just lost interest in living. They all do it. Frank points out that refusing to eat is a means of asserting control over your life. Maybe you can't control anything else, but you can control what you put into your mouth.

Also, the hunger strike is a well known form of protest: you are no longer cooperating with a world that refuses to give you what you want. I have read quite a bit about the Brontes here and there, but not until I read Frank's book did I know that they once went on a hunger strike. Their beloved family servant, Tabby, had broken her leg and the adult Brontes (the children's father and aunt) had decided that they didn't want to take care of her and there was no use in having her around the house. They were going to ship her off to one of her relatives, but the young women insisted on nursing the woman who had always taken care of them. And they stopped eating until the grown-ups agreed to their demand. This happened in 1836, when Charlotte was 20 and her two sisters were 18 and 16.

I also noticed that people in Wuthering Heights lie all the time. Probably the most frequent liars are Heathcliff and the narrator, Nelly Dean, but everybody does some of it. Lying is also a very good way to control your environment, to evade punishment and make yourself look good. When it takes the form of well-written fiction, we admire it. But in general, people acquire the art of lying first and the art of good writing later (if at all.)

Food goes into our mouths, and words come out.

Food and lying also play a part in one of the stories about Emily that Charlotte wrote in 1830, when she was 14 and Emily was 12. As I mentioned in my other post, Emily and Anne created one imaginary country and Charlotte and Branwell created another one. Charlotte's alter ego, Lord Charles Wellesley, visits Parrysland (Emily's country, named after the Arctic explorer) and makes fun of everyone and everything. The inhabitants of Parrysland talk funny (apparently Charlotte continued to make fun of Emily and Anne's baby talk, even after they grew out of it) and they spend a lot of time discussing the doll clothes that Emily and Anne make for them.

According to Charlotte/Charles, they're also gluttons. (Eating disorders often start in adolescence; it's likely that Charlotte began to feel anxiety about food before her younger sisters did.) They spend their whole time eating themselves sick, and Lady Emily Parry's child is actually named "Eater." After supper, Lord Charles is left alone with Eater, and he proceeds to beat the crap out of the child. There's really no other way to describe it:

I ordered him to sit down. He laughed but did not obey: this incensed me and heaving the poker I struck him to the ground. The scream he set up was tremendous but it only increased my anger; I kicked him several times & dashed his head against the floor hoping to stun him . . .

When the boy's father comes running in and asks what happened, Charles/Charlotte replies, "Nothing at all . . . the sweet little boy fell down while I was playing with him & hurt himself." (As I said in the previous post, it really makes one think that Charlotte should never have been put in charge of any children.)

This episode is reminiscent of several scenes in Wuthering Heights - but it was written by Charlotte, who later professed herself shocked by the violence in Emily's novel. We have some information about Charlotte's transformation from raging adolescent to melancholy, resigned adult. We don't know exactly how Emily went from sewing doll clothes to writing works of passion. But it seems accurate to say that Charlotte learned, to an extent, how to compromise with the world: to tell it what she thought it wanted to hear. Emily never did.

We will never know the details of their sisterly life. All we do know is that they did spend most of their short lives together. In 1845, Charlotte was 29 and Emily 27. They had briefly attended various schools, usually together, and usually disliked it. They had tried to start their own school, which failed. They had played together, told stories together and apart. In 1845, Charlotte noticed among her sister's things a book, which she opened. It was a manuscript collection of Emily's poems.

For whatever reason, Charlotte had not been aware that Emily was writing poems, even though they lived in the same house. But she did know that looking at her book was an invasion of privacy. Charlotte never denied the fact that Emily was angry at her; but she insisted that the poems were good enough to be published, that they must be published, that the Bronte sisters who had failed in the only profession which was open to them could succeed as writers . . . wait a minute. These are Emily's poems we're talking about here. How did her sisters get in on the act?

It seems that neither Emily nor Anne had any interest in publication. This was Charlotte's idea, and she was the driving force. But Charlotte could not conceive of acting without her sisters. She needed them to attack the publishing world together. It seems to be generally agreed that, although all three of them had been writing poetry, Emily's was the best. But Emily, perhaps, was not interested in publishing. Charlotte, at the time, had not written her best work, but she had the desire to succeed. It's a weird symbiotic relationship - and there was Anne too, along for the ride.

Incidentally, I believe that Anne is a better writer than she's been given credit for, and Charlotte is partially to blame for this. After her sisters died, she reissued Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey. She chose not to republish Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. "She hardly thought it worth preserving. The choice of subject had been a mistake; Anne had written it 'under a strange conscientious half-ascetic notion of accomplishing a painful penance and severe duty.'"

That quote is from Rebecca Fraser's biography of the Brontes; there doesn't seem to be a citation but I guess those are Charlotte's words. If so, I've read the book and I do not understand what Charlotte was on about. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is about alcoholism. We believe that Anne's primary experience with alcoholism was the deterioration and death of her brother Branwell - a long ordeal which affected Charlotte deeply as well, since she and Branwell were very close (arguably, closer than Charlotte and Emily, considering the fact that they were writing partners.) It seems likely to me that Anne was more objective on the subject than Charlotte -- in fact, one of the unusual things about Tenant of Wildfell Hall is its objectivity, a trait lacking in other Bronte works. It's not a bad book; I would not even call it a "painful" book, especially not when compared with Charlotte's Villette.

Anyway. I wanted to write about Emily. But that anecdote does illustrate how Charlotte controlled the work and reputations of her sisters after their death, and how she may have misinterpreted them.

One last fact: Emily spent the last year of her life working on her second novel. We only know that because she mentioned it in a letter to her publisher. We know nothing else about it, not even the title. What happened to the manuscript? Was it deliberately destroyed - and if so, by whom?

The Fantasy World of the Brontes

2010-04-06T17:54:00.000-04:00

I've written about the Brontes before. Found myself going back to them recently. Perhaps because John Addington Symonds' obsession with his homosexual fantasies reminded me of the elaborate fantasy world they created as children. Not that their fantasies were explicitly sexual.* What Symonds' fantasies and the stories of the Bronte children have in common is that they were all about forbidden things; things they couldn't have.

Katherine Frank has written a very interesting, if fragmentary, biography of Emily Bronte which makes some good points about the "plays." For example, they started off being set in Africa: a warm, luxurious, fertile country very different from the bleak Yorkshire moors that were all the children had ever known. And yet, they did know about Africa, and British colonialism, through their precocious and voracious reading of newspapers. They were proper little imperialists, following in their father's Tory footsteps. And in their fantasy world they were omnipotent. Everything that they could not do at home, they did in fantasy. They could even restore the dead to life.

Many people have recounted the story of how the young Branwell Bronte received a set of toy soldiers from his father, and how the boy and each of his three sisters chose their favorite soldier, named him after some historical figure and began to make up stories about them. Charlotte's soldier was the Duke of Wellington, Emily and Anne chose the Arctic explorers Parry and Ross, and Branwell chose Napoleon. I have not found anyone who points out that to British people of that era, Napoleon was a very bad guy. Also, he and Wellington were archenemies. In modern terms, for Charlotte and Branwell to play Napoleon and Wellington would be like playing Superman and Lex Luthor, Xavier and Magneto, George Bush and Osama bin Laden (oops, I digress again.)

Indeed, the four children divided into two teams, with Emily and Anne telling most of their stories together, and Charlotte and Branwell creating their own fictional world. (As far as I know, only Charlotte's stories have been published. I believe that none of Emily or Anne's original writing survived; although Emily's later poems about her fictional world of Gondal have been published, the book is hard to find.) It appears that many of Branwell's characters were rogues and villains. Charlotte's characters tend to be less actively malicious, but they are rather deceitful. Perhaps the most notable thing about the stories she wrote down is the strong vein of satire. She makes fun of her brother's poetical pretensions. She makes fun of her younger sisters, finding the things they told stories about to be babyish.

Much of her juvenilia took the form of a series of magazines that were published in their imaginary British colony, and the advertisements in these magazines are as carefully drawn as anything else. One of her heroes publishes a book called "The Elements of Lying." A rat-trap is sold by one Monsieur "it-can-catch-nothing-for-it's-Broken." Branwell and Charlotte were also obsessed with poison. He invented something called "prussian butter,"which was made from prussic acid (now known as cyanide). "White flour" was a synonym for arsenic. Therefore, perhaps the scariest of Charlotte's imaginary advertisements is one for white bread and prussian butter, sold by Captain "make-thousands-Not-Eat-any-more-food-for-the-Remainder-of-their-precious-Lives."

It's black humor - tame by today's standards, but in distinct contradiction to the morality of the Victorian era - especially, the morality that was imposed on children. Many people professed themselves to be shocked by Charlotte's first published novel, Jane Eyre. If they had read the tales of murder, adultery and drunken debauchery that Charlotte and Branwell concocted while in their teens, they would have been even more shocked.

Indeed, the tragedy of Branwell's life is that he acted out his fantasies of the hard-drinking, misunderstood, black-sheep poet (fantasies strongly influenced by the life of Lord Byron), and they killed him. The tragedy of Charlotte's life is that she was not allowed to act out any of her fantasies . . . even her fantasy of being a writer was considered unsuitable for women.

At the age of fifteen, Charlotte went to boarding school. This affected her fictional world in two significant ways. For the first time, major female characters appear and romance becomes one of the themes. The other major change was that Charlotte began to feel conflicted about her fantasy world. She knew that she had to start dealing with the real world, but she didn't want to. She made two life-long friends at school, but for the most part she didn't like people, and she especially didn't like children, which was unfortunate because the only occupation that was considered suitable for a woman of her social class was that of teacher or governess. (The treatment of children in her stories would have horrified any potential employers.)

To her more religious friend, Ellen Nussey, Charlotte wrote a lot about her own "wickedness." I believe that this can refer only to her fantasy world, to its amorality and general unbecomingness for a young lady. It was her only solace. For years it had been her only source of entertainment. She found it impossible to stop living in that world. But what did the real world have to offer her?

I don't believe that fantasizing is "wicked." Is it wicked for a teenage girl to pretend to be an explorer, a Regency rake, a magazine editor? I don't even believe that it cuts people off from the real world. The fantasy world of the Bronte children was strongly rooted in actuality: the Duke of Wellington and his family, British colonies in Africa, Byron and Napoleon are all found there. Drinking, gambling, adultery and (horrors!) atheism are things that good Christian children are not supposed to know about, but somehow they learned about them and happily told stories about them. And yet there was a gulf between reality and fantasy that none of them could cross. The forbidden remained forbidden.

What if it had not been forbidden? What if there were a way to bring the power and pleasure of the fantasy world into reality? Hopefully the Brontes would not have become famous poisoners. But if they had not seen their dreams as wicked, if they all, especially the girls, had had more options . . . perhaps they would have accomplished even more than they did.

Okay, I have one last anecdote about the talent of imagination. Elizabeth Gaskell, friend and fellow writer, once asked Charlotte if she had ever taken opium, since her description of its effects in her last novel, Villette, was very realistic.

"Charlotte replied no, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything not within her own experience: she thought intensely about it for many a night before falling asleep, 'till at length . . . she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened.'"

Robert Graves used a similar technique to recreate events for his historical novels (he also presented his visions as historical fact.) I believe in the power of the subconscious mind to solve problems in the real world. I wonder if Charlotte ever tried to answer any more pressing questions that way.

* At least, not the ones they wrote down. Charlotte Bronte, writing at the age of 13, distinguished between their secret and non-secret "plays." "Bed plays means secret plays - they are very nice ones." Of course, that still doesn't mean they were sexual, and that's not my primary interest. I digress.

Why "Transient"?

2010-03-24T12:07:00.000-04:00

The name of this blog is "Transient" because . . . when I decided to start a blog about being transgendered, it was obvious to me that it had to be named trans-something. (Actually "trans-something" would be a good name too.)

And the truth is that gender is a transient concept for me. I don't mean that I used to be some other gender. I mean that for most of my life, I didn't know I was transgendered. It's not something that one can see, like skin color, eye color, or physical sex. My gender was not clearly visible . . . it moved in and out of view, like a distant shore seen through the mists.

Also, for a while, I didn't believe in gender at all. I still don't think that anyone knows what gender really "is." At worst, they have opinions about what it should be. I believe that traditional gender roles don't benefit anyone, male or female, because they're based on a long list of things that you're not allowed to do if you're female, or male. Whatever gender is, it is not cast in stone.

Recently I read a very interesting novel by one Gwyneth Jones, called White Queen. It's about a race of aliens who refer to people intermittently as "he" or "she," depending on how that person is behaving at the moment. That's a good example of the transience of gender.

However, transience goes beyond gender. Life itself is transient: that's the real reason I picked that name for my blog. Gender is only one aspect of who we are, and life has a lot more things in it than just gender.

A few months ago I decided to move to another part of the country. I traveled some 1,300 miles. That's transience for you. And with this decision and this journey I realized more strongly than ever that everything is change. Except for one or two things that endure.

I've always tried to see the world as it is. (Which makes it all the more interesting on the occasions when I discover how ignorant I've been). Transient is the world as it is.

John Addington Symonds: a life spent in dreams

2010-03-15T14:52:00.002-04:00

Mr. Symonds (1840-1893) falls a little outside of my general purview. He never identified as transgendered, or as a member of the "third sex," which was the equivalent phrase used during his lifetime to describe gender-nonconforming or homosexual people. But he was such an unusual person that I want to write about him anyway.

The Person

I just read his memoirs, which were edited by Phyllis Grosskurth. Primarily they describe his "secret life" - his lifelong obsession with homosexuality, which he was afraid to act on until the age of thirty, and seemingly never stopped feeling ashamed of. At one point in the book, he claims that he never allowed himself to consciously fantasize about homoerotic encounters, but his dreams were always full of them, ever since he was a child.

When he was about twelve years old, and studying Greek, he came across two quotations which shaped his personality. One was from the Illiad: "Like a young prince with the first down upon his lip, the time when youth is most charming." This exemplified his desire. The other line was from Euripides: "My tongue it was that swore, my heart remained unpledged." This governed his interactions with other people - from then on, almost every word he spoke would be a lie. The secrets of his heart would remain unspoken, even to himself. Or as he put it:

I now dissembled my deepest feelings, and only revealed those sentiments which I knew would pass muster. Without meaning to do so, I came to act a part, and no one knew what was going on inside of me. . . . I was ready enough in writing to communicate such portions of my experience as I chose to exhibit - impenetrably reserved in the depth of myself, rhetorically candid on the surface. . . . I allowed an outer self of commonplace cheerfulness and easy-going pliability to settle like a crust upon my inner and real character.

The memoir was his attempt to reveal "the truth," but it seems that, having lost the knack of honesty, he could never really get it back. He remained devious.

For example, the young man who possibly was his first sexual partner was named Norman. Symonds writes, "I will call him Norman, though that was not his real name." His editor is completely baffled, almost outraged, by the fact that Norman was his real name. She describes Symonds' subterfuge as "naive," which I personally think shows a certain lack of understanding of the nature of hypocrisy. It doesn't matter how implausible your story is, as long as you stick to it. (Indeed, she might have found modern examples of this by following the careers of certain American politicians.)

Symonds insists that "Nothing occurred between [him and Norman] which the censorious could rightly consider unworthy of two gentlemen." Then he goes on to describe them exchanging kisses and sleeping together in the nude. (Was this really acceptable conduct for gentlemen? If so, Symonds was in a sense lucky that he got to indulge himself to such an extent. Later eras figured out that all such intimate contact between men is wrong, wrong, wrong.) It's only at the very end of the book that he says his first sexual experience occurred when he was thirty. You have to backtrack and figure out that when he was that age, Norman was his love interest.

Of course, Symonds had to conceal the facts in order to protect his beloved and himself, because sodomy was then punishable by imprisonment. He was afraid to tell the whole truth, and his fears were justified. However, he was also constantly wracked with guilt and shame. Or was he?

The last two pages of the memoir are an overview of Symonds' life, told in the third person. He describes the conflict he felt between his sexual desires and his desire to conform to society's rules.

By the light of his clear brain he condemns the natural action of his appetite; and what in moments of self-abandonment to impulse appeared a beauteous angel, stands revealed before him as a devil abhorred by the society he clings to. The agony of this struggle between self-yielding to desire and love, and self-scourging by a trained discipline of analytic reflection, breaks his nerve. The only exit for a soul thus plagued is suicide.

The first appendix of this book is Symonds' case history, which appeared in Havelock Ellis' book Sexual Inversion. It is much franker about his sexual experiences (in the memoir Symonds describes himself as knowing absolutely nothing about sex for the first 25 years of his life, but the case history gives a slightly different impression), and ends with the statement:

A believes firmly that his homosexual appetite was inborn and developed in exactly the same way and by the same exciting causes as the heterosexual appetite in normal persons. . . . He has no moral sense of doing wrong, . . . feels the intolerable injustice of his social position, and considers the criminal codes of modern nations, insofar as they touch his case, to be iniquitous.

There's a certain contradiction there. Was he exaggerating his feelings of shame, in the memoir, as part of a plea for sympathy? (Personally, I find all his whining and agonizing to be overly histrionic.) I do think that, in addition to worrying about what people would think if they knew he was gay, he was terrified of sex itself. After all, everyone around him had also been taught that homosexuality was wrong, but many men acted on it anyway. Some of these men were his friends, so he knew it could be done, but for many years he was still reluctant to do it himself.

The Book

I have to say that in my opinion, Phyllis Grosskurth was not entirely sympathetic to her subject: neither the person, John Addington Symonds, nor the topic of homosexuality. She makes the revealing comment that "we may not be much more 'educated' about the causes and nature of homosexuality than the public was in Symonds' day." This appears to be her way of saying that she doesn't believe people are born homosexual. Instead she clings to a Freudian interpretation, and searches desperately for some traumatic event in Symonds' childhood that would have turned him gay. He had only one memory of his mother, who died when he was four, and although there was nothing sexual about this memory, it must have been IT because it's about his mother. (Ironically, Grosskurth overlooks certain childhood incidents described in the case history, which were probably more relevant.) I also believe that she exaggerates his neglect of his wife.

However, it appears that Grosskurth did not censor the memoirs, and we owe her a debt for that. She says that she only omitted his "execrable poetry and . . . self-conscious nature descriptions." Symonds actually published rather a lot of poetry (and won the Newdigate Prize for one of his poems while at Oxford), so I don't think it could have been all bad. On the other hand, many people have let their feelings overwhelm whatever talent they may have, when writing poems that mean a lot to them. The nature descriptions that she left in reveal that, like many Victorians, he felt very strongly about beautiful landscapes. It's interesting to note that he describes some of the most significant events in his life in terms of what he saw around him - i.e., his first kiss is inextricably intertwined with the riverbank on which they lay, trees, flowers, and the afternoon sunlight falling on them.

Rather like my post on Edward Carpenter, I haven't told the whole story of John Addington Symonds here. (Incidentally, he and Carpenter were acquainted, and were working together on a book about homosexuality when Symonds died.) The memoir is definitely worth reading, and here is a website devoted to John Addington Symonds.

Selma

2010-02-22T12:47:00.000-05:00

In my recent trip across the American South, we drove through Montgomery, Alabama and past Selma, which to me means only one thing.

People talk a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., especially when the third Monday in January comes around, but for me, actually seeing one of the places where he marched taught me more than I ever knew before. Forty-five years have gone by, but Montgomery is still the deepest of the Deep South, and by looking at those fields and breathing that air I knew that, in that place forty-five years ago, demanding black people's right to vote was, essentially, illegal.

My last post was about the importance of the law, but there are some things the law cannot provide for us. There are in fact some rights that we have to step outside the law in order to attain. Sometimes it's because the law says one thing, but the people in power say something else. And sometimes it's because the law, written by the people in power, has not yet caught up to a more universal sense of justice.

I also wanted to say that when you drive through downtown Montgomery, along the MLK Expressway, you will see signs for several tourist attractions, one of them being "The First White House of the Confederacy." I don't believe that people ever forget.

There is No Law for Anyone

2010-02-18T16:14:00.000-05:00

I get very nervous when I hear someone say, "Those people don't have any rights" or "That person shouldn't get to have a lawyer." For one thing, everybody has rights. But it goes further than that:

We're talking about terrorists here. And even if these terrorists get tried in a civilian court, with all the rights and defense lawyers in the world, they'll still be convicted. Does anyone think they might possibly be acquitted? No. That's not why they object to due process in these cases. It's because they want to show a complete lack of respect for suspected terrorists. They're not really human, so they don't have human rights. (Incidentally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to name just one, has been in prison since 2003, and he's not ever getting out.)

Some people argue that terrorists have stepped outside the rule of law - more so than any other criminals, apparently - and somehow that justifies not applying the law to them. But in fact the only way to restore law and order is to carry out the law, not to ignore it. This commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog put it well:

Wrapping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in our Bill of Rights is exactly what we want to do. Because then, when we convict him and execute judgement on him . . . people will understand that he deserved it, that he got what's coming to him. We can be both severe and just at the same time.

Saying that terrorists ought to be denied normal rights is not just disrespectful to them. It's disrespectful of the rule of law. The law should apply to everyone, without exceptions. Otherwise it's meaningless.

And in fact, the flip side of "these people are so evil that the law doesn't apply to them" is "these people are so good that the law doesn't apply to them either." The same people who want to deny terrorists their rights are the people saying that those American Christian missionaries who went to Haiti and attempted to take a bunch of children out of the country illegally "had good intentions" and "didn't do anything wrong." (Of course, if a group of Muslim missionaries went to Haiti and tried to take children away from their parents, it would be seen as evidence of how evil Islam is.)

No, in these people's minds the law really doesn't count for anything at all. It really makes you wonder who they think the legal system does apply to, and how they think it works.

Edward Carpenter: Victorian Radical Faerie

2010-01-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

Finally got ahold of Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Edward Carpenter, which was published about a year ago. I am so happy that I finally got to read this book. I had it on request at the library for (what seems like) months, and I was afraid it wouldn't show up before I moved. But it did, just in time!

The Person

I like Edward Carpenter because his worldview is very similar to mine, and because he was saying all these important things more than a hundred years ago. It is a little painful to realize that we have to keep rediscovering these ideas over and over; every generation believes it's the first. That's why it's important to remember that we do have a history and we have forebears. Carpenter was well known and well loved in his time, and in fact his legacy has survived even though his name may have been forgotten.

Carpenter was born in 1844 and died in 1929. Most of his writing and activism were in the fields of socialism and homosexuality, but his concerns also extended to: the environment, animal rights, women's rights, vegetarianism, spirituality and paganism, free love and birth control, nudism and the simple life. I have probably left some things out, and in fact there's no way I can tell his whole story here.

To me the most amazing thing is not his wide variety of interests, but his tolerance for other points of view. He had very strong convictions, and expressed them frequently, but it appears that he never expected everyone to live their lives exactly the same way he did. That kind of enforced conformity, which often goes by the name of "political correctness," has harmed many people and damaged many movements whose goal, ironically, was human liberation. (There is a positive side to political correctness, if it teaches people to be genuinely inclusive.)

Carpenter was born into a fairly wealthy family, the seventh of ten children, most of whom were girls. (I came across a website which asserts that all of his older siblings were girls, but that is untrue.) As a boy he insisted on learning to play the piano, which in that era and that social milieu was considered to be a "girl thing." (One of the points to remember about strict gender roles is that everything is divided up into male or female. If females do it, then males can't possibly be allowed to do it; and vice versa. Nothing is permitted to be simply human.) He always felt as if his family didn't understand him, although obviously they were not as strict with him as they could have been. Incidentally, his father did not go to church, which was fairly shocking at the time.

He said that as a child, he had recognized his attraction to "others of his sex" and was taught to be ashamed of it. Nonetheless, he managed in large part to throw off this shame. Throughout his life male homosexuality was illegal (in his lifetime, the penalty was reduced from death, to life imprisonment, to imprisonment with hard labor), so he could never be entirely open about it. But he wrote as much as he could, and in his private life he helped many people to accept their feelings.

In 1864 he went to Cambridge, where he got a degree and subsequently a teaching job. At that time, Oxbridge professors were required to be a) male; b) unmarried; and c) ordained ministers. Carpenter found himself having to preach sermons, which didn't sit well with him. He had many doubts about Christianity, which had not yet solidified into a new philosophy of life. He was also involved in the "University Extension" movement, in which educated men either set up new schools or went around the country giving lectures to their less fortunate brothers and sisters. This must have been his introduction to Socialism, and throughout his life he preferred the society of the working classes. It sounds rather condescending, but it's an indication of how much he hated the constraints of a upper-class existence.

In 1874 he officially left Cambridge, to spend the next six years teaching and learning in various Northern towns. (One of the amusing things about the book is the culture shock he experienced when moving to the North of England, and the constant insistence that Northerners really are different from Southerners. The author herself was born in Leeds apparently. What makes it funny is that England is a little tiny island filled with white people. But oh no, they're so very different from each other. Anyway.) Living in these severely polluted manufacturing towns also taught him the importance of protecting the environment, which he promoted throughout his life.

In 1877 he traveled to America on family business and met Walt Whitman, to whom he had already written a couple fan letters. Whitman was, of course, The Man. Carpenter's first book, Towards Democracy, was an extended prose poem strongly influenced by Whitman's style. By "democracy" he meant not only the limited political definition, but human liberation of all varieties.

In 1882 Carpenter's father died and he inherited 6,000 pounds. (I mention the specific amount because, prior to this occurrence, he had been living on about 60 pounds a year.) He built a house in the country and lived there for the next 40 years, growing vegetables for sale and making sandals. It was not the life a well-off Cambridge graduate was expected to live. Some people mocked "the simple life" and the evils of Socialism; others flocked to the Movement and admired Carpenter for putting his ideals into practice.

He had friends, lovers, and admirers around the world. One of his Cambridge classmates was from Sri Lanka - they kept in touch throughout their lives and Carpenter went to visit him there, also passing through India, where he observed British racism first-hand and learned as much as he could about authentic Eastern religious traditions. He also had many friends in America, and since he knew French, German and Italian he kept up with trends in Europe as well.

He met his life partner, George Merrill, on a train in 1891. They died within about a year of each other and were buried in the same grave. Carpenter's earlier romances (all with men) had not ended happily, but after meeting Merrill he felt more confident about his sexuality and dared to begin writing about it. However, it was unsafe for him to actually come out, or to focus on homosexuality too closely. Therefore, he wrote a series of pamphlets, called: Sex-love and its Place in a Free Society, Woman and her Place in a Free Society, Marriage in a Free Society, and Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society.

Homogenic Love was the "queer" pamphlet, slightly camouflaged by Carpenter's other writings on sex and society. (He disliked the word "homosexual" because it was a bastard combination of Greek and Latin.) Unfortunately, his timing was bad and this pamphlet was published in early 1895, just a couple months before Oscar Wilde was convicted of sodomy. Homosexuality immediately became such a dangerous subject that Carpenter's publisher broke his contract to publish the three previous pamphlets in one book, and temporarily stopped selling Towards Democracy as well. Carpenter didn't stop writing about homosexuality, but he always had to be careful.

Edward Carpenter believed in a primitive utopia, a previous Golden Age in which women and homosexuals had more respect than they get in the modern so-called "civilized" era in which he, and we, live. Some people think this revisioning of the past is foolish. Personally, I believe that, not only is it rather foolish to believe that people have always lived the same way we live now, but also, if we have always had these prejudices, what reason is there to hope that things will ever get any better? If this really is human nature, then we're doomed.

You may not be familiar with the Radical Faeries. I knew enough about them to recognize that Edward Carpenter was their spiritual (fairy) godfather, but it wasn't until I read this book that I found out there was a more direct connection to the founder of the Radical Faeries, Harry Hay:

Aged eleven in 1925, [Hay] had spotted The Intermediate Sex locked in a glass case in the local library. The word "sex" caught his attention and he contrived to persuade the librarian to go out to the hairdressers, by promising to look after the books. On returning . . . she discovered, to her horror, the schoolboy still eagerly devouring Carpenter's prohibited book.

Following Carpenter's theories, later in life "Hay developed an ideology of a 'Third Sex,' distinct psychologically and culturally from heterosexuals, and argued that these differences carried potential benefits from society as a whole." (Yes, Rowbotham's use of "heterosexuals" in that sentence is awkward. We might say that she means "cissexuals.")

The Book

Rowbotham took 400 pages to tell the story of Carpenter's life, and it seems that she had to cut some things. The only complaint I have about the book is that in a couple places she jumps around chronologically, describing an event and then going back to something else that happened earlier.

I just want to reiterate that my review of this long book cannot possibly tell the whole story. But I greatly admire Edward Carpenter and I wish he were better known today.

(Incidentally, I've lately been reading Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, which were published between 1864 and 1880. That is the exact period of time during which Carpenter was becoming radicalized; but although these novels deal extensively with politics, the world they depict is not Carpenter's world at all.)

Transignorance

2010-01-05T11:22:00.000-05:00

There are some things that we can't recognize until someone else points them out to us, even though we live with them every day.

When I was a teenager I discovered feminism and it blew my mind. I said, "Yes, it's true that people have treated me disrespectfully because I inhabit a female body, and all my life I've heard people saying derogatory things about females." But I never acknowledged it until I heard someone else (in fact, several someones) say it.

There was no one to say any words to me about transgender, and so it took me many more years to put that into words. Now I've invented a new word: transignorance.

Misogyny is when someone looks at a female body and responds with contempt. Transignorance is when someone looks at someone else and sees only their body. There is no other gender there. Transphobia is when someone suspects the existence of transgender/transsexuality in another person and responds with hatred or fear. If you don't see it, you can't condemn it.

The difference between active prejudice (such as misogyny or transphobia) and transignorance is the difference between: "You're inferior" and "You don't exist." The key point is that the person who says "You don't exist" is looking right at you at the time.

Afterword: This was probably inspired by learning of Mary Daly's death yesterday. I was never able to read anything by her except the Wickedary, mostly because her fondness for capitalizing Words drove me Insane. I was aware of her problematic attitude towards racial issues; was not aware of her transphobia until today, but I'm not surprised at all. She seemed to me to be one of those people who could not contend with difference in any positive way. She spoke powerfully for her people . . . but if you were not one of her people, forget it. Still, she was a great feminist and even though feminism has its limitations, I honor her for that.

Is gender non-conformity immoral?

2009-12-16T15:33:00.000-05:00

Recently I re-read Christine Jorgensen's autobiography. The copy on the back cover includes this:

"Fifteen years ago [in 1953], a slender young woman stepped off a plane from Denmark to be greeted by howling reporters and an outraged American public."

Now I ask myself, why were they "outraged?" Why that in particular? What is there about a sex change to invoke outrage, when it ought to be a personal decision that does no harm to anyone?

A little friend of mine on Facebook joined a group called "I hate it when you can't tell if someone is a boy or a girl." I decided to take a look at it. I believe that everyone in the group is young, because most of the incidents described happened at school. Also, they sound very young. And several incidents took the form of "I said, 'Wow, that cute boy smiled at me' and my friends said, 'That's a girl, stupid!'"

In other words, what they hate is feeling attracted to someone who turns out to be the socially unacceptable gender for them to be attracted to. This gets back to the homophobia I touched on in my earlier post.

I'm discussing gender non-conformity in general, rather than focusing on transgender or transsexuality, because I believe that gender non-conformity is what really bothers people - probably because it's something that more people have experienced for themselves. Nobody can conform completely to their gender stereotype. And I believe that everybody knows at least one person who really can't conform, who causes the people around them to feel outraged and disturbed and complain about it on Facebook. (Unfortunately that's not all they do.)

Some reasons why gender non-conformity is considered to be "immoral":

Cross-dressing is forbidden in the Bible.
Genitals define gender . . . anybody who imagines their gender to be based on something else is insane. (Does that mean that insanity is immoral?)
People are supposed to conform to their gender roles, because society is based on the arrangement that men go out to work and women stay home and take care of the kids.
I don't know any transgendered people, therefore there is no such thing; aka Transgendered people look like freaks, therefore they are freaks/The trans people I've known are neurotic, therefore all trans people are neurotic/I've never wanted to change my gender, therefore anyone whose life choices are different from mine is immoral, ie, wrong. (Again, that's a very long-winded example of objection on the grounds of non-conformity.)

Gender non-conformity is a sin in the sense that all non-conformity is sinful. Also gender non-conformity is strongly linked to sexuality, which makes everything worse. (This is what puritanical Americans are taught to believe.)

Examples of gender non-conformity:

Women wearing pants.
Women smoking cigarettes.
Men doing laundry.
Men letting their hair grow below their ears.
Women getting college degrees.
Men taking care of children.

These are all horribly shocking things which have caused the breakdown of society. Right? Also they may encourage transgendered people to think, "Well if they can do that then why can't I transgress a few gender norms myself?" None of the items in that list make a person transgendered or transsexual. But this does:

People deciding that they are not defined by their genitals.

That's the danger zone right there. And really, I mean, what's wrong with that? Why would we want to be defined by our unmentionable bits? (Okay, I'm being sarcastic. But that's what sex is all about in Western culture. We say it's disgusting but we can't get away from it.)

Social Skills for Aspies

2009-12-10T17:27:00.001-05:00

(No, this is not specifically a transgender subject. But it is a subject that concerns me. And I do think social skills can be more difficult for trans people. So.)

The term "Aspies" refers to people who have or appear to have Asperger's syndrome, which is "characterized by an inability to understand how to interact socially." I have never been officially diagnosed (and I don't want to be) but I was definitely born without social skills. However, I have managed to learn at least a little bit about social interaction. Here are my tips:

The first key to acquiring social skills is to want to interact with people, to believe that there is some benefit in it to you, and also to them. If it is important enough to you, you will put some work into it. And it does take work but it can be done.
Basic rules of etiquette are actually very easy to memorize and use.
The purpose of etiquette and small talk is primarily to indicate that you are a) interested in talking to someone and b) able to behave more or less like a normal person. The actual verbal "information" conveyed in conversation is less important than the act of conversation itself. This is why, for example, the weather remains a perennial topic of conversation. If you say, "Oh, it's raining again" or "What a nice day," you are not conveying any information that the other person doesn't already know. You are giving them an opportunity to agree with you, which is pretty much the goal of most social communication.
Social communication is very often not about saying what you really think. This may seem like hypocrisy, but it is absolutely essential. (Reading Jane Austen taught me this.)
Aspies have a tendency to be very intense. Most social interactions are meant to be casual and superficial - that means, the opposite of intense. That's why it is helpful to back off, not to treat every conversation as an argument or a chance for you to do all the talking. And if, like me, you're more likely not to talk at all - it still helps to take conversations less seriously, to cultivate the ritual of conversation, to treat it like a game. Once you learn the rules, it really is quite predictable.
People like to be given opportunities to talk about themselves. And it helps if you genuinely listen to what they say. Remember, this is a good opportunity for you to collect information.
When someone says, "Hello, how are you?" the correct response is, "I'm fine, how are you?" If you know them well and they seem friendly, and you are not in fact "fine," you might expand your response to something like, "Things are pretty crazy today," but keep it short (two or three words) and try to finish up with "how are you?" The goal is to give them a chance to say whatever they wanted to say when they approached you. Or if they were greeting you in passing, the goal is to respond and let each of you go on about your business.
Most of these rules are for casual interactions, with people you don't know very well. I believe that it's also important to be polite to family members and closer friends.
Eye contact. This is a tough one for Aspies. Personally, I find that I'm afraid of looking people in the face. It seems to provide me with too much information. I prefer focusing on people without looking at them directly. (Do you find that it's easier to look at someone when both of you are smiling, in a good mood, having a pleasant conversation?) In any case, it's important to remember to make eye contact - although people don't like fixed stares either. Meet their eyes for a couple seconds and then look away. Wait a few minutes and then repeat.

Advanced social skills: manipulation. Some people have an amazing ability to tell people what they want to hear, or to talk them into doing what they want them to do. It seems to be something they're born with . . . one child of my acquaintance, when she wants to use a toy her brother is playing with, reminds him that "it's nice to share." Get it? For people like that, the sharing only goes one way. In any case, manipulation is probably beyond the abilities of socially disabled people, but it is interesting to think about just how much can be done with social skills. I recommend The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker, which includes a description of the techniques used by con artists to manipulate. (By the way, "con" was originally short for "confidence" - gaining someone's confidence is a key element of being able to manipulate them.)

Most of what I've written here is about creating a social persona. I was also born without one of those (is that the same as being born without social skills?) A social persona is a buffer between yourself and the world. It protects you. The only way I could think of to protect myself, when I was young, was not to attract attention at all, not to talk to people at all. But that doesn't really work too well. The social persona is a much better shield. (Although some people go overboard with it and forget that they are anything besides their social persona. It's important to remember that there is always a real person underneath.)

One last thought: it seems to be widely believed that children need to be taught how to read. But they are not taught social skills in the same way -- not "officially" at school. Ironically, like many Aspies I did in fact teach myself to read before starting school, but I couldn't teach myself social skills. (If my parents were supposed to teach me -- well, they didn't.) For us, being expected to understand social interactions is like being expected to know how to read without being taught would be for "ordinary" children. I have to say that it's very frustrating.

Michael Dillon: The "First" Man-Made Man

2009-12-07T12:45:00.000-05:00

The First Man-Made Man, by Pagan Kennedy, is a book about Michael Dillon, one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. At the time the book was written he was believed to have been the first female-to-male transsexual, but recently someone else has been rediscovered. Call Dillon the second man-made man.

It's a short book which contains tremendous amounts of information. Some of the most interesting stuff is not directly related to Dillon at all. I will attempt to give a short overview of his life.

The Person

Dillon was born in 1915 and named Laura Maud Dillon. (He later changed his name to Laurence Michael, but seems always to have gone by "Michael.") His mother died of complications soon after the birth. In that era, fathers were believed to be incapable of caring for children, let alone infants, so Dillon's father handed off his two young children to a pair of spinster aunts. He died when Dillon was nine.

These women were what one might call highly eccentric. The lives of genteel unmarried women were at that time fairly restricted, and they seem to have imposed even more restrictions than were necessary. According to Kennedy, they told their niece that no one wanted to come over to her house, or invite her to their houses. They even told her not to greet people if she passed them on the street. Under these conditions, it's not surprising that Dillon never really developed any social skills and found it difficult to make friends later in life.

The young Dillon had one stroke of luck: he was befriended by the local vicar, who convinced the aunts to let him go to Oxford. The first women's colleges at Oxford were founded in 1879 -- however, women were not allowed to take complete degrees until 1920. It was at Oxford that Dillon began dressing as a man.

In 1939, a year after graduation, Dillon consulted a doctor for the first time about what we would today call his "transsexuality." The doctor gave him some testosterone pills, but unfortunately he also gossiped to Dillon's co-workers about this "woman who wanted to become a man." Dillon quit his job and moved to another town.

In 1943, Dillon met a plastic surgeon, one of the first in Britain, who had studied with the man who apparently invented plastic surgery, Harold Gillies. Dr. Gillies invented his surgical techniques while working on men who had been disfigured in World War I, people who had been injured in accidents . . . and on a certain number of people who either had been born with ambiguous genitals, or wanted sex-reassignment surgery. His disciple wrote Dillon a note that enabled him to change the name and sex listed on his identity documents (possibly before any surgery had been carried out) and passed him on to Dr. Gillies, who performed several surgeries on his chest and genitals over a number of years.

In 1949 he became the proud new owner of an official penis. Ironically, the main purpose of this organ was to allow him to pass in those "public" situations where men are gathered together in the nude or semi-nude. It was not fully functional, and considering that men have a taboo against staring at each other's equipment, one can't help but wonder just how realistic it was. In any case, Dillon was happy. Temporarily.

The story of Dillon's outing is surely unique. Dillon's father had actually been a baronet. When he died, the title passed to Dillon's older brother, who had no children. Therefore Michael Dillon was the heir to the baronetcy (although Laura Dillon would not have been.) Dillon wanted to be officially known as the heir. It turns out that there are two directories of the peerage in Britain -- Burke's and Debrett's. Dillon showed his revised birth certificate to the editor of Debrett's and explained the situation. The editor saw his point and changed the entry for the baronetcy in question. He believed that Burke's peerage would also get changed, but this did not happen. Someone compared the two peerages and asked, "Why is Laura Dillon listed in one and Michael Dillon listed in the other?"

This happened in 1958. Dillon was then working as a ship's doctor. His ship was docked in Baltimore when the story of the peerage discrepancy broke -- and apparently it was huge. Dillon couldn't stand the publicity (if it had been me, I would have left the peerage and the baronetcy alone, but Dillon wanted to be recognized. Except he also didn't.) He fled again.

A couple years earlier, he had become interested in mysticism. He studied the works of Gurdjieff, and found a "Tibetan" guru who turned out to be a fake. But Tibet still called to him. When the peerage story broke, he went to India and became the disciple of an English Buddhist who had been ordained as a monk in the Theravada tradition. Dillon wanted to be ordained as well, but he discovered that, according to the original Buddhist rules, members of the "third sex" are not allowed to be ordained.

What did they mean by the "third sex?" Kennedy says it's not clear. I would have been fascinated to find out, but if Dillon felt any particular curiosity, his biographer doesn't mention it. He hoped that they would make an exception for him. He was happy in India (it was difficult to get to Tibet because it was in the process of being occupied by the Chinese) despite these various problems.

As Kennedy says, he had reshaped his body and now he was trying to reshape his mind. He was living in a foreign land . . . there must have been something comforting about that. I believe that people judge foreigners less harshly than they judge their own -- or rather, they allow strangers to be strange. If it's one of your own kind, you have to keep them in line. Dillon also admitted to feeling a certain superiority, as a white man in Asia. In England he was only a freak.

He gave away his inheritance, an act which he believed was in accordance with Buddhist doctrine, and lived in poverty. He died in 1962, in India, probably of malnutrition. (There is a website which claims that the Buddhist vegetarian diet is what malnourished him, but it was more likely to be lack of food in general.)

The Book

I would not say that Kennedy is unsympathetic to her subject, but I do feel that she misses the point of transsexuality. Much of the book is devoted to a discussion of the history of cosmetic surgery and hormone treatment, in which Kennedy provides many fascinating (and sometimes grotesque) facts. Her goal is to demonstrate that both cissexuals* and transsexuals have sought to alter their bodies with surgery and hormones . . . and if that causes people to feel more tolerance for transsexuals, that's great, but I still believe that wanting to get a new nose (for example) is not at all the same thing as wanting to change your biological sex. Also, hormone therapy for cissexuals promises to "maintain" or "restore" their current or former state. It doesn't create an entirely new physical condition.

After reading this book, I had to wonder if I really understood Michael Dillon. Perhaps biographies of transfolk can never be entirely successful, because it is such a subjective state of being. For example, after I read Conundrum by Jan Morris (which Kennedy describes as "masterfully written," by the way) I did feel as if I understood her. She was expressing herself, speaking for herself; no one else could speak for her. That is the essence of transgender/transsexuality: no one else can speak for us. (Incidentally, the year before he died Dillon did complete an autobiography, which Kennedy had access to, but the manuscript has not been published.)

The First Man-Made Man is unquestionably worth reading . . . but it also seems to be wandering in the dark. (Is that an accurate reflection of Michael Dillon's life?) It describes his body, and some of his mental processes, but it never seems to find his heart. The body can be reshaped, the mind can be reprogrammed, but the heart is that item deep inside of us which does not change.

*"Cissexual" is the opposite of "transsexual," just as "cisgender" is the opposite of "transgender:" it refers to someone who feels their gender to be in harmony with their biological sex.

"It's all in your mind."

2009-11-16T13:25:00.000-05:00

I recently came across this very interesting story about detecting the effects of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) on brain activity. Apparently this is what they found:

A brain processing system that includes the amygdala — the fear hot spot — becomes overactive. Other regions important for attention and memory, regions that usually moderate our response to fear, are tamped down.

That feels right to me, based on my own experience. If "attention" means "paying attention to events in the present," it's very true that you lose that ability when in the throes of an anxiety/PTSD attack. It's interesting that memory should also be affected. One might think that PTSD is caused by unpleasant memories. Maybe what happens is you focus on that particular memory and forget others. It's as if you lose touch with the present and the past . . . with everything except the nightmare.

But this bit made me sad. And angry:

. . . problems too often shrugged off as "just in your head" in fact do have physical signs . . . "There's something different in your brain," explains Dr. Jasmeet Pannu Hayes of Boston University, who is helping to lead that research at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' National Center for PTSD. "Just putting a real physical marker there, saying that this is a real thing," encourages more people to seek care, he said.

It's so infuriating that something like PTSD is "not real" unless scientists can find physical evidence. I mean, that applies to all of our feelings, right? How do we know if we're really happy or sad, without a freaking scientist to tell us so? I guess I'm going to have to get a brain scan every time I try to decide which flavor of ice cream to buy. Which one do I really want? Oh I can't tell because it's all in my mind!

And of course this totally applies to transgender, which is all in a person's mind. Many people have theorized about physical causes for gender dysphoria. Personally I don't care. I don't need scientific justification for my feelings. I've spent years trying to understand myself and my own mind. Not that I understand it all, but I believe that psychological techniques, and teaching people that it's okay to feel the things that you feel, have more potential to solve mental/emotional problems than fixating on physical evidence.

Moreover, we interact with the world by creating a mental model. It really is all in our minds. Just ask the Buddhists. It's strange that our society values the mental above the physical in many ways . . . but not this one.

Free Will

2009-11-16T12:34:00.001-05:00

Christians used to believe in free will. I've been wondering lately if they still do. (I'm not a Christian, but I live in a country which finds it difficult to conceive of morality outside the Christian framework.) I have the impression that God gave us free will and we're supposed to use it. To me that implies that, not only do we get to make choices, but a wide variety of choices are probably acceptable. If there is really only One Right Way, that's not a choice, is it?

But, for example, when I hear some Christians talk about homosexuality, free will seems to vanish. Specifically, the conservative Christian argument goes as follows: To be homosexual is a sin, but since we're all sinful it may not be any worse than any other sin. However, to act on one's homosexual desires is definitely wrong. What becomes of free will in that situation?

To me that sounds like any exercise of one's free will is immoral, because we are born sinful and therefore all our natural desires are sinful. There is actually no choice in moral matters: you can only obey the commandments of your religion. (Or other authority figures.) Maybe the Christian definition of free will never meant anything other than, "you have a choice either to behave and go to Heaven, or misbehave and suffer eternal damnation." I really don't think that's much of a choice.

In any case, it's an axiom of the homosexual movement that homosexuality is not a choice. This may grant us a certain amount of tolerance, according to the argument described above, that "we're all sinners," but that tolerance only seems to go so far. It's extremely dependent on people not flaunting it. (I also think it's a stumbling block as regards the gay marriage issue, because everybody knows that marriage is a choice.)

Fundamentally, homosexuality is something you do, as well as something you are. And that will always get back to the question of choice and free will. I'm not entirely convinced that the "not a choice" argument is helpful. Saying, "it's not my fault, I was born that way" confirms the belief that it is sinful. It says, "Yes this is a bad thing but you can't blame me for it."

Choosing to act on X says, "I believe this is the right thing to do." It poses a moral challenge. We say that if we are to be true to ourselves we must act on this, act out this, be visible instead of invisible. We say that true morality consists of being true to ourselves . . . and that's the complete opposite of the Christian doctrine of original sin.

(Yes, this entire argument applies to transgender as well. I'll be writing about that in an upcoming post.)

Quentin Crisp: Disloyal to Civilization

2009-11-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

I adore the late Quentin Crisp. If I believed in role models, he would be one of mine. But in fact, neither he nor I believe in them. I've just been rereading his collected works and was struck by this comment he made after reading a book about the movie stars Clift, Brando and Dean:

"It then dawned on my befuddled brain that what many men feel convention is preventing them from expressing may not be some hideous piratical urge to rape or homicide, but the feminine side of their natures. This is an idea that has never before occurred to me."

The reason it never occurred to him is that Mr. Crisp was completely incapable of repressing his feminine side, even if he had wanted to, which he apparently didn't.

I have frequently encountered the claim that civilization is the only thing that prevents us from doing horrible things to each other. Because apparently human beings are all psychopaths and our deepest desires are to kill and maim. I despise that concept utterly.

As far as I can tell, the goal of civilization is to set up a social hierarchy wherein the upper ranks get to dominate, and the fact that we all start at the bottom, as children, stores up plenty of resentment and hostility that, if we belong to the fortunate categories, we can take out on our underlings later, when we get underlings. But perhaps, like many of my compatriots, I have confused "civilization" with "family values."

Anyway, I infinitely prefer the idea that these "horrible things" from which civilization is saving us are only effeminacy, or female masculinity, or uppityness in general, or sex between consenting adults. I think that explains a lot.

Radclyffe Hall: Congenital Invert

2009-11-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

I recently read Sally Cline's biography of Radclyffe Hall. I can't exactly recommend this particular book, because I found the writer's style annoying, but Hall is a fascinating subject and I do believe the research was well done.

Radclyffe Hall was openly lesbian, politically conservative and independently wealthy. Those three things all go together: she could afford to be out, but because of her wealth and family pride she also feared social change . . . except when it might benefit her and her kind. (Ironically, she was opposed to female suffrage. I guess she didn't think the vote was very important.) She was physically abused by her mother, and perhaps also by her stepfather, but she supported them financially throughout their worthless lives.

For her religious beliefs, she was a devout Catholic and also a strong believer in Spiritualism. Perhaps one of the strangest things about her is that she and her life partner, Una Troubridge, carried on a longterm "posthumous" relationship with Mabel Batten, who was Hall's first significant lover and Troubridge's cousin. (Incidentally, a surprising number of English lesbians "of good family" converted to Catholicism in the first half of the 20th century. It was an act that allowed you to become both rebellious and steeped in tradition. As Emma Donoghue puts it, "Being Catholic in England meant becoming slightly foreign, aloof from the establishment; as a church it was associated with the rich and the poor, but definitely not the bourgeoisie." And of course, to be Anglo-Catholic was not at all the same thing as being Irish Catholic.)

Well, obviously I could go on about Radclyffe Hall all day. But the reason I'm writing this post is to talk about her gender identity. In her day, certain people were considered to be "congenital inverts." "Invert" means that they were what we today call "transgendered" -- a male person living in a female body, or vice versa. "Congenital" means that they were born that way, and just like today, that was seen to be an important moral point. If you're congenital, it's not your fault. You're not just doing it to show off, or to annoy. You can't help it.

It was also assumed that your sexuality was defined by your gender identity. Someone like Hall, who believed herself to really be a man (and pronouns are so confusing, by the way. As far as I can tell, Hall always referred to herself with feminine pronouns, and most of her butch friends did too) would automatically be attracted to women. Effeminate men were always attracted to men.

In other words, no distinction was made between homosexuals and transgendered people. In modern times a strong distinction is made. I'm kind of ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I wish there were more solidarity between the two groups. The acronym GLBT gets used a lot, but the B's and T's often feel themselves to be tacked on. On the other hand, I certainly don't want anybody making assumptions about anybody else. Furthermore, it's heterosexist to assume that "masculine" people are only attracted to "feminine" people, and it's caused a lot of problems for trans people.

I have not actually read The Well of Loneliness, but I have read Hall's short story, "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself," which clearly depicts a butch identity. And even though Hall's identity is not mine, it still means a lot to me to see us in print. I don't think I would have liked Hall much as a person. But we have to take our history wherever we can find it, and I am grateful to her for speaking out.

Alice Cooper

2009-10-26T15:46:00.000-04:00

Recently I was reminiscing with some friends of mine about The Muppet Show. Don't recall who brought up Alice Cooper -- it probably wasn't me -- but I said that seeing him on The Muppet Show rearranged my horizons. I had been expecting someone like the Walt Disney version of Alice in Wonderland: a blonde woman in a blue dress. That's not who showed up. Suddenly a lot more things seemed possible.

I've mentioned previously on this blog that I didn't have a label for myself as transgendered. There was no word for it. And of course there was no word for Mr. Alice either. He never identified as trans (back then the word "transsexual" was more commonly used than "transgender") . . . he wore women's clothing occasionally but not consistently. He was just doing his thing. And maybe it was all an act . . . but he got out there and did it, and to this day he's still being Alice Cooper. That is something.

There is No Connection Between Sex and Gender

2009-09-22T11:45:00.001-04:00

This is a post I was meaning to write when I first started this blog, but didn't get around to it.

Back then I visited the website of the Intersex Society of North America and read something that I thought was very interesting. But first, I'll quote the first paragraph of their definition of "intersex":

“Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.

So, an intersex person has some kind of ambiguity about their biological sex. This is the bit that really struck me though, where they compare intersex and transgender. They state, in part:

The truth is that the vast majority of people with intersex conditions identify as male or female rather than transgender or transsexual. Thus, where all people who identify as transgender or transsexual experience problems with their gender identity, only a small portion of intersex people experience these problems.

Now, if that's true, it makes me wonder: what are these people basing their gender identity on? Supposedly one's gender is the same as one's biological sex. Of course, that assumes that biological sex is always perfectly obvious. If anybody has a "right" to be confused about their gender, it would be someone whose biological sex is unclear. But here we have an association of intersex people which states that they are not unclear about their gender. So it must be based on something other than sex.

In other words: sex is not binary. Gender is not binary. Things are a lot more complicated than that.

Caster Semenya, Caster Semenya, Caster Semenya

2009-09-15T13:08:00.001-04:00

My heart goes out to her because in her I see my inner self made physical.

My heart goes out to her because she's been insulted and humiliated.

My heart goes out to her because there is still too much fucking ignorance in the world.

Also:

Caster Semenya: Part 2b of the Women Athletes series

(Posted using ShareThis)

Update: Caster Semenya placed on suicide watch.

Posing as Female; or, the Awesomeness of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

2009-09-15T13:02:00.000-04:00

(Note: I've been working on this post for a few weeks now. Not sure if it's done or not, but I'm sick of looking at it, so it's time to run it up the flagpole.)

When I was a feminist*, I disapproved of drag queens. (In fact, I disapproved of transwomen in general.) There's something especially infuriating about being told that women are supposed to dress a certain way, and then seeing men dressed that way. Because it seems like men invented all these feminine trappings (I could certainly never have conceived of some of this stuff), and if they like them so much, maybe they should just keep them for themselves. Why force them on me if I don't want them? Perhaps men are really the ones who enjoy wearing makeup and slinky dresses. That in itself doesn't bother me. It's the expectations piled on me that drove me mad. It's the ideal woman, that none of us can ever live up to. It's just not me.

Is it true that men are better at portraying an ideal woman, because for them it is purely imaginary? I think that biological females tend to get distracted by biology. Not very glamorous sometimes.

I once heard someone describing his first sight of a drag queen. It was in public, and at first he thought he was looking at a really magnificent woman, until someone clued him in. But he was still astounded. I don't recall if he actually said, "She was more of a woman than any real woman," but that's the impression I got. She had an air about her.

Now I think that the femininity of a transwoman is real. It can't be faked. Makeup and pretty clothes help; so do hormones and surgery; but the real thing is something inside you, and if you've got it, then you've got it.

Priscilla is one of the things that changed my mind, although, of course, ironically, the actors in that movie are not "real" drag queens, and so therefore they pretty much disprove my point. Terence Stamp, especially, was just amazing. That's acting!

And, of course, I've given up "posing as female" myself. That has removed a lot of my anger. Like I said, I don't want to do drag myself. But those who want to, and look fabulous doing it -- more power to them! The funny thing is that I do care about my clothes a lot. But I've always tried to create my own style. It has to look nice to me, and it has to be comfortable, which most feminine clothes aren't.

Haven't quite got my head around "posing as male" yet though . . . that is to say, I believe that masculinity is just as much of a pose as femininity -- perhaps even more so, given that men are generally expected to "excel" and not to show weakness. Fallibility is the human condition. And I'm not interested in pretending to be superior. Take superiority out of masculinity and what have you got? I wonder about that.

Still feeling my way between the ideal and the real. Still trying to avoid the unreal (by which I don't mean, the ideal.)

* I still believe in everything that feminism stands for. But traditional feminism has no concept of transgender, so it's much less useful to me now.

Rainbow Fields

2009-08-06T10:45:00.000-04:00

When I was a college freshman, I spent a semester in therapy. For the first session, the counselor handed me a pad of paper and some crayons. "Draw a picture of your childhood," she said.

That was easy. Without hesitation, I drew a large circle, for the horizon. I drew a line intersecting the southern edge of the circle - that was the road. Most of the circle I colored green, pink and blue. The fields were green - they were never actually pink and blue, but that's the way I remember them: magical colors. In the summer they turned orange and yellow (for real!) with Indian paintbrush flowers. I should have drawn the woods too but I can't remember if I did.

I put a dot out in the field to represent myself. Where our house was I put a large black dot. It was concentrated: thick, black, ugly. I put four dots next to it to represent my family. I put one more dot outside of the circle to represent my father. Then I was done.

The counselor and I looked at the picture. "What do you see?" she asked. I started to explain it to her and then I stopped.

"That's strange," I said. "I didn't intend to do that."

"What?" she asked (no doubt with a certain professional satisfaction.)

"That dot out in the field is me," I said. "That's where I was happy. I put four dots to represent my family . . . my mother, my two brothers . . . and me, again. I didn't realize I was putting myself twice."

"There are two of you," she said.

"Yeah. There are two of me."

I don't recall that we talked about that very much. I needed time to assimilate this new idea, and there were more specific things that I wanted to talk about. But it's certainly true that I spent a lot of time - then, and right up to now - trying to find my real self. Not the self that everybody else saw, or failed to see.

I told her I was queer, but I had not yet excavated the fact that I was also transgendered. There were other issues I had to deal with first. But obviously, the existence of my "two selves" suggests that I had things to hide.

My mother said to me recently that she interprets my change of name as a reference to my maturity. My new name is my adult name; my old name belongs to the child I was, "out in the fields." I don't see it that way at all. I know that I'm still the child I was then. I have the same secrets. I must have the same gender.

It's certainly true that the lessons I learned as a child in the rainbow fields are what have kept me alive. To summarize: the human world is not the only world, thank goodness. Human beings (including myself) are selfish, narrow-minded, and scared.

There's a whole universe out there, much bigger than humanity. It provides beauty, nourishment, and a certain amount of danger, too. It is constantly changing. Constantly alive. Humans build their little structures and push their little buttons. Many of them don't seem to realize that the universe is alive. Life goes on without them. I was stifling inside that little box. I had to get out.

Sometimes I still forget those lessons. But I have to remember, because I can't survive without them. Nor have I learned everything I need to know, remembered everything I need to remember. I kept secrets even from myself.

The universe is still out there.

Pity vs. Respect?

2009-02-23T12:55:00.000-05:00

Several years ago I discovered a website which I thought had some very good advice on how to come out to your family. These were the bits that really struck me:

You don't want a parent to feel sorry for you; they won't take this as seriously as you want them to if they pity you. . . .
Be patient with them; if they don't accept it right off, don't be angry with them. This is a very big thing for them and for you. You are not the only person going through this transition; your parents or parent goes through it with you, just in a different way. No matter how much they may cry, fall apart, rant, or fall silent, always be the strong one; the adult. . . .
If you give in to childish behavior and act like a victim, you disrespect yourself and you lose the respect of them in the long run.

In general, I don't want people to pity me. (And I believe that self-pity is probably the most pernicious thing in the universe.) I like it when people respect me, although they don't always.

I'm writing about this now because I find myself in a place where neither pity nor respect seem appropriate. Over the past year I've been struggling with certain things that are very difficult for me. (No, not my gender -- or at least, that's been difficult for entirely different reasons.) I have to admit that I've been pretty stupid. I'm not accustomed to feeling stupid, and I have to admit it, not just to myself, but to other people.

Anyway, I still don't want pity and I don't (yet) deserve respect. Because everybody does stupid things sometimes. So this is some kind of middle ground, called life, I guess.