First Thoughts

Sunday Morning

Well, I didn't finish moving the thing over to my dumb little kubernetes cluster. It's mostly there but there's some leftover work to finish up getting my container building workflow to act right.

Friday Night

Alright, a glass of red wine and let’s read a boo- a, oh fuck it’s a long chapter.

A second glass of red, a Friday evening, a chapter of Dorley and hey wait, is Ladytron going to come up in this book? It feels like Ladytron is, like, one chapter away from having deep “Soft Power” lyrical references sprinkled throughout.

Anyway goddamn, I just want Greaves to send out loot boxes of pop culture at this point. I spent so much time in high school listening to Placebo songs. Also, I think the singer from Placebo got arrested last year for some kind of antifascist protest, so he holds up pretty well so far as I know. Greaves has, if not good taste, my taste.

I’ll say, I felt conflicted during the last chapter. Will is not my cup of tea by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn’t feel much sympathy for Maria, given that she’s a core institutional component to his current captivity. This chapter changed my way of feeling on the matter.

Indira, as usual, is a standout gem. I still think her life is aspirational, maybe futuristic, for Dorley. Some of that is just my crippling Iain Banks addiction speaking, but she’s been able to claw back, through great personal effort, a lot of the integrity that’s been forcibly denied for e.g. Vicky.

Maria’s own reaction was quite telling, as well. The rhetoric around reform in Dorley is pretty easy to discount. The sponsors, themselves armed, rely on the implicit threat of extreme violence from the armed military contractors. Declan was brought in as a recruit, and then proved so unsuitable that <REDACTED>. The captives are forced to eat something called “Weetabix.”

Not exactly signs of a program interested in healing. So reading Maria, during her hour of suffering, suggest treats for the boys in the basement came as some surprise to me. The reform angle is visible in the graduates of the program, but it’s pretty thin gruel when the institution is so consistently violent.

Anyhoo, this week my Road Dawg Pound and I read “We Don’t Take Boys For Fun” (callback to Paige saying “Boys are for fun”?) and book 2 is starting to get its hooks in me, despite the fact that this chapter is One Million Words Long and I have been just, criminally busy.

Recap

Aftermath

Rich girls!

Maybe the clearest, most consistent, economic analysis about Dorley is that womanhood is an economic condition. Christine, Steffie, Aaron, Melissa, the litany of people in open retreat from the aristo-patriarchy or subject to working-class-womanhood gets longer.

Maria gets into variety cereal packs and it’s gut-wrenching, honestly. This is the point in the novel when I get on her side. It’s also more evidence that Aaron is, somehow, a wet little gremlin of a man and also, somehow, a Good Egg. His primary complaint has been the unnatural combination of Wheat and Wheat (or oat and wheat, whatever.) And her Froot-Loops-Pilled response has to be taken in that lens. Outside her breakfast reforms thesis, Maria is a very dedicated supplicant to Reform and Dorley, and her singlemindedness in this respect shines through here.

It’s, disquieting let’s say, to see so much in the way of daddy-issues. I’ll get into that a bit more at the end maybe. I’m having a Gender Thought reading this chapter and also having pretty-recently read Kristine Eck’s Coercion in Rebel Recruitment.

Why’d you have to fall in love with a trans girl, Vick? And why’d she have to be so nice? I can’t even resent her for making me nervous!

Anyway, Christine really shanks it and exposes Vicky’s lies a bit to Lorna, in a way that will be difficult later. Just, Jesus H Roosevelt Christ. Christine has to have some kind of a personal crisis of honesty at some point here. My pet theory right now is more or less that she’ll turn out to be nonbinary based upon her roof interaction in the first book, but something is still clearly just barely-mended in her right now. Maybe that’s the second-year of it all and I’m way off-base. Maybe she’s drowning after the driftwood and is due to come up for air and then it’ll be better. But her being so gung-ho Dorley-pilled while Paige is investigating the celestial gender and stepping aside the same kind of bullshit argues that Christine has got a major crisis in front of her.

Anyway TIL what an SNRI is. Not beating the “dumb animals” allegations this week.

Then we get a very sweet moment with Edy and Maria and Placebo. For any young folks reading this, the guy from Placebo is pretty universally accessible in the young Cillian Murphy manner, at least from my point of view. Dude’s objectively pretty.

Who gives a crap? I was only fake on it for six months, maybe it makes total sense that I can’t fucking spell it!

A problem Christine has, maybe the central problem, is her desire to be tragically alone in contrast to her utter need for community and structure. There’s, something there I think. Like, she has so much in common with her fellow humans but she’s just so convinced of her own alienation that she reinforces it even without any help from bigots and assholes.

Meanwhile Back at the Basement

Aaron da best. Honestly I could just post that at this point and it’s usually true. What a sweetheart once you get some good influences in the room. And, also, a good influence on Stef. She really needed people to be responsible for in part. Maybe this is just my dad coming out, but Stef needed responsibilities to which to rise, and she seems to be flourishing now that she has them. I hope that happens for Christine too. Vicky describes it as an institutional failure of empathy that Christine is so involved but maybe she needs to be needed?

Either way, Stef being anything other than uncomfortable and miserable about her own sexuality is new.

Collateral Damage

Of course, Christine hurts Lorna because of her own selfish (but totally understandable) inattention to detail and convenient lies. When Stef meets Lorna I’m expecting, more or less, a Whole Fucking Thing at this point.

Indira and Aaron together are a great combo, as a side-note. Sometimes this really is just a good hangout book.

I feel so much for Christine. Again, trans women and decent men are basically the most natural allies in the world, if we could just get over this shit. All our dads are such fuckos. It feels self-indulgent to write more on the subject. Her mother should leave. She probably will not. You can lead your mom to water but you can’t make her read Why Does He Do That?

Looking forward to whatever Abby is cooking up. She’s been prominent lately and I imagine something good is coming. In the meantime, what’s one more secret.

Endless Bullshit

I can’t help feeling you lot are getting too casual with the whole forced feminisation thing

Stef has been stepping up as a leader in her community (of torture basement residents) but everyone gets tired. We learn about Adam. Son of a founding family (what is that?) and I can sort of feel around that, but I think the valence is quite different in England. I was born a WASP in one of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism and still am usually, and that has class connotations and political connotations and ethical connotations in America that I don’t follow entirely with Adam. My touchstones are, essentially, Westboro or Lakewood outside of what I think of as “normal church,” and so I’m guessing it’s the former.

We learn in a scene to which I am not going to do justice that the boys in the basement are going to learn about their futures. Stef and Pippa listen to what I’m assuming is the song “Meds” by Placebo, given the events of the chapter.

Errant Thoughts

I am having two thoughts this week. One, that institutional manhood is basically the same shape as a rebel organization. The second, that there are ways that trans isolation seems, to me, to kind of reinforce some really evil ideas that come from bigots and smuggles them in a little bit, at least to read Christine.

Prison is a Gender

There’s only so many times you can force a kind boy to tell strangers they’re going to hell before you break him

First off, this is mostly going to be avoiding what I want to call the concrete fiction of logistical details and plot. I understand that within the universe of Dorley, there are existential constraints on Dorley. I get it, there are real fictional details that make certain aspects of Dorley necessary, and those are very interesting to me as a reader when I’m enjoying the book, but not very interesting to me as a writer because Alyson Greaves is God in this place. She sets the parameters, so fine, they’re necessary. Take it as given that sure, there’s this organization and they have constraints, whatever. You’re in the basement, I’m in the sky, so to speak. I want to write about what an organization like Dorley and a person like Paige share with an institution like Manhood and a person like me.

I think I need the kind of Uppercase/lowercase distinction that e.g. PJ Maddy is fond of in Second Philosophy.

So, she’d say there are two notions:

• "truth" (the correspondence of claims with details)
• "Truth" (Maddy would say that’s a fake thing but e.g. the Carolingians described by Gabriele and Perry would have treated it as more important than details)

Really she’d say there’s correspondence theory and Correspondence Theory, but same basic idea. And that’s where I want to say that there’s Manhood and manhood. Manhood is this pervasive coercive extractive structure that is a huge bummer. Is lowercase manhood? I don’t think so, based on, basically Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen (read another book, amirite? Jesus.) But I’m not entirely sure, and I don’t know how a person would be sure, really. I also don’t know how important the question is to be honest, because it doesn’t have any implications for what I do in response.

A very specifically odd reader might have caught, last chapter, that I was relating Paige and Dorley to the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Early on when we were captured, the LRA explained to us that all five brothers couldn't serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my two younger brothers and invited us to watch. Then they beat them with sticks until the two of them died. They told us it would give us strength to fight.

I’ve been conceiving of this project as sort of requiring that I maintain a crowbar separation from all transfeminist discourse, and that’s, obviously, trivially, impossible given that I bumped into this book in the first place. So, l think I probably owe it to myself to unpack some of what it has me thinking about.

I read this, and it slant-rhymed with what I was already thinking about from Paige’s and Vicky’s experiences lately. Also I don’t think Bhatt would give a solitary fuck about any of this; she’s busy thinking about a more urgent set of projects than trying to tease out if/how men ought to fix ourselves.

So, enough gilding the lily. When I read trans women writing about the things to which their imposed “boyhoods” exposed them, I think about the gradient of voluntary to forced recruitment. At its voluntary edge, recruitment doesn’t need force. People willingly commit. And then, there’s social pressure (“join up, I’m joining and we’re friends!”), all the way to the threat or reality of force against the recruit or the family.

This seems trivially obvious as I type it, but Manhood is perfectly happy to take recruits voluntarily, and incredibly willing to take recruits forcibly. Bhatt writes about the lack of care around boys who grow up to be women or womanly. I think a key insight is that that lack of care is part of Manhood. That is, not to forcibly recruit is to fail to have been forcibly recruited yourself. Transmisogyny is a core competency for institutional masculinity.

So, to bring it back to Dorley. Dorley seems like two things at once to me:

• A kind of a cis-trans mix-em-up.
• Relatedly, a forced-recruitment rebel organization.

By the first I mean, I think Dorley is kind of a funhouse mirror that depicts, “what if trans, but cis?” And being trans makes Dorley a rebel organization. And being cis it’s a forced recruitment organization. Manhood, on the other hand is a forced recruitment organization with a fantasy of being rebellious. Just, throat clearing one mo’ ‘gain: I am not making claims about actual trans people or even fictional trans dormitories. I am trying to read into the structure of a fictional coercive organization concerned with gender and to pull out something for my own use. I understand that there’s a lot of wish fulfillment going on in the concrete fiction. And I hope you’ll bear with me; I’m groping at what Dorley is telling me about myself as a cis man, not denigrating the book (incredible) or actual trans womanhood (non-coercive by definition.)

Maybe upper-case Manhood is synonymous with patriarchy but I actually think there’s a class-complex aspect to patriarchy that lives outside of this narrow question. Anyway, Manhood is a prime example of Stationary Bandit Theory in action. And, that’s a pickle, frankly. Because, well, there are these men around. Like, I’m one of them, I’m, you know, a man. I was somewhat-forcibly recruited into Manhood but not into manhood. And so, manhood is in my mind this distinct kind of boring thing while Manhood is a transcultural transnational institution that demands grotesque self-alienation and violence out of men and against everyone else.

Paige is such a great example in Dorley that, you don’t really get much of a choice as long as you’re member to the set. Some guy is going to see me and I’m going to be, well, passively reinforcing Manhood even though I don’t like the institution much. Paige is off doing Paige things (helping Christine, living her life, making a deep independent study of the angelic nature of gender, whatever,) and yet she’s still “Instagram beautiful” and aspirational and liable to be yoinked back into the basement to lend a hand. It’s honestly the same shape as my misgivings with regard to Christianity at this point: I can be myself and in so doing I’m generating this aura of tolerance that dominant swathes of the institution contradict.

What do you do when your own real convictions align with the supposed but betrayed convictions of an extractive institution? Like, the Church sucks, Manhood sucks. There's an erogatory demand to fix them both at least, but when are you supposed to be a rat on a sinking ship (and is that even possible?)

So, there are these extractive institutions. And we’re products of them. Paige. Me. Christine. Whatever. And, even in opposition we end up reinforcing them sometimes. Maybe Paige can twist the institution in a direction she finds less appalling. Maybe I can raise my daughter to demand dignity from men. But, meanwhile, Paige is still a Dorley girl and I’m still a man.

And that’s what brings us back to the LRA and Eck. Eck describes a scale of recruitment from voluntary to forced, and it includes everything from “social pressure” to “forced crimes.” And the distributed coercion part of cisgender means that I can’t actually opt out of those crimes really. They’re just, a thing that my being around does passively even. So then, I like to cite “should implies could” a fair amount, and, what should I do? What should Paige do? No idea, maybe nothing at all. She’s been forced to do crimes, she’s been socially and physically entrapped, and here she is back at it again because of the dynamic at work in her institution.

To bring it back several weeks, this to me explains why some of the trans women I’ve talked to about Declan experienced such worse examples of Manhood than I have actually. I’m low-hanging fruit; I’m some dude and I don’t really care about gender in any appreciable way. I’m a man because I happened to be a man, I don’t have, like, a theorized pride in masculinity I carry around. I like what my body did in my teens and early twenties, and it’s been pretty great. So, why bother being terrible in front of me? I don’t need forced indoctrination, I’m voluntary. Whereas, some of the ladies who write about it described incredibly risible bullshit in Man spaces. Was that an implicit violent recruitment strategy? I tend to think so.

Dorley is important to me because, sure, it’ll make me more empathetic. Like, trans women and cis men should be natural allies because men who want to be free share basically 100% of our foes in common with trans women. A bunch of weirdos telling us not to act how we want and instead to be this oppressive other thing. Shit sucks.

It’s also an important book because it’s genuinely one of the best organizationally-minded novels ever written (look, gender is interesting, but I gotta be real here, it’s only taking about second fiddle for me in Dorley versus the study of an organization under duress, which has me chomping popcorn and turning pages.)

And/but it’s also because it depicts a gender-institution in explicit terms that demands to be considered as such. Seeing a coercive intracohort structure like Dorley pull Paige in is, just, incredibly eye-opening. She’s a good woman, who is better than this bullshit, but here she is doing it anyway.

New Adventures of Old Christine

Christine's loneliness is profound. And it spreads through secrets, lies, and misunderstanding in service of Dorley. There's a risk of dehumanizing yourself in response to bigotry. And that maybe risks doing the same thing to other people. I worry about that when I relate to trans women through my chronic illness.

You have an endocrinology issue? I have an endocrinology issue! Besties. You also think you’re basically a cyborg useless eater, right? Oh. No? Me neither no doubt no doubt.