My life in books

Jill Lepore’s The Secret Life of Wonder Woman isn’t about Wonder Woman, so much as it is about the way that she became not just the perfect realisation of the lives and passions of the incredible group of people who were involved in the lives of her creators, but the crystalisation of the early suffragist, feminist, and to some degree socialist views of a generation of women and men who fought for women’s rights. Where Wonder Woman is Amazonian royalty, her creators were influenced by some of the fiercest voices for women,’s equality, suffrage, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom that existed during the early years of the 1900s. Where Wonder Woman fought for truth, one of her creators spent much of his professional life studying how to determine truth from deception in criminal cases, and determine the reliability of testimony in court.

Four people may be said to have taken a hand in creating the crucible in which Wonder Woman, the symbol of female power - who wears bracelets of iron to remind her and all Amazons that giving oneself into the power of a man means giving oneself into slavery - was shaped.

These four people, three women and one man, lived their own secret lives, and it was from their common experiences, beliefs, and philosophies that the idea of Wonder Woman took form. The feminist hero was a collaborative effort between William Moulton Marston and his three partners, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley, all feminists, suffragists and free love radicals like himself - a polyamorous family collective.

Marsdon was a professor of philosophy and psychology, the two fields not being seen as particularly different at the time, who focused on the psychology and physiology of emotion, observation, and deception in his research. He was, with much input from his long-time partner and colleague, the inventor of the lie detector machine.

Something else he shared with his partner Elizabeth Holloway was a lifelong commitment to feminism, whom he met when they were both in grade school. Neither seems to have ever thought seriously about a future without the other, though both were often to be found in circles that approved of female emancipation and free love. Holloway, like Marsden, spent much of her early adult life in study, beginning her university education at Mount Holyoke, a hotbed of feminism and suffragette agitation, and earning both an MA from Radcyffe and a law degree.

Olive Byrne, who lived with the family in the role of nanny to the Marsdon children - hers and Holloway’s - was the one with the strongest ties to radical feminism. Her mother, Ethyl Byrne, sister of Margaret Sanger, was a suffragist, birth control advocate and socialist, who nearly died in prison in a well publicised hunger strike. Even when Sanger compromised with eugenicists and conservatives to get her arguments for birth control mainstreamed, Byrne remained a free love radical socialist, and Olive had much of her uncompromising spirit. Olive met Marsdon, several years her senior, when she took a course in experimental psychology with him at Tutfs, where she was majoring in English. She later became his research assistant and at some point his lover.

Marjorie Huntley was perhaps the most open-minded of the household, and more of an intermittent member of the household, the eccentric aunt who wanders off but keeps her home base with the rest of the family. Through Huntley’s radical and mystical ideas and connections, Marsdon, Holoway and Byrne became involved in a new age mix of feminism, bondage, free love and theosophy, a cult of female superiority through submission, that is frankly not particularly coherent in its principles and may have been a way for the four people involved to give themselves justification for the kind of relationships and family they wanted despite its extreme variance from not just convention, but some of the more established radical ways of organising sexual relationships currently being explored.

Marston wanted his wife and his lovers - all of them strong, intelligent women not easily manipulated - without having to work hard at it, and he wanted relationships where he could explore his interest in domination and submission. Holloway wanted Marston, but she also wanted to be both professional woman and mother in a world where one woman doing both was hard to imagine. Byrne wanted Marston, and after a childhood of insecurity, with mothers and aunts protesting and organising, being in prison, politically active, and dropping Olive off wherever someone could take care of her, wanted a committed family, and Huntley wanted lovers she could live out her unusual beliefs and bondage fantasies with. Some evidence from the letters and personal remembrances of surviving family members suggests that most if not all of them were at least open to the idea of bisexuality. With Marsdon as the nexus, they created an intentional family.

Despite his credentials, intelligence and charisma, Marsdon was the sort of person who was constantly getting involved in situations that seemed at best not well thought-out or unreasonably self-promoting and at worst vaguely unethical. Instead of rising in the ranks of academia, he slowly dropped, and soon was unable to keep a professional appointment. He tried and failed in a number of business ventures. Ultimately, he proved utterly incapable of supporting his family in any normal occupation. The household of three, sometimes four adults, and four children, was primarily supported by Holloway, with occasional lecturing fees from Marston and some money from Byrne’s writing as a regular contributor to Family Circle. The family made up its own amusements, many of which involved writing and drawing of comics - then in their infancy - by the children.

As Lepore describes the household at this point, “The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, ‘It’s best to ignore him.’ “

In 1938, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack Burns, who had been working in pulp publishing (and tried but failed to get Marsden an ‘in’ to pulp fiction writing), started a comics line that featured strong women like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Amazonia of the North in his new product, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Superman and Batman had become icons for Maxwell Charles Gaines’ comic lines, but no one else was writing female heroes. As comics became more popular, the also received criticism for their violence and sexuality and its effect on children. After Olive Byrne wrote one of her ‘ask the psychiatrist’ articles for Family Circle in which Marsden was strongly approving of comics as long as they never showed successful murder or torture - trust bondage enthusiast Marsden to approve of stories of women tied up but rescued before anything bad can happen - Gaines hired him as a consultant. And Marsden convinced Gaines to introduce a new superhero - and thus, after development work in the Marsden household and the DC comics offices, Wonder Woman was born. Marsden wrote the story, and handed it over with the warning that none of the feminism was to be altered. It wasn’t, though there was opposition from many corners during the comic’s early years. Wonder Woman was a popular success, but its enemies were powerful, and there were many people, including some of those who later worked for Gaines at DC Comics after Marston contracted polio and became less able to be involved in the production of the comic, who rejected not just the comics in general, with their violence and crime, but Wonder Woman’s obvious feminism and rejection of traditional female roles.

And what about the bondage? At one level, they were using a visual language of woman in chains familiar to anyone who had lived through the era of women’s suffrage and extending it to include all women’s struggles. They were also putting into images their own family mythologies about the need for women to submit in order to gain full superiority. And they were playing out their family dynamics in public.

The Marsden family was a unique environment from which a genre-changing comic emerged, but there’s no hiding the strange dynamics and ethical choices here - and I’m not talking about either polyamory or bondage. First, there’s the obsession with lie detection, which strikes me as a consequence of the hidden lives and connections among these four people. Then, there’s the overwhelming focus on self promotion, and promotion of Marsden’s projects. And the utter lack of professional ethics. Holloway advances Marsden’s chances to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica without disclosing their relationship; Olive praises his psychiatric gifts and his projects without disclosure either, and even - before it’s known that he created Wonder Woman - solicits his advice to concerned parents about comic for their kids. Their authorial interrelationships are intricate, covert, and unethical.

And, yet, for all their flaws, these four people encapsulated a generation’s need for change, for freedom, for women’s independence and created a feminist icon that still resonates today, despite all attempts to diminish it.

Another year, another Valdemarian anthology from Mercedes Lackey. These books are like catnip for me. The collections are sometimes uneven, but Valdemar is a wonderful invention, a rich secondary word with so many different cultures and potential stories, and there’s something about Lackey’s world that I find irresistible.

As usual, there are some stories from longtime contributors, many of them featuring characters we’ve met before and come to appreciate, and some from new writers who’ve never written for Valdemar before. And of course a brand new story by Lackey herself, which answers one of the questions many of us have had about Need - and also makes a strong statement about trans inclusivity. But then, Lackey has always been an LGBT ally, which is probably one of the reasons I feel comfortable with her work.

In fact, Lackey’s story, “Woman’s Need Calls Me,” is my favourite from this collection, which is in fact one of the stronger collections of recent years - there really wasn’t one story that I didn’t enjoy, although some were slight in terms of action and adventure.

Good comfort reading when I needed it.




Note: This anthology contains 18 stories, 16 written by women and two written by men.

In How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz defines transexuality as well as a once used but now outdated term, transexualism, as “conditions in which people hope to change the bodily characteristics of sex. (The terms apply whether or not the individual has undergone surgery.)” She goes on to say that, in modern usage, “transsexuals are a subset of ‘transgendered’ people, an umbrella term used for those with various forms and degrees of crossgender practices and identiacations. ‘Transgendered’ includes, among others, some people who identify as ‘butch’ or masculine lesbians, as ‘fairies,’ ‘queens,’ or feminine gay men, and as heterosexual crossdressers as well as those who identify as transsexual. The categories are not hermetically sealed, and to a certain extent the boundaries are permeable.” (This book was published in 2002; since then, the term ‘transgendered’ has fallen out of usage, to be replaced by transgender, or simply, trans. In discussing the book, I will use some of the terms that Meyerowitz uses, such as transsexual defined specifically as a trans person who has had, or is seeking, medical intervention toward gender confirmation. I will avoid other terms which in my opinion are now too outdated to be respectful of trans experience, or which define a trans person solely by their type of transition, which Meyerowitz does throughout the book. Readers are therefore cautioned that they may find the terminology is this book to be reductive, outdated, or even traumatic.)

Thus, the book focuses on a particular subset of trans individuals, specifically, those who feel that some degree of medical intervention or body modification is part of satisfying their personal sense of their gender identity. It looks at the history of expression and fulfillment of this desire in the North American context - those who have sought to ‘change their sex,’ and those who have provided, or sometimes withheld, that process.

There have always been people who did not feel that the gender assigned to them based on their physical sexual anatomy was who they really were; in some cultures, there have been acceptable social avenues for them to take on the gender they identified as, in others, some have simply lived in discomfort, or found individual ways to ‘pass’ as their true gender. But it has only been in the past hundred years that the idea of devising surgical procedures that could give a person at least a semblance of functioning sexual organs that matched their gender identity has been part of the conversation, and only in the past 50 or so that the techniques have become relatively available to most of those seeking a physical change.

Meyerowitz notes: “ ‘transsexualism,’ defined in part by the request for surgical sex change, did not appear as a medical category until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when doctors David O. Cauldwell and Harry Benjamin first coined and publicized the English term transsexual and when Christine Jorgensen first appeared in the press.

But the concepts of ‘sex change’ and ‘sex-change surgery’ existed well before the word transsexual entered the medical parlance. In the early twentieth century European scientists began to undertake experiments on ‘sex transformation,’ first on animals and then on humans.”

Much of the early European research and experimentation into what is now referred to as gender confirmation surgery took place in Germany, home of such leading researchers into the psychology and physiology of sex as Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, but this research was abruptly halted when the Nazi party came into power. Still, many individuals had by this time received various kinds of surgical treatment intended to remove unwanted sexual organs and in some cases, create functional vaginas for transexual women.

Many of these techniques had already existed for some time - it was the use of these techniques to help transgender individuals that was new. “Sex-change surgery, then, did not take root when and where it did because of new or unusual medical technology. It took root in part because Germany had a vocal campaign for sexual emancipation. In Berlin, Hirschfeld and others worked to remove the legal and medical obstacles to sexual and gender variance, to enable homosexuals, crossdressers, and those who hoped to change their sex to live their lives as they chose.”

However, while the awareness of surgical possibilities became part of the American sexological landscape, beginning in the early 1930s, most American physicians did not offer the procedures, despite a large number of individuals seeking such surgery. In a few cases, sympathetic surgeons were warned that surgery to remove healthy organs was illegal and could result in serious ramifications if they attempted such procedures.

Meyerowitz devotes several chapters to accounts of early transsexuals whose stories were extensively covered in the media - such women as Christine Jorgensen, Charlotte MacLeod, and Tamara Rees - noting how these stories made the public - including other transgender people who might otherwise have thought themselves alone, the only person with such feelings - aware of trans people and the possibilities of gender confirmation surgery. Unfortunately, publicity did little to distinguish between transvestites and transexuals, or transsexuals and intersex persons seeking surgery to establish their chosen biological sex, nor did it affect the prevailing notion that transsexual women were more akin to gay men than cisgender women. And curiously, there was little interest in the stories of trans men. In fact, most physicians who provided care for trans people believed that trans men were rare, perhaps as few as 10 percent of trans individuals, and some questioned “whether there should be such a diagnosis as ‘transsexualism’ for females.”

Meyerowitz also discusses the development of better surgical techniques over time. Since surgeons mostly saw trans women in their practices, techniques in vaginal construction were a major point of concern. Trans women, however first had to find doctors willing to remove the penis and testicles. This was a major roadblock for some time. Some trans women were so determined to receive confirmation surgery that they attempted to remove their own penes and testicles, leaving doctors with no choice but to complete the desired surgeries. Trans men were less likely to seek out surgery in the early years, perhaps because hormone treatments were sufficient to help most achieve a body they could feel somewhat comfortable in, and phalloplasty techniques at the time were notoriously unsatisfactory. Trans men did seek out mastectomies and hysterectomies, but the reluctance to remove healthy, but unwanted, organs made these surgeries difficult to obtain.

The media focus on transsexuals also brought about a debate, in both the public and professional spheres, over the nature of sex and gender. Among the European sexologists who pioneered gender confirmation surgery, the predominant concept of biological sex was of a universal bisexuality, with individuals located on a spectrum. The transsexual person simply moved along the spectrum, bringing out more if the characteristics associated with the other end of the spectrum. This concept, however, was not common in America, nor did it find much acceptance when proposed.

What came to predominate, and to influence future thinking about sexual identity, was the idea of a psychological sex that was distinct from, though usually in accord with, biological sex. This was the ‘invention’ of gender as a concept.

“In the first half of the twentieth century the theory of human bisexuality had, for some doctors and scientists, redefined sex and legitimated sex-reassignment surgery; in the second half of the century a theory of immutable gender identity came to replace it. In the 1940s and afterward, scientists who studied intersexuality adopted the concept of a deeply rooted sense of “psychological sex.” Some of them suggested that hormones or genes created psychological sex, but others considered it conditioned, imprinted, or learned. In any case, they claimed that no one could change an adult’s psychological sex. Once established, they asserted, the sense of being a man or a woman remained armly entrenched, immune to both psychotherapeutic and medical interventions. They applied this conception of psychological sex—which they later labeled “gender role and orientation” and “gender identity”—first to people with intersexed conditions and then to transsexuals. In this view, the mind—the sense of self—was less malleable than the body.”

However, instead of bringing about an acceptance of surgical intervention to match biological sex to gender, the overall response was to promote the enforcement of rigid standards of gendered behaviour in childhood and support psychotherapy to correct apparent gender non-conforming begaviour, to ensure that the child developed the ‘right’ psychological sex by adulthood. Interestingly enough, the same attitudes prevailed among those who thought that human were to some degree bisexual, in that everyone had some characteristics of the “other” sex - firm education in appropriate gender roles was necessary to minimise the consequences of this bisexuality. Few questioned the necessity of a clear demarkation between male and female. The result was the pathologising of transsexuality as a psychiatric disorder.

Physicians were already gatekeepers, due to their power to offer or withhold available surgical procedures. Pathologising trans people further added to the adversarial relationship developing between doctors who had the technical knowledge to do the surgeries desired, and trans people who sought surgical interventions. Many doctors tried to ‘cure’ their trans clients first. Trans people tried to figure out what they had to say and do to obtain surgery. Many trans women sought to appear hyperfeminine to persuade doctors that there was no way they could live as men. Discussing sex was a dangerous topic - acknowledging desire for men, while appropriate behaviour for a straight trans woman, ran the risk of being diagnosed instead as a gay man, ineligible for surgery. For trans lesbians, the problems were even more difficult, as their sexual orientation could be read as male heterosexuality, and cause for attempting treatment rather than surgery. Many insisted they felt no sexual desire. The need to tailor their life experiences and presentation to convince doctors to approve surgery led to an assumption among doctors that trans people were inherently deceitful. And so the gatekeeping became a major obstacle in the quest of trans people to reshape their bodies to match their identities.

Adding to the problems faced by trans people seeking surgery was the confusion of the medical establishment between transsexuality, transvestitism, and homosexuality. Some felt that trans women were gay men so horrified by their homosexuality that they needed to erase it by becoming women. The debated how to distinguish true trans people from gay people or cross-dressers. Similar discussions developed in the queer community, with various groups - gay men, lesbians, drag queens, heterosexual transvestites - arguing over how trans people should be viewed. One of the difficulties her was that some people who had identified as gay men, drag queens, or butch lesbians, eventually realised that they were in fact trans women and men. Meanwhile, trans peoples’ attempts to define themselves simply as people assigned a gender that was not congruent with their identity were often ignored.

In the 1960s, one consequence of the general ‘sexual revolution’ was a relaxation of defined gender roles, and an openness toward sexual experimentation, that on the one hand, gave many young people the chance to explore androgyny and even living as another gender, and on the other, made it easier for distinct subcultures to emerge, drawing distinctions between those who were gay or lesbian with marked preferences to adopting behaviours associated with another gender, and transexuals who identified as a gender other than the one socially assigned them. Lines of demarkation grew up between those who sought gender confirmation surgeries, and those who identified as ‘fairies’ or ‘butches’. Transsexuality was at least for some distinguished from homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the medical profession was making distinctions based on the path patients had followed to an awareness of their gender identity. They tended to favour the person who had tried to live a conventional life, followed the heterosexual rules for their assigned gender, and lived lives of quiet desperation. Those who came to a desire for gender confirmation surgery through experiences as living as gay men and drag queens, who had been sexually adventurous, were often seen as poor candidates for surgery.

Another consequence of sexual freedom was the eroticisation of trans people. Pornographic images of the feminised bodies of post-surgery trans women began appearing. This was accompanied by erotic images of ‘half-men, half-women’ - trans women who had received hormone treatments and thus had both breasts and a penis. “The sexualization of MTFs went hand in hand with the legalization and commercialization of sexual expression. In this changing sexual climate, the tabloids and pulps presented their stories as less concerned with what the main-stream press dubbed ‘desperately unhappy lives’ and more concerned with titillating adventures.”

Meyerowitz records the low changes in the mainstream medical profession’s attitudes toward gender confirmation surgery, and the work of transgender activists in bringing about greater awareness and acceptance for their situation. Slowly, hospitals began to open gender identity clinics where surgeries were performed on trans men and women, starting with Johns Hopkins in 1965: “By the end of the 1970s more than a thousand transsexuals had undergone surgery at the hands of doctors based at American universities, and fifteen to twenty “major centers” conducted transsexual surgery in the United States.”

Unfortunately, demand far exceeded supply, and the doctors running these clinics set up strict conditions. Again, professional gatekeeping came between the transgender individual and their right to control their own body: “By the end of the 1960s the doctors required psychological evaluation to ascertain that patients had longstanding crossgender identiacation and no severe mental illness. The doctors also wanted patients to live as the other sex and take hormones for a number of months or years before undergoing irreversible surgery. They looked for patients with the intelligence to understand what the surgery could and could not do, and with what they considered realistic plans for the future, especially employment.” Preference was given to those whom doctors felt could most easily ‘pass’ and who presented as ‘quiet’ and highly conventional in their gender expression. Trans lesbians and gay men were unlikely to be approved.

As the availability of surgery grew, legal issues became more important, and courts were increasingly asked to rule on whether a trans person could change their birth certificates and other key documentation from their assigned gender to their true gender. Thanks to the supportive testimony of a number of doctor-advocates, a series of precedents were established where the courts did order the official change of sex on birth certificates, which was the first step to obtaining new documentation of other kinds, and offered a trans individual the ability to provide legal proof of their gender when required. However, where the courts were tending to define gender by reference to genital appearance, governments held onto older ideas and defined gender by (presumed) chromosomal composition. And even the courts provided no hope fir trans people who had not, or could not, have surgery. This was particularly onerous for trans men, for whom phalloplasty remained an unsatisfactory option lacking in both sensation and function.

As the era of liberal sexual freedom that marked the 60s and 70s began to change, Meyerowitz documents shifts in acceptance among both gays and lesbians, and feminists, toward transgender men and women. The prevailing gay culture had adopted the “cult of the macho” and rejected the drag and fairy culture that had supported trans women in transition. At the same time, lesbian culture began to see trans men as butches who were deserting the fold for a safer, moe privileged life. Feminists critiqued trans men and women as reactionaries who reinforced gender stereotypes that the women’s movement was fighting to change, and distrusted trans women who, they believed, had grown up with male privilege and could never be, culturally or psychologically, women, thus establishing the trans-exclusionary (TERF) streak in feminism which remains a problem to this day.

As the conservative 80s set in, the few legal victories trans activists had achieved were rolled back, and existing surgical clinics came under attack from both the right, with a renewed insistence that surgery enabled mental illness and that trans individuals required treatment to restore the ‘proper’ gender identity, and from the left, with a strong critique of the rigid gender roles doctors required of prospective surgical patients. But as their rights were being denied and the few gains made eroded, trans people fought back, forming advocacy organisations, building communities and working to educate both the public and the medical profession on the realities of being transgender.

As Meyerowitz says, “The rise of the transgender movement capped the century in which sex change arst became a medical specialty and transsexuals arst emerged as a visible social group. From the early twentieth-century ex- periments on changing the sex of animals to the liberationist move- ment of the 1990s, the topic of sex change had served as a key site for the deanition and redeanition of sex in popular culture, science, medi- cine, law, and daily life. In a century when others had challenged the social categories and hierarchies of class, race, and gender, the people who hoped to change their sex had brought into question another fundamental category—biological sex itself—commonly understood as obvious and unchangeable. In the modern push for self-expression, they had taken the meanings of self-transformation and social mobility to a new level, and from the margins of society, they had grappled with the everyday ways in which unconventional individuals confounded and provoked the mainstream. In the process, they had engaged with doctors, scientists, reporters, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay libera- tionists, among others. Together, these various groups had debated big questions of medical ethics, nature and nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. None of them could ax the deanition of sex, which remains a topic of debate in medical journals, courtrooms, and television talk shows, and none of them could settle the question of the interconnections among sex, gender, and sexuality. Still, by the end of the twentieth century, the transgender activists could hope at least for a future in which the variations of sex and gender might no longer elicit stigma, ridicule, harassment, or assault.”

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars takes place in an world that was much like our own, until a massive catastrophe - the fall to earth off the coast of the US of a meteorite last enough to precipitate an extinction level event (ELE) - changes everything. In this iteration of our world, the calculations that show the inevitable changes in climate that will make the planet uninhabitable within decades are accepted as scientific fact by the world’s political leaders, who decide upon a two-pronged approach - to try to ameliorate the effects of the catastrophe to save life in earth, and to colonise the solar system so that if necessary, humanity will have another home.

It’s lucky, in a way, that this catastrophe falls during the early post-war period, when science was respected and economies were still capable of being mobilised to meet goals. If Kowal had chosen to set such a novel today, I suspect no such response to a global catastrophe would have seemed realistic - but this was still the era of potential.

The narrative is focused on Elma Wexler, a former WASP - one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who, as civilian pilots attached to the military, ferried airplanes wherever needed, including to the front, during the Second World War. Elma, now retired, and her husband, Nathaniel York, a scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war, and later with the fledgling American space program, survived the concussive wave that destroyed most of the east coast, and Nathaniel’s colleagues at Langley, by accident - they were on vacation in the Poconos, having flown out in Elma’s little Cessna - and were able to fly west out of the circle of destruction to reach an air force base that would temporarily become the centre of the immediate response to the meteorite fall.

It is Elma, who is not only a pilot but a calculator - one of the women whose mathematical skills enabled the pre-computer space program to determine how to get an object into orbit and bring it home, whose calculations prove that humanity is facing an ELE. Both Nathaniel and Elma become part of the international effort to reach space, but Elma has a secret goal - to be one of the astronauts that goes into space.

If you’ve read the original novelette that sparked the series, Lady Astronaut of Mars, you know what happens, in the broadest of strokes, in both the race to colonise the system and Elma’s personal quest to become an astronaut. But that doesn’t change the reader’s absorption in the details of the process here, told over the years as it happens.

But while Kowal tells us the story of a successful space program, and the frustrations of a fully qualified woman locked out of her dream of going into space, Kowal also gives us a look at the society of 1950s America that does not flinch from uncomfortable truths. Elma and her husband Nathaniel are Jewish; there are hints of anti-semitism, and echoes, in the deaths surrounding the fall of the meteor, of the devastating losses of the Holocaust. There is ample evidence of the high degree of segregation and the entrenched racism of the time, in everything from the choices made during the post-cataclysmic evacuation not to look for survivors in black neighbourhoods, to the bitterness of black women pilots, who can’t even hope, as Elma does, that they could get anywhere near the astronaut training program. Kowal does not forget the dynamics of the society she’s chosen to place her break in history within.

The novel also deals sensitively with disability. Elma has an anxiety disorder, brought on by the highly pressured and misogynistic atmosphere she faced as an early entrant - and a female ine at that - into a prestigious math and physics program at university. The disorder surfaces when she must take on public relations tasks as a part of her quest to open the astronaut corps to women, and she begins taking sedatives to deal with it - a choice that will jeopardise her position when women are ultimately allowed into astronaut training and she is one of the successful candidates.

The second of Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” novels, The Fated Sky, takes up a few years after the first novel ends. Having made it to the Moon, and established the beginnings of a colony there, the next goal in the space program is Mars. The extreme climate changes triggered by the Meteor fall are beginning to have demonstrable effects - the temperature is rising, the cloud cover remains thick, adding to the greenhouse effect, and while it is possible that not all the earth will become uninhabitable, still, the need to provide a ew home for humanity is very real, and the Moon is not an ideal location for a self-sustaining colony. But not everyone is convinced that the space program is necessary, and protest is growing, especially among marginalised populations - specifically, in America, black people, who know that if the earth is left behind, they will be too.

Elma has been spending half her time piloting shuttle rockets between colonies on the moon, and half her time on Earth. On one of Elma’s return trips, the rocket is highjacked on landing by a group of black activists protesting the money spent on space that could be better spent on improving conditions on earth. Elma, using her celebrity status as the “lady astronaut” - even though there are a number of female astronauts by now - persuades the activists to release all the other hostages, who are suffering from gravity sickness, which she manages to pass off to the activists as potentially infectious ‘space germs.’ Once again, the lady astronaut makes the news.

To counteract adverse publicity and shore up faltering financial support, Elma is asked to join the the first Mars mission. She accepts, not realising that another astronaut who has been training for the mission with the other crew fir months is being pulled to make room for her. The atmosphere of the mission is compromised from the minute she arrives, and it dies not get any better when the government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the recent highjacking, places pressure on the two black member of the Mars crew, one of whom had been, like Elma, on the rocket when it was taken.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly that Elma, who we are primed by literary traditions to see as the hero, is actually a very flawed character, naive and thoughtless, the perfect example of the white liberal who wants to do the right things, but never actually thinks from any point of view save her own, and ends up making matters worse until she learns to sit back and let those most directly affected by the injustices that anger her take the lead in strategising. She has no idea of how she appears to others, being wrapped up in her own view of herself as both victim and saviour. But the stresses of the journey to Mars become a journey to maturity for her, and by the end of the novel, when she and a handful of other colonists stand on Mars, we feel that she has become something even more important than a hero - a woman who has fulfilled her dreams, and come to know herself in the process.

These are fascinating books, both for their examination of a path to the stars that we might once have followed, and for their uncompromising look at the deep flaws in our society which really have not changed much since the days in which the book is set. We’ve lost the stars, but at the same time, we’ve done little to fix what we have here on earth. It’s this that makes these books a poignant illustration of what might have been.

But at the same time, these are inspiring novels about women in science, and women in space, and my God, I needed to read something like this just now.

Zarqa Nawaz is a very funny person. This should not surprise anyone who knows that she is the creator of the Canadian comedy series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, a memoir that begins with her experience as a Muslim girl growing up in Brampton Ontario.

Nawaz was born in England, but her parents, originally from Pakistan, moved to Canada when she was three in search of a better life for themselves and their children. These days, Brampton is one of the most multi-cultural cities in Canada, a minority-majority community where a very large proportion of the residents are from South, Central and West Asia. When Nawaz’s family arrived, she was the only brown girl in her classroom, though she was joined a few years later by a girl whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan.

Because she is a very funny person, Nawaz speaks lightly, humorously, about not fitting in, about bring ostracised by the nice white girls because of the food she brought for lunch, her unfashionably modest clothing, her hairy legs on display in gym class, the list of differences that set her apart, marked her as alien. The list of incidents, large and small, that extended into adulthood, representative of the unthinking racism around her.

At the same time, Nawaz describes with considerable wit the contradictions and complexities of living as a faithful, but modern, Muslim, in a primarily non-Muslim world, from finding halal marshmallows for a campfire to persuading your parents not to arrange your marriage, at least not yet. She talks about finding her husband, getting started as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about her experience making the hajj, about being a Muslim in North America after 9/11, and about the making of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Along the way, she educates her readers, through some occasionally side-splitting anecdotes, about many aspects of Muslim life, from the importance of designing a bathroom for ease of ritual ablutions to the controversies over men and women praying together in the mosque, to the Muslim traditions of observance for the dead.

Laughter is a universal human experience, and there are ways of de-mystifying and de-exoticising that perhaps can best be done through humour such as this. Certainly I felt in reading it, a great sense of connection to an intelligent, witty woman who takes the essence of her religion seriously, but questions its sexism and its quirks, and can laugh with love at the foibles of her family and community while demonstrating the shared humanity that links all our experiences. And in terms of the aspects of her personal life that she shares in this memoir, there are things that I’m pretty sure every middle class working mother of four can relate to with a sense of recognition.

Too often, in parts of the world that are mostly white and Christian, Islam is misunderstood, its differences made to stand out. But Nawaz makes us see the similarities. In her description of the hajj, for example, the rituals, the places, the histories and events connected with each part of the pilgrimage, the symbolism of the acts required of the Muslim on hajj, and her own emotions and responses as she moves through the process, one sees the ways in which this central Muslim experience is like the (more familiar to Western minds) Christian religious rituals and traditions, from Lent to pilgrimages to such places a Lourdes, in how it develops, and what it means to those who take part.

In the end, perhaps the best thing I can say about Nawaz’ book is that I laughed all the way through, frequently nodded in recognition, and ended up feeling more than ever that people are people regardless of how they worship or what they wear.

Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote are performers, long-time creative partners whose shows are a mix of comedy, music and other media. They are also both trans, and it was inevitable that they would eventually develop - with contributions from a new partner, Clyde Petersen, also trans - a performance that came out of their experiences. The show they developed, called Gender Failure, has now become the basis of a book by the same name.

Gender Failure is not an easy book to describe. Its themes, though, are highly relevant to the current revolution in understanding gender. This is an exploration of growing up assigned female when you are not, about feeling a failure at being a girl because you don’t want to do the same things, about feeling vaguely wrong. It’s about slowly working out who you really are and what you want to do about it. It’s about the way society treats people who are gender non-conforming or non-binary or who don’t fit into the two standard boxes for gender identity and presentation. It’s about gender dysphoria, feeling that parts of your body, the parts we associate with gender, aren’t right, aren’t really a part of you the way your foot or your shoulder is. It’s about realising that human experience transcends the so-called gender binary and that locking ourselves into boxes that prescribe not just a binary of genitals and bodies, but of behaviours and identities, limits us all.

As we learn through a series of interwoven autobiographical essays, alternating between the experiences of the two authors around gender, both Coyote and Spoon have tried out several labels, checked out several gender identity boxes, before separately coming to identify as non-binary. Both have at times chosen a style of gender presentation that tends toward masculine. By the photos included in the book, Coyote in particular reads as butch, and acknowledges that this remains a part of their identity. Neither fits exactly into one of those gendered boxes, however, even the expanded set. But society insists that even if you are gender-non-conforming, you have to do it in the right way to get the body you feel you should be in. As Coyote says, taking about their decision to have top surgery:

“In British Columbia, the province in Canada where I live, this surgery is covered by our health care system, provided you qualify. And by qualify, they mean be diagnosed. They, being the government. The government will pay for you to get fixed, but only if they decide you are broken in the right way. The other they being, in this case, the medical establishment. Before the bureaucrats can sign off on the form and send it to the surgeon, a psychologist and a psychiatrist must first decide if they believe me that I am who I say I am. In order to do this, I must fill out a long multiple-choice questionnaire, which the psychologist that my doctor referred me to will read through and assess, and then refer me to a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Because someone who is trained in this stuff has to sign off that I do in fact have a bona fide gender identity disorder, but that someone cannot be me, because I am not qualified. And by gender identity disorder, they all mean that you want to be a man. Or a woman, as the case may be. It is not enough to just feel that you are not a woman or a man. You must want to be not the box that they have all previously put you in. There is no box to check for not wanting a box at all. No one knows how to fix that.”

Spoon comments on their own first realisation of the possibility of not having to identify as male despite rejecting their assigned sex:

“What would it mean not to be a man or a woman? Over the years I had learned not to think of people’s assigned sexes as their genders, but I had expected others to place themselves at least conceptually on one side of the gender binary. I started to meet a lot more people who went by the “they” pronoun. Most people in the queer community around me didn’t have any difficulty using it. In a space where non-binary pronouns had been largely accepted, I began to see the benefits of using them. It dragged me out of an identity that had been previously cemented because I thought being a man was the only way to move away from my assigned sex. In this community I did not have to be male not to be female.”

By calling the show, and the book, Gender Failure, Coyote and Spoon openup the discussion on gender identity - in discussing their own experiences, initially labeling them as ‘failures’ at being girls, or women, but then also coming to realise that identifying as men is just as inauthentic for them, they call for the question - is it those who do not fit in the boxes who are failures, or is the binary system itself proving to be a failure as more and more people reject its rigidity and limited possibilities. As Spoon comments: “Now that I define my gender and sexuality as stories I tell and agree upon, I want to leave room for future possibilities that I have not been presented with yet. I am a gender failure. I failed at the gender binary, unable to find a place in being either a man or a woman with which I felt comfortable. But ultimately I believe that it’s the binary that fails to leave room for most people to write their own gender stories.”

Hilda of Whitby was a remarkable person, based on what little we know of her. A woman respected for her intellect and spiritual wisdom, Descendant of Saxon royalty, she founded a monastery that was chosen as the site for a religious debate that changed the course of European history.

Nicola Griffith has made her the central character in a profoundly fascinating historical novel, Hild, which gives us enormous insight into not only the way that a woman like Hilda could have lived and thrived in her time and place, but also into the politics, both secular and religious, of her time, and the everyday way of life of the peoples of the British Isles in the seventh century. Griffith’s research is detailed, comprehensive and impressive. Her imagining of Hild, from childhood into early adulthood, is compelling, but equally so is the story of the king who was her great-uncle and patron, Edwin of Deira. In his lifetime, Edwin gained power and authority, through both conquest and key alliances, over a significant part of Britain. His conversion to Christianity was a major advancement of the Roman church. Though much of what he accomplished failed to survive his death, his achievements gave Hild the opportunity to become the power she was in a time when women rarely wielded such influence openly.

Griffith gives us a portrait of Hild as a girl who from her childhood was different from other girls, partly because of her innate gift of intelligence and foresight, and partly because of the relentless pressure of her mother, the ambitious Breguswith of Kent. After a precarious early childhood following the murder of her father Hereric, Breguswith and her daughters, Hereswith and Hild, find safety at the court of Hereic’s uncle, Edwin of Deira. While Hild is still a young girl, Breguswith sets the stage for Edwin to see her as a child with a special destiny, born to be his seer.

This gives Hild a unique position in Edwin’s court, and in the world around her. She moves between male and female spheres of daily life, helping her mother and the other women of the court with weaving, brewing and herbcraft, but also riding out to battle with Edwin as seer and advisor, a party to male pursuits of politics and war. She carries a seax and on occasion uses it, a woman and warrior in the normally all-male world of battle, but when at home, she shares in the activities of other women. Crossing boundaries becomes part of her power - she hears and sees events from multiple perspectives within her world, which adds to her sources of information and her success as a prophetess. Spending time with both the nobles and fighting men of Edwin’s court, and with servants, farmers and peasants, she crosses lines of class, race, and religion, treating both the dominant Anglisc (Angles and Saxons) and the conquered wealh (Celtic and British) with respect, finding counsel with the ascendant priests of Rome, the older priests of Christian Ireland, and the fading priests of Wodan and the old gods.

But her position, hovering between these worlds, not fully a part of any of them, is an uneasy one, sometimes a lonely one, often a misunderstood one. For all the honour that falls on her as kin and counsel to the king, the whispers call her unnatural, a woman who kills, a freemartin, butcher-bird, aelf, haegtes, witch, demon.

Griffith ends this, the first volume of Hild’s story, with a marriage between Hild and her childhood companion, Cian, who has become an honoured warrior in Edwin’s war band, and the gift to Cian of the lordship over a part of Edwin’s kingdom known ad Elmet - the part of Britain where both Hild and Cian were born, and where Hild holds land in her own name. We do not know whether Hilda of Whitby was ever married, but it is likely, given the general attitudes toward women, and the very real political advantages of binding ambitious men to their overlords through bonds of marriage and kinship. In Griffith’s imagining, however, there are seeds of potential disaster. Unknown to most, including Cian himself, he is the illegitimate son of Hild’s father, Hereric, nephew of Edwin, and a bondswoman.

And here Griffith leaves Hild, married, no longer the king’s seer, but still powerful, as wife of the lord of Elmet, with much of her life’s journey still ahead of her. I hope Griffith is working on the sequel, it’s going to be hard to wait and see what lies ahead for Hild.

After many long years, Diane Duane is returning to the World of the Middle Kingdoms, to the tale of the Five, the story of Herewiss and Freelorn, Segnbora and Sunspark and Hasai. In preparation for the publication of the long-awaited concluding volume, The Door into Starlight, Duane plans to release five shorter works, intended as bridging pieces between the first three novels and the series’ conclusion.

The first of these is The Levin-gad, which is a word meaning lightning rod in one of the old Middle Kingdom tongues, and features Herewiss, who has ventured alone out into the night to call out a dangerous foe who otherwise might do great harm elsewhere.

It’s a strong return to the world, a powerful statement of the central themes of the series and a delightful reminder that this is a world where love is welcome as it comes, without limits of gender or number. Family is family, even when it includes multitudes and not all of them human. It is Duane’s vision of the power of love, personified in a Goddess who embodies herself in the world and takes form without regard to male or female, and the idea of life and the joy we find in it as the bulwark against the withering force of despair, that captivated me so many years ago, and holds me still in admiration and appreciation.

So happy to see the return to the Middle Kingdoms.

I have not read much on trans history, theory and activism. I’ve read Feinberg and Bornstein, but in general, this is an area where I feel a real need to learn more, to widen my perspectives and understanding. I approach the topic from an absolute conviction that trans men are men, trans women are women, trans non-binary folk are non-binary folk, and that in everyday circumstances, the question of one’s being trans or cis is relevant for health and medical issues and otherwise is no one’s damn business. But it’s important to me to learn from trans folk what they want me, as a cis person, to know, and so I’m reading more theory and lived experience by trans folk.

Julia Serano’s book, Excluded: Making Feminism and Queer Movements More Inclusive, seemed an obvious place to start. I’m a feminist, and queer, and have long been aware that trans folk have not been fully included in these activist spaces. And as a feminist and a queer person who has cis privilege, it’s my responsibility to understand why that’s happening and how to change it.

In her Introduction to the book, Serano briefly discusses the ways that transgender folk are excluded, noting that “... they are all steeped in sexism—in each case, exclusion is based on the premise that certain ways of being gendered or sexual are more legitimate, natural, or righteous than others.” She goes on to state: “... I believe that sexism-based exclusion within feminist and queer circles stems primarily from a handful of foundational, albeit incorrect, assumptions that we routinely make about gender and sexuality, and about sexism and marginalization. These false assumptions infect our theories, our activism, our organizations, and our communities. And they enable us to vigorously protest certain forms of sexism (especially sexisms that we personally face!) while simultaneously ignoring and/or perpetuating other forms of sexism. In short, the way we describe and set out to challenge sexism is irreparably broken. My main purpose in writing this book is to highlight these fallacies in our theory and activism, and to offer new and more accurate ways of thinking about gender and sexism that will avoid the pitfalls of the past.”

The book takes the form of a series of essays in two sections, the first dealing with exclusion, particularly from the author’s perspective as a trans, bisexual, femme woman. The second section consists of essays “... that forward a new framework for thinking about gender, sexuality, sexism, and marginalization.”

Serano begins with the observation that transexualism and transgenderism are often critiqued in feminist theory because they, as some feminists argue, “reinforce the gender binary.” A significant body of feminist work sees the source of sexism in the existence of a ‘gender system’ and posits that the way to end sexism is by ‘moving beyond gender’ - these theorists see gender as wholly socially constructed. Serano calls this approach gender artifactualism, and identifies it as a perversion of the famous statement that the personal is political.

Gender artifactualism may be seen as a response to gender determinism, the belief that women and men are born with predetermined sex-specific behaviors and desires. The argument that gender roles are ‘programmed’ by one’s biology implies that the observed differences between men and women are both natural and immutable, and this is frequently used as a justification for a vast range of sexist attitudes and behaviours.

Serano sees both gender artifactualism and gender determinism as ‘homogenising’ - either one assumes that there can be little to no individual variation in gender and sexuality, because in either case, behaviours are programmed, either by biology or by socialisation. In truth, however, variety is widespread in these areas - there is a wide range of gender identifications, ways being gendered (or not), and ways of being sexual (or not). Looking at this variety, Serano argues instead that a theory that matches this reality must be holistic, and include multiple factors in understanding the genesis and nature of gender, including factirs associated with biology, environment, and socialisation.

“The holistic model that I am forwarding here begins with the recognition that while we may be biologically similar to one another in many ways, we are also the products of biological variation—nobody shares our unique genetic and physiological makeup. And while we may share the same culture, or may be subjected to the same social expectations and norms, we are also each uniquely socially situated—nobody shares our specific set of life experiences or environment. Therefore, while our shared biology and culture may create certain trends (e.g., a preponderance of typical genders and sexualities), we should also expect the variation in our biology and life experiences to help generate diversity in our genders and sexualities.”

She goes on to say that “Because gender and sexuality have many biological, social, and environmental inputs, they are not particularly malleable—in other words, changing one or a couple inputs would not likely result in a huge overall effect. This explains why most of us find that we cannot easily or purposefully change our genders and sexualities at the drop of a hat (despite some people’s claims that “gender is just performance” or that one can simply “pray away the gay”). Like our tastes in food, most of us experience our genders and sexualities to be profound, deeply felt, and resistant to change. Sure, sometimes people experience shifts in their gender or sexuality, just as our taste for certain foods may change over time. But when these shifts do occur, they are almost always inexplicable, unexpected, and sometimes even downright unwanted (at least at first). Such shifts might occur as a result of changes in some combination of our physiology, environment, and/or life experiences.”

Serano argues that, rather than locating the source of sexism and cissexism (and other forms of oppression based on identity) in a monolithic gender system, we need to see this too as a complex set of interactions derived from the existence of multiple marked states - that is to say, characteristics or behaviours which are noticed because they differ from what is assumed or expected.

“... unmarked/marked distinctions may arise from our own personal biases and expectations, or they may be culturally ordained. In either case, the process of marking a person or trait often occurs on an unconscious level, and therefore takes on an air of common sense: It just seems “natural” for us to focus our attention on people who we view as exceptional or different from us in some significant way.”

As Serano points out, reactions to marked states can be positive, negative, or neutral, but they define the marked state as both remarkable and questionable, in that we feel entitled to notice and comment on the marked state, and to ask questions about someone exhibiting a marked status. Marked traits which are seen negatively, or stigmatised, are often thought of as being suspicious, artificial, dubious, inauthentic, invalid, unnatural, exotic, or alien. The effect is often to dehumanise the people possessing the marked trait. For Serrano, the importance of understanding the distinctions between marked and unmarked states is that “... it appears to underlie all forms of sexism, as well as marginalization more generally. This is not to say that being marked is the same thing as, or necessarily leads to, being marginalized—as I alluded to in previous examples, we are just as capable of being indifferent to, or even impressed by, someone who is deemed marked as we are of invalidating them. But what is true is that the act of marking automatically creates a double standard, where certain traits are viewed and treated differently than others. This act of marking essentially divides the world up into two classes: those who have the trait in question (for whom meanings and value judgments will tend to “stick”), and those who do not (and who are therefore beyond reproach). These double standards provide the underlying architecture that enables sexism and marginalization.”

It is the existence of such double standards with respect to stigmatised marked traits that leads to marginalisation, as those exhibiting such traits are consistently seen and treated differently, in a multitude of ways. The fact that multiple double standards can be applied to a single marked trait, and that the same double standards can be applied to many different marked traits, results in the complex experiences of marginalisation reported by those exhibiting marked traits - being seen, for instance, as sometimes dangerous, sometimes exotic, sometimes ignored, sometimes to be pitied - but never to be seen as simply another individual human being.

“Thinking about sexism and marginalization in terms of myriad double standards implores us to challenge all double standards: those that are prevalent, and those that are rare; those that negatively impact us, and those that negatively impact others; those that we are currently aware of, as well as those that are currently unknown to us. Having such a mindset can make us more open to learning about new double standards when they are first described to us (rather than outright dismissing them because they do not fit into our worldview), and more mindful of the fact that we ourselves are fallible (as we may be unknowingly engaging in, or enforcing, certain double standards ourselves). Perhaps most importantly, thinking in terms of myriad double standards encourages humility, as it forces us to admit that there are many aspects of gender and sexism that we do not personally experience, and therefore cannot fully know about. For this reason, it would be conceited for us to project our fixed and limited perspective of the universe onto other people.”

Serano identifies three general types of double standards at work in marginalisation: universal assumptions, hierarchies, and stereotypes or attributions.

“When we talk about sexism and marginalization, we often talk about them in terms of some overarching ideology or ism that is prevalent in society. Isms are generally composed of the three types of double standards that I have discussed so far. For instance, traditional sexism (the overarching ideology) consists of a universal assumption (that maleness and masculinity are the norm), a hierarchy (that women are seen as less legitimate and important than men), and a slew of stereotypes and attributions.”

Having established the basic tenets of this theory of gender, and the processes of sexism and marginalisation, Serano goes on to propose a holistic approach to feminist as a means of combatting such marginalisation. She begins by defining holistic feminism as “...a wide-ranging movement to challenge all double standards based on sex, gender, and/or sexuality. Furthermore, this approach to feminism remains committed to intersectionality and working to challenge all forms of marginalization, rather than focusing solely on specific forms of sexism.”

Some of the tools or methodologies of a holistic approach to feminism, in Serano’s model, include:

Expecting heterogeneity - combatting the homogenising of marginalised groups that arises from stereotyping and universal assumptions by recognising that individuals within a marginalised group will differ in many ways;

Challenging gender entitlement - rejecting the societal expectation that people identify and express their genders in particular ways and the punitive response to those who do not follow social expectations, refusing to police the autonomous and consensual genders and sexualities of others; and

Self-examining desire and embracing ambivalence - examining our attractions (and lack of attractions) for indications of unacknowledged double standards, and understanding that sexual attractions and practices can have both empowering, positive, aspects, and disempowering, negative aspects.

Serano also stresses the importance of understanding the ways that invalidation is used as a technique against multiple marginalised groups - indeed, she notes that it is possible to identify a previously unrecognised marginalisation by observing that those who share in are invalidated in specific ways. There are many forms that invalidation can take, such as: suggesting mental incompetence; sexualising the marginalised group; attributions of immorality, danger, deceitful or manipulative behaviour; describing and treating the marginalised group as being unhealthy, sick, or diseased; seeing the marginalised group as anomalous, exotic, open to fetishisation or being an object of fascination or study; identification as unnatural, inauthentic, or fake.

This model of holistic feminism, and the theory of marked states and double standards that underlies it, appeals strongly to me. It recognises the multiplicity of marginalisations and invalidations that are at the root of any oppressive situation, and leaves room for differences and commonalities among marginalised groups to be acknowledged and incorporated into an ongoing life of activism. It allows for the identification of unacknowledged firms of marginalisation, and their inclusion in an activist framework. There’s much to consider here, and I’m now looking forward to reading more of Serano’s analysis and theoretical work, to see the development of this model.

Bitch Planet Volume 2: President Bitch (containing issues 6 through 10 of the comic series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick) continues to tell a brilliantly dystopic and uncomfortably violent story. As with the first volume, I can’t quite say I like or enjoy reading it, it’s too raw and too close to reality, in spirit if not in fact. It’s hard to read about women in prison for being insufficiently docile, and not hear the chants of ‘Lock her up’ heard at Trump rallies, or think of women of colour from Joanne Little to Sandra Bland and on and on, imprisoned, abused, raped, killed, in jails and prisons, or thousands of migrant women detained for the ‘crime’ of seeking refuge in the richest country in the world. Feminist dystopias are hard things to read if you happen to be a woman in this time.

But, on with the story. Volume One established the scene and set up a situation where former athlete Kamau agrees to lead a team of women inmates in the Metaton tournament that is a huge part of the authoritarian, patriarchal culture in which a place like Bitch Planet can exist. Volume 2 begins with a flashback telling the story of Bitch Planet inmate Meiko Maki, who was murdered during a Metaton practice session at the conclusion of Volume 1. In the present, multiple plot threads are advancing. Meiko’s father, Makoto Maki, an engineer, has been assigned the task of building a Metaton stadium on the Bitch Planet. He agrees, hoping to see his daughter - not knowing she is dead. Kamau has convinced a guard to get a map of the prison for her, and convinced that her sister is being held in a special cell. We, however, have seen that her sister Morowa, a trans woman, is being held in the general population in a special section with other trans women. Whitney, the official who offered Kamau the leadership of the Metaton tram, has been stripped of her position and imprisoned fir Meiko’s murder - and is now Kamau’s cellmate.

When Makoto is allowed a ‘virtual interview’ with Meiko, he realises something is very wrong, and uses his authority to get access to the prison controls, shut down the power and open all the cell doors. Kamau takes the opportunity to look for her sister, but instead, discovers that the mysterious unnamed prisoner in the special cell is an older black woman named Eleanor Doane, whom Kamau addresses as Madame President. The volume ends as revolution, both in the prison and on Earth begins.

There is a very raw, very real feeling to this narrative. It’s powerful, it is saying things that need to be said. It’s profoundly intersectional, and one of the things about it that is so very right is the way that it shows us that while sexism causes damage and injury to all women, it’s the multiply marginalised, black women, trans women, women who cannot conform to male-created standards of beauty, who suffer most. It acknowledges the reality that women of colour have always been more likely to be seen as transgressive and non-compliant, and be punished for it by the justice system, which has always operated for the benefit of the multiply privileged - those who are white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender and predominantly men.

I can hardly bear to read it, but I’m going to keep on doing so anyway. If you are interested, I urge you to read the individual comics, not the trade compilations, because of the excellent articles by feminist, anti-racist and trans activists and scholars. Bitch Planet is more than just a powerful feminist narrative, it’s an experience.