Quilette reviews a rather grim
memoir of what happened to a marriage when a man decided he was a woman. It's
her telling, of course, but I've no reason to believe it isn't largely true. "You’re polished like a doll, now veiled like a widow, perfumed like a corpse."
I'll probably not look for the book. Reading about it is hard enough.
4 comments:
It's similar to a man coming out as gay and wanting to leave the marriage when his children are already nearly grown (15 & 19) which we watched in friends from our vacation spot years ago. When people tell me their behavior does not affect anyone except the few parties principally involved I have taken to immediately looking for those who might be devastated. They are quickly found. We are not independent.
There's a myth been implicitly propounded to the effect that you can't attend to others' well-being properly unless you put your own sexual desires first.
I passed over this the first time I read it, but for some reason I remembered it today: "...esoteric art-house interests such as kintsugi (look it up)."
You really should look it up. It's pretty nifty: an art of embracing the need for repair of broken things, and making the repair into a highlighted part of what the things are. A broken bowl might be remade into a functional bowl, with the repaired seams highlighted in gold.
The author of the review missed a trick, as perhaps did the author of the book, because it's a very useful analogy for what is going on here. The art of kintsugi only works because there is an acknowledged need to repair the broken thing by putting it back into its proper form. One can think of both the trans-* project and the objections to it being raised by the wife in these terms. The man is trying to put himself into the form of a woman, which he thinks of as being a sort of repair; the wife is pointing out that he never had that form to start with, couldn't have it, and can only be a mockery of the true thing rather than a repaired form of it.
That is why the line you quote, James, is not quite right: "doll... widow... corpse." Only the doll is appropriate; the widow really is a woman, though no longer a wife; the corpse may well have been a woman, but now is 'broken' in a way. The man is painted not just like a doll but as one; you can make him into a doll but not a woman.
Unless, of course, there is something more to being a woman than having the right kind of body, or the experiences that flow from it. Back when we first started talking about all this stuff, I noted that for these claims to be treated as true there has to be a truthmaker for them other than the material. It can't even be a form in Aristotle's sense, because the form is going to turn out to have something to do with the order into which the material is put -- i.e., the absence of the right chromosomes or bodily functions is going to determine what form you are in fact in, and it won't be the female form. You need a form on Plato's terms, or a spirit or soul or something similar, to say that 'the REAL me is a woman.' This ends up being a necessarily religious movement, in other words; it can only be a matter of faith, because materialism is entirely opposed.
If it is a religious war, ironically it is one in which the weight of materialism will fall on conservatives' side for a change. If the material is all there 'really' is, then the claim is just false and provably false. If there's a soul that is the real truthmaker, well, tell us more about that.
I did indeed miss a trick when I skipped the kintsugi reference. Thanks for catching that.
The line seemed to describe the wife's frustration--I've used the doll analogy but the other imagery wasn't anything I'd have thought of. Assuming that "by their fruits you will know them" applies here, we can draw some conclusions about how well his model of himself as a woman actually works. She seems to hint that he's killing something in himself, and perfuming it.
It's certainly a weird kind of religious war: we have Galli who don't believe that Attis will bring fertility, but we treat them with special honor, if not as actual fortune-tellers.
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