Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

[jack]

Good

I loved this book a lot, lot more when I reread it. I like seeing grown-up Ivan, but more than anything else, I liked seeing emotional interactions with Simon Illyan and Alys Vorpatril. I laughed a lot, and really cared about the fragile relationships being rebuilt. And I liked the varied viewpoints.

Bad

There is a very short passage describing a trans man, Dono, from a previous book. Who was a very good character (despite some false starts, and being inconsistent with what we know about being trans in the real world).

It is from the point of view of one or two people who are not sympathetic, which is possibly realistic, but it's really awful that that's the only mention in the book, and it's not outweighed by any non-phobic description :(

Ugly

Like several recent books, the plot machinations are mostly a background to the characters, which is fine. But I'd rather the plot were dialled back to a smaller scale, rather than trying to squeeze in "oh, and $bigthing is in danger" into a sidenote somewhere.

The two problems I averred to in my previous post, are the necessity for Ivan and Tej to marry, and Simon's plan to give the Arquas more rope, rather than just ringing ImpSec and saying "Hey, you know how we want a presence in Jackson's Hole? If you offer these guys a big loan, they'll go and do it for you. PS. There's a bunch of money buried under impsec."

I think the intent of the plot is that those were necessary, and Ivan's and Simon's emotional biases toward marriage and meddling were a minor peccadillo, not "and then we nearly got lots of people killed because we didn't think things through". But I genuinely can't tell. Am I missing something?

Comments

[damerell]

I was not quite convinced by the complaints about the treatment of Lord Dono. First of all, Lord Dono's in an odd position compared to a typical trans man; he transitioned for entirely political reasons and presumably would have preferred to remain a woman if not for those reasons - one wonders if he suffers from dysphoria now. Even a Betan might see that as somewhat odd; and Ivan's not a Betan, he's a young man from a culture only two generations away from isolated feudalism, and one with something of a tendency for being tactless. I think it would be entirely out of character if he did not sometimes make such remarks.

[naath]

We've never had anything pov Don@ , and really Ivan is NOT the most reliable of people, perhaps especially on this subject - I wouldn't assume that Ivan speaks with the Voice Of The Author, he is Well Known To Be Stupid.

The truth could be anything from "Dona is a woman who was co-erced into transitioning by By because for some reason it is easier to convince the Council to accept a trans Count than a female Count and she is a 'better' prospect than the alternative Vorutyers" right through to "Dono is and always has been a man, as soon as he could he went immediately to Beta Colony to transition, called By post-facto to say 'he cuz I'm a MAN'". Dono has obviously made this decision in a culture where men are clearly In Charge, and I suppose if he has a non-binary gender then choosing to present as male might be a logical option.

I'd tend towards the Betans refusing to perform drastic surgery on someone who was clearly being coerced, and quite good at spotting coercion; Cordelia got very much the painful end of that particular stick back when they Authorities though that the Horrible Barrayarans had Brainwashed her. But maybe they've come around to "not our business why you want your genitals reconfigured, if you don't like it we can always put them back".

[damerell]

I would guess, given Beta and Barrayar, that well-off Barrayarans who find out that trans people exist and aren't as the average Barrayaran thinks of them and that they are one immediately emigrate and never come back, just as I imagine there are a fair number of variously deformed expat Barrayarans floating about the rest of known space because all sorts of places care much less.

Since Dono was well off and well informed, that would seem to make it unlikely that by a happy chance they happened to want to transition anyway.

So my interpretation of it is:
It might have been By's suggestion, but Dono is a willing participant, regarding crosstransitioning (this is a word I've just made up) as better than meekly submitting to the otherwise inevitable.

(Implication: if something in the books is potentially offensive, I think it's not Ivan sticking his foot in it, or even a book where the only thing is Ivan doing so, but the implication that at least some people will find being in the wrong gender body quite tolerable really, given that Dono seems content enough with it to be thinking of being a groom at the end of A Civil Campaign. The Culture books have much more of this...)

[jack]

I'm really sorry, I seemed to have completely screwed up this explanation :(

I think there's a difference between "that's unrealistic" and "that's offensive". "That's unrealistic" is not the ONLY possible flaw a book can have.

I think Bujold really likes Dono, and definitely DOESN'T share Ivan's opinion and this paragraph is supposed to show the flaws in Ivan's point of view. I don't think it's unrealistic that the only description of Dono came from a transphobic rant. I think it's harmful because of the risk that someone might read that, and not read any mention in the book of how to think correctly and sympathetically about Dono.

Likewise, it's completely consistent that many people who get Betan gender-change surgery are curing gender dysphoria, and Dono is an exception. But it's harmful that those hypothetical majority are never mentioned, because to someone reading the book it will look like Dono is supposed to be representative.

[damerell]

Well, we are coming in at an odd point in the series if this is the first we hear of Lord Dono and we don't know enough about Beta Colony to realise that's atypical. I think, say, A Civil Campaign is a lot better - and particularly "X transitions the wrong way for political reasons" is exactly the sort of "what does technology do to social issues" stuff that Bujold does so well with the uterine replicator.

And, hm. There does come a point where one has to ask "Well, Mr Author, why did you write about _that_" - I'm looking at you, John Ringo - but also I think a time when the tail of being nice can't be allowed to wag the narrative dog, where one can't say the author is being gratuitously offensive but simply that the story is one where unpleasant things happen to people.

... mind you, I have not read the book.

[jack]

There does come a point where one has to ask "Well, Mr Author, why did you write about _that_" - I'm looking at you, John Ringo - but also I think a time when the tail of being nice can't be allowed to wag the narrative dog, where one can't say the author is being gratuitously offensive but simply that the story is one where unpleasant things happen to people.

I think that's basically right.

But I think you could make the book a lot better without changing the plot.

I think there's an old-fashioned narrative of how gender-swapping would work, just based on people's automatic assumptions, which shows up in many books, for instance:

* There's no such thing as gender dysphoria, before or after.
* If you swap from gender A to gender B, you automatically remain heterosexual.

This contradicts current narratives by actual trans people, which is more like:

* People have an innate gender which we don't know how to change (whether it fits neatly into M or F or is something more complicated)
* We may be able to change people's bodies
* Matching the body to the gender is the most important reason to transition
* Your orientation doesn't have to obey any fixed rules, it can be whatever you like, it may remain the same afterwards, or change somewhat, or you may realise you had a more complicated orientation all along but didn't realise it until it became an issue.

And there's also the true biological facts, which are more similar to the current narrative, but there's probably more to discover.

Lots of books are written with the old assumptions just because that's what someone assumed and/or that was the cultural narrative at the time. A few books (depressingly few) are written with the new assumptions.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Bujold was aware of the new narrative at all. Everything she wrote about Dono is exactly what you'd expect from someone working from the old narrative, interested in exploring issues of M vs F on Barrayar, but unaware of trans issues.

That would not be at all surprising. I'm somewhat aware of trans issues, knowing a few trans people, but 10 years ago, the vast, vast, vast majority of people (including me) probably had no idea, even if they should have done.

As it happens, Dono doesn't explicitly contradict the new narrative. For instance, it's possible that the people who _need_ to transition for gender dysphoria do so quietly on Beta, get screwed over on Barrayar, and aren't mentioned, and it's possible that some people have weak self-body-images and would be perfectly happy to live with either sex, and Donna happened to be one of them.

However, it would have been completely easy to insert one or two lines, mentioning that fact, and that Dono was really unrepresentative of trans people. That would still be somewhat problematic, writing about a really unrepresentative member of a minority group, but at least it wouldn't strongly imply they *were* representative.

Since, if you thought of it, it would be so easy to do, the fact that Bujold didn't do that strongly suggests she didn't know it would be a problem. (Or was deliberately overruled by an editor, etc.)

That's not a horrible thing -- not every book can be progressive propaganda for every cause, it's not surprising an author wouldn't realise every possible community she might accidentally trample on, but it's a problem which I pointed out.

Likewise, it would be trivial to insert a line in CVA pointing out how Ivan is wrong about Dono. There, I think, Bujold knew that Ivan was wrong, but maybe didn't realise that there were real-world trans people who might be hurt by it.

And FWIW, I think Bujold _does_ do technology-vs-social-issues stuff very well, and does characters very sympathetically, so I think Dono is a positive character in many ways, simply by being a good character who happens to be trans. (I know some trans people who love him for that.) But it's also true that he's misleadingly unrepresentative of trans people (and I know some trans people who hate him for that).

[damerell]

I suppose "He was bisexual; now he's monogamous" is similarly an example of Bujold stuck in the "old narrative". On reflection, I'm largely convinced by what you write, which is part of why this reply is short.

I do wonder where Barrayar is in general. Is Dono going to be the first out trans person?

[jack]

On reflection, I'm largely convinced by what you write, which is part of why this reply is short.

Thank you! Sorry if I ranted too long :)

"He was bisexual; now he's monogamous" is similarly an example of Bujold stuck in the "old narrative".

Exactly. In that case, I think the actual characterisation is fine, but she used the word "bisexual" incorrectly given current definitions, in a way offensive to most bisexuals. I think then she did include a quote in a later book showing she'd found out and embraced modern terminology.

(And that was pretty positive given Aral is a wonderful character, although there are some problems, eg. the gay relationships are the bad ones and the heterosexual relationships are the good ones, but that was hard to avoid for plot reasons.)

I do wonder where Barrayar is in general. Is Dono going to be the first out trans person?

It seems they're the first high-profile trans person, or someone would probably have drawn the comparison. Presumably there may have been some people where it wasn't secret, but wasn't advertised, or people who didn't fit into the modern narrative: eg. there's a mention of a woman who was declared a man for inheritance reasons but we don't know if she had person reasons for suggesting that, or it was purely pragmatic.