“If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild,” Plomin told the Observer.
Again: there’s more similarity than difference between genders.
I’ll tell you a secret about fear: it’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage.’ It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn’t have seconds to spare for funk. Lord Khusro’s injunction echoed Vasco Miraanda’s motto, another version of which I found, years later, in a story by J. Conrad. I must live until I die.
I’m reading it because I recommended his Midnight’s Children to a student, then wanted to re-read it myself, & so instead picked up one of his I hadn’t read. I love his writing – it’s at once so inebriating, the joy he takes with language, but then exhausting — why aspire when someone is already so good at what you want to do? — still, I’m writing anyway.
I’ve just read the new Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. I’ll write a more thorough review later, and interview them about the book, but for now, here’s the blurb I wrote:
She-males and drag queens and bois, oh my.
Bornstein & Bergman found not just the outlaws but the outliers, the people who have deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined their genders, for whom gender is not just an identity or expression but the last tool in the toolbox. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation is a good way to get up to speed on the shifting, new, and created identities of Genderland.
I am pleased as punch to see that they’re going with a qualitative survey for partners’ issues. If you’re a partner, and especially if you’re the kind of partner who isn’t “typical” or in the majority most of the time (boyfriends/husbands of trans women, male partners of FTMs, women who intentionally sought out trans partners) make sure you fill it out.
Jessica Who? wrote a nice piece about her experience reading and re-reading My Husband Betty. It’s so satisfying to know that anything I’ve written helped someone else come to terms with their crossdressing or their transness. I was just putting the finishing touches on it seven years ago, around this time of year. I had no idea how my life would change once it was published, but I’m sure I had even less idea that anyone else’s would!
Cheryl Morgan asks Is There, or Should There Be, Such a Thing as Trans Lit? It’s a good question. She leaves out a bunch of books, like Feinberg’s Drag King Dreams and Luna, written for young adults and winner of the prestigious National Book Award. Ursula LeGuin’s entire civilization in The Left Hand of Darkness is, effectively, trans, in a third gender, gender-fluid, gender-neutral sort of way. Neil Gaiman has had good portrayals of trans people in his books, most notably in Sandman. There’s Trans-Sister Radio, which came out a few years back.
I’d love to hear more, if you can think of others – novels in which trans people are characters – so have at it.
I think there already is such a thing as Trans Lit. As with gay & lesbian lit, it includes all the various genres: history, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, etc. Personally I’d like to see more books where a character happens to be trans, and what is important about them isn’t necessarily, or only tangentially, their transness. The novel I’m working on now has at least one, and I’m not even sure I’m going to mention that the person is trans. Honestly, isn’t every book about any person potentially about a trans person? How do we know Jake Gatsby wasn’t a trans guy, after all?
It’s been a hundred years since Magnus Hirschfeld published The Transvestites. The earliest bibliographic entries Ray Blanchard tracked down are these:
Die Transvestiten – Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites – A Study of the Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress], Pulvermacher, Berlin, 1910.
Co-authored with Max Tilke: Die Transvestiten – Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb [Transvestites – The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress], Illustrierter Teil, Pulvermacher, Berlin, 1912.
How cool is that? I couldn’t help but think that Virginia Prince died only last year, at the age of 96. Imagine, she was born only a few years after that book was published, when the idea of anyone being “out” about crossdressing was – to borrow from Hirschfeld’s language – verboten.
It’s hard to imagine what might have been, if the Nazis had not destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex.
Dairy Queen – whose name is funny enough, really, & kind of obscene – sells something they call a Dilly Bar.
A Dilly Bar. It sounds obscene in so many ways, doesn’t it?
But what makes me laugh the hardest is that “dilly boy” is slang (in Polari) for a male prostitute. So theoretically, a bar where male prostitutes hang out should be called a Dilly Boy Bar.
For those of you who are continuing to follow the hullabaloo about Google Books, and specifically Author’s Guild’s settlement with them, do listen to this interview with Ursula LeGuin, who cancelled her membership to Author’s Guild as a result of the settlement.
She also has interesting things to say about the state of the book, education and literacy in the US, and her current project.
Apparently Caulfield was still alive to write Salinger’s obit:
“There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.
Goddamn if The Onion didn’t nail it exactly, even if, I”m sure, a million crumby people thought of it with them.
The world has gotten significantly less smart in the past two days: first we lost the people’s historian, Howard Zinn, whose books educated so many of us as to the real legacy of American Populism.
I can’t come up with anything better to do than dig the heels of my hands into my eyes and sit, fully dressed, in a bathroom stall, with my own grief. You remember the scene: it’s from Franny & Zoey.
Let me say right here & now that I don’t care if he wrote or what he wrote since he’s been in exile. It’s not like there have been any American authors that even touch his four books’ worth of genius.
