Frankissstein

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson 2019
Use This Book: The Only Book You'll Ever Need! by Melissa Hecksher 2006
Adult Doodle Book
Very Hungry Caterpillar Coloring Book by Eric Carl 2003
Weight: 3.5 lbs
Method of Disposal: Sterilizing/Sending to a friend

I have a compulsive need to read everything that Jeanette Winterson publishes and have ever since I was 16 years old, working at Waldenbooks, and my coworker/dear friend introduced me to Written on the Body.  When I saw it was called Frankissstein in bright pink lettering with a triple x on the cover I did get concerned about if I would enjoy it, but even that title could not put me off reading it.

In true Winterson form, she was fluid about time and gender.  Her characters were extreme representations and the writing would sometimes get extra lyrical.  I ended up enjoying this book much more than I thought I would, and it made me want to revisit the original Frankenstein and read up on Mary Shelly and her crew.  I felt that if I could remember more it might mean more, but I suppose it is possible that it might also take away.  I appreciated frankenstein's many reincarnations.

I was surprised by some reviewers outrage at Winterson for the book being transphobic.  I am not transgendered, unfortunately, and cannot say that this book should not or could not be offensive to someone else.  I am just reading more and grappling with it.  I am about to do that here so please feel free to stop reading if you need to.

The number one reason I saw for it was that being transgendered was represented as a choice the trans character made.  One person was emphatic that it was no more a choice than being a lesbian woman is a choice.  I have always wondered about the choice argument though.  Why should I not choose to be a lesbian?  Why would I not choose to do so?  Isn't it a heightened form of freedom if I could live in a society that allowed me to CHOOSE my sexuality?  Now, that being said, I do not feel like I ever did choose it.  As young as I can remember (and my mother too, for that point), I have been fascinated with women and have never felt drawn to a boy or a man.  I do think many people are "born that way," and I am one of them.  Other women I have dated, though, have fallen on a spectrum of sexuality, and the woman I have loved for the last 7 years only recounts being attracted to boys/men, but she was attracted to me and fell in love with me.  If there is more than one fish in the sea and if "the one" is not just one person then did she not sort of make a choice?  And is that not ok?  Many people are born trans and maybe some "would not choose it."  If given the choice nowadays, where I live, I would absolutely choose to be queer and not heterosexual.

Given that Winterson seems drawn to the middle, the grey, the ever-changing area no matter what her subject area is, makes me feel this was not an offensive representation of someone choosing their gender.  The trans character also describes feeling both masculine and feminine all their life and making different choices at different times given both those gender identities where embodied within them in different capacities.  Winterson writes, "I'm a woman. And I'm a man.  That's how it is for me.  I am in a body that I prefer.  But the past, my past, is not subject to surgery.  I didn't do it to distance myself from myself.  I did it to get nearer to myself."  Now, other characters do react in a transphobic way to them.  That happens and is representative of the transphobia we see in life.

I also read that the transgender character was overly sexualized, but the transgender character did not come across to me that way.  The most hyper-sexualized and potentially offensive character was Ron, the heterosexual male.  There was a lot of graphic description about sex bots, but sex bots are real and often advertised much like they were in the book.  It may be because I am hyper-sexualized myself, but I just did not see that.  There were some seriously grotesque and unappealing descriptions, but they were not geared towards being transgendered.

The sexual assault came out of nowhere, and I was not sure it really added to the book except that it is something that happens and the character it happens to fights there way out with a lot of luck, strength, and fight or flight mode kicking in.  If we are supposed to be making a comparison between humans, monsters, robots, time travellers. emotionally wounded and patched up people then the assault does show that the character is not a monster, nor a robot.  In my life, sexual assault has felt jarring and contrary to my experience, and I am jarred by depictions of it regularly.  I am okay with that.  I do not want it to ever feel normal or ordinary.

What did pull me really far out of the book was one word that I believe was maybe used twice to describe the character, Claire.  She was a "black" woman.  The only character given a racial identity, and I could not find the reason.  I do not think we have to ignore race, but it is problematic to only identify one person and no one else.  Does that mean I just assume everyone else is....white? Why?

The things that really drew me in were the fluidity of time and humanity repeating and existing in a multitude of forms and environments.  The past foreshadowing the present and the future.  The present fight to know the future.  Broken people being a patchwork piece--regular Frakenstein's monsters.  The obsession with mortality taking away life.  What is it that scares us about Artificial Intelligence and what should scare us?  What does it say about who we are when we say what we really, honestly want about our robots, our relationships with others, our monsters?

I guess there is a lot to think about and unpack here, and I do enjoy thinking and unpacking.

I Am My Own Wife

I Am My Own Wife A Play by Doug Wright
2004
Weight: 5.4 oz
Method of Disposal: Donating

The subject this play was based on was ridiculously interesting--so interesting that I would argue that Wright could not totally fail unless he were to totally attack and demean her.  That is something it sounds like he would never do.  He clearly found her enchanting.  Not that the language used is super transpositive, but he exuded respect and fascination. 

The subject is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transwoman who managed to survive Nazi Germany and the Stasi.  Not only did she survive it, but she was able to maintain her identity and took some incredible risks to preserve history, to collect, and to do what she enjoyed most.  She owned and ran the Gründerzeit Museum.  In 1997 she moved to Sweden stating that Berlin was too dangerous, but she went back for a visit in 2002 and died of a heart attack in the city she called home for so long.

Now, tell me that in itself is not a story you want to know more about.  I am not sure I was as keen on the play as I was her, but I do imagine it was a hard one to write and to boil down to such few pages.

A Queer and Pleasant Danger

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir  by Kate Bornstein
2012
Weight: 1.5 lbs
Method of Disposal: Leaving at Joe's in EAV

My dear friend, Harriet, bought me this book for my birthday before she flew back home to the U.K.
It was on my wish list--yeah yeah, I know I should not even have a wish list since I am trying to get rid of all my books.  It is hard though.  I do not want to only ready books from the 80's and 90's.  I need to have access to current information and literature.

I was excited to read it because I read some of Bornstein's other work in college and really enjoyed it and learned from it.  Gender Outlaw was my first and then I had to get The Gender Workbook, neither of which I am prepared to get rid of yet.

This memoir is, amongst other things, a letter to the author's daughter who she has not spoken to in 16 years.  Bornstein's need to communicate with her daughter and the obstacles that prevent it broke my heart from page one.  She tears into her life and exposes herself in every chapter.  We hear about her childhood, her father, and the experiences she had while realizing her transgender identity.  Then we are sucked into the strict, abusive world of Scientology, something I never knew about Bornstein before I read this book.  It exposes things I never knew, and I found it to be so interesting and, again, heartbreaking that it is the largest obstacle between Kate and her daughter.  She writes about BDSM, her eating disorder, her relationships, her sex life, the loss of her mother, the loss of her brother, loneliness, closeness.  It can get raw and some people may even think gritty, but it was so honest and so interesting.  I left with a new level of respect for Bornstein, whom I already respected.  If you are looking for an interesting memoir by someone who has probably led a more exciting life than you then this is the one.

The Apartheid of Sex

The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender

1995

Weight: 8 oz

Method of Disposal: Left at a Mexican Restaurant in Oakhurst GA

I am lucky to have the experiences I have.  This book would have really impressed me so much more if I had not already read so many other books putting forth similar arguments and, in many cases, the same arguments.  I am completely on board with the notion that there are a multitude of sexes and sexualities.  I do believe that both sex and gender are on a continuum and are not actually binary systems, despite what we are socialized to believe.  I am lucky because nothing in this book was new to me.  I have had the privilege of accessing this information at home, being exposed to it in school, experiencing it in real life.  It is for this reason that I found myself bored so often while reading the book.  I wanted to get wrapped up in the revolutionary tone and the strength of the author’s voice.  I wanted to feel what the reviewers felt.  I have a lot of interest in the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling and was hopeful after seeing her comments on the back of the book.  I am going to leave this book somewhere in Decatur and hope that it finds a home with an open-minded individual who has never thought about questioning the sex, gender, sexuality binaries.  Good luck little ManifestO!

Am I Blue?

2 X   Am I Blue?: Coming Out From the Silence Edited by Marion Dane Bauer

1994

Weight: 1.8 lbs

Method of Disposal: Donating the one with a cover, leaving the one without somewhere someone can find it

This is an anthology of gay/lesbian young adult fiction that I loved when I was in the right age bracket for it.  I remember reading it and trying to get my father to read it too, though he was nervous about carrying it on a plane.  He traveled a lot for work.  

The author opens the book with these words:

         Ten years ago, an anthology of short stories dealing with gay and lesbian themes

         probably would not be considered by any major young adult publisher.  It is my dream

         that ten years from now an anthology will not be needed, that gay and lesbian

         characters will be as integrated into juvenile literature as they are in life….

         one out of ten teenagers attempts suicide.  One out of three of those does so

         because of concern about being homosexual.  That means that in every

         statistical classroom across the country there is a young person in danger of dying for lack                    of information and support concerning his or her sexuality.

I probably bought this book about 4 years after it was published, and I was thankful for it.  It has now been 17 years since it was published.  I worked in the children’s/young adult department of a bookstore for years, and I remember what it felt like—long after I quit reading exclusively young adult fiction, as I was an adult—and finding all the new gay/lesbian books.  There was a handful, maybe two or three, of fiction books.  I think there were two books about being transgendered.  I was stunned.  It was not that many , but it was a huge increase.  They kept coming.  I read them all, one after the other.  I love YA fiction anyway, but this was huge to me.  It was unexpected.  As booksellers, we would have to scan the books and send the ones that weren’t selling back to the publisher.  I always made sure to keep a couple books on the shelf no matter what the scanner said.  I fought to get that section, instead of one of my coworkers.  I knew that teenagers would still read them, but might be too ashamed to bring them home to their parents or might need their parents financial support to buy them.  There are many good reasons, including a child’s safety, that they may not want their family or friends to figure out about their questions and/or sexuality.  The big chain bookstore might not have cared about that, but I did.  

So, in a way, her dream has partially come true a decade later.  There are not quite as many books as I believe there should be, but they are coming.  There are more and more every year.  Tides are changing.  She did not mention transgendered literature, and YA fiction is truly lacking in that department--hell all fiction is.  The books I do find are good, but they are very basic and do not support a real continuum of gender.  There are still a lot of traps and simplicities.  I feel the young adults and teenagers are ready for some more complicated themes.  Not only can they handle it, but they need it.

Almost two decades later, we have the “It Gets Better” Campaign.  Queer youth is still struggling and suicide is still of huge importance to the sexual minority population.  The more information we can get out there the better.  We all need safe places and access to information and support. 

 In some ways, I am sad to see that the editor’s wishes have not been completely fulfilled to their fullest extent in almost twice as long as she had hoped.  But then I think about what I expected when I was at the age when I found this book, and I am so pleasantly surprised by how far we have come.  How different life is for me now than it was then.  How different it seems to be for the younger generations I have been lucky enough to talk to and interact with.  At least, when it comes to gay and lesbian progression.   

We still need a lot more information on bisexuality and queerness.  We need more information on transgenderism.  We also need information about being intersexed and, please, rush it on to the youth.  Most adults I know have no concept of what that word even means.  And, let me clarify here, that being transgender is not a sexuality.  Being intersex is not a sexuality and it is not directly linked to being transgender.  I include these groups because we are all dealing with problems that are created and exacerbated by a gender, sex, and sexuality binary system, and we are considered a minority because of it.

Thank you, Marion Dane Bauer, for your work and let us all continue doing this work together.  I hope these books fall into hands that need them.

"Wow. I never considered that girls could be transgendered."

Luna by Julie Anne Peters
2004
Weight: 13 ounces
Method of Disposal: Donating—I just found a new place I can donate books. I like the variety. Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party in Atlanta sells all used books for 50 cents and then donates the money to Noah’s Ark. http://www.drbombays.com --tea shop http://www.noahs-ark.org --Animal Rehabilitation Center and Children’s Care Homes



Luna is a difficult one for me. On the one hand, I am thrilled that there is a book about being transgendered for teenagers and, on the other hand, I feel like it fell short. It could have been so much more! Or, am I putting too much pressure on it because it is such a rare thing? Probably. It should not have to be the authoritative book for teens on being transgendered. We should have a selection.

I respect the author. Julie Anne Peters also wrote DEFINE NORMAL and KEEPING YOU A SECRET. The first one is about getting past appearances and getting to know people who are not like you. The other is about two young women who fall in love in high school and all the shit they have to go through because of it. Thank you, Julie Anne Peters, for giving some variety to our young adult libraries. Some of the best books are made for teens and for kids. They are important, imaginative, and emotional. Children and adults can relate through them, and they hint at a common language/understanding. Adults usually write the books, but they connect to something in the child. This is the kind of book I was looking for in middle school. It came a little late, but not too late.

Luna is simplistic, but it is not such a bad introduction. The story is told from the point of view of the sister of Luna, a wonderful and caring girl who sometimes gets frustrated with how important she is to her sibling. I wish that the book did not have to reinforce such a cliché of transgender experience, but I also know that sometimes that is how it is. It is not that there are not people out there who will be able to relate fully to Luna—there are plenty of people who will. It just seems like it is the only story we hear. A “boy” struggling with his actual identity as a “girl.” “He” has been feminine since “he” was pushed out of the womb, and that is how it is. Period. No blurry lines--just from one thing to another. Again, this is not the fault of the book or the author but the American society at large. Luna recognizes that strict gender roles can cause damage, that there is a difference between gender and sexuality, and that we are all human. We get frustrated.

Overall, I think this is a great addition to any young adult collection, and I will miss it when it is gone. I hope it reaches someone young who is looking for a book just like it. Luna will be a great start in an overall understanding of oneself and/or others, but there will be much more to learn and read when it is over.

Queer (not so?) Fabulous

From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond edited by Morty Diamond
2004
Weight: 6.4 oz.
Method of Disposal: Giving away to my friend, Tracy H.



I recently had a conversation about the use of the word queer (amongst other things) with a good friend over cold beer. We had different experiences and feelings surrounding the word. This book does not really define, explain, or defend the word though almost everyone in the book self-identifies as “queer.” It is a book about and by transgendered people, monster trans people, genderqueer people, and so many others. I have re-read it and am passing it on in hopes that it will help in the quest for understanding, community, and revolution that is so desperately sought by so many people struggling with what identity may or may not mean to THE movement.

It is not my favorite book about “radical gender transformation”, but it has its moments. It is one in a list of many that I will be re-reading and then passing on.

In this collection, I particularly like “Father and Son” by Mykkah Herner and was happy that I was inheriting some of my father’s shorts while I was reading about his father-son bonding moment, receiving hand-me-downs in the form of suits, shirts, and pants. I was also a big fan of “Dear Breasts” by Storm Florez and “If I Should Die Before I wake…Don’t Let Me 9/26-11/4/02 For Brotha Bear” by Imani Henry.

If you have read this book or when you read this book—let me know what you think.