First Post

[hoisinsauce]

A space to chat fandom! Anon!

Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

You guys told me to, so I'm reading it! Don't count on a detailed liveblog, though, because TBH it ain't worth the effort. I also don't really want to pass judgment on it until I'm finished, since...maybe? some of my complaints will be addressed. It's competently and sometimes wittily written, but the dialogue truly is bad - it's basically flowery 3rd person narration repurposed with quotation marks. And honestly, it's just a really trashy book so far. Both misogynist and ~transmisogynist, punctuated with a lot of uncomfortable sex scenes and navel-gazing about gender. I'm not sure if the author set out to write the Great Trans Novel and accidentally wrote trashy chick-with-a-dick-lit, or if he knew he was writing something trashy and the critics thought it was Deep. (But I'm not finished, so maybe it turns out to be Deep later!)

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Good luck, anon!

Surely not TRANSMISOGYNY?!!! Cancel, post-haste!

tbf I actually enjoyed bits of the excerpts of Long Chu I read (admittedly not much); when it was being shameless and straightforward it could be funny, just as a whole marred by how much he obviously despised women and would devote paragraphs to weird rants about how much he hated women. I liked the review in The Radical Notion, because it was quite balanced and acknowledged the merits while still being like 'fuck off, dude'.

Bad dialogue is probably the most distracting thing, anyway. I can look past weak narration with good dialogue, but I don't think it works the other way.

Sounds like a book that might benefit immensely from replacing the word 'gender' with some other noun. Just need to find a good candidate!

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt I mean, I am certainly not the person to say what is and what isn't transmisogynistic! I only call it that because I know that if I were some sort of trans, I would be fucking horrified if all the nice folx reading this for their bookclubs assumed this book was in any way representative of my experience. The characters (so far!) are uniformly privileged and unpleasant, with no experience of poverty or real discrimination. They care about fucking and affirming their gender. That's it.

Reese, the MC, fucks an HIV-positive man because bug-chasing gives him the same thrill he imagines women get with pregnancy scares. He pretends his estrogen is birth control. He gets in an abusive sugar baby relationship because being beaten and called a whore makes him feel like a woman. And this is not just Reese! One of his TIM friends fantasizes about being pimped out and murdered by a man.

Do spoiler cuts work?

But in ways that both of them felt but neither could fully admit, the entire saga of the boots that led to the slap was a form of pageantry. Beneath it lay Reese’s own sense of womanhood. The reason Stanley hit Reese reversed everything both of them wanted to be true: Stanley hit Reese because she wanted him to hit her.
....
In old books she had read, Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but fit with a perfect logic in one of the dark crevices of her heart. And yeah, liberal feminists—especially the trans-hating variety—would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her? The New York Times regularly published op-eds by famous feminists who pointedly ruled her out as a woman. Let them. She’d be over here, getting knocked around, each blow a minor illustration of her place in a world that did its gendering work no matter what you called it. So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa I guess the cut DID NOT work, sorry to everyone who had to scroll past this. D:

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

> The characters (so far!) are uniformly privileged and unpleasant, with no experience of poverty or real discrimination. They care about fucking and affirming their gender. That's it.

Idk man, I've met some noisy transactivists who call themselves trans and who seem to absolutely love that kind of rep, because they're super narcissistic people who can't see that something's wrong.

That hitting quote is so longwinded omg. hit hit hit hit hit.
heart with ~dark crevices~
lol trying to pre-empt reviewers, u so smart. 'if i say they'll call me sexist, then im not sexist hahahahaha'
haha I wrote that line before even reading the next line, called it, you unimaginative man.

Yeah... I think you were too generous about the narration, if that's representative! xD

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

> Reese, the MC, fucks an HIV-positive man because bug-chasing gives him the same thrill he imagines women get with pregnancy scares.

You know, when I first heard about this, I wondered if this was a result of a man reading fic written by women and mistaking it for real life; assuming that what women liked on the page translated to what they wanted irl. Because loads of women are into reading about accidental pregnancy; it's a common romance trope and I'd guess a pretty common kink. But irl, pregnancy scares are just annoying and stressful. So I kinda saw this as evidence, not just that he had a fantasy idea of what a woman was, but that it was a fantasy built out of tropes he'd encountered in fiction.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

I strongly suspect this book will be improved by switching out 'feminist' for 'furby' and 'trans' for 'shelby'. Still considering potential replacements for 'gender'; the word needs to work as both a noun and a verb...

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa Let's continue! The basic plot is that Reese's TIM ex, Amy/Ames, has detransitioned since they were together and has now gotten his new GF Katrina preggers. Katrina is Amy/Ames' boss and fantasy TIM GF because she's kinky and tops him. Katrina had a miscarriage before and is happy to be pregnant now, but Amy/Ames has a TIM freakout about being a FATHER, and reveals that he lied to her about being sterile and he used to live as a woman. Katrina freaks out and gets hugely drunk at a business dinner, outing Amy/Ames to the company. (OFC the ciswoman has to be an actual bitch about it in the narrative, even though she's the one who's been wronged.) Amy/Ames SOMEHOW gets the fucking insane idea of asking Reese (they haven't met in years!) to join them in a...throuple? of parenting because maybe THEN he won't feel like a FATHER. Katrina is fucking horrified...until she calls her mom who thinks it's a great idea! (This is an example of the author just shoving characters around until they fit in his boxes instead of doing the work to make their choices believable.)

Back to Reese! OFC this beautiful, curvy, passing TIM used to work at a daycare (stealth), where he amazed everyone by being more a natural mother than...the actual moms. Be amazed at this male fantasy:

The tiny soft bodies in her arms, the way they giggled and cooed, triggered some sort of deep oxytocin-laced trance in Reese. She felt she knew instinctively what to do, knew just how much of the breast milk to give each girl so that she didn’t get sick, knew when they needed to be burped, knew when each needed to be picked up and held, when each could be settled back into her baby carrier. The mothers returned to their daughters sleeping and fed. They gushed that Reese had natural mothering instincts, and together began asking at the front desk for Reese’s schedule, planning their workouts to correspond with her shifts, then telling other young mothers about the tall maternal brunette. Within a few weeks, Reese was overwhelmed with children during her shifts, and offers to babysit in her free time, so that management was faced with either hiring a second employee during her shifts or changing the policy to no longer disclose her schedule.

REESE WANT BABY. REESE DESERVE BABY. GIVE REESE BABY.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

> telling other young mothers about the tall maternal brunette.

r/thathappened

I mean, it's all thathappened, but especially that bit!

"Guess what everyone, there's this *brunette* and she's so *maternal*, you would not *believe*! She feeds the kids she's paid to feed and everything!"

(Watching TV rn so I will have to come back later to work out exactly how each character is related to the others, since sounds like you have to commit about 40 hours of undivided attention and draw a few maps to follow it.)

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa Part 3! We get a bunch of flashbacks and see that Amy/Ames is like the most typical AGP ever. He plays with girls, secretly wears his mom's bras, and is all ~betrayed when he asks to BORROW one as a 10yo kid and she's disturbed. He loses his virginity to a girl in a scene that feels like the author is masturbating:

And then Amy was back in. Both into Delia and into the fantasy. In two places at once. Amy wanted her ass grabbed. She grabbed Delia’s ass. Delia moaned. She pictured Delia pinching her nipples, and reached around and pinched Delia’s tiny breasts. And then, without warning, Amy was coming. Not in the room with Delia, but in another similar room, where Delia was spanking her, where she was Delia’s little slut, where Delia had her captive, where she was Delia’s good girl, forever and ever.

Amy/Ames REALLY hates women:

When she watched the girls she knew, a burning jealousy would stab through her. Little things. How they plucked their eyebrows. How they put their hands on each other’s arms. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous. So it was easy for her to call girls bitches. To dismiss their concerns, which cruelly could never apply to her. To charm the boys with jokes about the ridiculousness of girls, of femininity in general.

So here's where it starts to get kind of weird(er). Is this book some kind of exercise in self-harm? Because I get the feeling the author hates himself, hates women, hates transwomen, and is trying to...explain that? Exorcise it? Give it meaning? Amy/Ames gets into forced feminization sissy erotica and is disgusted by himself for it.

Amy hated how much she loved the stories, the orgasms that came as she read them at all hours of the day, sneaking in a story in the twenty minutes between classes, or whole nights spent in a jerk-off marathon, story after story, until reality began to fade. She knew that anyone she knew who discovered it wouldn’t understand. They’d just think she hated femininity and equated it with humiliation. She’d be shunned, and deservedly so. For years—until she transitioned, until she met women into rape-play, into servitude and infantilization, women who had eroticized and sexually defanged every unspeakable shame and violation life had thrown at their womanhood—she couldn’t actually think of a single argument to counter the undeniable orgasm-certified evidence of her unpardonable misogyny.

Like, he really hates himself:

She liked the stories that were as close to her life as possible. A shy college boy. Domineering older women. What she really liked was when the women made the trans girls have sex with men. When the older women watched and laughed.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa More on the theory that this is some kind of literary self-harm. Amy/Ames goes to a cross-dressing boutique with a random dude to try on clothes and is super turned on, obvs. Only a woman and her daughter accidentally mistake it for an actual clothing store and are horrified:

Amy saw the store through her eyes: a Silence of the Lambs–level display of disembodied female body parts. Worst of all, the red-faced men, one now hiding, the other creepily fingering panties and who knew what else. The specialty panties—with wider gusset for women of all anatomies!—that Amy held in her hand and had been examining with curiosity when the bell above the door announced the women’s entrance, burned radioactively. She longed to drop them, to throw them away from her, but feared that doing so would attract attention her way, the equivalent of waving a lace-trimmed pink flag. So she stood frozen, apparently transfixed by the panties, hating the image she felt sure she presented. She wanted to apologize.
...
“Mom. Let’s go,” said the daughter. The rack of books behind her were illustrated erotica labeled FORCED WOMANHOOD, their covers decorated with drawings of shemales bound and being whipped.
...
She would do almost anything to never again be looked at the way those women had looked at her. It wasn’t that they had even been rude. They had simply seen her. Seen a true thing in her that she had spent her life making sure never to show to anyone.

Say what you will about this book (it sucks), but you can't deny it's really fucking honest.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, a man writing about wanking. This has never been seen before in fiction.

I was hoping it'd be a bit more original, at least. Seems very pedestrian.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa Part 4? Sorry for dumping these all at once, but I want to get this book out of my head!

We're back in the main timeline. Reese tells Katrina that he wants to be a mother because if he isn't he'll forever be a "silly whore". When he whines about how TIMs aren't expected to be mothers, Katrina smacks him down, saying that POC women have been discouraged from having kids, too. This bit is actually kind of funny:

Reese had not expected to be questioned on her right to victimhood as a trans woman. Apparently, no one had informed Katrina that among queers, trans women were still a subaltern du jour. Perhaps Reese had grown accustomed to leaning on that a little too heavily.

LOL. Katrina:

"You think it’s hard to be a mother because you’re trans. I think it’s hard to be a mother as the mixed descendant of Chinese and Jewish immigrants. We have difficulty with motherhood in common."

This is just shitty writing. Don't just spell out the moral of your story like that, dude.

There are then 3 pages of Werner Herzog RPF. Why?? I guess the author wanted to imagine having a convo w/Warner about clothing for some reason.

Reese goes to a transwoman's funeral, and this bit is also mildly witty:

If you are a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a lot, because church is where they hold the funerals. What no one wants to admit about funerals, because you’re supposed to be crushed by the melancholy of being a trans girl among the prematurely dead trans girls, is that funerals for dead trans girls number among the notable social events of a season.

Reese thinks he's a psychopath because he's stopped feeling any grief about this. Again, I think this is the author telling on himself.

But hey! The author finally remembered us radfems!

As she stands there gaping, anti-transgender bills ferment in various state senates. Even the liberal media—The New York Times and The New Yorker and New York magazine—have taken to publishing anti-trans screeds penned by conservatives, the editors disingenuously wringing their hands and pleading “balance” or “wait for the science.” Radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists have teamed up to insist that trans women are all pedophiles, that such predators can’t be trusted around children or in women’s spaces. Every year, the list of murdered trans women, most of color, grows longer. Among those cases, the number of victims who were misgendered in their own obituaries is greater than the number of victims whose murderer has been identified.

Mmm, didactic literature!

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Oh good, I was wondering when the lectures would start.

Also lol, I see it's the good ol' fashioned "put the pep talk in the mouth of the person from the class I'm oppressing to give my views legitimacy", ok.

(Also is this book past or present tense now???)

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa Part 5! At this point, Katrina is basically pleading with Reese to be the baby's 2nd mom. It makes no sense for her character, but she's really just a cardboard cut-out for the author to project his fantasy upon. But Reese doesn't want to be 2nd Mom! Reese wants to be 1st Mom, only Mom! He FUCKING HATES WOMEN:

Reese rolls her eyes. Cis women are always complaining about the burden of their reproductive ability, while secretly cherishing it. Hysterectomies are widely available, but even women who don’t want children aren’t exactly lining up to get them.

Katrina and Reese go baby shopping and Reese is the one assumed to be pregnant. LMAOOOOO r/thathappened. They put matching breast pumps on the register because OFC Reese is going to breastfeed. He's actually got a pump already that he uses for mommy!kink sex, what the FUCK. He (and Amy/Ames) are both really, really into mommy!kink:

Sometimes, Reese wants to talk with Katrina about the eroticism of motherhood. Even this store. Look at it! A sanctum of femaleness, of private domestic acts. Maternity clothes to cover a changing body. Photos and products designed to encourage touch, nurturing, care. Everything packaged in the same soft, pale pastel colors women choose for lingerie when the male gaze is subtracted from the equation. The ghost scent of baby powder dusting the space. Queers—hell, even straight people—had all begun to call each other “daddy” in bed, but for Reese, there had never been a word more taboo, more soft, more intimate than “mommy.” If masculine displays of overt horniness have always been more celebrated than their feminine counterparts, the mommy vs. daddy dirty-talk dichotomy only heightens that disparity.

Katrina buys a book about lesbian "second" moms for her mom and Reese to read, but Reese is offended because EW lesbians are exclusionary:

She couldn’t quite fake politeness through her vague dismay at yet another suggestion that her own journey into queer parenting must begin with advice from the cis lesbians who disdained her motherhood. Why, whenever she proclaimed her desire for motherhood, did people point her to a political movement that had banked thirty years making it clear that it didn’t want her around?

I cannot emphasize enough how SHITTY of a person Reese is. Katrina is willing to co-mother her child with a complete stranger, but all Reese can do is complain:

And this is Reese’s whole complaint. That in the end, when it comes to final say in how the baby will be raised, Katrina, the natal mom, will have that last word. Second-place mom, Reese, would be allowed suggestions only.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Lol, thathappened indeed!

> Everything packaged in the same soft, pale pastel colors women choose for lingerie when the male gaze is subtracted from the equation.

That's your male gaze, right there. Also fuck off.

> If masculine displays of overt horniness have always been more celebrated than their feminine counterparts, the mommy vs. daddy dirty-talk dichotomy only heightens that disparity.

You fight that sexism, you! But also, what a confused idea. Among people who like that shit, the person saying 'daddy' tends to be characterised as feminine. People normally think of some creepy guy soliciting a dominatrix when they think of someone using 'mommy' in a sexual context. Sounds like a 'masculine display of overt horniness' to me. So the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

> Why, whenever she proclaimed her desire for motherhood, did people point her to a political movement that had banked thirty years making it clear that it didn’t want her around?

Because 1) that desire is nuts and based on your fetish, and 2) they're hoping you get the message, would be my guess.

And yes, how very dare the woman who actually gives birth to the child have more of a say than the random unrelated guy that's hanging around hating women and getting hard when he sees maternity-wear. Truly, a scandal.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Bf's comments:

"How can he not see how much of a woman he isn't, from this scene alone? Here's a shop set up to offer women practical things for a practical purpose, and all he can do is wank. The women are just trying to get on with their lives, but there he is, in the way, wanking in their general direction."

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa Part 6, we're almost done!

Katrina takes Reese to an essential oils party and Reese is an asshole thinking about all these sad cishet women who believe in this shit. But oops! One of Katrina's friends turns out to be married to the dude Reese is fucking! And he got HIV from fucking a previous transwoman! Katrina justifiably freaks out but Reese thinks she's being stupid for worrying about HIV and babies. Amy/Ames agrees, saying it's "the most basic freak-out." Amy/Ames asks Reese when he's going to change, and Reese says:

“I’ll change when it’s worth it to me to change. The actual question is whether this thing with Katrina is real enough for either of us to bother to change. For you to change too, for you to get back in touch with yourself. For Katrina to change too, because apparently she needs to.”

REESE IS THE BIGGEST FUCKING ASSHOLE, OMG. This situation is literally entirely his fault and all he can say is that Amy/Ames needs to transition again and Katrina needs to get over her anti-AIDS bigotry, or whatever. He has zero empathy for either of them, and when he hears that Katrina is considering an abortion, he freaks out and sends an awful email to them because they're threatening HIS baby. HIS.

Katrina gives Amy/Ames an ultimatum - stay and be a father, or dissolve their relationship and she gets an abortion. This characterization choice feels icky to me and inauthentic. It's presently coldly and without much empathy for Katrina. Why can't she keep the baby and raise it with her supportive mother and friends?

Amy/Ames is like, fuck, I'm depressed as hell and don't want my baby to know me as a dude. He tells Katrina that he'll raise the kid with her, but he can't promise not to transition again. Katrina isn't so hot for this idea, but - HEY! pay attention to Reese again! He's had a trans miscarriage, okay?? In an attempt to numb his pain he walks into the freezing ocean, and everybody misinterprets it as a suicide attempt. They all reconnect at the hospital and Reese actually apologizes! But not without Katrina doing some self-flagellation of her own, saying that she "wanted the good parts of queerness without the hard parts." WTF?? Also apparently worrying about AIDS and the baby was homophobic.

Reese tries to accept the fact that he won't get to be a mother to the baby. I guess that's almost growth? But what else is he gonna do? He has no other choice. That's not actually change if you just accept the situation your own shitty behavior has put you in!

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

> In an attempt to numb his pain he walks into the freezing ocean

Pmsl, that is so fucking male.

I wish I could say that I was shocked at this entry, but it sounds like all the other shitty narcissistlit I've seen. Especially the throwing Katrina under the bus, and that, "For Katrina to change too, because apparently she needs to.” All these guys treat their female characters the same way. I bet there's a near identical line in Anger Is A Gift. They think it's cute and sassy and instead it just comes across as creepily desperate to attack a woman.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

sa LAST PART HOORAY!

Katrina schedules an abortion because Amy/Ames isn't stable enough for her. Amy/Ames feels like it's some huge betrayal. Katrina invites Reese to come along as well, even though Reese privately is all pro-life now:

In her mind, she had given the baby up to Katrina, and now, it was with dismay—perhaps even horror—that she had to acquiesce that the baby’s mother had the right to abort. That another woman could end the existence of a baby that she had come to imagine, softly, tentatively, at the center of her future life. She had found her emotions and, in the two days since Ames told her about the abortion, had veered in the direction of pro-life politics.

Sure, Reese. Anyway, he still tries to guilt-trip her into waiting longer. Finally, everybody gets philosophical:

“Well, what if this is our solution? Maybe this is so awkward and hard and without obvious precedent because we’re trying to imagine our own solution, to reinvent something for ourselves, whatever kind of”—he pauses, and looks down at his own feet, the boots and jeans he wears—“whatever kind of women we are.”

“Maybe,” Katrina says.

Reese hears this, an indefinite to Katrina’s tone, and she raises her head, eyes shining in the dark circles. “Yeah,” Reese agrees, “maybe.”

Katrina gets up to make some tea. The kettle boils, and she pours out three cups and returns with them. The three of them sip in silence as the clock ticks. They are together, and miles from each other, their thoughts turning to themselves, then turning to the baby, each in her own way contemplating how her tenuous rendition of womanhood has become dependent upon the existence of this little person, who is not yet, and yet may not be.

THE END!

This is just...nonsense. Try-hard philosophical gobbledygook. What if...the real baby was the friends we made along the way?? Reese has not grown or changed. Amy/Ames is still an indecisive weenie. Katrina is a paper cut-out of a woman who is only in this story because her womb is convenient to the author's fantasy. It makes no sense to imply that Katrina has changed her mind after this conversation because she has no connection to the theme of evolving transwomanhood.

I mean, what more can I say? The book has well-placed thematic parallels and it's incredibly honest, but that's where my praise ends. I don't want to think about any of the characters ever again. They hurt each other, they hurt themselves. They don't learn. Now, you can make a great book out of terrible people - I admire Lolita as much as I hate it. But I don't know what the author thought he was writing. It comes across as self-harm, a ritual humiliation. What does the trans community think about this book? Because I can tell you right now - don't worry about this being nominated for a women's prize. It'll be viscerally disgusting to 90% of the women reading it for their book clubs. It's more #transphobic than anything radfems have ever said about trans people.

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

What an embarrassment, especially "her tenuous rendition of womanhood". I don't think these guys get that only they see it like this. A sane person will read it more like "her tenuous rendition of being 5ft7". Save your renditions for concerts; Butler doesn't hold up when we're talking about anything important, sorry. And cringed at the pro-lofe bit, of course.

Yes, I like honest tell-all literature; I think this piece might have worked better if he'd just written it as a journal instead of trying to shoehorn his feelings into a fictional world. Because he doesn't seem very interested in crafting that world. My guess is he's not entertaining enough on a sentence-by-sentence level for people to read if he writes in a journal format. So there's a plot tacked on in an attempt to get people to listen to him drone on about his feelings and opinions.

Anyway. I find it funny how, if these excerpts are any indication, he's constantly using adverbs like "softly, daintily, tentatively" and so on to describe himself because he thinks it makes him seem feminine, without realising how very male that entire attitude to women is.

Congrats for getting through it, anyway!

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

> What if...the real baby was the friends we made along the way??

This made me lol, nonny. :)

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Looks like you called it, seems it didn't make the shortlist! https://twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1387485765827956741

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Any plans to compile these notes for o/books? I bet a lot of people would get a kick out of the quotes... :D

Re: Books - Detransition, Baby

[(Anonymous)]

Nah, I'm a shy nonny and TBH people have written better takedowns of the book on Twitter.