My life in books

The Belles, by Dhonielle Clayton, is a very strange, yet strangely compelling, book. Perhaps because it is a young adult novel, I don’t find myself demanding that the worldbuilding make all that much sense, which s a good thing, because this doesn’t. The motivations are quite realistic, however, and that’s part of the strangeness.

Camilla Beauregard is one of the Belles. This term is ambiguous, in that It seems to be the term used both for anyone with the gift of psychically producing physical changes that make women beautiful, and to those particular women who have been through a highly commercialised training and preparation to be a Belle at one of the establishments set up for Belles to do their work - often called teahouses - or as official Belle to the Royal family the ‘favourite.’

On the one hand, we have something resembling the extensive beauty pageant culture we are familiar with, except the Belles actually can create real beauty, in themselves and others, and on the other, we have a tradition that seems to want to evoke Western images of geisha and teahouse culture, but making the services of the geisha be not just the creation of comfort and a pleasant social evening, but also very reason for seeking them out.

There are some odd things that the protagonist Camilla, who becomes Belle of the Imperial Teahouse, notices but doesn’t think about at first. New Belles are selected for the important teahouse positions every three years - but where are al the other Belles? Some go into the machine, becoming carers and instructors of future Belles, but the others? Where are they, and what is behind the odd occasional comments made by some of the older women about there being more than one Belle in the teahouses? What has happened? Why does she hear screams in the night? Then comes the strangest thing - Amber, the Belle chosen as favourite, has been demoted, she, Camilla, is to be favourite, and no one will talk about it.

First in a series.

Peasprout Chen and her younger brother Cricket live in the land of Shin, where wu liu, the beautiful and deadly art of martial skating, was invented. Peasprout, who is fourteen and a prodigy at wu liu, and as such, she and Cricket have been selected by the Dowager Empress herself to study at the Pearl Famous Academy of Skate and Sword in a goodwill exchange - a mission that carries much responsibility, for the independant city-state of Pearl has taken preeminence in the great martial art and Peasprout is here in Pearl not just to learn all the secrets of wu liu but to do better than all the Pearlian students and restore the honour of Shin.

This is the premise behind Henry Lien’s delightful Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword, a fantasy for children with the spirit of anime and the feel of one of those classic children’s books that grows organically from a special story invented to tell a beloved child to a tale that enchants children everywhere. It’s set up as a traditional boarding school novel, with the protagonist as outsider forced into competition with the school bully and persecuted by the bully’s clique, with stern teachers who never understand the difficulties facing the protagonist, and unexpected allies.

Yet underneath this surface lie some dark secrets that could spell serious danger for Peasprout and Cricket, who are both innocent of the political machinations that lie behind this ‘goodwill exchange’ but may nonetheless suffer the consequences of intrigues they had no part in.

I’m really looking forward to reading the sequel, Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions, because she’s a character that it’s hard not to love, and I know I want to see more of her.

JY Yang’s novella The Descent of Monsters takes place in the universe of the Protectorate created in their earlier works, The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Thread of Fortune, but the main characters of those narratives, Sanao Akeha and their twin sibling Mokoya, rebel children of the Protector, appear only as secondary characters, as does Mokoya’s lover, Rider, who has travelled to the Protectorate in search of their own lost twin.

The Descent of Monsters is an epistolary novel, told in diary excerpts, letters, transcripts, and excerpts from reports within a frame that tells us as we begin that the main character, Tensor Chuwan Sariman, a junior investigator, is already dead, and their lover Kayan is urged to continue the investigation detailed in the documents and discover the truth that Chuwan has died for.

The investigation centres on an experimental facility where Tensorites are supposedly breeding guard animals for farms. But something has gone wrong, a huge and dangerous creature, certainly no farm guard, has escaped and everything in the facility - humans and animals alike - is dead, torn to pieces. Found hiding in the ruin are Rider and Sanao Akeha, wounded, apparently having killed the escaped creature. Yet as Chuwan investigates, their personal diary entries make it clear that the easy narrative has mysterious gaps in it. Interrogation notes are heavily redacted, anomalies and highly unusual circumstances - such as the total absence of all written documents, including diaries and personal correspondence - are ignored, and Chuwan is instructed not to search for the truth, not to follow clues or ask questions, but just to rubberstamp the official narrative and forget everything else.

Chuwan of course cannot do this. They break into the interrogator’s office and steal the unredacted transcripts, and run, in an attempt to personally contact Rider, Sanao Akeda, and the other rebels. A chance encounter with Yuan-ning, the sibling of one of the victims gives them access to letters from the facility that suggest secret, and horrifying, research programs.

Even after connecting with Rider and the others at the Grand Monastery, Chuwan continues to investigate, with help from Yuan-ning and the rebels. What they find means their death, as the reader has known from the beginning, but it reveals exactly what was going on in the Tensorate’s secret facility, leaves so many other questions unanswered and demands future actions - which no doubt Yang is writing as I write this.

This is a work of great craft, and it forms a key part of a story that I have become deeply involved in. I need to know what comes next in this astonishing world Yang has created.

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.”

Kim Fu’s novel, For Today I Am a Boy, is a difficult book to read, because for most of the time, the major characters appear to be living lives of quiet desperation. It tells, simply and straightforwardly, with the openness of a child - which the protagonist is, in the beginning - about growing up in a sadly dysfunctional immigrant family. The narrator, Peter Huang, is a young Chinese boy whose family lives in a small Ontario town. His father, desperate to assimilate, to be seen as a model Canadian, to become invisible as a minority, refuses to allow Cantonese to be spoken in the home, insists the only North American foods be prepared. He spends much of his life moving from one job to another, anything that gives him a managerial title, no matter how low the pay, until he finally becomes a civil servant, able to fulfill his image of the successful middle class professional man, dressed in suit and tie, a part of the Canadian dream. He is ambitious for his children, also. The oldest two daughters must assimilate, become doctors and lawyers. And for his one son, the only boy among four children, his ambitions are that he become a man, strong and in every way the perfect model minority.

But his family, which he so desperately wants to be perfect, has deep secrets. His wife pretends to work part-time, but really goes to the local Chinese Association to gamble. He himself has an affair with one of the women in the neighbourhood, who is suffering from delusions clustered around her infertility, and eventually commits suicide.

The oldest daughter Adele resists the role of scholar laid out for her, has no interest in becoming a doctor, and eventually drops out of university to run away to Amsterdam with her boyfriend. The second daughter, Helen, in contrast works very hard to be the perfect reflection of her father’s aspirations, the textbook lawyer, but is never really acknowledged. And the youngest daughter, Bonnie, is a rebel, sexually precocious, smoking, drinking, sneaking out to bars and flirting with older men.

And then there is Peter, who has the biggest secret. He wants to be a girl. Though the story is told from Peter’s perspective, the boy hiding his tryouts with his sisters’ make-up, brushing their hair, secretly cooking dinner when it’s supposed to be his sister Bonnie’s turn, still it’s clear that Peter’s father suspects that something is not quite right. He polices his son’s behaviour, praising him for ‘manly things’ - even when, forced to join in by some neighbourhood boys, he takes part in a an assault on a young girl - and withholding love and approval when he does something too ‘girly.’

For Today I Am a Boy is about Peter’s long, tormented, journey from hidden shame to self-acceptance. Growing up, he has no idea that there is anyone else like him - I use the male pronoun because Peter does not really understand that he can be someone other than a boy, albeit a weak and tormented one, for most of the book - who feels that they are not the gender they were assigned, the gender everyone believes them to be. As soon as he finishes high school, he moves to Montreal, starts working in restaurants, slowly building hs skill towards becoming a chef. And being alone. Not understanding who he is, but knowing that something is wrong, he stumbles through several painfully abusive relationships, avoiding friendships, focusing on work.

But there is a tomorrow for Peter, a time when finally there is an understanding of what has driven the fear and isolation for so long, and in that tomorrow, Peter is Audrey and she is finally whole.

This book hurt to read, for so many reasons. All four siblings have so far to go to become themselves, though arguably it is Audrey who must come the farthest. And always in the background, the pain of the father, demanding and disappointed, the mother, oppressed and enraged. The tangled issues of sexuality that all four sisters have to work through in different ways, and the racism and fetishisation that faces them as Asian-Canadians, and as Asian women.

It’s a powerful novel, and worth reading, despite the pain that so many of the characters carry, for the insights into growing up in an atmosphere that, even without overt violence, is deeply traumatic, and ultimately, just for the joy of the last paragraph: “Four grown women sit in a pub, raising their tourist steins to the camera. The waiter who holds the camera comments on how much they look alike. ‘We’re sisters,’ Bonnie says. ‘Wir sind Schwestern. This is Adele, Helen, and Audrey.’ “

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.

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.

The third of Heather Rose Jones’ Alpenna novels, Mother of Souls, continues the story of Margerit Sovitre, wealthy thaumaturge and famed swordswoman Barbara, Countess of Savese.

Their circle of friends and associates has continued to expand, drawing more women from various professions and ways of life. Margerit’s extensive fortune has enabled her to continue being the patron of a number of women, both upper class and working class, who are expanding the scope of the female professions, women’s scholarship, and women’s engagement in the Mysteries - the very real forms of religious magic that can be seen, generated, shaped and directed by ritual, words and music.

The focus of the novel lies in one of the great mystery rituals which is supposed to bring safely to the small country of Alpenna. Margerit has already rewritten it, and yet the new version is not without flaws, a fact brought to her attention one of the new characters in Margerit’s circle, Serafina Talarico, an archivist, born in Rome but of Ethiopian ancestry, who has a rare gift for being able to see in detail the energy flows invoked by rituals. The flaw that reveals itself to Serafina’s vision may have some connection to rumours that have come to Barbara about mysterious, possibly unnatural storms in the mountains along part of Alpennia’s border. Amid the unfolding of this greater plotline lie a number personal stories: Serafina’s unhappy marriage, and her despair at being able to see the great mysteries but not evoke them; Barbara’s engagement in bringing order to a recently inherited title and lands that have been ignored for years by their previous lord; the revelation that Barbara’s armin, Tavit, is a trans man, deeply conflicted in a world that has no place or understanding of his nature; Luzie Valorin, an impoverished widow with a remarkable gift for musical composition and performance that evokes the energies associated with the Mysteries.

While I love the woman to woman relationships that are the backdrop to this series - Margerit and Barbara, Jeanne de Cherdillac and Antuniet - the most fascinating part of the culture in which Margerit’s adventures in ritual magic, and Barbara’s exercises in statecraft, take place is the feeling of watching a renaissance of women’s scholarship. In this novel, one of Margerit’s new projects is the creation of a college for women, with a print shop attached so that the works of the women Margerit has supported through her substantial fortune, and as well as more commercial projects, can be published without having to rely solely on subscriptions - which are harder for women scholars to generate. Interwoven in the major and minor plots are important stories about women struggling to be recognised for their work, intelligence, talent and skill, and the ways in which their efforts are undermined, blocked, trivialised, and even plagarised by men who cannot deal with women who think, and create, and do other such things with serious intent that have been by tradition reserved for men. Jones writes with a fiercely feminist vision, and an unabashed love for the hearts and souls of women making their own ways in the world.

In her Introduction to Angela Ritchie’s Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Angela Y. Davis writes:

“Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color is a very important twenty-first-century document. It reminds us how little in the way of material progress has been made during the last century in purging our societies of officially condoned racist violence. At the same time, Andrea Ritchie’s multifaceted and unrelenting antiviolence practice over the last decade, to which her book bears witness, reveals extraordinary progress in the way we conceptualize state violence and antiviolence strategies. She does not urge us simply to add women of color to the list of targets of police violence—a list that is already longer than anyone would wish. She asks us to consider what the vast problem of state violence looks like if we acknowledge how gender and sexuality, disability, and nation are intermeshed with race and class. In other words, Ritchie’s feminist approach reminds us that the job of purging our worlds of racist violence is far more complicated than advocates of simple police reform would have us believe. It is not only Black women and women of color who are “invisible no more” but also the immensity and complexity of the problem of rooting out the nexus of racist violence.”

It is this intersectional approach to the documenting of state violence against women of colour that makes this book so important. The issue is far more deeply embedded in white society than any approach that focuses primarily on police and prison reform can affect. It is part and parcel of whiteness itself, and must be addressed by radical change, not liberal reform. As Mariame Kaba notes in her Introduction, “Today, my organizing work is focused on abolishing police, prisons, and surveillance. It took a long time for me to embrace abolition as praxis. I bought into the idea that more training, more transparency, better community oversight, and prosecuting killer cops would lead to a more just system of policing. I was wrong. The origin story of modern American policing is slave patrols and union busting. A system created to contain and control me as a Black woman cannot be reformed.”

In this book, Ritchie exposes state violence against black, Indigenous, and other women of colour, starting with the early history of policing as a means of controlling the lives of Indigenous people and African-descended slaves. She gives voice to the many black and Indigenous women who experienced sexual violence at the hands of American soldiers, slave patrollers, and later, police officers. She also examines the gender-specific forms of border policing waged against immigrant women throughout American history, many of which are based on, and reinforce, racist stereotypes of hypersexuality, promiscuity, indiscriminate child-bearing, criminality, and sexual and gender non-conformity among women of colour.

She painstakingly traces the links between race, disability and sexual and gender non-conformity, demonstrating how all are factors placing women, trans men, and queer and non-binary people of colour at high risk from violence, and frequently sexualised violence from police and other state agents. She looks at laws and policing strategies, from anti-loitering and anti-prostitution laws to “broken windows” and “quality of life” policing to child welfare and domestic violence interventions as sites of racial profiling, invasion of privacy, gender role policing and violence.

Yet in this painful litany of injustice upon injustice, there is also a record of resistance. “There is no question that the shroud of invisibility around Black women’s and women of color’s experiences of police violence has been irrevocably lifted in the post-Ferguson moment and movement. It has been forcefully pushed aside by young women on the front lines in Ferguson and by bloggers and organizers across the country who were speaking out in the days and months following Mike Brown’s killing, who were outraged at Dajerria Becton’s assault in McKinney, who rose up in widespread protest following Sandra Bland’s death in police custody, and who unapologetically demanded attention and action around #AssaultatSpringValleyHigh and the rape of thirteen Black women by Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, and who demanded justice for Rekia Boyd.”

But as each new day’s newspapers and twitter feeds inform us, the state’s assault on black, Indigenous and other racially marginalised women, trans men and non-gender conforming people continues, and so must the resistance.