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

[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.