Stephen King’s ‘The Outsider’ (TONS of spoilers ahead)

Ok…first post in awhile, I’ll try to be more regular about this.

Just lately I mowed through Stephen King’s most recent novel, The Outsider, and while it was quite the page-turner for the most part I would still say it’s essentially mixed. The overall thematic development is consistent and compelling throughout but sort of chokes on itself. With the pointed Dracula nods at the end, I can’t help but be reminded of Bram Stoker’s own botched ending.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. Fairly early on Stephen King establishes clear parallels with an Edgar Allen Poe story called William Wilson. The wife of the main character even brings the story up with him, and in the same exchange we hear an Arthur Conan Doyle quote, which can be reasonably paraphrased as ‘when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be true, however improbable’. Ralph Anderson, our main character, when discussing the Poe story remarks on the “damn good psychology” for “the nineteenth century”. Here he’s referring to the story’s ending when William Wilson commits suicide, after being psychologically destabilized and overwhelmed by the lifelong presence of a doppelganger. Anderson’s wife says that, when you look past the psychology, you’re left with the supernatural. William Wilson had a deadly psychological reaction to something that, as far as the story is concerned, seems to have been physically happening.

This is the central thematic thread that I think Stephen King has trouble with. Not long after Anderson has this conversation with his wife, the story makes a hard shift to supernatural fiction. Holly Gibney, a character from King’s Mr. Mercedes books, enters the plot fulfilling the role of Dr. Van Helsing, which I actually thought was pretty cool. Since I finished The Outsider, I’ve read Finders Keepers and I’m currently halfway through Mr. Mercedes largely because I wanted more of Holly Gibney. Gibney even has a talk with Anderson and company about the need to overcome their assumptions about reality and the limits of the human mind, sorta like how Helsing prefaces one of his explanations by pointing out things in the natural world that, at that time, seemed improbable (like extremely old turtles). Holly Gibney is also a film-buff and has a tendency to bring movie and book references into casual conversation (when they find out that the vampiric title character has a human servant, Holly refers to him as a “Renfield”).

While I’m going on about the iffy transition halfway through the book, I’d also like to add that it adds substantial depth to Ralph Anderson’s character arc. At the very beginning, Detective Anderson directs a very public arrest of Terry Maitland, a high school teacher and little league coach, in the middle of a game because he is absolutely convinced that he raped, murdered and mutilated a young boy (a crime that we later learn was the work of the Outsider, or el cuco, a Latin American variation of the vampire myth with more emphasis on shape-shifting). Anderson feels like he knows, beyond any possibility of a doubt, that he has the right man, chiefly because of DNA traces and eye-witnesses before and after the killing. The fact that Maitland’s reputation and alibis are squeaky clean makes him even more convinced, since an immaculate public front looks like careful denial or misdirection when paired with evidence that he did something monstrous. Not to mention everyone has heard of the serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer, whose friends and neighbors were shocked after the arrests and said that they always seemed so nice.

I find it easy to think that, with this sort of beginning, the reader is going to assume that either Maitland did it or that Anderson is dangerously off-base and arrogant. Personally, Anderson made my skin crawl early in the book. At least part of that had to do with certain genre conventions, though.

A central conflict is hardly ever resolved at the very beginning. If something looks all-important early on, then it cannot be. At least, it cannot be with a lot of successfully written stories (if I ever write something on this blog about Final Fantasy XV, I’ll probably bring up the romance between Noctis and Luna as a huge problem for a similar reason). With that in mind, I found it easy to assume that Maitland’s incrimination was simply a set-up for the bigger plot and that he is probably not guilty…which makes Anderson’s certainty appear repugnant.

It also doesn’t help that we hear Anderson trotting out the brutal death of the child to inspire fellow cops and the District Attorney to work for a conviction more than we hear about the actual killing. I know that’s a bit of a technicality, and with stories that exploit subjectivity we are naturally shown perspectives of events rather than events themselves. So, within this sub-genre, it’s a totally legitimate thing to do. Just sayin’, it doesn’t make Anderson look any more sympathetic or justified. What it does do, though, is prove to us that Anderson himself believes it, which makes it all the more compelling when he is forced to acknowledge that he’s wrong. It also helps the reader connect with him when he and Holly Gibney are talking about the need to acknowledge that something is happening that transcends what Anderson is initially willing to consider. In the end, when Holly and Ralph become the central heroes, we have seen Ralph Anderson go from someone on the brink of convicting an innocent man to a truly sympathetic protagonist. Stephen King doesn’t always handle morally gray characters very well, but when he does he nails it. (My favorite anti-hero of his being Roland Deschain…more on that if one or more Dark Tower posts happen).

Having mentioned the essential quality of Ralph’s arc, though…the story becomes glaringly plot-driven once we discover the real nature of the Outsider, which both Holly and Yunel Sablo (a supporting character) compare to a shape-shifting, folkloric monster called el cuco. On one hand, it’s nice to see people from the two opposing sides of the Terry Maitland fiasco working together (Anderson and Sablo manage to enlist the help of Howie Gold, Maitland’s lawyer, and a P.I. who works for him named Alec Pelley).

On the other…the tension and drama of the first half of the book hinged on the reasons for the starkly opposing pictures of whether or not Terry Maitland was guilty. In other words, it was psychological tension. Then the first half comes to a head and we hear Anderson’s wife remark, while talking about William Wilson, that, once you drop the psychology, you are left with the supernatural. This is where the plot is supposed to really thicken. But the dramatic momentum of the first half just isn’t matched in the second. I don’t think the second half is essentially bad, but it does feel a little bit naked compared to the first.

The involvement of the alcoholic detective who turns into the Outsider’s “Renfield” is interesting until he dies in a gunfight. Like Snakebite Andi in Doctor Sleep, I was kind of left wondering what exactly the “Renfield” brought to the story (other than another character death in said gunfight). When the snake that biting the alcoholic got it’s own sub-chapter, I thought it was gonna tie in with el cuco….maybe he can telepathically manipulate snakes, kinda like how Dracula can manipulate wolves? In which case, is he simply bumping off his “Renfield” because he’s ceased to be useful, or is something else going on? Is the “Renfield” going to get transformed into another vampiric creature or something? When you use a specific sub-chapter for a snake that’s about to bite someone, you’re naturally prompting the reader to wonder about it’s significance. If the significance is simply to provide a slow death to a character you don’t know what else to do with and make him shoot badly, then it’s kind of underwhelming.

If I wanted, I could get really snarky and say that these problems with the second half and ending are also halmarks of Stoker’s influence, since in the original Dracula Van Helsing flips the lids on the coffins containing Dracula and his brides before nightfall and just stakes them all. I remember reading that book when I was sixteen and I thought it was one of the biggest anti-climaxes I had ever read. Then there’s this little chapter at the end with everyone having families which, for sixteen-year-old me, just made it all the more fake and unsatisfying. It’s like Bram Stoker just got performance anxiety at the end and choked.

While the Outsider’s death happens abruptly, there is one interesting detail. In most vampire fiction, vampires are portrayed as formerly human with many aspects of their human identities and feelings still intact. Since the Outsider changes shape so often and can create a ghostly avatar that creates the appearance of teleportation, we are tempted to think of him as fundamentally not human. No more human than Pennywise. One of Terry Maitland’s daughters even catches a glimpse of him without a disguise and sees him as having “straws for eyes”, which almost sounds like eyes on stalks.

But when Holly is talking to him in his cave, she says that without the memory altering (he can do that via telepathy) and shape-shifting, he is just a pedophile and a sexual sadist. The Outsider loudly denies this, saying that he targets children because their suffering provides the most nourishing psychic sustenance for him, and that he leaves semen on the bodies of his victims (we learn earlier that he didn’t just do it with his most recent) in order to provide a DNA link to his chosen patsy (while assuming someone else’s shape, his DNA is also a perfect match for theirs, hence the DNA evidence against Terry Maitland). Holly points out that there are other ways to do that, like with saliva, sweat or even his own blood. Holly insists that he’s a sexual predator, provoking him into a sloppy attack and providing a chance for Holly to kill him.

While we were initially prompted to think of the Outsider as fundamentally non-human, the fact that Holly got him wound up by accusing him of being a pedophile and a sexual sadist is telling. In the natural world, animal predators do not seem to have complicated and messy feelings about their prey that they are compelled to misrepresent. Not that we have any way of knowing this, but shame and denial don’t seem to be in the equation with species-to-species predation. The implication is that the Outsider actually was formerly human and was transformed.

There are a few other satisfying aspects to the ending, such as Ralph and Holly’s conversation at the very end. In general, though…the book is just lopsided. Not as lopsided as Doctor Sleep, but still lopsided. I also gotta admit that it’s more re-readable than Doctor Sleep.

The importance of non-binary language for those who are not

I have a lot of mixed feelings about bringing up this topic but since I brought it up in my very first post I feel like I should clarify what I meant.

Way back when I heard Jordan Peterson’s appearance on Sam Harris’ Waking Up podcast and felt compelled to sound off publicly, I briefly mentioned my own relationship with non-binary language when I first began coming out. The more personal and anecdotal stuff was secondary to my main points there, but upon re-reading it I don’t think I was very clear on what I meant.

Right away, I want to make it clear that I’m not saying everybody is non-binary. A. that just isn’t true and B. it parallels a very fallacious line of thought about bisexuality. In the past, when people have learned that I am bisexual, they’ve been a little incredulous. A straight friend of mine from high school seemed to think that I’m interested exclusively in men and, for awhile, was surprised whenever he was reminded that I’m attracted to women as well. One man, whom I was involved with for a long time, would sometimes say that, on the rare occasions he had sex with women, that they were essentially “the exception that proves the rule” (this person is gay.) The point of these stories seemed to be that everyone has some degree of flexibility but there is an inevitable average that, for most intents and purposes, designates your orientation.

I don’t think this person knew about Alfred Kinsey, but his beliefs clearly mapped onto the concept of the Kinsey spectrum. When Kinsey gathered his data for his two books on human sexuality, he surveyed innumerable people and reported that people who are exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual are rare, and that most people are “predominantly gay” or “predominantly straight”. In essence, everyone is bisexual but everyone has an average that designates their sexual orientation more than the deviations from the average. Back when my high school friend would be surprised by my attraction to women, he would sometimes express something similar. I would say something like “you already know I’m bisexual” and he would say something like “yes but don’t you…desire men more than you desire women?” The high school friend and the ex-partner seemed to be driving at the same thing: the term ‘bisexual’ is fundamentally not relevant. Either you have a consistent average within more diverse possibilities, or you are simply refusing to “own up” to the fact that you are either gay or straight.

I don’t think people should be afraid of fluidity but I also think embracing fluidity can obfuscate other relevant averages. On one hand, consider people who have been mostly straight except for one very deep and long lasting same sex attraction. If that one relationship ends, such a person may simply continue being interested in the opposite sex. The one break in the pattern does not, in and of itself, compel one to re-evaluate their identity. Internalized homophobia could also come up in this context: if you think that gay people are foreign “others” who you think of as existing far from you, you might not mentally place yourself in that category. On the other hand, there are people like me who simply do not have a consistent preference for the sex or gender of their partners. For myself and other bisexuals, bisexuality itself is the average.

Forgive me if I’m taking a long time getting to the point, but I think this habit of mind bears mentioning. With sexual orientation and gender, there are categories that are used the most and that people are the most familiar with, i.e. gay, straight, male and female. The vast majority of people can relate to one of those four categories and their common acceptance can create doubt about people who do not relate to those four groups. If it is commonly assumed that those four groups are universal and if someone has things in common with more than one of them, a lay person might think that some sort of male \ female straight \ gay identity must be there, even if it’s not obvious. This has an unintentional consistency with “questioning” people who may feel alienated from commonly accepted groups but eventually come to identify with one of them. This both alienates people who truly do not identify as gay or straight, male or female, and compels people to re-interpret their lives with previously unclear aspects of their identity re-defined as lucid.

Aaaaaannndd……at long last we’re now close to that “point” thing that seems to be all the rage these days. In the Waking Up episode with Jordan Peterson, he expresses his anxiety with legal protection extending to non-binary individuals in particular. In other situations, Peterson has described gender neutral pronouns like ze and hir as words that he “hates” and will never use. From that point, I started getting anecdotal with my early twenties when I was struggling to come out and how Kate Bornstein’s explanation of being genderqueer was my first really accessible way of making sense of my feelings.

As I said at some length above, I do not want to say that everyone is non-binary in the same way that Alfred Kinsey encouraged people to think that everyone is bisexual, and that once you’ve nailed down your consistent average the wider flexibility ceases to matter. As someone who used to identify as non-binary, I would never say anything that flippant. But I’m not at all convinced that my lived experience is unique, or even very different from the average transgender person.

For me, the most basic and obvious reason for the usefulness of non-binary language is that the average transperson has internalized a script from the rest of society interrogating their existence. Most transwomen, at some point in their lives, have heard something like “it takes more than a dress, heels and surgery to make a woman”. Queer people in general are also likely to be asked why they are how they are. I’ve heard some truly odd replies to this question when older transwomen have told me about other conversations that they’ve had.

In my own family, there’s a widely circulated story about a trans individual who said she wanted to be female because men open doors. I don’t think I need to dwell on how absurd that is. But if you have been told that you’re mentally ill and have had people demand an explanation from you over and over again, it definitely makes sense that you’d start to think that any answer would be better than no answer, that if you just say something, no matter how transparently false, it will take the heat off of you. If someone badgers you to answer a question over and over again throughout your life, it makes sense that eventually you’d just want them to shut up and go away, and giving a random answer could be a learned way to do that.

Another surface level reason for why non-binary language is useful for trans people within the binary is their lived experience. I have not had the childhood that a ciswoman or a cisman has had. Cismen don’t have their peace of mind ruined by gender dysphoria and ciswoman have female anatomy. As a bare bones concession to objective reality, I have a set of experiences as a transgender person that cispeople simply do not have and vice versa. TERFs are infamous for pointing out the absence of wombs, vaginas, menstruation, etc. Strictly speaking, these remarks are relevant, but not in the way that TERFs maintain that they are. It doesn’t mean that transwomen are less female or that transmen are less male, but it does mean that there are experiences that trans people have that cispeople do not.

If that seems obvious to the point of being silly, let me break down some stuff about myself. My body dysphoria compelled me to persistently seek out hormone replacement therapy and voice training. The stress of my dysphoria compels me to make my body more female. Regardless of what I believe about gender or consciously assert about myself, my bodily transition is definitely headed in a direction that fits within the binary. I don’t know why that is and never have, so my dysphoria seems to have a subconscious origin. According to the definitions, this makes me a transsexual woman, since the motivation comes from and relates to my sex. A big part of my transition is making my body female, which in and of itself is an experience that both cismen and ciswomen do not have. Although I’m female, only a minority of females need to transition. It’s absolutely true that I don’t have a uterus and have never menstruated, but the same can be said of many women, and it fits with the larger phenomena of experiences unique to transpeople. I don’t think owning this uniqueness causes anyone to lose, it certainly doesn’t invalidate anyone. Only in a world where male and female are the only two gendered categories could that be invalidating.

An intuitive objection to this is that mainstream culture in general only accommodates the categories of male and female and to act like this does not have the power to isolate and harm people is naive. I totally agree, but the consequences of social censure is not the same question as whether or not something is real. A lot of us have had conversations with straight people who think that being queer is a “bad idea” because of all the ways that society punishes queerness. This is also more or less what social conservatives mean when they say that the definition of marriage is between a man and a woman.

Asserting that someone disbelieves in something or will attempt to dissuade others from doing something is not evidence against it. A statement of belief or disbelief is not objective evidence of anything. So it’s absolutely true that society punishes people who do not conform to the binary, but that’s not the same question as whether or not non-binary experiences and language matter. I think it even attests to the weakness of the binary that it alienates and oppresses people who identify within the binary, like transsexual women or men, who typically have to deal with a lifetime of reconciling their felt gender with a world that constantly demands an explanation or justification.

There is another objection to this that I really do have mixed feelings about, though; that trans people feeling alienated from the binary is a consequence of internalized transphobia. That’s true and there’s nothing like the difference between a trans persons’ conscious assessment and beliefs and the persistence of body dysphoria to underscore how true it is. Body dysphoria can compel someone to transition in the face of a lifetime of internalizing messages that they should not. At the same time, though, I also believe that part of exorcising bad emotions is to acknowledge that it’s okay to feel them. If you have felt that being trans has caused society to make you feel unwelcome as either a man or a woman, then the next step could be to acknowledge that it’s okay not to be either.

The relationship between graphics and scenario writing in video games

I have attempted two playthroughs of Final Fantasy IV and choked both times. As a FF fan that ain’t normal for me, to say nothing of how excited I was to play it in the beginning. From what I read on the internet prior, it seemed like IV was the turning point for Final Fantasy becoming the narrative heavy experience that we all know today. I don’t think I’ll sound too lame if I own that the Golbez fight in the castle of the dwarves was a factor in the termination of both of my playthroughs, especially if I add that I was playing it on a DS those times. For some reason, Square Enix decided to buff a boss fight in this remake that was already notoriously hard to begin with.

So playthrough one ended with the Golbez fight and playthrough two ended when I started buffing Rydia immediately before she disappears from the party. I got her to learn bio, which most agree is a thing you want to have in the dwarvish Golbez fight, but my nerves were so fried from all the grinding that took that I just didn’t have the patience to keep playing after that point. Just yesterday, though, I was able to start playing the original 16-bit SNES version and I’m actually getting more interested in the events of the story than I was the first time around. Within my first few minutes of SNES FFIV I was reminded that the effect of the Nintendo DS graphics and voice acting was almost as much of a turn off as the remake’s infamous difficulty spike.

No matter what the subject of a film, painting or video game is, how that subject looks is bound to direct your attention at least as much as the script of the subject’s story. However with video games and commercial cinema there is an oddly quantitative way of judging something as qualitative as visual and auditory effect. To me, it’s comparable to saying that photographs have destroyed the reason to ever draw, or that photography has replaced painting. We could digress even further if we dwell on what ways of looking and sounding are treated as the most “natural” or “appealing” in computer animation (I mean, if I wanna look like Serah Farron in FFXIII, I’m gonna need to spend several grand on plastic surgery).

But for now, regardless of what we are treating as real, let’s at least allow that trying to look “real” is something that is widely valued in both video games and big budget movies. How “real” something looks can be valued with strange single-mindedness, though. For some, the fact that black and white film can have color doctored into them is a good enough reason to do it, regardless if certain decisions were originally planned to have the best effect as black and white images. Digitally adding color to a film like Orphee or Les enfants terribles would, to say the absolute least, be very, very single-minded.

I think this was the mistake that was being made in the DS FFIV remake. Voice acting and 3D graphics were added without consideration for how they would change the flow of the action. The voice actors also sound unsure if they are supposed to be melodramatic or earnest. I get that stories and characters are allowed to have tone shifts, but with the FFIV voices the changes sounded too random to be intentional. In the older version, though, the use of text-based dialogue allowed both the delivery of words and their content to go by the player’s own pace. In this regard, I think the DS remake compares particularly badly to the original. Just look at the different presentations of the desolation of the Mage Village and the theft of their crystal. I found the 16-bit portrayal easier on the eyes and therefore easier to take in. Probably because the scenario was written with a 16-bit image in mind.

Anyway, this is more of a random thought of the day. I’m still pretty early in my playthrough but so far everything about the presentation is working better.

Random thoughts about Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ and ‘Doctor Sleep’

In the last few months I’ve quickly mowed my way through both books Stephen King wrote about Danny Torrance and I think the contrast between them has interesting implications. The dialogue between the two is intrigueing but the second one needs it more than the first, a little too much, actually.

Within the first few chapters of Doctor Sleep dealing with the True Knot characters the town Jerusalem’s Lot is mentioned, to say nothing of the close resemblance between the True Knot and the way vampires are portrayed in both ‘Salem’s Lot and the fifth Dark Tower book. The ‘Salem’s Lot nods contained within a Shining sequel is telling. That this is a sequel about Danny Torrance as an adult emulating his father’s mistakes also adds to the implications here.

As a creative writer myself and a litcrit buff I found this interesting but not sufficient to carry the whole weight of Doctor Sleep. The overly-formulaic story can only lead me to believe that Stephen King’s possibly unconscious wish to comment on his earlier work was his main motivation here. The lack of balance and chemistry between the creative retrospective and the lazy plot construction is just too bad since a few characters are written very well and I enjoyed spending time with them (I’m thinking specifically of grown-up Danny, Abra, Abra’s Momo, Rose The Hat and Snakebite Andi- more on that last one later). In the end I would give Doctor Sleep a C-. I still enjoyed reading it, though, and may actually re-read it at some point.

Although the places King chose to place most of his effort made the book lopsided, the beginning is compulsively readable. I think anyone who loved The Shining would find it easy to get sucked in early on, as it picks up with Danny and Wendy Torrance and Dick Hollorran three years after the events of the first book. I also enjoyed reading about Danny’s tentative journey back to sobriety and almost every chapter that involved Rose The Hat or Abra. Even if the book is unbalanced overall, it’s compelling in some places. This, though, just leads me back to the weaknesses. Near the end when Danny is checking up on the lock boxes “in his head” and the True Knot settles at the Overlook Lodge it seems like some special deep connection with The Shining or more satisfying tie-in with his early work is about to happen.

The reader has known that two of those three boxes contain two of the most memorable ghosts from what used to be the Overlook Hotel. The mention of the boxes at that point prompts you to wonder about how your attention was directed early on: not only was our opening look at Danny, Hollorran and lock boxes three years after the events of the first book fun, but it told us centrally important things about the current story. At that point I was wondering if the True Knot really was just an external danger that telepathically “bumped” into Abra at the right time to set the plot in motion- but now, with the plot converging at the former location at the Overlook Hotel and Danny considering opening the boxes up, it seems like the plot is finally coming together. This place in the story even feels consistent with Dick’s cryptic message from the afterlife: all devils come from your childhood. We even learn that Danny’s father impregnated Abra’s grandmother during an alcoholic blackout and that Abra is his niece. It all seems to be coming together. That the True Knot has an affinity for the Overlook Lodge even suggests a deeper connection from their end as well.

Also, since things from early in the story are now proving their relevance, it also seems like the ultimate function of Andi’s arc may be around the corner. If this character we’ve been following for so long is supposed to have some sort of effect on the overall story and her shooting death truly was not the last word, then it seems like the involvement of Andi’s lover at the end would open that up. Ghosts are a thing in this story, after all, and when Andi died I wasn’t quite sure if she seriously went the whole story (as one of the True Knot members we see the most of ) without actually contributing to the plot or interesting participation with other arcs. It seriously looked like Stephen King brought her in for no reason- now that Andi’s lover is doing things at the haunted place, though, now it looks like we’re gonna see why that character was in the story.

Anyway we don’t. Normally, shutting down the whole antagonistic half of a story without giving a compelling reason why the antagonists are there is a bad enough move. The best understanding we are given is that the vampire-like people found the psychic little girl. The True Knot just happened to wander in from the outside.

Now I don’t think that passive protagonists are always a bad idea. Granted, they need to be handled more carefully than active protagonists, but that doesn’t mean they never ever work: they’re just trickier to do, and Doctor Sleep doesn’t pull it off. There is no organic reason outside of the True Knot for Danny and Abra to be in the same story. One of the reasons why this stands out in such a bad way in this book is that, as a sequel, you’re just tempted to remember the precedents set by the first story. In The Shining, all characters and plot elements had clear purposes and the development of the story does not require a spontaneous outside force- everything that happens throughout The Shining happens with all of the things we started the story with. Now sequels can break rules and conventions set down by their source material if the sequel is a totally sufficient story on it’s own and does not need prior context, but Doctor Sleep is not self-sufficient.

While plot-movers that arrive randomly from the outside are not necessarily bad all the time (any more than passive protagonists are bad all the time) they are generally not a safe bet- random outside occurrences within a story need extra work, sorta like how passive protagonists need extra work, and many writers who use both of those tropes do not realize that. Since Doctor Sleep needs The Shining for context and since The Shining did not take these extra risks, the fact that Doctor Sleep takes them and fails is hard to get around. So if Doctor Sleep does not work as a follow-up to The Shining and is not written in a way that makes it wholly self-contained, this sorta leads me back to my suspicion that a wish or need to look back on older work was Stephen King’s real motivation.

A weakness in this that I can cop to immediately is that this whole assessment hinges on my opinion that Doctor Sleep fails as both a sequel and a stand-alone story. That’s totally my opinion but I think that if a book fails in the roles it is presented in, then it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there was a motivation at work that is not connected to how it is presented. If a book that appears to be a sequel does not work as a sequel and cannot be self-sufficient on it’s own, then I think it’s reasonable to suspect that the author had some other feeling or intent in mind.

Since the relationship with early Stephen King novels is front and center, I don’t think it’s going too far to think that this is largely a statement on The Shining. Another statement on \ interpretation of The Shining, the Kubrick film, prompted Stephen King to make his own statement in the form of the 1997 miniseries adaptation. King has felt the need to comment on The Shining in a way that he does not comment on a lot of his other works. While he likes little understated world-building nuances revolving around The Dark Tower, he does not normally make frank connections and statements. Maybe there’s something I’m not getting but I think The Dark Tower is the only other story where King felt the need to say something himself in his own work (granted, that was way more literal than the Danny Torrance stories).

Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Canadian gender identity protection

So I was listening to a recording of Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast just now and was put in the uncomfortable position of getting exasperated with one of my intellectual heroes (Harris).

Harris was interviewing Jordan B. Peterson, which I thought was exciting given Peterson’s thoughts on mythic archetypes. I’m a creative writer myself and I’m also a total spazz for literary criticism, mythology and history. I was kinda stoked about this. But before they got to what I thought would be really interesting they began by discussing a legislative measure in Canada protecting gender identity from spontaneous public heckling.

Soooooo I’m a trans lady myself (on HRT for over two years and been totally out for as long) so I realize I have a protective emotional impulse on this topic. But I think there are glaringly obvious reasons why these legal policies should not be seen as absurd on their face.

Yelling random invective is something that you could end up in court for. If I loudly scream ‘fuck you’ while we are arguing in public I can reasonably expect legal charges. The basic way of behaving in question is not something the mainstream would disagree about beforehand. We all agree that random and spontaneous verbal harassment should have some kind of legal protection or social consequence.

Peterson trots out the Canadian protection of gender identity and preferred pronouns as if people would be hashing it out with you on a regular basis and it wouldn’t be reasonable to impose a legal penalty for it. I know I’m just relaying an anecdote here, but I work in an elementary school. It requires you to be around all kinds of people all day. In general, my gender identity and preferred pronouns are not a problem. Around the time I came out I was assured personally by many of my coworkers that I had nothing but support from them.

I’m not trying to say my lucky experience is normal but I am saying that there is such a thing as an ordinary expectation of civility in mainstream culture. All our lives we’ve learned that baiting trouble is a bad idea so I don’t see how legally protecting preferred pronouns and gender expression is somehow beyond the pale. It does not demand anything that general social mores do not already.

Large diversity of different non-binary pronouns are mentioned by Peterson as a problem and a dangerous foreign step into something static, delicate and necessary. The volume of different pronouns alone is, for Peterson, an indication of scary Marxist post-modern nutjobs taking over the world. Listen to the video yourself if you think I’m exaggerating. Peterson mentions social justice tribunals and means for determining unconscious biases that he says are not supported by science.

I realize that Peterson sees the pronoun question as the ‘bath water’ and the suspect unconscious bias examinations as the ‘baby’ in question here, so he presumably sees the pronoun issue as the tip of the bigger iceberg and, implicitly, not strictly culpable. The segue from the specific policy protecting gender expression and preferred pronouns to Peterson’s general anxieties about social justice kicking open the door to cultural fluidity is glossed over. After talking about employers being sanctioned for the bigoted language of their employees while on the job or with the public, Jordan Peterson says this that this is in keeping with “other elements in the background that are equally reprehensible” and then starts with the social justice tribunals.

You could say that Peterson is not specifically laying blame against transpeople here, but he is also trotting out an implicit association between gender-nonconforming people and social break down. Jordan B. Peterson is a big boy and I think we can safely assume he knows that he’s making the association. The fact that he glosses over it could mean that he doesn’t think it matters, that he takes it as a matter of course or that the audience should know already that the pronoun lead in was a “ringer” to begin with- that it never was the real subject. None of those possibilities provide a sequential justification for the association.

(I don’t wanna dwell on things beyond Peterson’s bald subject jump, but he mentions that he’s worried about the dialogue concerning biology and gender identity- read Julia Serano and Susan Stryker. The trans community is interested and active in that conversation and making it sound like you’ll be slammed in an iron maiden for mentioning it is stupid)

My next big problem here has to do with what I think is a misunderstanding about non-binary language. Let’s start with something nice and plain and personal. To say nothing of the genuine experience of non-binary individuals, non-binary language can make the early steps of coming out easier to understand for trans people within the binary. This I’ve experienced.

In my early twenties I made my first earnest attempts at coming out. In the interest of staying on topic I’ll try to not digress too deep into personal anecdote. I barely knew what I was doing at the time and soon I became anxious to be familiar with a body of information that would make my feelings easier to talk about. I began reading everything I could find about gender variance throughout history and current psychological wisdom. I found book-length studies of male crossdressers, historical texts and pop culture commentary. A lot of it was extremely interesting and academic curiosity alone would have been reason enough to read all that in the end.

Curiosity may have been the only reason in the end, since nothing I found addressed what I wanted: what I wanted was to understand my dysphoria and find a way to think clearly about feelings that would help me to put self-destruction behind me. It just didn’t happen during my gender bending psychology, pop culture and history kick. A book about gender-fluidity did speak to what I was feeling though. A day putzing around in Barnes & Noble put me in touch with Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein.

I said earlier that I wasn’t going to make this particular entry all about me and my life. I’m really not, even now: I’m just trying to explain how language without it’s emphasis on designating someone as male or female has practical applications for trans people within the binary, like myself. I was raised in a starkly non-conformist mixed-race environment both before and after my parents’ divorce. As the child of a single mother- and also as a female-identified queer -I need no convincing as per feminism or the oppressive nature of historical gender roles. A basic part of my nature spoke to a particular state of being- to express it would be to walk into a rhetorical nightmare of “you think femaleness is X”. I had no way of discussing or understanding it, even to myself. For me, learning how to think and talk about gender outside of the binary was a much-needed kiss of life, even if I myself am not non-binary.

So let’s wrap this up: dysphoria has to do with a visceral experience of being required to live in total resistance to your gender identity. If I may hearken back to my parenthetical remarks about Jordan Peterson, I’d be all ears for a definite verdict from evolutionary biology or neurology relating to gender identity. The conflict between how I was reared versus how I felt is so staggering and mysterious that I can’t help but wonder about biological factors. But however amorphous this notion may be for a cis person, let us at least stay with the bedrock that dysphoria is total panic and confusion; dysphoria is to be driven toward what you need because where you are right now is fundamentally not supportable. Dysphoria will tell you what you need to get away from but it will not tell you where you are going. My resistance to dysphoria has taught me that I am a transwoman. I know that now, but simply knowing the word ‘dysphoria’ and the concept of gender-variance could not have told me how I would make sense of things in the end.

In case that’s too wordy: gender dysphoria is a visceral, repulsive experience that does not endear you to normal ways of discussing gender. Non-binary language can be way of disarming aspects of this early on, even if one is not non-binary.

I think that might be all I have to say about this that requires any sort of minutia. And, although I said it would not be, it was largely anecdotal. What I wanted to do was explain one or two plain reasons why a gender-nonconforming person would benefit from non-binary language, whether or not they are non-binary. As far as legal protection and rational expectations go, you cannot yell ethnic slurs or insults without legal sanction- I’m not convinced that protecting gender identity demands anything more of society.