#p. 42

[everyillumi]

[valend]

They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness;

awwww hyde is just such a petite little boy 🥺

[returntomytilene]

‘[According to Renée Vivien], Lilith is not merely the first failed woman. She is perhaps the conscience of mankind; she combines the madness of fever and desire with the perversity of the outcast. Her true crime  is her hunger for the Absolute—that is, her quest for knowledge, her inability to compromise. It is likely, too, that Vivien sought to replace Orpheus with Lilith as a symbol of the quest for hermetic knowledge and also to enthrone her as the goddess of the truly decadent. She is perverse rather than pure, she inspires delirium more than salvation.’

— Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page

[moon-ager]

mr welsh, did you conduct a thorough investigation into some of my worst personal insecurities and feelings of guilt as inspiration for this paragraph, or.....?

[firstreadbooks]

“I’m good. How are you?” “I don’t even know anymore. Is that diet?”

Chapter 3, p.42 (TFiOS)

Kaitlyn doesn’t know because she’s not certain whether the correct British response is ‘I’m good’, ‘I’m well’, ‘I’m fine’, ‘I’m grand’, or ‘Sound as a pound my love, and you?’

[firstreadbooks]

Kaitlyn just happened to be an extremely sophisticated twenty-five-year-old socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in Indianapolis. Everyone accepted it.

Chapter 3, p.42 (TFiOS)

What a load of pandering, cissexist bullshit. How is it that a 16 year old American girl who says she’s a 25 year old British socialite is just simply accepted while trans people (trans women in particular) are being murdered?

Before you wonder why I’m bringing trans people up for this, consider this: the ‘stuck in the wrong body’ line might be used time and again to describe the trans experience, but it was actually thought up by cis people, who own the majority on trans discourse by simply being heard but have no idea what the trans experience is like. It’s the same narrative that justifies violence against trans people, that makes the people who grow up by this narrative believe that trans people aren’t valid. It’s the same line that, when met with the quandary of how to portray trans people in film, makes people say ‘well, it’s perfectly fine for Eddie Redmayne to play a trans woman, because he’s portraying the character before surgery – but it’s a surprise he’s playing her after surgery too, shouldn’t they have found an actress for that?’

Now consider Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be a ‘transracial’* [sic] Black woman. The ‘stuck in the wrong body’ line was used in the media to describe her experience, and while it has never been correct, it’s been aligned with (cis owned) trans discourse for so long that people genuinely began comparing her experience to that of trans people and saying she’s the same as Caitlyn Jenner (a comparison about which YouTuber Kat Blaque made an excellent video (link provided below)).

All that considered, that Green used this line to describe Kaitlyn calling herself a 25 year old British socialite just shows how completely insensitive he is to trans people in general, knowing that readers will think Kaitlyn is deluded and believe trans people are just as much so (with one stark difference - ‘everyone’ accepts her). 

So let me ask again, why is Kaitlyn more accepted? Because at the end of the day, she’s still a cis girl with a serious case of Anglophilia, and how a cis person presents and expresses their identity will always be considered far more valid than anything trans people have to say about themselves.

[Kat Blaque’s video] (Visit her tumblr page here.)

* The term ‘transracial’ has been used incorrectly by and about Dolezal, as the term was originally used to describe adopted children whose race doesn’t match that of their parents (e.g. Zahara, Pax and Maddox, the children of Brad and Angelina Jolie Pitt. The better term for Dolezal’s experience, as a White woman who believes she’s Black, would be ‘transethnic’, if anything.

[firstreadbooks]

“Darling,” she said, vaguely British. “How are you?” People didn’t find the accent odd or off-putting.

Chapter 3, p.42 (TFiOS)

Why is she putting on a fake British accent? What is going on in her life that she needs to do this? How do other people not find it off-putting? How is she not being bullied mercilessly? Is she doing this to gain popularity by playing the part of the favourable (i.e. white) foreigner?

[firstreadbooks]

Mom was also in the food court, alone, in a corner where she thought I couldn’t see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and reading through some papers. Medical stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.

Chapter 3, p.42 (TFiOS)

Is this all for the Phlanxifor trial they’re ostensibly in at the moment? Is Mama Lancaster actually recording the drug’s effects on her daughter’s health? We may never know.