Queen of Hearts

Mea Culpa

First off, I have to admit to something.

My entire understanding of the character of Christine has been upended. You see, a woman described as wearing a waistcoat and shorts would be some kind of ska-revival person out of the early-to-mid-aughts.

So, I've been filling in around that detail and assuming that Christine was close to my friend Tammy from school, who wore nothing but Chuck Taylor All-Stars, jorts, and either Reel Big Fish merch or what I would have called a vest. Which is why I assumed she listened to the Weakerthans, not Tay-Swift.

Joke's on me. This is also probably good evidence that the massive chronological-cultural difference I saw in e.g. Declan and Aaron is at least in-part just because of the Atlantic Ocean.

This is also probably a good case that I should be paying more attention to clothing descriptions in general in this book. Like, I don't think I even mentioned the butterfly dress.

And, this is dumb, but, it took me reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to unlock that, yes the dress is a symbol probably, you (checks British slang dictionary) absolute numpty.

Are they even called caterpillars in British? I feel lost at sea now, uh, bruv.

First, err, Second Thoughts

Allons-y to da boys in da basement in this, chapter 12, Queen of Hearts.

Recap

Da boys are recovering from the inspection/assault from nurse Karen. Adam is having a brutal time of it, everyone but Stef got tazed.

This might be psycho shit but I really don't see why Moody is a bridge too far for Stefan. Being a raging alcoholic fuck-up to the extent that you kill someone through your own negligence is certainly not a strong recommendation, but compared to the misogynist misfit toys lying around, I would think that a sobered up recovering Moody would be a relief.

Aaron mentions the Tories so I guess this is a good time to remember that in 2019 that was, what, leading up to or just after the BoJo/Corbyn election? Given that he's an incel dickhead I'm curious if he'd be ah, purged from the Labour party after 2019 for good reasons or bad reasons.

I'm glad to see Adam treated so humanistically by the text. I think it would have been easy to leave him on the periphery for longer, or paint him as a caricature, but it's interesting to see Stef so willing to empathize after the brutality from Karen.

It's lightly droll that Stef is asking to speak to a manager about Karen's behavior, but I'm glad to see him be so proactive. That feels like something he couldn't have done earlier in this story.

Coffee Break

Christine, Pippa, and Paige are out on the town getting coffee, and we see Christine really struggle. It seems like the same disorienting experience of being perceived that Stef felt last chapter is at play here. But instead of being literally naked, the vulnerability has navigated outward to both the building, Dorley, and the clothing Christine wears. As it's been explained to me in part and I intuit in part, Christine's whole "shorts" thing is kind of related to a "can't fail if you don't try" attitude?

There's something kind of in-conflict there, but I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on it. Like, Christine's most-guaranteed feminine space, Dorley, consistently pressures her to be more feminine, but when she's out in the world with less of that explicit pressure she feels the pressure more. Maybe in this instance, Dorley is working as a metaphor for Christine's own worries about failing to be a girl?

And no-one cares what cardboard thinks, do they?

Paige is cool, on that note. I don't know what role she's supposed to be playing here exactly - a foil for Christine maybe? But the whole deal with the wacky-ideology-collection and the gently-applied peer pressure, big fan, she's a good one. I wonder what kind of philosophy she studies primarily, if they mentioned it I didn't pick up on that detail.

Stef Meets Aunt Bea!

He's been running through the encounter with the nurse, over and over, and still he finds no sense in it.

Yeah me neither to be honest? I'm kind of surprised it was a Whole Thing and a Plot Point, to be honest. I figured it was kind of a standard issue thing to happen in a torture dungeon, but there's a lot of Incident about its handling here. The context Pippa gave to the moment adds a lot, but I'm unclear if Greaves is writing Stef's perspective in on the other boys in the basement, or if this is part of the more directly allegorical portion of the text. It's tough for me to figure it out, but I kind of suspect that that's what's going on there.

Not to minimize the unpleasantness of a medical examination, just, it didn't read as that strange an aspect of it to me at the time.

Anyway, Stef meets Aunt Bea because if the assault were totally unaddressable then the institution of Dorley would be totally irredeemable. Or, that's my read anyway. I need to like these people doing this thing or the book falls apart, as a reader. So, there can be a string of bad actors (Christine kidnapping Stef, Stef entering the programme under false pretenses, Karen groping the recruits, various overzealous sponsors) as long as there's an avenue for reform.

[T]his place has been rehabilitating men, by its own curious methods, for a long time, so Beatrice will have seen dozens of boys go through the programme. Dozens of boys just like him. She probably only bothers learning their faces when they get new ones.

I can see Stef is starting to become, not a true believer, but at least an agnostic about Dorley. Something that nags at me though is, there probably really have been dozens of boys just like him. Christine isn't the only sister who's ever gamed the system I assume. And boys like Adam end up in here sometimes. So given enough sloppy operating time, there's almost certainly been another Stefan Riley in Dorley, right?

"None of us was instantly good at any of this."

"Except Vicky," Christine says.

Shopping Trip

Poor Christine really is having a difficult time trying. This I kind of empathize with, as a former very-fat-kid. Once I had dropped a lot of the weight (again, puberty, sometimes it's a fucking miracle), it still took years of my older sisters trying to get me to wear an outfit. As opposed to a tie-dye Metal Greymon T-shirt and chinos. Because I felt like if I "did an outfit", it had the potential to be double-humiliating. I could fail to be attractive as a body, and get caught trying to show off what I didn't have.

So, Jesus, poor girl. By all accounts she's lovely (see: everyone talking to her about her, or Stef's first-person reaction to her.) Anyway, we have a shopping montage, and the trio learn that Stef talked to Aunt Bea.

A Trial of Makeup

They didn't make you, they just ... brought you out.

Christine is going through some kind of a crisis. I don't want to retread, because we've seen her go through this a lot so far in this book and I'm not capable of digging into the nuance of the portrayal -- "Greaves write good; Christine sympathetic character" is about the level of analysis I'm hitting on this subject.

Except to say, Christine's extra layer ("I'm not really trans because I was a basement abductee") is probably a real mindfuck if women are already prone to thinking that they're not really trans. Might be worth adding some extra bells and whistles to the programme to help with that kind of recursive doubt.

The juxtaposition between "a nurse groped the boys during their mandatory violence-threatened examination" and "forced plastic surgery" is, a wide gulf let's say. The idea that the first is an assault and the second is not presents some, let's say challenges for the intervening months of the programme.

We learn that Karen is one of the old guard. And, this is the kinder, gentler Dorley. That's pretty chilling, but sure, why not. Let's see how it plays out.

I love getting a lore dump, and this chapter delivers:

• Grandmother sounds like the person who was as scary as Aunt Bea sounded initially ("wait until you hear about Great Great Grandmother!", I guess)
• Dorley's recruitment used to include totally unsympathetic recruits (murders and rapists) who I would not want to read about, so thanks a million Alyson, good eye there.
• The Dorley programme used to be less, ah, patient-centered and even more carceral.

I'll try to get into this a little bit later, but an aspect of Dorley jumps out: as trans people are more visible, Dorley becomes a lot more complicated to maintain as a forced-fem-blacksite.

At the Club and it's Going Down

Let me have you. Just for one night. Will you do that for me? Will you let me have you? ... Good girl

Hell yeah Christine, get it.

This whole set of scenes is a little bit hard to actually recap. To be honest my main take away is that Paige is super cool, and that Greaves probably remembers the Buffy slow dance scene set to "Fade Into You", what with the half-time dancing and all.

Stef After Action Self-Report

Pippa visits Stef. I'd forgotten that he had scalded his back all to shit recently. I need to start paying more attention to the dates attached to this.

Pippa injects the first estradiol shot. Okay, I'm very happy for Stef but this is utterly indistinguishable from an intended sexual assault, right? I know Stef is in a tough spot but he's not exactly virtuous here, knowing what he knows about e.g. Adam's fundamental simple innocence or what-have-you. Then again, Pope Leo XIV is in hot water with the British Atheists Club or something for thinking that being an atheist is not as good as being a Catholic, so, "forced-fem dungeon is forced" is probably fundamentally unsurprising. That's the trick in writing about Dorley as a part of Dorley I guess. It's not utopian, so why am I even commenting on the dystopian part of the fiction after a point?

Errant Thoughts

Millennial Supervisor

"He made a 'can has cheeseburger' joke last week. I had to Google it" -- words that made me feel like the fucking Crypt Keeper, boils and ghouls.

Agoraphobic Trans Commune

This is October 2019, also. Stef mentions feeling panicked at being in an open space and I have to imagine that there will be a lot of that going around next year.

BRITISH WATCH 2025

Oh, Jesus, God in heaven

Is this a common Anglicism? I think I say it because one of my best friends in school was Irish, and outside that I've never run into the phrase except in a vanishingly few stray places.

A Double-Edged Sword

those for whom masculinity has been a double-edged sword, a source of pain as well as strength

I think this is an interesting, but flawed, dichotomy.

I suspect it's meant to be as it's presented, as well. But, I mean, gender stuff is always going to cause some pain, I suspect. When I got bullied, it's because I was doing my gender the wrong way. When I stopped getting bullied it's because I was in a lane that made it, logistically, harder to bully me. And now, insofar as I'm of any real use to anyone, it's because I'm a clean-cut cis white straight guy who isn't hateful. Like, I'm pretty lukewarm, I'm not especially convincing or smart, the value-add for me as an ally (shoot me) is that I make bigots visually comfortable but I can disagree with them comfortably. That's painful, because frankly "locker room talk" is real, and you have a duty to tell people to shut the fuck up. I dunno, I have a hard time imagining a good man who doesn't suffer some pain as a part of being a man. It's not that being a man is painful though, it's that being a man comes with an ethical responsibility to make other men better men, and that responsibility is painful because they're not.

Grandmother, Christine has long inferred, had the tendency to view womanhood as inherently degrading, at least when applied to those who'd been assigned male

Whereas, this is just the pits, and also the right-wing status quo. I could be missing something here, but the idea of womanhood as a punishment is pretty firmly reactionary, right?

The Spectacle and Transition

So, I kind of sit the fence between liberalism and socialism I suppose. The Paul Crider essay "Inheritance of Equals" gets at roughly what I believe. And, I came to that by a few milestones, namely a dissatisfaction with Methodism and reading The Society of the Spectacle in like, the late aughts.

I'm not here to do mid-century left-wing philosophy recaps, I'm here to be a good-faith, good-humor cis guy reader. As such, I'll keep this comically, erroneously terse.

I understood Debord to say:,

• Society has become less about being.
• It is now more about seeming.
• It will be more about owning.
• That is, shall we say, bad.

That melds well with the kind of austere Protestantism I tend to bring to the table, and Dorley really throws a wrench in the whole edifice at a structural level.

Because, Stef is not currently a woman. He's using "he" series pronouns, he's living as a boy, he's "valuing self-loathing over identity", as Christine says. And, maybe in an imaginary culture that does not exist and has never existed, Stef could simply be a woman without changing her body or her clothes or the perceptions of other people, but that's not real. What's real is that Christine's womanhood is tenuous without the support of other women and the seeming of being a woman to the people who perceive her and the physical body that she wants. And, at least to some extent, she needs the clothes. The clothes make the (wo)man in part in this book.

So, that's, a huge blindspot in my worldview. And I think it probably comes down to the sort of male-by-default attitude of a lot of the made world? Medical studies overindex on men, "unisex" clothes are menswear extended to women, not "skirts for bros" or anything like that. So the idea of owning something to change how I'm seen to change how I feel to change how I am is just a little bit, stranger to me than I think it would be if I weren't a cis man.

On the other hand, I think (hope?) there are a few ways to reconcile the worry on consumerist-gender-expression, not all of them transphobic. This is getting out into territory that's pretty sketchy for me, so take it with several grains of salt: I'm not a smart man, so this is murky conceptual water for me.

For one thing, the objects of what I want to call "tertiary gender" (I'm thinking of like, Minnie Mouse's bow here; makeup brushes, feminine attire, &c.) are currently consumerist in their role. But that doesn't mean that they're necessarily so, we're just in a very acquisitive time. And, the ownership of the dresses isn't really the whole of it. Christine's non-ownership is tangled up in her feeling of being an imposter partially because they're Paige's dresses, but I think it's the affordance of wearing the dress, the permission to wear it that's the thing that's so hard for her? And so, Paige's willingness to share doesn't make her sharing less effective than if she just gave Christine some dresses, because the sharing carries with it this social vouching-for?

Alternately, I mentioned trans womanhood as detournement pretty recently I think. And, this is more of a blind alley I think, because it kind of seems like for trans womanhood to have an intrinsic artistic or political aesthetic role, it would require womanhood to exist in opposition to manhood. And that's kind of this male-by-default attitude that I don't think is very helpful, just generally. So, I don't know, that feels like a vein that's more about how cis people perceive transness than about how, at least in Dorley, trans people actually feel.

Woof. I dunno. I guess all I'm really saying here is, I gotta retool some stuff I've thought philosophically to account for the obviously real phenomena described in this book as it relates to owned objects and the perception of others. I don't think I've cracked that nut, by any means.

Pippa

I'm really fascinated by Pippa's evolution as a sponsor. I think the point Greaves is driving pretty consistently lately is that a humanist version of reform achieves better results with better methods. I know that works narrowly as a critique of the medical cruelty that trans people suffer, but I think it's also really easy to take it as a broader critique of "necessary evils."

In any case, I love that Stef and Pippa are watching A Christmas Prince at the end.

Greaves keeps pulling me into this fiction because the people in it are so nice to be around that it makes you forget that it's a basement dungeon.