The book chat yesterday was very interesting, and threw some new light on Shadow Man that I’d like to share with you.

The first thing I should note is that Shadow Man doesn’t attempt to create an ideal view of a genderqueer society. The focus of the book is on the conservative Harans, not on the more liberal Concord Worlds. What Scott is trying to do is show how silly our treatment of intersex people is, by creating a world in which intersex births are more common. Her entire knowledge of intersex people appears to have come from Fausto-Sterling’s essay, which is now acknowledged to be woefully simplistic. But that’s not really her point, many other made-up, more complex gender systems for humanity would have done the same job.

I was somewhat surprised that some people thought that the Concord Worlds was supposed to be seen as an ideal society. As Matt Cheney noted, Tatian has his own hang-ups, and I think it is simpler and more sensible to assume that’s because he’s a flawed character as well, rather than assuming that the author is trying to portray an ideal view of gender and failing.

And talking of which, if you can’t figure out what the author intended from reading a book, trying to decide whether the author has “failed” or not is a bit pointless. There are books in which it is very clear that the author is pushing an agenda, and may even has a mouthpiece character, but most writers are more sensible than this.

What would have been nice was for Scott to write a sequel in which Warreven gets to travel to the Concord Worlds and find out that they too have odd hang-ups about the wrangwys, but sadly that didn’t happen.

Anyway, if what you are looking for is a book that gives a realistic portrait of genderqueer people (as we know them), with sympathetic characters that you can identify with, then Shadow Man is not the book for you. My apologies if I gave the impression that it might be.

A particular issue that we discussed is that many of the Haran characters in the book seem to think that Warreven was foolish not to opt to be legally female and marry Tendlathe. From our point of view this seems odd, because our practice is for intersex children to be raised as male if at all possible. Why would any parent want a girl when they have an option to have a boy? Well, that’s the way the doctors present the choice anyway. But on Hara intersex kids don’t have to opt for a gender until adolescence, which changes the equation somewhat. In particular Warreven had the opportunity to become the wife of the dictator’s son, and turned it down to register as “male”.

It is hard to get inside the character’s head here. Possibly Warreven had some inkling of the sort of bigot Tendlathe would become, but 3e could still have registered as female. Maybe registering as male made the point more forcefully. Maybe there was a gender identity issue at play. However, Scott seems blissfully unaware of the concept of gender identity, so I don’t think that is likely. For what it is worth, my view is that Warreven was primarily interested in staking 3is right to 3is identity as a herm. I think 3e chose to register as male because he knew that 3is gender performance was closer to feminine than masculine, and consequently this would create maximum incongruence between 3is legal gender and 3is perceived gender. Registering as male may also have helped further 3is career as a civil rights lawyer.