amado1: (Holmes)
I finished this book yesterday and I want to rant about it!

First of all, on reading this book, I got the impression that there was a TON of hype about it. If so, I totally missed it. I found it slotted into a B&N bookcase (not even on display), the only copy available, and thought, "Well, it's obviously gay so let's give it a try." I liked the dark plot description on the back: Jonah, a broke aspiring playwright in NYC, becomes involved with Richard, a celebrated gay writer who's old enough to be Jonah's dad. Obvious set-up for a sticky, abusive situation. The cover and title suggested a cheeky, campy treatment and I was all-aboard.

(Dude, this book is stuffed with evidence that it was highly-promoted. There's a reader discussion guide in the back! An interview with the author! A little blurb saying that upon publication it had ALREADY been optioned for an Amazon TV show! And to top it all off, it was Parks-Ramage's debut.)

Well, okay, here's a quick plot description.

It starts with a prologue. Our main character sits on a witness stand. He's supposed to testify about the rape and abuse he suffered at Richard's hands. He's doing this to help an unnamed young man who is suing Richard for similar rape and abuse, but on the stand, Jonah changes his mind last-minute and instead testifies that Richard was a loving boyfriend who never hurt anybody.

Cut to 2008.

Read more... )

(deep breath)

This book was like, 200 pages long, guys. It was NOT long enough to show a happy relationship delve into an abusive one while ALSO tackling Richard's incest trauma, Jonah's kinship with Mace Miller, Jonah's fucked-up relationships with his mom and dad. It DEFINITELY wasn't long enough to tackle all of the above while also introducing a nefarious ring of gay rapists with a secret torture dungeon in the Hamptons, and also a rapey Christian cult, and also a healing strawberry farm and pro-gay church. Even a skilled writer would struggle to juggle those elements and do them all justice (if you accept the premise that these are good ideas and SHOULD be juggled at all).

Parks-Ramage, as a writer... he's not bad. Honestly. He's competent. He's had a lot of writing gigs in his life and it shows. He knows how to string a sentence together. But he's by no means an interesting writer. This plot is stuffed full of potentially interesting ideas, and Parks-Ramage isn't equipped to handle them. Each new element is delivered in the form of flat exposition. Dialogue is bland, immemorable, with zero surprises. No character ever surprises me, actually; nor do I ever get that pleasantly-surprised "wow!" moment while reading a particularly beautiful sentence or impactful snippet of dialogue. Also, I can't help but pick this bone: why do we need to constantly devote entire pages to the most dull subjects in this book?? Paragraph after paragraph describes Jonah's budget during his escape from the Hamptons. "I had $200 from Mace and I spent $100 on a train ticket to NYC and then the hostel was $40 a night and I spent $10 on food each day at the bodega--" LOOK, I JUST SUMMED IT UP INTO ONE SENTENCE, and even THAT sentence is so long and boring that it ought to be cut!

The characters really seem like cardboard cut-outs -- broad strokes of common stereotypes. Richard's most interesting trait is that he was apparently molested by his mom, but outside of the Mace rape scene, it's never explored. And that one scene is not enough to justify including incest as a plot point, imo. Not saying that you have to justify incest specifically, but that you have to justify EVERY plot point -- you have to treat your plot points with respect, think about them seriously, explore them to the full extent. If you fail to do that with ANY plot point then your book immediately becomes shakier.

Jonah, unlike Richard, is stuffed with potentially interesting traits. He falsely accused his dad of molestation. He only just recently went to conversion therapy. He's manipulative, selfish, vain, a little cutthroat. But all these things are written, somehow, so blandly, that Jonah is immensely boring to read. In the back of the book, Parks-Ramage talks about Jonah. He admits that many early readers considered Jonah to be too unsympathetic. Parks-Ramage contends that Jonah is MEANT to be unsympathetic. He wanted to explore unsympathetic, imperfect victims.

Reading this made it all click for me about why Jonah doesn't work. Parks-Ramage really didn't set out to write a person; he set out to write an unsympathetic victim specifically so he could make an Important Point. This is why it seems like all of Jonah's actions Just Happen, coincidentally, without any impact on him -- because Parks-Ramage isn't interested in the bare-minimum work of exploring Jonah's personality. Those things are PURELY there to establish that not all victims are angels, And They Deserve Justice Anyway.

Me, to a friend: "[explains the plot]"
My friend: "Why can't people just write good books"
My friend: "pro gay churches are such copouts. I think i could write a book better than this."
My friend: "Me too movement was a cancer on literature"

amado1: (Default)
Well, this is a difficult book to rate!

I adore books on the Satanic Panic. It’s one of my favorite subjects, and this one blew me out of the water. For 384 pages I was totally gripped. The writing was engaging, conversational, funny … and yes, frequently it slipped from “professional” into “mocking.” This was an early warning sign, because when I eagerly turned to the sources at the back of the book, I realized the lack of professionalism ran deeper than I thought — there weren’t any sources! Instead, Emerson says, in essence, “Just trust me — I promise not to lie.” And “Just Google it.” And “if you can’t find it on Google, just call people like I did” (which people?) “and maybe buy a plane ticket to BYU. While you’re at it, talk to Scott Barrett—“ (now incarcerated for child molestation) “—and ask him to see his brother’s journal!”

Um. What? I need a minute.

You spent the whole book debunking this con artist of an author who THRIVED off saying “just trust me…” and then you said, “Just trust me”? Emerson, why? 😭

Before the “sources” I would have rated this book easily 4/5 stars, maybe 5/5. I had read many of the Satanic Panic histories he referenced (although in most cases, he didn’t reference them by NAME) and I considered this the best overarching history of the movement that I’d seen. Maybe not the most thorough, because it wasn’t meant to be a history of the Satanic Panic, but excellent, concise, with a clear idea of the timeline and main events, all while giving plenty of detail and attention to the main focus: Alden Barrett, Go Ask Alice, Beatrice Sparks, and the role these cast members played in the Satanic Panic itself.

It’s very sad to me that I can’t in good conscience recommend this book, all because of the sloppy citations. I LOVED this book! It was emotional, well-written, and it SEEMED well-researched too. But all of us who read Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal as kids have heard “Just trust me” before. We aren’t gonna do it again!

Osamu Dazai

Oct. 3rd, 2023 08:13 am
amado1: (Default)
Oh my god, I read "Flowers of Buffoonery" and I'm back in my Osamu Dazai era...

Like, look, I didn't even know what "Flowers of Buffoonery" was ABOUT, I just knew that I loved "No Longer Human" (it's one of my Top 5 favorite novels) so I just grabbed it without reading the back T__T Holy shit, it was good. It's a prequel to "No Longer Human," featuring the same suicidal protagonist as a young man.

This novel takes place over a period of four days, following Yozo immediately after his failed double-suicide (where an unnamed woman died, but Yozo was rescued from the sea by fishermen) up to the day of his release from the sanatorium by the sea, where he'll presumably be taken into police custody for aiding a suicide. There aren't a ton of named characters. We meet Yozo's best friends, a fellow art student named Hida and his younger cousin Kosuge, and his nurse Mano, who has a scar over her eye and was bullied as a child, called "Firefly".

Kosuge and Hida are deathly afraid of addressing how serious this is. They can't stand to sit down and discuss Yozo's mental health, and neither can he -- so for the four days they're in the hospital together, they have a riot instead. Telling funny stories and exaggerating their laughter, playing pranks on the nurses, flirting self-deprecatingly with the tubercular girls in the sanatorium. Occasionally, Yozo (a talented painter) will try to sketch the sea where he almost drowned, but then he crumples the paper up and criticizes his own work.

The forced light-heartedness really underscores the sporadic moments where all the masking stops and we remember that Yozo is here because he tried to kill himself -- and because a girl we know nothing about did succeed, and nobody will talk about her. These are quiet moments, usually between Yozo and Mano, at night, when the boys are gone -- once, between Yozo and Hida on the beach, when a pair of tubercular patients almost flirted with the boys, and then shyly turned away.

Tension is peppered throughout the narrative by serious adults -- Yozo's brother, the sanatorium director, the detectives -- who intrude on Yozo's hospital room to severely remind him (and the reader) that we don't know what happened before Page 1. Who was this girl? Did you know she had a husband? They found her body, you know. Did she really want to jump? Maybe she did, but we're not so convinced you wanted to die with her... Yozo's older brother works furiously to prevent charges from being brought while Yozo retreats into himself and plays cards with his friends; the director loans Yozo his own son's kimono when Yozo's clothes are destroyed by the waves, but also, almost bashfully, tells Yozo that he hopes the kid has learned his lesson.

At the end, you can sense Yozo's careful, fragile mask starting to crack. His friends fall out of the narrative. It's just him and Mano, Mano reaching out to him, seeking emotional connection, and Yozo almost panicking when she does. The day of Yozo's release, he and Mano take a wintry hike across the cliffs in the hopes of seeing Mount Fuji. But when they reach the clifftop, the sky is too foggy, and there's nothing to be seen -- just a 300-foot drop at Yozo's feet.

The end!

Throughout the short novel, at the end of almost every chapter, we have notes from the writer -- an anxious, self-critical mess who laments comically that his novel is never going to be the masterpiece he hopes it will. The characters won't work with him; his technique is too sloppy and transparent. Apparently this is something Dazai lifted from Gide, but I think it works phenomenally well for this particular story -- the so-called "flowers of buffoonery" are, as Dazai describes, the delicate, fragile acts of clowning that the boys get up to, to protect each other from thoughts of Yozo's near-suicide. Periodically, throughout the novel, those flowers collapse and die. If you know anything about Dazai, then you know this story is lifted directly from his own life, when he ran away with a bar-maid as a young man and tried to commit double-suicide together -- she drowned; he was rescued; his older brother saved him from prosecution.

The comical, self-deprecating notes at the end of each chapter distract us from this, but it's a fragile framework, and toward the end of the book it collapses entirely and disappears, leaving us with the stark autobiographical nature of the story and the uneasy knowledge -- as Yozo edges toward the cliff -- that Dazai did end up dying in another double-suicide later in life, also by drowning.

amado1: (Holmes)
I was super chatty and energetic on the 30th and my roommate happened to come home while I was compiling my books for the month -- so it took me hours just to write that list, and I didn't add any thoughts or summaries!

So:

A Cruel God Reigns )

The Overachievers )

Heaven )

Franz Kafka - The Drawings )

Elena Knows )



Regarding the Pain of Others )



Hex )

David Bowie's Serious Moonlight Tour )

Petshop of Horrors )

And Much of Madness )

Know My Name )

12) I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Hell, everyone's talked about this book, so I don't need to. It's fantastic, the hype is real.

Oxygen Mask )

How Can You Write a Poem When You're Dying of AIDS? )

How to Disappear Completely )

Normal People )

17) A Study in Scarlet Marquis

Y'all know I loved this one :)

Lawrence of Arabia's Clouds Hill )

Going Hungry )
 

amado1: (Holmes)
OK!

Earlier this year, I read David Gerrold's "The Case of the Green Carnation," where Holmes and Watson delicately attempt to help poor Oscar Wilde out. I gave the book a high-star review, 4 or 5, and thought at the time that I honestly couldn't expect better. But Mary Pagones blew old Dave out of the water.

"A Study in Scarlet Marquis" is rigorously researched, packed with witty whipcrack dialogue, and is laced with a tragic tenderness all throughout -- Oscar Wilde's suicidal decision to go to trial is treated with heartbreaking sympathy; Holmes' and Watson's relationship with Francis Douglas makes me ACHE; and ofc the barely-spoken love between Holmes and Watson is the whole book's underlying emotional thread. Besides that, the prose is totally electric and all the descriptions just pop off the page.

About Oscar Wilde: I've always been fond of him. The first time I read him was when I found a Dover Thrift Edition of Dorian Gray in this Christian bookshop as a kid -- instantly it became my favorite book. I didn't even understand half of what was going on in the narrative but I adored it. Since reading "De Profundis," I've become a bit sensitive to portrayals of Wilde as a ridiculous, pretentious fop -- there's an element of this at play in David Gerrold's work. Holmes and Watson are the steady, respectable, totally discreet homosexuals; Wilde is the faintly disgusting poseur who comes across as reckless, whiny.

But that's not the case with Mary Pagones. Oscar Wilde is portrayed sensitively, affectionately -- aging, and terrifying aware of his age, his impending ugliness, his blackened teeth; hitched to a beautiful, coarse creature who can't hope to match him intellectually and treats him with profound cruelty and hints of true-to-life abuse. His devotion to Alfred seems self-aware, resigned, and suicidal. Watson and Holmes watch him go down with a sympathy and sadness -- and deep affection -- that infects the reader. And although Watson and Holmes are much better at disguising their homosexuality, the author makes it clear that they're no better than Oscar for that, and their efforts and fears do nothing to really protect them in the end.

OK, that's my general review XD Now here's a general overview of the plot:

It started with Watson and Holmes on vacation in the English countryside, where they hear of a deadly accident at a nearby hunting party. They arrive to examine the body, a young man (and real-life historical figure) named Francis Douglas, who has clearly committed suicide. Francis' companions refuse to believe it and Watson and Holmes agree that it would be unkind to force them to admit it. They allow the coroner to mark Francis' death down as an accident.

During this scene, it becomes clear that Watson and Holmes have met Francis before and are deeply saddened by his death.

In the next chapter, the narrative jumps back a few years, to the first time Holmes and Watson met Francis -- then a nervous wreck with his nails bitten brutally short. Francis is working as a personal secretary to Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery and future Prime Minister. At first Holmes and Watson think Francis must be here because of Rosebery, but no -- it's about Francis' beautiful younger brother, Lord Alfred Douglas. Alfred, nicknamed Bosie, is dating Oscar Wilde, and has recently gotten "poor Oscar" into some trouble.

Basically, when Oscar wrote a lavishly affectionate letter to Bosie, Bosie slipped the letter into his coat pocket. Later that same night, Bosie hired a young male prostitute (there are rumors he never actually slept with Wilde, considering him too old and fat), and lent the boy his coat. The boy found the incriminating letter in the pocket, stole it, and is now using it to blackmail Wilde for the outrageous sum of 60 pounds, which is far outside Wilde's budget -- despite his posturing as an extravagant gentleman, he's viciously broke, and spends all his money appeasing Bosie's aristocratic tastes.

Francis is worried out of his mind. His father, the Marquess of Queensbury, is totally insane and abusive to both boys -- even Francis, his favorite. If this evidence gets out that Bosie and Oscar are really in a relationship, the Marquess might do something drastic. Holmes and Watson agree to visit Wilde, where Holmes gently suggests that Wilde just publish the letter himself and call it a prose sonnet.

The problem seems solved, but Bosie continues to be reckless, and the Marquess' feverish desire to ruin his own sons only grows. Soon it spreads to Francis as well -- because Rosebery has a habit of picking up handsome young male secretaries and then firing them when they get married. Francis admits to Holmes that he and Rosebery are indeed together, and he doesn't know what to do. It's an impossible situation. His father is determined to prove Rosebery is sodomizing his son -- and that Wilde is sodomizing the other. The Marquess doesn't care that in doing so, he'll ruin the reputation of both Douglas boys. In fact, that might be exactly what the Marquess wants; he seems to deliberately sabotage both sons no matter what steps they take in life. He punishes Alfred for being idle the same way he punishes Francis for taking a job.

While Holmes and Watson try to save Wilde from one Douglas boy and the other Douglas boy from himself, they also quietly deal with their own problems -- cruel bickering where a moody Holmes insults Watson's writing, hitting on a sore spot; Holmes' addiction to cocaine; Mycroft's increasingly frequent visits and his warnings that they need to live separately, try to be less conspicuous, and even the ramifications of Watson's stories and their various fabrications. Most notably, in this story, Watson made up the Reichenbach Falls; yes, Holmes really did leave him there, and no, Holmes didn't tell him why, but there was no Professor Moriarty, no dramatic fall to the death. Holmes simply left. Officially, in Watson's stories, Holmes is still dead, and they're living off royalties from Holmes' research papers and paltry detective fees. But everyone in London knows Holmes is alive because they can see him and Watson walking down the street daily, arm in arm. The question is, when will Holmes let Watson resurrect him? And the tension lies in Watson's writing, Holmes' discomfort with how they're portrayed, both of their unease with the lies about Watson's marriage and their relationship.

There's an excellent scene about midway through the book where Watson visits a doctor. At first we think he's going there to get his leg checked up; ever since Chapter 1, the author's been mentioning Watson's war wound and its stiffness, deliberately setting us up for this moment imo. But Watson is really there to talk about Holmes. He discusses Holmes' mood swings -- dark depressive phases that last for days, where he can get really cruel; wild upswings where he doesn't sleep for an entire week. Work helps keep him steady; cocaine makes the mood swings worse.

For a little while, Watson and the doctor politely discuss how cocaine negatively impacts someone like Holmes, and then the doctor takes a hard swerve: his prescription is for Holmes and Watson to leave England entirely. Go to France, where the social climate is kinder. Live openly and happily. Watson's cheeks burn but he goes numb and quietly says that they can't do that; Holmes loves London more than he loves any man.

Ouch!!

Eventually, the narrative takes us back to Francis' suicide, which hurts DEEPLY now, because we've seen how he met Holmes and Watson, watched their friendship develop, grew to genuinely like this kid -- a closeted gay kid, the responsible older son, doomed to constantly cover for and protect his flamboyantly open younger brother. When Francis is rejected by Rosebery and forced to marry a woman, he kills himself, and that night, we see Holmes and Watson processing the suicide in a lovely, subtle, achingly sad scene in their hotel.

Anyway, here's my highlights -- a mix of shippy Holmes/Watson moments and examples of the snappy dialogue.

*****

Quotes )

I have many other highlights, but I'll stop there. This is probably the most affecting scene in the novel for me -- this, and the very end, where Holmes and Watson attend the auction of Oscar Wilde's personal possessions. Holmes, a bit of a hoarder himself, is deeply affected by the callous auctioning of Oscar's beloved books (as was I, when I first learned about it). But the only item he himself bids on is Oscar Wilde's writing desk, as a gift to Watson.

The scene above, right after Francis Douglas' death, is another favorite of mine -- the subtlety of Holmes's tears is what makes it for me.

amado1: (Default)
I finished reading Mister Magic two nights ago and gave it 4 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, taking off a star mostly because the message became a little overwrought toward the end. The last 4-5 chapters were a slog, but the rest of the book? Fantastic, creative, and genuinely scary.

Plot and Mild Critique ).

Favorite character: Javi! Hands down.

Top three scares:
1) the silhouette at the top of the basement stairs with a blanket around its shoulders -- the way it silently opens one corner of the blanket to invite Val in, the way Isaac always does. But it's not Isaac.
2) The scene where Val finds a black thread in the scar on her palm and tugs it out, releasing an odor of infection and rot, and... well, hopefully you read the scene.
3) The simple concept of that strange house where Mister Magic was filmed, with windows stretching up to the sixth floor, no doors on any of the bedrooms, a TV in every room ... and the TVs come on at night of their own volition, and as Val walks down the stairs, she suddenly realizes she's lost count of what floor she's on ... and what if she accidentally walks down those stairs and right into the dreadful basement, where the portal is waiting?

amado1: (Default)
This is a nonfiction book about Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white lesbian couple who killed themselves and their six adopted children (all Black) by driving their SUV off a cliff in Mendocino County back in 2018.

It's an excellently written book. The author has previous writing credits for covering the foster care system, which is her true focus here: as she notes early in the book, there are plenty of op-eds and podcasts asking us to empathize with Jennifer and Sarah. But there's been zero focus on the kids themselves, their birth families, and how CPS failed them. 

In sum:

Bio family background )

I'll cover the rest in a bullet-point style to try and keep it brief:
Details )

Well, here's some particularly insightful quotes from the book, some of which are themselves quotes from other books. I'll note that where relevant.

Quotes )

amado1: (Default)
I finished Patricia Wants to Cuddle last night and I have some thoughts!

The premise is great: the final four contestants on a Bachelor-style reality TV show go to a remote PNW island to film some of their last episodes together. While there, they're picked off one-by-one in gruesome ways by a female Sasquatch who haunts the island ... and is desperate for love.

This is a book I wholeheartedly recommend ... that premise is golden, and it definitely lives up to it. But at the same time, it's a difficult book to rate! I think I would give it an honest 3/5 stars, but on Goodreads, I upped it to 4/5, just because I want other people to read it so badly.

Pros, Cons, Spoilers )

As for Patricia: look, when Renee watches Patricia viciously stomp Jeremy to death, and then Renee moves forward and slowly, tenderly bandages Patricia's wounds and strokes her face, thinking of how sad and lonely Patricia must be... YES YES YES YES. I adore Creature From the Black Lagoon, and really, this is Creature, but with a happy ending for the monster, who also happens to be a lesbian this time.

(I say, as if the Gill-man isn't also a lesbian, in vibes)

Read it! Read it read it read it. That is all.

amado1: (Default)
This is a slim little volume written by Chris Hedges, a war journalist who reported on the Dirty War in Argentina, the Yugoslav Wars, and the Gulf Wars (all prior to publishing this book). It's a great little treatise on the way a state builds up its "national myth" in times of war to whip the people into a fervor -- and an examination of how people really act in wartime, with abundant references to Classical poems and literature.

I don't have my typical Good vs. Bad assessment for this book. The entire text was interesting and well-written; I never felt like the author was wasting my time. His writing style was a little flowery for my tastes, but not offensive, and I quickly got used to it.

So without any frills, here's the quotes I highlighted as I was reading!

 

Read more... )




amado1: (Pierre Joubert)
I read this last night! It's about 320 pages, and I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, although, you know, that's 4 stars as a YA romance book, NOT 4 stars as a sci-fi book. As a sci-fi book I'd probably give it 2/5.

The premise: Cat is five years old when her father, a cyberneticist, brings home a human-looking android named Finn. Finn is one of a kind, and as Cat grows up, she falls in love with him, but refuses to admit it, because she can't be with an android. The book follows her from age five to probably her mid-40s, when she has a son of her own and both her parents are dead.

As most of the focus is on Cat, we see detailed portraits of her high school days, her college friends and adventures as a fiber artist, her time as a "vice girl" selling cigarettes, her unhappy marriage to an AI engineer, her divorce, her pregnancy, etc etc. Our glimpses of Finn are always from Cat's POV; we don't see his inner thoughts or motivations. Since Cat is a particularly incurious narrator, this means that for much of the book, we really don't know a single damn thing about Finn!

The journey takes Cat from a 5-year-old who refuses to believe Finn is an android, to a young adult who fiercely reminds herself and him that he can't feel anything while also using him for sex, to a more mature adult who understands the ways she's used and hurt Finn and now sees him fully as a person.

The Good )
The Bad )

This is a minor thing, but in a worldbuilding sense, it bugged me. It's established that Finn can't eat or drink, but he can taste things. Later, we learn that he's just a mess of wires and circuit boards inside a human-shaped cell. He doesn't have replica organs or human anatomy or anything like that. We ALSO learn that when he hears a new word or phrase, he repeats it back in the voice of whoever said it, via recording equipment. Well, since he doesn't have vocal cords, presumably everything he says is emitting from a speaker. Why does he move his lips at all? He doesn't need to. It's little stuff like that that bugged me on a sci-fi level, but like I said at the start, this isn't really a sci-fi novel at all. It's YA romance, and in terms of YA romance, it's quite good.

amado1: (Holmes)
The premise: A genderless entity known as A wakes up in a new body every morning. They don't get to choose who. It's always a kid more or less the same age as A, in more or less the same geographical area (which is currently Maryland, and the age is 16). A has been doing this all their life, with no idea why, or who they are, or who their parents are, or what happens if... or how to...

(None of these questions get answered)

Review )

This was recc'ed to me by a friend who has previously only recc'ed bangers: Octavia E. Butler's Xenogensis trilogy; Carolyn Ives Gilman's Halfway Human; Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow; and now she's recced me The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I figured I'd pick up "The Mad Scientist's Daughter" next!

amado1: (Default)
I picked up this book on David Reimer recently. Nonfiction, it devotes its attention to three different subjects. One of those is David, born Bruce and raised as Brenda. As an identical twin, David was born with normal cis hormones and genitals, but lost his penis in a botched circumcision around the age of 8 months. Afterward, he was surgically altered and raised as a girl on the advice of Subject #2, Dr. John Money.

Money made a name for himself as a sexologist and headed up the Johns Hopkins gender research lab. He guided and honed MTF transgender surgery in the United States. He also spearheaded the movement to surgically alter intersex children and raise them as whatever sex parents preferred, often citing David Reimer as proof that it could be done. Money believed gender was entirely sociological, not biological, and therefore, babies could be altered and raised as any gender without ill effects.

The third subject is Milton "Mickey" Diamond, a scientist who naively published a paper challenging Money's research when he was in grad school. Mickey became a lifelong target of Money's, and was in a sense ostracized by the scientific community, but he quietly continued his research. Unlike Money, Diamond believed there was a biological, genetic source of "gender" -- and that includes for trans and intersex folks, too. One's genetic gender, for a variety of reasons, might not match one's assigned gender at birth, and extensive bloodwork might show an invisible intersex condition in many trans folks.

Since this book was published in 2002, it's not clear if Diamond's research was ever continued ... I haven't looked into it yet.

Largely, the book follows Money's soaring career, his manipulation of patients and shady business practice, and the decidedly tragic trajectory of David's life. David, raised as Brenda, knew he was male from the moment they tried to put him in dresses, but couldn't articulate it. He consistently struck strangers (classmates, teachers, babysitters) as a little boy, in terms of demeanor and interests, posture, the way he walked, etc. Every year, David was taken to Money's research lab, where he and his twin brother were subjected to highly personal interviews from a very young age. Money quizzed them on their sexual preferences, habits, and fantasies as young as six, showed them pornography, and made them reenact sex with each other and unclothe to examine each other's genitals.

Money firmly believed all this was necessary for "Brenda" and her uncertain gender identity. In the press, Money made no mention of Brenda's insistence that she was a boy, her disgust for girly things, her peers' and teachers' POV, or her struggles in school. He trumpeted the case as a total triumph and described Brenda as a very girl young girl who loved dolls and dresses.

When she hit puberty, Brenda refused to go see Dr. Money for her yearly trips. She knew by now that there was something wrong with her genitals and that she was supposed to have reconstructive surgery on her vagina. The concept made her miserable. Eventually she rejected dresses and long hair and started going out in public as a boy. Her parents felt compelled to tell her the truth and help her transition with a local team. His therapists at first resisted, but over the course of several years, they broke away from Dr. Money and helped David start on testosterone and get a phalloplasty. He, his parents, and his twin brother remained traumatized by the whole ordeal.

Although the author of the book didn't know this at the time, David's twin brother would commit suicide shortly after it was published. David followed not long after.

Here are some quotes I highlighted:

Quotes )

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