71 – Trans: Where reality meets ideology
I know people who have read this and kept it off of their Goodreads profile because they don’t want to be attacked simply for having let its words cross their eyes. However, we’ve been together a long time now and I think you all know that I read books from all points of the political spectrum. There are no subjects, in my mind, that are off-limits for examination or critique. And if I’m honest, I do have considerable worries about the trans right movement and the lack of scrutiny it gets. The entire movement treats dissent like blasphemy, and I’m not a fan of faith-based extremism influencing my decisions.
There are two main bullet points here for Helen Joyce’s book. The first is that it is very dull. It’s written with all the stylistic flourish of a shopping list. It has about as much energy as a dead seagull. Its words land on the page with the leaden thump of a roofing tile falling listlessly from a badly maintained roof. It is an utterly charmless chore of a book.
The second bullet point is that it still manages to put together a very convincing position as to the fundamental incompatibility of sex-based rights and gender identity. It’s not a hateful book. It isn’t lacking in sympathy – in the main. It’s just forensic in the way that it builds the case that the debate is at an inflection point where it cannot progress without rights being denied to one group or another. One of those rights being for biological women to give consent over who has access to their bodies. It seems mind-bogglingly that we’re at that point, but we are.
See, here is the thing – we cannot treat one group’s rights as inviolable and everyone else’s as negotiable. That’s a position that is fundamentally incompatible with universalism as a guiding principle. Every group has to make compromises with regards to what their rights are. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Society is the word we give the web of compromises that we’ve all agreed upon – the minimum viable product that ensures we don’t end up killing each other. The extremist wing of the trans right movement has managed to turn a meaningful negotiation over the parameters of co-existence into a complete shut-down of rational debate. I have never seen so much support for a movement that is so unflinching in its willingness to deny all sense, all logic, all science. And more problematically – all compromise and all empathy.
This is what the book is about – not trans people, but rather the ideology of extremism that has done perhaps irreparable damage to the discourse around transgenderism. One that has its own mirrors in the dumbass rhetoric of a lot of ‘progressives’. Once upon a time if I had been called a homophobe, or a transphobe, or a white supremacist I would have been genuinely shocked and looked inwards as to the truth of such a statement. I would make intellectual reparations. I’ve been in that position, I’ve learned from it. Honestly now I just shrug because I don’t think it means anything of value. The corrective power of verbal censure has been eroded through overly trivial repetition.
‘Meh, I’m sure your right but I don’t care’, is not the response those words should elicit. They used to be blisteringly powerful. Now they’re just tiresomely performative. Chanting social media slogans is not the same thing as making an argument, and those slogans just devalue the words that are drafted into their unfortunate service. The easier something is to chant, the more likely it is to be an absurd and dangerous over-simplification. One of the reasons that the right is in the ascendency is because of over-reach by the left. The pendulum always swings back.
Trans as a book probably isn’t going to move the dial in the debate. People will go in with an opinion and they’ll probably leave with the same opinion. It’s too toxic now. Too much like trench warfare between intractable ideologies. I do appreciate though that there are women out there that will take a stand when so many others will permit themselves to be steamrollered to escape the overused charge of bigotry. I don’t comment about it a lot myself, because I have no skin in the game and I don’t feel like I am entitled to have a strong opinion or act as an advocate one way or another. It’s not my place to tell women what a woman is. It’s a shame more men don’t feel the same way because a lot of the worst aggressors in the ‘debate’ are men who are telling women what it’s okay for them to think.
I obviously have endless sympathy for trans people who just want to live their authentic life and are damaged by their assumed asssociation with the extremes of the movement.. I am fully supportive of the removal of all reasonable barriers to their engaging fully with modern society in all its complexity. I’m happy to address people in whatever form they want to be addressed, and to respect their sense of identity. I have zero time though for the zealots that have turned their requests for simple dignity into a borderline fascistic front of the culture wars. Those are the ones most discussed in this book, and I find myself in general agreement with most of its argument.
Just to make it clear – I think the extreme wing of the other side is just as bad. Everyone needs to calm the fuck down.
72 – All the Lovers in the Night
It has been some time between my reading this book and writing its review, and like many of these vaguely abstract Japanese novels I find it hard to rediscover the truth of it. As popular as these books are, I find them flighty in an unappealing way – more of a shimmering mirage than an actual novel. The protagonist is a copy editor, I recall. I think she makes the intentional choice to become an alcoholic to spice up a dreary life. She meets an older man and embarks on a friendship. Probably other things happen but I can’t bring them clearly to mind.
Let’s just move on. I rated it three out of five stars, but I honestly couldn’t say more than that. Truthfully I’m not even sure I can say that because I don’t remember why I rated it that way.
73 – Confessions
On the other hand, here’s a short Japanese novel that is extremely memorable for how viciously cruel it is. It begins with a soliloquy from a teacher to her students, on the day she is to leave them. It starts off innocuous enough until it begins to cohere into a hard denouncement of certain students in the classroom. The teacher’s daughter, you see, had been murdered. And she’d been murdered by people in the class, listening to her speak. And so, in revenge, she leaves them with a message – she has taken action. Not a revenge of hot blooded violence. A colder, more measured revenge. A revenge that will linger, like her pain.
Now this is almost the opposite to All The Lovers in the Night. That book was (I think) all quiet introspection and slice-of-life character (un)development. This is more like Fight Club, if Tyler Durden spent less time making soap and more time injecting HIV into the milk cartoons of his students.
I liked this one a lot – everything from its stark prose to its thoughtful exploration of revenge, stigma, and catharsis. It perhaps lacks the poetry of introspection that many of this style of novel manages to effortlessly capture, but it makes up for it by being, you know, interesting.
74 – Among Others
Among Others is an interesting book – like the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole meets a love letter to the Interlibrary Loan System by way of Malory Towers. A young girl, sent off to a boarding school after the death of her sister, finds herself lonely and isolated with her only refuge being science fiction books. These she reads at great speed and in great numbers, feeding her addiction with the pocket money sent by her absent (and creepy) father and through the support and indulgence of the librarians at the local town.
Oh, and she knows a bunch of faeries and can work magic.
Among Others has an especially interesting approach to that magic – it exists, posits the book, because it never does anything that wasn’t always going to happen anyway. It’s just that it wasn’t always going to happen anyway until the magic was done. In other words, magic can change the flow of reality to ensure its outcome is met but it never does it in a way that shows its the proximal cause. If you cast a spell to give yourself friends, for example, it would turn out that you’d made all those friends along the way anyway. Had you not cast the spell, you wouldn’t have made those friends. It’s both a credible way of evoking supernatural power in an incredulous age, and the single most frustrating way I can imagine of practising occult power.
A lot of the book is given over to a kind of philosophical exploration of free-will in a world where magic works in this way. Our protagonist at one point casts the spell I mentioned – to find friends – and soon after discovers a book club at the library, where all the books she loves so much are discussed in depth by people as interested in them as she is. But she worries – did her spell create the book club, and the people she met, and the librarian who supported her in exploring the literature? Or did it just direct her attention to what was already there?
It’s perhaps worth noting at this point that her mother is insane and our main’s character’s paranoia about her mother’s magic is one of the things that occupies her on a day to day basis.
Among Others is really a story about those titular ‘Others’, and given that it takes the form of a series of diary entries one has to wonder the extent to which the stories it tells are true reflections, or unreliable narrations, or perhaps even an attempt to make meaning from a life that has few genuinely good things within it. But it’s also a pleasingly comforting read for someone who resonated a lot with its main themes – never really belonging and finding comfort and connection within books. Many of the moments of joy in the tale – such as our protagonist stalking book catalogues and drawing comfort from fiction – could have been lifted out of my own life when I was young. I found the book evoked some serious nostalgia, which is quite something given how isolating it is to be the only person you know who is interested in the things that you are.
But also, while I wouldn’t place this book in the tradition of ‘cosy’ literature, it does have one feature that it shares with books that are ‘about a vibe’ – hardly anything happens. It’s kind of the Ready Player One of science-fiction references – it relies on that spark of affection that comes from a book invoking the secret shibboleths of your fandom. I can imagine it being a particularly irritating book to read if you don’t know your Asimov from your Le Guin. It’s a book that is almost aggressive in its referential gatekeeping.
Very enjoyable though.
75 – The Silence of the Girls
There are too many books on the Trojan War. I mean, we can all agree with that, right? So many of the books I have read this year – the ones cast my way by popular enthusiasm – have been on this topic, exploring it from a dozen different perspectives. The Ancient Greeks are Having a Moment.
Anyway, this is a book about the Trojan War. It is also a very good book about the Trojan War. The first book I read for my ‘A Book A Week by Women Authors’ project was A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. And in my review, all those months ago, I remarked that while it was well written it was also too flighty to really compel – that its unwillingness to contribute to the literature of antiquity basically resulted in it doing the opposite of what the author claimed to want to do. That book wanted to tell the story of the forgotten women of Troy and instead retold the story of the unforgotten women. The Silence of the Girls is really what I was hoping I would have gotten out of A Thousand Ships. It’s deep where A Thousand Ships is shallow. It’s creative when A Thousand Ships is synthetic. It’s genuinely moving. It’s multi-dimensional when A Thousand Ships is one dimensional. Don’t get me wrong, I liked a Thousand Ships. I just think this is a better version of that book.
That said, while I thought it was genuinely great it didn’t quite enter the upper echelons of my affection and I think it’s because, in the end, this story feels stale. It feels like a well that is drawn almost dry of any real novelty. The peripheries of the Trojan War – the camp life, the unspeakable brutalization of women, the preening savagery of the Greeks – are all so well trod at this point that it’s almost like following the worn track-lines of a commute. Much of the book is spent circling around the black hole of the premise, in repetitive orbits.
I honestly don’t know why the Trojan War has become such a popular topic for novel writers. I guess it’s out of copyright but it has been for thousands of years. I think I would have enjoyed this a touch more if I hadn’t felt at times like I was singing along to an old Karaoke staple. An enjoyable experience, but it doesn’t feel as if anything new was created in this ‘new’ interpretation of a classic story.