Messy gender issues in science fiction and fantasy: Jacqueline Carey's Starless
OK, back to science fiction. Which, of course, has nothing to do with politics. Except that I keep telling you that science fiction writers are better at it than a lot of professional political commentators.
It is difficult, though. For the last bunch-o-years, all of the complicated stuff around a kind of sex/gender distinction has been having a long "moment," not just in American culture, but in science fiction and fantasy. The latter, of course, is a reflection of the former. When something is happening in culture and politics, writers pick it up. The whole sex/gender thing is a hot topic, so the realm of science fiction and fantasy writers has collectively decided that every writer worth their salt must make a go of it. Some do well, and some do... less well. Why? Writing is hard. So, as American culture and politics continue to have a whole, big thing about sex/gender, every writer in the business continues to do the "hey, I gotta get me some of that!" thing to varying levels of success.
This morning, one of the successes, based on my current nightstand reading. Jacqueline Carey's Starless. Carey is good. I'm not a fan of her most famous series, but I preach from the mountaintops about the greatness of the Banewreaker/Godslayer duology, along with some of her other books. Starless is not her best, but it is worth a read, particularly because it is so much more interesting as an entry into the "let's write about sex/gender" than much of what is out there.
The clunkers out there? They go wrong in a variety of ways. The biggest problem is that if you start with a point you want to beat into your reader's head (usually the same basic point as every other writer) rather than a world-building concept, your world-building will suffer, and your writing will range between dull, pedantic and self-defeating. And if you are too afraid of provoking a twitter backlash, you won't say anything interesting.
Start with the concept. That's how you say something interesting.
The basic premise behind Starless is that the main god of the planet is Zar, the Sun. The moons and stars are the children of Zar. The stars rebelled, so Zar cast them down, leaving the sky... you get the point. Each minor god gets dominion over some island, or whatever, in their repentance. On Zarkhoum, there is a fire god, and a god of the winds, who share dominion. When a member of the royal family there-- the Sun-Blessed-- is born with a particular arrangement of the moons, and another child is born at the exact same time, that other child is chosen as a "shadow" to the Sun-Blessed. Zariya is the youngest daughter of the ruling king of Zarkhoum, and when she is born, a bunch of kids are born at the same time. They are gathered together, so that a ceremonial hawk feather can be dropped to them. Whichever infant reaches up to grab the hawk feather is chosen by the god of the winds-- Pahrkun-- to be the shadow of that royal, to protect, in this case, her.
There's a catch, and here's where Carey starts doing something interesting with sex/gender. It had always been a male chosen as a shadow, and shadows are trained by the Fortress of the Winds, which trains men. Warriors, and blah, blah, blah. When Zariya was born, Pahrkun selected a girl to be her shadow. The Fortress of the Winds doesn't train girls.
But... there's a loophole. On Zarkhoum, when a family has a girl, they will sometimes declare the girl to be an "honorary" boy, because title, and blah, blah (you figure it out), and raise the child as a boy. They call such a child a "bhazim."
The loophole, then, is to declare the girl chosen-- Khai-- a bhazim. But here's where it gets messy. The Fortress raises Khai, as a boy, but they say nothing about Khai's status as a bhazim. Khai is raised in an environment of men and boys, "declared" a boy, told nothing about that declaration, and strict privacy rules on, shall we say, morning ablutions are instituted so that Khai can never observe a physical difference by seeing anyone else nude.
Translation: the Fortress of the Winds just straight-up lied to Khai.
Obviously, there is a point at which the lie becomes unsustainable. That point is called "puberty."
Problems ensue.
Now, think about how brilliant this is as a set-up to talk about sex/gender. What it doesn't do is fall back on lazy cliches. It's a psychology experiment that no IRB would ever approve. You know, that institution at colleges and universities that is supposed to oversee human subjects research to ensure that human subjects aren't harmed? Let's just say, the system isn't 100%, but normally, this kind of thing is supposed to be stopped. For... rather obvious reasons. This kind of thing would seriously mess with a person's head. And, it does. The precise manner in which it does is the point.
Of course, we don't know exactly what it would do, because we can't run the experiment. That's the point. It would tell us a lot about sex/gender, but, we can't do it because, ya' know, ethics 'n stuff. Instead, we have Jacqueline Carey to write about it in a fictional... let's call it "Aristotelean" way.
Anyway, this is a very different take on the whole sex/gender thing. And it is not a replication of 2019 dialog on transgender issues in the US because it doesn't even take place on this planet. Good for Carey! Zarkhoumi culture is not our culture. It is clearly influenced in some vague way by Arab culture... kinda, sorta..., but it can be used to discuss our cultural issues via its differences. That's the point! This is good writing!
Khai does not "identify" as male, in the sense of modern, western socio-political dialog on sex-gender distinctions as it relates to the current state of the discipline of psychology. Khai is physiologically female, and raised under the, not exactly identity, so much as belief of male. Had Khai not been sent to the Fortress to be raised bhazim, we are given no indication that Khai would have felt any kind of gender dysmorphia, and at no point does Khai express dysmorphia regarding genitalia. Rather, the reveal is forced by the fact that as time passes, a boy who works out as constantly and as brutally as Khai does will develop a certain musculature and physique that Khai doesn't. That doesn't sit well with Khai, who spent an early childhood looking forward to developing a large, hulking frame that would look like the rest of the brothers at the Fortress of the Winds. That's very different.
And also very understandable.
So what does this mean? In one light, Carey's book is a sympathetic portrayal of a hero who doesn't conform to gender norms. One side of the LGBTQ community can say yay for representation, right? But imagine someone looking to take offense. One might read Starless from a hostile perspective and claim that Carey is portraying those who do not conform to sex/gender norms as the result of some sort of psychological damage and mistreatment in early childhood. Ooooh, not so nice anymore, is it? And had Carey worried about that, she wouldn't have published it. Of course, you can't fully project a modern, American cultural reading onto Zarkhoum. It's metaphor.
Slippery stuff, that.
That latter reading doesn't seem to be a common one. Why not? Bluntly, Khai's the hero, and most readers don't look past that. I do wonder how the book will age, though, and if you give me a classroom of impressionable "woke" kids, I could get 'em to call Carey a trans-phobe. Is she? I don't think so. Not by a longshot, but an antagonistic reader can misconstrue anything. The whole objective of the antagonistic reader is to look for a way to misconstrue something, and say, a-ha! You're a reactionary! Or... something.
Bad faith readers have all sorts of motivations for doing that!
Continuing, though, did you notice me tap-dancing around pronouns there? Shortly after Khai and Zariya meet, Zariya asks how she should refer to Khai. She doesn't use the phrase, "what are your pronouns," which is a thing that people are doing now, but from Zariya's perspective, the question makes sense. She doesn't know the polite way to interact with a bhazim. Khai says that "he" prefers "he."
Observe good writing. Carey isn't doing the "let me beat you over the head with modern, American stuff" because this ain't even the same planet. Instead of saying "I am a boy/man who was 'assigned female at birth,' so say, 'he,'" or something like that, Khai just tells Zariya that he prefers "he" because he is used to it. That's all. He's 16, so for 16 years, everyone has referenced him with, "he," and he's just accustomed to it.
Note what's so cool about this, from the writing perspective. Carey takes the pronoun thing, and doesn't just say to an audience, "hey! Ask everyone, 'what are your pronouns,' and if you 'misgender' them, you're a monster!" Instead, you have a character who isn't exactly transgender in terms of how we define gender dysmorphia, but is kinda "fluid," but not really because we don't have bhazim in this world, and the conversation is based on one character's preference, based in comfort and accustomedness given the character's life. It is adjacent to, but not replicative of common dialog.
And to make it more interesting still, Khai had some experiences that put things in a different perspective, particularly with his mentor, Vironesh. Vironesh was the previous shadow, whose charge got killed, and then traveled the world as a sort of seabound cop with "the coursers of Obid." The coursers of Obid saw the sex/gender thing very differently from Zarkhoum. On Zarkhoum, women weren't warriors, but the coursers didn't care about male/female differences. Men and women were the same to them. So, every time Khai got pissed off about being bhazim because he just wanted to be a man, full stop, Vironesh said something to the effect of, why do you care? Among the coursers, women fight just like the men. It makes no difference. (And Khai's the toughest badass around anyway.) And if it's that bad to be a woman, what are you saying about Zariya, whom you are charged to protect? The subtext of Vironesh's questioning was whether or not Khai's rejection of his physiological sex was misogynistic, in a way that the coursers rejected.
That always threw Khai for a loop. To Khai, at least part of it was that the Fortress lied to him for years, and the lie itself was troubling, and yes, there's that. But it was clearly bigger than that to Khai, but... to echo Vironesh, why? Khai had to come to terms with that. And that was hard. It was also a hard question to be able to ask. By that, I mean it was hard for Carey to be able to have a character ask that question.
In one sense, Vironesh's perspective was strongly feminist. Male-female equality. But...
Vironesh asking his question could, from a certain contingent, be taken as not sufficiently supportive of a transgender experience. It's a "why does your physical body matter" question.
To the coursers, it didn't because they made no distinction between male and female gender roles, to use an older definition of "gender." And it wasn't that Khai "identified" as male, by the way that phrase is now used. Instead, Khai was raised bhazim. Not the same thing. That gives Carey-- see what happens there?-- a loophole to have Vironesh ask a question that skirts the lines of what can and cannot be asked in modern dialog, when what he's really saying is that Khai should just do whatever he needs to do because who cares about the rest? "Honor beyond honor," as Vironesh repeatedly says.
But there is a very controversial ideology that says that the real issue in all of this sex/gender stuff is the artificial construction of gender roles. Break down the artificial barriers of gender roles in society, and that's the goal. Push that far enough, and you wind up at... "TERF." Trans-exclusionary radical feminism. That's the ideology that says someone who is physically male, and transitions later in life to female hasn't had the same experience of discrimination, and that the male/female gender roles need to be broken down as artificial constructions because they are the real problems anyway. Vironesh, to an audience looking for a fight, is walking up to the line of TERF-ism. Except that he's a man, and Khai is bhazim, so it plays differently. Everything is just flipped.
You see what I mean about how much is going on here, and how much Carey can write simply because it is a different world, told through metaphor? I'm frankly amazed that there isn't more backlash against Vironesh among readership. Is Carey taking a position of TERF-ism? No, but she is using an alternative world to ask more complicated questions. It's just that you have to do that in order to address such complex issues. This is what science fiction & fantasy are so great at doing! Complex metaphor.
And Carey does more still! As Khai becomes more accustomed to the fact that he is bhazim, and a post-pubescent person with a female body, Khai winds up in situations that call for dressing and acting as a woman. In the court of the Sun-Blessed, there's just no way around that. Khai's responses vary by situation! All of this paints a picture of a sort of "gender fluid" character, but that brings us back to the possible hostile response of whether or not this is the result of what would arguably be psychological abuse by the Fortress of the Winds.
A hostile, bad faith reading of Starless would press Carey on gender identity, yet the entire point is to address an entirely different culture on a different planet and address these ideas through metaphor and difference.
Beware bad faith readings, and bad faith readers. They are the absolute worst, and the bane of all reasonable dialog. The bane of intellectual civilization.
There is so much built into this. The sex/gender thing is messy, and filled with potential for science fiction and fantasy. However, because it is so tempting, and such a cultural thing right now, there is a plethora of bad stuff out there. It is nice to read something thoughtful, and part of that is that if you pick apart Starless, Carey was really taking some risks here.
Admission-- I have a bit left to read, so I may post an addendum upon finishing the book, but I post on the weekends, and I seem to be doing SF-related posts on Sundays. So, whatever. Perhaps more later, but this is probably it for Starless. I am more likely to contrast it with something else next week. Anyway, this is the kind of thing that goes through my head as I read.
It is difficult, though. For the last bunch-o-years, all of the complicated stuff around a kind of sex/gender distinction has been having a long "moment," not just in American culture, but in science fiction and fantasy. The latter, of course, is a reflection of the former. When something is happening in culture and politics, writers pick it up. The whole sex/gender thing is a hot topic, so the realm of science fiction and fantasy writers has collectively decided that every writer worth their salt must make a go of it. Some do well, and some do... less well. Why? Writing is hard. So, as American culture and politics continue to have a whole, big thing about sex/gender, every writer in the business continues to do the "hey, I gotta get me some of that!" thing to varying levels of success.
This morning, one of the successes, based on my current nightstand reading. Jacqueline Carey's Starless. Carey is good. I'm not a fan of her most famous series, but I preach from the mountaintops about the greatness of the Banewreaker/Godslayer duology, along with some of her other books. Starless is not her best, but it is worth a read, particularly because it is so much more interesting as an entry into the "let's write about sex/gender" than much of what is out there.
The clunkers out there? They go wrong in a variety of ways. The biggest problem is that if you start with a point you want to beat into your reader's head (usually the same basic point as every other writer) rather than a world-building concept, your world-building will suffer, and your writing will range between dull, pedantic and self-defeating. And if you are too afraid of provoking a twitter backlash, you won't say anything interesting.
Start with the concept. That's how you say something interesting.
The basic premise behind Starless is that the main god of the planet is Zar, the Sun. The moons and stars are the children of Zar. The stars rebelled, so Zar cast them down, leaving the sky... you get the point. Each minor god gets dominion over some island, or whatever, in their repentance. On Zarkhoum, there is a fire god, and a god of the winds, who share dominion. When a member of the royal family there-- the Sun-Blessed-- is born with a particular arrangement of the moons, and another child is born at the exact same time, that other child is chosen as a "shadow" to the Sun-Blessed. Zariya is the youngest daughter of the ruling king of Zarkhoum, and when she is born, a bunch of kids are born at the same time. They are gathered together, so that a ceremonial hawk feather can be dropped to them. Whichever infant reaches up to grab the hawk feather is chosen by the god of the winds-- Pahrkun-- to be the shadow of that royal, to protect, in this case, her.
There's a catch, and here's where Carey starts doing something interesting with sex/gender. It had always been a male chosen as a shadow, and shadows are trained by the Fortress of the Winds, which trains men. Warriors, and blah, blah, blah. When Zariya was born, Pahrkun selected a girl to be her shadow. The Fortress of the Winds doesn't train girls.
But... there's a loophole. On Zarkhoum, when a family has a girl, they will sometimes declare the girl to be an "honorary" boy, because title, and blah, blah (you figure it out), and raise the child as a boy. They call such a child a "bhazim."
The loophole, then, is to declare the girl chosen-- Khai-- a bhazim. But here's where it gets messy. The Fortress raises Khai, as a boy, but they say nothing about Khai's status as a bhazim. Khai is raised in an environment of men and boys, "declared" a boy, told nothing about that declaration, and strict privacy rules on, shall we say, morning ablutions are instituted so that Khai can never observe a physical difference by seeing anyone else nude.
Translation: the Fortress of the Winds just straight-up lied to Khai.
Obviously, there is a point at which the lie becomes unsustainable. That point is called "puberty."
Problems ensue.
Now, think about how brilliant this is as a set-up to talk about sex/gender. What it doesn't do is fall back on lazy cliches. It's a psychology experiment that no IRB would ever approve. You know, that institution at colleges and universities that is supposed to oversee human subjects research to ensure that human subjects aren't harmed? Let's just say, the system isn't 100%, but normally, this kind of thing is supposed to be stopped. For... rather obvious reasons. This kind of thing would seriously mess with a person's head. And, it does. The precise manner in which it does is the point.
Of course, we don't know exactly what it would do, because we can't run the experiment. That's the point. It would tell us a lot about sex/gender, but, we can't do it because, ya' know, ethics 'n stuff. Instead, we have Jacqueline Carey to write about it in a fictional... let's call it "Aristotelean" way.
Anyway, this is a very different take on the whole sex/gender thing. And it is not a replication of 2019 dialog on transgender issues in the US because it doesn't even take place on this planet. Good for Carey! Zarkhoumi culture is not our culture. It is clearly influenced in some vague way by Arab culture... kinda, sorta..., but it can be used to discuss our cultural issues via its differences. That's the point! This is good writing!
Khai does not "identify" as male, in the sense of modern, western socio-political dialog on sex-gender distinctions as it relates to the current state of the discipline of psychology. Khai is physiologically female, and raised under the, not exactly identity, so much as belief of male. Had Khai not been sent to the Fortress to be raised bhazim, we are given no indication that Khai would have felt any kind of gender dysmorphia, and at no point does Khai express dysmorphia regarding genitalia. Rather, the reveal is forced by the fact that as time passes, a boy who works out as constantly and as brutally as Khai does will develop a certain musculature and physique that Khai doesn't. That doesn't sit well with Khai, who spent an early childhood looking forward to developing a large, hulking frame that would look like the rest of the brothers at the Fortress of the Winds. That's very different.
And also very understandable.
So what does this mean? In one light, Carey's book is a sympathetic portrayal of a hero who doesn't conform to gender norms. One side of the LGBTQ community can say yay for representation, right? But imagine someone looking to take offense. One might read Starless from a hostile perspective and claim that Carey is portraying those who do not conform to sex/gender norms as the result of some sort of psychological damage and mistreatment in early childhood. Ooooh, not so nice anymore, is it? And had Carey worried about that, she wouldn't have published it. Of course, you can't fully project a modern, American cultural reading onto Zarkhoum. It's metaphor.
Slippery stuff, that.
That latter reading doesn't seem to be a common one. Why not? Bluntly, Khai's the hero, and most readers don't look past that. I do wonder how the book will age, though, and if you give me a classroom of impressionable "woke" kids, I could get 'em to call Carey a trans-phobe. Is she? I don't think so. Not by a longshot, but an antagonistic reader can misconstrue anything. The whole objective of the antagonistic reader is to look for a way to misconstrue something, and say, a-ha! You're a reactionary! Or... something.
Bad faith readers have all sorts of motivations for doing that!
Continuing, though, did you notice me tap-dancing around pronouns there? Shortly after Khai and Zariya meet, Zariya asks how she should refer to Khai. She doesn't use the phrase, "what are your pronouns," which is a thing that people are doing now, but from Zariya's perspective, the question makes sense. She doesn't know the polite way to interact with a bhazim. Khai says that "he" prefers "he."
Observe good writing. Carey isn't doing the "let me beat you over the head with modern, American stuff" because this ain't even the same planet. Instead of saying "I am a boy/man who was 'assigned female at birth,' so say, 'he,'" or something like that, Khai just tells Zariya that he prefers "he" because he is used to it. That's all. He's 16, so for 16 years, everyone has referenced him with, "he," and he's just accustomed to it.
Note what's so cool about this, from the writing perspective. Carey takes the pronoun thing, and doesn't just say to an audience, "hey! Ask everyone, 'what are your pronouns,' and if you 'misgender' them, you're a monster!" Instead, you have a character who isn't exactly transgender in terms of how we define gender dysmorphia, but is kinda "fluid," but not really because we don't have bhazim in this world, and the conversation is based on one character's preference, based in comfort and accustomedness given the character's life. It is adjacent to, but not replicative of common dialog.
And to make it more interesting still, Khai had some experiences that put things in a different perspective, particularly with his mentor, Vironesh. Vironesh was the previous shadow, whose charge got killed, and then traveled the world as a sort of seabound cop with "the coursers of Obid." The coursers of Obid saw the sex/gender thing very differently from Zarkhoum. On Zarkhoum, women weren't warriors, but the coursers didn't care about male/female differences. Men and women were the same to them. So, every time Khai got pissed off about being bhazim because he just wanted to be a man, full stop, Vironesh said something to the effect of, why do you care? Among the coursers, women fight just like the men. It makes no difference. (And Khai's the toughest badass around anyway.) And if it's that bad to be a woman, what are you saying about Zariya, whom you are charged to protect? The subtext of Vironesh's questioning was whether or not Khai's rejection of his physiological sex was misogynistic, in a way that the coursers rejected.
That always threw Khai for a loop. To Khai, at least part of it was that the Fortress lied to him for years, and the lie itself was troubling, and yes, there's that. But it was clearly bigger than that to Khai, but... to echo Vironesh, why? Khai had to come to terms with that. And that was hard. It was also a hard question to be able to ask. By that, I mean it was hard for Carey to be able to have a character ask that question.
In one sense, Vironesh's perspective was strongly feminist. Male-female equality. But...
Vironesh asking his question could, from a certain contingent, be taken as not sufficiently supportive of a transgender experience. It's a "why does your physical body matter" question.
To the coursers, it didn't because they made no distinction between male and female gender roles, to use an older definition of "gender." And it wasn't that Khai "identified" as male, by the way that phrase is now used. Instead, Khai was raised bhazim. Not the same thing. That gives Carey-- see what happens there?-- a loophole to have Vironesh ask a question that skirts the lines of what can and cannot be asked in modern dialog, when what he's really saying is that Khai should just do whatever he needs to do because who cares about the rest? "Honor beyond honor," as Vironesh repeatedly says.
But there is a very controversial ideology that says that the real issue in all of this sex/gender stuff is the artificial construction of gender roles. Break down the artificial barriers of gender roles in society, and that's the goal. Push that far enough, and you wind up at... "TERF." Trans-exclusionary radical feminism. That's the ideology that says someone who is physically male, and transitions later in life to female hasn't had the same experience of discrimination, and that the male/female gender roles need to be broken down as artificial constructions because they are the real problems anyway. Vironesh, to an audience looking for a fight, is walking up to the line of TERF-ism. Except that he's a man, and Khai is bhazim, so it plays differently. Everything is just flipped.
You see what I mean about how much is going on here, and how much Carey can write simply because it is a different world, told through metaphor? I'm frankly amazed that there isn't more backlash against Vironesh among readership. Is Carey taking a position of TERF-ism? No, but she is using an alternative world to ask more complicated questions. It's just that you have to do that in order to address such complex issues. This is what science fiction & fantasy are so great at doing! Complex metaphor.
And Carey does more still! As Khai becomes more accustomed to the fact that he is bhazim, and a post-pubescent person with a female body, Khai winds up in situations that call for dressing and acting as a woman. In the court of the Sun-Blessed, there's just no way around that. Khai's responses vary by situation! All of this paints a picture of a sort of "gender fluid" character, but that brings us back to the possible hostile response of whether or not this is the result of what would arguably be psychological abuse by the Fortress of the Winds.
A hostile, bad faith reading of Starless would press Carey on gender identity, yet the entire point is to address an entirely different culture on a different planet and address these ideas through metaphor and difference.
Beware bad faith readings, and bad faith readers. They are the absolute worst, and the bane of all reasonable dialog. The bane of intellectual civilization.
There is so much built into this. The sex/gender thing is messy, and filled with potential for science fiction and fantasy. However, because it is so tempting, and such a cultural thing right now, there is a plethora of bad stuff out there. It is nice to read something thoughtful, and part of that is that if you pick apart Starless, Carey was really taking some risks here.
Admission-- I have a bit left to read, so I may post an addendum upon finishing the book, but I post on the weekends, and I seem to be doing SF-related posts on Sundays. So, whatever. Perhaps more later, but this is probably it for Starless. I am more likely to contrast it with something else next week. Anyway, this is the kind of thing that goes through my head as I read.
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