SF gender

[liv]

So I read Ian McDonald's River of gods about a month ago, and although I was extremely impressed with it, I never got round to posting a review. I think that's partly because I bounced about it at cartesiandaemon and rysmiel while I was reading it, and partly because I'm disorganized. But it's an absolutely fascinating and highly original book.

Anyway, among the explosion of exciting SF ideas, one of them is the concept of "nutes" who "Step Away" from gender, by a surgical and psychological process more or less analogous to an extreme version of sex reassignment surgery in our reality. I just can't get out of my head that if that gender existed, I would want to be it.

I mean, I know the medical technology described in the book is totally unrealistic, including physically rewiring the brain so that it doesn't even think gendered thoughts, not to mention remodelling the entire skeleton. And even it were possible, it would be a totally stupid idea; the book postulates, I'm sure correctly, that nutes are almost universally hated and regarded as freaks. It's perfectly obvious that I'm much, much safer looking like a moderately attractive woman than in a body that would upset everybody by being even more gender rebellious than any genderqueer person can ever manage in reality. People who know me well know I'm not as female in my head as I look, but I don't have to deal with the prejudices of any random strangers based on my appearance, and that's really the optimum situation. I also really don't need to be convincing myself not to do something that isn't even slightly an option!

Somebody said to me recently that if I have to hesitate to remember that I'm supposed to be female, that makes me gender dysphoric. To me that seems like comparing feeling a bit melancholy sometimes with actual clinical depression; I generally quite like my body and it's not even slightly a hardship being regarded as a woman. Thinking wistfully about how it would be nice to be able to opt out of gender is no more serious than vaguely speculating about whether telepathy or invisibility would be a cooler superpower. And realistically, even with existing technology I could present as a lot more androgynous if I chose to, and I don't think it's worth the hassle in order to look more like the person in my head. And really, even in RoG, it's a choice between male, female and social outcast, which isn't a whole lot better than having only two options.

Don't know if I'm actually going anywhere with this; the main point is that if you are interested in my review, it's linked.

Comments

[liv]

I am definitely aware that I am looking at India through the totally inappropriate lens of my European cultural assumptions; I mentioned something about that problem in the review. I am not sure that I am capable of reading Indian novels written by actually Indian authors, even assuming that they exist in translation; I find Rushdie confusing already, and he's very much writing within a Western framework. My understanding of India is always going to be third-hand, and I'm sort of ok with that because I can't expect in one lifetime to understand the whole world as intimately as I understand my one tiny little cultural and geographic niche.

I have picked up enough to realize that gender in India doesn't work the same way as in America, and I had read of the hijra system before. In River of Gods, hijra is a fairly straightforward insult, equivalent to bastard. It doesn't seem to be applied to nutes, though; they are something much more scary than a non-virile man.

I thought the portrayal of the caste system was very plausible, though I'm sure it misses more nuances than I can even imagine. We're postulating a society where most people don't treat religion as a strong influence in their lives, and consider themselves far too modern and cosmopolitan to care about that superstitious nonsense. Caste is important to Parvati and some of the people around her, but most of the characters in the book, I think realistically, have at least consciously discarded that system. At the same time, they still have underlying prejudices. And there is a deeply ingrained system of economic and class divisions, which I can't see not being the case in any fifty year future projection of India.

As for the technology being improbable, that wasn't a criticism of the book. In a book where physicists can open portals into alternate universes and harvest energy from them, it's very silly to quibble about unlikely medical technology. It seems socially plausible, though of course it's astronomically unlikely that India in 2047 will be exactly like that, and I think that's more important than whether the exact technologies imagined would really work the way they're described. The point about the "Stepping Away" surgery being improbable is that there's absolutely no point in my wondering whether I would take up that option if it existed, it's the equivalent of thinking of what three wishes I'd choose if I had a fairy godmother.