Knickers and Twists

[steepholm]

Back in the days when Edward de Bono was fighting Uri Geller and Magnus Pyke for dominance of the nerdier parts of the airwaves, this lateral thinking puzzle was one of many that did the rounds at my school:

A man and his son are driving to watch the football. They have a car accident. The father is killed instantly. His son survives but is in critical condition. He is rushed to the hospital and prepped for surgery. The surgeon enters the operating room, looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.”

The solution – need I really put it under a cut? – is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother. I’d like to think that this puzzle worked better in the 1970s than it does today, although since women still make up less than 10% of surgeons in the UK perhaps it still works all too well.

Anyway, what’s the effect of this twist? Assuming you took a while to work out the answer, I would like to think that your reaction was a sheepish acknowledgement that even the most enlightened minds may unwittingly harbour sexist assumptions. It’s a salutary, astringent jest – as well as a fun lateral thinking exercise, of course.

Many years ago I watched the RSC perform The New Inn at the Swan in Stratford. I’d not read it, so was taken by surprise by the double revelations of the climax, in which (for those unfamiliar with Ben Jonson’s late work) a marriage appears to have just taken place when the bride’s father steps in, whips off the bride’s dress, and reveals that his daughter is really his son (she is wearing doublet and hose under her female clothes) and that for reasons we need not go into here he has been dressed as a girl. The marriage is void! Then, however, the mother steps in in turn, and tears off the doublet and hose to reveal petticoats. The bride really is a girl after all – a fact she has hidden from her husband all these years. The marriage is legal again!

What’s the effect of this twist? Jonson’s larking about with theatrical convention, naturally. In the first performance, the person playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl was, of course, a boy actor, which adds yet another twist to the two that went before. It’s a joke that’s used elsewhere in the theatre of the time, but The New Inn is the most multi-layered version I’ve seen. I laughed like a drain. One might say that Jonson is telling us something about the arbitrariness of gender, but I think it would be truer to say that the scene is mostly poking fun at stage and storytelling conventions. The bride (Frank) is a bit of a cipher, anyway.

Why am I talking about twists, by the way? Because it was one thing I mentioned in my paper at last weekend’s IRSCL conference, when discussing the representation of transitioning children and teens in children’s and YA fiction. I had far more material than I needed (thanks in large part to the good offices of diceytillerman in directing me to relevant books), and this was something I only had time to raise as a point for further consideration. So I want to expand on it a bit here.

One thing I really dislike in trans YA fiction is what we might call the Crying Game style twist, which occurs when a character is revealed to be trans (or "really a man/woman/boy/girl" [delete as applicable]), in the eyes of the cisnormative point-of-view character. The classic response to this perfect storm of transphobia (“You’re really a guy!”) and homophobia (Ugh! I’ve just kissed/had sex with a guy and that means I may be gay!”) is to vomit, as Fergus does in The Crying Game, and Logan does in Brian Katcher’s Almost Perfect ("On my hands and knees, I vomited all over the rubberized surface of the track."), and Brian Griffin does in Family Guy (for a full thirty seconds!):

It's true that the point-of-view character sometimes rows back and come to a greater understanding, as Fergus does with Dil and Logan does with Sage (what is it with naming trans women after herbs?), so the takeaway isn’t quite “Trans people are disgusting, deceptive freaks”. It’s more “It’s only natural to think of trans people as disgusting, deceptive freaks at first, but if you try really hard you may be able to accept that they’re just people.” Which is better, but frankly doesn’t win many cookies.

But here I’m interested not in the attitudes involved (which are all too familiar) so much as the use of a twist. The twist was the thing that got everyone talking about The Crying Game, after all, and it was publicised on that basis:



Twists are of course attractive, for both readers and writers. They’re the narrative equivalent of a sugar rush – though they may be empty calories, and conventional wisdom assures us that a plot held together with twists alone cannot be enjoyed more than once with pleasure. But twists such as these work entirely by subjecting trans people to a fetishizing cisnormative gaze, and finding them gross. If trans people were really considered to be people, the twist would no more be a twist than discovering that the person you just made out with is right-handed.

Since the paper I’ve been given a copy of Simon Packham’s Only We Know, which is told in the first-person present tense by a teenage girl, Lauren, who has started at a new school in a new town because of something bad that happened at her previous school. We don’t learn what that something is until page 220 (of a 230-page book), and of course part of the interest of the book is trying to figure it out. So, by the usual rules of not spoiling I should keep stumm, not to deprive you of that pleasure or the visceral thrill of the eventual revelation – but fuck that noise. The twist is that Lauren is trans of course, and the whole book leads up to that revelation. Now, since Lauren is also the narrator, we don’t get the disgust of The Crying Game or Almost Perfect: in fact, when the secret comes out everyone is super cool with it. And the reader, having lived with Lauren from the “inside”, is less likely to reject her now, presumably.

In some ways, we might say this plot has more in common with The New Inn than with The Crying Game. But isn’t there something a bit off about using the trans-as-twist trope at all, for all its obvious narrative utility as a “reveal”? It’s still pretty objectifying, after all.

If only such a revelation could be managed so that its effect were like the twist in the surgeon story – that is, to expose, not the “real” sex of the trans person, or even the simple fact that they are trans (with the assumption that this will shock us), but rather to make the reader aware of their own cisnormative assumptions. There’s a twist that might be worth writing – but how could it be done? Hoc opus, hic labor est.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Do you really think that one's repulsion at a Nazi should be governed by the fact that Nazism is voluntary?

Well, yes I do, really. Conversely, as a general principle I don't think anyone should be blamed for things that are beyond their control. (Which isn't to say that it's always easy to determine what is beyond one's control.)

Republicans/Tories were the kinds of example I had in mind when I mentioned borderline cases. (And of course both are very broad churches anyway - certainly the Tories, amongst whom I've known several very decent people.)

The smoking example's an interesting one, and there I suspect that other factors may be involved. The repulsion may be in large measure to the smell of tobacco, for example, rather than to the act of smoking as a voluntary choice. But I'll give it some thought.

Of course there must be borderline cases, but I think there's a fairly reasonable distinction between being physically repulsed by transsexual women, and murdering them. If they're both "transphobia", we really, really need more words.

Perhaps, but I have no problem labelling both as such; just as, while there's a big difference between not letting Jews join your country club and setting up death camps, both acts are anti-Semitic.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"may be in large measure to the smell of tobacco"? May? That aversion I'll admit to, and I'd say entirely. That she might be addicted, or even if humans somehow emitted tobacco smoke without their own volition, would make no difference whatever to my physical repulsion to the stuff.

Conversely, I'd feel no physical repulsion if she owned a tobacco farm as long as she didn't indulge in the stuff herself. I might be appalled at her choice of profession, but that's a mental opinion at an entirely different level.

For death camps, we already have another word: "genocide". And yet I still find it very hard to convince people that the term "anti-semitism" also covers genteel, politely-worded quota systems and stuff like Gentleman's Agreement. My repeated experience is that anti-semites are just lying in wait for you to say, or even imply, that they're anti-semites, because that gives them the chance to get all huffy, seize the upper hand and blame you for going beyond the pale in name-calling. And this when "genocidal" is a clearly established term.

So I'd be really cautious about wielding the term "transphobia."

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

It doesn't matter whether or not you invent a new word; if that new word connotes disapprobation of somebody's prejudice, that somebody will get huffy.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We're not inventing a new word to replace the old word. We're inventing the new word to free the old word to mean what it's always meant. Doesn't work. I've even had this argument explicitly on words in less contentious subjects. Someone wants to change the meaning of a word, and chides me for wanting to keep the old meaning. I say fine, we can use the old word for the new meaning, but then we need a new word to mean what the old word used to mean. So wouldn't it be less confusing if we use the old word in its old meaning, and use a new word for a new meaning?

That seems to me a sensible argument, but it doesn't prevail.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

In this case, that's moot. The issue is that people who are expressing a harmful prejudice resist admitting it, and one of their defense mechanisms is to get huffy and nasty when called on it. It doesn't matter what word is used.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And they probably secretly realize this, which is why they go totally nuclear on the word "anti-semitic" turning up, to head off any response of the kind you're suggesting. I speak from bitter experience.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

But why on earth let the anti-Semites control your use of the term? That seems quite backwards to me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They're not controlling your use of the term; they're controlling their use of the term. Since their use includes their reading of your use, what you're accomplishing by using it is letting them derail the argument and win on points. Is that what you want?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I don't follow that at all, sorry. It sounds to me as though if they could control the argument to that extent, they'd "win on points" (whatever that means -- they wouldn't have convinced me) no matter what, in which case I might as well stick to my guns about what I meant.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I suppose that depends on what you consider the goal of entering into an argument is. If your goal is to convince yourself, you might as well not even bother: you already think you're right. If, however, the goal is to persuade the other party, it's best - if possible - to speak in their language, avoid giving hostages to fortune, and try not to wind up in a situation where they can walk off smugly convinced of their own superiority because you insulted them. (I'm not very good as those goals myself, but I try.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The end result if both parties did that is that they'd each be using each other's definition of anti-Semitism, which would be at least as bad as before :-) Also, the definition of a term may be a major subject of a debate, as transphobia appears to be here.

Few debates have only two parties. Usually there are bystanders to be convinced (or not).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've never had another party show me that courtesy. It's only me who is expected to show it to them.

But that's because I'm not low enough to consider words like "anti-semitic" (or even "transphobic") to be nuclear.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I take your point (which you expand on in later comments) about giving people an easy "out" by using terms that they can latch onto as offensive. However, I don't think "genocide" - which is an act that has been carried out against various peoples, not all of them Jews - is an adequate substitute for "anti-Semitism", which is a motivation for such an act. That's a bit like saying, "We can't call this attack transphobic - what it really is is murder."