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.]

When I say this novel is fantasy, I mean this in two ways: my usual meaning, that the science is ridiculous, but also that it romanticizes the past like fantasy does. A third problem, unrelated to genre, is that her handling of her characters’ sexual orientation breaks my suspension of disbelief. I’ll talk about the science first, leaving aside the absurdity of faster-than-light travel since it’s only a peripheral element and focusing on biology instead, especially the deus-ex-machina virus central to the book. After the biology, I’ll look at the dissonance between the technology and economic production available to the natives and the social structures of their societies. Third, I’ll argue that the near-total absence of discussion of men and sexual orientation just doesn’t make sense. Finally, I’ll offer some random thoughts on the book and its connections to others.

Midway through the book, the protagonist, Marghe Taishan, indicates that the original settlers of the planet mixed genetic material from Earth life into the planet’s life. There’s no particular evidence of this in the narrative, since except for horses and humans none of the other plants and animals mentioned are familiar. However, even assuming almost identical biochemistry based on DNA and proteins, there are some simple variations that could make Earth life and xenolife inert or toxic with respect to each other, such as biomolecules possessing the opposite chirality, different complements of amino acids, or even variations in how DNA codes for amino acids, making such genetic engineering impossible.

Another problem is that there are too many close analogs to Earth phyla and superclasses: there are mammal-like furred animals, bird-like animals, insect-like animals, fish-like animals, etc. While it’s quite possible there would be some similarities between Earth life and xenolife because of convergent evolution, as for instance segmented phyla are quite common on Earth both now and in the geological past, it’s unlikely that all the same phyla would be present at the same time. The coexistence of mammals, fish, insects, and birds has only lasted about 65 million years, compared to almost 600 million years of significant multicellular presence on land.

The failure of alien life to be alien is a common weakness in science fiction. The virus that’s central to Ammonite’s plot shares this problem. How likely is it that an alien virus would affect humans? Viruses are exquisitely adapted to their hosts and rarely jump species, though over geological time it does happen. However, the probability of a jump gets smaller the farther away the species is: of known zoonotic diseases in humans, most of them come from other mammals, with a handful from birds and insects. A virus adapted to life on another planet would face a harder time infecting humans than a bacteriophage.

However, the virus doesn’t only infect and kill humans, but it also modifies the survivors in a fashion that, as far as I know, no extant virus does. It enhances senses, including giving them some sort of electromagnetic sense. It grants some kind of biological manipulation ability, including a laying-on-hands kind of healing and, most importantly, the ability for two women to get pregnant together and have children that aren’t genetically identical to their mothers(!), though they can reproduce via normal parthenogenesis too. (It’s still extremely unclear to me how this process works—there’s not much implication of genetic mixing in the description, but rather seems to suggest the two women permute each others genes. This would fail, on many levels, because many mutations in genes are lethal or least maladaptive, with safe variations a rarity. Sex works well because all the genes involved have been tested by natural selection and mixing different variants together doesn’t often create lethal combinations, even though it can happen, e.g. sickle-cell anemia.)

The most absurd thing it does is to allow some women to access memories of their ancestors and even some nonhuman sapients on the planet. The only mechanism I can envision to make that work is some bizarre process where the virus takes memories and converts them into DNA and then reverses it, but that has severe difficulties. While she does make some effort to talk about biology and biochemistry, which is more than I’ve seen some authors of nominal science fiction do, the ancestral-memory aspect of the virus is very fantasy-ish even in terms of the genre definitions. Griffith handwaves the virus for the most part, providing a poetic description of the reproductive process; a cop-out on the racial memory aspect at one point when Marge recalls a word and can’t decide if it’s racial memory or if she learned it, forgot it, and then somehow the virus recovered it; and a bogus technobabble physics-like explanation of the magic virus powers at the end. It would be impossible for any natural virus, as opposed to some engineered nanonmachine, to do everything that the virus does in the story. She also never explains why the virus kills men.

Romanticizing the past is even more fantasy-like than positing ancestral memories, though. The only culture that feels real to me, from a perspective where I’ve read a fair amount of medieval and ancient history, are the Echraidne/Briogannon: they’re xenophobic, tradition-bound, violent, and leadership is inherited. Government is more or less not mentioned for the other native cultures that appear in the book. This doesn’t make much sense: violent oppression by aristocracies was a feature of almost all pre-modern agricultural societies and the subsistence farmers who made up most of the population wouldn’t forget their overlords. Even if the natives somehow escaped that trap, they’d still need some form of government, and the only other type known to be functional and stable over time scales of centuries is democracy, but there’s no evidence of voting or democratic politics. If Griffith and anarcho-libertarians weren’t at polar opposite ends of the political spectrum, I’d almost believe that the natives had some kind of primitive anarcho-capitalism like some anarcho-capitalists posit existed on Iceland in the past.

The economic aspects of the native society are just as difficult to reconcile with history. Most of the population seems to be subsistence farmers, but the farming Marghe does is presented more as hobby gardening than the backbreaking toil of subsistence farming in the real world. Real subsistence farmers suffer partly because of appropriative governments that take away any surplus above the bare minimum to keep them and their families alive, but also because uncontrolled reproduction means that any gains in farming productivity are eventually eaten away by population growth until everyone is back at the Malthusian limit. Since reproduction on Jeep is voluntary, it’s possible they might avoid this trap, too, though I’m suspicious there’s a tragedy of the commons effect: in agricultural societies, children are economic investments rather than consumption goods, but land is not infinite and so while individual incentives point to having more children, collectively the society will eventually hit the Malthusian limit. In general, though, the natives are far healthier, seem to have much more wealth, and travel much farther than any historic subsistence-farming culture. You don’t see any of the soul-crushing poverty or boredom that makes subsistence farmers in the real world leave for cities as soon as other employment becomes available, much less a high rate of childhood mortality or other similar features of pre-modern cultures. I don’t find any of this plausible in the least.

One of the oddest parts of the novel to me is what the characters never discuss: sexual orientation. While after two or three centuries of isolation the natives would probably not have a concept of men or sexual orientation as we do, there’s no excuse for Marghe or the other characters who come from the broader galactic culture. The only reference that we’ve ever had to a romantic relationship that occurs off Jeep is a mention of Marghe having a “lover” in her personnel file, with no reference to said lover’s gender. Once on Jeep, Marghe falls in love with a native woman and shows some signs of attraction to another. Does this mean she’s a lesbian? It’s not clear. Two of the Company personnel are clearly in love with one another, but while PoV characters notice the relationship, they don’t reflect on what it means about the characters’ sexual preferences. Are they lesbians? Marghe observes that the Company doctor and the acting commander seem to be moving towards a relationship at the end of the book. Are they lesbians?

None of the non-native women at any point mentions a husband, boyfriend, or male romantic partner of any sort, either who died from the virus or who they’ll never see again because they can’t leave Jeep. That no one ever talks about sexual orientation or relationships with men strains my credulity. I would expect different reactions to their situation from different women: my best guess is that straight women would have a palpable sense of loss, both for specific male partners and the general knowledge that they’d never be able to have a relationship with their preferred gender ever again, while lesbians and bisexual women wouldn’t but might still think about the implications of being stuck on female-only planet. I have a hard time projecting what they would do as straight women in those circumstances, simply because I’m not straight and because it’s so unprecedented that I don’t have a reservoir of stories written by straight people to draw on. One thing I’m certain they would do, though, is talk about it.

As for the natives, while I suspect that natural and sexual selection would eventually cause most women to be attracted to other women in much the same way that they’ve acted in the real world to make most people straight, I doubt two or three centuries is long enough for that to happen. How would all those straight women who’ve never seen a man understand and express their sexuality? I don’t have any firm guesses, just because the situation is so far outside anything that’s happened in the real world, but here’s one possibility: people on the transmasculine spectrum, who would be butch lesbians and trans men in our culture, would be in extreme demand as romantic partners. I don’t see any of this in the setting. Experience with situational sexuality in our world is that, without other options, some humans will sometimes have sex with whoever’s available regardless of their usual gender preferences. I don’t know how this plays out in practice when the circumstances are permanent. Can straight women fall in love with other straight women when there are no men around? Would there be a lot of female-female couples who don’t have much sex, no more than is needed for reproductive purposes or when they’re feeling desperate, but live together and combine their lives as married couples in our culture do? (This is a reasonably common outcome of relationships where a trans woman marries a straight cis woman before coming out and transitioning—while they no longer have sex because they’re no longer mutually attracted, they have a relationship that’s deeper than most friendships between women become in our culture.) Griffith ignores all of these questions and possibilities and treats, as far as I can tell, all of her characters as if they’re attracted to women.

After I finished it, I spent some time asking myself if the book delivered on its promises in the opening, until I realized that because I was asking the question, the answer was, “No.” When I started the book, I thought it could be a science fiction mystery focused on the virus and what happened to the original colonists or another kind of story oriented on the conflict with the Company. Griffiths did neither. She even gives a boost to the science fiction mystery idea halfway through by introducing the goths and the standing stones, but nothing comes of it. She introduces the revelations about the virus almost as afterthoughts, and they have almost no impact on the plot. The Company remains an opaque, impersonal, almost mechanical villain; at the end, Marghe thinks that the Company won’t give up and will come back, but there’s no planning or conflict over that in the novel itself.

What story does she tell? It’s about Marghe and also the Company personnel going native. I’ve already indicated that I thought that a bunch of straight women ought to grapple more with this decision even if they don’t have a choice. I also find the idea that women used to the standard of living of galactic civilization readily accepting the life of subsistence farmers hard to believe: they make no plans for trying to boost Jeep’s technological level while they still have access to all the technology they brought with them. I don’t mean to say the novel is bad—if I make the assumption Marghe is a lesbian, her character development is interesting. I just felt the opening didn’t set up what it ended up being.

• I sighed at the use of a corporation as a villain. While villainous corporations out to steal natives’ land have existed in history, they’re unusual and often government/corporation cooperative ventures, and modern examples are rare. The future is not necessarily like the past: I seriously, seriously doubt that colonialism is going to come back in style if humans ever develop interstellar travel for a whole host of reasons. The idea of evil colonialist corporations is more the combination of two left-wing bogeymen, evil corporations and colonialism, than anything based in reality. Governments did most of the colonizing and most of the slaughtering in the colonialist past of Earth. (This is one of the things that pissed me off about Avatar, too.)
• Some of the characters mentioned they’d tried “hormones” to try to stop the men from dying, but it didn’t work. I guess trans women would be screwed, though given the magical powers the virus displays, maybe it can check for suitable gender identity before killing someone.
• Marghe decides to get pregnant awfully quickly. She’s known Thenike for a couple of months before they have sex for the first time and make each other pregnant that same instance. While most of Marghe’s character development is believable, this decision felt rushed and unlikely.
• The virus in this book reminded me a bit of the symbiote on Ballybran in Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer, though they’re used to very different effects. McCaffrey’s is still a deux ex machina, but less of one.
• Ethan of Athos has some similarities to this story, including a single-sex planet (only male), a near-complete absence of discussion of sexual orientation and romantic relationships in a population of (presumably) mostly straight men, and a major supporting character from a mixed-gender society with an undefined sexual orientation. These are problems in LMB’s novella as well as Ammonite, but in other respects LMB’s setup is more plausible: Ethan of Athos‘s all-male culture was intentionally founded that way.

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.)

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”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I happen to be religious. My brand of Judaism is super liberal and feminist, but it still counts as religion. Fairly often, in my liberal bubble, people will say things that imply all religious people are stupid, or hoodwinked, or even evil. This post itself is inspired by a comment thread from a post on Feministe, where a concrete discussion of an attempt by one restaurant owner in Crown Heights to bridge the gap between the Black and Orthodox Jewish populations of Crown Heights, and the difficulties arising from the kashrut certification organization, was derailed by comments like this:

Tom Foolery:

Eh. Let them isolate themselves. Atheism is on the way up, and stuff like this only helps.

tinfoil hattie:

I have neither patience nor tolerance for any “religion” that has as one of its cornerstones the inhumanity of women. And that’s pretty much every religion. As much as one might like to say it’s “the people” who make bad choices within an otherwise good religion, all religions, at their core (except Wicca), degrade and debase women and any other “non-man,” for that matter. Some are worse than others. But they all suck, frankly.

And there’s no such thing as a “fundamentalist” atheist, because atheism isn’t a religion

To be fair, other commenters did do some calling-out of the derail, but it still came off as a pretty uncomfortable place for me. I don’t find this kind of discussion to be productive.

An ill-informed lumping together of every religion helps nobody. Even among people who share the same ostensible religion, you can have wide ranges of understandings of that religion. My Judaism and the Judaism of the rabbis who are making it difficult for this person to keep his kashrut certification share a similar heritage, but not all the same beliefs, by any means. One of the commenters above may have had experience with Wiccans who did not degrade and debase women; but that doesn’t mean all Wiccans have a completely unopressive view of gender (especially to those of us who see ourselves as not fully described by the gender binary).

The problem is that religion sometimes is used as a basis for constructing a structure of social power. Structures of power are often oppressive, whether they’re religious or secular in origin. It’s easy to point to oppressive structures of power that claim their authority in terms of religion, and then generalize to a claim that all religion is oppressive. But that ignores the fact that not all religion creates religion-based power structures (the havurah that I was a member of back in Massachusetts didn’t seem to, at least), that not all religious power structures are oppressive all the time (see also religiously-based social justice efforts), and that there are plenty of oppressive secular power structures.

Criticizing oppression in the name of religion is useful. I certainly do my share of it. But please don’t criticize the whole concept of religion just because it’s sometimes used as an excuse for oppression.

I recently got married.  About two months ago I was in Cambridge City Hall filling out our forms with my then-fiancée, and I had a conversation with the clerk that went something like this:

her (verifying form): and what’s your sex?

me: I kind of don’t have one?  I’d prefer not to check that box.

her: Well, what’s your official sex?

me: Yeah, about that.  I’m trans.  Different parts of my documentation disagree about that right now.

her: Okay… then… what would a doctor say your sex is?

me: I don’t know.  It probably depends on the doctor.

her: Is it… complete?

At this point I can tell she’s trying to get me to tell her about what’s between my legs, which as far as I am concerned is none of her business.

me: I don’t feel particularly partial.

her: Can you just check the one that is most applicable to you?

me: I really don’t want to lie on this form that I took an oath not to lie on.

We went through several more rounds of this.  They weren’t being intentionally impolite or anything, they just presumably didn’t have a good precedent.  Eventually they agreed to let the tickybox be, and they’d call the state office to ask what to do, given my preference that the box remain unchecked.  Well, a couple days later, my fiancée gets a call from them that they won’t force me to state a gender!

I didn’t want to post this publicly until my marriage certificate was well and properly registered with the state, for fear they’d take it away, but take a look:

The important part is at the bottom of the form. “Party A” (my now-wife) has a little typewritten ‘x’ somewhere in the vicinity of “FEMALE.” “Party B”, me, has no such marking.  Success!  It didn’t print on this copy, but the original official form even has a typed note to the left saying something like “23 OK BY STATE MAY NOT BE AMENDED LATER”.

Married life?  It’s great   There might be more commentary on the process of getting queerly married coming in the future.

(Spoiler alert: gender is squishy, except when it’s not. Also, Tasha Yar doesn’t make it through the first season. Sorry, wrong Next Generation.)

If we’re going to chat about this book, let me first share all the juicy bits with you, before we get into the tough and over-cooked meta-discussion. There are certainly some fabulous gems to be found: Telyn Kusalik discusses being exhausted about explaining gender to others when they’d rather be sharing amazing vegan curry recipes; Julia Serano excellently rants against those who dismiss her gender as a performance; E.S. Weisbrot relates the piratical appropriation of behaviors; Sam Peterson posits a potential mutable (and mutant) fourth wave which still needs intolerance appraisals. And, in a piece close to my heart, StormMiguel Florez pens a love letter to safe restrooms entitled “Dear Austin Special Needs Bathroom”.

It’s certainly important work to explore the great gender wilderness. Not so many years ago, when the only well-travelled and well-lit roads used to be paved with heteronormativity, it was much harder to set off exploring on your own. Speaking personally, I am deeply indebted to those who have left signposts behind along their painfully blazed trails, reminding me that I am not alone and that others have been there before me. It’s good that this work continues to be done, because there the world clearly contains more genders than people and there’s always more space needed to make them feel safe.

The format of this book is also its greatest weakness. When each author has but a few pages to speak, it starts to feel more like a shallow survey of the diverse identities rather than something groundbreaking. I will admit that my expectations were quite high—I had hoped that the titular sequel to Kate Bornstein’s original Gender Outlaw would be even more challenging to me as a reader than the original was 15 years ago. I’ve certainly changed a lot in that time, but it’s not just me. Bornstein’s original was an accessible and unapologetic look at gender in society when there weren’t many similar voices to be found.

It doesn’t feel like that’s still the case, at least in my admittedly queer, white, and well-off neck of the woods. I realize that it’s an amazing place of privilege to be living at a time and a place where I can be overwhelmed by folks feeling free to talk about their unique and fabulous gender identities. It’s just that the internet is full of more personal narratives than I could ever hope to stomach. I have had my fill of other people’s childhoods. There are enough outlaws at this point that they’ve formed their own city-state and have started up trade relations. So, from the cultural context that it was published in alone, this book felt less about outlaws and more like “Your Gender Is Not My Gender and That’s OK: A Pop-up Book for Kids of All Ages”.

I am hungry for practicalities. Gender outlaws may live off in the great gender wilderness near the forest of Magical Realism, but as we all know no gender identity survives first contact with the enemy. I want stories about how these outlaws intersect with a social reality that largely doesn’t believe in them. When you need at least a five page story to explain your identity, how do you live as a whole person in a world where nobody has time to listen? I approve of the optimistic cheerleading here to boldly and unapologetically express whatever genders you happen to be at any given moment, but I need less encouragement and more how-to manuals. Perhaps I’m just worn out on introspection.

In short, this would be an excellent collection for somebody who needs to be filled up with hope that there is a space in the world for their genders. However, if your bookshelf at home already too closely resembles the entire gender section at your local bookstore, you could probably give this a pass (even though you won’t.) In either case, skip the introduction.

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(Oh, you’re still here! The introduction, you say? Hmm. Do I really have to get into this? You won’t just trust me when I recommend skipping it? Really? Well, sit down and let me put on some tea. Don’t say that I didn’t warn you!)

In case you missed the brouhaha, the original call for submissions used the word “trannies,” which understandably made quite a few folks uncomfortable. In the introduction to the book, Bornstein and Bergman bring this up explicitly in an attempt to address it.

First, they categorize this discomfort as coming from an older generation who find the language too visceral to move past. Besides the fact that this is an unfounded ageist dismissal, I know plenty of trans folks a generation younger who are equally uncomfortable.

Secondly, Bornstein self-identifies as a tranny and claims that she was using the word before it became a slur [citation needed]. Still, good on her, but that doesn’t make it appropriate to use that language for others.

Thirdly, Bergman points out that this reaction feels a lot like being attacked by parts of the gay community for using the word queer. I’ll defer to an excellent post by Cedar who points out why reclaiming the word tranny is not quite the same as reclaiming the word queer.

I’m sure they meant it with the best of intentions, but the use of the word tranny is always a giant warning sign. In my experience, it quite clearly indicates that somebody prizes being hip and subversive over being respectful. To their credit, I don’t think it ultimately signified that here in the resulting contents of this collection, but that doesn’t make me feel less alienated or uncomfortable.

If I were editing the editors, I would have just replaced the entire discussion with another contribution by the fabulous Sam Peterson. It would have left a better taste in my mouth.

Meanwhile, the government agencies that run the internet have decided, under pressure from corporations who want to run targeted marketing, that everyone who uses the internet must register under their legal name.  Scratch and Winc, freewheeling spirits that they are, refuse, and a grumpy government bureaucrat decides to make an example of them.  Plot ensues. At times the plot seems blown by a strong wind towards the rhetorical points the authors are trying to make; since I am interested in both the plot and the politics it’s meant to support, I was inclined to forgive this tendency.

The treatment of gender in the first half of the book is a joy to read.  Scratch and Winc shift effortlessly through various genders, and not just “male” and “female” They use a variety of queer genders, and the personae that do fit into a binary gender scheme often fit in a more nuanced way than classic gender stereotypes would predict.  Unfortunately, the book does end up eventually describing a little more than I’d like to have known about our protagonists’ gendered embodiment. I think I almost would have preferred it if that was left ambiguous.

Reading Nearly Roadkill in the light of the modern internet, it’s fun to compare the speculative-fiction prediction to the reality.  In Nearly Roadkill; our intrepid protagonists are unlikely warriors of anonymity and shifting identity, and the government wants everyone on the internet to be trivially traceable back to a real name.  Over here in 2010, the government doesn’t care much about anonymity — the companies that want to mine our lives for their ad-targeting databases don’t seem to need any regulatory support.  Offer people a useful service, and they’ll gladly hand over all kinds of personal information.  Instead of a threat of jail for anonymous use of the internet, you just don’t get invited to your friends’ parties if you don’t have a Facebook account.

On the other side of the anonymity spectrum, you have things like 4chan, which seems to have a bit of a different tone than the anonymous chatrooms in Nearly Roadkill, though they’re both focused pretty hard on sex. 4chan seems a lot larger than the internet Scratch and Winc live in, and has more trolling — which isn’t to say that Scratch and Winc never encounter any trolling at all, it just seems a little less common than on 4chan. The section of the internet I am familiar with that’s most similar to Scratch and Winc’s environment is IRC, which somewhere in between in terms of anonymity — you’re traceable by IP address, but not by name. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the book was partially inspired by IRC, as the timing would be about right. These days, IRC feels mildly antiquated, in the same way that the chats in Nearly Roadkill do.

In Nearly Roadkill, you don’t have all these worlds existing side-by-side. You’re either Registered or you’re not, and there’s no partitioning or middle-ground. It’s interesting imagining that world, but I’m glad I don’t live in it.

As a genderhead interested in the cultural impact of technology, I had a lot of fun reading this book, even with all the hats it was trying to wear at once. It’s no High Literature, but it’ll show you a good time.

We should start having substantive posts up very soon!