First Thoughts

Caveat Emptor

This was kind of a tough chapter for me to get through. It took me a dumb amount of time to write this post and I'm not super happy with the outcome. Feels sour in a way. But, I'm also under time constraints and have a job and other stuff to do, and frankly the more time I spend writing this post the less I like it. So, uh, here you go, enjoy.

I've been a little busy, and that's making its way into how I feel about these I think. Or, I've been a little long on book backlog, and conscious that I have a long way to go yet in this series with more characters and longer subsequent chapters. You know, selling the house, changing the job, starting the school drop-off, planning a move; it all takes time and so do alternate pursuits like video games or "outside."

This chapter itself is kind of illustrative: there is to be a party, and we are ever 50% of the way between when we just were, on the one hand, to the party, on the other. I am nominally about 2/3 of the way through this series, but I think I'm practically 50% of the way there.

I'm going to stop aiming for really any kind of a solid schedule here because as I see it I have 3 options:

• Dislike this book and write shitty posts (bad)
• Slip schedule, like, every time (fine)
• Write posts more than once per chapter (bad) I think slipping schedule is the least bad option on offer as a matter of reality.

There's a kind of force-of-repetition effect at times. Someone has a crisis and someone else a realization and we are always meeting new friends and there is always a sub-basement of the heart in which worse mutilations become normalized. I think that must come with the territory of depicting a culture, or an institution, more than a single person. Like, in the first book, Steph and Christine were our main characters. In the second, we broadened significantly, and now, I think it's a true ensemble piece.

I still found a lot to like in this chapter specifically and in this volume so far, but I might just be more of a Secrets fan.

Woof Woof Road Dogz

This week... and a half, we read Home Away from Home and a bit more of Trans / Rad / Fem. Once more to clear my throat, Trans / Rad / Fem is, yes, more trans writing, but no, that's not the only reason I'm shoe-horning it into here. I also just don't really write anything besides this blog, so it has no other place it'd go anyway. That, and, it's Beth's fault I'm reading either of these books frankly. So take it up with her.

Looking around, I get the sense that I'm about at the end of Act One of a three-act structure. The Stenordale Manor parts, I find extra-challenging, but I can see how they work as a heightened version of Melissa's role in the last novel. The young-Beatrice parts are more thrilling, much less of a bummer.

I kind of wish they were more fully distinct works? Once we leave Almsworth Dorley gets into this problem of geometric slowdown. That, and, I could gut out the Stenordale Manor thread in one or two goes pretty well, they just feel like such robbed momentum from the rest of the novel on account of the tangential overlap with most of the cast of characters.

Recap

The cell corridor’s gotten cluttered since they stashed Will, Oliver and Raphael down here almost two months ago.

They should have killed them. Honestly. At the point where you've been doing this to someone for weeks and you're still more worried about the other inmates-err-recruits, you don't care about them as a person. It's not plausible.

Maybe it'd be bad press, if this wasn't a blacksite, but it is. So drown them in the sea, the circle is exhausted. Ollie and Raph are barely characters, and they're both presumably utter bastards, but the have/have-not of totally ignoring their innate dignity as persons and trying to preserve their personhood as raw material is absurd.

Now, that absurdity is pretty great as a narrative struggle. Can you apply a generic humanity to a specific monster? Not without difficulties, as it turns out.

Really looking forward to learning what happened with Martin over the last dozen chapters or so. Sometimes life is like that, I guess. You get into a relationship, look up, and your friends are into ska now.

We learn that Martin hit his sponsor's best friend's husband with his car. Which more fully explains why he ended up in Dorley, in part. I know, "treatment didn't work", "I was careless", "nobody held me to account," and maybe that's how it'd work, but there are plenty of drunks who dry out eventually and don't end up in Dorley Hall.

The Literature? What Literature?

Curious what proportoin of readership ask this question. It can't just have been me, there's gotta be several of us.

You’re supposed to be reforming everyone you bring down here, not just the ones you like.

That is kind of the problem, isn't it?

Should he even be in the cells at all? Is it doing more harm than good?

I'm sorry, am I to take it that they've had Ollie in:

• Almost or total solitary-confinement
• Sometimes forced-feeding
• With no exercise

for over a month? This is getting pretty close to an uncrossable bridge, right? After a certain point no number of struggle sessions and new perspective is going to overcome the fact that this place has legitimately treated him horribly. These things have long-term costs that don't just get paved over with a baptism in estradiol.

You were never like them.

That's interesting. It's like the dark(er) side of Aaron's observation from last chapter that the older Sisters look upon recruits as objects of humor.

I know I'm sort of empathizing with he worst remaining person who isn't an irredeemable monster over a lot of characters I know and like. It is difficult not to side with Ollie and Raph somewhat, even while thinking that they are bastards; the conditions are just so very bad.

Shitting Everywhere like a Nervous Gazelle

So, it sounds like we're still calling him Aaron (and 'him'.)

Steph and Aaron are not hiding their romance, and I think that's nice. Good for those two.

Steph is worried about Ollie and Raph coming back into genpop, about the danger it might present her. Greaves puts that right next to a Pippa-scene seeing those two and it's striking how the theory of Dorley and the practice of Dorley differ.

Theory: the recruits are the youngest Sisters; "we were you"/"you will be us."

Practice: the recruits are divided into compliant or non-compliant respectively. Compliant recruits are treated with compassion, non-compliant recruits are tortured.

I've been re-reading The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (link is a review) and something that stands out coming back to Dorley after is the degree of state-mistrust embedded in the book. Some of it is probably its origin as NHS-frustration, but it extends well beyond there. You have too the power of British panoptica, the subtle dichotomies Greaves creates between ostensibly equal people, the almost-constant abuses of power from one corner or another. That said, I dunno, maybe Greaves is an anarchist, but I don't think Dorley is legible as an anarchist work. It has such a preoccupation with the limits of choice. After the Old Dorley (the statelet) there is a New Dorley (still a state.) After the current state, you can see the next iteration waiting in the wings. Maybe the questoin is how Aunt Christine will come to handle such matters.

But the book's focus on human development, the availability of the soil in which to flourish, and the costs of violent overreach, are all very Millsian.

I wish I wrote this at hours like "10AM" instead of "5AM", because I have no idea really what the early-morning caffein drip's progress does to the end result.

Don't be Insightful, Moody. It's Creepy.

Don't call me that.

Some more ripples from last few chapters. Aaron has to reckon with his impact even over the last few months; he doesn't get to just wake up having been redeemed in the eyes of the other people in his life. Names, they apparently hold a lot of power, who knew.

Steph gets caught daydreaming and we still don't hear much from Martin, but hey, he speaketh. She gets nervous and tempted to act like a man when Ollie comes in.

Ollie enters first and glares at her, so she glares right back at him and resolves to blame him and him alone for inspiring such impulses in her.

Look, I know. Ollie and Raph were bad men on the outside. They're bad men on the inside, too. But inside, they are in essence the scape-goats for the floor. They have been reduced (in size, in scope, in threat-level) and that reduction is treated as evidence of their having deserved their punishment, more or less. What part of this was useful, to anyone?

Ollie's still a bigot, of course.

We don't want to wash you out, Oliver, but we will if we have to.

I think they do want to wash Ollie out, honestly. They don't want to have washouts, but they'd love to REDACTED this guy, yeah? Dorley has a nominal set of values that cannot acknowledge the antipathy the institution feels towards these dudes.

Anyway, there's a whole snafu. Steph threatens Ollie, deadnaming and wrong pronouns abound, Raph and Ollie do not like one another. Weirdly, having been abused mightily and kept in apalling conditions, Ollie is not somehow in a better mood.

Valérie and Trevor

I have not been outside for more than a cumulative day in thirty years. And I moisturise.

A brief visit. The two do not quite get along yet, but have a cantankerous rapport that's plenty fun to read. I have hopes for them, but also Trevor is new, and plenty disposable.

It’s not as if things can get much worse for either of them.

Well I certainly hope not. If we get into I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream territory I'll be closing shop.

A Trip Upstairs

They're going upstairs, hurray! Also there's a dark humor in the juxtaposition of this with Trevor's observation that they're unlikely to have the means of escape.

Steph and Aaron will go to the Christmas Eve party while the other recruits continue their food-as-control weight-redistribution regime. It's really something how Greaves can construct such a deeply fucked place and still write plausible characters who benefit.

The Disdain

Contemplating everything these psychos are doing to us hurt quite a fucking lot.

Poor baby

This scene we get to hear a little bit more from Martin. Who explains, submitting to Pamela's will freed him from choice. I will be interested to see where that goes, given how central choice has been to the story of Dorley so far. There's tension there, of course, because Dorley is both a violently and a subtly coercive institution, and so the "choice" is in effect preordained. At some point, Martin will have to take back responsibility, how will he deal with that moment?

Raph calls people some pretty unsavory slurs, dead-names Stephanie, &c. I don't know, he's in here for a reason (cheated on his girlfriend after coercing her into getting an abortion IIRC) and now we're "sweetening" the deal with allegations of domestic battery. He's at least a womanizer, definitely a Bad Guy. Honestly his retrograde politics are a less bad reason, to me, for basementing than the womanizing when you get right down to it. All that said, he's still in this moment undergoing some pretty extreme body horror at the hands of the university's extrajudicial-transmogrification society so maybe people could have a touch of sympathy?

You think the sponsors just happened to pick up a bunch of unruly lads who all secretly wanted to be girls and you and Ollie are the only real men out of the lot of us?

One benefit to being a serialized novel in the modern world is that you get to cheat out to the fourth wall with a tiny extra bit of precision. This is a really funny passage of Dorley, heavy subject matter aside.

The recruits have a struggle session about whether Dorley believes that men as a class are an evil or just men like the ones in Dorley. I think this notion of male training as an affliction is, gosh what do I think? I think it lets people off the hook. I think it's the shadow of "boys will be boys," basically. It is of a kind with the way that white reactionaries claim underdog status and persecution now.

Identity-as-Destiny, Identity-as-Choice

The point is, men can be good. But us, Raph, you and I, we can’t. Yeah, there’s a way to navigate all the male training that got shoved our way and come out the other side as someone who isn’t a complete bastard, obviously because loads of— many— some men manage it just fine. We didn’t.

Can't/won't, potato/tomato. "Didn't," where we land, is indisputable.

Aaron uses a metaphor of 'drinking in moderation' as it applies to masculinity. Dorley has been raising the choice/destiny question lately.

For biographical reasons, this puts me in a tough spot:

First, the concept of 'choosing to transition' feels like it echoes a lot of the bigotry of the aughts in America around marriage equality. Righly or wrongly from a semantic perspective, the Equal Protections Clause needed sexuality and gender to be inborn for the Constitution to imply certain rights, and so that's what they became, at least as a matter of rhetoric. Maybe always were, or always were for some people. I couldn't tell you and I don't have a horse in that race. So, when we're talking about choosing womanhood, anything I say about it feels like I'm about 2 seconds from inadvertently betraying a political cause that is still firmly in the Eye of Sauron's gaze.

Second, I think that opening up the absolute necessity of choice in identity creation collapses the Lambert-regime's project. So that language of choice has to serve at the focal point for several different rays:

• The readers may choose to condition their hair. This is the authorial broadcast context, maybe call it. It's a good thing to tell people; you have to keep going and keep deciding, in the face of bastards, to live your life.
• The recruits must choose to accept their new lots in life (or to die, presumably if not really.) This best taken as intimidation in the world.
• The recruits must choose to further embrace and enact their new lots in life. This inverts the Old Dorley more or less entirely. For the establishment to feel content in its own right, Old Dorley needed the recruits to remain miserable, to be in a state of perpetual shame and shock. New Dorley needs the opposite; Melissa was a problem to the new regime even before the climax of Secrets. Because Melissa was, like Julia, like Yasmin, settled and unhappy.
• The reader may choose to enact their lot in life, and moreover to continue to choose it. See what's over that next hill, etc.

It's not breaking new ground or anything to say that Dorley has a mandate to learn and to grow and to choose. It's also a nice piece of situational irony to embed that in a story about being forced and being captured.

Bournemouth

Aaron, what is it you think a puppy mill does?

Thank God for the Holt Person or this would be a real trudge.

Back to Trevor

How did you survive this?

There is a sense in which I did not.

Trevor recalls being forcibly stripped at school and shoved into a dress. This leads me directly to my next question, what the fuck is a British school?

I think Trevor here is the first time we've explicitly seen a man with any dysphoria in Dorley. So that's interesting.

Also of interest, Valérie has self-consciously hardened her heart, but is capable of way more empathetic treatment of her charge here than e.g. the Sisters at large. Trevor's innoncence is not a given in this respect. He decided to work at a PMC for the Evil Decadent Aristocracy, that's at least basementable on a moral scale, if not a political or practical one.

Christine

A brief snapshot. Christine's mother, puttering around the garden in the chill. Then the money, ruining everything. And Christine's mother, no longer puttering, but paying for labor like some kind of a horrid nouveau riche.

Maybe I'm just in a mood (Ed: I was at least in a mood.) I know each of these almost-narrators have their own perspective, but I find a common unease around material abundance. But all the same, I want to assign Dorley a relationship to money.

Things we can justifiably believe:

• Aristocrats in Dorley hand down gender training. See schooling
• They also proactively subvert that training to delight themselves at the expense of working people.
• The owning classes by and denature the human spirit.
• Suffering at the hands of the owning classes can lead to sublimation and euphoria.
• At least one aristocrat, Elle Lambert is responsible for subverting that suffering and bending it towards something "more humane."
• Wealth leads almost inexorably towards human misery.
• Except for the case Lambert. So far.

I'm not shedding any tears for the British aristocracy. Frankly, the "No Tyrants" protest was a sign that the British people are somehow even more juiceless in the pursuit of freedom than we, the American people. But all the same, there's some tension here I'm curious about long-term.

I take it on faith that Greaves is tying a knot here with intent. On the one hand, filthy lucre powers Dorley. From the posh interiors to the stipends to the boutique medical care to the highly sophisicated torture aparatus. On the other, in general, wealth is treated as toxic.

Christine's mother used to be connected to the land. Braced, by the cold. Puttering in the garden, vs not doing that. Gender as imparted concurrent to if not by the accumulation of weatlh.

[W]hen she was nongendered the way children are and accessible to her mother's affections (emph. mine)

I'm gonna need some exegesis on this one, there's a whole book shoved into this sentence.

[S]he has to choose a path for herself, to decide what she wants to do, and seventy or eighty years have opened up in front of her like a chasm.

This is such a strange thought to me in this context. Molded into the shape of a defective manhood. Broken apart in a basement. Recreated in an uneasy womanhood. All of that intentionally passive voice. Christine has a looming world of choice in front of her because she's basically never chosen to do anything. So that's one reason Bea was so insistent on Christine choosing to dress a way. It's not that she needs to conform, necessarily (see also Jodie,) it's that she needs to walk the path on her own two feet.

Dira’s waiting for her in her room, and now that Christine’s had her fill of silence she wants to be with her family again.

Well that's nice.

Steph is Dressed

Tiny little scene. Paige and Pippa help Steph get dressed for the party. When Dorley is doing this it's at its best in some ways. We have so much heavy drama, and so much of what Mick Herron would call the clash of yellow and grey. And, yeah I think the whole ediface is an effective argument against classist pro-ruler gender-training towards evil, sometimes in the form of a funhouse mirror. But, from what I hear some of Greaves' books are like, "what if someone played soccer?", and I probably would've gotten the good out that too.

It can be kind of uncanny, alienating even, to try and write about a serial that deals so heavily in the ethics of mutilation. At a certain point you either have to just shrug, like many of the characters in or readers of Dorley, or decide you're going to write a treatise on the vindication of the rights of humans.

Earth Humans: What Rights do They Have? Do they have rights? Let's find out.

Coming to a publisher near you.

Edy and Adam

They didn’t have a choice to be girls, though. Did they?

That’s the thing, they did. We gave them the bodies; they became girls by choice.”

I wonder if she believes that. It's absurd on its face. Dorley Hall severs unfree and/or harmful people from a different life, sure, whatever. Metaphor for the way cisdom works, sure, granted. The Sisters making this claim, maybe-or-maybe-don't believe this, yeah, totally on board.

But, the choice is girlhood or the heavily implied threat of death. So, there's your problem right there. Amartya Sen (Ed: audible groans) describes identity construction as an individual act but as having social constraints. He deems those constraints "feasibility" and compares them to the budget constraint in a household: I may choose what I purchase within the bounds of budget. Likewise, it would be impossible for me to authentically identify as, say, Swedish. I am not Swedish and no amount of yellow or blue will make that the case absent my imigrating to Sweden and really digging in like a tick. In Dorley and in Dorley, The feasibility constraint becomes womanhood (with the possible subsequent acknowledgment of a nonbinary identity) or nothing. Ultimately, no, they did not become girls by choice; they faced a feasibility constraint that only allowed them to become girls. No choice in sight. That repeated claim is a continuing part of the forced recruitment strategy of this violent rebel organization. It's also probably, more or less kind of true anyway.

Bah! Humbug.

Please, thank them for me.

All that said, yes, Adam is better off not being in a violent patriarchical cult. Well done, bar cleared.

Grace is a precious gift; and it is ours, not God's, to give.

Put tersely, if its someone's to give, it is theirs to withhold. I, an enlightened mainliner, can see why taking grace and putting it in the community could be attractive. But it all swings on whether God is a person or a thing, I think. If you believe in a human God, then, yes, giving grace to one another is an improvement. If you believe in an inhuman God, then the idea that your grace could be contingent on another sinner's good will ought to be pretty terrifying in comparison.

Most Christians do believe in a humanoid God these days, probably including Adam's weirdo cult. Evangelicals, amirite? So this too is a prosocial step forward, if not one that I can endorse theologically.

I guess Adam is playing Stardew Valley? I never got around to that one, but I hear it's great.

Getting Ready Montage

The downside is, they have to meet me.

Maria and Aaron share a very sweet sisterhood. I like the stern / jokester dichotomy, it's nice. Also nice of her to bring Bailey's and cocoa.

Aaron and Steph are getting ready for the party with various Sisterly helpers. Both are nervous, wihch is to be expected.

Christine, too, is getting ready. And has really leaned into knowing how to get ready.

Steph thinks awhile on the phrase "dressing in women's clothes," how she arrived at that phrase, why she wants to leave it and land on "dressing as she wishes." And then we go back to Valérie for a spell.

Meanwhile Back at the Alternate Torture Mansion

Frankie and Valérie discuss where Frankie's true hatred of men resides. It's not normal men, who are merely abusers, but the upper class aristocratic men, who are abusers with flare and impunity. Frankie stumbles on a pretty common description of transmisogyny, that trans women get treated as women-and-not-women in whatever the worst possible configuration is for the trans woman at the time.

Shy

Shahida is naturally going to the party. Rachel, obviously, is not. Read the room!

Your girl. If only.

Jesus Christ, with the yearning.

Zeno's Paradox: Can a Christmas Party Ever Start?

Charlie thanks Steph for her understanding, which is another little exhibit for Steph as a regime-cracking force in Dorley. Not a bad thing per se, just, Bea was worried about the impact and its her adopted role to be small-c conservative. So, Bea was correct, at least magnitudinally.

I don't think it makes sense for Rachel to have expected an invite to the Dorley party, but maybe I'm being a stick in the mud.

Mel and Steph have a reunion that isn't tinged with misgendered kidnapping.

Aaron arrives aaaand

50% of the Distance to the Torture Mansion

We're back to Stenordale Manor, merry Christmas. Jake is bored on duty.

Dear God in heaven Jake and Callum are talking about the ethics of their torture mansion.

Jake raises the, frankly salient point that Callum has killed 2 people and that those people had lives.

Prickinville

Fuckin', got 'em.

Jake is being pretty fast and objectionable with the mis-gendering and the dead-naming here but still encourages Callum to, I suppose, coerce Valérie into sex. Which complicates Frankie's point from earlier; yes, aristocrats give the means to the men with guns, but they're still making choices and doing things. They are, in fact, sophisticated ethical agents who have decided to systematically discard their sense of ethical reason. They are no less blameworthy.

Jake started to see the appeal.

Point in case, Jake is not the pawn of the aristocracy here so much as he is a moral black-hole who deserves the bayonet.

I think I'm starting to see a climax come into view, and it centers around at least two separate assailants in Stenordale. I don't really follow what happens in the titular Hall yet in this book. Still early days, I guess.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas? Hopefully?

I swear to God if the next chapter doesn't have a Christmas Eve party I will quit writing this blog.

Errant Thoughts

Bhatt Signal

Only barely tangentially related, I finally got around to a bit more Bhatt, her brief essay "Raceblending and Womanface: Discussing Social Constructs." Some day I'll finish that book on forestry and then this blog will achieve its dadly apotheosis as a blog about JS Mill and trees.

Overall, it's a pretty brisk treatment of a bad faith question, taken instead in genuinely good faith. You should read it; it's a fun piece.

Trick Question?

Why can't you transition from one race to another?

Bhatt picks topics with confidence, and you just gotta respect that. Nobody stumbles or creeps into "so what's the deal with race vs gender, amirite?"

I'd kind of put her with HW Brands in that sense. Even if I'm not super-satisfied with how she gets where she goes in 'Racebending' and ‘Womanface’: Discussing Social Constructs, it's a great topic and her argument generally holds water. I'd pay good money to see what a freshman-level philosophy seminar did with this in a 90 minute slot, but you'd have to use voice-masking technology to avoid some future-senator's career being derailed at the tender age of19. And, again, I'm going to credit the style before caring about the substance. Bhatt shows more blunt-force-courage in her premise here than a lot of phil-o'maths people do when they're talking about the implications of the nature of the cardinality of the real numbers. Not that the continuum isn't important, but it's at least, only important to Elder Gods and people who viscerally care about set theory.

Style points aside, I'll take a minute and see if I can pose something that isn't total garbage. Here's my best low-time high-effort answer, "race is more fully dependent on the eyes of others and gender more totally depends on one's own self-report." I would also accept, "the language of gender supports the action of transition and the language of race does not; they are simply different shapes." I'm not particularly satisfied either place, but otherwise all I have is a Potter Stewart "I know it when I see it" test.

I think a longer treatment of the subject might have to get heavily into the social ephemera of racial-perception and code-switching vs the personal investment of becoming. Something fundamental is taken to have changed internally in transitioning, right? You simply can't honestly edit your ethnographic history in the way that you can edit yourself. And race is about that history because it's so much about modern economic and social arrangements and those don't exist in a vacuum. Gender, could, of course respond with "right back at you, buddy." Again, "you can't transition race because there's not affordance for it" might just be what it is. You can't count to four sides of a triangle either, chuds probably don't know that though.

Oh hey also, the question starts to seem like less of a gotcha or a non-sequitur if you consider White Psychodrama and its repenter/represser dichotomy.

Much like the Repenter, they are aware of our broad historical situation, and not immune to pangs of guilt. But the Represser feels this is largely unreasonable—too much focus on the negatives rather than the positives, and prone to generating an irrational self-hatred in themselves and among their fellow whites. The Represser does not deny the central points of the earlier narrative, but they would like to change the focus away from the potentially guilt-inducing elements.

So, for the represser, race is (or should be thought of as) immaterial and itself ephemeral. If you start from the idea that the historical conditions that created modern race are best left ignored, that would, you know, undermine a lot of its distinctive features vs gender.

What this argument really wants to assert is that if a progressive social model truly wishes to regard both race and gender as independent of and unmoored by biology, then what applies for one should also apply for the other.

That's incisive. The issue is that these are two questions in a class of questions, but that bucket does not imply that they are the same question nor the same manner of institution. Bhatt uses this question, "why transition gender but not race?" as a vehicle. She takes it on a scenic route to tell the reader that we should expect to look at the particulars of social constructs and to look at them in historical context. And good idea, it's a good vehicle to get there. It's also just kind of a Wittgensteinian nonsense question though. Why can you transition gender and not race? Because that's not how race works, simple as.

It's worth teasing apart those two axes of power in the contemporary world, and/but the question simply makes no sense. Race and gender are different words that mean different things. Why can you fly a plane but not a country?

Intangible and Therefore Immaterial

Aww yeah, Bhatt is Hume-Posting again

I've been re-reading the (what I think is excellent) book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism and something that stands out in the text but which I'd forgotten for all of the raising up of Paine and Mill is the political importance of the Sublime.

Simply put, a social construct is an abstraction that derives meaning by consensus.

Good terse definition fit for purpose. That purpose being, illustrating a defect in the implied rhetorical answer to the overall question, "why transition gender but not race?"

I suppose, before you first access the technology of social construction, you have these relations that appear transhistorical (race, gender, pick any of several others.) For kind of silly example: my kid until recently had no conception that there was a time before cars. Cars were transhistorical in her world-view, and only Around the World in 80 Ways testified otherwise.

For a more serious example, before you have access to the concept of social construction, aren't all of those constructs either:

• Transhistorical?
• Whig-historical?

When the toolkit "an abstraction that derives meaning by consensus," pops up, you go from a collection of apparently natural relations to an apparently natural toolkit for analyzing contingent social relations. Is social construction natural? I think it basically has to be for you to be a verbal sociable animal.

So I think Hume would like Bhatt's approach here, while also being more than a litle brain-wrinkled by literally any paragraph of it or the core concept. Taking abstraction and consensus as tools to shove off gender-conservatism is a good move (the only move?) because it shows their reasoning, "race and gender are inalieable", as implying, "the products of abstract consensus are structurally identical."

Then she sets to work leveling the ground on which that shaky house of an idea immediately falls.

Things Which are Unequal to One Another are Not Equal to One Another

Bhatt's answer ends up broader than my head-scratching; race isn't gender, so race and gender are unequal, despite being both member to some class of consensus-based notion. Some of the best proofs are tautological.

If race is an abstraction, what exactly is it abstracting?

So, a different question, maybe one Bhatt's more interested in after all. She narrows the question to a US-centric perspective. And here I have a small worry. A nit, even. Bhatt describes race as homogenizing, and I'd argue the opposite is true in maybe-greater measure; race is pretty often a discriminant in the USA, designed far more to shave off subsets of the populace from their rights and into scarcity than to accumulate supersets of people for dominion. We have dominion, we're an empire; we're often enough creating variegated underclasses when we "do race." So sure, race in America abstracts over basically ownership relations (of land, then of land and people, then of land and capital.)

But, also. Eventually, in America, if you aren't Black you circle the "contingently white" drain. You can play the social injustice game to out-white or out-underdog someone (the critical innovation for MAGA has been to do both at once) for whatever the rhetorical project. There are plenty of lenses, all of them jaded, to look on America and race, though: pick your poison.

Anyway, Bhatt describes the classes of citizenship implied by race, raises the difference of ancestry in race, so far so good.

Worries

I have two small worries about the essay's conclusion:

• Race does not always work as Bhatt describes.
• Gender often does work quite similarly to how Bhatt describes race.

Bhatt assigns historical context the primary role in locking in race in a way gender is not. I find that a little bit incongruous with:

• Bhatt's own expression of patriarchy as constructed to impose service from one half of the population to the other. That is itself an existing history of subjugation, no?
• The potential for the semantics of racial description to drift, frankly. America takes some pretty unique delights in hating Black people, but the homogenizing effect Bhatt describes seems like a rabbit/duck pair with the shaving-off of liberty.

For a lurid and rancid contemporary example (consier yourself warned), take that SMA lady on twitter. The terse narrative is thus:

• SMA (@generic_void) is a white lady (more on this in a bit) who put out a questionnare that men can fill out to try and date her.
• She followed up and said that she would not be interested in "race mixing."
• Then, of course, she listed her exceptions (this is getting pretty Hitler-y): Japanese, Brahmins, Greeks, Jews, Italians, Argentinians, and Brazilians.
• Naturally someone asked her what her race was. Scottish, Irish (is she Scotch-Irish? Scottish, and Irish? Of course the real answer is "neither, she's American,") Czech, and Spanish.

This, too, is OKCupid.

This is both:

• high-proof gossip, and
• illustrative, I think, of why "transitioning race" is oxymoronic even distinct from variously inherited historical colonial hangovers.

SMA's heritage is almost entirely self-reported as what old-timey-racism would deem "ethnic", and simultaneously she is viewing Italians, Jews and Greeks as blanket-nonwhite. So the homogenization-mechanism is sort of present here, reflexively, but only as a way to impose that exclusivity. Two sides of the same coin, perhaps. And that race-categorization-mechanism is a tool of separation for her to express her grotesque value system.

I take it as pretty common-sensical that younger generations transition at higher rates because it was a more feasible decision when they transitioned than when their grandparents would have. It's still presumably hard as nails, and getting harder as I write this in 2025, but the inter-generational contrast is an order of magnitude, right? There have been medical advances, quality-of-life improvements (a more diverse and casual dress code, more broadly-available sizing in clothes and shoes), &c. So younger generations' feasibility for identity-formation and expression stretches to accommodate transitioning in a way that, as important and urgent as it might have been, people haven't always been able to do?

Simultaneously, the feasibility constraint for choosing to be a different race is, ah, pretty hard to reach, even in comparison. Because as Bhatt writes, lineage is part of it. You can certainly choose within that feasibility requirement in edge cases. I have had friends of mixed heritage choose to ignore or embrace part of their lineage in choosing their performance of race, but they were always dual-passing (white and latina, Arab and Spanish.) That's where some of Bhatt's homogenization comes into play from my perspective; the Katamarification of whiteness as the negation of Blackness. That's, I dunno maybe controversial, might have some unfortunate implications about which I'm unaware. As usual, if I've said something horrid hmu and I'll retract-and-or-fix-it. Still, it seems like the goal of the institution of American whiteness is to be able to expel anyone at any time so as to execute a convenient authority, or include anyone at any time in order to maintain that authority. Always with the implied threat of Blackness underlying it.

Anyway, race, gender, choice. You know: polite dinner conversation. Both share the obstacle of historic oppression and economic suppression, sure. But, the enforced servitude of women has usually been at close proximity to men, whereas the modes of servitude captured by the institutions of race can often happen at a distance or with only a shared seem. That consistent geographic separation, the limited element of distinct lineage, the mode of race as method of exclusion, all create distinctive social barriers in identity formation from those of gender.

Does Gender Not Also Do That Stuff, Though?

In contrast to this, gender is much more grounded in one's present existence.

I am not totally sure this is an adequate distinction? Race and gender's methods of oppression overlap a little more, I think, than Bhatt gives credit here:

• Race is and has been used to restrict or enforce partnerships, see Loving v Virginia.
• It's been used to mark people for exploitation (domestic, sexual, &c.), see Charles Sumner.
• It's certainly viewed (trans)historically, see every weird IQ article or eugenics weirdo for the last century or more.

Anyway, Yeah, Good Question.

So, I think the feasibility constraints are different, as Bhatt argues, but that her answer doesn't really get to "why", just reaffirms "that."

This reminds me of that goddamn fucking bat essay for me, and I don't mean that as a dig. It sparked thought, wihch is good. Philosophy essays should do that sometimes without demanding that I, like, understand a Big Thing Very Well. Topos theory in shambles. On the other, I think it was maybe a bit over-terse. It's too concise for me to get to grips with what Bhatt genuinely wants to say is unique about the construct of gender that lets it be transitional but durable. Or with what Bhatt wants to say is unique about race that is sticky across lineages.

Of course, I'm also not reading the next essay yet, so maybe she's just trying to put something in mind for later on.

Other Errant Thoughts

Nope. Nonezo. Head fully empty.

This chapter left me wanting more. More what? More Christmas Party, obviously.

What's pretty funny about that is, one of my criticisms of the text is that it lets characters shy away so much from The Horrors that they aid and/or abet. And yet, I would far rather read about the party than the torture-mansion. So, acknowledged: nonstop torture is unpleasant, and none of the readers are here for Bloodlands. Worry addressed if not quite resolved.