Wis[s]e Words

The trans life

Published on May 26, 20131 Comment

A while back NBC’s Dateline did a surprisingly good and respectful documentary about Josie Romero, a nine year old trans girl and how she and her parents dealt with the fact that their little boy was actually their little girl. It also looks at the medical challenges young trans children have to deal with, those who start transition before puberty. If you know your physical gender doesn’t match your real one, going through puberty is hell, as that’s of course when the physical differences between boys and girls really start to matter in all sorts of way. Going through that, then going through physical transition to get to your chosen gender does all sorts of things to your body. Therefore the best practise for children like Josie is to start them on hormone blockers to delay puberty a few years, then start hormone treatment when they’re old enough for it to get the physical transition going. It all sounds scary if you haven’t had to think about it before, but the Dateline documentary does well in presenting it as honest and positive as possible.

If you want a slighter wider view of what living your life as a trans person means, take a look at the Trans Scribe series over at the “girl on girl culture” magazine Autostraddle. It’s a honest, at times moving series, that shows that trans lives don’t have to be tragic.

The cake is no lie

Published on May 23, 2013Leave a comment

#womentoread

Published on May 22, 2013Leave a comment

Kari Sperring is fed up with the lack of attention to women writers in science fiction and fantasy and is doing something about it:

So, yesterday I decided to indulge in another round of that intermittent habit, poking the internet with a stick, but starting a hashtag — #womentoread — over on Twitter. I asked people to recommend sff by women. The response was astonishing: I’d hoped that some of my friends would pick it up, but… One of the very first to do so was Seanan Mcguire (Thank you, Seanan!) and it just took off.

[…]

But why now, exactly. I’ve done something like this before (last year with the fantasy by women thing). That’s part of it. I am an activist to my bones: it’s coded into me to try and do something when I see an injustice. And I know far too many really great women writers who are underrated, under-reviewed, under-recognised. I see male writers praised for doing things in books which women did before them, which women are doing as well as them — but the women are ignored and sidelined.

You can share the idea. You can write a review of a book by a woman. You can blog about a woman writer you admire. You can post a list of links to the websites of women writers you love. It doesn’t have to be ep;ic fantasy or even sff. It can be any genre. And then, please, go to twitter and tweet that link with the #womentoread hashtag. If you’re not on twitter, post the link here in the comments and I will tweet it for you.

Nina Allen took this idea and prepared a list of 101 women writers to read, which is a good start to look for new writers to try, as is James Nicoll’s list. This is not the first time of course that the lack of visibility of women in sf&f has come up; two years ago Nicola Griffith started the Russ pledge in a similar attempt to get more discussion of women sf&f writers going. Some people, like me, took her up on it but of course such grassroots attemps take time to perculate upwards. A new initiative like #womentoread may help get some more momentum behind the continuing struggle to get more attention to women.

What I want to do with this is not to set up my own list of women writers, but rather do some posts highlighting some of my favourite writers, perhaps on a weekly basis; I’m thinking Women Writers Wednesday. I’ve been trying to read more female writers in the past couple of years, but a bit more systemic attention won’t do any harm.

Mother of Storms

Published on May 21, 2013Leave a comment

Living as I do in my cozy little corner of northwest Europe, where things like volcanos or earthquakes, let alone tornadoes, just don’t happen, it’s hard to understand the sheer scale of destruction a tornado like the one that hit Moore, OK yesterday can leave behind. Seeing videos like the one above just leave me gobsmacked. Luckily it’s not all doom and gloom and finding your dog alive though your house is flattened must give this woman some sort of comfort:

The Heart of Valor — Tanya Huff

Published on May 19, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of The Heart of Valor

The Heart of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2007

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. The first Valor novel was a replay of every mil-sf writer’s favourite Zulu War siege, while the second took on an equally venerable plot: the “let’s investigate a mysterious derelict alien space ship” one. And now, with The Heart of Valor, the third novel in the series, Tanya Huff once again takes on an old mil-sf standby, the march upcountry across a hostile planet, though she doesn’t go for the full Anabasis. In short, it looks like Tanya Huff is working her way through the Big Book of Stock Mil-SF Plots, but I’m not complaining. The general outlines might not be original, but as with everything, it’s all in the execution.

It helps if you have a strong character to hang your story on of course, and I like gunnery sergeant Torin Kerr. She’s a hardbitten, cynical career soldier keeping an eye out for her people, weary of her superiors and their inevitable fuckups. She also somebody we met in the first book waking up from a tryst with a di’Taykan, a somewhat randy alien species who never say no to a one-night stand, a di’Taykan that later turned out to be her commanding officer. Huff lets the reader spent a lot of time in sergeant Kerr’s skull and she comes across as smarter than she presents, conscientious and slightly paranoid. The latter is probably not surprising, considering her previous adventure on a very alien spaceship.