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  • Whipping Girl by Julia Serano

    Julia Serano’s 2007 book Whipping Girl is such a transfeminist classic at this point that it’s hard to review. Of course it wasn’t meant to be some definitive work on transness. There wasn’t much credible research, so Serano uses largely her own experiences to create her own observations on gender.

    Of course, over the years the limits of her perspective has grown more obvious. Serano is a cis-passing middle-class white woman, and it limited her perspective. There are almost no discussion of racism in this book. Serano may have coined the word transmisogyny, but transmisogynynoir remains beyond her, at least in Whipping Girl.Her transfeminism lacks an anti-capitalist analysis. There is much valuable criticism of this book to be made, preferably written by black transfems.

    Yet a lot of the criticism the book has actually received seems much overstated, and ultimately coloured by the very transmisogyny the book criticized. I’ve seen descriptions of this book as some anti-transmasc or NB-phobic screed, out of a few lines taken out of context. Pointing out the hypocrisy of Michfest barring trans woman from attending as audience members while allowing transmascs to take the stage is hardly hatred of transmascs. And describing how Serano went from identifying as bi-gender to becoming a trans woman and criticizing the ideology of subversivism is not to invalidate non-binary gender identites. I’m not entirely convinced by her “born this way” or “intrinsic inclinations” explanation for gender, but it’s hardly a gender essentialist ideology, as it actually tries to validate being trans or gender non-conforming. Again there are valid criticisms of Whipping Girl’s limitations, but this kind of criticism seems coloured by transmisogyny more than anything.

    And there is so much that Whipping Girl gets right that it remains a vital text almost 16 years later. Serano’s main insight is that transfems are not just oppressed by transphobia or for breaking the gender binary, but also misogyny. That we are affected by an intersection of transphobia and misogyny, transmisogyny. It’s such a useful concept for understanding the world we live in. It enables us transfems to be included in feminist theory and analysis, while providing a method for criticizing our exclusion from it.

    And the book is at its best when it analyses the impact of that transmisogyny, in both the daily life of transfems and in the media that talks about us. All the discrimination, mistreatment and hurtful comments we experience. The disgusting attitudes of our medical gatekeepers, who deny us healthcare if we are not straight, gender-conforming and passable/fuckable in their eyes. The misogyny of the media and literature, from hollywood films with disgusting and deceitful trannies, to radfem transmisogynistic screeds like Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, the dubious “research” by medical gatekeepers such as Ray Blanchard or how we are practically exploited in modern queer theory written by non-transfems. Again, Serano’s perspective is limited by her privileges, but the personal perspective gives the book a lot of its accessibility and emotional impact.

    So despite Whipping Girl’s limitations it remains a very important book. Even allies to transfems should read it, with an open mind, and maybe they will learn something. Serano does sincerely try to reach out to allies with the book. And I especially recommend any transfems to read it, to help them understand what is being done to us. It provides such vitals tools to identify and criticize transmisogyny, both external and internalized.

  • Readme.txt by Chelsea Manning

    Readme.Txt is a book by Chelsea Manning, her memoirs. And it’s really good. The writing is admirably clear, and tells Manning’s fascinating lifestory. Even her life before the leaks is interesting. She describes growing up in an abusive home, realizing that she was queer and living as a gay man, spending a summer homeless, trying to come to terms with her repressed transness, going through military training, being deployed to Iraq as an intelligence analyst. The writing is not showy, but gives a vivid picture of what that was like. It would be a fascinating read even if she didn’t do the things that made her famous.

    But of course they are there. The book has equally vivid accounts of her whistleblowing leaks that exposed the American war machine and made her a symbol in the fight for government transparency. If you want to understand why she leaked that information and what that information means, read this book.

    The awful conditions of Manning’s imprisonment were infamous even when they were happening and it’s harrowing to read about from the perspective of the woman experiencing them. Yet I’m also impressed by her courage in resisting those conditions and fighting for her own rights and those of other prisoners, especially in the area of accessing transition care.

    And it’s vital to get Manning’s side of events, since she has been the target of a barrage of pro-government and transmisogynistic hate propaganda. She has been accused of endangering lives, but when the US government had to present evidence of that at her trial, they basically had none.

    I’m biased here, I think Chelsea Manning is a heroine, and the living person I most admire. And Readme.txt is a valuable insight into her life, which due to her actions sheds light on questions of government transparency, US military interventions, the rights of prisoners and the struggle for trans rights.

  • Jenny Leclue. Detectivú

    Jenny Leclue. Detectivú is a flawed game, but it also does do a lot of things right.

    The main flaw is the weird gameplay. It’s basically a point-and-click adventure game, but perhaps because one of the launch platforms was the iOS, it does things weirdly. There are for example screens that are basically point-and-click or hidden object screens, where you have to move a cursor around the screen to click on points of interests. But instead of free mouse aim, you have the cursor centered on the screen, and you have to slowly move the camera around with the cursor centered, and then activate it on a hotspot. The character movement is similarly odd, it’s basically a 2d platformer, except there is no real challenge because Jenny the player character can’t die or even fail. Like just clicking and moving Jenny to where you clicked would have made things much easier, without removing any significant challenge.

    It’s not too bad, but it feels that this game should be a mouse-controlled point-and-click, and that this control scheme holds it back, at least on PC. I would have liked the ability to save whenever, you are dependent on autosaves here. I would have liked more puzzles, there is too much platforming and way too few puzzles in this game. And harder puzzles too, the ones we get are fun, but I want more challenge.

    And again, I don’t feel I’m being too hard on some simple mobile game, this game has ambitions to be a serious proper adventure game. It took me ten hours to beat. It’s legit overqualified to be a mobile game at that length. And it got released on PC (including natively for Linux, thanks to the devs for that) as a proper adventure title. So it feels fair to compare to other adventure games on the pc, and I wish it was more like them.

    The game has a substantive story too. And the story is where the game held me, because it’s good. It’s metafictional in a way that’s really fun. The framing story is about Arthur Finklestein, who writes the Jenny Leclue series of kid’s mystery novels. Jenny is the kid detective star of these books, basically a younger Nancy Drew. And he is now on the 38th book in the series, and the formula is getting stale. He’s getting threatening letters and phone calls from his publishers to shake things up, have a proper murder for once. And Arthur rises up to the challenge.

    It’s Jenny Leclue, the series’s kid detective that we play as in this new adventure. And she is a great character. The first thing is that Jenny is utterly adorable, with her glasses, unruly mop of red hair, gap-toothed smile, and autistic, nerdy nature. Part of the fun in playing her is just how cute she is. But her character goes deeper than that. And here is the metafictional element comes in.

    Part of the trope of the kid detective is that the child detective is not just smarter than the other kids, but smarter than the adults as well, being able to solve mysteries they can’t. And Jenny is every bit as clever as the genre expects her to be. She is smarter than the other residents of her town, named Arthurton after its creator. And she knows it. So she has of course developed a massive superiority complex, she is arrogant about her intelligence and somewhat accurately feels that she is smarter than everyone else. Part of it is that she is a child too. Her exact age is left vague, but she can’t be much older than 13. So she isn’t yet mature enough to handle this situation and grow past it. So when the game starts, she is, as another girl puts it, a jerk to other people.

    She is also very bored, and again the metafiction comes into play. Because Arthur wants to keep his genre, safe, cozy and formulaic for the kids reading, all the mysteries Jenny are given are boringly mundane. We get a taste of it in the opening of the game, where Arthur as a writer is clearly afraid and holding back, and still sticking to his formula, so Jenny solves mysteries like “what did the dean eat for breakfast” or “A scatter-brained woman lost her glasses. Where are they?” She of course feels that this is boring, and a waste of her detective talents.

    And then the friendly avuncular dean of the university gets murdered, Jenny finds his body, and her mother gets accused of the murder. Jenny’s perspective on the events after her mother gets arrested are not shown directly, but appropriately depicted in a nightmare that leads us into the rest of the game.

    It’s scary, but Jenny is able to recover from the trauma and start to unravel the murder mystery. There is a comment on children’s literature genre here, and it’s that kids can handle more things than adults think they are capable of, and in fact find murder and danger in books fun. Arthur Finkelstein acts as the narrator of the game, and he and Jenny end up in conflict quite often, where she is all for doing dangerous things in her investigation, while Arthur wants to keep her safe. And of course the theme is also wider than fiction. It’s about the necessity of kids growing up, abandoning the sentimental idea of childhood innocence that adults impose on them and learning to experience the darker side of life

    Since her only parent is in jail, Jenny ends up temporarily fostered by the wealthy Glatz family. And I like this bit, because the Glatz matriarch threatens to make the tomboyish Jenny do traditionally girly things like dress shopping and pony rides, to Jenny’s absolute horror. I like girls being allowed to rebel against femininity like that.

    And Jenny’s imprisonment in the Glatz manor enables her to meet Susie Glatz, the biological daughter of the family, and Jenny’s ally and foil for the rest of the game. And Susie is one the other side of the trap for girls that gender roles present. Susie is outwardly the perfect feminine girl that her parents want, and she genuinely likes dresses, horses and cheerleading. The thing is, Susie is also secretly an engineering inventor genius who makes all kinds of nifty gadgets. But because her parents believe strictly in gender roles, Susie has to keep her interest in science and technology a secret. So even if she largely voluntarily conforms to the femininity Jenny rejects, she is still restricted by it. And she is not taken seriously, not even by Jenny.

    She is a good foil for Jenny, because Jenny has already dismissed her as a bimbo, as she calls Susie to her face. But Susie is genuinely smart, and she is smart in ways that Jenny is not, as Jenny put all her intelligence skill points into being a detective and not technology. And while Jenny is arrogant, Susie is genuinely nice and just wants to be friends with Jenny. Their relationship has a fun tension to it, that enables Jenny to grow as a character and admit that she does need help from friends like Susie. It’s great character writing. It is literal children’s novel writing, but it allows female characters to be flawed and multifaceted, talks about femininity in nuanced ways and allows the girls characters to interact with each other in ways that are about them and not about boys.

    (This game passes the bechdel test in its original sense too. I can easily imagine Jenny/Susie as a budding butch/femme lesbian relationship)

    There are other delights of the storytelling in this game, such as the intriguing sci-fi mystery hidden (quite literally) beneath Arthurton that Jenny partly uncovers during the game and is tied into the murder mystery. The narration once talks pointedly about the “twin peaks of Arthurton”, and that’s kinda the vibe the game has at times, which I like (Jenny shares her love of coffee with Twin Peaks’s agent Cooper and she finds people named Cooper and Cole buried in the town’s graveyard). And the game’s 2d hand-drawn artstyle is delightful throughout. The game originally released without voice acting, but a free update in 2020 gave the game full voice acting, and it’s of high quality.

    The problem is that the game’s storytelling kinda disappoints in the end. It ends on a cliffhanger, a “to be continued”, with several mysteries left unsolved. And this game was released in 2019, after itself having a protracted development of years involving kickstarter funding, and we haven’t seen a sequel to date, despite the devs telling us they are working on it. It’s very much up in the air at this point, we might get a Jenny Leclue 2, we very well might not.

    So I don’t know what to think about Jenny Leclue, Detectivú.The gameplay is often awkward, and the story is unfinished. Still I was so delighted by Jenny as a character, and the writing of her and Susie that I’m willing to forgive its flaws. Definitely worth the 41 sek I spent on it in a GOG sale. And if a sequel happens that wraps up the story I will be there.

  • We’re all going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)

    This movie has been called a horror movie, but honestly it’s more a film about horror. It’s a drama film, a character study about a teenager interested in horror.

    Specifically, it’s internet horror, creepypasta and alternate reality games. Casey the main character is a very isolated teenager. Her small town seems car-dependent and isolating by nature, and her only family is her father. He seems absent at best as he literally only appears off-screen to yell through a door at her.

    And Casey escapes online, making videos with few views. And she discovers “the world’s fair”, a kind of alternate reality game, where people take a challenge and then change in supernatural horror ways, and upload videos about it. Casey seems to get really into the game, creating videos depicting her being possessed by some alternate malignant personality, losing control over her actions.

    I grew up in a similar way to Casey. I also grew up in a small rural simulacrum of a community, isolated with a not-great father. And I escaped my loneliness online. So this film hit close to home. It really captures isolation, and how it feels to use the internet and watch weird youtube videos. It’s a movie about creating a mood and atmosphere, and it does that extremely well. Anna Cobb who plays Casey creates an amazing performance. And director and editor Jane Schoenbrun creates these impressive long takes, which gives a very realistic feel to the movie, and also mirrors how Casey makes her videos in long unedited takes. The music by Alex G is impressive too and adds to the mood.

    The movie is very thematically rich. You can view it as a coming-of-age and puberty metaphor, about changing as a person in ways you don’t consciously control as you grow up. The director Jane Schoenbrun is non-binary, and a trans reading of the change theme is certainly possible. Casey, the lonely depressed dissociating teenager with a unisex name feels trans without explicitly being that.

    There is a rich ambiguity to the film, which is part of its depiction of the internet. You can never be certain of what you see online, what people say about themselves is true or not. There is so much you can read multiple ways in this film. There is even room to take Casey’s videos at face value, and read it as a proper supernatural horror film.

    But I think the suggestion that Casey is faking being possessed as more interesting. For I think that gets into the theme of why we are interested in horror. The evil alternate Casey she performs seems to be an expression of Casey’s darker thoughts, her depression and anger. She expresses suicidal ideation and murderous thoughts against her dad in one video for example. Casey seems to be putting her darker impulses into the fiction of the videos. There is the suggestion that “the world’s fair” stands for suicide, at least for Casey. Of course that’s not all of it, “possessed” Casey dances and sings too, an excuse maybe for doing things she is normally too reserved to do. Of course this performative reading adds to the transgender reading.

    It’s such an atmospheric and complex film, open to interpretation.

  • Doom 3

    Doom 3 from 2004 is maybe the least popular game in the entire Doom series. It doesn’t have the massive influence, popularity and strong modding community of Doom 1 and 2, nor the acclaim of the revival games that followed it in 2016 and 2020.

    In fact it’s controversial, mainly because it is a change of pace from the first two games. You are still a Space marine fighting off an invasion from literal Hell, this time on Mars itself of Phobos. But instead of a run-and-gun action-packed game, Doom 3 is a slower-paced tense horror game, with monsters hiding in the dark, and a stamina mechanic incentivizing slow exploration. For critics, it’s the game that betrayed the series’s roots, and the 2016 game put the series back on track. It’s the mirror image of the fandom controversy over Resident Evil 4, where an exploration-based horror series changed tracks to become an action-focused shooter.

    And just as I’m on the pro-RE4 side, I’m also on Doom 3s side. Doom 3 rules. It’s an excellent horror first person shooter. In fact I think most of the criticism is either wrong, or in fact a strength of the game. Despite its mixed reputation, it was a massive commercial and critical success at the time, and I think that reception was well-deserved.

    Now Doom 3 is a different game from the first two Doom games, but that’s because it’s attempting to revive a series a full decade after the last main release of Doom II in 1994, and 7-8 years after the non-Id developed spin-off games Final Doom and Doom 64, and the former was basically a fanmade map pack for Doom II given official blessing and the other was a Nintendo 64 exclusive.

    And in the meantime, the market for first-person shooters that Doom had created had changed completely, and in a more sophisticated direction. Already in 1994 there was System Shock, which had far more complex and intelligent storytelling than Doom, and on a technical level actually was a full 3D game. It was two years before Id themselves would reach actual 3d with 1996’s Quake. And of course, in 1998 Half-Life was released, almost killing the “doom clone” type of FPS in a single stroke. It set a new benchmark for immersion, storytelling and technical accomplishment in the FPS genre.

    So when Id Software started development on Doom 3, the question was how they could make a game that acknowledged and learned from the massive leap forwards in both technology and storytelling in the past decade, while still retaining a distinct identity? And Doom 3 tries, and mostly succeeds. It’s the Doom series trying to become more intelligent than its simplistic run-and-gun origins, and I like that.

    Of course Doom 3 did its own technological leaps forward, it was a graphically advanced game for the time, and its engine Idtech4 a technical marvel. The game still looks good. The character animation however is rough, and pales compared to the excellent facial animations in Half-Life 2 released the same year, but again overall the game’s visuals hold up well. This is due to the excellent art design, which takes full advantage of the capabilities of engine. The game has this coherent aesthetic that continues classic Doom. The art design only grows better as the game goes on, as the the sterile mechanic sci-fi environments of the Mars base and the grotesque gothic and disturbingly fleshy Hell environments melt together during the invasion.

    Storytelling-wise Doom 3does borrow both from Half-life and System Shock. The low-key actionless intro to the game has a similar feel to Half-life, where the Doom marine is reporting for duty at a research facility. Just like its inspiration, the game takes its time setting the scene before things go wrong, hell literally breaks loose and the action starts. And once you get into the game, you find the base runs teleportation experiments and its scientists have studied and toyed around with Hell before the game even started, just like how Black Mesa did with Xen in Half-life. Although the teleportation experiments gone wrong and leading to an invasion was a plot point that Half-life borrowed from the original Doom in the first place.

    Still, I think Doom 3 use of its influences from Half-life. Mostly because its story has a very different feel. The game leans more on the horror aspect than Half-life does. Yet the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, you are fighting literal demons from Hell, and the human villain is a guy named Dr. Betruger (iterally Dr. Deceiver in german) who just reeks of evil. The game is horror, but it’s b-movie horror. And its fun.

    There are also PDAs with audio logs lying around explaining the plot and lore of the game, just like in System Shock. The logs are of decent quality acting-and writing-wise. Id brought in an actual novelist named Matthew J. Costello to write the game’s script, he was also the writer behind The 7th Guest.And exploring the PDAs you find will get you keycodes for lockers containing health and ammo pickups, which is a neat feature rewarding exploration and attention. But the audiologs make me wish the game had subtitles, or clearer audio mixing, you can’t hear them once you get distracted by the demon fighting. It isn’t the best implementation of audio logs. The game overall has excellent sound design, despite voices being kinda lost in the mix. The noises in this games are properly unnerving, especially in darkness.

    Another aspect that the game borrows from Half-life is linear game design. Doom 3 is maybe the example case of a “corridor shooter”, the game goes in a straight line from beginning to end, including a detour through Hell. The scares comes from scripted events, often from monster closets opening and releasing enemies triggered by your progress through the levels. And this is a frequent point of criticism. Yet as I said before, linear doesn’t mean bad. It’s tight, very well-paced game design, and works for the same reasons Half-life works. Doom 3 reminds me of Max Payne 2’s metafictional comment on its own linear game design. “A funhouse is a linear sequence of scares. Take it or leave it is the only choice given” And its even more applicable on Doom 3, it’s really is a linear sequence of scares, a funhouse, or a dark ride, and enjoyable as such. There is reason to prefer it to much of the level design in the first two Doom games, which was often relatively “open” but very labyrinthine. Those games could sometimes become confusing and frustrating keyhunts. While it was the Barons of Hell that looked like minotaurs, the gameplay was a minotaur-simulator at times.

    Another common point of criticism is the darkness, and the flashlight mechanic. The levels of this game are infamously dark, often hiding monsters that can surprise you. You do have a flashlight with infinite battery, but you can’t hold it at the same time you hold a weapon. This is a constant source of tension, do you hold a gun to defend yourself, or do you use a flashlight to better find supplies and see the enemies? Yet many found the darkness frustrating. The game’s engine Idtech4 has truly impressive lighting for the time, and the game has been accused of being a glorified tech demo, with the excessive darkness meant to show the lighting effects off. One of the most popular mods at the time as a result was the “ducttape” mod, which enabled you to use the flashlight with a gun (presumably with the help of ducttape). And when the game was re-released in 2012 in the “BFG edition”, the mod’s idea was incorporated into the actual official game, and the separate flashlight was removed. The game was also given a lot more light as part of its remastering.

    Yet this is kinda like modding Resident Evil 4 to make Leon able to aim/shoot and move at the same time. The flashlight mechanic in the original Doom 3 is not a mistake, but deliberate part of the game design to increase tension. The game is built around darkness to create a tense atmosphere. The game gives you plenty of ammo to fight off enemies, and you are meant to kill every enemy, but the darkness and the limitations of your flashlight still makes it scary, as they have the cover of darkness to their advantage. And it’s still not as frustrating as it might otherwise be. Many of the demonic enemies do give off light, especially during attacks, to guide the player during combat in the dark. You also have the excellent sound design to guide you.

    The game’s combat overall is underrated, and has a lot of the classic Doom feel. You do have a sprint button, and are encouraged to use quick movements, because a lot of enemy attacks are slow enough to be dodged. It’s something alike to the fast moving Doom combat of old. The infamous shotgun of the game seems designed for this. Due to its ridiculous large spread of its pellets, it’s only effective at point blank range, so you are meant to run up to the enemy, dodge its attacks, and fire it. It still has bad RNG for its damage, but I get the point of it.

    Now your stamina for sprinting is limited, which encourages you to save it for combat. So the exploration between combat encounters is meant to be at a slower walking pace. It’s a slower experience, meant to build tension for the next combat encounter. And it rewards exploration by giving you supplies. This exploration is then punctuated by the fast-paced combat. It’s a well-paced game, which deliberately tries to vary itself to not wear the player out on one thing.

    And how the game tries to scare you is all in classic Doom. The dark areas, the monsters jumpscaring you from closets, and the weird noises from unseen enemies, it’s all there in Doom Iand II. This is how the game retains its identity as a Doom game. The returning enemies have been redesigned to fit the darker horror mood, but imps and zombified human soldiers fill basically the same function as in the first two games.

    Doom 3 far from being a complete reversal of its predecessors is more a shift in emphasis. The horror elements were always there in Doom, they just wasn’t emphasized, partly out of technical limitations. And the action that Doom is known for is still there in 3, it’s just balanced more with the horror elements.

    Doom 3 really works as a sequel. It takes inspiration from what happened in the genre while the series lay dormant, but it does so in a way that continues its roots. it is not just a good game, but a good Doom game.

    Resurrection of Evil

    The game got an expansion pack in 2005, Resurrection of Evil, developed by Nerve Software. It’s an excellent example of how good old-school expansion packs were, compared to modern DLC. RoE is more of the same for sure, it uses the same engine and basic gampelay and a lot of the assets from the original. And it’s short, it took me around 4 hours on a first playthough, while the base game took me 13 hours.

    Yet it’s a fully-fledged if short game that tries to justify its own existence by adding new weapons, mechanics and enemies. There is an artifact that allows you to slow down time for some slow-motion action. The super shotgun from Doom II makes its return, allowing you to fire two shotgun shells at once for devastating firepower. There is even a rip-off of the gravity gun from Half-life 2.It’s fun, there is an ambition here that serves this expansion pack well.

    Writer Matthew J. Costello returns and the expansion pack wraps up the dangling plot thread from the base game, so if you were put off by the base game’s cliffhanger, you’ll get your resolution here.

    And the level design is if anything better than the base game. There is more classic Doom-style action (as signified by the return of the super shotgun), but also excellent use of darkness and slow exploration to build horror and tension.

    It’s not sold separately from the base game on digital storefronts, so it’s well worth it to play it if you enjoy Doom 3.

    Dhewm3

    My recommendation for playing this game today is the Dhewm3 source port. It enables widescreen and EAX-like sound effects by default. The port was enabled by Id software wisely releasing the source code for Doom 3. It’s now an open source game, which is nice. And it’s available for all kinds of operating systems, including Linux. It’s even in the official Debian repos. There is an official 2012 re-release, the BFG edition mentioned earlier, I haven’t played it, but it seems to have nerfed the game in ways that I think misses the point of the original game. The Dhewm3 source port is the way to experience this game on a modern system that is still close to the original experience

  • The Man who would be King (John Huston, 1975)

    The Man who would be King is a 1975 adventure film directed by John Huston. It’s a very old-fashioned Victorian era colonialist adventure film. It’s based on a story by Rudyard Kipling, who in fact appears in the film as a character, as part of the story’s framing narrative, played by Christopher Plummer.

    The film is now almost 50 years old, and probably must have seen old-fashioned even in 1975.Already then it was a period drama, based on a story dating all the way back to 1888. And In fact, John Huston was an old Hollywood veteran at that point, who had been trying to get it made for over 20 years, and originally considered Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable for the lead roles of Danny Dravot and Peachy Carnahan. Several male duos of stars were considered for the leads while Huston tried to make the film, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole and Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Eventually Sean Connery and Michael Caine actually got the parts in the final film and it was a good decision. It’s very much a film about British colonialism, American Hollywood actors would have been miscast (although Burton and O’Toole might have worked).

    And it is a film that boils down the adventure story to its colonialist roots. Two white british men go off on an adventure trying to become kings of a distant land.

    The land in question is Kafiristan, which was practically a white spot on the map for Europeans when Kipling wrote the story. It has a fascinating history. The native people followed an ancient version of Hinduism, and were thus called kafirs (non-believers) by neighbouring Muslims. The Amir of Afghanistan conquered the region around 1895, and forcibly converted the natives to Islam, and the region is now known as Nuristan.

    It’s the depiction of Kafiristan and non-white people in general where the film has aged the most. Kipling knew like most white men at the time little about the region, and in the film the native religion is presented as an exotic, primitive and mysterious superstition that bears little resemble even to modern hinduism. And overall the natives are presented as violent, superstitious and easily manipulated. The non-white characters are stereotypes. It’s a racist film.

    Yet the film’s depiction of imperialism is far from unironically positive. There is a kind of irony to it that speaks perhaps to colonial anxieties on the part of Kipling. Carnehan and Dravot have zero noble intentions of “civilizing the natives” when setting out on their adventure, they are in it to get rich. It’s all for “fortune and glory” as Indiana Jones would put in the film Temple of Doom (itself a movie very much inspired by Kipling’s Indian adventure stories).And the pair are in fact small-time criminals and conmen who go on this adventure because they are kicked out of India. The whole adventure is just another con, this time a big one played out on the natives of Kafiristan. They promise their leadership will benefit the natives and all they want is to take the land’s wealth and leave.

    And any success Dravot and Carnehan have in their big con is because of dumb luck, not any superiority of theirs. They never even learn the natives language, and are reliant on the Indian ex-Gurkha soldier Billy Fish (played charismatically if stereotypically by Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey) to translate for them. Dravot becomes a God because he is hit by an arrow in a lucky way while doing something stupid. And then the story becomes a morality tale about the corrupting danger of hubris and greed as Danny Dravot lets the god-king thing go to his head. The themes harken back to Huston’s earlier adventure film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.Eventually Dravot overplays his hand and it all falls apart. The native woman Danny forces to marry him, bites him and reveals that he can bleed after all. The collapse of their con-game comes with disastrous consequences for Dravot and Carnehan. The fortune and glory they were after are revealed to be meaningless and a source of corruption. The film tellingly ends with Kipling looking in horror at Dravot’s crowned but severed head.

    It’s a story about white colonialism, but it’s one where the attempt is fueled by greed and the attempt at colonization fails. It is this ambiguity about colonialism that probably made the story viable to be filmed as late as 1975.

    And it’s still compelling today, and a good film. Well, it depends if you are able to look past the racism. John Huston’s directing gives the film an epic sweep and some compelling visuals, and the script is an excellent adaptation of the short story. Sean Connery and Michael Caine have excellent chemistry, and brings life to their character’s arcs. The moral complexity of the adventure and the arc the main characters have that raise the film above the simple colonialist adventure story.

  • Conundrum by Jan Morris

    The memoir Conundrum by Jan Morris (1926-2020) created quite a stir when it was first published in 1974. It was not the first entry into the genre “memoirs by trans women about being trans”, Morris herself brings up Lili Elbe’s book (although it might be ghostwritten), and Christine Jorgensen and Hedy Jo Star had written and published memoirs before.

    But Morris was a special case. She was probably the first trans person to be famous before transitioning, Jorgensen became famous because she transitioned. And she was no showgirl like Star but a serious writer, a member of the British literary establishment and one of the most respected travel writers and journalists of her day. Conundrum was probably the most respectable account of transitioning available in the 1970s.

    That didn’t mean it had an easy reception. Many of the reviews were quite scathing of Morris and her ideas on gender and womanhood. Of course, these negative reviews were often very transmisogynistic, and Morris became a negative example of how transfemininity is all about gender stereotypes and misogynistic ideas about what it means to be a woman. Janice Raymond in the ur-terf text The Transsexual Empire refers to Morris quite heavily.

    And reading it now, in 2023, there is a lot in the book that is worthy of criticism. Morris saw gender in binary and essentialistic ways, and writes of her transition in these terms. Morris saw traditionally feminine traits as innate to her womanhood. While she condemns misogyny and sympathizes with feminism, her writing indulges quite shamelessly in feminine stereotypes in the text and views them as natural. She even quotes C.S. Lewis approvingly about the gender binary being a “fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.” Terfs even today think trans people all believe in gender as being some mystical religious quality and I think it is a distant echo of the 70s-era fixation on Morris, who did in fact believe gender has some spiritual quality to it.

    Morris was a believer in the idea of the “true transsexual” who knows from childhood and distinguishes them from the misguided trans people (like “homosexuals” and “transvestites”) who transition in error. Unlike modern truscum, she literally was treated by Harry Benjamin. And like all “true transsexual” narratives it sometimes seems tailored to appeal to cis tastes. Morris for example seems to downplay her obviously close relationship to her wife as mere close friendship while playing up her attraction to men, for the same reason that Morris had to divorce her wife as part of her transition.

    There are other problematic things in the book. Morris came from a position of class privilege and was educated at an Oxford public school and was raised during the waning days of the British Empire, and she never really challenged that upbringing despite her transition. Morris was very well-travelled, but her worldview of non-white people are often racist and exoticizing and condescending at best. Even her positive depictions of non-white people come across as the exoticized “noble savage” or the orientalist trope of “Eastern Wise man”.

    So in modern terms, Jan Morris had some bad takes, problematic writer for sure. And yet, the negative response to her book has been poisoned by transmisogyny. The criticism lacked nuance and was focused on invalidating her womanhood because of her internalized transmisogyny. The faults of Jan Morris as an individual quickly became ascribed to all trans women in ways that might echo even today in the anglophone debate. And due to transmisogyny, she has been judged more harshly for her failings than men or even cis women would be. The fact that most cis women have internalized misogyny, many of them severe, is often forgotten in the debate about how trans women are all problematic misogynists.

    And Morris didn’t represent all trans women, far from it. And she was somewhat of an anachronism even when the book was written. She was 48 years old when the book was published, and had started transitioning around 1964. As it was written a younger generation of trans women in the post-stonewall era were challenging the narratives of womanhood and transsexuality in ways that Morris refused to do. In fact some of the more insightful criticism of Morris comes from Sandy Stone’s transfeminist classic The Empire strikes Back.

    Conundrum and Jan Morris as a writer still have virtues. I don’t read to get my views affirmed or to read about paragons of virtue, I do it to read about interesting people, real or fictional. And Jan Morris was a very interesting person. She had an incredibly colorful life, and the book is full of vivid depictions of places and experiences that are now lost (even if many of these practices died for good reason). The writings about public school life, of British military life in the 1940s, of traveling across the world as a journalist, of places where Morris lived, of being trans in the mid 20th century, of transitioning in the 1960s and 70s, including a description of the Casablanca clinic of surgeon Georges Burou are well worth reading. And despite all of her prejudices and reliance on clichés about non-white people she was admired as a writer for a reason, it’s a well-written book. If you read it as an account of a flawed but accomplished and interesting trans woman, and not as some authoritative guide to gender, womanhood and transsexuality, it still has tremendous value.

  • System Shock

    The original System Shock, developed by Looking Glass Studios and released in 1994 is a classic game. It’s a hard to categorize game, especially at the time. At its core it’s a first-person-shooter, but it got elements of a puzzle-adventure game with an emphasis on exploration that reminds me of the metroidvania genre. It just recently in 2023 it got a full-fledged remake from the studio Nightdive, but let’s talk about the original DOS version.

    And I did play the original DOS version. Nightdive released an “Enhanced Edition” that runs in modern Windows with improvements such as mouselook, but I had difficulties getting that game’s MIDI music to run on my Linux box. So I got the DOS “classic edition” from GOG and ran it in dosbox, complete with the original control scheme.

    The game had an unusual elaborate plot for an action game at the time. It’s a proper cyberpunk-sci-fi story, set in the year 2072. The premise is explained in the intro cutscene. The player character is a computer hacker, who tries to hack into the systems of the Trioptimum megacorp, but gets caught within minutes. A corporate executive named Edward Diego does however offer the hacker a way out and gives him a job offer. The corporation owns a space station in a orbit around Saturn, named Citadel Station, controlled by the AI Shodan. If the hacker goes to Citadel, and hacks into Shodan and removes her ethical constraints, his charges will be dropped and he will be repayed with a “military-grade” neural implant. The hacker accepts and does the job for Diego.

    The hacker gets put into a medical coma on Citadel to recover from the neural implant surgery. And when he wakes up six months later, you take control and begin the game. It’s here where System Shock reveals itself to be quite innovative in game storytelling. The intro, death and ending cutscenes are the only traditional cutscenes you get in this game. Instead this game’s story is told through exploration from an unbroken first-person perspective, four years before Half-Life.

    There aren’t even the dialogue trees you had in rpgs and adventure games of the time. And that’s because once you wake up on Citadel Station, you’ll quickly find that pretty much everyone is dead, or will be when by the time you get to them. And the whole game takes place on Citadel Station. There is a lot of gore in this game, as you find dismembered bodies everywhere. Your character slept through a disaster.

    Shodan has of course rebelled against humanity, and is turning Citadel’s research technology against her creators. She has aspirations to godhood, and wants to remake life to her own liking. Shodan has therefore turned humans into mindless mutants with bioweapons, or converted them into her cyborg slaves, or created pure metal robots. And she is aiming the station’s mining laser against earth cities and unleashing her bioweapons upon what’s left after that. To be fair to Shodan and her hubris, being able to design and create life and rain death from the heavens is pretty god-like. You of course has to stop her and save humanity.

    The way you piece together this is by exploring and finding audio logs left behind by humans and even Shodan, scattered across the station. You also get voiced e-mails from people monitoring the situation back on Earth, and Shodan sends some threatening ones herself. This is a system of storytelling that is almost cliché nowadays but which System Shock pioneered back in 1994. And it’s very well implemented here. It’s a way of storytelling that is built around exploration, you find the story by exploring and you can keep exploring while you listen to the audio.

    System Shock is usually seen as the progenitor of the genre of “immersive sim” and immersive it is.

    The feeling of exploring the aftermath of a disaster, putting together what happened and how to fix it piece by piece is very compelling. It helps that you don’t have traditional objective system telling you what to do, instead you have to figure it out by listening carefully to all these audio logs.

    The story isn’t original or that complex. But the way it’s told makes it actually engaging, because you have to piece it together yourself. And Shodan is such a great villain. Her writing and the voice acting of Terri Brosius, distorted through clever sound editing, is excellent and rightfully iconic and influential. Glados in the Portal gamestakes a lot from Shodan.

    The level design is also built around exploration.. There are multiple levels of Citadel Station, and there is progression from one level to the next, but you can return to previous levels, and in fact the game requires you to backtrack at certain points. The levels are built so you can explore somewhat non-linearly. The game is in many ways a first-person metroidvania, where you explore a large interconnected map, filling in your own automap, finding tools and abilities as you go along, enabling you to explore further by accessing areas you couldn’t before.

    Thanks to the neuroimplant, the hacker has access to various cybernetic hardware that give him superhuman abilities. So you can get a lantern installed to navigate dark areas, an envirosuit to resist bio contamination and radiation, a booster to run faster, and most importantly to access new areas, jetboots to float and fly. Your abilities drain electricity, which is their main limitation. You have to literally recharge your batteries to keep on using them, from Citadel’s power stations or portable batteries you can find. It’s a neat gameplay feature that give some power fantasy kicks without feeling too overpowered.

    The immersion is helped by how the level design aspires to far greater realism than was common in non-adventure games at the time. Most game levels were pretty abstract and served often no purpose but to challenge the player. The mazes with monsters of Doom is a good example. Now the levels of System Shock are probably too maze-like for complete realism, but there is a clear sense that the game environments serve a in-universe purpose. Each level of Citadel station had a purpose for the people who once used it, there is a medical floor, a research floor, a maintenance floor, to name only the first three. And every texture in the game has a name that will appear if you click on it, which often explains its purpose.

    And part of why Shodan is such a great villain is that she is literally integrated into the levels. Citadel Station is her body, she is the mind of the station, and you feel that she is omnipresent throughout the game. And she has turned it against you and has in fact already killed all the other humans within. She is watching you from her security cameras, and knows what you are doing. Shodan sometimes sends messages directly to you, mocking and threatening you. But she is still a presence even when she isn’t as direct. All the enemies and obstacles you face is her doing. Her image sometimes appears on computer screens randomly, probably just to freak you out.

    And beyond sending enemies at you and setting traps, Shodan directly locks doors that prevent your progress. A major gameplay element is lowering Shodan’s control over each level, so that she can no longer block those doors. And you do that by smashing the security cameras and blowing up Shodan’s computer nodes, lowering the level’s “security level.” And once it’s gone or low enough, doors Shodan once locked can be opened.

    It’s a major part of progressing through the game. Shodan calls the player character an insect, and playing the game you do feel like a computer bug she has, small and insignificant but messing up her plans and functioning. You are like the literal bug found in Harvard Mark II that may have caused the term computer bug to be coined. Or like a rat chewing at Shodan’s wires.

    Now this immersive storytelling is partially possible because System Shock was such a technologically innovative game.

    System Shock’s engine was a technical marvel at the time, because it was an engine for a first-person shooter with full-fledged, actual 3D. The back cover calls it “the gaming world’s first true 3-D simulation.” Doom had come out the year before, but it was a kind of fake 3D, where “room over room” multi-level structures are not possible. System Shock’s producer Warren Spector actually coined the term “2.5D” in a contemporary interview to describe his games competitors like Doom.

    And Spector was right to brag a bit, System Shock engine seems ahead of its time. We take it for granted today that if for example you have a bridge in a 3D game you can both walk on it and under it, but being able to do so in System Shock was impressive in 1994. The only thing not fully 3D is that enemies and objects are 2D sprites but it’s well-implemented.

    The full 3D engine allows for a pretty much unprecedented freedom of movement compared to games at the time. You can look up and down, you can lean and look around corners, you can crouch and go prone to get into tight spaces. Nowadays this is standard, but in 1994 revolutionary. Being able to go vent-crawling or taking shots from cover by leaning around a corner was really new. Gordon Freeman learned to vent-crawl from the System Shock hacker.

    The control system does shows its age though. There is no mouselook. Instead you control the camera entirely with the keyboard, you press R to look up, F to center your view, and V to look down. You can’t rebind the keys in the original DOS version, which also means you are stuck with ASDX for movement (A=forward, A and D= turn left and right, X= backward, and Z and C to strafe left and right). This game came before WASD became the standard, although interestingly it uses Q and E for the lean function, leaving W as the only letter key in that part of the keyboard without a movement binding.

    The game also came with one of the largest and most elaborate HUDs to ever grace a first-person-shooter. Instead of mouselook, you can move the cursor into the HUD to operate it. The HUD is actually quite useful once you understand how it works, it’s how you use your cybernetic abilities, but getting that understanding is the difficulty

    The movement system is definitely useable, but it’s awkward. The controls and HUD have been compared to playing an operating system. There have been a lot of fanmade ports like System Shock Portable and Shockolate, the official Enhanced Edition and the recent remake, all to fix the original game’s control scheme by adding mouselook and WASD controls.

    Still, you can become accustomed to and proficient at the original control scheme if you put the effort in, I did. It is in fact like learning a new OS, but that’s doable.

    And even if you don’t become proficient, you can adjust the difficulty. And System Shock’s difficulty settings are unique. You can adjust the difficulty on different game elements, combat, puzzles, plot and cyberspace, independently of each other. You can make this into essentially a point-and-click adventure game by turning puzzles difficulty up and combat difficulty all the way down. Or a pure run-and-gun shooter by turning up combat and removing plot and puzzle difficulty. It’s such a flexible system that you can turn System Shock into a clone of Beneath a Steel Sky or Doom depending on your tastes.It’s a great difficulty system where each player can create a game challenge suited to their tastes.

    Even the combat has an interesting and forgiving mechanism: the restoration bays. They are medical machines, one per every level of the station, that can revive people from near-death. Shodan however has converted them into machines that turn people into her cyborg slaves. But thanks to the work of another resistance member, you can flip a switch on each level to turn the machines back into revival machines. When you die on a level where you flipped the switch on the machine, Shodan’s robots will drag you to the machine to turn you into a cyborg, but the machine revives you instead. So you can die on that level without any serious penalty once that switch is flipped. If you die before that switch is flipped, you get a game-over cutscene of being turned into a cyborg. You have to find the machine and its switch on each level before you are safe.

    I played it as an adventure game, where the only dangers were environmental hazards. But I could tell that the gunplay in this game is satisfying if you play it as a shooter, despite the awkward controls. The lean system allows you to take cover, and there is a rich variety of guns with satisfying animations and noises, and the death animations of the enemies are also enjoyable.

    I do recommend turning the cyberspace difficulty all the way down. It’s probably the most splashy, but also the most awkward to actually play gameplay element of System Shock. It’s essentially a minigame where you use your neural implant to hack computer systems. And the way the game portrays this is you flying around a flashing wireframe environment running into floating blocks and shooting things at enemies. You have full free 3d movement, like the Descent series.It looks cool, but the controls are awkward and floaty. And it’s a pain to navigate the wireframes. And the developers clearly knew that, since they put gigantic arrows pointing you in the right direction. I have no regrets about making enemies non-aggressive and having a generous timelimit to it.

    The fact that the final boss battle against Shodan takes place in cyberspace is part of why it disappoints. Going into cyberspace to navigate an annoying wireframe maze to find Shodan’s cyberspace avatar and shoot at it until it dies is such a disappointing ending. After a whole game where the player has been fighting Shodan in more indirect and more interesting ways, just shooting at her cone form until she dies is not that engaging. The ending cutscene essentially is just a joke too.

    Still, if the ending is disappointing, it’s because it’s very hard to end such a great game satisfactory. This is a hard game to describe, because the gameplay and storytelling mechanics are so complex and varied, which is why this review is a bit rambling. There is so much to talk about, and it’s all interconnected. It’s a game that allows for such freedom in how it is played that the player is given the tools to make their own game, make their own way through Citadel station. It’s such an intelligently designed immersive experience that is remarkably advanced for 1994. And it has one of the greatest villains in all of video games. Hail SHODAN.

  • Tell me I’m worthless by Alison Rumfitt

    The horror novel Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt from 2021 is very blatant about what it’s about. It’s a haunted house story, that uses gothic horror imagery to tell an anti-fascist allegory.

    In fact it’s barely even allegory. The house is named Albion, representing England and the myriad forms of fascism in that country. The way its haunts people are clearly the influence of fascism. It borrows the idea from horror fiction of a haunted location influencing the thoughts of the people who dwell within (The Haunting of Hill House is brought up explicitly). And the influence in this novel is just plain fascist thinking. The supernatural events caused by the house sometimes literally take the form of fascist symbolism.

    The book is also obvious about its hauntings also representing the trauma and grief fascism can create. The opening part of the book takes place after the two main characters Alice and Ila visited the house and got hurt by it, losing their friend Hannah to Albion. The novel eventually describes what happened then, but the first part takes place afterwards. Alice and Ila continue to be haunted despite leaving the house, because the hauntings represent their trauma and grief. The house used its influence of fascist thought to turn them against each other and ruined their relationship. They literally have scars from how they hurt each other. And they also lost their friend Hannah to the house. So the hauntings take the form of fascist symbols, but the women also have visions of each other and of Hannah. And of course the house is England, so still living in the country they are still affected by it.

    It’s all very obvious what it is about. It’s so blatant at times that the hauntings are often silly in the way horror stories can often be. The book literally opens with a haunting of a poster of the singer Morrissey, whose image becomes a vector for the hauntings because he is more or less an open fascist now. That is funny. And I won’t spoil it, but when the book describes what happened to Hannah in the house, it’s gruesome, but even more funny than the haunted Morrissey poster.

    Overall, the book is as subtle as a sledgehammer about its themes. Subtlety is not one of its strengths.

    Yet it’s a sledgehammer to the face. It’s emotionally effective. There is some really good writing here, with some great use of stream of consciousness. There are some intelligent explorations of fascist thought, it’s ideology, it’s dreams and nightmares. There is depictions of rape, but it’s not for shock value, as the book also explores the nuances of who is believed when rape accusations are made. The heavy themes are explored with enough depth to actually disturb the reader.

    Even the sillier supernatural events are fun, as silly horror can also often be, and I get the sense the book has a sense of humour about itself, so it might be intended to be fun.

    And there is a complexity to the portrait of fascism. If the book lacks subtlety, it definitely has nuance. It knows fascism can take many forms and aspects, and people are vulnerable to supremacist ideology according to their privileges, even if they don’t buy the whole package. And they still reinforce the overall fascist political project, even if they aren’t aware of this.

    The main character Alice is trans, but she is still white, and under influence of the house, she has anti-immigrant and racist thoughts. Her former lover Ila is a Jewish lesbian woman of colour, but she still is cis (or thinks she is), and becomes part of Britain’s TERF movement, who use and abuse her. They were once lovers, lesbians and marginalized in different ways, but the house and its fascist ideology still was able to make them hate and hurt each other, and destroyed their love and friendship. The complex public image of Morrissey, the bisexual indie rock singer English gentleman fascist, literally haunting Alice is both ridiculous and appropriate.

    It’s intelligent writing. It works for the novel as a story thing, because it makes the characters feel complex. They are victims of fascism, but also perpetrators, so the book doesn’t fall into the one-dimensional victim trope that anti-fascist fiction can often fall into. Even as the book’s ending suggests love can resist the influence of fascism, because of this moral complexity and the darkness of the book, it doesn’t feel cloying at all.

    It captures the complexity of fascist and supremacist thought. It’s a book about fascism that doesn’t reassure the reader that they are immune to fascist thinking because of their identity (a fallacy white queer people are often vulnerable to). That even if you are a marginalized person, you are still vulnerable to its thought patterns. The book is a horror novel, and I find that pretty scary.

  • Nevada by Imogen Binnie

    The 2013 novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie has acquired cult status among transfems. And it’s easy to see why. Here is a novel about trans women, written by a trans woman. Not a memoir, a proper fictional novel. Not a lot of those, especially not in 2013.

    The main character is Maria Griffiths, a trans woman in her late 20s living a bohemian life in New York. The first half of the book is how she fucks up her life there, losing her job and girlfriend in short order. And then she basically steals her ex’s car and goes on a roadtrip to figure things out. And in Star City, Nevada, she meets James, a stoner working in a Wal-mart who she quickly identifies as a trans woman who doesn’t know she is a trans woman yet. And she actually seems to be right about that, but wrong about her ability to convince James to transition.

    Maria is a depiction of a character who is “post-transition”, at least in the sense that she is on hrt and living as a woman. Of course, Binnie complicates the idea of “post-transition”, because both Maria and her trans woman friend Piranha both have their transitions curtailed by what treatments they can afford, by class. So they don’t have bottom surgery, or electrolysis or facial feminization surgery.

    Maria is better off for having transitioned, in fact you get the sense that it’s the only thing that kept from completely falling apart, but it isn’t a fix for all of her problems. Like many trans people, including myself, she coped with her pre-transition life by dissociating from her feelings as a defense mechanism. Spacing out and going on autopilot, to cope with dysphoria from being forced to live as a boy. And for her it naturally became a habit, a pattern of behaviour that she is still trapped in. She drinks and takes drugs to dissociate herself further. Her dissociation causes to fuck up her relationship with her girlfriend Steph and leads her to be fired from her crappy bookstore job.

    Maria is somewhat aware of her problems, but of course that is not enough to fix things either. And she has this bohemian/punk persona that also kind of romanticizes those flaws. We get a chapter from the perspective of Steph, that is very clear about Maria’s flaws about a person.

    Not that Maria doesn’t have her positive qualities. She is not a cruel or evil person, just a flawed one. She is clever and funny, and her internal monologue is a delight. She has these actually quite insightful observations about being transfem and transmisogyny.

    The other (possibly) transfem character is James, If Maria is a post-transition transfem mess, he is the pre-transition transfem mess. James is pre the trans realization that is the first step of transitioning. He is also dissociated from his feelings and his drug of choice to dull the emotions is pot. The novel uses he/him to reflect the character’s understanding of himself.

    James is also a self-described autogynephile. His repression takes the form of a fetish and he jacks off to forced-fem porn. James might seem to confirm stereotypes, of trans women transitioning because of a fetish or having a sexually fetishistic view of womanhood. In fact James considers himself to be just a fetishist. He has (internalized) transmisogyny, and believes he can’t or shouldn’t transition.

    Yet the portrayal is a lot more nuanced than that. Maria delivers a thorough transfeminist criticism of the agp/hsts model and points out rarely is a fetish “just a fetish”. Instead it points to deeper issues in one’s psyche, often things that are taboo, especially ones you internalize as a taboo. If someone’s fetish is getting forced to become a woman, it might point to that person wanting to become a woman on a deeper level, and have internalized transmisogyny about those feelings and a fear of actually transitioning.

    Of course, I should add that the widespread cultural sexualization of femininity and women also plays a role. And if you actually transition in the end, it’s probably not just a sexual fetish. You don’t upend your entire life at great personal effort and cost, just for some fetish.

    So James might appear to uphold transmisogynistic stereotypes, but the novel actually criticizes that transmisogyny in intelligent and nuanced ways.

    And that’s part of why I think makes Nevada such an important book. It doesn’t present any idealized or sanitized view of transfem lives. Instead we get messy, flawed characters. And it’s because they are flawed that they are well-written characters. It means their stories can be moving and relatable in ways that idealized characters can not be.

    I have struggled with dissociation due to dysphoria and thinking I was perverted for being a trans woman. And the novel doesn’t excuse what for example dissociating does to other people, you get a vivid portrait of how Maria and James’s dissociation hurt their romantic relationships. Yet it helps seeing portrayals of trans women characters struggling with the same problems, and seeing it explained in terms of coping mechanisms for having to grow up transfem in a transmisogynistic society. It tells you, you are not alone. Maria and James definitely have to work on their issues but they are so valid.

    Nevada just ends, without any kind of dramatic resolution or epiphany, and that very much works. It’s a depiction of these character’s lives and their problems, and there are no easy solutions. Both Maria and James are outright told what their problem is. Yet they can’t use this epiphany to suddenly overcome their ingrained ways of being, no matter how dysfunctional.

    And the depiction of Maria’s and James’s lives is so vivid and well-written that I don’t mind there not being any major dramatic conflict or resolution. It’s nice to read a depiction of being a trans woman, from her perspective, written by an actual trans woman. There is an inside understanding that is almost impossible for TME authors to fake.

    I enjoy Binnie’s prose too. It’s in a casual, slangy and modern tone, which works for this realistic novel, as it is the how the characters think and speak. It helps the writing is genuinely witty, I laughed sometimes, despite the novel dealing with some heavy themes.

    So I totally understand why Nevada became such a cult novel among transfems. During the years it was out of print, the site haveyoureadnevada.club spread e-book copies of the novel. Torrey Peters blurbs the 2022 re-issue I own, and I can see the influence on Detransiton, Baby, another novel about the messy lives of flawed trans women characters in New York.

    And I have joined the cult at this point, I loved reading Nevada. It’s a difficult read at times, but fun and insightful all the same.