Misc. comments 51

[redbird]

More comments from elsewhere:

To a locked post:

Thanks for sharing this.

I don't think I'm genderqueer, but one way of thinking of things that I sometimes find useful is that there's also an axis of "how much does gender matter?" There are people whose own gender matters a lot to them; there are people to whom everyone else's gender matters a lot (and that can be very wearing, especially when they think they get to say what other people's gender is); and there are people to whom certain other people's gender matters; and I think there are people for whom any or all of those are context-dependent. (That the shapes of how I become attracted/notice attraction to women and to men are different feels relevant here.)

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A discussion of holiday gifts for people one doesn't know what to buy for, including gifts to charity in people's names, reminded me of my virtual collection of rivers that I have crossed on foot. My first explanation wasn't clear, and adrian_turtle didn't realize I meant by bridge:

Bridges definitely count: most of the rivers I'm thinking of haven't frozen solid in my lifetime, at least not at the points where I crossed (the Thames at London, Hudson on the George Washington Bridge, and Columbia at Portland, for example; I don't know for sure about the Seine, but it was liquid when I was there). So yes, Mill Creek should be on there. (I don't think the Charles is, though I may have forgotten something from ages ago.)

Maybe I should also count streams I've waded through/across? (Though the one that comes to mind first, I don't think I ever knew the name of, it's a small stream that flows into the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick.)

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A friend was talking about the idea of "guilty pleasure," which she agreed is flawed, as a lead-in to talking about a specific writer who she hadn't sought out more books by because it would have meant being seen as someone who read that sort of book:

I think I want to look at the distinction between guilty and embarrassing pleasures. There's a difference between telling people "I know this is trash but…" or "I shouldn't" [while reaching for certain categories of food] and not talking about the thing. There are times when the "I shouldn't" is a piece of social bonding, I think: the point isn't to not have chocolate, it's to signal "I am a person with virtuous/culturally appropriate ideas about food."

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In the course of a discussion on customers_suck a poster said some offensively clueless things about transgender people. A number of commenters are trying to educate that poster (and, of course, the usual lurkers). In the course of that, I wrote:

Yes. I'm a cis woman who is sometimes misgendered; not only is it rude to treat trans women differently from other women, but it's not as easy to tell who is and isn't trans as some people assume.

How to tell someone is transgendered:

• They tell you.


• They ask another trusted person to get the word out. That could be someone asking their parents to let other relatives know; a friend of mine who talked to his boss and then got HR to send a memo to his coworkers so they'd get his new name right; or Chaz Bono using a publicist.

[I figure if I do some Trans 101 stuff so transgender people don't have to, maybe I can take a break from doing Poly 101. I don't expect any of this to come as a revelation to many of you, but I'm pleased at having been succinct, so am keeping it.]

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In response to gareth_rees in a discussion of critics and book reviews in james_nicoll/james_davis_nicoll's journal:

The author may be dead, but some of this sounds like the critics in Tlön inferring the personality and beliefs of the man who wrote Hamlet and The Cherry Orchard.

I can tell the difference between "the author" and "the narrative voice" and (just for example) don't assume that papersky agrees on any particular subject with Sulien, the narrator of her novel The King's Peace. I wouldn't be impressed by a critic or reviewer who wrote "Walton thinks" in ways that implied that the two were necessarily the same. Especially if someone is writing mostly for a lay audience—people who read quite a bit, but haven't spent much time studying criticism or literary theory—they should be willing to take the time to make that distinction. Otherwise it's reasonable in their terms for me to say "$reviewer cannot tell the difference between the writer and the fictional narrative voice," because the review they have published, the opinions that appear in the text, elide the difference.

Among other things, I want there to be room for someone to look at an author's works through their career, and comment on similiarities. "The narrator of $book was orphaned very young" is a different statement than "$author has written several novels, and all of their protagonists were orphaned by age three."

Comments

[striped]

On behalf of all the trans* people of the world, thank you! To pay you back, I promise to keep calling out misogyny even when I pass reliably as a man. :-)

It's much harder to do a clear and concise 101 about a thing that concerns oneself. It's hard not to take it very personally when it's one's own life. And one is probably fed up with having to explain the same thing time and time again and face the same prejudices.

[tim]

Good trans 101 comment! In my experience, cis people (and trans men who haven't interacted with many trans women) tend to react rather interestingly to the "you can't tell who's trans" point. It descends into circular logic very, very quickly.