Houston, Houston, Do You Read As Trans?

[graveexcitement]

For my Gender and Speculative Fiction course (which has been quite enjoyable thus far), this week's assigned reading was Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Alice Sheldon, under the pen name James Tiptree Jr. All we had to do was read it (and read/listen to a short NPR news story on Sheldon/Tiptree); we were not given any kind of annotation or writing assignment.

This is too bad, because it turned out I had a lot to say, and I don't imagine I'll get to say it all in class tomorrow morning, as presumably other people will want to speak too. (This is also too bad because it meant I wrote all this instead of doing other readings/assignments and I wasn't even assigned to do so.)

Warnings: rape mentions, slurs, discussion of a person who presents as male being outed as biologically female and violent reaction to this

My first reaction, before being to articulate all this, was to make a meme.

I should probably just move on to other assignments (lol, so much for my "do english first, it's first in the morning and it's easiest" plan -- I did it first, but at what cost) but also, like.

Okay so the basic concept of Houston, Houston, Do You Read? is: Three men (including the POV character, Lorimer) were on a 1970s-era spaceship, on some mission that put them close to the sun. There was a solar flare that damaged their ship and, unbeknownst to them, also spit them out three hundred years in the future. They make contact with the future equivalent of NASA and a nearby spacecraft studying Mercury, both of which are mostly staffed by women.

They hitch a ride with the nearby spacecraft in order to get back to Earth, because theirs isn't going to cut it. It turns out that in this alternate future-history there was an epidemic that greatly hampered fertility, which at first prevented any births at all and then resulted in only female babies being born (though at first the men are presented a fiction that women are just much more common due to a temporary shortage of male babies.)

It's eventually revealed that (1) the human race is now propagated only by cloning, as the last men died out hundreds of years ago (2) the people who at first appeared to be future men are actually AFAB and have simply undergone hormone treatments (the text simply says "early androgen treatments," but the effect seems to be similar to that of puberty blockers + testosterone for AFAB people) because, "We need the muscle-power for some jobs."

Which: this is interesting! There's some really interesting stuff in this story about a society of clones. There's 11,000 source genomes, so there's about that many different "blueprints" that a person can be, biologically; clones of the same genome consider themselves sisters, and all share the same first name, with the second name being their personal name (in the story, Judy Paris and Judy Dakar.) In fact, they consider themselves not only sisters, but to share the same identity and personality in some respects ("Judys talk a lot," say Judy Paris and Judy Dakar).

The stuff about gender is also interesting. Imagine going on hormones just because you need increased muscle mass for your job! Those that do are, in the story, called "andys," possibly short for androgen (the hormone treatment) or androgyne. In order to preserve the illusion that this future society has men (to keep our three time-travelling men in the dark), one of them goes by the name "Andy" and uses he/him pronouns. There is a hint earlier in the story that Andy does not usually use he/him pronouns, though it's easy to miss and isn't confirmed.

But...

Okay, so the conflict of the story is this: while hosting a party of sorts, as they near the end of the return journey to Earth, the women have drugged the three time-travelling men with a "disinhibitor" in order to better understand them and the risks of introducing them into their society back home. For the POV character, Lorimer, this mostly means he's a lot more talkative than he would be normally, and is repeatedly sucked into flashbacks (which explain how they got here, the things he's discovered thus far, etc.)

But for another of the men, Bud, under the influence of the drug... well, this is where the explicit attempted rape scene comes in, and I really do mean explicit. (Yikes.) Andy shows up at this point, and Bud starts beating Andy up. Lorimer intervenes to stop this, and tells Bud that he's hitting "a woman. Andy is a woman, Bud. You're hitting a girl. She's not a man" and says "Her real name is Kay."

(Andy then is referred to as "the androgyne" in the narration, which also switches from male pronouns to "his/her." The narration transitions to referring to Andy as "Andy/Kay," or once "Andy-who-is-not-a-man".)

Bud then calls Andy a "bull dyke" and violently checks Andy's crotch, roaring in laughter when he finds "no balls."

And it's just like. Bud is very obviously positioned as In The Wrong. (All the twentieth-century men are, to greater and lesser extents; Lorimer is just the least bad of them.) That doesn't make it feel great to read about someone presenting as one gender being outed and having their genitals checked when they are revealed to biologically be the other, even if this person likely does not actually identify as the gender they were presenting as (there are hints that this was probably just to preserve the illusion that men still existed in the future.)

Like. Maybe it is actually 100% correct to say that Andy prefers the name Kay and she/her pronouns, that she was only using Andy and he/him for the ruse. It was still really goddamn discomforting to read them being outed like that, and especially Bud's reaction to it.

I don't know how much experience the author had with trans people (this is, I remind you, a woman who used a male persona in her writing -- and it wasn't just a pseudonym, she exchanged letters with other contemporary sci-fi authors under this name), though she had enough of an idea for the concept of "AFAB person who, through hormonal treatments/puberty blockers, undergoes male puberty rather than female puberty."

But it's... disquieting. Even if the character involved is clearly meant to be villainous, it still makes me wonder: Why did you include this? And what do you think of people like me? Do you think we are "really" women, just pretending to be men?

I guess that's about it, and now it's dinnertime. Maybe now I can stop thinking about this story until class tomorrow, at which point I intend to be as loud as fucking possible.

Wrote that a few hours ago on Discord, then realized hey, I wrote a thousand words, I might as well preserve it somewhere a bit less ephemeral. Now I just have to... turn my focus to other classes. Sigh.