Time to get Lisa Nowak'd Up and Rescue your Former-Self's Found-Foster Little-Sibling

A few people suggested in the last couple of months that I might want to read "Everything Must Go" and "Like an Angel" back-to-back, and having now read both, this chapter is more fun than the last, so that makes sense. "Everything Must Go" is a tough act to follow, though.

The choppy perspective-switching creates a cool frenetic energy in this chapter that works really well. Woven through is Aaron's less outwardly exciting drama, and the realization he's coming to accept.

Interventiaaron

Christ, she’s a weight on this fucking place. She’s a black hole, distorting everything around her.

Yes,

She should have let Christine get her out, accepted her offers of help, found a way to transition on the outside.

but no.

Steph's cognitive dissonance here is strong. On the one hand she believes that Aaron does not deserve this fate. More on that later. On the other hand she believes that she is culpable of complicating the machinery of that fate.

There is a knot there, of course.

You mustn't interfere!

lol.

You Talking Hume to Me?

[S]he didn’t even consider that the others might have needs that matter

Strangely enough, Steph's moral confusion here hearkens back to a conservative from way back with an unprecedented and undefeated hat game (just, CW sexism about Hume, among other things, if you read him. No excuses, but it was before A Vindication of the Rights of Women, to set expectations.)

[T]hough it seems a very simple proposition to say, that nature, by an instinctive sentiment, distinguishes property, yet in reality we shall find, that there are required for that purpose ten thousand different instincts, and these employed about objects of the greatest intricacy and nicest discernment

Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals tries to ground morality on empirical observation. And, of course, Steph's reflections here reminded me of Hume's writing on the origins of the morality of property. Hume argues, basically, that sentimentality is the root of morality. I don't know that that moral philosophy makes any kind of sense, but I think it's a useful framework for Steph's experience.

It's also worth reading, and shorter than almost any chapter of Dorley.

I mentioned that Hume views sympathy as the root of moral feeling. That's as opposed to any kind of natural moral order. That's not to undermine morality in Hume's case, just to divorce it from nature, more or less. Now, quibbles with that aside, I want to talk about bodies and property. Steph's body, when she was Stef, was not hers, I don't think.

Like, I'd argue she had a right to it (see caps-locked epigraph) for basically the reasons of Hume's justification of property. But she had not taken possession of it ironically enough for a future basement dweller. Her parents had a share of it, the state had a share of it, and maybe I'd say that a portion of it was hers for the easy taking but unclaimed.

Her experience so far is, I guess, a two-fold enabler here for Steph to claim her body, and then to validate the claims of others:

She is no longer under extreme stress about getting shanked with a plastic spoon in a basement dungeon
She has taken possession of her body

Should Implies Could

Steph's guilt arises from a sense that she's been selfish. I don't think that's accurate, I think she's been pretty generous all things considered, but that's her position.

How could Steph have possibly empathized for the other recruits? Their condition boils down to "being forced gradually into a body and gender not of their choosing." And while that's Steph's experience on the surface, she hadn't ever actually had the body and gender she'd choose given the chance.

So, the condition for them was doubly abstracted. In contrast, once Steph begins to grow into herself, she appreciates their plight as more than a theoretical concern.

Owning Oneself

It will naturally be expected, that the beauty of the body, as is supposed by all ancient moralists, will be similar, in some respects, to that of the mind; and that every kind of esteem, which is paid to a man, will have something similar in its origin, whether it arise from his mental endowments, or from the situation of his exterior circumstances.

Ultimately the violation against the recruits is the theft of their bodies. Well, Steph never really owned a body until she was in Dorley, I'd continue to argue.

In any case, the specter of losing their autonomy didn't animate Steph because Steph had no sentiment about losing something that she did not think she could ever have. I'd say, because she was cut out of the system of bodily property by her society and her state, the "natural approbation" for good didn't move her; how could it/why would it?

Anyway... Hume Says Trans Rights or Something

Steph needed to know more to be able to feel more, in short, and needed to have more (of herself) to know more. Honestly I wonder if that gap is responsible for the true believers?

Steph becomes, well, self-possessed at a different time than the rest of the cohort, and/but unlike Melissa, is more self-assured. So, in contrast to the women who saw their cohort emerge from the same soup, she's getting a very differently oriented concurrent view of what's happening to the other recruits.

There's, a thread there to pull there maybe, about trans women's perspectives on manhood. Someone should pull it if it strikes their fancy, I'm curious what that difference in sentiment means about mutual misunderstandings (versus one-sided ones.) In other words, just how inaccessible are trans women's thought patterns to me? How inaccessible are mine to them?

I think it's tempting to overstate the difficulty or deny its existence outright. To say, either we're basically mutually inscrutable or else all just brains in different jars.

"Stupid boy!"

Steph starts recycling old hits from a tough childhood. Horribly, they're all misgendered, so that adds an extra spice to the soup.

We're talking whole unexplored avenues of parental-driven self-loathing.

Revisiting Steph's generosity with the other recruits (well, Aaron really) for a moment, this is a sign that she's nowhere near "baked." It's easy to let something slide for an organization that doesn't have enough staffing, especially if it's going well. I hope that someone's really keeping an eye on Steph's health because I do not think that she will do that herself.

As I say that though, I have to remember that she's been so numb for so long that having these little stabs of remembered pain is probably actually good. Like when you come inside from the snow and your toes warm up. And, for Steph, the femininity is at least part of the mental health support she needs. I'm kind of just assuming that the bumps and bruises of being closeted mean she'll need something supplemental there too? To help get the "stupid boy" demons out of her brain.

James's Parenting Corner

Calling your kid "stupid" sucks shit, just as an aside. It goes against the entire project of parenting. Self-defeating, self-aggrandizing, nonsense. I think I've been underrating how shitty Steph's childhood was.

Gaylor Total Cultural Victory

Moving on, I really was underestimating the amount of TSwift these gals got up to. Melissa is going the distance (going for speeeed) to save Stef, but Stef is a fiction; there is only Steph. And Melissa's boss is a cool dude.

The causal chain leads inexorably back to her.

That's an enlightening worry. Melissa doesn't seem as inclined to take her own life these days, but she still really really wants out. Of, I guess, connection? Wants not to be involved, in some sense?

She's having a full on freakout about Stef/ph (understandable), and Zach is a mensch. He gets her the space she needs to take care of her shit, and off she goes to trigger what seems like the climax of the arc, if not the whole novel.

Not if Shahida Causes the Climax First

I love it when a plan falls apart.

Not misgender, though. Not if she’s right.

Yeah she knows something's up, let's fuckin' goooo.

This is another place where Greaves breaks with my expectations, that characters be stupid and miss things until much later. I really appreciate that about her writing style! She resolutely ignores that cliché, and it is one of my least favorites. I am thrilled that Dorley doesn't have much in the way of extra avoidable miscommunications.

Shahida worries that she forced herself on Melissa. Did she? Honestly unclear from the prior chapter, when you get right down to it. I think, a lot of it depends on their respective levels of intoxication to be frank.

She was, sexually reckless with Melissa? Recklessness isn't by itself wrong, maybe, but avoiding recklessness is a great way to avoid doing wrong.

Her perspective on herself here, as having forced herself on Melissa, is intriguing, though. For one, it demonstrates Shahida's conscientiousness. I get a one-sided view on this, so take it with a grain of salt, but a lot of women don't seem to believe that they have access to sexual malfeasance. Hard to add sufficient detail around that claim without this becoming a fucking interminable post, so take it or leave it, evidence-free. I'm mostly talking about the inter-gender version of locker-room talk and slightly talking about some shitty behavior on the part of girlfriends and one-night-stands past.

Maybe that cavalier attitude is all just bravado. Or a code-switching thing for mixed company. Maybe it's sincere. Either way it's interesting to see a woman wrestle with the possibility for one of her formative events.

Shahida jumps on AIM, and gets the gang together. Not a bad idea. It seems like she did not keep in touch very well. I suspect that the events of the prior chapter have something to do with why. Weird how the "not having it together basement torture society book" has so many good ideas for social hygiene.

<3 Mark

Shahida has a cool mom.

Can one ever get used to abject loneliness?

I like the double-meaning there right after critiquing Shahida's tenacity trying to find "Mark." I also feel a sense of relief that the characters in Dorley also have the occasional spot of trouble with names and apparent genders and time. That's, you know, tricky conceptually because it feels like such a faux pas to fuck it up, and also it's kind of an inverse Ship of Theseus situation.

My spidey sense goes off when Shahida starts photo-shopping a synthetic Melissa. That seems a little bit transgressive, but maybe I'm just being precious about it. I guess, she's learning something about someone who was very dear to her.

But what's in that secret folder?

Vampire Queens: The Seven Great Houses

Mark's beautiful. Just as he always was.

Jesus, I look awful.

A little bit of levity here, if not later.

I wonder why Dorley didn't catch on to the eating disorder. Maybe they did and didn't give it enough attention. Maybe it was hidden in the traditional womanhood with which Bea wants to equip the girls. Maybe it's welcomed, implicitly.

Diversity Win?

Lashing out because you’re feeling angry and isolated again, Aaron?

Fuck it. Who’s he kidding? Steph’s Steph, and no revelation, no matter how appalling, can change that. Steph’s Steph, and she’s a fucking liar.

Aaron's reasoning here is genuinely pretty impressive, I find, even down to the dissonant realizations that her sin is lesser, yet he cannot make himself okay with it.

She'll have a reason.

Good bit of tension set up here with this refrain. Steph has reasons, and good ones, but will she reveal them or is she still effectively under the Judas Goat order?

Disclosur3: Micha3l Douglas g3ts Throat Canc3r

For all the noises I make about the melancholy resemblance to Sally Rooney or the narrative style like Deborah Cohen's, my real favorite thing about Greaves' writing is that she lets characters learn useful facts when it's plausible.

Maria spills the beans about Steph's Judas Goat situation to Aaron, even after he'd already worked out that there was something going on there. Hitting it out of the park, these two are.

Steph's Sponsor

If Stephanie had to convince her flipping breakfast of her value, be an honest advocate for her own hunger before it would let her eat it, she’d starve.

I think Steph picked a good time to break it to Aaron. That could've gone on far too long, maybe forever, and I'm glad that she told him. On the concrete level, it's a time when Aaron has gone through something intense, and when Steph feels a lot of guilt over it. So, good. Aaron's safe, let him know your part in it, and then you can be friends(+) in good faith.

This is one of the earlier moments of support for a recruit that can be read as such without caveats, I think. The institution is genuinely help two of its fledgling members navigate a complicated situation.

Shower Scene

Stephanie Middlename Riley

It's good to see more and more of Pippa in the second book. I should really go back and reread the first at some point in hard copy, since I know there are at least some differences there.

Aaron learning about Steph is a big deal! Hurray for Steph. She should not have to lie, because "should implies could" and she clearly cannot.

So, we're in the shower again with Aaron and Steph. Which, yes a water place. But I don't think it's simply that this is a big moment for Aaron's burgeoning femininity. The shower has that, but it's also the scene of some of the most intimate moments for these two to date. Dealing with Declan, the scalding incident, the conditioner, &c.

It's kind of like returning to the scene of the crime from Steph's (flawed, overly self-critical) perspective.

Step one of recovery [...] was learning to laugh about it.

Yikes.

Melissa

Okay, so here she is. She has retraced her steps all the way back to Dorley. Damn, good for her. Melissa and Steph kind of act like an Ouroboros in Dorley up through this point. Steph seeks out where Melissa transitioned seeks out where Steph was kidnapped. A mess, maybe a necessary one.

One thing I quite like having Melissa as a perspective character is that it throws a wrench in "utopian Dorley," which is a less interesting reading of the text, for me, anyway. I don't need a book about how I should just be a girl; I'm all good on that count, honestly. The interplay between all of these people and their flawed institutional system is, as such, just a lot more fun for me to read.

Melissa also, taken alongside Steph, draws a really interesting contrast. She's someone who did want what Dorley has to offer, and who still couldn't come out the other side happy. Presumably that's in part because of the fear, the violence, and the coercion, but maybe it's also because of some significant otherwise neglected pharmaceutical and therapeutic needs?

Anyway, come to this chapter we got:

Tories getting reelected (is BoJo leader in Dorley? Did Brexit happen? My canon is that Jeremy Hunt won the leadership election, because that speaks to a truly illegible alternate timeline.)
Polycrises at Dorley Hall (Shahida and Melissa and The Holt Creature and...)
Deeply unhappy people from Manchester. One thing America and the UK have in common.

Maybe this Is the Climax of the Second Book

Shahida sees Melissa, goes to Dorley. The pot's boiling over!

During these little vignettes, Greaves switches perspective constantly, and by so doing gave me a sense of acceleration and loss of control. It's a great way to get me to tense up and plug into the action.

Melissa and Steph

Rabia makes a mental note to ask Maria to take her off the emergency rota and put her on the real emergency rota — do not call unless the Hall is sinking into the Abyss — and turns off her phone. Goes back to work.

Dissolve to...

Steph and Pippa are working on dressing, etc., when Melissa finally arrives. Melissa finds Steph, which kicks off a bout of dysphoria for Steph because:

Being seen is hard.
Melissa does not know that Steph is trans.

In a moment of extreme irony, Melissa starts to kidnap Steph, and it falls too Christine to take action.

They're Transing the Dinosaurs with their Gay Frog Genes!

We’re womankind; we’re the ones who inherit the Earth, remember? What? It’s true. I saw it in an old movie. With dinosaurs. And that guy from Thor: Ragnarok.

God Jurassic Park fucks. We just re-watched it a few weeks ago and it's just so good.

Queueing for over an hour to vote, that sucks. Polling place access matters etc.

Oh well. I'm sure Jeremy Hunt or whoever won the Dorley-verse Tory party leadership will do fine. We don't know that it's BoJo specifically, right? It could be anyone. Some harmless 1-Nation Conservative who just didn't like the Iraq war, (and who, as seemingly literally any Briton in the political class, doesn't understand Keynesianism.)

They Dressed Her Up

I am intensely curious about Melissa's motivations here. Reading it along, it seems like she's got a touch of the old self-directed misogyny, but I'd be surprised if that was what was happening. She's not a true believer, so she's doing something that, given her knowledge of the facts, makes absolute sense. She's also locked in, now.

Meanwhile, Tabby takes Shahida into the hall for coffee and story time. So everyone's assembled.

Future Aunt Christine

And it falls to Christine to keep everything from rapidly disassembling in an unscheduled fashion.

It must be strange for her to suddenly be a leader, given how much she tried to avoid being too compliant in the first book, and how much of an angry nerd she was back when she was a boy. It is clear that they should have told Melissa. Oh well, there you go. Mistakes made, and all that.

Pilled

I can’t let them do to you what I saw them do to everyone else.

Okay so Melissa is reacting out of empathy to The Horrors, then. That makes sense. The true believers' framing (up to and including Steph during some moments) of Dorley as creating happy fulfilled women doesn't quite add up once you take into account the remote satellites around Dorley. Your Melissas and other largely out-of-focus graduates who got the hell out of there.

Kitchen

Ah yes, what's one more itsy-bitsy kidnapping. "Everything Must Go", by giving the reader a chapter off from Dorley the place, was also a reset for just how violent this place is. Very little in the way of regard for outsiders' rights, for example.

I understand that that's what the organization believe is necessary to continue, and maybe it is; I am just weary of running out of fingers to count the number of incidental kidnapping-related events from this kinder, gentler, Dorley.

Saying Facts to Listeners

Melissa, Steph is trans.

Again, Greaves lets characters assert facts to one another. It's like everyone has a goddamn superpower compared to broad swathes of all human storytelling. Maybe I should be less easily impressed, but I get pretty anxious and/or frustrated at that kind of plot-line unless someone's a well established wallflower or incompetent. Being neither, Christine spits it out very quickly in the scheme of things.

Menty-B

A crowd gathers in the conservatory where Melissa has taken Steph. Christine opens the doors to demonstrate that Steph is here of her own volition. And, she is.

Melissa realizes that she went off half-cocked, and now she feels really bad. I, will once again be the conservative here and say that Melissa acted rationally during this episode. Abby and she might have a complicated relationship, but no small part of it is deeply coercive in a morally compromised way. Abby exercised dominion over Melissa, and that in part saved her, but in part manipulated her in an undeniably horrific manner.

My Past is my Past

Nationalized Universal Girlfriend

You keep leaving responsibilities in front of her. What’s she supposed to do, just watch as this place falls apart?

If you want something done, ask someone busy to do it.

Christine deserves not to have to do this. I think she'll have to choose between running Dorley and having her life at some point. I hope she picks her life, but I'd understand if she picks reforming Dorley. It seems like a passion project for her.

They really do need to pay Christine more, though. This place is held together by shoestring, bubble gum, and money, so maybe throw money at the problem. It buys a lot of shoe string and bubblegum.

Disclosure, Enclosure

I had to chew on the exchange between Paige and Shahida a little bit to feel where Paige is coming from.

Enclosure

On Shahida's side of the coin, it's simple enough. Her friend disappeared, presumably dead, and then wasn't. That's a big deal! Learning that this institution saved her, that the "him" part was in effect a clerical error carried way too far, and that this institution also disappears and mutilates young men, well, you'll have to excuse Shahida (who is, naturally, forcibly detained during all of this) for being a little bit incredulous.

I think so far as it goes, "you hijacked my friend and locked me up, the least you can do is tell me what the hell is happening" is a reasonable stance.

Disclosure

But that's not really any of Paige's business, now is it? Paige cares about her Sisters. She cares deeply about Christine. She does not want to do this. It's not her job nor is it any particular ethical duty of hers so far as I can tell.

For all the bitching I do about Dorley being a coercive, extractive, machine that turns pounds Sterling into human rights violations, I think during the Lorna disclosure process I was pretty blind to the way that works after the basement year.

Paige lives under a regime coerced duties in support of the Sisterhood. Those are not freely chosen, obviously. Even though womanhood is working out very well for her, that does not imply a fealty to Dorley without limit.

A minute ago I wrote that for Christine, Dorley lies in conflict with her free life. That conflict must be legible to Paige, even though not being a leader left Christine and Paige yearning. I don't recall why they weren't together, actually, but I'm going to go with "trauma" as a reasonable guess.

Anyway, Dorley's roping Paige into participating in violent rebel group action once more. Of course she's pissed; Our Lady of Black Bagged Teenagers needs someone to do it and apparently it's gotta be her.

You’re generally actually present, so occasionally you’ll just have to do something you don’t want to do.

I don't actually understand why Paige needs to do this, since Tabitha is around, especially once Lorna and Vicky arrive on the scene.

Taking a beat, what does Paige's reaction tell me as a reader about anything?

I think it's an interesting counterpoint to Lorna's attitude, for one.

Can we help?

Lorna's an organizer for trans rights. Paige is stealthing indefinitely. Of course they could have very different attitudes towards participation in disclosure. I've mentioned before that I don't really do disability politics ever. I think the cavalier way that people talk in eugenicist terms about the disabled is so casually dehumanizing that it's kind of scary, honestly. People, normal people with gardens and doctors and Food Network viewing habits, will Go Big and inadvertently say that letting chronically sick people live is weakening the species. It's just, a very widely held belief underneath it all. I don't like it when people notice my medical sensors, pumps, scars, &c. I find it really alienating and invasive. And, there's a pretty good argument from a less-invisibly disabled perspective that I'm kind of a chump-ass coward in that regard.

At the same time, I don't think I should have to do that kind of organizing. Paige, she's just like me for real, I'm saying I guess.

Anyway, it took me a long time thinking about that tautology ("my past is my past") to get any kind of empathy there. Hopefully I didn't totally miss the mark, it feels like kind of a stretch honestly.

Supercut

Maria shows Aaron a montage of Steph and he begins to understand a bit better.

He followed a lot of women on social media! Mostly women who posted porn!

Idly, Aaron's relationship with porn seems strange to me. It might be generational? But I think it's odd that Aaron engaged with porn through social media. Maybe I'm just a prude.

That kind of a screen-mediated social-to-pornographic ramp might have a little to say about his particular mode of harassment as well, though? There's a symmetry there, almost like Aaron was trying to complete a reciprocal act. Still can't wrap my head around the behavior. Weird gremlin, he was.

He wondered at the time what it felt like, and since he found out what the programme was about, he’s been idly waiting to feel it for himself.

Boy, I still really can't get a read on Aaron's whole deal with this. Melissa's later bit about intrinsic vs socialized masculinity maybe applies?

You’re what’s important to me, and you’ve barely eaten.

This is a great contrast to both the experience he saw in Steph's clip-show, and Aaron's experience by-and-large before Dorley. Aaron has not, as a rule, been what's important to anyone.

Some Kind of an Air Bud Situation

Christine's conservatory gambit works; Melissa faints into Abby's arms.

Back in the Mug Zone

Shahida is having trouble digesting the forced transition torture basement for some reason. Weird.

I’m a good girl turned very annoyed girl.

Lorna's quick turnaround on Dorley surprises me. Lorna uses the metaphor of the maze and I think that's an interesting one with mixed merit.

It’s like putting a mouse in a maze and rewarding it with food only when it finally consents to bite the other mice.

Lorna is speaking as a trans woman who did not undergo the forced torture reassignment basement, so her knowledge of the context is probably colored by that. But, Dorley is a maze too. In fact, it's another maze that's powered by eventual consent to bite the other mice. That's true of Steph being a Judas Goat, it's true of the shadowy funding going towards un-aristocrat-ing young men of dubious character, the whole thing is built on eating its own. It's certainly one path that sponsorship takes. Even for the good sponsors; Indira can be a fiercely loyal and loving sister, who also credibly threatens torture (ed: geez we get it, you don't like forced feeding). So the maze analogy might work for Lorna, but I don't think it applies as cleanly to Dorley as an institution as she'd like it to. Of course, Lorna found out about Dorley like 10 days ago, so there's plenty of time for nuance later.

We're making ourselves extremely vulnerable for you; please try to remember that.

Right back at you! Shahida's still locked in here, yes? This is a persistent bother for me in these disclosure scenes, though. I won't harp on it, because I think it has more value as analogy than as direct fiction, for me anyway.

I think the disclosure scenes have a lot in common with public arguments about trans rights? The mainstream press takes "legitimate confusion and concerns" or cult-of-manhood/womanhood stuff very seriously and asks trans organizers to tone it down, while the overwhelming force of State and stochastic violence are hovering at best just out of view. So, the irony is effective.

She was Just Trying it Out!

How do you know you’re back at Dorley, Melissa?’ Oh, because I’m hiding in a dark corner, crying. It’s a clue.

Seriously what the fuck happened to Melissa here that isn't happening to Steph?

Abby helps Melissa get cleaned up.

I really don't think it was "incredibly stupid" of Melissa to come in here guns blazing, but she and I can agree to disagree. Melissa's not great at introspection, it doesn't seem like. And Steph resembling her closely was probably pretty useless as a clue to her. So, from her perspective, it looks exactly like Steph was kidnapped and being forced-reassigned by the kidnapping-and-forced-reassignments club.

What Does it Mean to Have your Boundaries Violated?

All those women, waiting for him to escalate.

Aaron on the other hand, is legitimately very stupid. How in the Christ could he not know that he was doing that? I thought the received wisdom was more or less that the entire point of harassment was the feeling of power, or of inflicting powerlessness. The abominable idiocy of The Past Holt Creature is staggering. Maybe his dad is a trout fucker.

[He] returns her affection as someone who might one day be considered her equal.

That gives a little insight into the importance of them all being sisters, excepting e.g. Bea and Grandmother.

Cheery Concrete Girlboss Torture Box

She didn't expect her to be so sad

Okay, so Melissa being a much better liar does play into her having such a horrific experience. The pantomime. And also The Horrors.

Anyway, here we are on the roof again. This post is already getting shaggy, but the last time we were up here I think it was book 1 and a turning point on Christine's journey towards earnestly loving Dorley? The symbolism is pretty self-evident I think so I'll leave it there.

They discuss The Holt Affair and the prevalence of basement suicidal ideation.

Sometimes those for whom masculinity isn’t intrinsic but still forms a fundamental part of their socialisation, their training for the world, have the hardest time imagining life without it. It’s their foundation.

Now that's something right there. "Intrinsic." For whom masculinity isn't intrinsic.

Well, which masculinity probably matters a lot in that algebra. That's, the current crisis, more or less. Lorna talked about "hegemonic masculinity," and I took that as meaning more or less, "patriarchy stuff," the masculinity with a will to imperial privilege. That looks different, I suppose, across classes and times and places and peoples.

There are definitely venues where I wouldn't be an acceptable man. That's not important; it doesn't mean anything to me anymore, because they're really just expressing an aesthetic preference-as-judgment. I don't usually like them either.

But I'm a grown-ass man, while Aaron is an emotional fetus. He got shuttled into trout-fucking territory, into the internet, &c. So anything different probably helps.

Don't Be a Girl

Then maybe the best thing you can do is let him figure it out for himself.

Well so there's the bad taste right? Aaron was downstream of "hegemonic masculinity", and is now downstream of Dorley. He is a mouse who has only lived in mazes and nobody taught him to look up.

I'm a trans girl who didn't work it out until it was too late.

Too late for what? You worked it out. Melissa's "by rights" reveals a lot about her mindset here too, again, along a communitarian vs individualist axis.

The collective caught her, first in the form of Shahida and her school friends trying to get her to dress as her, and to eat something. Then in the form of Abby.

Abby, hmm. Despite her protestations to the contrary, I am deeply skeptical of Abby now, given the new details of her relationship with Melissa. I'll try to keep an open mind, but it seems fucked on several levels.

Don't let her out yet, will you?

Evil place; the people sure are nice, though.

Disclosure

He's going to survive, ..., and he has to do this.

That sounds pretty familiar.

Hey gaylord, show us your dick!

Aaron origin story confirmed. A pretty common fail-state for men. He decided that all women are the same ur-woman. Maybe twice. Once for Georgina, once for Elizabeth. Even more common fail-state, the classic Madonna/Whore dichotomy.

So, Aaron, again. He's recognizable as trans, even to me, from that "gonna survive / have to do it" realization. That's a pretty common refrain.

Errant Thoughts

God this ran long.
I'm getting ready to sell the house, start a new job, and my parents are in town.
So, maybe some schedule slippage.
The Little Mermaid is apt there. Water motif goes splassssssh is about all the time I have to dig into it currently.