Trapped!
I am pleased beyond measure to have had a story of mine* included in Brit Mandelo's wonderful new anthology BEYOND BINARY: GENDERQUEER AND SEXUALLY FLUID SPECULATIVE FICTION (from Steve Berman's ground-breaking Lethe Press).
But I confess I was stumped, right on page 1 of her Introduction, by the term Cisgendered.
I called Brit up to get her to tell me, and she, a Gender Studies grad student, patiently explained, and I thought I understood . . . sorta.
But I didn't really - and I wasn't really comfortable, either, with the idea of yet another category I had to try to squeeeeze my bad interstitial self into - until my dear friend Pat O'Connor (who teaches at Oberlin) said:
"It means you feel like a woman trapped in a woman's body."
- Yes!!! I hollered (in the restaurant, frightening the other patrons). - So true!!!
*The story is "'A Wild and a Wicked Youth'" - which is about the childhood of Richard St Vier, one of the Swordspoint protags - but unlike a few of my other Riverside short stories, I think stands unquestionably on its own without reference to the novels . . . despite the disparaging words of the Locus reviewer, who loved nearly everything else in Beyond Binary. Which really gave me a mauvais quart d'heure: Nobody likes to hear that a work of theirs didn't "land" properly. It is very discouraging and demoralizing. And it does happen, as often as not. I hope it makes you laugh to know that I got myself out of the funk by reminding myself that that self-same awful story that someone had disparaged in print had also been selected for two "Best of the Year" collections [Jonathan Strahan's Vol. 4 from Nightshade, and David Hartwell's upcoming e-book from Tor]!
I say this not to boast, but to remind us all that These Things Happen. And there's (almost) always a way out.
This is my first post directly to DreamWidth, with a cross-posting set up to LiveJournal (thanks to my wonderful new assistant, Katharine Duckett - wonderful, that is, if it works....!).
But I confess I was stumped, right on page 1 of her Introduction, by the term Cisgendered.
I called Brit up to get her to tell me, and she, a Gender Studies grad student, patiently explained, and I thought I understood . . . sorta.
But I didn't really - and I wasn't really comfortable, either, with the idea of yet another category I had to try to squeeeeze my bad interstitial self into - until my dear friend Pat O'Connor (who teaches at Oberlin) said:
"It means you feel like a woman trapped in a woman's body."
- Yes!!! I hollered (in the restaurant, frightening the other patrons). - So true!!!
*The story is "'A Wild and a Wicked Youth'" - which is about the childhood of Richard St Vier, one of the Swordspoint protags - but unlike a few of my other Riverside short stories, I think stands unquestionably on its own without reference to the novels . . . despite the disparaging words of the Locus reviewer, who loved nearly everything else in Beyond Binary. Which really gave me a mauvais quart d'heure: Nobody likes to hear that a work of theirs didn't "land" properly. It is very discouraging and demoralizing. And it does happen, as often as not. I hope it makes you laugh to know that I got myself out of the funk by reminding myself that that self-same awful story that someone had disparaged in print had also been selected for two "Best of the Year" collections [Jonathan Strahan's Vol. 4 from Nightshade, and David Hartwell's upcoming e-book from Tor]!
I say this not to boast, but to remind us all that These Things Happen. And there's (almost) always a way out.
This is my first post directly to DreamWidth, with a cross-posting set up to LiveJournal (thanks to my wonderful new assistant, Katharine Duckett - wonderful, that is, if it works....!).