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