J.S. Fields

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September 29, 2020

Review: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Genre: fantasy: portal fantasy

Pairings: none

Queer Representation: intersex girl

Warnings: none

Review

Full disclosure – this isn’t an impartial review because I worked as a sensitivity reader on this book. But the Wayward Children series is one of my all-time favorites, and I wanted to take some time to discuss parts of the book that really moved me, especially as they relate to intersex conditions. The main character and I shared a diagnosis at the time of this book’s writing (mine has since been changed from AIS to ‘we-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-you-are-but-definitely-it’s-an-intersex-thing’ syndrome).

Regan is a quintessential girl, especially when it comes to horses. Her best friend is also a quintessential girl, and the school queen bee. Unfortunately, Regan does not realize how tenuous her position in Laurel’s circle is until she makes the mistake of trusting her ‘best friend’ with her fresh new secret – she’s XY Androgen Insensitive.

“You’re not a boy,” said Maureen soothingly. “If you feel like you’re a girl, then you’re a girl. You’ve always been our daughter. You’re just also part of a small percentage of the population who are considered intersex, meaning your body  has its own ways of regulating things like hormone production. Some intersex people are more clearly a blend of what doctors would consider male and female attributes; that wasn’t the case with you. There was no surgical intervention or modification after you were born–not that your father and I would have approved that if the doctors had wanted to do it. You are exactly as you were meant to be.” 

(bold emphasis added by me)

(I want to add here, that it’s great to see a definition of intersex that encompasses not just those with deeply externally visible differences. Our understanding of intersex conditions has come so far in the past decade, now working to include PCOS as well, and it’s important to remember that it can be changes to your internal structures as well as hormones, that make the unique cocktail that is Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD), or intersex.)

Though her parents are fully supportive, best-friend Laurel absolutely loses it. She declares Regan a disgusting boy, kicks her out of the social circle, and blabs about it all over school. Regan, having wanted nothing more than to just be normal her whole life, runs into the nearby forest, where she finds her door.

This door takes Regan and the reader to the Hooflands – where all the beings are some form of horse-type creature (with some exceptions, mostly drawn from the canon of G1 1980s-era My Little Pony). She is first entranced by the unicorns, but soon gets picked up by a herd of centaurs, who think her most unusual feature is her ability to climb trees easily and swim:

“When a human shows up in the Hooflands, it means something bad’s about to happen. You’re tricky little things. Well suited to tight spaces, and thumbs. Having thumbs is sort of like having a magical sword no one can take away from you. It’s destiny!” Pansy held up her hands and wiggled her own thumbs exaggeratedly. “Centaurs have thumbs, but we can’t fit in a lot of places humans can, and we don’t swim very well.”

Thus, Regan finds the normal life she always wanted with the (unicorn ranching) centaurs. Mildly hanging over her head is the knowledge that humans only come to the Hooflands when a Great Deed is needed, and that at some point she will go the way of the other humans – to the Great Deed, and then vanish.

Aside from the Hooflands clearly being where I’d go regardless of being intersx (hello, My Little Pony obsession!), the book’s entire structure treats intersex conditions in the way I think most intersex people treat them–a part of who we are, but not WHAT we are. This isn’t a book about a girl overcoming being intersex, or coming to terms with being intersex. It’s about a girl who happens to be intersex, and gets to have an awesome adventure where she learns everything she is, is enough. She doesn’t need to be a hero. She isn’t anything special. She’s just Regan. And that’s okay.

It also allows the reader, through Regan, to remember the desire for the simplicity of childhood as our peers moved into the complex social dynamics of junior high/middle school, and high school. It walks that fine line between innocence and self-awareness, which is nowhere more apparent than here:

“No one’s going to snatch me in the food court,” said Regan, the uneasy awareness that children had been snatched in food courts before flooding in on the heels of her words. But that was in another world, one filled with bullying, backstabbing humans, not in this brighter, cleaner world of horse-people and honest answers. She would be fine here.

Inadvertently, Regan and I share this aspect in common too (unbeknownst I think to Seanan when she originally wrote this). I was abducted from a mall arcade in the sixth grade, though I was the exact age Regan is in this book. Which is probably another reason I found such a great home in the Hooflands, along with Regan and the centaurs. And I do appreciate the Tyrek cameo, since Escape from Midnight Castle scared the living daylight out of me as a kid:

Seen this close, he was terrifying, a mountain of a man walking through a world built to a much smaller scale, Each of hooves was larger than her entire face. He swung his muzzle around to face her, expression bovine and unreadable, and snorted.

Though I did find the following section the most chilling in the entire book, possible because I tied it to the discussion of food court abductions, as above:

None of them looked away until Regan had reached the place where the road began to bend out of sight. Bit by bit, she disappeared. One of the goals made a disbelieving wailing sound. She didn’t come back.

She didn’t come back.

For me, this was the perfect book. Perhaps because I’ve read the entire series and never felt at home with any of the doors, partly because I think I didn’t realize how much I needed to see an intersex child having an adventure completely independent of her chromosomal arrangement. This book is beautiful, and melancholy, and fractal, and I think it will be not only a lifeline to those who share Regan’s diagnosis, but to anyone who has ever felt like their biology kept them somehow apart.

You can see if a door will let you into the Hooflands by preordering here. Note – extensive knowledge of MLP not required, but useful.

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, intersex, portal fantasy

March 10, 2019

Review: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

This is a review for the second in a series. To read book one, A LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET, click here.

 

Genre: science fiction (space opera)

Pairings: none

Queer Representation: gender fluid

Warnings: none

 

Review

Picking up right where THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET left off, Lovey, the sentient AI, is in her new body and not having a good time. We follow her journey to understanding herself and her new housing, along with her friends/guardians Pepper and Blue.

As with LONG WAY, there isn’t an immediate through line to this book. Instead, we hop between (mostly) Pepper and Sidra’s (Lovey’s new name) POV and their day-to-day interactions. Sidra learns about being human and being limited by having just two eyes and a limited memory, meets a gender fluid alien who kind of gets her, has a disastrous tattoo experience, and really fleshes out the struggles of Lovelace in book one.

Most of Pepper’s POV is from the past, wherein we learn about Pepper being raised by another sentient AI, Owl, on a craptastic world. Pepper is a genetically engineered girl–only one chromosome–and was bred to sort scrap in a factory and never see the sky. Her compelling backstory (my absolute favorite part of the book) sets the stage for how she interacts with Sidra, and allows for a plot to finally coalesce in the back quarter of the book, where the four characters–Blue, Pepper, Sidra, and Sidra’s new friend Tak–break into a museum to try to steal Owl out of the ship that has become her tomb.

This book didn’t have the same level of science in it as did LONG WAY, but the mod speak and pseudo forum-Discord-chat board lingo is spot on. As with LONG WAY, the characters are dynamic and three dimensional, and you can’t help but love all of them. Chamber’s hallmark is character development and character interactions, and both shine through in ORBIT.

As always, there is plenty of solid queer rep. Tak (an Aeluon, a species with four genders) is particularly well done, and the discussion of how Tak changes genders, and the hormones and cultural norms around that and Tak’s entire species, is utterly fascinating. Pepper is a nice inclusion for intersex rep, though hers comes through genetic engineering and not biological diversity.

The strongest parts of the book are the human(alien)/AI interactions. Pepper’s relationship with Owl is completely child and mother, and absolutely breathtaking as Pepper tries to navigate isolation and survival and puberty. Pepper’s relationship with Sidra walks that awkward friend/caretaker role, but Pepper’s compassion for AIs, stemming from her upbringing, is organic. Their arguments pull the reader from both sides, and the resulting tension keeps the book moving forward without any need for a plot.

Some other fun notes

It’s the attention to detail that always makes Chamber’s books stand out. A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT includes in-text AI user manuals, chatroom dialogue, and a bunch of other fun snippets that build the world:

Yes, you can have sex! You’ve got all the parts for it, and unless you’re coupling with an expert physician who spends a lot of time looking at your bits under good light (hey, to each their own), no one will be able to tell the difference. But before you get to it, please do plenty of research about health sexual relationships and proper consent. Ideally, ask a friend for advice. Similar to the recommendation about hand washing, you should also practise good hygiene and disease prevention practices for the same of your partner. There’s no guarantee that xyr imubots are up to date.

Which leads me to my next favorite part – the use of ‘xe’ and ‘xyr’ when you don’t know someone’s gender, or when they are not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. Fantastic neopronoun, and used perfectly in text.

The Big Bug Crew. I just… the sims and their descriptions and Pepper’s connection to them are just so perfect. I know The Big Bug Crew. After reading this book I would play that sim and buy those toys. That’s how deeply affected I was by Pepper’s reactions to and time with the sim.

While the first book in the Wayfarer series wasn’t a strong favorite, A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT was an easy and emotional read. It can be read as a standalone or as the second in the series, and is a must read for lovers of character-driven space opera.

Get your own sentient AI system (illegal, of course, but still cool) here in print, here in audio, or here in ebook.

Read the review for the first in the series, THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET, here.

~~

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Filed Under: book review Tagged With: gender fluid, intersex, nonbinary, sci fi, space opera

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