Batter Up

Sorry to drop a weekend; it will almost surely happen again but hopefully not for a long time. I went camping the last two weekends, once on Cape Cod, once on an island in Lake Champlain, hence the skip week. There are Very Cold Beaches in both places, which is good. It is July, and it's the approximately 2 weeks of actually hot weather we ever get.

My daughter is at a very "why?" age right now, and during our dozen or so little beach excursions, she pretty consistently asked "why are my hands wet?" after sticking them underwater to grab a rock or a shell. I told her, "because water, is wet."

That is the level of keen insight which I will apply to my analysis here.

Table Setting

This time me'n'the road dawgz read "Waterslides", a kind of curve-ball chapter for me.

It was good, but it took me until the second read-through to think so. I really liked meeting Shahida, I'm very curious where that will go but I presume she'll be a force to be reckoned with in the rest of the second book. The Aaron perspective stuff is causing me to like, physically tense up and my shoulders are over my ears reading about his experience. Which, hey, probably the point in part. It's not a comfortable time to be Aaron. Nonetheless, those passages were challenging for me.

I guess I don't spend that much time reading fiction (could leave it at that honestly) that's so ambiguous. It's a testament to Greaves that Dorley can sustain the level of layering it does and be any kind of coherent. But, you know, close-reading the basement-cult deacon does wear on at times. And the alternative is being stupid. It's not like you can just take these things at face value.

If Greaves weren't excellent (or I weren't writing this blog) I think I'd probably have bounced off by this point. But, it's good writing, well executed and conceived. I just had to kind of argue myself into reading it? I probably would've skimmed it or skipped over it if it weren't for the blag. I only mention it to say that this book is not becoming an easier hang, exactly. I'm excited for the new wrinkle that Greaves introduces at the end though.

At a meta-level, when Greaves shows Lorna or Stef becoming "mechanical" in their protests, I sort of empathize. Because, there's no book without most of the parts that I find tough to digest. It's tied up in the core conceit of the whole story.

In any case, what I'm left with after some of these chapters is just the sense that, maybe we sink Britain and make everyone else in the Anglosphere learn a Gaelic properly instead.

Recap

2007 August 7 - Peri Park Holiday Resort

We meet 13-year-old Shahida at a swimming complex with her mom and Edward (the new boyfriend.) A glass stately-pleasure-dome of swimming. The family moved to Almsworth after her father's death, using life insurance money, and now they can afford this.

This is some dozen years ago (is that "a stone of years ago" in British?) and Shahida meets Melissa-then-Mark. I get the implication that she's maybe Melissa's Elizabeth.

Shahida is Melissa's age, making her a few years older than Steph. She likes, or even loves, to swim, and she never could get to a good pool while her father was alive for economic rasons basically. But now that she's moved to Almsworth and her mother's getten together with Edward, they can afford to go to Peri Park.

British Senses Going Off

This is back before the second round of double post-Imperial balls-sitting that the UK has since performed so I think Shahida was probably pretty poor not to be able to get to a reasonable swimming pool? Maybe my Yankee is showing. God only knows what benighted place Shahida lives. "Penrith and the Border", "Blemingfordshire and the Dire Straits."

Time and money, work and responsibilities

So, that's fair, families get busy. Her parents should still have made time for it if it meant that much to her but sometimes you drop the ball. Anyway, there's some kind of baseline "in this economy?!" going on here. Shahida is not well to do. That's typically been a signal of not being a ghoul in this story.

Water Parks, and the Slides in Them

Waterslides, are covered in water.

Swimming pools? Filled with the stuff, generally speaking.

When Greaves highlights water, I obviously think about "Driftwood", and "The Fallen General" from "You're Just Someone I was Forced to Know", and the various shower scenes. She's established water as at least a kind of a motif around femininity. In light of all the Jesus-y stuff floating around recently, I'm inclined to think she's framing transition as a baptism. Which, in Dorley makes sense; it's a somewhat ambivalent book about the role of community in curtailing our choices. It's also a book about being thrust into a cult, and into a millennia-old institution (womanhood, generally.)

For Shahida, there's kind of a quickly-had surface analogy that maps onto the recruits in the basement.

Her dad dies.
She goes to Almsworth.
She gets access to joyful life-affirming water.

The order's a bit off, but the freedom of water comes to Shahida in the absence of the man she spent her childhood with. I don't know that that's anything, but it's just lying there asking to be mentioned.

What might be even more of a stretch, but in for a penny &c, is the contrast between her and then-Mark is her being a dork for (everything, but also) Peri Park, versus his hesitation. They both end up in the water though.

This passage, as I read it, sets up a potential tension between Shahida (positive dork) and the methods of Dorley (torture basement) for reform. But it's been over a decade. Then-Mark is now Melissa. So maybe Shahida's changed too.

Shahida

paradisical

Love to get another outsider who can stumble through. I feel a kind of solidarity with all the confused characters of Dorley. She really reminds me of my little niece here. So enthusiastic about things, and so outgoing and expressive. Just, fatherfully, the line about "missing puzzle pieces" made me tear up because I am the biggest softy and we're cleaning house in a major way right now.

Anyway, curious what 12 years of intervening UK have done to her, hopefully nothing too horrible. I will watch with great interest to see what else we get to learn about her and then-Mark's friendship.

London is like, a Short Train Ride Away from Essex County

Seriously England. I checked my phone and it's a slightly long Chicago commute-by-train to get to London. It's less time to take a train to Edinburgh than it is to drive basically anywhere, ever.

2019 December 11

Lorna and Jodie speak for awhile about the Decision to live as cis or trans. I wonder if a WoD stream would be very good, or so utterly painful to observe that I might experience True Death.

The online presence vs NPH dynamic seems like a really interesting metaphor for the closet, again. Paige's Instagram followers vs Jodie's WoD stream vs their NPHs kind of look forward at the omnicidally-online culture we've created post-2020. There are all of these anonymous people perceiving them but distanced from them (lots of Panopticon-adjacent stuff in this chapter, speaking of WoD.) And their self-conscious venues for expression are bound by the expectations of their audiences.

And to underpin Lorna's argument to Jodie, Jodie worries, but in a way that's subtly disjoint from how Paige worries. Jodie's scary observers are more about the state (the UK) and the institution (Dorley) than The Market (engagement), but those are really the unholy trinity that catch the girls in a bind, aren't they?

Aside from all that, this kind of a commentary on passing vs being out is just interesting. Like, the closest thing I ever have to choose to that is which regional accent I'm going to codeswitch to in a given room. And this isn't particularly close to that, it's code-fixedness instead of code-switching, in some sense.

It's an interesting conversation, I'm saying. Lorna makes some great points, security through obscurity is not actually security.

Re: Jodie's Penis

Dorley insists that if Jodie does decide to be cis in her NPH, she gets another round of surgery.

It's a little Dorley-as-bizarro-NHS moment I'm guessing. Like, yes, logistically it makes sense too, but the whole "only such and such kind of person gets to be trans" theme seems like it applies (or its inverse, I should say.)

Dorley Orthodoxy Cannot Withstand Easily Contact with Transness

It's not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. ... [A] hyperbinary, both natural and necessary to reinscribe at every turn

Just another note that, per Edy's conversation with Bea in "Gunpoweder Boy", conventionally trans people necessarily throw a wrench in the regimented project of Dorley Hall. Dorley's evolving reaction to that will be really interesting to watch if it goes anywhere.

In Old Worse Dorley, the very notion of a latent femininity was treated as another lever for torture. I guess I can map that onto like, the historic British torture and murder of Alan Turing, but I'm sure there are better examples that Ball Knowers (or I guess "No Balls Anymore Knowers") could give. And then in New Better Dorley, the idea is that the recruits must be converted into women. Specifically.

I know! Gender’s fun, isn’t it? -- Amethyst

That is not the official position of Dorley Hall. -- Beatrice

Like, looking back at "Butterflies", we have this uncomfortable interaction between Bea and Amethyst around pronouns. Amethyst plays it off pretty well, but it's pretty clear reading the chapter that it's a tense moment. The ambiguities that come with humanity are still at odds with the system of the institution (sorry to link this again but I just find it relevant again.) Incidentally, I don't think that it's an accident that Hancox-Li has been so clear talking about "reactionary camp" without diving headlong into truly gross misogyny of her own. The other people I've heard on the subject pretty quickly devolve into kind of appearance-shamey focus on the women of MAGA. And, I'm all for being mean-spirited, but it's good that Hancox-Li doesn't spend all of her time on the women when the dudes are right there being 5 stddevs from normal at all times.

I'm not trying to manifest a futuristic trans Joan d'Arc figure to die heroically for the future. I worry it seems like I'm putting a Special Responsibility on trans people in the above the way that liberal Yankees sometimes do with Black women. That's not my intention here. I'm more saying, authoritarian-minded institutions don't really know how to deal with transness. I don't think that they can know. And yes, that's also a strong practical reason for coalition building.

Back to Dorley, an authoritarian trans institution. That is, maybe a little bit inherently unstable? A lot bit inherently unstable? A contradiction in terms, even? Some new kind of person will introduce themselves to the little boxed-in world (of Dorley, of wherever) and then the whole thing needs revising all over again.

Basement Level - Aaron's Struggles

I'm going to gloss over some of Aaron's ongoing tribulations, basically because I don't want to spend another thousand words ranting about Dorley, Dorley, and the limits of choice vs destiny. I don't have much new to say on that front, and Aaron's suffering is disqueting.

He's going through what I kind of assume is gender dysphoria, because his body is changing against his will, but that's not really anything new. He knows what the institution he's in demands of him, but unlike a trans person in real life, he knows that he'll end up capitulating to Dorley. He doesn't want this, everyone knows, everyone loves him, and they're doing it anyway.

What do you do with that, ultimately? It's a bad thing that they're doing to him, it's not the first bad thing that's been done to him, and he has done very bad things also.

Medical Consultations

Fuck, that's actually terrifying.

A Tiresome Lecture

Indira gives Lorna a talking to about the harm that she caused Christine.

I'm ambivalent about the Indira part of this at the threshold. I can't really tell if it's in good faith or not. Like Lorna, I'm inclined to think it is.

As a matter of interpersonal drama, this is all absurd in the extreme and I have to roll my eyes honestly. These women kidnapped a bunch of actually and allegedly horrible young men, sure, and I can make some allowances for that.

But, and I can't stress this enough, also Stef when they had no evidence that she was a trans woman or a normal recruit, and briefly Lorna. So color me skeptical about some of this wounded attitude, next to the torture dungeon? And "assault", really? This after Christine kidnapped and then threatened Lorna? It's like, here we are next to the casual mutilation, and we're papering over real crimes.

And so there's my escape rope to something for which I have a bit more appetite. Let's turn it on its head: in mirror world, we're fretting over whether or not trans people are difficult to explain to especially sheltered cis children. Meanwhile we (global meta-society; the rightwing globally; whatever) mutilate a bunch of them, by denying them the straightforward pharmaceuticals that let them become. So viewing Indira as a stand-in for, well, her exact opposite, there's an echo of how outrageous that must feel? Getting lectured next to the torture dungeon.

And again, contact with non-coerced trans women heightens contradictions within Dorley as an institution because the element of personal choice creeps back into the conversation.

The genuinely creepy part of this exchange, to me, is,

Still. I think she wants to take Paige and get the hell out. -- Lorna

She does. But she’s young. -- Indira

I found that kind of chilling. I maintain that Christine's role in Dorley comes at huge personal expense to her. She's simultaneously incredibly fragile and needs to be cared for, and has this taxing organizational job to play in the blacksite kidnapping ring. So this notion that her will is to be treated as childish is the cherry on the shit sundae, more or less.

In need of deep and affectionate care
Load bearing responsibilities
Too young to know what she wants

Just, a recipe for a perpetually suffering child. So, Dorley as Omelas then. Or, a human sacrifice. This is tongue in cheek, not a real piece of analysis, but let's put the Christ back in Christine I suppose.

Moving right along,

Steph and Lorna Chat Once More

The jealousy dynamic I was expecting really didn't pan out at all yet. Lorna's going to get the deluxe treatment as a bribe more or less, and so the two are on relatively even footing. That's nice because it lets Lorna be an extra audience proxy for the second book, but one who can go outside the building.

I really wonder how Abby messed up with Melissa. I'm sure we'll find out later.

I’ve not met a single one who isn’t happy, and I’ve met most who are in the building.

That, does not seem true to me on its face. Julia and Yasmin, for example. Abby herself, with her covert familial ties back again. Whatever happened with Melissa (Steph hasn't met Melissa, of course.) Obviously the washouts. I have to chalk this up to Steph doing some motivated reasoning, and getting good and comfortable with the banal evil of it all. Maybe those women are happy to be women, but Dorley is not making them happy women, per se.

The Panopticon

He follows her gaze: the light on the camera bump has gone red. He looks around, and all the cameras are the same. Switched off.

Maria and Aaron have a strikingly candid conversation about all this. I'm trying not to harp on what they're doing to Aaron any more. You get me by this point: I think being a man has very little to do with being a bad man. I'm very glad that Maria is so kind in this moment. He's breaking down pretty badly it seems like.

The constant observation is maddening and it's interesting that he behaves, according to his self-report to Steph later, more femininely when the cameras are off. More eggvidence maybe, but I think it might just be a combination of oppositional-defiant disorder and a conflicting but desperate need to please the observer. And that constant performance in here is interesting in part for how it flips Bentham on his head, and maybe Foucault a bit too.

The panopticon is supposed to enforce discipline, but for Aaron it has the reverse effects just as often. His performance swings between straightforwardly aiming to please and self-consciously trying to piss people off. The problem seems to be that the observers are also observed, and their reactions are also stimulus for the inmate.

Aaron's wankathon from last book was at least partially performance. He was being watched. He knew he was being watched. He was acting out as a part of his performance of being a prisoner and a man. Critically, it's moments when he's the most private (not the most alone) where he's the most feminine. In the shower. Telling Stef about his new sexual awakening. He is, in any case, imprisoned. In a basement, duh, but also in all of the eyes on him. Each person watching him locks him into his performance of masculinity, currently. Barring, sometimes, Maria and Steph. Before, for the bullies in the upper crust. Then at St. Almsworth, he created his own prison bars, first metaphorically and then literally, by harassing all of those women. Demanding to be seen, when being seen is apparently fucking horrible for him.

I've been, honestly, pretty skeptical of Maria's assertion that Aaron would fall back into his old ways. How would anybody in Dorley know that? They're risk averse to the point of madness, and they'd never risk Aaron going back at large as a man. For that matter, outside the practical historical record, there's the fact that Aaron is a human, with the capacity to learn and choose and grow, and the desire to do so. And new friends to keep him steady.

But the difference between Aaron's behavior on-camera and off-camera makes me reconsider Maria's perspective a little bit. Maybe she's right; maybe his understanding of manhood is too flawed to be repaired (especially by Dorley) and so any means necessary are justified to retrieve his humanity.

An Inexplicable but Brief Detour into Dred Scott

This is gonna be one of those little non-sequitur sections I can't help.

Obviously now we have to consider Lincoln's response to Dred Scott v Sandford, nothing else seems as relevant even if it's a cliché to talk about it in the context of panoptica and basement-dungeons in the UK.

For context, Dred Scott was an enslaved man in the USA. The people who held him in bondage took him from Missouri (slave state) through Wiscconsin (free territory.) He sued for his freedom upon his return to Missouri, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled that Black people could not be citizens. This was in 1857, after the first Republican candidate for the Presidency, as the country's politics reoriented around chattel slavery as the explicit political cleavage of the time.

Lincoln, in response:

All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrent of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

I think it's worth considering surveilance as prison, and coercive gender presentation as prison,just a bit, in that light.

If for Aaron (and for a lot more people than just him,) being perceived with expectation is a prison, then each one of his little perceptible failures is binding him. I know I'm about 1mm from "did you know that gender is a prison?!?!" right now, but hopefully I'm bringing something of at least passing interest to mind.

Aaron has himself been disappeared. If anything he's the least-seen kind of person that can exist. There's a nice little irony then in the relief he feels from being completely hidden. Maybe this is rock bottom for him and whoever came out of that room is a new person. But, he's in this bind where all the powers of earth have combined against, not him exactly, but the person he could be. The systematic honing of Aaron into this maladjusted little pustule instead of a proper human being.

Take then, Jodie and Paige. Also bound, basically, by the eyes of strangers, and the hostility of the courts. We used to have this working theory of the Constitution that a right to privacy emanated from its penumbra or somesuch. And, I think that might have been watered down precisely as it became increasingly urgent from a civil rights context.

What am I on about really? Honestly, I've been thinking about panoptica a lot lately, and I'm a real Lincoln sicko. Simple as. But too and again, a stratified social order cannot survive prolonged contact with freedom.

Mammon is most certainly anti-trans. The richest man in the world is hell-bent on burning everything down because his daughter had the gall to exist.
Ambition does, in fact, follow. Gavin Newsom and his ilk are (wrongly) convinced that fucking over trans kids is the way back to power.
The theology of the day is, in fact, fast joining the cry. The United Methodists, to their credit, forked over quite a lot of cash to win their schism and let trans deacons into the church in the last decade, but the mainline churches are kind of a reliquary at this point. The theology of the day we are not. If anything, Will and Adam's shitty little sects (scientism, fundamentalism) are.

So, that's all kind of grim, but Lincoln was always kind of grim. I wouldn't take it as a forecast.

So, Lorna and the Basement

Trying to think about what the basement would mean to Lorna. It's the last place before the seeds sprout or the eggs crack &c. What's Lorna's basement, I guess?

There's a pretty facile "rock bottom" comparison here still. I mean, it's literally the bottom of the building. A place where you can only get better (or, you know, get washed out and turned into an servitor by the Adeptus Mechanicus or whatever.) My family has some addicts, and none of them want to go back to where or who they were when they got into whatever program worked for them, but almost all of them are still in that program.

Anyway, logistics! Lorna and Stef meet with the electrologist and Mrs. Prentice, the surgeon. She's, uh, some kind of notable regional inhabitant and/or caste member. I think she's moneyed?

What the fuck is a jelly salad.

It’s like pulling an olive out of a jelly salad.

Cis Man Mis-Empathizes with Orchie, News at Eleven

We butchered a rooster once and one of its testes burst while we were removing the organs. The sympathetic gorge-rising was similar. I know it must feel very different for Steph to talk about that, to be clear. Just, I cannot let such an analogy go unremarked. It's, ah, very affective.

Steph and Maria talk. I'm glad we get to see so much more Maria than we did earlier on. Her new lease on life seems really healthy for her, and as a result the boys. Making it about reform instead of implicitly about punishment and all that.

And then Steph and Aaron touch bases.

Once More to the Basement

Boys might. I don’t.

Who's talking, Aaron?

I can't tell if Aaron is an egg, and it doesn't matter. He's a Dorley recruit so all of this egg/seed stuff is kind of mooted by the actual mandated destiny he has, even post-grad. Aaron will have an NPH. He will be a woman unless he becomes nonbinary and Bea signs off on it. And, survival bias aside, he will very likely come to identify with that outcome.

Aaron and Stef recap the day's events.

Aaron muses that he's what's left after the guy who came to Dorley died. I can see why Aaron would feel that way. He's been removed from his context, and later he goes on to describe not recognizing the face in the mirror. He's undergoing a kind of death, for sure. And, Dorley will turn that to the good as a rebirth.

Aaron's ideas about what it meant to be a man were pretty far off the mark, huh? I really do wonder if a few months in the basement, without the forced transition but with Steph's good influence would fix him. But that line of dialog, "Boys might. I don't" just says so much about how alienated he is from the world. It recalls how Stef thought way back in early book 1.

Well. Brits. I don't know.

Boarding school kid picked on for his height and his accent and his family’s lack of connections.

I always forget about the accents. I like to think that I understand class some, but the UK's level of distinction seems to be very different than the USA's.

The Missing Person Poster

There's a "missing" poster for "Mark", let's fucking goooooooo! Get hype!! Woo WOOOOO!!!

Dorley's discretion is, maybe not as good as they think it is. Chrisine being on the case might help, but Christine is also spinning a lot of plates.

Of course if Stefan felt that way about The Melissa Who Was Promised, somebody else could. Frankly, I'm very excited to see what Shahida's role is from here on out. I hope she hasn't been left cold and dark by the absence of her friend, I really hope she's not a TERF because it'd be a bummer, and I will be making popcorn for the next chapter.

I love it when Greaves has a cliffhanger.

Errant Thoughts

Panic World

Relevant episode from Garbage Day's podcast Panic World on TERF island's notable former children's author.

Matt and Ryan talk about the "why" of TERFism in the UK and connect it to class and media in a way I found pretty interesting in the context of Dorley. It's worth a listen if you like this sort of thing.

I still clearly don't viscerally appreciate the depth and breadth of corruption in English aristocracy.

How to Love a Forest

Only those who love trees should cut them

I'm reading a few things in my off time aside from Dorley. For one, How to Love a Forest. And I think it's good so far as a book (I have not read the full text yet and cannot vouch for it as a whole.) Also, it has a little bit to say about the Dorley ethical bind.

The world is. Et in Arcadia ego, and all that.

And, it being kind of an off-the-wall comp, you could take anything you wanted from that.

The Sisters are only capable of doing good work through their love of the people that the recruits are underneath their bad habits.
In contrast, the Sisters' ironic distance (from the recruits, the horrors, their own trauma, whatever) is, at root, counter to their project's reformist ideal.

Anyway, How to Love a Forest is not about that, at all. But it is a good book so far, and it gets into that Leopold land-ethic thing. "What's good is what's good for the ."