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intersexbookclub · 6 months

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Discussion summary: Left Hand of Darkness

Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic in science fiction that explores issues of sex/gender in an alien-yet-human society where the aliens are just like us except in how they reproduce. These aliens, the Gethenians, can reproduce as either male or female. They spend most of their lives sexually undifferentiated. Once a month, they go into heat (“kemmer”) and their sexual organs activate as either male or female (it’s essentially random).

Here's a summary of the discussions we had on 2023-08-25 and 2023-09-01 about the book:

HIGH LEVEL REACTONS

Michelle (@scifimagpie): even though it was written by a cis straight perisex woman there is a queerness to the writing that feels true and that she nailed. There is a queerness to the soul of this book that still holds up, that's true and good, and I cannot but love and respect that.

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): this book is such a commentary on 1960s misogyny. Genly is a raging misogynist. It takes a whole prison break and crossing the arctic for Genly to realize a woman or androgyne can be competent 👀

Dimitri: [Having read just the first half of the book] I wonder if it keeps happening, if Genly keeps going "woaaaah" [to the Gethenians’ androgyny] or if he ever acclimates. It's been half the novel my guy

vic: yeah a book where a guy is destroyed by seeing a breast makes me want queer theory

vic: [it also] makes me feel good to see how much has changed [since the 1960s]

THE INTERSEX STUFF

A thing we appreciated about the book was how being intersex is contextual. The main character of the book, Genly Ai, is a human from a planet like Earth, who visits Gethen to open trade and diplomatic relations.

On his home planet, and to Earth sensibilities, Genly is perisex - he is able to reproduce at any time of the month and is consistently male.

But on Gethen, Genly becomes intersex. On Gethen, the norm is that you only manifest (and can reproduce as) a given sex during the monthly kemmer (heat/oestrus) period.

The Gethenians understand Genly as living in “permanent kemmer”, which is described as a common (intersex) condition, and these people are hyper-sexualized and referred to as Perverts.

At this point it’s worth noting that depiction is not the same as endorsement. Michelle pointed out the book is very empathetic to those in permanent kemmer. LeGuin does not appear to be endorsing the social stigma faced by these people, merely depicting it, and putting a mirror to how our own society treats intersex people.

Throughout the book, Genly is treated as an oddity by the Gethenians. He is hyper sexualized. He undergoes a genital inspection to prove he is who he says he is.

When Genly is sent to a prison camp and forcibly given HRT, he does not respond “normally” to the hormones, the effects are way worse for him, and the prison camp staff don’t care, and keep administering them even if it’ll kill him.

Two of us have had the experience of having hyperandrogenism and being forced onto birth control as teenager, and relating to the sluggishness of the drugs that Genly experienced, as well as the sense that gender/sex conformity was more important to authority figures (parents, doctors) than actual health and well-being.

Another scene we discussed the one where Genly is in a prison van en route to the gulag, and a Gethenian enters kemmer and wants to mate with him and he declines. He is given multiple opportunities over the course of the book to try having sex with a Gethenian, and declines every time, and we wondered if he avoided it out of trauma of being hyper-sexualized & hyper-medicalized & having had his genitals inspected.

We discussed the way he described his genital inspection through a trauma lens, and how it interacts with toxic masculinity - in vic’s terms, Genly being "I am a manly man and I have don't trauma"

Those of us who read the short story, Coming of Age in Karhide, noted that once the world was narrated from a Gethenian POV, the people in permanent kemmer were treated far more neutrally, which gave us the impression that Genly as an unreliable narrator was injecting some intersexism along with his misogyny

WHY IT MATTERS TO READ THIS BOOK THROUGH AN INTERSEX LENS

Elizabeth: I’ve encountered critiques of this book from perisex trans folks because to them the book is committing biological essentialism, and dismissing the book as a result. I think they’re missing that this book is as much about (inter)sex as it is about gender. I think they’re too quick to dismiss the book as being outdated or having backwards ideas because they’re not appreciating the intersex themes.

Elizabeth: The intersex themes aren’t exactly subtle, so it kind of stings that I haven’t seen any intersex analyses of this book, but there are dozens (hundreds?) of perisex trans analyses that all miss the huge intersex elephants in the room.

Also Elizabeth: I’ve seen this book show up in lists of intersex books/characters made by perisex people, and I’ve seen Estraven listed as intersex character, and it gets me upset because Estraven isn’t intersex! Estraven is perisex in the society in which he lives. Genly is the intersex character in this story and people who misunderstand intersex as being able to reproduce as male & female (or having quirky genitals smh) are completely missing that being intersex is socially constructed and based on what is considered typical for a given species.

WHAT THE BOOK DOESN’T HANDLE WELL

The body descriptions. As Dmitri put it: “ Like "his butt jiggled and it reminded me of women" ew. It was intentional but I had to put the book down. It reminded me of transvestigators and how they take pictures of people in public.” 🤮

Not pushing Genly to reflect on how weird he is about other people’s bodies. We all had issues with how Genly is constantly scrutinizing the bodies of other humans to assess their gender(s) and it’s pretty gross.

vic asked: “how much of this is her reproducing violence without her knowing it? A thing I didn't like was how he always judging and analyzing people's bodies and realizing others treat him that way. And I wish there was more of his discomfort about this, that it made him feel icky.”

Dimitri added: “I really wanted him to have a moment of this too, for him to realize how much it sucks to be treated this way. As a trans person it's so uncomfortable. What are you doing going around doing this to people?”

Using male pronouns as default/ungendered pronouns. Élaina asked why Genly thinks a male pronoun is more appropriate for a transcendent God and pointed out there’s a lot to unpack there.

OTHER POSITIVES ABOUT THE BOOK

Genly’s journey towards respecting women, that he still had a ways to go by the end of the book. vic pointed out how “LeGuin was straight, and she loves men, and is kinda giving them the side-eye [in this book]. Her writing about how Genly is childish makes me really happy. It’s kind of hilarious to watch him bang his head against the wall because he’s so rigid.”

To which Dmitri added: “I agree with the bit on forgiving men for stuff. I don't know how she [LeGuin] does it but she really lays it all out. She gives you a platter of how men are bad at things, how they make mistakes that are pretty specific to them. She has prepared a buffet of it.”

Autistic Estraven! As Michelle put it: “autistic queer feels about Estraven speaking literally and plainly and Genly not getting it”

The truck chapter. Hits like a pile of bricks. We talked about it as a metaphor for the current pandemic.

The Genly x Estraven slowburn queerplatonic relationship

The conlang! Less is more in how it gets used

MIXED REACTIONS

The Foretelling. For some it felt unnecessary and a bit fetishy. For others it was fun paranormal times.

Pacing. Some liked how the book really forces you to really contemplate as you go. Others struggled with a pace that feels very slow to 2023 readers.

WORKS WE COMPARED THE BOOK TO

Star Trek (the original series) - we wondered if LHOD and Genly Ai were progressive by 1960s standards, and TOS came up as a comparison point. We were all of the impression that TOS was progressive for its time but all of us find it pretty misogynist by our standards. The interest in extra-sensory perception (ESP) is something that was a staple of TOS that feels very strange to contemporary viewers and also cropped up in LHOD

Ancillary Justice - for being a book where characters’ genders are all ambiguous but the POV character is actually normal about how they describe other characters’ bodies.

The Deep - for being another book in a situation where being able to reproduce as male and female is the norm. The Deep was written by an actually intersex author, and doesn’t have the cisperisex gaze of scrutinizing every body for sex. But oddly LHOD actually winds up feeling more like a book about intersex people, because it features a character who is the odd one out in a gonosynic society. In contrast, nobody is intersex in the Deep - everybody matches the norms for their species, which makes the intersex themes in the work much more subtle.

Overall, as vic put it, “there's something to be said about an honest depiction that's not great, especially when there's no alternatives”. For a long time there weren’t many other games in town when it came to this sort of book, and even though some things now feel dated, it’s still a valuable read. We’d love to see more intersex reviews & analyses of the book!

#intersex book club #book summaries #book reviews #left hand of darkness #the left hand of darkness #ursula k. le guin #intersex books #intersex literature #queer books #queer literature #queer fiction #queer scifi #intersex

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eviebane · 4 months

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you guys loved my part 1 and 2 of Badly Explained Good Omens so i'm just going to keep doing it. fight me. (disclaimer: this series will be written when i'm either sleep deprived, caffeine overloaded, or drunk. feel free to speculate which one it is this time)

right so Season 1 of Good Omens is basically, these two man-shaped creatures who definitely don't want to lick each other's faces get together in a park full of spies & snitches so they can talk without raising suspicion (foolproof plan, obviously). it's basically a romeo and juliet thing, except romeo is an angelic bookseller hoarder and juilet is a snake demon who will make u re-evaluate your sexual orientation. and possibly give you gender envy. your average stuff, right.

so gender envy boy (Crowley) goes, hey, my lot made me uber the devil's son to an american diplomat the other night, and the angel (Aziraphale) goes, if you're going to destroy the world via evil baby style, can you lot at least not make it into some cheesy american movie. at least make it something actually cool. anyway so they're chatting about the end of the world, as you do, and Crowley goes y'know, Hell is gonna fuck the whole world up and Azi goes Nah, we beat your dumbarses before, we will again, and Crowley goes ANYWAY if everyone gets slaughtered, guess what? no more food, no more music. your life is gonna be boring af

so they go on a little date and Crowley keeps winding him up about how boring shit's gonna be when all the humans have been murdered in the ethereal/occult purge, and Aziraphale finally goes Yeah OK, but you realise I can't do shit about it right? like it's God's will and Crowley goes Nah nah nah, look. Look. Right. so I gotta look after this devil child for a few years and use my sexy nanny vibes to make sure he's evil. why don't YOU also infiltrate this devil child's household and teach him not to kill snails? it'll be like cosmic balance. yin/yang. the kid will be a normal little shit like most preteen boys, rather than starting apocalypses little shit.

Aziraphale is so captivated by his slutty charm and sparkling eyes that he agrees.

so they stalk the kid, dress up like old welsh gardeners and dominatrix nanny to teach him to love slugs and crush his foes under his boot. surprisingly, the kid is relatively normal. although he hates dinosaurs, so that's obviously concerning. Crowley suggests cold blooded murder of the child but Aziraphale's like Nah why don't i cosplay Fell the Marvellous again at his birthday party and Crowley goes why the fuck do I love this loser

anyway so as it turns out, the nuns that Crowley uber'd this baby to 11 years ago ended up with the wrong parents. The best friends husbands roadtrip to go fuck up the nuns, but actually Crowley's maggot colleague (no thats not an insult) burned the nunnery down and it's now a paintball arena, where currently a bunch of repressed office workers are shooting each other. there's a noteworthy bit where the husbands get hit with a paintball, Crowley becomes a naga (except reverse the top and bottom bits. Yeah it's terrifying) just to make a dude shit himself, then Aziraphale puppy dog eyes Crowley to get the stain off his coat because it ruins his vibes and that's not kool.

Crowley tries to make out with Aziraphale against the wall but then forgets the kissing part, then he bippity-boppity-boos a surviving ex-nun so they can interrogate her. the whole trip is pretty useless and it ends up becoming just them two flirt-fighting for a day. Oh also Crowley runs over a witch, but it's fine because she's an American

As it turns out, the witch left a book behind in Crowley's car and Aziraphale yoinks it like the book kleptomaniac he is, then binges it like your new favourite 150k fanfic

Crowley literally climbs the walls in boredom (unfortunately got cut, but still happened in my mind). They eventually meet up in Secret Rendezvous Spot #3 where they have a lover's quarrel and Crowley slut walks off

Next thing ya know, there's a witchfinder (yea don't worry too much about him) at Aziraphale's door and he tries to exorcise him via a prophecy book, a cute little retro desk bell and a fuckin lighter. Anyway.

So Aziraphale was trying to talk to God before the nutbag showed up via a magic angel circle that does a little star trek hologram. He ends up talking to God's secretary (not the fun kind) and he's like, Yeah no God's having PTO rn. Also you're being drafted into war 'cause shit's about to go down and Aziraphale's like Ahhh ok cool neat. let me just like, do a bit of tidying up first, oh and I have to pick up the dry cleaning, um then I need to make dinner, so anyway i'll be there soon. totally. yup. so excited to go fight hot sexy with pretty yellow eyes- bad, evil demons.

Aziraphale accidently cha cha slides into the circle and his body crumbles (same) and he pops into Heaven without a body. He gets yelled at by Anderson for not having a body or that sword he gave the humans 6000 years ago, and honestly I can't help but think it's Heaven's fault for not stock taking enough

Aziraphale's like Haha yeah Anderson I'm not fighting no war, I have a hot sexy yellow-eyed pretty beautiful smart funny demon to ki- uuuh, I mean, I'm a pacifist now, BYE and he yeets himself back to the mortal plane via a floaty picture of Earth

He finds Crowley going on a bender and doodling A+C=<3 on the pub table. Aziraphale's like Right Crowley get your shit together, we got an Apocalypse to stop in Tadfield

Crowley ends up getting trapped in London via a giant doom circle of fire that he designed, but he's like Ah nah fuck it, my Bentley can take it and it DOES. I mean it does explode, but only after it gets him to Tadfield. What a stellar car. 10/10

The husbands try to murder the child with a fireworks gun, that fails, then they watch the child encourage his friends to insult three cosmic beings to death. Yah it actually works, too.

The child then insults Lucifer into the void, and that's it, ba ba boom, apocalypse averted. The husbands do what they do best; get crunk.

Heaven & Hell kidnap the husbands and tries to give them their Worst Employee of the Century rewards, but the husbands survive it via clever trickery and Being A Little Shit, and they ride off into the sunset and confess their love at the Ritz via affectionate insults

the end

season 2

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #aziracrow #goodomens #gomens #badly explained good omens #crack #for the record i have written an entire (yes all 4 books) summary of the hunger games if anyone wants it. its as appalling as this is

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cemeterything · 1 year

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Is Locked Tomb the media/story with the skeleton face paint (?) Guy? If yes, what is the story/genre? I see you reblogging stuff about it and it seems very intriguing but I don't want to look it up, just so that I don't find any major spoilers.

the locked tomb is a sci-fi/fantasy series set in a post apocalyptic future where humanity is scattered across nine planets and the culture, religion and political system is centered around necromancy, which is an ability some people are born with and can develop through training and studying. it starts with gideon the ninth, in which the titular gideon, a ward of the ninth house, is sent off-planet with her necromancer and liege lady harrowhark nonagesimus (harrow for short) to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for nine talented necromancers from noble families and their cavaliers (essentially bodyguards and companions/caretakers/servants to necromancers, with varying personal relationships between the two. gideon is harrow's cavalier.) to ascend to sainthood (in the necromancers' case) or hero status (in the cavaliers'), personally requested by god himself. while participating in this assessment alongside their necromantic peers, gideon and harrow begin to uncover a more sinister plot. from there, everything only gets more complicated.

if you like failgirls and loser wizards, fucked up relationships, queer characters (mostly lesbians, there's a reason they're known as the 'lesbian necromancers in space' books), death, horror, catholic guilt, gender fuckery, and critiques of imperialism in your stories, you might enjoy the locked tomb.

#its very hard to provide any kind of coherent summary without spoilers because these books are best experienced firsthand #rather than explained. but i tried.

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fictionadventurer · 10 months

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The more I learn about Civil War politics, the more I'm convinced that Lincoln's most impressive and useful leadership trait was that he never let his pride get in the way of doing his job.

Other people in Lincoln's position would have come to Washington with something to prove. They'd have resented the insults and tried to disprove them. They'd have tried to seize power and credit, rejected help, spent a lot of time trying to reach a certain level of respect.

Lincoln's response to, "You're just a backwoods lawyer with no executive experience who makes too many dumb jokes," was pretty much always, "Yeah. And?" He had no interest in petty personal power plays. He had a country to run. There was a war on. It didn't matter what people thought of him so long as the job got done.

He was aware of his personal shortcomings and was always willing to accept advice and help from people who had more knowledge and experience in certain areas. He presided over a chaotic Cabinet full of abrasive personalities who thought they were better and smarter than him, but he kept working with them because they could get the job done. For example: Stanton was absolutely horrible to him when they were both working as lawyers. Just incredibly mean on a personal level. But when Lincoln needed someone to replace Cameron, he swallowed his pride and appointed Stanton as Secretary of War, where Stanton proceeded to be mean to everyone in the world, but he whipped that department into shape and kept it running efficiently through a very chaotic war. Pretty much no one except Lincoln would have been able to put up with that. He could put up with people who were personally difficult if they could do the job he needed them to do--which he was only able to do because his own ego didn't get in the way.

Lincoln's example is a prime demonstration of how humility isn't underrating yourself--it's being so secure in your own abilities and identity that you don't need to attack anyone or defend yourself to prove your worth. He knew his shortcomings, but he also knew his strengths. He was willing to give other people credit for successes and take blame upon himself for failures if it kept things running smoothly. He was secure enough in his own power that he could deal generously--but firmly--with people who tried to undermine him. In a city full of huge egos, in a profession that rewards puffed-up pride, that levelheaded humility is an extremely rare trait--which is what made it so impressive and effective.

#history is awesome #presidential talk #so i went to a teeny backwater thrift store today #their tiny history book section just happened to have an old lincoln biography #i opened to the page about the cabinet #which describes the situation like 'seward was calling himself premier and lording it over everyone'#'blair was causing problems everywhere'#'welles was insulting everyone in his diary and especially hated stanton grant and seward'#'and stanton hated absolutely everyone in the whole wide world'#and as i was reading this i was internally kicking my legs with excitement and cackling with glee because this is the good stuff #i don't know why but i love these horrible petty men #they're like a bunch of raccoons fighting over territory in a dumpster fire it's so great #i read the whole chapter right there in the store #and it impressed upon me yet again how impressive lincoln was to put up with all these guys #(the writer was a bit simplistic and made a lot of these guys come off as worse than they were)#(like he made seward sound like a complete incompetent when he was a pretty good secretary of state)#(he had some grandiose ideas but the man deserves a lot of credit for keeping england out of the war)#(but for a one-chapter summary of these guys it wasn't exactly wrong and it was a ton of fun)#i very much did not want another book especially another american history book #but it was only fifty cents and i have a pouch full of spare change #and the writer's style was so much fun that i decided to take the book with me #i don't plan to read the whole thing (i'm sick of lincoln bios) but it's fun to dip into for things like this #and i had to talk to you about it

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