Spending more time reading 

7/1/2024 

==========================

My actual vacation for the academic year started late last week, after I 
finished a two day camp teaching kids about creative coding

I'm trying to read more. I owe my rawtext compatriots my own write up of 
the book Computers As Theatre, which I've read through once but I feel 
weirdly intimidated to try and get all of my thoughts out about it, so 
instead I ended up reading something completely Not About Computers 
which is the book Female Husbands: A Trans History

I'm in the conclusion with a few pages left when my concentration failed 
and, waiting for the rice cooker to be done so we can have a big pile of 
tofu and broccoli for dinner, I decided to write this post

It's been a good read, one that shows just how messy the history of both 
gender non-conformity and queerness has been in the u.s. and u.k.

It explores the ways that "biological sex" is, in many ways, the newer 
concept than gender

There were people who lived as men and married women and, even after 
death, were still seen as having been men legally by virtue of the 
actions they took

They were steady members of their community, churchgoes, married to women, and 
did work like other men so they lived out the "gender" of man

But the book traces how biological essentialism was an outgrowth of 
backlashes to feminist organizing so that by the end of its two century 
journey we went from "oh did you know the guy down the street had lady 
parts after all? weird, right? well I'll go see how his widow is doing, 
I know she's taking his death hard" to anti-cross-dressing laws and 
"scientific" arguments for why feeeeemales were inherently unsuited to 
physical labor and governance alike

Now I'm not saying the past was better, it was still really bad for a 
lot of these people and they faced punishment when their "deception" was 
found out 

but!!

it's not as linear of a journey as you'd expect and I was actually kind 
of shocked to realize just how recent a lot of the ideas of having a 
"real" sex that is different than what you do in your community really 
is