Intersex Book Reviews

(Originally posted on Tumblr: Aug 2, 2023)

For the last week of July 2023, we convened for a lovely discussion of The Deep by Rivers Solomon. Before I proceed to a summary of our thoughts on the book, I (Elizabeth) have a few things I wanna make clear to perisex (non-intersex) readers upfront:

PSA: Intersex is not the same as biological hermaphrodism. Biological hermaphrodism means members of a given species can reproduce as both male or female, whether at the same time (simultaneous hermaphrodism / cosexuality) or one at a time (sequential hermaphroditism / dichogamy).

Intersex humans cannot reproduce as both male and female. Intersex means we have primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that deviate from what is considered “typical” for our species. Intersex is a big umbrella term comprising dozens of known intersex variations. Common kinds of intersex presentations in humans include female humans with well-developed facial hair and male humans with developed breasts. Many intersex people can reproduce, but many intersex people struggle with infertility. Do not use the h-word to refer to intersex humans. It is a slur when used to refer to intersex people. [/END PSA]

Moving onto the discussion summary:

WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK INTERSEX

  • It’s written by an openly intersex author \o/
  • Like in The Fortunate Fall we an intersex author using sea creatures as a metaphor for intersex (mermaids this time). As we talked about there it’s a rich source of metaphor for fiction writers since the ocean is a place that is foreign yet familiar.
  • In The Deep, there is an discussion of how humans let their genitals hang out, unlike the mermaids (and most sea creatures) who have internal genitals. We discussed that the mermaid as metaphor for intersex people allows for a sort of “Schrodinger’s genitals” – it allows for a de-emphasis on genitals since they are hidden while also normalizing that you could get anything if you get close enough to somebody to find out. 😉
  • In this book, the mermaids (waijinru) can reproduce as both male or female, and when mating can engage both at the same time - similar to how snails mate. (In biology this is known as cosexuality.) The book was very matter-of-fact in a way that attendees noted as normalizing and accessible.
  • Creating a fantastical species that is cosexual allows Solomon to resist and play with ideas of perinormativity, encouraging readers to think of humanoids that are not limited to perinormative ideas of sex binaries. (Please note: the waijinru themselves are not intersex, see PSA above.)

SNAPSHOT TAKES

  • Michelle: “ ‘What if boundaries’ turned out well”
  • Also Michelle: “It’s reverse Little Mermaid” and it even had a comb
  • Élaina: The book gets at how we need to spread the grief and the joy around in society. Liked at how the book gets at how disabling it is to hold the trauma, to be the historian. It is isolating for her, even though she's venerated but the isolation can be objectifying.
  • vic: Rivers Solomon has a style of writing that is unapologetically themself

POSITIVES

  • Raw, visceral depiction of autistic experience
  • Queer joy! Instead of being about isolation it’s about togetherness. Instead of mortality it’s about continuity. And a happy ending!
  • Nuanced exploration of the tensions between community/self, grief/joy, and past/present
  • Despite the heavy topic, there was a buoyancy from all the sharing and love
  • Nice to have casual but explicit intersex representation
  • Subverts “The Chosen One” trope
  • Has a disabled protagonist who struggles with their disability and the resolution is not cure, but social change to accommodate them! More please!
  • Representation of vicarious trauma. So much discussion of trauma in our society focuses only on traumas that are personally experienced. But people can be traumatized by seeing people they identify with who go experience violence. We talked about historians who study eugenics and genocides can be traumatized by it, and how in academia we don’t really have enough supports for mitigating this.

MIXED REACTIONS

  • Opinion was divided on the writing style but pacing/rhythm was a common complaint
  • Depictions of sensory experiences of waijinru. Some stuff on smelling and feeling currents and some very handwavy electric (field?) communication but still wound up feeling very human in how the world was depicted. Some of us felt it didn’t go far enough in making the waijru feel nonhuman, but vic shared the idea that the book had been written in waijinru language and translated to human for humans.
  • A bit of audism – characters were described as not having concepts of things until they learnt spoken language, which felt like Hellen Keller flim flam. Keller knew dozens of signs before Anne Sullivan was her teacher, and used them to communicate with her family. There was no mention of sign language though there are multiple places it would have made more sense (inter-species communication, communicating with deaf waijinru).
  • The post-narrative discussion. I (Elizabeth) appreciated the citational practice, particularly given calls for citational practice in music. But I hated the telephone metaphor, not only is it used to dismiss oral histories as unreliable but it also felt dismissive of Solomon’s work, and others also felt it was kind of condescending.
  • Some of us were put off by the trans-Atlantic slave trade being described as “the world’s greatest holocaust the world has ever known”. Not only does this set up some sort of oppression olympics, the slave trade was atrocious in ways that were distinct from the holocaust, such as that the children of slaves were born into slavery. However, Élaina pointed out that in France right now there is an effort by black people to get French people to recognize their role in the slave trade, that it actually was a severe atrocity, and so this sort of language is invoked to convince denialists that this was in fact a massive atrocity.

NOTABLE DISCUSSIONS

  • The practice and methods for telling history (historiography). The book makes a subtle argument against having a historian be detached from the history & communities they are studying, that they need to be engaged and appreciate their role in it. The book also argues for spreading the load around. And we talked about how rituals can be borne from history – as vic put it, the character “Zoti [the first historian] was just a guy, y’know” and it wasn’t a given that the cultural practices of Rememberance and having one sole historian would emerge from the waijinru’s origins.
  • Cultural expectations of duty. Everybody in the call came from a different cultural background and we talked about differing cultural expectations of duty, such as utang na lob in Filipino culture, and how Brazil’s culture is different from Canada’s.
  • The book makes an argument that humans need to know where we’re from and what our histories are. We spent time talking about this both sociologically – how many settler colonists and descendents of slaves feel this lack of connection because of a lack of sense of connection to land and history – but also personally. For those of us coming from cultures that gave us a sense of historicity we talked about how it’s a double-edged sword, and how the history can feel like a drag.
  • Humans and forgetting mass trauma. We had a discussion about whether to remember vs re-enact in memorializing mass traumas. One participant put out an idea that historical mass traumas haunt people for a long time after, and we talked about how this isn’t necessarily the case, as humans are experts at denial. We talked about the active denial going on about the covid pandemic, how people at the start of the covid pandemic called it “unprecedented” because of how society had actively worked to forget AIDS (and previous SARS epidemics). We talked about how people and societies actively deny genocides, such as how Turks continue to deny the genocide of Armenians, Greeks, Kurds & Assyrians. Which ties back to how there’s a need for Europeans to recognize and appreciate the magnitude and horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

READ IF YOU LIKED

  • The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
  • The Giver
  • Leviathan Falls (Expanse book 9)
  • Works by Rivers Solomon, Akwaeke Emezi

Originally posted on Tumblr, Jul 3, 2023

For our June 2023 book pick we read The Fortunate Fall, a cyberpunk novel from the mid-1990s written by a trans intersex author (Raphael Carter). Intersex author Bogi Takács has argued that the book deserves being read for its intersex themes, which have gone underappreciated. We had a lovely discussion about the book and here are some notes summarizing our reactions. Spoilers ahoy!

INTERSEX THEMES

  • The book has two characters who self-describe as hermaphrodite in ways that are fairly minor. The intersex-ness of this book does not come from centring on explicitly intersex characters but instead through themes that speak to intersex experiences. (Please note: the h-term is generally considered a slur against intersex people. This is the language used in a mid-1990s book by an intersex author.)
  • A major theme of the book was coercive medical procedures and the maiming of one’s body. Characters such as the protagonist are described as having literal holes in them. The State requires invasive body modification of queer people to “suppress” their queerness and enforce conformity.
  • Which gets to the suppressor chips. In the end of the book the main character has her suppressor chip removed which brings back her memories of a previous sapphic relationship and who she was before she became a “camera” (ie. a journalist/influencer). We read the suppressor chips as a metaphor for how so many intersex people have their medical histories hidden from them. We also talked about how this could be read as a metaphor for people who deny their own queerness (e.g. transness, gayness, etc)
  • This will come up again when we read The Deep by Rivers Solomon but there’s a trend in intersex literature to portray intersex people as sea creatures. One of our hermaphrodite (their term) characters refers to themself as a mermaid and has a mental link with a humpback whale. We talked about how deep sea creatures are a great vehicle for writers to explore both the strangeness and the naturalness of being intersex. The ocean is intensely familiar but also foreign, and features animals whose sex determination schemes are far more fluid (ha) than us humans.

OUR PRIMARY REACTIONS (SPOILER HEAVY)

  • Elizabeth: “I was not expecting the book to end with honey I need to move in with you because my whale is about to die”
  • Michelle: “this was a darker book, started with a news report on genocide and ended with saddest breakup in gay history”

POSITIVES

  • OMG THAT ENDING
  • A uniquely devastating sapphic romance
  • The viscerality of jacking one’s brain into a digital set up. A lot of modern cyberpunk has paved over the physicality and the grotesqueness of body modification and this book did not shy away from it.
  • A book that argues for animal rights in a technological society. It got us talking about what an internet that serves other animals would be like.
  • Some excellent lines such as *“The state allows you to hate it but only enough so as not to threaten it.” and “You can’t just show people the evil of the word, people will turn away. You need to show them hope.”* which got us talking about activism and how to make political change

NEGATIVES

  • This book is pessimistic AF
  • No real denouement. Could be intentional to make the ending weigh on you more but also means less sense of what happens at the end.
  • The whale is never given a name! 😭
  • Disability as worse than death trope
  • Afrofuturism felt kinda weak; Africa is one country and it has surprisingly little effect on other cultures despite supposed superpower status

WHAT WE THOUGHT THE BOOK MIGHT BE TRYING TO SAY

We spent a bunch of time speculating as to authorial intent with the book. Here are some things we brainstormed:

  • In a totalitarian world where you’re an influencer and people literally tune into your brain, self-preservation comes at all costs including those you love.
  • Queer romance can be deep and tender, and societal prejudice can cause real hurt (remember: book came out in mid-1990s).
  • A cautionary tale to not back down from your love or your principles.
  • Huge leaps in technology won’t change social structure. We can invent technology to experience what other people have experienced and it alone won’t lead to increased acceptance of queers or protection of the environment/animals. (Again, remember: written in mid-1990s, a time of legit optimism about the internet.) From the book: “The Net should be the most democratic form of communication that the world has ever known…. But instead it is being used to enforce an official vision of humanity.”
  • Michelle: a thesis of this book was “we fucking failed at saving the whales”

HOW IT HELD UP

READ IF YOU LIKED

  • Idoru by William Gibson
  • Star Trek IV (the one with the whales)
  • The Matrix
  • Animorphs #19
  • Ancillary Justice

#intersex #book review #BookReview #cyberpunk #SciFi #trans