What did we Learn at School Today?

First Thoughts

I looked back and it apparently took me 2 months to read this book. It's funny because, a) this is a pretty straightforward novel in some respects, and b) the last book that took me that long was Peter Watson's fascinating pre-911 text, The Modern Mind (here lies a Kirkus review). It's also funny because, every time I see someone mention reading Dorley they've entered some kind of fugue state and read the whole weekend through to past where I am now (e.g. I just listened to the first episode of St. Almsworth Book Club and it's already called out there). I don't mean to say that Dorley has been any kind of a slog; it hasn't. But, Dorley is a rich text and a lot of what it describes is, not exactly alien to my experience of the world, but analogic to it. So, I wanted to take a post (maybe two) and get to grips with what Dorley has in it that doesn't fit in a chapter-by-chapter recap.

I'll try not to spend too much time doing this, I don't want to get mired in navel-gazing, and I want to keep writing about this story until I'm caught up. I do want to take the time to take a beat though.

Next week (remember when I thought I could do 1 a day? ha,) I'll keep going with Chapter 16, but I might periodically take a week off of forward progress to write a little more in-depth stuff about the book so far.

Anyway, I think I owe a proper review.

TLDR: What did I Think?

Look, it's a very good book. I made a whole goddamn RSS-to-Bluesky cronjob bot about the fucker, what do you want from me?

• Dorley girls have immaculate taste in pop culture. Fellas, is it trans to like Digimon? Don't answer that.
• Alyson Greaves is a very good fiction writer. This story would be pretty unapproachable to a non-initiate in the genre, but her writing makes it a really gripping experience instead of an alienating one. She shows a ton of attention to detail, she consistently uses these dramatic-ironic chapter constructions that are like a little puzzle box, and alternates warm interpersonal dramedy with cliff-hanging suspense.
• The level of empathy for most of the characters in here does a lot to get the reader involved, even without really understanding what's going on or what it's like to be trans.

I think it's, ah, maybe Important, too. So, if you do know a cis guy who doesn't seem like a prick, recommend it, buy him a copy for his birthday, something like that. I'll get into it a little bit later, but trans politics are kind of a special twin of immigration politics (even more than other health politics are) in that the same common sense can lead to wildly different policy thoughts depending on how much detail the person doing the thinking has at hand.

The rest of this post is going to mostly just be some odds-and-ends about Dorley that didn't quite fit anywhere else in the blog so far. None of them mention Long Kesh so we can all be thankful for that at least.

Photonegative

I was hoping, implicitly, to be a little more personally shaken reading Dorley. I suppose, an ideal outcome was either cracking an egg (hey, if it turned out I'd been a woman this whole time that would've been good information to have), or making me realize a Big Truth About Transness.

I think I've realized some small-to-medium truths along those lines, and maybe we can all clap our hands if we believe in fairies until they count as Profound?

Being a Good Cis Man is Holding your Gender Loosely

This is the output of a morning run, so bear with me if there are especially stupid parts.

I listened to the first STAB pod (I hope that's a fine site? I didn't want to link to Spotify or Apple but I dunno) and the hosts have a segment about what they did to affirm their femininity that week. That really struck me because, if I heard two men doing that it would be 100% red flag shit.

And, I think I understand why Bea tries to keep Christine from "backsliding." My life as a man, I've been kind of in the pocket naturally in some ways (boxing, baseball, the music of Postal Service) for cisgendered manhood. If anything, it's been important and enriching for me to step out of my gender's comfort zones. For example, by reading Dorley.

But for a trans woman, she's basically demanding that the world listen to her say "I AM" twenty-four hours a day and having the world only respond tentatively at best. I've written about the half-empathies and difficult differences between my experience of the world and hers before, but that strikes me as the worst one.

We're both swimming up stream. I'm trying not to be my father. She's trying not to be seen as her father. And there's a common resistance there, I think.

My grandfather was a Unitarian. His first job was singing a jingle, live, before the movies to advertise a local shoe store during the Great Depression. His last was as one of the most liberal magistrates in Texas. He told me that the bar for a good man was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (that was not his line, to be clear.)

Ironically, I'm certain if a good man had raised me, I would have less in common with trans women. The upstream swim, to be, to proactively exist, is maybe the only gendered thread of common experience I can find with trans women. I suppose my priors about trans women were, roughly "women who experienced boyhood," but in writing this and talking with people about their experiences of childhood, that's clearly false. There's some nameless childhood purgatory that trans girls have, and it's distinct from boyhood because it is, just, so profoundly alienated.

This is, I suppose, more to do with writing Dudely than reading Dorley. I'll get back to the book soon, but it strikes me as importantish.

I have come to think that the mark of a healthy cis straight guy is basically, just happening to be a cis straight guy. There are so many of us who are Cis Straight Guys instead of cis straight guys, and it's just so much business to attend to. I think a lot of men spend a lot of their time advertising their attractions, rejections, etc. to other men instead of just, being attracted. There's a nesting doll of closets that are smaller and require weirder stress positions to fit in, and it's just, so much wasted effort. Like, fine, date the girl with the pink hair, nobody gives a shit. Date the slightly-chubby girl, fuck.

All this to say, the effort that cis men put into being perceived by other cis men as cis men is, I guess, gender affirming, but it's inherently closeted. I'm a cis straight guy because I happened to like how my body ended up. Because I happened to like cis women. And, just, is that the weird thing? Because a lot of dudes are shaving their eyelashes or speed-running Barry Bonds physiques and honestly, there's something that's novel, or at least distinct there.

Men Shouldn't be Segregated

Kind of paired to all of this stuff is, men shouldn't be hanging out only with men. I don't mean to inflict us on other genders or anything, but, we get weird, it seems like.

There's this kind of Male Space (TM'd by Emma, probably) that I thought I understood, but I'm coming to see I have had very little experience with. Concerning, as a Cis Man Who Reads Dorley, I guess.

(My credentials, they are in shambles.)

But, it's a little striking to me how many trans women experienced a version of The Boyhood Experience that included some truly fucking heinous abuse. My dad put cigarettes out on me and called me some pretty objectionable terms ("oh, you know the ones"), but nobody ever bragged about doing a rape in front of me.

And, I can only thank the cis women (and presumably the trans men, just by statistics) who were around me to make the weight room and the ice baths into places where we blasted Third Eye Blind instead of talking about deeply disquieting sexual violence.

So there's a lesson from Dorley I guess. I dunno, it's pretty hard to snap this back to the book versus the people I've heard from.

Three Magi

Dorley is a trans story (I am so wise.) But the way it engages with masculinity is pretty striking in that it's in a kind of a limited opposition. Most of the men we see are failures, whether that's Stef and Aaron's fathers (who fail to be human beings to their children), or the recruits themselves (just a Dante's Inferno's worth of sinners.) That's perfectly natural because this book isn't really about them outside the systems that they help continue (rapacious classism, the austerity-to-fascism downward spiral, misogyny.)

I'm not, honestly that interested with the catalog of the failures of men. To be frank, I feel like we've been having this argument since before I was born and there's little new evidence. You can read Last Call at the Hotel Imperial (and you should) and see basically the same one-versus-many, man-versus-woman litany of failures for a century, ever since we had a shortage of demand instead of supply. Like, if you can't accept that rich cis men have done a bunch of bad shit with power, and poor cis men have helped them do it, you probably aren't reading this in the first place.

The exceptions in Dorley, though, are worth taking notice, because I think they start to fill in what a "good" man is in Dorley's (the text's, not the institution's or the fandom's) paradigm. And, I kind of get the sense that the maximalist position is that all men ought to transition, but per the book itself, that's not really the case.

As I count it, there are 3 to date, listed in order of the amount I give a shit:

• Nadeem
• Russ
• Hasan

Nadeem

Nadeem doesn't need much attention here, and his primary virtue is that he'd agree.

His main role is that he's for fun, and fine with being for fun. Paige makes out with him at the club, and they're both fine with the interaction. Insofar as we know anything about him though, we know that he's not posessive, and not turned off by an assertive woman. So there's a breadcrumb there.

Honestly, being a Nadeem for a night is pretty life-affirming. I recommend being a himbo for an hour if you get the chance and you happen to be a man. Sometimes you're Lord Byron, Sometimes you're a hamburger. Read the room.

Russ

I'm on the record as straight up not understanding what it's like to be a woman. I can care about you and want the best and have on-demand opinions on the statistical evidence and conservative arguments against sports bans (seriously, I am incredibly tedious on this, do not get me started, that one teenage girl out of Maine was more eloquent.) But I don't fucking understand it, right?

And that's Russ, I think. His older sister, his best friend, both kind of drift off to be different people and leave him. That fucking sucks. But it's justified, because should implies can, and they can't do anything else.

Russ is a bit of a cypher in all of this, but at the end of the day he's one of the good ones, because I need 3 good ones for this part of the post to work.

Hasan

I've held Indira up as the Dorley-Dream before, and before I get into Hasan I ought to expand upon why. Because I am a predictable cis man, it all comes back to Mad Men.

Don is fragmented. That fragmentation is a sort of spiritual sickness. He can't be a part of his own life because his life is chopped up into montages (now for Capitalists!) and consumption and wanting. The sisters of Dorley are much the same. They have a boyhood (or something like it; I'm still not really sure how many of them are eggs versus abducted men to be honest,) and then a traumatic split, and then a girlhood and a womanhood, divorced from their family and history.

And that divorce is alienating.

It just, is. I could stop talking to my family, and I'm not all that good about keeping in touch(I'm writing this instead of writing a "Family Update" email), but that's to my loss. Maybe keeping in touch better would be better, but the fact is that I don't, and I miss them because my soul calls out for the people who knew me when I was a child. But all that said and done, it's not good for a person to be New. New people can be anything and that anomie is freeing, but you'd prefer to be free and be known to just being a dandelion.

Hasan is a bridge. And maybe being a good man is being a bridge between old culture and new. To be Hasan is to at least glimpse some of the hardships that your childhood friend went through, and to accept that you're not going to get all the details, and to love them anyway. In Hasan's case it's passionate, romantic love, but it could extend to a broader notion of love-as-common-feeling. That love that just says, I feel happy when you are happy.

The Bright Sword: Dorley for Boys

To take a pivot, I kind of want to offer... $10? For a trans woman to tell me how she feels about The Bright Sword.

I've kind of jokingly called that book "Boy Dorley", I've written about it a little bit here before, and I think it illuminates a lot of the gender-class duplex that Dorley discusses.

Briefest Spoilers

For those uninitiated, it's a book about King Arthur, also about the ongoing collapse of the post-war order. Collum is a bastard churl thief from a backwater, and seeks to join the Round Table. Sadly, by the time he gets there, only a few of them are still living, and Arthur is dead. The knights adopt Collum, they seek a new monarch, and come to grips with Britishness, Romanness, Paganism and harsh Christianity.

Back to the Non-Spoilers

Anyway, The Bright Sword spends a lot of its time weighing what's been lost (to my eyes, the post-war liberal world order, but I'm sure that's reader overreach.) versus the paths forward. The whole thing reminds me of the behavioral economics paper on too many options for jam. Or that high-school boy's essay on Andrew Tate fandom.

A man can be a Christian, a pagan, a nothing, a knight, a thief, etc.

Maybe that choice is an affliction. Maybe everyone else's lack of choice is.

In any case, I'd be curious to hear about it because it's the most Gender I've seen in a cis-dude book since Manhood for Amateurs by Chabon.

I think I arrive at that point because, to paraphrase Bea, and I suppose Sartre, one is doomed to choose. And The Bright Sword is the best exploration of what goes into those choices that I've read in a long time.

Dorley and Immigration

This is kind of my last port of call because it's Friday and I still have some work to finish (or for some better reason, take your pick.)

So, I'm kind of a bleeding heart I guess. And, the center mass of that blood has been immigration, or refugees specifically I suppose.

One thing you learn as you get involved with immigration is, almost everyone has the same values on this stuff. They want it to be fair. They want it to be sane. They want it to be ethical. But they don't have the same priors. They don't know that the previous, "overly liberal" system routinely subjected people to dehumanizing, Kafkaesque bullshit.

Something you learn hearing from trans women while you, a cis man, write about Dorley, is that the whole health system is fucking bullshit for trans people. It just is. Liberalism is empirical. It tells us that, we see people. So those people are where the rights all have to live because otherwise where would they even be? And, as a parent, children happen to be people.

I could ramble, I'm trying not to do so because it feels self-indulgent and anyone reading this must know better than I do already. My point is just, immigration and trans political issues are twinned.

A reasonable person with a pretty common-sense reading of facts could know almost nothing about the issues and commit crimes against humanity or know even a little bit and be to the far left of the Overton window. So I guess the hope is that people can be made to listen about them.

The hatred that underpins transphobia and xenophobia are even the same constituent fears, as I see it. Fear of change, fear of novelty, primarily.

• "We can't lose our men to womanhood, then where will the men come from?"
• "We can't lose our women to foreigners, then where will we come from?"

The fix, in both cases, is just to understand that "the glass is already broken", and stop worrying about this shit.

Taylor Swift

1989 is the best album, Midnights is second-best. If you disagree you're just fucking wrong, sorry. 1989 is one of the best albums for running a 10-miler that any human has conceived of.

Errant Thoughts

• I'll be back in a few days with the next chapter. I really do love this book so far, and I intend to read it as long as Greaves writes it.
• I'm serious; give this book to your cis dude friends/family/positively-valenced-acquaintances; it's good for us.
• Sorry that I'm still such a cis guy. I think that's probably a little bit of a let down? I know that part of the OG prompt implicitly assumed that this book would have either witchcraft effects or be impenetrable to a cis guy. I guess some rocks are egg-shaped.