When God hates you and mothers run away

[sovay]

I meant to mention this earlier today, but the day happened: "After the Red Sea" has been highlighted by Bogi Takács as part of eir #diversepoems series. I'm honored.

Courtesy of handful_ofdust's Tumblr: color photographs of women in the ATS in 1942. Some of those shots could be stills from The Gentle Sex (1943), but they're history.

Have now finished Season Two of Hannibal. Quoting rushthatspeaks: "Rocks fall, everybody Schrödinger." The season finale was extraordinarily beautifully filmed. Have now watched two more episodes of Twin Peaks (1990). It's wonderful; I am watching it with delight. Have also watched the first two episodes of Agent Carter (2014) and should write about them soon, because at the moment my reactions are a mostly positive incoherence centering around pulp sci-fi tropes, role reversals, excellent use of color and costume design, and Peggy Carter punching a lot of people, sometimes while holding a stapler. [edit: see comments!] I wish the show had slightly more budget and more characters of color, but it still has six episodes in which to fix the latter. I believe derspatchel when he says that lobster would have been too expensive to waste on a foley effect in 1946, but if that is my greatest historical complaint about a show, is it ever ahead of the pack. This is probably the most varied amount of television I have watched in a span of two days since I lived somewhere with a TV.

I cannot afford to fall into Flight Rising, but I have now been shown (by Rush) a breeding clan and there are some beautiful dragons in that world.

Comments

[sovay]

It's a thing I've wondered about from time to time, but since our data for transgenderism in the past is, shall we say, a wee bit fragmentary, it's probably an unanswerable question.

I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to this comment, but it's a quarter to three in the morning. So without, I hope, TMI: my body is frequently a difficult place for me to be in. It's just nice that I don't have to take additional flak every day for not putting on makeup and other visible observances of femininity.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Not TMI at all, at least for me. (I have enough trans friends that my bar for TMI on gender issues is pretty damn high. You pretty much have to start in on the specifics of medical procedures involving your genitalia before you're anywhere in the ballpark.)

What you say here is exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of. The extent to which society enforces a narrow stereotype of a gender has to affect, I would imagine, the extent to which a non-conforming person feels like they are not that gender, as opposed to just being an unusual member of the category. Kind of a spoiler, but in the third book of the Memoirs of Lady Trent (the one that's coming out in a couple of months), Isabella spends some time in a society that a) has a third gender and b) identifies her as a member of that gender. Somebody else asks here whether she thinks that's right, and her response is that she doesn't buy into the cosmological view they have of that concept -- but her behavior does mostly fit what they describe. And where her own culture is concerned, she says that "so long as my society refuses to admit of a concept of femininity that allows for such things [...] one could indeed say that I stand between." She mostly just feels like an unusual woman, but she wouldn't have to go much further out on the spectrum to question her identity as a woman -- whereas if she were in 21st century America, she wouldn't even feel that terribly unusual.

But you'd pretty much have to transplant modern Western notions of transgenderism onto a past century to know whether the incidence of the concept is indeed higher when gender roles are narrower and more stringently enforced. There's a tangle in there of the behavioral side vs. body dysphoria and so forth that I am not remotely qualified to guess at, let alone properly unpack.

[sovay]

What you say here is exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

I am not sure about that. All the societal latitude in the world does not ameliorate the problem when it is the body itself that is wrong.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I should have said "it touches on exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of" -- because part of what I read out of what you said is that the lack of additional flak changes your experience of the situation. (Doesn't negate: changes.) That doesn't remove the issue of body dysphoria; but what I meant by the tangle of that with the behavioral side is that there are trans people for whom the body being wrong is not necessarily as central to their experience, and if they're not getting as much shit from the world around them for failing to conform in behavioral terms, they may not feel as alienated by their assigned gender as they would in a society with stricter roles. Or, to put it another way: when a category is culturally defined, changing the boundaries of the definition changes the way people at or across those boundaries relate to the category. Even with our current concepts, there's tension about surgery and "passing" and all the rest, where we're still saying that if you want to call yourself a man or a woman, you'd better have the junk and outward signals to match. Which puts pressure on those who don't have the dysphoria or don't match the standards of their preferred gender to conform again -- just to a different set of requirements, this time.

All of which is long and rambly and not really on the topic of this post, so I apologize for dragging it off-thread. I just think about these things any time I see non-gender-conformist characters in historical media: which ones would call themselves trans if the category existed for them? Which ones would feel more comfortable in their gender if the boundaries were different?

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Or put another way -- You hear a lot of stories about women in the past disguising themselves as men to join the army or otherwise enter men-only careers, and many of these stories, it turns out, are true. How many of them were what we'd now consider transmen, and how many were just passing as men because in that time and place it was the only way to get into the army?

Of course, presumably the ones who really did identify as men kept up the identity the rest of their lives, so barring accidental reveals, we don't hear about them.