Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Got harrassed as An Man yesterday. First time for everything, I guess. To be fair, the belligerent fellow trainsit passenger was VERY drunk, and also asked me if I was Black, so, not winning the perceptivity awards for the week.

Drunk Man, boarding train: "Aw yeah good afternoon mate, how are ya?"
Me, wedged in to the single seat beside the doors of an OSCAR motor carriage, with my suitcase in front of me: "Ah yeah not bad".

Drunk Man proceeded to various pronouncements, like asking me if I was Black (I am not only not Indigenous, nor of African or Islander descent, I am very pale, and was dressed for work in the CBD. And I don't have a shaved head any more. Not that people of colour don't wear blazers and ties, but there was nothing about me that might cause a drunk white guy to make an offensively stereotyped association based on clothes or hair, unlike, say, the time that a drunk African guy in Geneva cat-called me, in English, with "Hey lady, you look like African Queen!" based on, I assume, my shaven head). On the other hand, he also called me "big fella". He was loud and socially inappropriate, but did not seem to be initially aggressive.

At some point, he came over to my side of the carriage, and loomed through the glass that divided me from the designated doorway egress zone. Then he lurched over to the same spot, opposite me. At this point, I was ignoring him entirely, and mostly still listening to my podcast with reasonable focus; but I made eye contact with the woman opposite me to make sure she knew I knew she was also in an uncomfortable position.

The woman opposite me, I realised, was a Virgin Australia flight attendant, still in uniform. After a few minutes, she got up and came over to stand next to me, taking up the hand-hold spot by the doors on my side of the carriage. Initially I had thought she might have felt threatened with him standing in that spot on *her* side, but, as became clear, she had gone into "work mode" and was looking out for me.

Mr Belligerant sat down in her seat. This was good, because I was starting to worry that he'd fall over as the train swayed, leaving us with a Medical Incident on our hands. Mr Belligerant was muttering and burping for a while, and I became very anxious - concerned he was going to puke right onto my suitcase.

I was so concerned about this iminient puking situation, and the alternative possibility that he'd pass out just as we entered the more remote streches of the line along the Central Coast, that I didn't really pay attention to what he was saying. I was comforted by the presence of Ms VirginAus, because one can assume that a flight attendant will keep her head if there's a medical emergency.

Roughly around Mooney Mooney, I realise Mr Belligerent is aggressively shouting "I'll blow ya", at either me or the general air. At this point, I suppose he might be having delusions (and perhaps he was). But if it was a proposition, to either me or the spectres in the air, it was made very aggressively. As a threat.

So baffled am I by what seems to be an aggressive threat of fellatio, that I make eye contact with Mr Belligerent. "What are you looking at cunt" was definitely aimed at me, and from there he escalated to various other insults and exhortations to me to get up (presumably to fight him, although with enough "I'll blow ya" that the possibility of incitement to public sex acts was still plausible).

Ms VirginAus mouths "are you okay?" at me, and I assure her I am. I am uncomfortable, but not scared. Aside from the baffling possibility of aggressive fellatory threats, and the one racial enquiry, nothing about this seems to be targeted or personal: he just doesn't like my face. Maybe he's mad because I answered him once and not again. Who knows. I have my suitcase between me and him, there's glass boxing me in, and I'm still more concerned that he might puke on my stuff than about physical violence.

I have too much baggage to get up and move, especially as the carriage is jam-packed. I now realise I should have asked Ms VirginAus to help me move my stuff to the other end of the carriage - make a perfectly reasonable announcement that I wish to use the lavatory, but my stuff is here, and the loo is in the other carriage. Or I could even have just given Ms VirginAus my seat to "mind my stuff" and gone on a loo expedition . But I still haven't processed that Ms VirginAus is protecting *me*, that she's gone into full Work Mode and she's simultaneously assessing the situation (not escalating) and looking after me.

My plan is that when we get to Woy Woy, I will get out, and just get into the next carriage. I can't go through to the next carriage while travelling, as we're in the fourth-from-rear carriage: Mr Belligerent and I, in opposite seats, are both jammed up against the wall of the driver's cabin. He's banging aggressively on his side of the wall, in fact. This does not lead to anything, because it's an 8 car train, and there's no one in the middle-of-train cabin.

Next Mr Belligerent gets up, further shouting at me to "get up you cunt". And now, it transpires, I should prepare to get out onto the platform at Woy Woy and fight him.

It is now extremely clear that I'm not being homophobically harrassed or threatened with gay-bashing, but invited to an Affray. In my time in private court transcription services, I typed enough local court hearings to know that "One or more drunk guys don't like the look of one or more other guys on a train, invite them to an Affray at the next station" is quite a common occurrence (often between white men and men of colour, sometimes between ethnically diverse groups of blokes on the basis of assumed gang territorial incursions, sometimes between white blokes for no good reason) and scripts out differently to your average gay-bashing.

This poses something of a problem for my "quietly exit the carriage at Woy Woy" plan. Mr Belligerent is now wavering in the middle of the carriage, rather than standing at the holding-on-pole opposite Ms VirginAus. Ms VirginAus is very tense. Later, she will say to another passenger that of course she's had self-defence training, and I belatedly realise she hadn't been alarmed in the same way I was, but preparing to defend me and/or intervene if I or another man got into it with this guy. I have no idea how she was gendering me, but hopefully if she WAS reading me as a man she'd realised I was not going to escalate.

I decide that actually, I do have to contact someone. I can't get up to call the driver via the help point, because if i get up, Mr Belligerent's script will start scripting. I don't think this is a "call 000" issue, and I'm at the wrong angle to read the info sticker to see if there's a "text transport police" number - and I can't see the carriage number either, because another passenger's head is in the way. I decide to tweet @ TrainLinkNorth, describing the service, carriage-from-rear, current location, and problem. We have not long crossed the Mooney Mooney bridge; there's a fair way to go until WoyWoy, someone will probably see the tweet and alert the driver or tell me what to do.

No sooner have I drafted this tweet than we hit the Hawkesbury black spot and the tweet won't send. Mr Belligerent gets louder and more sway-y.

A tall, middle-aged bloke comes up out of the downstairs half of the carriage, gets in between Mr Belligerent and me. I brace for Worse. Mr Tall says "Oy, mate, keep your voice down." Mr Belligerent yells something.

Mr Tall, to his credit, stays out of arm's reach, and does not raise his voice more than his first interjection. "Mate, this is the quiet carriage!"

To everyone's bafflement, Mr Belligerent breaks and runs, down into the downstairs of the carriage. Mr Tall follows, and those of us left in the front vestibule listen as a hullabaloo ripples through the downstairs and out of earshot.

At this point, the passenger who had been blocking the carriage number turns to me and Ms VirginAus and asks if we're ok. Ms VirginAus checks on me multiple times in rapid succession. Someone tells me that "we" have called the police (possibly fellow travellers of Mr Tall?), before the mobile reception dropped, and the situation will be sorted at Hornsby.

It becomes clear to me that everyone else is treating me as if I've been seriously threatened. I meanwhile have been quite sure that as long as I stayed with my suitcase in front of me, tucked into my one-seat nook, I'm not going to be hurt, although getting up would have been a risky idea. They all make sure I'm not leaving at Woy Woy (I am not).

At Woy Woy, the train is delayed a little (we were already late leaving Sydney) while Mr Belligerent is removed. Everyone asks if I have someone meeting me at Gosford, but I am in fact going through to Newcastle.

Over the trip from Woy Woy to Gosford, I talk a bit more with Ms VirginAus, and she talks to the remaining men in the vestibule. It slowly dawns on me that she's far more shaken up than I was. She doesn't sit down, but rides from Woy Woy to Gosford standing in front of her original seat, with one knee up on it. "I don't have any authority here," she says to the bloke who'd been on her other side through the Hawkesbury. "We get self-defence training, of course, but..."

She'd gone into Work Mode, with both emotional labour (looking after me) and threat assessment - but she didn't have any authority, so she couldn't take the early interventions she would have taken on a plane, and she had neither the back-up of colleagues nor of the legal authorities a flight attendant has when at work. And, depending on how she read me, she was either entirely surrounded by men, or by all men bar one intimidated dyke. Miscellaneous other men trying to deal with Problem Men on trains is one of many routes to Affray.

If I had fully processed how she was dealing with the situation, I would have said more during the ride through to Woy Woy - explicitly said (it's not like Mr Belligerent was listening) that I knew as long as I didn't get up and no one else got in his face, Mr Belligerent was the only person seriously unsafe here (risk of falling over on a moving train while drunk).

I ended up posting on Twitter, tagging in Virgin Aus, asking them to pass my thanks through. Then I've spent a chunk of time this morning trying to get through robot responses and seemingly-not-robot but the person hadn't read my tweets properly responses in order to convey *praise and thanks*, no this isn't a complaint. You should not be sorry to hear about this incident with [name], you should be proud of her and you should also get a message through to her manager and have someone check on her. And maybe advise your staff not to travel in uniform on their commutes! I'd hate to think that she was putting herself through stress, and at risk, because people would expect as much from a uniformed flight attendant.

When I finally got picked up by Dad and Ms15 from the bus stop out on the main road (I had left work early to catch the ultra-express train so that Dad could pick me up and still be in time to pick up Ms15 from her work - but then the train was delayed so I cooled my heels in Newcastle and caught the bus), I told them about it. The experience of Dad trying to indirectly figure out if I had been subjected to some kind of demographically targeted harrassment, without specifying which demographic, was quite entertaining (not that I blame him - I know perfectly well that the point in transition where I might start copping fag-directed homophobia, I'm ALSO the most stands-out-in-a-targetable-way dyke I've ever been, and Dad sure doesn't have the vocab for that).

No! That's the weirdest thing about it all! In fact, it's finally dawned on me that Mr Belligerent may have been shouting "I'll go ya", not "I'll blow ya", meaning I have been subjected to 100% demographic-neutral bloke-on-bloke aggression (unless he did think I was Black, I suppose). Truly, we live in a Society.

I have for some years now read, with fascination and frustration, a genre of essays (and occasional short story) which I short-hand under heteropessimism, although much of it is in fact so earnest (Sereisin's description of heteropessimism begins with Maggie Nelson's "heterosexuality always embarrasses me", requires a sort of ironic self-deprecation) that it might better be described as Sad Girl Content. It is the literature of shared (hetero) feminine abjection (in at least one prior post I called it the disappointment memoir mode).

I don't quite know what to do with this fixation, as I am no longer a usefully called a woman. The only kind of woman I find myself reflexively thinking of as akin to me is bi women, and so it continues to frustrate me that bi women are utterly absent from the communal literature of feminine (women-who-date-men) abjection.

There's a lot to commend in this recent essay by Ellie Anderson, on heteropessimism as feminist complaint. Anderson rightly takes a scalpen to Sareisin's slipshod use of "performative" to mean insincere.

Philosopher Kathryn Norlock argues that complaints may have intrinsic value even in cases when they do not aim for a transformation of circumstances in the way Ahmed describes. Norlock suggests that complaining can be recognized as valuable in itself once we take seriously the "interaffective dimension of ethical and social life." Specifically, complaint is a plea for validation that "one's pains are not insignificant," and for the company of others who recognize one's suffering as significant. Complaint has historically been disparaged by virtue of its associations with the feminine — specifically, with the feminine desire to share one's pains rather than remain an upright individual who acts in the public sphere — as in Aristotle and Kant. Norlock argues that rejecting this masculinist value system reveals that complaining is an activity that "regulates the emotional life, articulating and discerning the causes of pains, affirming the feelings of others or oneself, or inviting disclosure and commiseration." Complaining performs key functions in our collective and individual emotional lives.

This is true, and yet. Sara Ahmad, who Anderson cites extensively, would also direct us to attend to whose complaints are given space. Whose complaints are able to become a point of community, are allowed to make meaning. (Interestingly, the genre of heteropessimist complaint has several well-established women of colour in it - Christine Emba, for instance. Class, and access to the opinion essay industrial complex, seems a key factor.)

Bi women are not afforded the same authority to complain. The very structure of the complaint - that dating men flays one's dignity alive, and yet, one must, or withdraw entirely - means bisexuality is impossible. Perhaps some bi women married to men (especially, I expect, those with children) do participate in this discourse, but I can't remember the last time I read an essay grappling with the realities of heterosexual partnership/marriage from a bi perspective (maybe back in the era of feminist blogs? Perhaps these essays exist, and I'm not seeing them because of the glut of "I am an invisible queer" content from bi women; but I'd expect a good essay from a bi woman about having queer experience/identity and yet being stuck in the Crane Wife/Cat Person universe to generate HUGE amounts of biphobic discourse, the kind the "invisible queer" essays regularly attest to). The women writing the heteropessimist essays don't even seem to be aware that bi women are among them! This includes both Anderson and Sareisin (nb: Sareisin has since come out as nonbinary, but was writing as a lesbian at the time).

Sareisin rages that the heteropessimist does not meaningfully disengage from heterosexuality, Anderson argues that complaint is meaningful (but does not, I note, argue that constitues disaffiliation). Neither seem to have any sense what "disengage" or "disaffiliate" might look like. I did not get the sense, when I first read the Sareisin essay, that the author would have any time for me, a bi queer (then)woman who didn't move in lesbian circles.

Meanwhile, for a long time, I have felt that I had more in common with ostensibly straight or bi women who were single by choice or not seeking to date anymore than I did with most lesbians. Is that not also a form of disaffilation from heterosexuality? It certainly puts those women outside of many of the privileges of heterosexuality (economic, social, etc), while not actually marking them as queer unless they also display some other marked trait.

I don't have an answer. I don't even need to answer the question of which group of women I affiliate with, any more. And yet.

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction:
- Omnibus of Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms books, still. Slow going but still pleasing.
- Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man, in audiobook. It is not read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, so I am sad. The voice actor DOES do a good job of "Educated German-speaker speaking English" accent, though, and it's set in wine country, and I'm sort of... whatever the opposite of homesick is. Not even homesick for Switzerland, exactly, but nostalgia-frustrated because I have some cultural context for that area of DE but didn't spend much time there. Anyway. I am soured on Peter Grant (see below), but it has been suggested that I might resent the tie-ins less. We shall see.
- I am in fact partway through the short story The Death Haiku of the Azure Five, in Clarksworld (by L Chan) and enjoying it but I keep forgetting I'm reading it and reading some piece of news or essay or something instead.
Lit Mag: I have, in the past month, been picking up and putting back down the Lapham's Quarterly "Friendship" issue. This is improvement upon not picking it up at all.
Poetry: Nil, nada
Non-fiction for personal interest:
- I am finally making headway in Marion Turner's "Chaucer: A European Life". For a bunch of reasons, it's a perfect sort of book to keep in my go-bag for on site work at my current job, and on some remote work days I have a weird amount of standby time where it is preferred that we read books rather than be on our phones. I have learned a lot about the London wool staple!
- Still pottering through Danny Lavery's "Something that may shock and discredit you" for the second time, reading aloud to my partner.

There are many more things which I am nominally reading but haven't really picked up since last post.

Recently Finished:
Actually Recent:
Archer: the First Nations Issue by Maddee Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It took me a damn long time, but I finally finished this.

Two stand-out essays:

Q&A with SJ Norman

Anonymous: Pronoun Trouble

Neither makes me comfortable, and maybe I'll talk somewhere else one day about what in them hit home and what hit a nerve. Not on Goodreads, I think.




Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen by Greg Jenner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Things this was:
- a fun historical romp through periods and subjects largely outside my prior interests (except for Lord Byron, bless his weird over-dramatic socks)
- a MASTERCLASS in accessible citation. I listened in audio, and I had no idea there *were* footnotes at all, because Jenner weaves "as the such-and-such scholars say" in so well.
- a MASTERCLASS in breaking down theoretical concepts, see above

I also keep thinking about the section on celebrity photographs and early photographic manipulation. One actress, whose name I forget (and I can't check because I don't have hard copy) sued over manipulated images of her face over risqué nudes, and lost. I keep thinking about this in context of the current SAG strike, and AI, and being confused that no one is pitching hot take essays about the connection.



Semi-recent, IE, this year:
Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved the opening, framing, premise, and most of the execution of this. I enjoy the podcast, and I *particularly* appreciated the way that chapters of this sewed together what had been 2 or sometimes 3 podcast episodes to produce a chapter which had a sort of... preview and a chunky case study (Bosey and Roger Casement were a great combo).

However, I have two complaints:

1. the conclusion was MEH. It did not say anything the introduction didn't say and it said it more boringly. Perhaps this is a product of the public history style? But I have definitely read pop history which doesn't do that (see: Greg Jenner's Dead Famous).

2. The final chapter, which sewed together Andrew Sullivan and Pym Fortuyn, with a contextual segue through the AIDS crisis, was a HOT MESS. It gave no specific contextual attention to AIDS or gay public health in general on the continent, aside from one note that Amsterdam had dealt pretty well because of pre-existing good links between gay community and health services over a hepatitis outbreak. In general, it was written as if the US's approach to AIDS was paradigmatic for the world, which it just wasn't. Australia in general, and Sydney specifically, was a lot closer to Amsterdam (perhaps because of better responses to earlier outbreaks? I don't know and my epidemiology history insiders are only confident to speak on AIDS>COVID trajectories). There's a lot that Pim Fortuyn and centrist-to-right US gays have in common, of course, but you can't just take New York's AIDS history and treat it as standard for the developed world. And the authors should BOTH KNOW BETTER and also have the resources to do better, because one is English and one is an American working for the Gay Museum in Berlin!

I am still, however, very much on board with their project of "bad gay" history: the history, specifically, of how "reclaiming" gay figures from the past has fed into dubious contemporary politics. Something I feel the trans community should think more carefully about before going all in on reclamatory and redemptive premodern narratives, but I appear to be rowing my boat upstream on that count.



View all my reviews

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a difficult and important read. I marked it to-read back when I was madly collecting books about the trauma of being Assigned Girl, hoping that reading enough feminist rage and trauma would anchor me in my assigned gender. By the time I got around to reading it, that was a lost cause.

This was very much a book about early (peri-pubsecent) sexualisation, and the project of reclaiming one's sexuality from a barrage of constant sexual predation. I was about to say that "although I was in an abusive relationship, Febos' experience is wildly different to mine", but it... isn't, not entirely. The age parameters, now that I think about it, are oddly similar, but the frequency and (forgive the legalese) severity, and above all the impact upon me, are widly different. I can't even put that latter down to gender, because I know many trans men whose lives and indeed adult selves walk much closer to Febos than to me.

I spent most of this book ping-ponging between "yoewch, to accurate", and "... wtf i thought this sort of thing was mostly a scare story they told you in school health class". Much like how I offhandedly said to a friend a while back "everyone knows Go Ask Alice was a hoax, that's not how peer pressure ACTUALLY works" and the friend went... "well i read it and it seemed pretty close to my experience. I'd call it plagiarism rather than a hoax." (the author of Go Ask Alice, in case you didn't know, was a conservative therapist working with young women).

Things I particularly resonated with:
- Febos' description of how her parents were not at all prepared to either help or protect her from what was going on. Same, except wildly different. Mine, for instance, were not equipped to help a kid who didn't experience sexuality as just... a natural thing that happens. Who might need to THINK, read, compare, consider, etc. I don't think they'd have coped better with Febos per se, but they were running on a script for a normative daughter halfway between us.
- The chapter about the cuddle party, and feeling obliged to offer affection/consolation to the Sad Man. I particularly appreciated that Febos gave equal weight to discomfort with the attentions of an Enthusiastic Woman And Her Male Partner, because were it about Sad Man alone... I'd be thinking of all the weird physical dynamics which come up with people OTHER than the Sad Straight Man.

Things I didn't but which were elucidatory: I won't go into all of them. But even though I've ditched my project work on Chaucer, I retain my fascination with Kim Zarins' "Sometimes We Tell The Truth". Her WOB's prologue gave me instant "erk". Like... okay, I get where you're going here but this feels wrong, it feels like a story they tell in health class not... a thing that actually happens. (A friend who HAD been subj to advances from older men at age 12 thought I meant I didn't think anyone was. No, I get that... happens... but something about the narration felt like an /extrapolation/ of how that might happen rather than either actually how it happens or how the young girl in q might re-tool the story later) On first read of Febos I didn't make the connection. On second read... the way Febos characterises her younger self feels like the kind of narration Zarins' WOB didn't hit; but Zaris' 17 y old Alison doesn't sound as far removed from Febos' 12 y old self as I thought. If that makes sense? Of course adult Febos isn't trying to paper over her wounds: her whole brand is Trauma Writing. But if she did... maybe it might come out closer to Zarins' Alison than I initially thought.



All About Yves: Notes from a transition by Yves Rees

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proper review coming but:
1. Rounded up by reason if “I like to read about people like me”.
2. However, I’m pretty sure I’d rather hear from Yves 2025 than Yves “I could never use a men’s bathroom” 2021. There’s a lot that’s gauche here, and ffs. Your trad pub memoir doesn’t count for “publish or perish”. The academic audience might not be here in 2025 but the queers will.

---

23.07.23 Note from later me: I read this as audiobook, I don't have a hard copy, and I'm really not up to re-considering the Saga of Nonbinary Academic right now. Maybe another year. Maybe another decade. This memoir was immensely important to me but didn't review it at the time and I cannot now.



Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


THAT WAS BOTH VALIDATING (yes, i guessed who nona was) and NOT WHAT I EXPECTED AT ALL. A+, ROUND OF APPLAUSE.

...

HOWEVER I would like to register a growing sense of wtf re the charactisation of the genocidal apocalypticist as Maori? It became really explicit in this book and ... no? Love the kiwi localisation, but... Uh. Weirdly I have seen no pushback, and I am not committed enough to this book or genre, nor informed enough about the NZ context specifically.

I note my discomfort, I hope it doesn't snowball, and in the meantime I will do as I have resolved to do instead of pontificating about Books I Read For Fun: bump something else up the tbr. In this case, Alexis Wright's The Swan Book.



Bonus: One(1) Deep Backdated Review. The next in queue is Manion's "Female Husbands", and I do not have the werewithal. But I promised a trans woman pal I'd dig out the applicable-to-her-interests bits, so I might re-read it soonish and then it can go into the recent queue again. Instead:

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I am really souring on these books, which I don't think is necessarily a flaw in Aaronovitch's work so much as my increasing distaste for the built in copaganda of much crime fiction. I remain UGH that Peter has not left the Met.



Online Fiction: two recent two backdated
Recent:
- Kehkashan Khalid, The Petticoat Government (Fantasy Magazine). Set in something approximating Mughal India, I think? It actually provided a fleshed-out sense of how female regnancy could work in highly spatially segregated societies, something I *technically know* with my research into gendered space in high and late medieval Europe, but haven't got a really graspable characterised handle on.
- L Chan, Re/union (Clarkesworld). One daughter, of several siblings, is the only remaining family member observing the pious New Year rituals with the ancestors: who are now, for both better and worse, represented by AI simulations at a banquet table. I don't have the cultural context for this and yet it both gripped and gutted me in places.

Backdated
- Rob E Boley, The Assembly of Graves (Diabolical Plots). Sometimes, I read depictions of lesbian relationships, written by (apparently cis and straight, although frequently one only assumes that because Queer Authors have their ID front and foremost) Men, which seem incredibly realistic and Relatable (TM) to me. It is possible this is a sign of my Gender (TM), given I frequently have the opposite relationship with Lesbian Fictions (TM). I dunno. I do know this is a neat horror story and I did not predict the twists to it even though perhaps I should have.
- Cheri Kamei, Blood in the Thread (Tor dot com). This is, I think, a pretty good story in its own right. Nevertheless. I said; I have said over and over and I'm sure more often than that but in keywords I can't recall to fling at site search; that I wanted a queer take on the Cat Person/Crane Wife problem. This is not what I wanted. If I wanted the abjection of the More Queer (butchness optional) partner faced with a Femme and/or Bi partner I could consume anything from The Well of Loneliness to Rent. And yet. I don't think this is a BAD short story, just. One I'm inclined to be bristly at.

Recently Added To The TBR:
Fiction:
- Alis Hawkins, "A Bitter Remedy", from a series called The Oxford Mysteries. KJ Charles gave it a mixed review but I think I like the things she likes and the things she dislikes in this one would be balanced out by my love of weirdly specific academic history.
- Patrick DeWitt, "The Librarianist". Got the rec from the twitter account "Caustic Cover Critic", who is one of my few sources of non-gay capital L Literary recommendations.
- Bruce Pascoe, "Salt: Selected Stories and Essays". I've had Dark Emu on my kobo for ages, but first burnout happened and now my work reading needs to be hard copy. I am intruiged by the idea of mixing fiction and essay, and have earmarked this as a possible library read, esp when I run out of work-appropriate things from my already owned hard copy pile.
- Se-hee Baek, "I want to die but I want to eat Tteokbokki". I saw a really strong rec for this as a depiction of Depression Et Al, and hey, I've never read Korean fiction before.

---

Some links: past and present:

Past: The dates on these are mid 2021, and hoo boy, let me tell you, scrolling back two years in my pinboard is, quite literally, scrolling back two years in terms of gender dysphoria and career anxiety. Still. Some stuff that, now that I look at it again, stuck with me!

- Isabelle O'Carrol (Refinery29), ADHD and gaslighting in women. TLDR neurodivergent women (people? I suspect people) more vulnerable to manipulation.
- Jessica J. Lee (Catapault), How seaweed shapes our past and future. I get a lot of reading recs from SE Smith on Twitter and I think this is one of them.
- Temma Ehrenfeld (Undark), Immune System Mutiny: Mast Cells and the Mystery of Long Covid. By now, in 2023, most of the Long Covid content i see online (perhaps due to Twitter algorithm) is outright misinformation, albeit often driven by understandable trauma and self-protection. I believe I was already noticing this trend by 2021, and this particular article did not trip that alarm. I'm interested in MAST cell activation syndrome, in and of itself, because friends have it and I suspect at least one relative does, and also it's weird and I am interested in weird things.
- Paige Turner (own blog), The healing process can be traumatic. I got bored of Paige's blog within six months of this post, but this one remains both short and true.

Recent: Other than ones linked earlier in this post, I give you the following:
- The Carapan gallery of Mexican art (own blog), What is an Alebrije: TL;DR man has hallucinations in the 1930s, makes art, accidentally sets off a folk art tradition.
- JP Brammer (own blog), Food Fight: on "ethnic" food and percieved authenticity. I love many things Brammer writes and this is a fine example.
- Chelsea Watego (Indigenous X), Voice To Parliament: Why Mob Are Staying Silent.
- Joseph Earp (Guardian), My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write then he plagiarised my work. Supplementary to, and bafflingly uncited in, the next link;
- Anna Verney and Richard Cooke, Being John Hughes (The Monthly). I was fascinated and apalled and at times discomfortingly empathetic to Hughes. I, too, was a kid from the periphery of the Hunter Region, said to be brilliant and promising. But I didn't go to Newcastle for uni, and I was not said to be the Next Big Thing (even at school: partly gender, but lbr the only Next Big Things my school at large was interested in was next big evangelist, and so my male peers as scholarly high achievers were in fact less lauded than I, at least I had the humanities teaching lead on my side). I too went abroad for a PhD and came home less than I had hoped to be. But I came home crippled by all the things I could not speak to, while Johnny Boy seems to have come home and determined to... speak to everything, by plagiarism if he can get away with it. (The worst is his remixing of the Bringing Them Home report's accounts, but he also felt the need to plagiarise a relatively privileged male student? Why?? Baffling.)

Conclusion: I should find someone to talk to me about my gender, IN FRENCH. Candidates: my actual therapist; or the social worker at Checkpoint Bern (a native Francophone); or seeing the trans specific social worker at Checkpoint Lausanne.

After Zurich Pride, I'm planning on doing Pride Romandie (much smaller) in Bulle (medium size village, ie, tiny in terms of places that have pride parades). Friend Hobbit S and their partner V will pick me up in Bern and drive me there.

Hobbit S has been asked to point-person an Asexual gathering/marching conglomerate. Parade too small to require that all groups have A Float. I found this out when I suggested that we three (all some flavour of trans) meet up with TGNS.

S is unsure if they should Organise an ace thing.

Me: OH happy to join up there!
Me: I can volunteer my rusty French! I thinK I can even explain why I'm there without implying you're my partner!

And then I had twenty seconds to think and... okay I COULD probably describe the circumstances of my ace-compatibility and how I know that, via describing K, etc. Or I could just... grab the available mostly-fits term, demisexuel*le. (I would have to make strategic choices about nouns and adjectives and pronouns, and I can't get any iel-users to explain how they do grammatical accord, if they don't all do the soft-stop * form, which I'm pretty sure they don't all do and also isn't a top option for me, I just sound like I can't speak French.)

I do not grab this term in English, for two reasons: firstly, most people I know who ID as demisexual react with repulsion to the concept of polyamory and all CERTAINLY go :s to the idea of bangin' on a first date, which I do occasionaly do. My... whatever, my weird situation is composed not of "know well before being able to countenance sex" so much as "I don't actually lust after people, most of the time, until AFTER I've already slept with them". IE, i require the "deep connection" of "able to have sex with this person, and indeed, I did, look" before wholistically lusting. (Some exceptions apply) Most demisexual and grey-ace people I know regard my sexual choices as repulsively hornt.

Secondarily, I have reason to believe that if I invested in asexuality as my primary identity I would use that to restrict myself. Given my well-attested Repression History, and that I... keep dating people with higher libidos than me, and envying them, like I WANT to be hornt but am not... this seems unwise.

And of course RIGHT NOW given I'm off the pill for once, and considering taking T, it seems foolish to sign up to an identity primarily understood as "not horny".

BUT. If I had to introduce myself in French in an ace space, then yes, I would say demisexuelle (probably in that form), with a bit of a shrug. And I therefore realised that if happened to hook up with a francophone... yeah, I would use demisexuelle to approximate my whole... DEAL. And I would feel a lot less angst about it than I would using the analagous term in English. It's just a WORD. If it achieves the COMMUNICATION GOAL, then HOORAY, I have COMMUNICATED IN FRENCH.

I think I really need to talk to someone about Gender in French. My German just isn't good enough to do the job, but my French might.

(Also: what if I signed in to Lingoda classes as Ed and just... used M grammar? It would feel fake. But deliberately fake as opposed to offensively fake. I don't know if it would fuck up my language aquisition, but I feel like defaulting to m is a common grammar error, so if I aquired it, a few weeks of immersion or a chunk of fr>de should break me of it...)

I don't know if I said on here, but when I moved back in 2020 I had the medium term goal of, once my moving costs were defrayed, joining a gym and paying for personal training in order to learn how to safely Do Weight Training. I do not think I am LIKELY to Become Swole, because I am starting from such a low baseline (and indeed worse now than it was in early 2020), but I would kind of like to Become Swole, honestly.

I had got as far as realising, in early March 2020, that the 24/7 gym chain I used in Geneva only serves Suisse Romande, and that the only chain which crosses the Rostigraben is the Migros gym - which didn't have a branch convenient to either the university or my house. So my hope of joining a chain, and travelling to a Francophone site for introductory instruction, tanked. And then COVID happened, tanking ALL my plans. And tanking my overall fitness.

(Sidebar: who know how much 'just walking around the office and stuff' was maintaining my fitness? Aside from minor exercise benefits, without wearing shoes and walking around corridors my feet have become IMPOSSIBLE. If I wear anything other than runners or my sketchers sandals outside I get excruciating foot cramps - and today, when I had been wearing NEW runners for a few days, then switched back to the old ones for the gym, taking the insole with me: foot cramps again! I can't wear my fabulous collection of Docs anymore. I have to take preventative naproxen to wear the heels that I wore all day five days a week in Japan.)

Now, double-vaxxed, and masked despite the fact that gyms are now exempt from the mask mandate (why, Switzerland, why), I have joined an Aggressively Feminine Gym. It is very pink. It is called, I kid you not, "Mrs Sporty". Turns out it's a German chain. I had an intake session with the franchise owner and she assured me they would preserve my 'weiblich' figure.

Me: das ist nicht wichtig für mich
Her: Wir sind ein FRAUENfitness!

Nevertheless, I have signed a year contract with them. Why? Because the women's gym, unlike either the cheap mixed gym or the Very Serious Gyms, offer extremely entry-level services as part of the package. What do men who don't know a barbell from a beardtrimmer do? What to men whose knees turn in and who cannot stand on one leg do, curl up and die in shame? The only men I've ever seen talking about starting from sub-zero with weight training were able to afford a one-on-one ongoing personal trainer.

Dealing with the gym owner gives me The Genders, but my plan was and is to let the very pink gym have their best shot at *finding* my feminine figure (I am increasingly shaped like Grimace), while I learn both the vocab and the entry-level skills. Seriously, my assigned trainer (more on her in a mo) had to give up and reach around and adjust my wrists (despite the no-contact COVID rules) holding the dumbell (a one-armed bicep curl to overhead press, if I understand Weights Internet correctly) because I just cannot interpret the visual guide correctly or follow her (in English!) corrections. I know enough from doing physio and yoga to know that I would be at less risk of injury with a weight machine BUT that I should not use them, because my stabiliser muscles are my weakest, and with freeweights you work those while you're working the major muscle groups.

So, the Pink Gym Ladies are here to correct me. I grit my teefs through the BMI talk (seriously, you're a LADIES GYM, and both boobs and muscle skew BMI). I was given a simple diet tips worksheet, which was amusing because it was very Germanic - advised three serves of dairy per day, and only on the yoghurt suggestion did they specify low-fat.

Very Good Things About The Aggressively Feminine Gym

The trainer I've been working with - the starter pack gets you three personal training sessions before you're set loose with the regular subscription, and you get three-to-six weekly workout revision sessions - is lovely. Quiet but significant dyke energy. *She* didn't assure me that I wouldn't get unsightly muscles.

The main daytime clientele are older ladies. Difficult to be intimidated when the person next to you is using the 1kg dumbbells off the special rack.

They've invested heavily in workout guidance tech, rather than machines. There are these stations like a 5ft 6 tablet: you QR code check in, and it has your routine logged. The bottom half of the screen shows you a demo video of someone performing each move, and the upper half videos you and has little circles and arrows showing you where you need to move the weight or move your body. At the moment I'm struggling to keep up with the demo speed, but I can see the pacing element being very important - due to the lack of stabiliser muscles when I CAN do something I tend to jerk it, which is Bad, Actually. And due to the ADHD I get bored doing things slowly.
Alongside that, the whole room is set up for interval training. There's an overhead 'move to the next station now' three minute timer, and one is supposed to alternate between the tablet with your set routine and a variety of other activities - cardio (jogging on the spot on a slightly soft surface, a step block), balance work (wobble board: i am bad at it) and there's a screen demonstrating assorted bodyweight exercises one could do. Plenty of those stretchy rubber resistance bands, broomsticks, and weighted basketballs, for whatever it is one uses those for.

And, greatest wonder of all:

There are no open changing spaces. Despite being a "women's gym", they have three individual changing cubicles, with heavy curtains. Each has a chair, a long mirror and a small shelf. There are IKEA Kallaxes to store your stuff in, but no locker-room benches. Two toilet cubicles, and the shower not only has a curtain but ALSO a locked changing cubicle.

My last gym didn't even have curtains on the showers, so, like: !!!. I probably won't shower at the gym, because I can just do so at home, but I would be much happier to do so in this environment. I'm just so struck by the fact that not only do they *have* changing cubicles, they've designed those to be standard - no 'here's the normal people space and here's the cubicle for the excessively shy' vibes.

I'd be really interested to know if other Mrs Sporty gyms are designed the same way. Even if not, it feels like the person who designed this one designed it this way not in spite of it being a "women's space" but because it is a women's space. Just. An awful lot of women do not enjoy changing in public, so why make them? (Why make anyone? But women are more likely to TALK about their self-consciousness, so I know it's a thing even for straight, cis, white, relatively thin women.) Something I think about a lot as the Bathroom Discourse inevitably comes around and around.

As for my fitness, I am bad at: interpreting physical instructions; standing on one leg; jumping sideways; lateral lunges or anything involving stretching sideways really; squats; having stable wrists for any dumbbell exercise; and co-ordinating my arms and my body movement when attempting to do the squat-with-arms-out thing. So, pretty much all the things you can be bad at. Also the vast disparateness between the two sides of my body shows up a lot, as does the fact that some of my major muscles do the work of their neighbours (the bicep curl to overhead press thing, for instance, I feel that in my back, not my arms. The weight is potentially too light for my arm strength while being a hard workout for my back).

Good news: I find it much easier to tolerate being bad at these things for half an hour than to slog through a 20 minute run - probably because the variety at least changes the WAY things are bad, so I'm not getting bored as well as failing at all the things.

Further bonuses: the Very Pink Gym is in my old neighbourhood, which is good for my ongoing access to the one coop supermarket that reliably has gluten-free pizza dough. Also the renovated bakery-café is next to the gym, and while it's the same chain as the one in the shopping centre near me now, the staff are nicer down there. Plus I can go check on my favourite local cats sometimes. A+

Today I: finalised a (small) grant application and sent it off; had continuing Out of Cucumber Errors over german "anrede" and gendered forms of address; had a nap; took clothes to the donation bin and bought coffee, which ended up being free because the barista fucked up and made me an approximation of a flat white (not a thing here) instead of a cap but I said I'd drink it anyway; did some work on my book proposal; listened to the Lafayette college lecture Shakespeare, Race and Queer Sexuality (part one).

I also took sfred's dinner idea from last week, and made baked potatoes with halloumi. In my case: cubed potatoes and sweet potato (par cook in microwave), with quartered onions, whole garlic cloves, and asparagus spears. Douse in olive oil with pepper and herbs. Add cubed halloumi. Bake. Nom.

BDE
Alison C. Rollins

God gave me a man
Who I, in turn, bodied
Had he lived, I would
Take myself more seriously.
Come what may I will
Get myself together,
I will whip myself into
The shape of a man
Who has put away
Childish things. I will
Take a woman as my toy
And pretend, in doing so,
I am highly favoured.

(For the record I'm just pulling up poems in the order I saved them, aside from occasionally typing out one from a hard copy - the Fryatt, for ex - so links between my particular day and the choice of poem occur at the point of posting.)

That's two fortnights now I've resumed my average of 3 books/2 weeks. At this rate I won't make my goodreads goal, or have read nearly all I Ought to have read for work, but it's something.

This past fortnight, a lot of reading and feels have circled around Gender. In Bowden's anthology of 18th c Chaucer modernisations, I found a 1715 Reeve's Tale in the style of a mock epic, which does some really odd stuff around the daughter: calls her the miller's 'female son', and a 'filiaster', and stresses her towering height and girth, in a way that if it was a text from 1915 I'd be happy calling transmisogyny - not that the daughter has ever been anything but assigned female, but in that by that time I'd be confident the joke was "she looks like a man in a dress". Here, I'm less sure. I talked about it a bit on the COMMode project twitter account. In part I'm hesitant to call it transmisogyny because the mockery relies on *person assigned female fails to grow up physically feminine OR act feminine* (elsewhere the poem stresses her failures in cooking, and her clumsiness), in a way is more reminiscent of the combo gender-policing and transphobia that trans men get, in being seen as defective women. Or, for that matter, the gendered mockery directed at cis women who just happen to fail at feminine tasks and tropes - I'm a pretty clumsy gal myself, clumsiness as unfeminine is *absolutely a thing*. Anyway, I settled on calling it 'oppositional-sexism based misogyny' (I'm not quite sure there's any other kind of misogyny, but so as to distinguish it from, say, oppositional-sexism based toxic masculinity).

At the same time, I was reading Kate Bornstein's 'Gender Outlaw' (updated edition) - I know Bornstein's been something of a contentious figure, and can see why from the book, certainly. What really struck me was the part where, under definitions of gender, she breaks down a list of bodily, behavioural and social codes that make up 'feminine' and therefore 'woman'- things a trans woman has to do in order to override automatic gendering based on facial structure, for instance. She talked about not meeting people's eyes as you walk around in public; flirting by looking at-and-back; various spoken language codes; ways of holding your body; ways of relating to others. Some of them had never occurred to me at all (not looking directly at people on the street? I mean, of course I do, especially if they're coming toward me and we have to non-verbally negotiate who's going to dodge). Bornstein describes them all as, in essence, signals of submission, which: huh. (I think that's not entirely true of some of 'feminine' conversational patterns - asking more questions than you give opinions isn't necessarily submissive.)

I knew I had never fully internalised the norms of young women's behaviour, because everything ever written about how girls (especially co-ed educated girls) behave in classrooms is entirely inaccurate if applied to me. And I knew that when I was put through actual workplace communication training, in a govt job, I was punished for offering constructive critique ("okay, but what about x?") without padding it with praise in a way that both the men in the room and the woman with an MBA were not. I put it down to neuroatypicality: I just missed the memo on a lot, which was mostly productive in terms of my self-esteem and confidence, but increasingly likely to backfire as an adult. But that those codes, combined with certain codes of body language and eye contact, are codes of submission - well I assume I don't have those mastered either (idek, everyone agrees I Make Good Eye Contact, but if women are supposed to make less of it, perhaps I am OVERdoing it). Which probably explains why in sex-positive spaces I get read as Dominant with a capital D even when I'm not trying to be (and/or why men who think of themselves as Dominant with a capital D saw me, when I was younger and more impressionable, as secretly craving submission).

Ugh. Genders. Why. And you're about to say 'that's not gender that's gender roles / misogyny / etc', but it -is- gender in the sense that it's used to either gender you (determine what gender you are) or to react to you based on a system of gendered norms (aggressive for a woman is assertive for a man - variable by race, mind - intense intellectual engagement in a same-gender context reads as intimate in an opposed-gender one, and so on).

---

Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: I'm a little way into Balli Kaur Jaswal's 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows' and am currently annoyed with the protagonist and the premise (specifically that she gets a job teaching writing classes with no writing CV. C'mon. This is 21st c London, even if you limit to the Sikh community there should be a small handful of experienced writers desperate for that job). Three Daughters of Eve on hiatus again - I'm still enjoying it but you know how you avoid the Inevitable Embarrassment in romcoms? I'm avoiding the Inevitable Seduction By Teacher part even though I expect it to be done interestingly and well.
Non-fiction for Personal Interest: Only The Queer Child, still on hiatus.
Poetry: I haven't listened to Paradise Lost for quite a while, I should fix that.
Lit Mag: Still very slowly working through Autumn Meanjin...
For work: I'm partway through The House of Fame on audiobook, and still puttering through The New Companion to Chaucer at times. Main focus at the moment is Forni's Chaucer's Afterlife, which is giving me even more things for the TBR. I've ordered a personal hard copy, as this one is due back soon.

Recently Finished:

Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales by Betsy Bowden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Actually WAY more interesting than I expected. I now need to know a lot more about mock-epic, stat.


The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ooof. Big. Wide-ranging. Incredibly useful. I'm aware of the trenchant critique esp of her treatment of Islam, but as that hinges on 'too reliant on the literary imaginary' it's not a huge barrier for me. I *am* rather more skeptical of the last two chapters, on the Mongols and the Romani respectively - the former, for about half of it, doesn't seem to as carefully distinguish between 'to European observers Mongols SEEMED animalistic because of...' and giving an emotive paraphrase of 'they were x and y'... Heng is much more careful with this re: Islam, and, hmm. Ditto the Romani chapter: I don't know enough to critique the historical claims but it seemed very obvious to me that a lot of the authoritative secondary sources she quotes are deeply prejudiced, and she doesn't really get into that (eg: why assume that the Romani devised the story about wandering in exile due to ancestors having abandoned Christianity as a _cunning plot_, at all? Given many Romani are *now* usually Catholic, could not the same influences identified as giving them the info on Christianity needed to devise such a story actually have resulted in conversions and the creation of such a narrative within some groups?).


Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is... a bit patchy, variable, I think? I haven't read the first edition, so I don't know how much of that comes from the updating process. There are certainly things in here that I stared at and thought "... if a trans woman said that on Twitter she would be excoriated by other trans people at the speed of retweet". In particular Bornstein seems comfortable attributing some women's discomfort with her 'male energy' early in transition to her own 'vestigal male privilege' and to her having not fully adopted the less explicit codes of feminine body language and communication at that stage, which... is not something most trans women would endorse as an explanation, let's say. Anyway. Bornstein has been thoroughly cancelled at least once in the internet age, and survived it, so, let's not hash that out.

Without necessarily ENDORSING that, I did really appreciate how much Bornstein talked about gender's implicit codes of body language and communication - somewhere she describes femininity's signals as all 'signals of submission', and, uh. Oh. Right. Yeah. That would explain a LOT of gendered social problems I encounter, both in very everyday spaces and in queer / sex-positive spaces.

I don't feel like I can give a coherent review because the book itself isn't trying for coherence. I can say that what REALLY stood out to me was the playscript at the end - I want a production, at once. I want to LIGHT a production, there's so much scope for storytelling through lighting there.

Online fiction: Patrick Dacey (Guernica), Counter Waves.

Up Next: More work stuff, at as quick a clip as I can manage.

---

Links of note, assorted:

Guy Rundle (Crickey), The Uniquely Australian Violence of the Brereton War Crimes Report, and

Boubuq Sayed (Meanjin), A New Generation of Australian War Criminals. These two make very similar points, with the exception that Sayed also notes that the major outlets, by providing links to veterans' counselling services but nothing for or about Afghan Australians, are continuing to centre soldiers over victims. Guess which of the two got splashed over the Murdoch press and hounded on social media and had his follow-up essay rejected by the Guardian? No prizes for guessing.

Damon (own blog), The uncanny valley of culture: on making english-language media while not being American.

James Wright (Triskele Heritage), Medieval Mythbusting blog 2: the man who invented the spiral staircase myth.

Naaman Zhou (Guardian Au), Australia's delivery deaths: the riders who never made it and the families left behind. Naaman Zhou (the man who brought you 'Australian scientist gets magnet stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device) is honestly one of the best culture/society-side economics reporters out there at the moment. Which is to say he's not reporting from parliament or on business forecasts, but on the practical realities: delivery drivers, university enrolments, underpayment scandals, and so on.

Michelle Toole, Brendan Crabb and Suman Majumdar (The Age), Blaming and shaming breaks a cardinal rule of public health.

Jamey Jesperson (History Workshop), Honouring trans lives, historicising trans death.

Shookofeh Rajabzadeh (ACMRS Arizona), Is your bread white enough? King Arthur baking company's racist marketing history.

Dan Charles (NPR, 2019), From cullinary dud to stud: how dutch plant breeders built our brussels sprouts boom. TL,DR, unlike most things, mass-market brussel sprouts have got rapidly BETTER in the last twenty years.