Indeed, some of the greatest moments in fiction happen when the author deliberately screws with prescriptions of language to see what happens. Surely the best authors are the ones who are not caged within the strictures of formal grammer, but the ones who use them like Lego to build new and wonderful things that Strunk and White could never have dreamed of?
Think, for example, of Iain (M.) Banks. Feersum Endjinn may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s no denying it’s creative, and it tells the Style Guide to go get stuffed. Or the narrative shuffling of Use of Weapons.
Or Newspeak. Or “Grok”. Or Tolkien’s use of “Dwarves” and “Elves” and how he made the publisher undo their edits when they “corrected” them to “dwarfs” and “elfs”.
I am currently reading No Gods, No Monsters which features a very diverse group of main characters. My favorite part is that the gender identities of the characters are not particularly the main point, they just are, which, IMHO, is how it should be.
I’ve been specifically searching for and listening to sci-fi and fantasy audiobooks with protagonists who use they/them pronouns. Extremely useful to train my brain away from outdated grammer rules and get comfy with they/them and especially “themself.” That last one still trips me up. I’d rather make the mistakes now then when I have a live person in front of me.
If gender neutral pronouns bother someone, exposure is the way to go. Not trying to pretend one’s own comfort outweighs the respect due to another individual’s personhood.
I am very disappointed with Lackey. While I am not a writer, it seems like it would be fairly easy to write a supporting character who is transgender or nonbinary just living their life. Especially for someone so renowned and wealthy. Lackey could get any number of sensitivity readers to provide perspective and avoid inadvertent disrespect.
That would require some self-reflection rather than knee jerk bigotry, though… /s
Also… didn’t both Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin have tons of stuff in their work which challenged the gender binary? Butler’s Xenogenesis, maybe?
Which is… weird, and I’m not sure what to think about it. Even if that’s true, you’d think they’d be able to get somebody to help regain access to the site, somehow.
Even so… I still think that even in 2003, Lackey had enough status in the publishing world to push back against that perception, if she’d wanted to. And the fantasy/sci-fi market today is not what it was almost 20 years ago.
That’s definitely weird, because this time around he defended it still being there as an intentional choice because they didn’t want to get into “revisionist history”, comparing updating their FAQ to the systematic whitewashing of the Tulsa massacre (yes really).
Unfortunately, it seems that he’s deleted every tweet he made during his tirade, including every reply, so I can’t bring a receipt. (There’s no apology tweet or anything, the past day of his Twitter activity is just gone.)
From digging around, it seems like there are two different websites on mercedeslackey.com; one that comes up when you navigate straight to it, which stretches back to about 2014, and one that’s like an archive of a LiveJournal or very old WordPress installation or something that ends in 2011, but which is still accessible through Google searches and old links to pages from elsenet. The “new” site doesn’t have an FAQ section, but only because it’s clearly been scrubbed out very recently. There are results for it when I search “Mercedes Lackey faq”, but they all 404 out. It seems they just did that, too, because Google’s last cache of the pages was literally yesterday. (There’s also no way to go back and look for it in the Internet Archive, because their domain has been excluded from the Wayback Machine… can’t tell when that happened but it’s extremely easy to be uncharitable in interpreting it.) I suppose it’s possible they lost the admin login for the old site, hence the need for the new one sitting on top of it, but the original page is a round-up written in plain HTML, so if they had the FTP access to upload a new software package to replace the old one, they had the ability to edit that page at any time and haven’t.
All that being said, there are results going back years and years and years, back to when the “old” site was still being actively updated, pointing out how gross that answer was, and it would appear that every time they make attempts to talk about it, it re-illustrates that they haven’t really gotten any further in actually understanding trans people, because they keep using the same language and assuming that trans people are nothing but a ball of angst that can only be “fixed” through transition, and reiterating that such a narrative would be exceptionally boring for non-trans people to put up with.
I remember him performing Great Leap Forward a while ago on Henry Rollins show, where he updated the lyrics, so that must be standard practice for him… Good on him…
No wonder hardly any trans people want to talk to the BBC. I wish I didn’t have to pay for a TV license (technically I don’t, but then I can’t legally watch any live streams of anything and I will be harrassed by the TV license people because I live in a university town).
But I thought he was having so much fun being cancelled…
Claiming moral superiority, Chappelle told the crowd, “If you think you’re mad at me — remember, I didn’t disinvite you from anything.” He also insisted that, “If anyone says trans people are angry at me, they are wrong. And if you see [a trans person], buy them a coffee or lipstick or whatever they want and tell them Dave Chappelle sent you.”
No, Dave, they are mad at you. Just shut the fuck up you self-centered piece of shit.
