The Sense God Gave Her

First Thoughts

Ironically, reading this over last weekend just gave me more time to stew on the book instead of giving you a faster post. Oops.

This time, on Dorley, all of the unsustainable little schemes that Christine ceased to sustain, and now Bea has her own unsustainable little scheme. So I guess the sisters of Dorley really do leave an impression on the organization; the church is the people, and all that. I know there's a chapter left of the book, roughly, so I'll try to keep this post a little shorter (Ed: I failed. Badly.)

Review in Brief

I know that Dorley attempts to take in bad men, but I think Greaves undercut this chapter's and the last's events a little bit. How so? Two ways:

1. By so heavily emphasizing the mistakes Dorley makes and its vulnerabilities to tampering. It's difficult for me to see Stef punching Declan as a clue to transvestigate Stef versus an indicator that she's one of the mopes and innocents and fuckups who could end up here. Maybe I'm coming to the chapter with a poor understanding of how bad the average recruit is, but "did a violent rape" isn't the kind of thing that usually wins friends and influence in my experience.
2. I know I liked the cliff-hanger, but by splitting the punch and the aftermath, something kind of fell out of the bottom for me in this chapter. Still good, but one of the weaker ones in the first book If I'm being honest. The structural ironies and collapsing house of cards? Love it. The next layer of the onion for Stef? Love it. The argument from Bea? Honestly kind of a tough hang for me.

The climax of the book is really sound as a matter of plot but it's a shame that I split it in 2 sessions. That's a problem for me, reading a 2 part finale as if it's really 2 distinct chapters, but I don't think it's a real problem for the novel, or for a reader who isn't spending more time writing about the book than they do reading it.

So, oops, the blog interfered with my reading the book, thus defeating itself. Many such cases probably.

Alons-y

For those yeomanlike Dogz of the Road reading along, this post is about The Sense God Gave Her.

Recap

Aww, no Fight Scene

Where we left off, Declan was telling a story about being a violent rapist so Stef cold-cocked him. The guards drag them apart, tase Declan, and Stef has a heart-to-heart with Pippa.

I know, I know, it's not that kind of book. Fiiine.

Stefan’s never wanted so much to hurt someone. It’s not a pleasant feeling.

Honestly, hard disagree. To summarize Swarm of Bees, "it can feel good to be angry." And being angry at someone who deserves retribution when you have the ability to inflict it is, just a rare opportunity.

That's not how you throw a punch.

I remember the first time I tried to punch someone. It was this apoplectically bad telegraphed left-hook and the dude ducked and then just kind of pushed me over. Stupid day. Stef, had a much better result but maybe a broken hand, too. It's sweet that Aaron checked on Stef. I'm sure things are... tense after the physical confrontation with Declan among the other recruits, and one thing I'm still really looking forward to is seeing Aaron transform into whatever Greaves has in store.

Pippa and the Aftermath

She always took care of me. Even when things got bad, she’d be there for me, to calm me down, to talk me through it. But it all ended when she met a man a bit too much like Declan. ... We all saw him coming. Even me. He got angry at the slightest thing. A horrifying mirror, actually, for me, although I didn’t truly realise that until much later. But we all tried to tell her: me, my dad, her mum, we all tried. And Sarah, she’d say, 'It’s only when he’s had too much to drink,' or, 'He’s trying to change for me,' or, 'You don’t understand him, but I do, because I love him'

I recognize this. I think pretty much everyone knows someone who has been abused, or has been themselves abused. I don't know Pippa's story yet, but the "horrifying mirror", is a little bit of a preview maybe. My question to all of this is just, why waste the time with Declan in the first place if he was obviously a washout? There's this James Baldwin quotation, something like, "by the time I was 17, you have done everything that you could do to me." And, to invert it, by the time Declan was 17, he was already this irredeemable creature. So why the half-effort now, exactly? It made it monotonically worse.

Limits of Patience

It's kind of troubling, now that we have the bounds of Dorley's reform in sight.

On the safest edge, there are mistakes and innocents like Stef. People who might only deserve to be here because they deserve something good to happen to them, or who don't deserve this at all. That leaves you with captured cultists like Adam, and negligent manslaughterers like Moody Martin, as a kind of minimal case. Everyone in the text seems to think that Martin is a lost cause, but honestly I think he's a Dorley mistaken recruit as well. Conventional rehab for alcoholism would have been just as viable a method of reform as far as I can tell. And, we know that Declan is so far beyond the pale that he's been forcibly disappeared and then murdered.

So when Dorley talks internally about being an institution for reform, that's quite a narrow case. A wide band of Dorley recruits are either accidents or hopelessly doomed.

Anyway let's go watch a movie!

Legally Blonde?

Coincidentally, my wife showed me this movie finally about a week ago and it's an absolute hamburger of a movie. Which is a compliment.

I gotta say, it's, ah, kind of bullshit that Stef doesn't get punished after the fight. I'm close to certain I would've acted the same way, but from Dorley's institutional perspective, that was pretty far out of bounds. What does it do to the group dynamic to know that Stef is the favorite, and can get away with intra-basement violence with no consequences? Nothing particularly stabilizing I wouldn't think.

It wouldn't have been just for Stef to get punished, but in what institution has justice ever been more important than predictability? The Enforced Disappearances Clubhouse does not strike me as a compassionate institution, at its core.

Fuck Declan, what's Going to Happen to Christine?

All the same, good riddance to Declan. He was a real bummer of a character to have laying around, and while I'm curious what the rest of the book will say about him (Is he actually dead? Do people feel good about that decision?) I don't really need "violent bully threatens the characters I like with impunity" as a plot device.

Now we turn back to Christine and Paige. Thank Christ she tells Paige about Stef. Not just because if something were to happen to Christine, Stef would be, what, double-disappeared? But also because Christine is such a great character to root for. I really love seeing her learn to be in the world (checks calendar, winces) and it'd be horrible to see her shove Paige away after all the fun of getting to read Paige's scenes too. Paige is such a well-drawn character; every extra quirk about her feels surprising but also lived-in. She's sort of tertiary to a large swathe of the book so far, but she might be my favorite.

On that note, Alyson Greaves introduces characters really well in this book. I think by giving us tidbits about them and kind of easing us into the details, she's managing to do the kind of writing that usually takes an audience-proxy character and delivering it without one, at least for me. I suppose that might be Stef, since he's the newcomer to the basement and all, but when we're meeting most of these people it's throught Christine's perspective. There might be some intentional cueing there to us as audience that Christine is still very much in the midst of becoming (oh hey, right, the butterfly dress) but either way, it's engaging stuff.

I can stop, you get it -- Greaves is a killer writer.

Anyhow, Christine tells Paige.

"I can’t believe we finally hooked a girl," Paige says, peering at Stef. "At least, someone who knows she’s a girl already," she adds, grinning, "and not just a painfully obvious uncracked egg like Vicky. A real-life, self-aware trans girl! What’s she going to think of us when she moves upstairs?"

Damn Lies

I'm still kind of dubious of this claim. There have been generations of Dorley girls right? So that 1.5% estimate would say they had a few already. And, ok let's stipulate that trans women probably don't do unhinged violent toxic shit as often as cis men (I'm not going stats-digging because I think that the stats don't exist and/or it'll be a blowout.) Sometimes, though, per Stef or maybe Adam, bystanders get shoved into the boiler. Well, I guess Stef and Adam are a quarter of the recruiting class right? I guess we don't really know exactly how long Aunt Bea has been in charge, but Karen's still around so it's not like, 30 years probably. So, I suppose, Stef could very well be the first. Useless digression, but I'll leave it in because I think I've been pretty skeptical of "Stef is the first one" in the past, and now I will accept that claim on its face until there's a plot twist to disprove it.

(Finishing a Huge Bong Rip): They Know!!!

What do you know, Stefan Riley?

Pippa did her own research, and knows that Stef isn't a horrorshow.

Who are you really, Stefan?

I didn't notice the slip-up from last chapter! God, I'd say I need to pay more attention but it's a fucking miracle I'm reading this at a reasonable clip, let alone writing or actually comprehending things.

Then why do you keep lying to me about the injections? ... It’s not okay. It’s barbaric

Bad scene, everyone's fault.

The lies about the injections are a war-crime if you're a country, so they're certainly not not an ethical oopsie-woopsie. Maybe it's just a provincial interest in my balls, but secret forced-transition is potentially double-no-good-very-bad compared to mere forced-transition. Actually, now that I say that, I think it's structurally clear why; for basically the same reason that enforced disappearances are even worse than just getting kidnapped. "Is my body changing or am I losing my mind in this torture prison?" is a pretty brutal thing to ask yourself daily in a concrete cell, one might reasonably conclude.

It’s worth it in the end

This chapter is like letting a deep breath out slowly. I'm glad that the characters I like are relaxing their shoulders and using their words to communicate for a little while, just as a change of pace.

The Roof Once More

Stay tuned time-after-next time for my nascent "Dorley the cultural construct is shaped like Dorley the building" essay, but it really is.

Eileen the Crow is, if I recall correctly, the gatling-gun lady you don't have to kill? She's like, up on a tower in an optional corner I think, and would really prefer that you stop murdering her patients (who are big scary monsters)? I should play Bloodborne again, just to nail down the details.

She’s not going to be mutilated. She’s going to be saved.

It's really surprising to see Dorley (the text) be so frank with the difference when Dorley (the fandom) are, shall we say, morally flexible on the matter at times. And I get it; I think about 3 posts ago I was musing that maybe we should forcibly castrate all zoomers because some of them like bad podcasters.

Dorley lies in a really stark contrast to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Because, Pippa justifiably believes that she's doing evil, and is a convivial and gentle person with her own functioning moral judgment (like when she spares Stef) in action. She is not banal, she is not evil but she's part of a system she herself believes to be evil. Which is, cognitively dissonant, but not really Stef's fault particularly.

Two Can Keep a Secret if Both are Implicated in the Same Felony

The secret exploding exponentially was probably not going to be a stable event. Aunt Bea visits Stef in her cell, and is casually terrifying, so good for her. It's so easy to forget just how much of a panopticon Dorley is but now Stef's bad op-sec has bumped into Pippa's bad op-sec and here we are.

It is a considerable burden, and she took it up for you! You understand this, yes? Then how dare you inflict that suffering upon her for no purpose!

So, bullshit. This is absurd on its face, right? Pippa signed up to do a long-form torture. The intent to torture is distinct from the intent to do helpful medical care, and Pippa's was habitual and premeditated. The absolution that Dorley offers is justified on a motive of reform, but entirely enacted through a method of torture. There's no way around joining such a system. Also, Stef is already perpetrating the same system by having voluntarily stayed in the first place, so it shouldn't be any great lift to join up officially.

Aunt Bea gets into the hostility that Dorley would face as a public institution if they turned into a boutique transition service, but the kidnappings are probably an even bigger logistical problem.

You have, therefore, experienced masculinity, and particularly the kind of grasping, possessive, abusive masculinity that we as a society have decided is appropriate to teach our young men, as nothing but a curse, correct? An unpleasant and often entirely irrational system of behaviour to which you have been expected to conform, and uphold in others.

This is a tough monolog to analyze for me, because I can't really tell where Bea as the speaker is coming from. Is this based on a particular wave of trans-specific political analysis in history? Is it a second-wave feminist critique of masculinity? Is it a Greaves author proxy speaking to Stef? Are we, the reader, supposed to see this on its face as an argument for Dorley contained by Dorley or as an argument for Dorley contained in the broader world? I dunno. I gotta think that this is meant to be a critique of masculinity taken to an illogical extremity.

'The Illusion of Destiny' versus 'Clash of Genders'

Just, Out of Time to Land the Plane

Full disclosure, I wrestled with Bea's pitch to Stef for like, 3 and a half days. I think there's about a book worth of discussion on adapting Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny to oppose 'clash of genders' conflict as opposed to 'clash of civilizations' conflict, and I am not going to get 'er done this week. I hope that if you've born with me so far, you'll know that I know that men commit the lion's share of violent and dominating acts in the world. And that I believe in a sort of spiritual sickness (a masculine memetic virus maybe?) in my gender as it tries to fight off monstrousness. Anyway, here's what I ended up with!

Back to the Action

Once you are in its grip, you can never be strong enough, never exercise enough power, never hurt enough people. You find yourself trapped between two destinies.

A good line but a falsity I think. The word "destiny" is a big blinking siren of bad reasoning to me, generally. It's draped in symbolism, and almost defined by binary cartoonish contrasts that seldom exist in real life. Destiny is about clashes of civilizations and heroes and villains. Masculinity isn't a great satan, and I don't think that there's an inevitability here. Rather, I think the cold violence of Dorley is self-defeating in the pursuit of a reformed broader masculinity. I know Dorley is secret and small. Its methods, though, are in keeping with the broader project of crowbar-enforced-gender-distinctions. Its ideas about men needing to be alienated from their own bodies are in synergy with the contemporary trends on the bigotted right to alienate young men from their bodies.

Bea describes the forced feminization as a necessity to undo the casual objectification of women. And, it seems like Dorley gets results in Dorley, but its results are filtered through a survivor bias (that Greaves readily shows; Bea is a character doing faulty reasoning, I think, as I write throught this -- it isn't Greaves using Bea as an Ayn-Rand-style author-proxy).

I've written a fair amount in this blog about growing into a man. I'll indulge myself a bit more in doing so here, because I don't know that the positive aspects of that are really accessible to a trans woman reader. I think there's a pretty nearby alternate universe where I'm an incel. I've got some risk factors:

• Late bloomer
• So online that I'm reading Dorley
• Was a real uggo for awhile

Objectification probably steered me off that path, but it wasn't some kind of "you-don't-own-yourself" moment, it was a 1-2 of feeling like I finally did own myself a little bit (Yay sports! Yay clothes!) and being subject to the female gaze for the first time.

It's striking that the alienation is made an inherent part of the objectification in the case of Dorley recruits. I'm sure there's a swathe of women who feel alienated by objectification, full stop. But when women objectify men in real life or in fiction, it's pretty hot, to be honest? Don't bonk me, I'm being serious. I'm thinking of like, a random episode of Grey's Anatomy where Burke cooks Thanksgiving and the show spends a lot of time focusing on his hot-dude arms. Because he's a hot dude cooking a turkey. Or the pool-shooting scene in Normal People by Sally Rooney. If you haven't read Normal People, you should, it's a sexy-ass book for sad people. Baste me like that turkey, Burke. Bend me over that pool table, Connell. They're just hot scenes, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe it's the authorial intent; they're sexually charged on purpose of course. And I guess there are a ton of objectified men in e.g. every war movie, they're just not objects of desire.

Why am I talking about this? Because the objectification is already there for men, is my point. It's just usually coupled with alienation, not intimacy. And Bea's vision relies intensively on an alienated object. I'm not so sure that that's why, in Dorley, this stuff works. I think it's more like, these recruits are inextricable complexes of body and soul. Not meat-machines, not fallen-angels; people. And they've failed. Not as men, but as people. So, when Christine talks about not being "him" any longer, it's because she's a new woman, with a new life, and has gotten to escape her failure.

The alienated objects of manhood (torture victim, mutliated casualty, stoic anonymous soldier,) are usually bent towards fascism not liberation. So, Bea's only success stories are kind of the exceptions, and the washouts are closer to the rule. The intimate objects (big sexy turkey arms doctor, Connell) really do seem different on some level. And it's not just fictitious, the female gaze is inherent to any kind of real intimacy for a cis straight dude. We like feeling valuable as pieces of meat. So, making more objects of violence and alienation seems short-sighted is all I'm saying really, and Bea only gets results because of:

• a torrent of dead bodies to skew the numbers, and
• a supportive environment inhabited by well-intentioned young women who nonetheless are part and parcel of a torture basement

As I said: you used us. You used Pippa, particularly; made her into an accomplice in your torture.

This line of reasoning is still faulty in my mind. Pippa already intended the torture, and Stef had very good reasons to believe that there was a risk in telling anybody. Also, Stef has been an accomplice to the other recruits' torture this whole time. So what does Bea owe Stef in return?

Welcome to the Team

I guess it was always going to go this way; at some point Stef would be a sponsor even if she flew beneath the radar. I'm excited for the next stage in this story though.

What did we Learn?

Aunt Bea's pitch is kind of deflated by the fact that we know what Dorley is for already as readers. I wonder if it's different in the published book (I'll buy a copy and find out soon; I just haven't gotten around to it.) That's a bit of a structural issue with the book, becase it sort of needs to work. I think it's a little bit maudlin, and a lot bit dismissive of individual choice. Again, "destiny" is a red herring to my way of thinking.

From my perspective, the real institutional reform Dorley needs is that it ought to be split. In finance, it's usually the case that a conglomerate trades below the sum of its parts in the end. For example, there's probably pent-up demand for owning shares of YouTube, as opposed to Google right now. Dorley has a brand problem that seems pretty easy to solve; just split off the black-ops murder-kidnapping wing from the medical services wing. Hell, you can keep recruiting secretly for the one in the other, if you'd like. But surely there are 8 Vickys, Mels, and Stefs in a year to kidnap, and then you can just go murder some bad dudes on the side if you like.

And just like that, you have 2 successful moderately sized firms with clear mission statements.

Errant Thoughts

Reform and Retribution

I don't have a ton else to say about Declan's fate, I suppose. It's good someone did something about him, both outside and inside the walls of Dorley. It's bad that he got extrajudicially kidnapped and murdered. It's worse that he got disappeared. The whole thing is a goddamn mess, and it's hard to read a good-faith attempt at reforming him into the way the institution treated him. So why recruit him at all, instead of just killing the fucker? Would've been cheaper. Would've been more humane.

Journaling

A couple of people now have sent me their transition journals, and I think I get a bit better why Dorley is such a big deal its fans. I want to caveat, I'm not going to say anything remotely specific about these, or what's in them. I do think it'd be kind of odd not to at least mention the themes I noticed in common with Dorley.

Grape job, bring an article into the universe of discussion and then banish it. Wow, what a wordsmith, who even needs humanities majors amirite?

For me, Dorley is a kind of odd book that I like pretty well. Its prose is well written, and economical. Its characters are likeable. It has a subtle, detailed focus on institutions and their character which I don't see much in fiction. It has a sense of friendly dramatic irony present at all times. Its action generally drives forward, and when it doesn't it's because there's a Big Thought Chapter or a Hangout Chapter, and I like both of those as a way to give the book some time and the reader some room to breathe. I get the sense that I'm reading Dorley pretty slowly compared to other people, because I have to write these things, which takes longer than the reading, so I don't ever get to "just one more chapter" it.

But, and again not to overrun the evidence I refuse to present here, the stuff going on with the characters in Dorley really does correspond to people's lives in an incredibly specific way. Stuff like, the introspection Stef shows to figure out if he's going through Gender Dysphoria or "just" dissonance earlier. The way that Stef feels about his body early on in the book, especially. Seeing that repeated in different ways with the same strong undercurrents. The girls' night out and these bursts of vibrance once they are out.

I've been doing this for weeks and skeeting about Dorley with a cortege of trans women. So, I've read and believed that this book was empathetically important, but a lot of that conversation was oriented alternately on the physiology of medicine, or on the sociology of gender(ed) institutions.

This is all kind of obvious on its face, I guess. It's not even new-to-me, just really reinforced by seeing people's parallel experiences to the book.

The biggest lesson I got from the journals about Dorley was just how inconvenient it is to transition. So much business to attend to. So many little beurocratic hoops. No wonder Dorley is a fantasy; just having someone take the wheel, pay the bills, and take care of the transition stuff to set you up.