#51: Gender defriender

Actual updates

New month, new rejections! I’m mentioning this not out of a play for your sympathy, but just as news; I know it takes dozens of rejections (or more!) to make it to one acceptance, if you do ever get there, and not every piece is a fit for every publication, and also I haven’t yet sent in anything that I have my heart and soul bound up into so much that I’d be really hurt if someone didn’t like them¹. That’s right, I’m DIYing footnotes. You can’t hover over them to see the text like you could on the old platform, but you can click to them and then hit back to return to your spot (it is annoying for me when I add one in between existing ones, since I have to re-number everything past that point).

Anyway, so, yeah, like I was saying, I’m not going to cry myself to sleep if my B- stories don’t get accepted anywhere, and form rejection letters aren’t cruel, they’re just boilerplate. It’s worth mentioning when it happens, because it will make it that much more exciting if I ever do get an acceptance. Will I for this particular story? I mean, probably not. It’s an okay story! It’s not the worst thing ever committed to a computer screen! But it’s probably not within the top 5% of stories these editors have read this month. This is mostly practice, both of writing more, and of submitting stuff to places.

Besides, I’ve got plenty of other things to cry myself to sleep over!

And, of course, so does everyone, and there’s plenty worth crying yourself to sleep about if your brain isn’t providing you any organically, but - just to say - I’m really going through it emotionally these days. Things have gotten to quite a point. I don’t want to go through the specifics, it does not help me feel any better, but I’m really just hanging on by my teeth here and hoping this round doesn’t last too much longer. I’ll make it through - I always have so far! - but I’m not going to enjoy it. Also, important note that this doesn’t have to do with anything else I’m talking about in this issue! I’m not bummed to death over story rejections, or over Gender Ruminations (comin’ up!), or over the fact that my work computer is starting to die a weird and protracted death. This is just due to the way my brain works, or to be more precise, doesn’t work.

All right. Now. I said I wanted to talk about some terminology stuff. Specifically, since a conversation with an acquaintance where they declared, flatly, that nonbinarity was a subset of transness, and that I was incorrect that both were under the same umbrella - rather, nonbinarity is under the umbrella of transness.

Before I go further, I want to note two things. First, this person, my interlocutor, can be a real know-it-all² about various subjects, not just gender, and is in the habit of making statements as if they are accepted fact when there’s actually plenty of room for discussion on them, or even when they’re just an opinion. So just because they said this as if it’s a locked-down fact does not mean it is, even though they’re someone with a fair amount of subject knowledge on it.

The second thing is that I may not have the standing to have this conversation, as someone with the weeniest gender - I’m joking but I’m serious, it very much feels like she/they , at least as an AFAB person, is a sort of weaselly, conflict-averse way to step out of a cis identity, and the internet seems to agree (if you consider memes to be a valid temperature check). The “no worries if not” of genders. Like if I was serious I’d place the they first, or go all the way into they/them pronouns³. This isn’t true but it feels true, a lot of the time.

I had a whole dissertation ready to go here about flattening identities together, hierarchical structures, being part of something versus being a version of something. But: I don’t want to sit around splitting hairs as if it’s important, when a trans child was just murdered in his school bathroom (interviews with his friends have now been published saying that Nex Benedict preferred to use he/him pronouns but was willing to go with they/them pronouns around his family, to make it easier for them, and if that doesn’t resonate for you, ask around), when his state’s department of education is run by a hatemonger who hires other hatemongers. I want to stress that what’s important isn’t how we categorize ourselves and each other, what’s important is how we defend each other, because this is not new and it’s not stopping, but it is getting worse.

Everyone already knows that we can only rely on each other - institutions won’t save us - and I want to feel like we’re all together in this fight, because we are. Being precious⁴ around the meanings of words isn’t going to help stop our enemies from trying to get us killed, and this is a luxury problem to ruminate on because I’m safe enough to look a way, and to live somewhere, where no one is institutionally trying to get me killed. I still want to feel like my own community believes in my existence and that of the people I love, but if it’s a choice between being the redheaded stepchild of variant genders and being left to fend for ourselves, the choice is clear.

I know nobody reading this is out there being shitty to the trans people in their life (and you definitely have some, I guarantee it), but if you’ve got the luxury of nobody arguing over whether you should exist or not, it’s time to do something. Go have an argument with your aunt. Propagandize your Facebook friends⁵. Use the tools that our enemies have already used; they worked on their side. I wouldn’t recommend “sitting down with a known fascist for an interview,” although someone’s already taken that tack; but surely I wouldn’t know anyone silly enough to think that showing the inconsistencies in their platform will get people to abandon it. It’s not a position arrived at by logic! You can’t logic people out of it!

But - and this is as far as I want to go on it - we’re all on the same level under this umbrella, whatever we’re calling the umbrella (and whatever we call it in the future - consider the amount of linguistic evolution we’ve had in this arena in even the past 20 years). We’re siblings and compatriots, and one identity isn’t the primary identity with the others being the knockoffs, the store brands, the factory seconds. That’s all. That’s my point.

What am I reading right now

Well, it’s not great.

I’m nearly done Penny Dreadful, by Will Christopher Baer, and first of all some terms shouldn’t have been handed down through the ages - people just love naming things or characters Penny Dreadful and it’s so boring to me. But I’m not just here to bag on the title. Oh no. I’m here to bag on the whole thing. In fact, I would be finished it by now if I wasn’t behind on reading (I know, I know, rules of my own making) but I’m dragging my feet since I don’t want to throw out everything I wrote panning it.

This is a sequel, of sorts, to 1999’s Kiss Me, Judas, which also got on my nerves. That one was rapturously blurbed by Maxim (it was 1999) with special praise lavished on its opening. Do you know what it opened with? It opened with the very timeworn urban legend cliche of “guy spends the night with hot mystery woman, then wakes up in a bathtub filled with ice, minus one kidney.” I was alive and old enough to be aware of this sort of thing in 1999, and that story was not new even then.

So, this one picks up a year later, where the protagonist (Phineas Poe, because it’s imperative you know that this author has Read Books) is back in Denver and unable to trust his own perceptions. The first book was aiming for noir; this one has some elements of that, mixed in with an mysterious underworld fixated on a game (or “game”) where its participants have all these very defined roles and try to bite other people’s tongues, or try not to have their tongues “taken,” or do slightly bloody sex shows, and everyone has a fake name and identity. There are a lot of rules. It sort of feels like he read some cyberpunk books of the previous decade and a half and wanted to make a complex demimonde that sounds like the future, but it took upwards of 100 pages for me to stop rolling my eyes while reading it (which is a talent, by the way). Maybe it’s because in the past 24 years - this one was written in 2000 - enough books have come out that do sex and violence better, or at least more interestingly; maybe it’s because we actually do live in the future now, and it’s less “freaky sex cult” than it is “talking to the little gay people in my phone.” Or maybe it’s because he says some absolutely mind-blowingly incorrect stuff about how sex and female anatomy work.

Another thing that’s very of-its-time in this book is the beauty standard for women; all the men are rapidly disintegrating shells but all the women are perfection, as measured in visible bones. I’m not kidding, a female character was just described as having “fine, shadowy ribs.” And, later, “collarbones you could drink from.” Christ, I remember worrying about whether my collarbones were visible enough. Living through that era was a misery.

Come to think of it, that’s relevant too: I was writing this earlier while listening to a cd a friend made me right around that same era, and all the songs on it that were contemporary were all kind of depressed-sounding, and that tracks with my experience. The culture just seemed like a rainy alley all the time (which suited me fine), and that isn’t a criticism against the book for also having that same aesthetic - but it’s definitely a big part of the mood of this book. No one is happy, or if they are, it’s in the way of a cow, vapid and satisfied, unaware of anything beyond their own existence. Actually, that may be too unkind to cows.

If you’re a radio listener, is the general musical zeitgeist in a better mood these days? I have no idea; I’m out of touch, which is not a complaint, but it does mean I don’t know if this has changed, or if it changed before and has now changed back, or if gloom has just always sold, or what.

There’s a third book in this series too. That’s next in my pile. Wish me luck.

ACTUALLY! LATE UPDATE! I’m also reading another book! The usual “didn’t want to drag a hardcover book to work” scenario applies. And this one is a lot more enjoyable! It’s Big Lonesome, by Jim Ruland, and it’s a short collection of short stories. Should you read it while listening to Psychic Dog’s album entitled Big and Lonely, which I had convinced myself was called Big and Lonesome until I just looked it up? Obviously yes.

Some links

Apparently they suck now! I am not a baseball specialist so the nuances of their uniforms are lost on me (although I have been to The Internet so I do know about the see-through pants), but due to cost-cutting and monopolies, they look a lot worse than they used to, and so do the jerseys that the fans buy - which is relevant because the ones that the athletes wear have to be performance materials and might need to be lighter, thinner, etc, but the ones you drop a couple hundred dollars on in your team’s merch store do not! But they are anyway! What Happened to Baseball Jerseys

Okay, you know I’m always going to post art fraud articles, but this one is way more than just “someone scammed a rich person and/or museum”: for starters, a member of the Barenaked Ladies is involved (in solving it! excuse me, they would never perpetrate art fraud!). Norval Morrisseau was a very major Anishinaabe artist, and there was a whole cottage industry of forging his works and then selling them for vast sums to museums, collectors, whoever does the interior decor for the Senate (in Canada), anyone who would pay. And, as usual, the people doing it banked on the colonial attitude towards Indigenous people and their work as being unimportant, mercenary, and not worth investigating. It’s a fascinating piece and you should read it. Inside the Biggest Art Fraud in History

Unbelievably ghoulish shit. Even more ammunition to my plan to write my own obituary if I have the luxury of knowing the end is at hand. I actually had a great-aunt who did that, and honestly, good for her. The Unsettling Scourge of Obituary Spam

Are you fucking kidding me? Beware: A Cheese Crisis Looms

Okay, I applaud this woman for making “willing to wear an overpriced dress” into a career, by all means get that bread, but it seems like the need for this job is a symptom of something; the wedding-industrial complex getting its hooks in people and making them believe they “need” certain things, maybe, or possibly just an epidemic of boring people. If you don’t have the right number of bridesmaids, who cares? Side note: I’ve never been a bridesmaid, and I think most of my friends are sufficiently married that I’ve altogether dodged that particular responsibility. The Surreal Life of a Professional Bridesmaid

Erdem Moraglioglu, whom you may know as the designer behind Erdem, is apparently obsessed with busts. The statues of heads, I mean. We love a man with a hobby. A Designer for Whom 25 Heads Are Better Than One

Genetically interesting lobsters! They’ve got unusual color schemes (sometimes more than one at once)! They’ve got gender implications! They’ve got names like “Banana Split”! Read all about it! Meet the Eight Celebrity Lobsters of Biddeford, Maine

Pretty cool - but also she had a lot of husbands die suddenly of an illness (well, two, which is more husbands than most of us have had), and you know now I’m wondering. The First Viking Woman to Sail to America Was a Legendary Traveler

Vindicated by science!! I first got wind of this idea from some Douglas Coupland book, one of his nonfiction numbers, where he talks about getting really emotionally grabbed by books you read on planes - and this manifests both as sobbing over a story that isn’t particularly touching and as e.g. believing with all your heart in the tenets espoused in a nonfiction book (he gave the example of a woman he knew reading a diet book on a plane and nearly putting herself in the hospital with her overadherence to it). He described it as being untethered to the ground and to reality, and while that’s a more fanciful way of looking at it, there are real, chemical reasons your emotions are all fucked up when you’re airborne! This Is Why You’re More Likely to Cry on an Airplane, According to a Psychologist

A stark look at the current ongoing shortage of ADHD meds. The wildest thing I learned in this article was that, and I am not making this up, the parent company of the affected drug manufacturer here in the US is named “Hetero.” Have you seen your customers?? The Empty Adderall Factory

This one hit me pretty hard. It’s both about aging parents with dementia and about climate change, at the same time; my folks do not currently have dementia, but they’re not getting any younger and I worry about it a lot. And of course the climate has long since been diagnosed as very, very sick, and I worry about that a lot too. What Happens When We Stop Remembering?

The title makes it sound like it’s going to be a sympathetic look at a man destroyed by the carceral punishment system, but it’s not, really - it’s about how this guy is such a good scam artist, apparently, that it’s too risky to allow him contact with anyone but his lawyer and his stepmother; presumably both of them are immune to his bullshit. A Man Apart: Is Jimmy Sabatino America’s Loneliest Prisoner?

This sounds like it’s going to be a SHOCKING EXPOSÉ but it’s more like a brief history of pet food and an exploration of one pet food testing facility. Also, those “real bits of mice” cat foods never landed with my current cat(s), although I suspect one cat of my youth, a real mouse murderer, would have gone for it. RIP, Foggy, you gory little idiot. 200 Cats, 200 Dogs, One Lab: The Secrets of the Pet Food Industry

Once again, AI companies think the rules are for other people. Wah wah we can’t make money if we have to respect copyright! Wah wah we can’t operate if we have to adhere to the instructions in websites’ robots.txt files! Then it sounds like you simply… can’t operate. The Rise and Fall of robots.txt

Sorry to any Dutch people who might be reading, but this sounds like the most un-Dutch thing I can think of. The article, to its credit, does mention this, and plenty of people interviewed for it are somewhat confused as to how this got positioned as a Dutch phenomenon. Doing nothing does sound nice, though! Someone should try it and let me know what it’s like. The Art of Doing Nothing: Have the Dutch Found the Answer to Burnout Culture?

Did chocolate chip used to be a staple and a classic? It’s always seemed kind of niche to me - it’s not in the Big 3, but it’s close enough to vanilla that it seems like it would be competing against it for market share. Mint chocolate chip, yes⁶. But plain? I don’t know. Chip by Chip, This Ice Cream Flavor is Melting Away

Pretty interesting look at an era of air travel that seems like it always only gets lionized - people dressing up to fly! airlines not nickel and diming you to death and then having the planes fall apart! - but was actually pretty draconian for the staff. This article focuses on one flight attendant who spearheaded the effort to make the job less unfair and discriminatory. Glamour, Travel, Sexism: When Flight Attendants Fought Back

Voyager I going insane in space! Man, I could not love this idea more. Machines catching space madness! Why not more! Death, Lonely Death

This is kind of cool, that just as your younger self lurks within your older self, so did this portrait - but if we’re being honest, they probably painted the earlier one because they weren’t sure he was going to survive to adulthood what with all the inbreeding. That Habsburg jaw, baby!! X-Ray Scans Reveal Hidden Portrait of the Young Charles II Behind the Older King

A troubling twist on the faux-rich scammer story that’s becoming so common. This boy posed as the son of an oligarch⁷ to seem cooler and more interesting to his friends, and also to get money and ritzy apartments and various accoutrements, and - it’s right in the title, so this isn’t a spoiler - this ends very poorly for him. A Teen’s Fatal Plunge into the London Underworld

Last issue I shared the link to the original Truman Capote piece, La Côte Basque, 1965, that sparked the feuds between him and all the fancy society ladies who had been his friends and were now realizing they were just his material, and which has now been turned into a show (which might not actually be any good - it sounds like they gave little thought to pacing and don’t really make the “swans” into real enough people, which is a perplexing choice because they literally ARE real people). But the show has done well with evoking the era visually, both in styling the actors involved and, apparently, in styling the food - especially since so much of the action revolves around a restaurant. How Food Stylists on “Feud” Brought La Côte Basque Back to Life

Organized academic-paper-fraud crime! People getting rich(? or at least making money) off of fake papers, fake authorship, fake journals - I’m not in the academic paper game, but considering I am trying to get writing of some sort accepted for publication, it kind of frosts my shorts to know that people are bypassing all the hard work and rejections just by paying for it. Paper Trail

This is a rather lovely look at a somewhat unlovely subject: making the best of going to the movies, or even “going to” the movies, when you’re broke and live in a little town with not a lot going for it. My Movie Theater

First of all, get the orcas on the phone; second of all, this history opens with members of European royalty (and relatives, because of course they are) punching each other in the face over a yacht race. If we have to have monarchs - and we don’t! - they should at least spend more of their time engaged in petty fisticuffs with one another. A Brief History of Superyachts

Some of you, I think, are familiar with this ski mountain! I had no idea this sort of thing was going on, but then, why would I? I’m not trying to court international investment to “create jobs” in economically depressed areas. Anyway, I wish everyone a very nice ski weekend at Scam Mountain. The Rural Ski Slope Caught Up in an International Scam

A small plane crashed in the Amazon. Four kids were on board. Over the next 40 days, rescue efforts raced the clock to find them, and the kids used the survival skills they had been taught to stay alive as best they could. There’s more, though. Miracle in the Jungle

Rich people who have never been outside in a city shouldn’t be allowed to decide what a city should be like, but since they’re rich… In the Shadow of Silicon Valley: Losing San Francisco

This is why I want a few people to read the stuff I write and (hopefully) enjoy it and then it stops there. If “success” means I have to become the promoter of my own book, put my face on the line to sell it, be a product myself rather than just the book being the product, then I don’t want success. I don’t want to have to look a certain way to get readers; I don’t want to need an additional skillset beyond writing an interesting, engaging story to get readers. There’s so much I don’t want. Everybody Has to Self-Promote Now. Nobody Wants To

Undersea detective work! Recovering the Lost Aviators of World War II

This one is really sad. Both because it involves the tragic deaths of two adults and a child, and because the reason for their deaths was basically that they were tricked into believing some conspiracy bullshit and thought they should go live out in the woods. People who promulgate that stuff online don’t even believe it themselves, but they prey on people who don’t have a good grasp on reality. “Please I Would Give Anything for You to Come Back”

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

WE’RE NOT HOBBYISTS! OR DABBLERS, ANYMORE! WE’RE HARDCORE, HARDCORE, WE’RE HARDCORE!

This has to be one of the all-time most arresting album cover images. I wish my cd was mastered at a little higher volume. Listen to some PJ Harvey today.

So a bunch of chums and I (hello, chums who read this) recently made a collaborative playlist based on songs with the names of cities in their titles, and it turned out to be 7 and a half hours long. Musicians love naming songs after cities! They love it so much! I don’t know why! Anyway, this is one of them.

This month’s top 5: formatting requirements by lit mags

1. Classic Shunn formatting, please

2. Format it any way you want, you can send us a Google doc, we don’t care, but we have some very specific requests for how you format the email subject line

3. Include your name in the filename

4. Do NOT under any circumstances include your name in the filename

5. and my personal favorite due to its overwhelming batshitness, Don’t indent paragraphs

I changed up my top 5 for this month; originally, I had a much darker (sort of) list, but after Aaron Bushnell, it sounded flippant to talk about things that compel me to stay alive. Really, what can any of us say we’re doing that makes us worth more alive, if we could be giving it up in service of ending a genocide? That’s the thought I’m left with, and the question I want to leave you with. What can I do that makes my life useful? And if what I can do isn’t helping, what can I change so that it is?

I want to end the genocide in Gaza. I want to end the genocidal posturing towards queer and trans youth (and adults, but youth are being particularly targeted) right here. Obviously I can’t do either of those things all alone, but I’m not all alone. None of us are. And if I have to be alive - and apparently I do - then I’m not going to waste it.

_{1 in fact, some people do like it, or at least that’s what they tell me to my face on the internet!}

_{2 i’ve been cursed with a lot of know-it-alls in my life lately and i think it’s penance for my own know-it-all tendencies, which i try to keep under wraps these days but definitely did not when i was younger. it’s easy enough for me to let it slide when it comes from someone at an earlier stage of life than me - who doesn’t go through that phase? - but when it’s someone a few years older it’s annoying. shouldn’t you have more self-awareness by now? shouldn’t you at least have a touch of anxiety?}

_{3 interestingly this does not really apply for (AMAB) folks who use he/they pronouns - probably because stepping out of a cis male identity to any degree consists a greater threat to accepted order, since that’s the power group, so it’s more subversive to reject that than it is to reject a more marginalized identity}

_{4 I had previously used a different term here to describe my being a sensitive little smol bean about gender terminology, which I do think still fits perfectly BUT as of the other day is out of my vocabulary. Apparently it’s been coopted by straight people trying to insult queers - rather than queers insulting each other (or themselves), as it was intended - and so it’s in the bin.}

_{5 it’s weird to me to suggest that people who are my peers use Facebook in any real way (other than for events, which it is still kind of useful for, and I guess for groups?), but every time I open it, I see people my own age unironically posting on it and having conversations and so on. But my point is that this is definitely where your uncle got his bad ideas, or at least got them reinforced, and if you want to countermessage those ideas, you have to do them in the right venue}

_{6 it’s not a yes for me, though - i am not a mint enjoyer}

_{7 this is already completely bonk. there are people out there using that term with a positive connotation???}