I can’t answer your question, but am a big fan of Jack Vance’s fantasy series, the Lyonesse trilogy (Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc) which is infused with a bunch of Irish folklore.
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Well, that’s going straight onto my to-borrow-from-library list!
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If society was more accepting of gender variance - I still would have physically transitioned.
There is no societal pressure to medically transition; my life has been a constant battle against the pressure to not medically transition.
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I get the feeling things were a bit different in Spain… the impression the author gives is a sort of regulatory capture scheme. The same doctors who set the limited number of procedures per year to be paid with public funds, were the ones diagnosing people and running their own private practice and playing on their parients’ insecurity to upsell additional cosmetic surgery. And in some cases, misgendering their patients in the operating room.
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Is it his his impression that gender confirming care that he didn’t find necessary for his transition is being “upsold”? Or is it the report of the people deciding to have those procedures? Who I’m going to posit are mostly trans women- who obviously can’t make decisions for themselves.
How many of those people are saying they didn’t want that care? Are his assertions based in fact or anecdotes?
Every year or two there’s another gender variant person saying that people don’t have to medically transition because they don’t have to. It’s like gay people who say that trans people don’t exist and should just be gay.
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I’m not the author, I’m not even necessarily defending the author, or the book. I might not be doing the best job summarizing it (or my opinion of it) either.
Yes, it was anecdotal and the author certainly seemed to have messy, complicated feelings about his own transition… which he didn’t articulate in a clear way. He describes it as having his body “stolen” and yet he never says he regrets it or would undo it if he could. I admit I don’t really get it.
…
Like I said, I was also a bit put off by some of the language and ideas. I poked around online to see if there were red flags about the book or the author, but I didn’t see any. So I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt as much as I could.
It sounds like in Spain, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria might not be as subject to delay and denial as in the US and UK – but if you have to go through the public system for actual treatment, expect to wait years or never get it at all. So the majority of people who do get treated, are those who can afford to do so at a private practice at their own expense. And that’s often the same doctor who wrote the prescription.
His one concrete example of “upselling” was giving trans men six-pack abs along with top surgery.
He does write that the needs of trans women and trans men where it comes to transition are different. But he concludes this is mostly due to social injustices and it’s better to fix the injustices.
I don’t think he was against anyone transitioning (nor against either cis or trans people getting cosmetic surgery if they choose to). But… well, the book’s a mess.
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The fact that he’s divorced from the community while consulting on the community is itself a red flag. As is his being published in a gender critical journal.
I’m sure he has some good ideas - but he undermines them by erasing others in service to his grand vision. While being a person who ensured he could pass, accessed HRT and trans confirming surgeries.
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I just bought this for Pussycat:
The Welsh mythologies dramatized in “adult fantasy” form. Apparently when The Lord of the Rings was a huge hit for Ballentine in the 1960’s, Lin Carter was ordered to find more stuff like that. He stumbled across an obscure novel written the 1920’s that adapted the fourth branch of The Mabinogion. When he tried to contact the author’s estate to seek permission to publish the long-dead woman’s novel, he was surprised to have the quite still alive author herself answer the phone. She was like “you wanna publish my old book? Sure. I wrote another one, but the first didn’t sell so I abandoned it. You wanna publish it too? How about I finish the other two as well?”
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My wife watched a video on the tetralogy recently and I wound up buying it too.
I can’t be sure I didn’t read it as a kid, or at least some of it, because “The Children of Llyr” does seem like an awfully familiar title. But maybe I saw it on display at a bookstore several times, or the phrase was in the translated Mabinogion I read in the 90s enough to stick in my head.
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Is that related to The Children of Lir? They were turned into swans.
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It is exactly that.
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I haven’t read these books, but the article is interesting. Was curious if anyone here has read them and had any thoughts
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Although the occasional book gets a ton of attention years after it was published, in practice most books have a shorter and shorter window in which to get noticed, before they start to disappear.
Makes me think of what is happening with films, too? Like films tend to spend very short time in theaters, prior to sort of disappearing onto some streaming platform…
Art and culture are being sabotaged as part of a program of dehumanization.
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The issue I have is that I always have a backlog of things to read, I think I’ve pre-ordered books a handful of times over the years unfortunately. I also am more hesitant to read books from authors I’m not familiar with but that’s my hang up and I’m trying to be better about reading new stuff from voices I don’t know.
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I think my backlog is probably a few thousand books. I never got through the collection we have here at the house, and I keep making lists of books to buy that seem interesting…
I don’t think that’s just you, but it’s a common thing. Books are more expensive now than they used to be, especially hardbacks. And most of us do not have the same disposable cash we once did.
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I hear ya, i have tried hard to stop buying physical books otherwise my backlog would be worse. I did just get the new OnePlus Pad 3 tablet and i’ve been using it to read manga/webcomics, but i would presume it’ll be comfortable to use for reading ebooks so i need to look into what to read on it. But no matter how practical it may be it does pain me though, i love physical books.
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I hope to replace the entire inside of my house with books, in fact. I plan to die by book pile avalanche…
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Reminds me of that guy in Japan died in an avalanche of his porn manga or disc collection (i am not looking that up on my work computer)
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