So Who Gets to Be a Woman?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Major sports competitions do not test participants in male events to see if they are “really” men. So why do they do it with women?

I mean, I know why they say they test women. There’s a silly panic that men are disguising themselves as women to win medals. Back in the day this was a dastardly “Communist” plan by the Soviet Union and the East Germans.

In fact, as I just discovered from this book review in The Nation, allegations about men passing as women in sports goes back even farther and has ties to Nazi Germany.

This started way before transphobia became the cause du jour and is rooted in the idea that men are so much more physically able than women that any random guy can beat world-class women athletes. You know, all those guys who are sure they could score a point or two off Serena Williams.

Funny that the women they seem to disqualify in these events are people assigned female at birth and raised as girls. Apparently some women have uncommon chromosome patterns or higher testosterone levels and some self-appointed authorities have decided they can’t possibly be women.

It’s a control mechanism, just like anti-abortion and anti-contraception laws. Or like asking women who have been raped what they were wearing and what they did to provoke the rape.

It’s a rule presented as an effort to “protect” women from men that instead victimizes women. Continue reading “So Who Gets to Be a Woman?”…

Baycon 2024 report

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Baycon is my local science fiction convention and I’ve been attending it, more or less regularly, since the 1990s. It’s moved from one hotel and city to another over the years and I have followed, “as the tail follows the dog.” My attendance came to a screeching halt in 2020 with the pandemic. The last convention I attended in person was FogCon in February of that year. We knew that a nasty virus was afoot but nobody wore masks. We “elbow-bumped” instead of hugging. If anyone got sick, I never heard. Then came the lockdown, as we called it. Conventions switched to virtual attendance. Althought I’m a somewhat slow adopted or tech, I’d become used to video chatting back in 2013, when I took care of my best friend in a different state while she was dying of cancer. My husband and I stayed in touch (via Skype, if I remember correctly). Then when my younger daughter attended medical school on the other side of the country, we visited by video chat regularly. She moved back to this area for her residency. Her final year was 2020, during which her regular service rotations were replaced by caring for dying Covid patients. Needless to say, I became quite cautious about my exposure. So even when conventions began to move from virtual-only to hybrid to in-person, I reconnected slowly. Even when I was ready to attend a convention in person (2023, which shows you how long it took me), armed with masks, hand sanitizer, and rapid tests, the universe conspired to jinx my plans. It was hard. I missed my friends and all the chance encounters and spontaneous expressions of community. All this is a prelude to my first successful return to in-person conventions.

Baycon programming had asked potential panelists to suggest topics. Two of mine were accepted, including Writing Beyond Trauma. Here’s the description I wrote:

These are perilous times for many of us. As survivors or the loved ones of survivors, how has our experience affected us as writers? How do our stories transcend and heal? Escape? Educate our audience? Are there times when the pain is so great, the words simply will not come–what do we do when we have lost our voice and how do we use writing to regain it? In this panel, we will strive to listen respectfully and to leave time between each speaker to absorb more deeply what they have said.

As a survivor of complex PTSD, I’m passionately interested in how my experiences affect my writing but also how writing provides a path to healing. But trauma refers to much more than individual experiences: it includes community and membership in larger groups (such as race or gender/sexual minority, immigrant status, incarceration history). My co-panelists included two people of color, a Native Indigenous person (Ohlone) and a survivor of cancer. Several of us had lost people we loved to violence or lived with mental illness. Others had experienced genocide directed at our communities. As moderator, I wanted to make sure the discussion was safe, respectful, and inclusive. I reached out to my co-panelists before the convention to make sure I understood which topics they wanted to be included and which they would prefer to avoid. How might we tread the line between invasion of privacy and triggers while being open? One thing I did was to keep the discussion slow, with time to listen deeply to each person’s comments. On several occasions, I asked for a moment to let what someone had said sink in. Panelists shared strategies for unblocking the inner voice when it has fallen silent due to overwhelming pain and grief. These ranged from picking up a different medium of creativity like music or crafts to “putting fears on the page” to using “baby steps” to reconnect with the flow of words. The panel was rich, compelling, and deeply moving.

The same day, I was on a panel on Creating Original Worlds. When I was a young writer, world-building checklists were highly touted. I could never do that. My characters took me on guided tours of the worlds of my stories. My fellow panelists agreed that an organic approach to world-building is not only perfectly valid but works better for many writers. I’ve had the experience of not knowing what research to do until the story demands it. I loved the phrase “reality-adjacent” to describe taking real-world history, cultures, etc., and tweaking them. Alternate history is an example, as are worlds that are familiar except for the addition of a fantastical or science-fictional element. How a writer creates worlds also depends on whether they are a “pantser” or an outliner.

In the panel on Beta Readers and Critique Groups, the panel agreed that it was as important to know what advice to ignore as what to take seriously. We also agreed that while it’s nice to ask your mother/partner/child to read your manuscript, they probably aren’t the best source of helpful feedback. When approaching a trusted reader or critique group, it’s a good idea to specify what level of feedback you’re looking for, whether overall impact, sensitivity issues, or line editing. For myself, I rarely let anyone see my first drafts—second or third is usual. I still revise a lot because my rough drafts are very, very rough. I also value the community support of writers’ groups.

My last panel was Paying Forward, Backward, and Sideways, a love letter to those who have encouraged us. We told stories of more senior writers who mentored us, how our colleagues cheered us on (and vice versa), and our responsibility to the generation of writers after us. I was reminded of a quote from Samuel Goldwyn: “When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.”

In between all this, I hung out with friends I hadn’t seen in person in four years, had a delightful time in the dealers’ room (gift-buying destination!) and got to attend a few panels. My all-time favorite was The Worst First Page, in which panelists attempted to write truly dreadful first pages. Being great writers, they failed, often with hilarious results. One particular entry was so well done, the audience enthusiastically urged the writer to submit it for publication as a humor piece.

 

 

Cambridgeshire

personby Gillian Polack
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Right now (when this post is released) I”m in Cambridgeshire. I’m staying with some friends from the science fiction community. They live in the middle of the fenland. Mostly my time with them is time out with friends, but we’re also going to see some things. By ‘some things’ I mean an old church that’s associated with one of my favourite Medieval historians: Henry of Huntingdon. Also museums. Also…fenland. I am learning to understand the fens. I’m also revising the research from a novel I never wrote because I ended up in hospital having a major heart operation. The novel that emerged from that dramatic year was The Year of the Fruit Cake. I had planned to write a novel set in the late seventeenth century. I won’t pick up that exact same novel, not with so much change din my life, but St Ives and its surrounds may be part of another novel.

I’ll spend my weekend with one of my fellow History Girls, Rosemary Hayes. She’s promised me some of my favourite places, including Lavenham in Essex and a rather brilliant museum of rural life. If all goes well (and our plans are not firm yet) while you read this, I’ll be at one of those places, or maybe at the house Lucy M Boston wrote into the Green Knowe stories. This is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit and to photograph since I first read a Green Knowe book when I was a child. Ironically, visiting it would be work-related… but still very, very special.

A Couple of Things I’ve Learned

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I learned two things in my 20s and early 30s that are useful to remember.

  1. Bad leaders can ruin an otherwise exemplary organization.
  2. All organizations need good written rules that reflect the way they actually do things.

The first one I learned when I went to work in the general counsel’s office at the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (now the National Cooperative Bank). That bank, established in the late 1970s, was the dream of the consumer cooperative movement – a funding source for food and housing co-ops (and, despite the name, for some worker co-op businesses).

The people initially hired – I started there in 1980, when it was just staffing up – included many people who, like me, had worked in the weeds establishing food and housing co-ops across the country, but it also included people who had come from other kinds of development banking. They were all very smart and committed to the project.

The initial president of the bank, Carol Greenwald, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. (The bank was funded by federal money, though set up to eventually be independent.) I am sure she looked good on paper – a banking regulator from Massachusetts with a strong Democratic Party and general progressive background.

But she had a major flaw: she didn’t trust anyone who didn’t suck up to her. At the time, her behavior made me furious. In retrospect, I am sure some of that came from the misogyny she must have experienced as she built her career – she was older than I, meaning that the blatant sexism was even worse than I put up with and I saw plenty of it.

(The nonsense that the man Republicans want as vice president puts out about childless cat ladies was pretty much par for the course back when second wave feminism came along. It was harder to mock back then.)

But if you have a staff of people who know much more about both co-ops and development banking than you do, you need to listen to them even when they tell you you’re wrong. And she refused to.

We even started organizing a union there – in the early 80s when unions were disappearing – not because our working conditions were bad (they weren’t), but because we were a bunch of activists who knew what the purpose of the bank was supposed to be and wanted to make it happen.

The National Co-operative Bank still exists, but it did not become the transformative institution it was intended to be. The truth is that most co-ops are still small and locally funded. And yes, I blame Carol Greenwald and bad leadership for that.

The second I learned doing food co-ops and other community groups in the early 70s. Because most activist sorts – actually most people – hate law and lawyers, the general attitude was that if you had to incorporate something, just do the minimum and ignore your charter and bylaws.

That works fine until you have a dispute. And you will have a dispute – human beings are social creatures, but they rarely agree with each other all the time.

Here’s the thing: the rules of your charter or your bylaws or your partnership agreement or your contract are what is going to govern when things get out of control. So if, for example, the bylaws require a formal annual meeting with decisions made by a majority, occasional informal meetings with decisions made by consensus are not going to be accepted. (And that doesn’t even get into the myriad definitions of consensus.) Continue reading “A Couple of Things I’ve Learned”…

Toys, or The Adjacency Romance

personby Madeleine Robins
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A toy can be used in any number of ways, according to the imagination of the player.

  • I have seen kids who were not allowed to own toy guns pick up a twig and start shooting with it: Pew! Pew! Pew! (I understand the impulse to keep toy guns out of the hands of children, but I’ve never seen it attain its objective.)
  • Regardless of what Mattel might have believed, for some of us Barbie wasn’t an aspirational toy. I used my Barbies to populate the elaborate cities and houses I constructed out of blocks and other toy box flotsam, and to serve as models for my inept attempts at clothing design. 
  • A friend’s daughter repurposed the highly detailed and elaborate play kitchen her grandparents gave her to be a library, with herself as the librarian (this is a child after my own heart). 

Where am I going with this? Well, after three years I have succumbed, and spent a week watching all three seasons of Bridgerton. I had been told repeatedly that I would love it: since I started out as a writer publishing Regency romances–Bridgerton, which is set in an alternate version of the English Regency, should be right up my road, right? Kinda? Maybe? No?

Well, kinda, in the sense that Bridgerton is entertaining. But also no, because I was left wondering why, out of all the toys available to them, the show’s creators decided to play with the English Regency. Continue reading “Toys, or The Adjacency Romance”…

Reading and Bristol

personby Gillian Polack
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By the time you read this, I will be in Bristol. I’m spending a couple of days with Catherine Butler, who is the most wonderful person. We will talk literature: she’s both an academic and a fiction writer and knows enormous amounts of fascinating stuff. My first encounter with her was when she answered questions for my book History and Fiction.  That’s today, at your end. At my end I’m still in Canberra!

Between Bristol and Canberra, came Reading. I will have met several friends, and also some new people with overlapping research interests. With luck, I will have seen The Importance of Being Earnest, acted in a place where Oscar Wilde’s prison is visible… and it will be work-related. That place is a ruined abbey. I’ll be in Reading mostly to create a photographic essay about how the town depicts its Middle Ages. Photographs. Lots of them. I’m happy to share a couple with you when i return, but only if you’re interested.

If you want to know about any of the places I go to or want to know more about the writers and science fiction folks I see along the way, let me know on each of these posts.  Comment madly. Tell me what you know and love. tell me what you’d like to know more about. When I return I’ll read all your comments. If you tell me what you’re interested in, I’ll report on those parts of my journey when I get back. A series of posts to match a series of posts! If everyone is silent, then what I write about on my return will be a complete surprise.

A Sigh of Relief

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I noticed two major reactions in my (carefully curated) social media after President Biden decided not to run for re-election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Mine – and the most common one – was a sense of relief and a bit of hope.

We are visiting Seattle, and I overheard someone discussing Biden’s decision at the Ballard Farmers Market (an overwhelming place, though full of good food). I checked the news before I shared the information with my partner and our friends.

As the day went on and I saw people – including prominent Democrats – quickly chiming in to support Harris, I felt my stomach unclench and my feelings of doom recede. It has always seemed to me that she could bring the strong presence and fight we need in this race, so long as she got support.

On Monday morning, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t wake up panicking about the felon nominated by the Republicans getting back in office.

The other reaction among people I know is the not unreasonable fear that misogyny and racism can still prevail. Too many women (in particular) are still reeling from 2016 and misogynoir is a very real thing.

There’s no question that things are going to get ugly.

But it’s also good news that the felonious con man and his minions were caught off guard by this. I’m sure they’ll get more sophisticated with their attacks, but right now it’s just bog standard nastiness.

From what I can tell, Biden handled this brilliantly. He announced just after the Republican convention ended, taking away their advantage. And apparently they were not ready for such an announcement, perhaps because their dear leader can’t imagine someone willingly giving up power.

After the drip, drip, drip of ageist bullshit (I’ve never met the president, so I don’t know anything about his health, but given that no one was doing the same thing with the equally old Republican nominee who rambles incoherently and is known to lie about his health, I am skeptical of the claims), the great strategy came as a relief. The pundits’ dream of an open and chaotic convention would be a disaster.

And no, such a convention would not be more “democratic.” I remember when conventions were actually contested and even as a teenager – OK, a nerdy teenager who watched conventions – I knew that everything happened in the smoke-filled rooms. Continue reading “A Sigh of Relief”…

Like ships that pass in the night…

personby Gillian Polack
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I needed my time off. My thesis is much advanced, but life has been really curiously strange recently and so it’s not yet finished. It’s far closer to being finished, and I do appreciate your patience. I’m going to ask you to be patient a bit longer before I return to regular blogging. I’m traveling for a bit. I’ll report back when I’m home, I promise. In the meantime, since I won’t have regular access to my computer, I thought I’d work through my itinerary and put up posts for the whole trip, tonight. Every Monday you’ll hear where I am and some of what I intend to do there.

This is something new for me. But this voyage i something new for me. I’ve been ill for so long and this is a giant test of whether I can keep the illnesses in abeyance and return to normal life. If i do well while I’m away, then I can do well when I return. I don’t want to share trials and tribulations, so I’m going to tell you about what I’m doing when I cannot blog. Pretend you’re with me….

A Violent Country

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The chickens came home to roost. A man who built a political career around stoking violence became the target of it.

I immediately thought of the attempt to kill George Wallace in 1972. Another man who stoked violence suddenly became a victim of it. The shooters in both cases sound similar.

Wallace spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He also repented of at least some of his racist actions. Being shot might have made him reflect on himself.

I don’t expect such reflection from the grifting felon that the Republicans are preparing to nominate. I wouldn’t expect it even if he’d been more badly injured. I don’t think he has the capacity to examine himself.

The Wallace shooting provided some of the material for Martin Scorcese’s brilliant movie Taxi Driver, a movie I saw when it first came out in 1976 and am not willing to ever watch again. I left that movie in shock – I still remember how I felt – because it so perfectly encapsulated the violence in our society and the thin line between someone seen as a good guy and someone seen as evil incarnate.

(If you’ve never seen it, you should watch it, but make sure you watch it with friends you can discuss it with afterwards.)

As I recall, the guy who shot at Ronald Reagan (and did more harm to his press secretary, Jim Brady) was obsessed with that movie and with Jodie Foster, who was in it. These things all connect.

Our politics has been intertwined with violence for most of our history. I am old enough to have been shocked to my core by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The murders later in the 1960s of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy made me fully aware of how off the rails things were.

The mass shootings we are so familiar with start about that time, too, with Charles Whitman climbing to the top of the University of Texas tower in 1967 and shooting so many people.

Nowadays, school shootings and similar violent attacks in dance halls, at concerts, even in churches, are now such common news that the response is more numbness than shock. Continue reading “A Violent Country”…

You Are What You Hear

personby Madeleine Robins
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Warning: approaching elderhood conversation ahead. You’ve been warned.

One of the things I have become… well, not anxious about, exactly, but vigilant about, is my hearing. I know that a certain amount of degradation of my original acuity is to be expected, but I by-god want to know if I’m beginning to lose a meaningful amount of hearing. Because I’m convinced that, while loss of hearing doesn’t cause dementia, it’s a big contributor to the speed with which it can take over. So once a year I get my ears tested, and the minute it’s indicated, I want hearing aids.

Why? Aside from the obvious–I don’t want to be a person who trails around conversations saying “huh? Will you repeat that?” if I can avoid it–sound, and particularly speech, is one of the things that keeps me moored to the world. There are now a budget of studies that indicate that there’s a strong correlation between hearing loss and cognitive decline. Studies of older adults with hearing loss found that they had mental decline 30%-40% faster, on average, than those whose hearing remained intact.

Why? There are a number of theories. 1) Hearing loss increases isolation, which decreases stimulation. 2) When you experience hearing loss, more of your brain is put to work trying to process the sounds you do hear and make sense of it. And 3) there’s a sort of diminishing loop between the ears and the brain: if your ears don’t pick up as much sound, the auditory nerves send fewer signals to the brain, and the brain declines.

I have spent the last eight years or so watching my beloved aunt’s succumb to dementia. Among other things, by the time anyone really noticed the decline in her hearing and hearing aids were acquired, they were not a habit: someone else had to remind her to use them, they annoyed her, so she didn’t use them. As I write (sitting in my aunt’s room while she dozes nearby) I can see the hearing aids in their case–the batteries probably in dire need of recharging. I cannot think of a single time I’ve seen hear use them since they came home with her–it’s just not a thing that became routine (when she was still able to form routines). Whereas she will put on her reading glasses to spend time with the newspaper. Reading–and those glasses–define something for her about who she is, even now. The hearing aids do not.

So if, as seems likely, I will eventually need hearing aids, I want them early enough that putting them in becomes part of my routine. Also–I learned this from watching my father-in-law– once you have hearing aids you can deploy them to manage your surroundings. More than once when there was a family squabble, I saw him, smiling seraphically, reach up and turn his hearing aids off. Family strife? No problem, just tune out. I’d like to think I won’t do that, but having the ability to do it is kind of appealing.