Over twenty years ago I wrote a story about a young man who gets arrested on a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras because a blood test shows he has XX chromosomes even though he appears to be male. The Louisiana of that story\u2019s time \u2013 which was more or less right now \u2013 had passed a law making it a crime to present yourself as anything but your \u201cnatural\u201d gender.<\/p>\n
He ends up in a jail cell with drag queens, a lesbian wearing male clothes, a trans person who is taking steps toward transition, and a woman not unlike himself \u2013 someone born with all the appearance of a woman, but with XY chromosomes.<\/p>\n
I told it from his \u2013 very clueless, in the beginning \u2013 point of view because I wanted the story to be about someone who had never even considered the possibility that he was anything other than a cis man being forced to confront the situation.<\/p>\n
It was a great story, but I was never able to sell it. I\u2019ve looked at it over the years and seen a couple of things I\u2019d change as I\u2019ve increased my understanding of these matters, but it\u2019s still a good story.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just too late to publish it, at least as science fiction. It\u2019s basically real life now. It\u2019s obvious that many places are going to be punishing people for being trans or even \u2013 shades of the past \u2013 for dressing in a way that belies your assigned gender.<\/p>\n
Maybe I should make the revisions and try it on a non-genre fiction magazine or anthology. Isn\u2019t realistic a hallmark of literary fiction?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not usually someone who writes science fiction that can be seen as predictive, but it was clear to me more than twenty years ago that there were places in the United States that might well pass laws against people for not fitting into prescribed gender roles.<\/p>\n
Of course, I wrote it as a warning. That\u2019s why most people write dystopias, after all. However, given the current fetish of the broligarchs for stupid takes on science fiction and fantasy, it\u2019s easy to believe people would have taken it as a good idea.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to live in Margaret Atwood\u2019s Gilead or William Gibson\u2019s Jackpot, but apparently a lot of people do. <\/p>\n
If the story had been published, I\u2019d have been pointing at it over the last few years. Some magazine really missed a bet on that one.<\/p>\n
I wrote another story \u2013 this one closer to thirty years ago \u2013 in which the U.S. Supreme Court decides that clones are not people for purposes of the constitutional prohibitions on slavery. That one was published. It won a contest sponsored by the National Law Journal<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Michael Bishop and I discussed it when he was one of my teachers at Clarion West. In 1997, he found it improbable. I wish I found it improbable in 2024.<\/p>\n
I know several teachers who have used that story in their classrooms. Teenagers relate to it.<\/p>\n
Some of the things we are likely to see from the grifter-in-chief, his henchmen, the religious extemists, and the broligarchs coming into power surprise even me, but as these stories attest, I have always been afraid of some of the possibilities.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s very obvious right now that not just definitions of gender but also definitions of humanity are at risk.<\/p>\n
I fear some of the things that will happen will be worse than I can imagine, and I have a very vivid imagination.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d really like to write a story set twenty or thirty years from now that has a more positive outcome. Pretty sure I won\u2019t be able to sell it because it won\u2019t be seen as sufficiently realistic.<\/p>\n
But if we\u2019re lucky, I\u2019ll be right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over twenty years ago I wrote a story about a young man who gets arrested on a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras because a blood test shows he has XX chromosomes even though he appears to be male. The Louisiana of that story\u2019s time \u2013 which was more or less right now \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,18],"tags":[968,969,88,967],"class_list":["post-3719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-sciencefiction","category-writing","tag-atwood","tag-gibson","tag-politics","tag-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3719"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3721,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3719\/revisions\/3721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}