The Crawl Offtopic

[I don't so much review books as dissect them, analyzing the aspects of them that I find interesting or annoying.]

A brief overview of the novel is that it’s about a planet called “Jeep” (I am not making this up. I don’t have any idea why she chose such a ridiculous name; it’s not at all symbolic.) that contains a virus that kills all men and about 20% of women. It was initially settled about two or three centuries before the novel is set, but the original settlers have regressed to an unclear but pre-industrial level of technology. The Company (It is referred to in-text as “Company,” not “the Company” or “Durallium Company;” I found this as offputting as “Jeep.”) lands soldiers on the planet looking for resources, unaware of the virus, experiences similar casualties, and puts the planet in quarantine. Mysteriously, there’s an all-female society still on the planet.

One of Griffith’s stated goals in writing this book was to subvert traditional portrayals of all-female societies in science fiction. Her opinion, which I more or less share, is that a society of women would look a lot like a society of men and women. I think she accomplishes this goal— my problems are with other issues in the story, not the question of whether women would set up cultures like the ones seen in the novel. I might differ a bit with her on the edges because I have some ideas about how a society of all women would be different (hint: all the differences would be subtle), but her presentation is just as plausible.

[Spoilers throughout from this point.]

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In Dan Savage’s Nov 23 column, he fields a question from a cis straight man (acronym FRAUD) who wants to be a good trans ally, but fears he’s being transphobic because he wouldn’t be comfortable dating a trans woman. Given that Dan’s taken some flack from anti-transphobia activists lately, he (perhaps wisely) decided to hand the question off to a noted trans activist. Unfortunately, I really didn’t like Kate Bornstein’s answer.

So here’s mine.

Dear FRAUD,

You’re being transphobic^[1]. But don’t despair yet. I’m a trans person, and I am a little transphobic (I used to be more so). Every time I look in the mirror and see the places where transness is written on my body, and wish that my body was more normatively cis-looking, that’s some of my transphobia acting up. Every time I feel like a freak or a weirdo for being trans, that’s my transphobia.

At this point, I want to dispel a myth: There’s no one particular body type that all trans women have. It’s true that the distribution of body types is different, but there are plenty of trans women with bodies well within the normative range for cis people, and there are also plenty of cis women who “look trans”.

So your feeling that you couldn’t really be comfortable getting it on with a trans woman? That’s transphobia^[2].

The truth is, our wider culture is transphobic (for details, check out Serano’s book Whipping Girl), and it’d be super surprising if you didn’t pick up some of that. The advice I’d give you in this case is to own up to it and work on it. Give yourself more credit than thinking you “can’t clear” that mental hurdle — you can, you just haven’t yet. Which is not saying I think you should run out and date a ton of trans folks right now — that wouldn’t be fair to those trans folks anyway. But don’t assume you’ll never widen your dating pool to include this very awesome group of women^[3].

[1] Some might call this “cisnormativity” instead of “transphobia”. In either way, what I mean is “enforcing and reinscribing the idea that being cis is better than being trans”

[2] If your objection is to particular anatomy, rather than overall trans status, it’s a more complicated situation. “I find certain shapes of people more attractive” is something that’s true for most people. While it’s problematic that those attractions tend to align with society’s distaste for trans bodies, on an individual level it’s hard to argue with taste.

[3] You might have already. No really, the ability to infallibly tell that someone is trans doesn’t exist.

(Picture credit James Cridland via Flickr. Creative Commons.)

I and many others rant about the concept of heteronormativity* and how it’s bad. What I mean by that word is “imposing hetero norms regarding gendered relationships”. The imposition can be overt, like a bus driver insisting a gay couple to get off the bus. That imposition can also be more subtle, like when a person talks about going on a date, making the assumption that both people have binary genders and the date is with someone of an opposite gender.

Recently I’ve started to hear more and more people describe themselves as “heteronormative” in a way that I think they mean “following heterosexual norms regarding gender and relationships”. I just want to say that that’s not what I mean when I get angry at heteronormativity. I’m sure hetero relationships that follow mainstream norms are awesome for some people, and they should just keep on keeping on (as long as nobody’s being coerced in any way).

*This counts for cisnormativity and other *normativity too, but I usually hear it regarding the word “heteronormative”

Let me be queerly frank with you here. The English language seems so full of “straight” idioms that it can often be hard to think queerly, you know? As a dear friend once said when when giving me directions, “We don’t go straight around here—we go queerly forward!”

Finding that thought hilariously endearing, I endeavored to excise such language from my life and instead stick only to queer talk. Originally, I did it because it was funny; queerly off, I had no intention of making this a longstanding practice. However, the irony is that after a while it became quite tricky to keep what was originally a joke queerly separated from reality.

Let me set the record queerly accurate about how bad it can get. You find yourself ordering queerly undiluted liquor at bars (unless you’re a queer edge and try to keep on the queer and narrow). Sometimes you have problems seeing queerly clearly. (The horror!) You try to vote a queer ticket (as if that existed). It even becomes hard for you not to give it to other people queerly unvarnished.

Most of you have probably seen queerly through me at this point, but I’m playing the “queer man” by writing this post. This word game does nothing more than make it hard for others to keep a queerly serious face around me. I’m talking about it here because I simply want to share a queerforward amazement that mere practice, even when not taken seriously, has deeply affected my awareness and my language over an extremely short period of time.

Take note, those of you who may have trouble keeping queerly differentiated what gendered pronoun to use for the trans folks you know and love. Maybe you just need to get your head screwed on queerly without cross-threading and start practicing.

Damn queerly affirmative.

In the last post, I promised more about using preferred pronouns.

Pronouns are important. They might not seem so to some cis people; I’ve had cis people tell me they really don’t care when they get accidentally mispronouned (other cis people, of course, do care, and feminine language is often used as a deliberate insult towards men). A cavalier attitude towards pronouns is a luxury trans folks don’t really have. Every time someone uses a gendered pronoun for us, we hear it. We hear when they’re using pronouns that respect us, and we hear when they’re using pronouns that don’t. Every time someone mispronouns us, that’s a small blow, a sign someone doesn’t respect us. In some sense someone who mispronouns us, knowing our proper pronouns, feels like someone who believes they know about our gender better than we do. Yes, we know it’s just habit. We know you generally mean no disrespect. But the only truly polite thing to do, the only way to actually not show disrespect, is to use people’s preferred pronouns. All the time.

When people screw up my pronouns they pretty often make some comment like “I’m trying, but it’s hard”. Yes, it is hard. Many rude habits are difficult to break. Like many difficult things, though, it’s much easier to do if you have some strategies.

So let me teach you how to use people’s preferred pronouns when those pronouns are not the same as before, not the same as what you’d guess by looking, or not the same as the two sets you’re more used to.

In the last post I suggested you heighten your awareness of the gender presentation of the people around you. For this post, I’ll encourage you to become more aware of gendered language. Train yourself to consciously hear gendered pronouns, and make a note of how each person is gendering each other person. Some exercises you can do (why yes, this course does come with homework):

• Spend an hour in a social situation counting gendered pronouns
• Spend an hour in a social situation not using any gendered pronouns for anyone (you might want to tell the people you’re with that you’re doing this exercise; they can even help catch you when you slip up)

If you find yourself in a situation where you might mess up someone’s pronouns, practice. Practice, practice, practice. When you’re by yourself, think of that person and say sentences about them, aloud, using their correct pronoun. Get out photos of them (if you have those; you might not, because a lot of trans people avoid cameras), and describe the scene out loud using correct pronouns. Do this a little each day until the correct pronoun comes automatically when you talk about the person.

While you’re practicing pronouns, also practice the other gendered language that person wants you to use. If he’d rather be a “son” than a “daughter,” practice calling him that. If ey’d rather just be a “child,” practice replacing gendered language with less-gendered alternatives. Keep in mind knowing someone’s pronouns doesn’t always tell you for sure what other gendered (or non-gendered) language they’d like you to use for them.

For people you know less well, Matt Kailey offers a useful tip:

“One thing that helps is to see the person as an entirely new and different individual instead of a man who you now have to call “she” or a woman who you now have to call “he.” Try it – it really works.”

Conversely, you may find that using correct pronouns for someone helps you perceive them in a way that better matches their gender identity.

Correct yourself when you make mistakes. Mistakes are understandable for a short time after someone changes pronouns, but they quickly feel more and more disrespectful the longer they happen. You can somewhat lessen the sting by correcting yourself every time you make a mistake, showing that you do care enough to try to use the right language for the person, and that you’re working on it. Keep up correct pronoun usage (and correcting your mistakes) even when the person isn’t around; not only is it the respectful thing to do, you’ll find making the effort to get pronouns right in the short run decreases the overall effort in the long run.

There are also ways you can help other people get pronouns right. Model correct pronoun use for others. When other people hear you using correct pronouns, they’re more likely to do so themselves. (Conversely, every time you use the wrong pronoun, you make it more likely someone else will do so.) Correcting other people when they miss a pronoun, just by saying the correct one, is also useful. One element of a supportive environment for a trans person is an environment in which the trans person isn’t the only one who stands up for their gender.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for people who are having trouble breaking wrong-pronoun habits?

Most “Trans 101″ links I have talk about the “who” of trans and genderqueer folks. They go through lists of terminology, make points about how we’re still human, and all that jazz. Important, but not stuff I’m particularly interested in going through; if you want a link my current favorite is Not Your Mom’s Trans 101.

Anyway, what I am interested in is the “how” of Trans 101 for cis people interacting with trans folks. Call it the lab accompaniment to Trans 101, if you will. It’ll likely be a series of more than one post. Today’s topic: what language you should use if you’re not sure of someone’s gender.

First of all, raise your awareness of people’s gender presentations a bit — be able to notice it when people are presenting with mixed gender cues. Don’t just look at people’s bodies, look at the other gender signals they’re sending — subtle cues like hairstyle and cut of clothing as well as more symbolic cues like deliberately-grown facial hair or skirts. Keep in mind that some gender cues are subtle; for example, a person you might read as male who wears fitted t-shirts, uses clear nail polish, and wears their long hair in a bun might be deliberately sending feminine-gendered signals. (Then again, they might not!) The first step in avoiding screwing up with someone’s gender is to notice when the assumptions so many people make about bodies’ relationships to gender might not be correct.

You might not want to assume this person’s gender. (Photo by Linden Tea tagged ‘genderqueer’; links through to Flickr. Creative Commons.)

So now what if you meet someone at a party (or a rally, or on the street, or in the course of your business dealings), and they’re presenting in a way that isn’t completely gender conforming? Here’s what you should do:
If the person is communicating a particular thing about their gender with their presentation (regardless of the shape of their body), and you can tell what it is, use pronouns (and other forms of interaction, of course) respecting what they are communicating — male pronouns for people clearly communicating male gender and female pronouns for people clearly communicating female gender. Be careful here, though, because very little “masculine” clothing is actually symbolically masculine enough to count as clear communication of a gender identity — with “feminine” clothing it’s a little simpler.

If, however, a person is presenting in a way that is less clear what gender they would prefer to be read as, don’t use gendered pronouns for them at first. If you absolutely can’t route a sentence around using a third-person pronoun for them, use “they/them/their” in the singular — yes, it is okay English. Absolutely do not use any gendered form of address like “sir”, “ma’am”, “dude”, “lady”, or anything like that. A person in this category might be one who has a number of subtle gender cues that differ with the gender that you read in their body, or an androgynously-bodied person presenting in an androgynous way, or a person presenting with multiple “conflicting” symbolic gender cues. Wait for them to tell you what gender they consider themself, if they feel like it. And if they don’t tell you, well, just relax about not knowing their gender. There are a lot of more important things to learn about someone, anyway.

Or this person’s gender, either. (Photo by Miss K ★, tagged ‘genderqueer’; links through to Flickr. Creative Commons.)

Note that I am not suggesting that you directly ask a person’s pronoun preference in most cases. I feel complicated about this; some people, myself included, actually enjoy being asked our pronoun preferences from time to time, because it shows you actually care about our feelings in the matter, and aren’t just making an assumption. (The only way you really know my gender for sure is if I tell you.) On the other hand, asking about pronoun preferences runs you the risk of awkwardness if the person happens to be cis and has never heard of pronoun preferences, or if the person happens to be trans and doesn’t want to have that fact come up in the conversation (it’s usually not relevant).

Final point: if someone has told you what pronouns they prefer, please do what they tell you. Even if you don’t think they look the way you expect someone with those pronouns to look, in body, in presentation, or both. Some people prefer gender-neutral pronouns that don’t count as officially the Queen’s English — they may take some getting used to, but the benefits in terms of not making the other person feel uncomfortable and out-of-place are worth it. If you screw up, correct yourself and move on. More on using people’s preferred pronouns later in this series.

Hi, The Crawl Offtopic! I’m Rachel and this is crossposted from my blog. I love footnotes, and I sometimes have difficulty considering myself bisexual.

To be clear, I have no problem with “bisexual” as a descriptive label. I have a boyfriend and two girlfriends [-1]; my behavior is clearly bisexual. [0] I do sometimes have difficulty taking on bisexuality as an identity category for myself. I’ve always had difficulty with the label “bisexual” even though it was the first alternative sexual label I took on myself. Here’s a hilarious-awkward timeline of my reasons for not calling myself bi:

• When I originally tried to come out to people at around fifteen — my senior year of high school — they denied that bisexuality existed, and told me that I was gay, and that claiming bisexuality was just a way to hedge around my own internalized homophobia. (Except they didn’t use that language at the time.) For some reason, I absorbed this idea and repeated it to myself and others.
• For a while in college I claimed to be “bi until graduation, except in reverse” as a way to excuse my obviously not-strictly-homosexual behavior. I’m not sure anyone bought this one.
• When I started to transition, I had this bizarre theory that I was queer both as a man and as a woman and that my sexual orientation was shifting and confused while I was in between genders. Therefore I was attracted to people from both genders, but only because I was both genders, and once I stopped being both genders, I would only be attracted to women? This is slightly less crazycakes than it sounds, but still rather silly.
• After my first serious attempt at a non-monogamous relationship went horribly south, I concluded that it was impossible to be bisexual, because my mystical One True Love could only have one sex/gender [1] and once I found them I would know what my sexual orientation was. …What? Rachel, you seriously thought this for like three whole years? I have nothing to say in my defense other than that I am better now.

For the last while I’ve taken to calling myself “queer” on the grounds that it’s a good label for “it’s complicated and not heteronormative,” and that’s still the closest I come to something I am comfortable calling myself as an identity category. Generally if I want to identify as anything surrounding my sexuality, it’s about what I do and not whom. I’ve been thinking about bisexuality recently because of my schoolwork and some conversations with friends, though, and because it’s a label that other people have been putting on me because I am interacting sexually with people of more than one gender. I’ve been thinking, then, “Okay, what would it mean to take this on as an identity? Is it a useful identity for me? Is it a useful decriptor?”

The last question is easiest so I will approach it first. It is a useful descriptor at a far-distance level, because it is more specific than queer, and because using that descriptor or a related one helps to combat bi invisibility in queer circles. This battle is much more won in my social circles than it is in other queer social circles; I really have no idea where it stands in academia and theory-land. (Although one classmate’s eagerness at discovering I had partners of multiple genders suggests there is still work to be done, and I have seen very limited academic work on bisexual queerness.) Closer in I suppose it is a useful descriptor for people who are thinking “Is Rachel potentially interested in person X?” in that it proves that the answer to that question is not dependent on gender.

Except that it totally is — or at least it is dependent on some intersection of gender and sexed embodiment.

I largely don’t care what’s in someone’s pants [2]; everyone I’ve interacted with has been awesome in some ways and challenging in others and I am grateful for the privilege of interacting with anyone at such a private level who I care for enough to reciprocate interest. I guess in that I find variety nice, that points toward bisexuality! But I do care about other aspects of sexed embodiment, like voices and skin texture and body hair and smell. In most of these contexts, except maybe voice, I tend pretty strongly towards preferring female embodied characteristics — smooth skin, less hair, and not smelling like man. (I don’t know how to better describe it. There is a family of smells I associate with adult human males that I find largely unpleasant.)

Sometimes I choose to be physically intimate with people who have those qualities anyway. This could be because I love them dearly. It could be because there are other things about them whose positive-attractiveness cancels out the negative-attractiveness of dude smell or whatever. It could also just be because I have chosen to not care for an evening. These are all choices. While sexual orientation at some level may not be a choice, and does not feel like one — I don’t choose to be attracted to long hair or smooth skin or cat ears or whatever — sexual expression is something I choose and want to continue to claim and possess as a choice that I can make on a daily or lifelong basis. If I have an innate sexual orientation that I cannot change, it is probably pretty close to “lesbian.” [3] I’m not sure that this idea of an innate sexual orientation is a terribly useful one for me, but if I’m going to define one, I’m not sure it should be “bisexual.”

That said, I don’t have a better term. The most obvious thing to suggest would be a Kinsey 5, but while I guess that could be a useful broad-strokes description of behavior, I don’t feel it’s accurate at an identity level. I’d rather think about it in terms of magnitudes; the magnitude of my attraction to female body characteristics is generally positive and the magnitude of my attraction to male body characteristics is generally negative, but there’s a lot more to attraction (especially for long-term partners versus Random Dude/t/te At Party or something) than body type, and sometimes the magnitude of the vectors adds up to very positive even when there are one or two negative vectors in there like “covered in body hair.” This is potentially related to Violet’s excellent “Vector Identity Theory,” although the specific formulation she provides is related to gender identity and not sexual partner choice. [4]
So uhhhhh… what do y’all think?

[-1] Don’t feel bad, I can’t keep track either. I discovered I had the second girlfriend by reading a third party’s LJ.

[0] OK, I have a little of a problem. I wish that the term “bisexual” didn’t reinforce the idea that there are two sexes, and that you can be attracted to either or both of them (or neither if you’re on the ball and recognize asexuality as a valid identity-zone for people to inhabit). There aren’t two sexes, at least not when you get down to individual cases, and attraction is crazy mad complicated, and if you accept that gender and sex aren’t the same even if you believe they are related, then bigendersexual and bisexual aren’t necessarily the same and “pansexual” or “omnisexual” starts to look better, except that then you’re throwing away all of the work done by bisexual activists to try to get bisexuality recognized at all, and you open up the can of worms and each worm is holding a barrel full of disappointingly serious monkeys. If you could do me a favor and accept that when I say “bisexuality” I mean “bi/pan/omnisexuality” that would be awesome.

[1] A problematic assumption in and of itself.

[2] To the extent to which I do, it is none of the internet’s business.

[3] I doubt that I do, in a lifelong sense, because of how often this has changed for me. However, if I do have one, the last five years or so of data suggest it’s oriented mostly toward an approximation of “woman.”

[4] “Sexual object choice” is arguably the term of art, but my sexual object choice usually involves going to hardware stores, while my sexual partner choice involves going to coffeeshops.

“Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.” —Isaac Asimov

Count the stereotypes!

Too many science fiction books have progressive ideas about future technology without any corresponding social change. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, society does not remain fixed as technology marches ahead. I don’t know that the future will necessarily be full of rainbows and unicorns, but I have a hard time imagining that things will remain as they are today. It seems preposterous to read about humans who have acclimated to wildly mutated meanings about what it means to be human, but still carry around fixed notions of heterosexuality and binary gender. There are unfortunately plenty of books that fit into this category, but I’d like to talk about two particular books that I’ve read recently.

In Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler, aliens show up to a dying earth to rescue the remaining humans. In order to save them and in payment for doing so, they involve themselves in the lives of these humans (in more ways than one.) After some time in dealing with the aliens, new normative family structures of five individuals emerge: a human couple (male and female), an alien couple (also male and female), and a non-gendered alien. Despite the normalization of sex with third-gendered aliens, every human character in the novel manages to only express heterosexual attraction towards other humans. If anything, the humans are ultimately repulsed by the tentacular aliens who have (arguably non-consensually) inserted themselves into human relationships.

Accelerando by Charles Stross describes a world populated by humans that can grow themselves new bodies, upload themselves into computers, and manipulate their environments at will. Although there is one incident of gender swapping, every character in the novel (including the cat) is always explicitly one of exactly two genders. One might argue that binary gender in some form is ingrained so deeply into the human experience that it’s unreasonable to expect that to change, even in the face of other overwhelming changes. Yet, in a post-human novel where it’s not that out of place for a character to be a flock of pigeons or a virtual dinosaur, is it somehow more far-fetched for them to be queer or to explore a gender other than male or female?

If you want a recommendation for a novel that deftly handles post-human gender, look no further than Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan. Like Egan’s other books, it’s about as hard as science fiction gets, yet it still makes room for excellent musings on gendered pronouns and mutable genitalia. I don’t think that this story is necessarily an accurate portrayal of where our technology or our society is going, but I do think that years from now it will probably hold up a lot better than other novels whose view of society is still fixed in the past.