Month: September 2015

Does The Soul Have a Gender?

TiresiasTiresias

Each time I start a new book, I look for something new to explore.   Almost all of them have, of course, dealt with gender identity, but with most of my books I start off asking a slightly different question, or exploring a slightly different scenario.

For the book I am working on now, I started with the question which serves as the title of this blog– does the soul have a gender?  I have occasionally included religious dimensions in my work, usually Christian, but this time I am exploring the idea of reincarnation.

I know in some cultures the idea persists that the soul takes on a female form when it is less spiritually evolved, and that as one progresses in their lives they eventually get to be a male. However, I reject this notion, which I believe reflects patriarchal and misogynistic cultures and their fear of women more than any true spiritual understanding.

I believe that neither male nor female is a superior or more evolved gender.  I believe they are different identities and that each has its strengths and weaknesses.  I believe both males and females are capable of creating life and beauty, and both are also capable of destruction and ugliness.

The cyclops.   The sirens.  One crushes with brute strength.  One lures you to your death with the allure of their beautiful voices.   We need both the masculine and the feminine and all the gradations in between.   The most evolved cultures honor all and live without fear of any.

I don’t know where any of my books are going as I write them.  I just write and see where the characters take me.  Sometimes, readers have complained about my endings, but I always feel like I am ending the stories where I need to.   Right now, having started with my questions about the soul, I am just letting the characters go where they please, and I am really enjoying writing my mythic exploration of this idea as my main character slowly comes to realize that he has a female soul, and how that knowledge impacts him in his current life.

 Here is an excerpt:

The water felt warm and scented oils clung to his smooth leg, the sweet odor of eucalyptus rising up to meet him as he stepped in completely, sliding down into the luxurious waters, and the candles flickered and he sighed as the water rose over his soft, swaying breasts, and he sighed softly, arching his back as he ran his hands his breasts, lifting them and squeezing his legs together as he remembered the way Chris had fucked him…

Craig opened his eyes, looking down at his hands on his flat, muscular chest.  What the hell?  He’d seen himself as a woman.  Again.   Had… loved seeing himself as a woman.  It had felt so good, so real, so…. Right?

Everything was wrong.   So wrong.   What had Chris done to him?

TG in 3D: Alien Worlds (spoilers)

alienworlds

Is what’s inside the true measure of a man?

Brick, a chauvinistic alpha male, asks this question just before revealing his new, pin-up girl body, with huge, gravity defying breasts, to his girlfriend, Connie.  And it is a first rate pin-up girl body, drawn by one of the masters of the form, Art Adams.  And those breasts are in 3-D, thrusting right off the page and right at the reader.

The girl he’d become– one of the most erotic images I had ever seen– a true fantasy girl in every way– blew my mind.  If you have seen Art Adam’s work, you know he loves the female form, and he draws erotic, idealized visions of femininity that surpass anything you will ever see in the real world.  The man who now found himself with those full, firm breasts and those slender, round arms was a tough, domineering, strong man who was all about the macho lifestyle, and now here he was in a physical form that embodied everything he had felt superior to before his change.

I think this was the first time I had seen a TG comic with nudity, a man as a bare-breasted woman, and that was part of the allure as well.   There he stood before the woman who loved him, now prettier and more generously endowed than she was.  I imagined the shame, the humiliation, the despair he must have felt to have his women see him as a female for the first time.

So, back to the question: Is what’s inside the true measure of a man?

The comic answers in a single panel as we see Brick, the former alpha male, wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes and cleaning laundry in a pond.  Connie, returning from a successful hunting trip, a rifle in one hand, calls out, “Better Hurry Up, Hun.”

“Yes, dear,”  Brick answers.  “Whatever you say, dear.”

The alpha male, now the prettier, curvier of the two, has become the fem in the relationship, and his formerly girly-girly girlfriend has become the dominant partner.  She has the rifle, she does the hunting.  He is in the traditional role of the wife.  The man with the bigger breasts has become the woman.  What’s inside has changed to match his new shape.

It may have been my juvenile state at the time, or maybe it is my still juvenile state as of today, but those breasts haunted me, the idea that those amazing breasts belonged to a man, and what it seemed like they had done to him.  I just felt like having those big, perfect breasts had stripped away his manhood, though I now would have to think there were other parts of his body that he lost that would have had an equal or bigger impact.  In any case, it seemed to me that it was the body that changed him.

In my own writings that have featured characters like Brick I have played with a different idea, though, than merely the idea that a perfect, sexy little pin-up girl body would turn a chauvinist into a pin-up girl personality.  My feeling has been that a chauvinist could become the victim of his own biases, and that he would turn himself into a submissive female, giggling and pleasing and all those things because he would believe that was all he could be given his new sex and shape. Perhaps it would not be a case of biology is destiny, but bias is destiny.

Check It Out at Mile High Comics

Should Non-TG actors play TG Characters?

04TRANSGENDER-blog427Photo from NYTIMES

Yes, they should.

The question, and my response, arise in response to a recent New York Times article discussing the casting of Eddie Redmanye and Elle Fanning to play transgender characters even though neither publicly identifies as being transgender.  Some groups and individuals have raised concerns, saying only actors who identify as transgender should play transgender characters..

I can summarize my feeling on this issue pretty simply:

  1.  We are not our bodies
  2. We are not what other people tell us
  3. We do not have to choose to identify as anything
  4. No one should be pressured into “outing” themselves.

To focus on item three, the pressure to put myself into a box and slap a label on my forehead tortured me throughout my life, and the need of others to label me created conflict where there didn’t need to be any.   I do not like labels, and I do not think we need to live in a world where every character and every actor has to be assigned a label and put into a box–  oh, that’s that transgender actor… or that gay actor… or that ingenue, or whatever.  Because people couldn’t figure me out they labelled me with things like girly boy, or they lisp he’s sensitive at me like being sensitive was a crime.   Some people called me a freak and a deviant.   That was where the drive for labels took me.  Do I want to be labelled?

NO.  We are are all more than labels, we all contain multitudes.  Am I a girlish boy?  A boyish girl?  I don’t have to choose.   I feel different things different days and different times, and my dream would be to live in world with more choices, more freedom and less labels.

The film makers can and will cast the actors they want to cast.  That is their right.   They want to make the best movie they can.  Some will not like those choices, and they have a right to express their feelings as well.

But I, for one, will never raise my hand and scream,  “LABEL ME!  Give me a bar code!  Put me in on a box on a shelf!”

I transcend all labels.  And you do, too.

New York Times on Casting

Wild Cards, a princess and a pregnancy (Spoilers)

wildcards

How would a man react to being turned into a pregnant woman?

The Wild Cards series of books, edited by George R.R. Martin was set in a version of our world in which a strange virus mutated some of the population, giving super powers to a few and making others into grotesque outcasts.  In Book 9, Jokertown Shuffle, things got TG to the extreme when the very male Dr. Tachyon is switched into the body of a teen-age girl by his own sociopathic son.

The story line delved into some ugly realities faced by women–  Tachyon is raped and abused by his son– in way I had never seen up to that point, and it juxtaposed that story line brilliantly with a fairy-tale princess vision of reality, with Tachyon finding himself a damsel in distress, having dreams where he is in a Alice in Wonderland fairy world, passively hoping to be rescued by a mysterious figure known as The Outcast.

The combination of these various very feminine/female fears and fantasies being imposed on a man fascinated me, delving into those questions of behavior and the line between biology and free-will.  Tachyon, initially horrified to have something growing inside him, quickly becomes overwhelmed by his body’s maternal instincts, and helpless and desperate, he just as quickly embraces his role as a pretty young princess, dependent on a man to rescue and protect him.

At the time, I felt the book very clearly fell on the side of biology.  It seemed to say–  put a baby in a man’s belly, and he will become a mother, put a man in a woman’s body, and he will start to have female fantasies.   I feel now, re-reading the book, that I may have misjudged.  Tachyon does not just find himself in a young woman’s body– he is subjected to brutality and abuse, rape, physically and mentally tortured and imprisoned.   Could many of the behaviors that I thought were biological actually be the result of the experiences he suffered?

Clearly, these things all would have an impact, so that whatever the biology and brain chemistry he found himself swimming in as a man in a pregnant woman’s body, the abuse and imprisonment also shaped his reactions and feelings.  Abortion wasn’t an option.  He had to carry the baby, and so he chose to dedicate himself to being the best mother he could be to his unborn child.

I remain fascinated by the fairy tale elements of Tachyon’s journey into motherhood and the impact being turned into a damsel in distress had on him and might have on other types of men. It’s something I have explored and continue to explore in my own writing.  Many of my stories use fairy tale tropes and Jungian archetypes, and I continue to like to write about the interaction between biology, environment and culture when it comes to gender identity.  I think there are some men out there who would become good mothers, but my feeling is that most of them would not primarily due to fear and ego.  Maybe I’ll write about that sometime soon.

Check it Out on Amazon!