Driftwood

First Thoughts

Is this where Ranked Competitive Breast Growth got its origin? I'm not linking to that, also. I have my dignity and even some of the chapter names violate Dudely House's code of ethics.

Is the Plural of 'Mea Culpa', 'Mea Culpas', or 'Meas Culpa'?

I'm still kind of getting to grips with the endocrinological aspects of what trans people go through; it's complicated and I think I've undervalued that. I'll get into why I think I've done so later on, but I want to separate the admission of error from the exploration of the root cause, and so I'm putting the apology up top: sorry.

Anyway, after last week, a few people reached out to tell me a little more about their experiences and I really appreciate it. Dorley is a really hard text to come into cold, and my favorite part of writing this thing is hearing about people's lives and the context that they brought to reading the book.

Good Ep

This is the first chapter in a few that got me with a cliffhanger. I've been enjoying this book, and kind of lounging around in the student-dramedy of it. I think Greaves has done a really excellent job building a world (or holding a mirror to the real one? whose hands are these?!) and has written some characters I really like to hang out with. But we haven't had anything that hit like the twist at the end of the chapter for me in a while.

Recap

It's really lucky that I read this chapter this week. I had a couple of conversations with people about transition journals and the medical role that estrogen plays for trans women in the last week that are kind of a useful context for this part.

Sick Gains

We start off with a text exchange between Stef and Christine, who's commenting so nicely on her transition diary. I had earlier mentioned that I didn't really get what that was for, and a few of people reached out to tell me either in broad strokes or in great detail about their experiences. I still don't get it get it, I'm sure, but reading what you wrote I'm starting to understand a little bit more. There's a common thread in the stories people are giving me that, there's just so much going on, and so much of it is tied both to self-perception and to physical changes, and to the chemical filters that your body puts between those two. You'd have to have something to anchor you, it seems like, or it could feel like absolute pandemonium, and it can't be your body or your brain chemistry or your social role, because you're changing all of those at once.

Someone else explained it awhile back in terms of tracking your progress at the gym (not exactly my thing either as a cardio bunny, but I have had spreadsheets of times and mileages and weather notes, so, same thing.) Plenty of ways to be.

Anyhow, Stef is on estradiol now, and it's doing wonders for her head.

Shower Scene

Aaron likes girls. That's what all those dick pics were about.

Stef and Aaron shower together, and Aaron kind of half-flirts with Stef. I'm pretty sure that Aaron doesn't even know if Aaron is trying to get Stef to flirt back out of loneliness, genuine affection, or weird ironic humor. At the risk of missing another obvious Aaronism, don't know what's going on yet, here. Aaron does a bit of shampoo-commercial self-display, and if I didn't know better I'd say that he knows he's getting Dorleyed and is just going with it. There's this moment where Stef is helping him wash his hair and he moans, and I think the text supports the idea that Aaron is just doing things without any firm intent.

Stef and Aaron discuss the matter of fighting or submitting to Dorley. This is the main conflict between the nice boys and the mean girls in the basement. And sure it works on the level of human drama as we've seen and will see. But it's Greaves writing, so presumably it's also a social commentary, and I think a clear one?

Dorley is a mirror of real life mainstream gender norms, and the people with the guns and the violence are, most obviously, the state. So the question of whether or not to fight is, I guess a stand-in the question of whether or not to actually transition? I get the sense from reading the stories people have shared, and from Stef's own attitude prior to getting black-bagged, that there's a period during which a lot of trans people at least play with the idea that they'll just be trans without doing anything about it.

The fact that this book is very clearly pro-transition would really strain that reading except for what happens later.

Stef's Secure Masculinity

Aaron says something in the shower about Stef being "so secure in [her] masculinity" that's interesting in light of the rest of the chapte.

Later on, Stef calls the Future Washout Boyz the "mean girls", and, it's interesting, Stef is kind of acting more stereotypically masculine in this chapter I suppose. Using "girls" as a term to minimize them, punching Declan, forming a little boy-tribe to scuffle over couches, that's all scrutable as the act of an early adolescent boy.

I think, with anything about the Basement Boyz the Stanford Prison Experiment comes to mind. They are here because they have been put here, and they are treated as prisoners because that's their assigned role. The sponsors are literally one degree removed from the same population, and are themselves not free. The whole thing is on some level designed to create these structurally enforced conflicts. To bring it back to Stef's masculinity, Stef is being treated as one of these boys, and that system of treatment to some extent makes him one of the boys on a behavioral level.

I don't know if that expands beyond the literal events very cleanly. And, I don't know if I'm just reading too much into what Aaron said. Maybe he meant that Stef is unburdened by performing masculinity, not that Stef is manly.

State-Provided Hugs from Cops

Aaron uses his Weetabix as a pointer. "Stef has movie nights with his. Meanwhile, Maria treats me like a disobedient child."

"Perhaps if you didn't behave like a disobedient child," Will says, "she might upgrade you to deeply unpleasant adult?"

Aaron's getting physically neglected, so that might explain why he's so clingy with Stef. It didn't occur to me earlier, when I was naively writing 4 paragraphs ago, like a fool or a baby. He legitimately has probably been touched very few times since he got down here, and apparently not at all by the approachable authority figure in his life. So, there's a motivation, whether or not Aaron could even explain why.

The sponsor/recruit relationships at the heart of the book are always the funniest parts. This chapter is a little shorter on that sort of thing, but the interplay between the basement and real life is ah, rich soil for metaphors.

Finally, Declan comes back.

Aaron Boner-Watch 2025

Ok, so Aaron's claims that he's just been constantly whipping the wire, flogging the post, rubbing infinity out, Jackson Pollocking the walls, taking a lot of Personal Time for Self Care Now More than Ever - those are all coming from his insecurity about his "puppy-dog-tail" no longer working like it used to do, right?

I'm convinced; that guy's dick never worked good! He's got bad-dick!

Declan Comes Back

You're so funny Aa-ron

I take it back, I do recognize this kind of dude. There's always some kind of evil-avuncular guy at your first job, telling insane stories that you hope aren't true about how much of a monster he is. Mine's name was Chris, and he would not shut up about doing cocaine and catching STDs from someone. He also hit on my sister to an appalling degree as a power play. Sense of humor badly attenuated, only there to be another little rhetorical cudgel.

How do you solve a problem like Declan?

He's back in genpop with the other dick-boys, harshing the vibe, and he's serving as a handy metaphor for the kind of periodic rebellion the boys are inclined towards. He not so subtly threatens my favorite troglodyte Aaron.

God, Once More the Ethics of Dorley

And here's another small round of "Dorley is not a good place".

I'm thinking about it, and it's actually bizarre that I haven't yammered on about Discipline and Punish in the context of Dorley. That's real character growth on my part, so I guess I'm backsliding when I say what follows. Dorley is about Stef, and about being trans, and also about state and societal repression of people's natural inclinations towards their own gender. The real basement is the everything anybody ever made along the way.

Generally speaking, it's probably best to take Dorley on its social-commentary level or its "metaphor of closettedness" level more than its "blacksite " level with attendant war-crimes.

Specifically, I keep coming back to this because of the Price sisters' hugner strike after the Old Bailey bombing. Very briefly, the Price sisters were in the Provisional IRA (the spookier IRA) and they led a car-bombing that injured hundreds and killed one. They were sentenced and locked away in a men's prison. They began a hunger strike which lasted 208 days. It lasted that long because for 165 of those days they were force-fed. In 1975 they were moved to a women's prison in (Northern) Ireland. Also in 1975 the World Medical Association issued the Declaration of Tokyo, prohibiting the practice.

Now, I'm 100% not transvestigating the Price sisters, just offering that they're my main point of reference in reading Dorley. Because, frankly this book is kind of hard to understand if it's not in your wheelhouse already. Dorley is not a book about a trans pitcher deciding whether or not to go into the MLB (someone please write that book, also, it'd be a great story and I would read it and make my friends read it. The role of pitcher is already distinct from the rest of their team, isolated and yet indispensable, also the easiest role for the first woman MLB player to fill.) It's in effect about being in the wrong prison. The surface comparisons are, pretty clear I think? The state, putting you in a place not made for your gender, acting like it's fine. The state, intervening in your bodily autonomy while also denying any potential bodily utility for you. The other inmates, leering at and cursing you.

So, reading Dorley as metaphor, and giving even some casual credence to Foucault, it's a pretty damning set of charges against society as a prison for people outside its narrow norms.

How does any of this apply to Declan? Well, there's a spectrum in Dorley from "accidental rubes" like Stef and Adam to obvious targets for murder like Declan. So, maybe I'm wrong and Declan will figure it out and become a new woman, but nobody in this institution believes that's going to happen. The whole edifice is pretty convinced that he's human flotsam and is going to be disappeared. And that's really the inhumane crime, not the assassination of a terrible man, but all the Business of it in between.

Clothes, it Turns Out, are Fun

On a much lighter note, out of the basement and into the bedroom we go.

Christine and Paige fool around, I stop reading this on my work computer and resurrect an ancient T-400 from the grave. Aunt Bea seems to have disappeared and murdered nurse Karen, which is another itsy-bitsy warcrime but hey we're all having fun here, and Karen was part of the biz of her own volition.

It's all fun and games until someone loses their --

I love the novelty mugs they are so good.

Christine, perhaps like Aaron in the future(?), benefits from the physical touch it seems like. Maybe it's just correlation, and she can be with Paige because she's less self-alienated, or maybe Paige is helping to pull her out of a rut. Either way, I like both of them as characters and I'm enjoying what I hope isn't a Doomed Romance (TM).

Monica yanks open the door to the entrance hall. "Not quite," she says, pausing on the threshold. "It'd just be Melissa, sitting alone at the kitchen table like the bloody Twilight Zone."

Institutional Dorley discuss the tactics of reforming Declan. We get a hint that maybe Melissa was also trans, which would not be surprising? A theme that came up after talking about the bullying boys do to boys was, that that didn't happen the same way to some younger trans women in their childhoods. Like, the coercion-to-belong wasn't there. So, trying to extrapolate from that (and maybe failing, hmu) it'd make a lot of sense for 2 trans girls to find each other as children and see something in one another even if they were both in the closet.

I guess I just wonder what proportion of men who walk into Dorley weren't.

Aaron's Penitence

Down in the bad-vibes basement, the boys have formed tribes. Very "driftwood."

Stef keeps needling Aaron about his dick pic crimes, and Aaron pushes back. I think, rightly so to be honest. From his perspective Stef is supposed to be equally damaged, and is a withholding friend who guilt-trips him. And compared to the other boys down here, I think Aaron is the least bad, so if Stefan won't even say what he did, he has no right to criticize Aaron (from Aaron's perspective.)

Christine talks a lot about being a different person than the boy who got dragged into Dorley, and I wonder if that difference is going to keep Stef from being as close to Aaron in the end. Their common experience is going to be based in part on a lie. Indira and Christine can be sisters in part because Indira went through the same thing; Dorley is their mother. But I'm not sure how Stef will feel about the person who walked in. Talking with people about this online, there's this recurring theme of getting to have the adolescence you never did before, and I wonder how much of that is English linguistic structures versus a feeling of continuity and being made whole.

All that to say, Aaron is being made new. Stef might be being made whole, not being made new.

Not the Egg Society of Great Britain

Christine has this habit of turning to technology when she gets stressed or scared. I dunno if that's just that she's a l337 hacker, or if there's a deeper meaning there, but it kind of lines up with the times that she's the least or most alienated from her body.

But, in the spirit of overlearning lessons as a reader, let's look at some clothes.

• Very stressed? "Vests" (this island disgusts me) and shorts. Hacking the security cameras.
• Doing well? A cute top and a skirt. Chatting online.
• Having the time of your life? Dress, which goes spinny. Touching grass.

Someone told me that the forum stuff is in part a callback to another Greaves book, and I think that's all the chatter about Girl Alex's boyfriend. The more interesting part to me is what cicada has to say.

cicada so this is the thing cis people DO NOT see this kind of thing, like EVER I know that sounds fake but it's true, almost none of them ever look at a 'boy', even one who is visibly gender-variant, and ask them if they're trans, it just doesn't happen yes ok maybe it happens in like, queer circles, where everyone's a little bit gender, but 'ordinary' men and women, the cishets, they don't see ANYTHING if the guys who live with your friend see nothing but an amab kid with, I'm guessing, a personality closed up tighter than her hoodie, none of them are going to ask, hey, kid, are you by any chance an egg??? it doesn't happen we're the last resort of cis people's imaginations they'll ask if we're two sheep in a trench coat before they ask if we're trans

This is why trans men have an easier time passing, right? The same kind of "unisex-means-menswear" male-by-default lens? So being out is an extra fight for trans women because outright repression by the state is only the most obvious layer that you have to resist. Even after the medical parts and setting aside the potential for organized institutional harms, there's still the fact that you have to be loud in some capacity, and not everyone wants to do that. I imagine it's a muscle you build as a trans woman or a cis woman or anyone nonbinary, to be loudly enough yourself that other people can hear it.

Paige knows something's up, and it's basically that Christine is doing machines instead of doing Paige. I'll be glad to have her in on the truth next chapter if Christine tells her - I imagine that that will help deal with the aftermath of this one.

Fight! Fight!

It's funny how extremely wrong cicada was.

The Nice Boyz push the Mean Girlz off of the couch territory through strength in numbers.

Stef overhears Declan describe being a violent rapist.

Stef starts a fight! With fisticuffs!

Look, this feels, ah, stereotypical but my blood is pumping. I know it's unlikely that Stef wins such a fight, or avoids sanctions as a consequence, but fucking get his ass Stef.

Great chapter no notes.

Errant Thoughts

Forced Feminization Fiction

I did not know before talking to Marilyn about an earlier chapter and some more of the context of Dorley that this was more or less a genre-reconstruction for a niche kind of erotica. I, may be genuinely too stupid to read this book without a literal study guide. I've mentioned that a few times, and maybe the gaping holes in this blog are useful as ideas for what to put on Dorley Genius in the future.

I've said that I think most cis dudes ought to read this book, and I think I was not quite right. I think we all ought to read a book like this one. And I think that this is a very good book.

That said without a lot of generous help from online strangers I'd be missing basically all subtext in here? Some of that's maybe even intentional. This is "what if I read a book?", not "what if there was a book?" so I don't want to read, like, the Dorley TV Tropes page to understand the full scope.

Anyway, the scope and depth of my ignorance is my greatest accomplishment to date.

The Limits of Empathy, the Power of Solidarity

On that note, I had a couple of interesting conversations with people after my last post, and not in a direction I expected. The basic line of things is, I really didn't/don't understand what estrogen does for trans women, and that's true, but I wanted to, I guess, unpack some of why I'm maybe extra-slow on the uptake.

I have a chronic endocrine disorder, and I was a chubby little kid growing up in a place where that wasn't the best thing to be, socially. Those are sources of what feels like a kind of a useless half-empathy. Because, if I go without my continuous medical hormone drip (AHEM), I feel, very bad. And then I presumably die. So far so good: a hormone supply I need from society! And I probably have some kind of a lite exercise bulimia, if we're being totally honest. Some sort of dysmorphic relationship anyway? The cardio, I'm saying, it makes me pure (read: conventionally attractive if you like butts.)

Because I don't want to say that being trans is a disability, or that being trans is an ugliness. That'd be just profoundly rude, when it comes down to it. And a rudeness I don't believe, more importantly. There's pretty clearly a different cultural complex centered around trans women than the treatment of sick men. Nobody loses their goddamn mind when I take my meds, as a trivial example. But, any empathy I have from my disability leans into pathology, because I'm legitimately sick. That's not a deep biopolitical statement or a controversial take: my body don't work good, the end.

And I don't want to say it's shallowly about physical appearance, either, to speak to fatphobia or My Fitness Journey (kill me). Because it's obviously not that, either; case in point, as Stef describes, it's the right music being in your head and the wrong music being out of your head (and even that is a supposedly inadequate metaphor per Stef.)

All of that to say, transness is hard to get in terms that aren't analogical for me, and the easy analogies all suck shit and feel like they're insulting. So in some ways it's easier to be like, "Yeah, your gender stuff, good for you, sounds like Magick." But even then it's kind of, uh, facile to just say "trans women are sorcerers", right?

Anyway, being sick is not being trans, being trans is not being sick, but there are common experiences there that are hard to talk about without feeling like a real piece of shit. And being awkward in puberty is not being trans. And being trans is not being adolescent. But, there's some common ground there too.

I think the honest truth is, we live in a world where we don't have to choose between helping trans women be who they want to be and feeding people; these are the possibilities for our grandchildren that Keynes talked about. So I hope it's enough to just think "transition on demand", and leave it at that without necessarily getting it in some deeper way.

Wrap it Up, Sad Cat, Fuck.

Okay. This was a good chapter. I suspect I'll read the next chapter in the next 24 hours and write about it by Monday night. Because I have a spot of free time, and I'm really enjoying it!