Gender arguments

The thing that makes conversations about gender and media difficult to have
is that, in an ideal world, I'd want gender to be a nonbinary system, a gender spectrum, with no particular weight or pressure to so much as pick a position on it, let alone be stuck there.

... but I am aware that this ideal world is based on what would make the world most comfortable for me, and other people want to do their own thing, so okay, I guess, they can play this two sided thing, if they particularly want.

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We have to start by engaging with the dominant paradigm, but I get so tired of it when it is being a really intolerable paradigm.

There's no room for anyone in this thing, why even prop it up?




So what this adds up to is, the Doctor has potential to be my ideal character. All Time Lords do now. Because they can demonstrate in one continuous person the utter irrelevance of packaging.

But, because they are on the whole written by binary people in a binary system, it seems annoyingly likely they won't.

And yet it's still progress, because parity is at least twelve more Doctors away, so this is a place to start.



It's just kind of wearying knowing that saying this out loud is... pretty likely to start an argument on the fundamentals. Like, gender. What is even up with that?

(no subject)

If you think you have invented an ansible
instant, faster than light, communication
and you only have one planet to test it on

how would you test?

if magic is ftl, how would they figure that out?

Asimov's Science Fiction, July August 2017

NOVELLAS

How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry by Alexander Jablokov

The Girl Who Stole Herself by R. Garcia y Robertson

I posted about the first of these as soon as read it, considering it worth the cover price on its own, https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3346818.html , but the other novella was also strong.

Central female character, mostly talking to girls and women, interesting career progression very swiftly, and a worldbuild that goes out in stages that make sense but sometimes managed to surprise me. Trigger warning for attempted rape, interrupted, and several different situations where sexual contact is implied or mentioned in situations cannot be freely consented to, like women in prison or slaves or attempted underage. It's all about how messed up all that all is. Protagonist is a 'closet princess' who spends all her time on the net, whose adventures in virtual reality have practical applications and real world political consequences. Interesting, but, see triggers.

Asimov's keeps being darker like that than is my preference.

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So that's a couple I can't see why they're SF, a lot that are darker than I'd like, and a couple of very readable ones.

So, basically, I can see Asimov's is doing a thing. It seems like a competently written thing. But it is only sometimes an overlap with things I want to read.

Still, good when it is.