"Sisters with Transistors" is a superb film. Before I watched it, the only one of the many extraordinary women presented therein that I knew of was Delia Derbyshire.
I had no idea that the soundtrack to The Forbidden Planet (which may very well be the greatest Science Fiction film ever made), was by Louis and Bebe Barron on equipment they pretty much entirely built themselves. Today, we plug in a laptop, back then you were a true pioneer.
+1 Sisters with Transistors. I watched this in the dark at the Metrograph, a theater in the outskirts of Manhattan, with maybe six other people, and the experience was transcendental.
When I was quite a bit younger I went through a Wendy Carlos obsession, and spent a lot of time with Switched On Bach, Clockwork Orange, and some of Wendy’s other synth works.
Much later on, after my interests had wandered a long way from analog synth stuff, I went through a Bossa Nova phase, and at some point discovered Joao Gilberto’s 1973 self titled album which shortly became one of my favourite albums of all time. It’s an absolutely hypnotic, beautifully stripped back yet harmonically complex distillation of the bossa sound.
Only after having listened to it surely hundreds of times I read up on the recording and discovered that Carlos was the sound engineer!
Now 83, she supposedly remains active in music, but is still an elusive figure who fiercely protects her work...
Her self-imposed seclusion is a cautionary tale for us today, something that she admitted in the 1979 People interview. “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,” she said. “There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
It's really hard to say how things might have gone had we taken some other path and she remains a reclusive figure. Some things are intractable problems, like it or not. (And I definitely don't like how hard the world makes it for trans individuals.)
Love the Tron soundtrack and am happy to learn about Wendy Carlos. Unfortunately, she has fought tirelessly to keep her music from being digitized and available online or streaming. I did however find this delightful collaboration she did with Weird Al Yankovic remaking Peter and the Wolf:
There must be a balance point between greed and control vs letting people enjoy your work. I understand the need for artists to earn a living, but being to restrictive will paint you in to a corner.
In a way she is doing the same to her music as she did to her self; hiding it away from public view
I lived in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where Wendy was from in 1982 when Wendy did this and never heard of her. Pawtucket was a tough multi-ethnic working class town, so I can't imagine how difficult it was for her to be public at that time. I was really into synthesizers then too. Amazing stuff.
Poor Wendy. I was literally thinking of her yesterday when I pulled out my original Clockwork Orange record. I would love her to do a masterclass and be able to extract some of her knowledge for my own experiments in electronic music. The whole world has lost out here. It's not too late though, I hope we see something from her.
As a trans woman; semi-professional musician, producer; audio engineer, and for whom Stanley Kubrick is my favourite artist of any medium, Wendy Carlos is one of the single greatest inspirations of my life.
I can’t personally imagine the struggle she went through all that time ago; having the courage to be herself when even today it’s been a personal struggle.
Gems like her really only come around every once in a while.
Lynn Conway is another woman I look up to. The trans women who lived between 1950 and 1980 and still managed to advance their careers impress me, and I do my best to emulate them.
> Upon completing her transition in 1968, Conway took a new name and identity, and restarted her career in what she called "stealth-mode". (From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway)
She managed to have groundbreaking impact in two disconnected careers after restarting from scratch!
Achieving something while struggling with gender dysphoria (as many trans people do) is overcoming adversity, which is the exact opposite of privilege.
If you've never experienced the sort of depersonalization and disconnection from our embodied selves that many of us trans people have, you have no clue how difficult it can be to do anything at all.
"Transgender workers report unemployment at twice the rate of the population as a whole (14% vs. 7% at the time the workers were surveyed)." "More than four in 10 transgender people (44%) who are currently working are underemployed." "Transgender workers are nearly four times more likely than the population as a whole to have a household income of under $10,000 (15% vs. 4% at the time the workers were surveyed)." https://www.thetaskforce.org/transgender-workers-at-greater-...
"Almost half of transgender people are unemployed, a survey by the Think-tank for Action on Social Change has found. Among the 51 per cent cent who had jobs, many settled for dismal salaries, the group’s research showed." https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/half-of-transgender-peopl...
"Trans Pulse Canada found that 24 percent of trans people have an annual income under $15,000, while 24 percent have an income between $15,000 and $30,000. With a poverty line of individual income at $25,920, almost half of trans people live either below the poverty line, or very close to it." https://xtramagazine.com/health/trans-health-canada-health-i...
One of the most frustrating things as a Carlos fan is that she is a huge fan of surround sound, records for surround sound, yet hasn't released any of her catalogue in true multichannel surround.
Owed to my father's long interest in electronic music, I'm the thankful owner of several of the 1960s/1970s original print Walter Carlos-attributed vinyl records and a few of the 1980s Wendy Carlos-attributed ones. Switched-On Bach/Brandenburgs, Sonic Seasonings, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer etc. all played a large part in my discovery of electronic music as a child.
The first Bach I heard as a kid were those vinyl records. Never thought about them as electronic music, just after getting a little bit older I realized this was connected with computers. I was always impressed by the covers [1].
The interesting thing is that these vinyl records were at home and at my grandparents home who love classical music. The impact of Wendy Carlos evidently goes beyond electronics.
These are still copyrighted recordings, and they seem to be available in the usual places you would find copyrighted digital audio.
Her work is not licensed for digital distribution, and largely out of print.
So, there's unfortunately no way to compensate her directly for her works.
And "work" is an understatement. Moog synths of the day were barely instruments. Imagine playing a symphony (symphonic arrangement) using only a single glass filled with water.
You could get any note you wanted, but only one at a time and even that required constant retuning.
Yes, Discogs is basically the IMDb of musical recordings. Its marketplace is probably the best place on the internet to find and sell physical copies of pretty much any musical recording.
They don't sell or host digital recordings, presumably for copyright reasons.
Ripping these original vinyl editions is already somewhere on my list of things-to-do-before-I-get-too-old. Currently I don't have a functional pickup for my record player. I will get around to it, some day. The Switched-On Boxed Set (CDs) was released in the late 90s, and I happen to have ripped that one about 20 years ago. I should do another FLAC or high-quality AAC rip of that box, for posterity, before eventual CD rot happens.
I was 8 when my dad handed me a set of headphones and had me listen to the first few minutes of Switched On Bach. Still vividly remember that experience, it was like a rapture.
Wendy's works are tough to find on streaming services these days. I'd love to listen to Timesteps again, from A Clockwork Orange.
I'm going to have to dig into Wendy Carlos more and will thanks to this thread and comments. When I came across the above I must have gotten sidetracked with Laurie Spiegel.
Tron 2 soundtrack was such a huge disappointment from me, and I'm a die hard Daft Punk fan. Listened to it once, never went back to it.
The original Tron soundtrack is such a joy, totally underrated... Amazing how she blended electronics with orchestration... in my memory it feels like a purely electronic soundtrack but it's not at all. The artistic impulse would be to go full electronic with something like this, she went in the opposite direction, and gave the score a sense of humanity (humans in the computer world).
Carlos kept pushing the envelope on everything she did. Up there with Delia Derbyshire to me... total pioneer.
Marginally off topic here, but Occams Laser created a 'sequel' album to the Daft Punk score, and I feel it more closely feels like an updated original Tron soundtrack.
There are two complete albums they've released: The Grid[1], which is a concept album based on the 1982 original, and Return to the Grid[2] which is a reimagined concept album for Tron Legacy, both that I absolutely love listening to.
Listened to a few tracks, this is right up my alley, thanks!
It's a little less Tron and a little more 80's film soundtrack vibe (which is also awesome).. The style seems to have come back in vogue a bit (Stranger Things etc.).
This reminds me a lot of the Le Matos soundtrack for Turbo Kid. [1] Their soundtrack to Summer of '84 has the same synth vibe but adds the horror soundtrack vibe, also recommended.
I would also recommend the Tron 2.0 (which was a video game released before Tron Legacy) soundtrack. It reimagines a few tracks and otherwise expands in a similar style to the first movie.
Also Tron 2.0 game nailed the aesthetic, I wish Tron Legacy did. It just looked like your run-of-the-mill orange-and-teal sci-fi film. Such a wasted opportunity.
edited: You know I never paid attention to the soundtrack to the game, just listened to it... holy cow you're right they did a great job! Tons of cues from the original film... thanks for this!
I liked the soundtrack for what it was but my ears had expected to hear the leitmotifs I was familiar with.
It's like watching a new Star Wars sequel and hearing no leitmotifs. Not The Force theme / Luke's theme, not Leia, not Yoda, nothing to tie it back to the original.
In the sequel they only had the leitmotif in a tiny scene (Jeff Bridges mouths it). And that was it.
I visited the Moog museum this summer with a friend while visiting Asheville, NC. I asked if they had any Wendy Carlos related memorabilia and they didn't seem to. I think may be there was a Switched on Bach vinyl up on a wall in the back.... It made me feel a little sad. I think living with gender dysphoria hurts people's self-esteem tremendously. She also lived in a time when April Ashley, who was the image of feminine beauty and grace, was accosted by old ladies in parks to shame her for "pretending" to be a woman once she was outed by UK tabloids just as her career began to take off. It's understandable why she'd want to avoid embracing fame. Even today trans people, and especially women, are an acceptable punching bag for both the public at large and public figures to take out their frustrations on....
She didn't become world famous like she may have if she'd been lucky enough to be born cisgender, but the thing that matters most is whether she found happiness in her private life. I hope she did.
The final paragraph of the article is interesting though:
> Her self-imposed seclusion is a cautionary tale for us today, something that she admitted in the 1979 People interview. “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,” she said. “There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
While that kind of tolerance/indifference wasn't available to everyone -- it probably helped to be wealthy enough to do what you want, and to be already established as a respected musician (Carlos actually was and still is world-famous!), and I'm sure it wasn't even as universal for Carlos as she was feeling it to be when she gave that quote in 1979 -- the quote makes me wonder if things have gotten worse over the past few years.
While there's more public acceptance in some quarters, it's also become a much bigger controversy in fact. It's hard to imagine a public figure feeling the kind of "indifference" Carlos described, where it didn't actually effect her career much, it wasn't a big deal to it. It was seen as an oddity, yes, but trans was perhaps not the cultural flashpoint like it is now.
Rather than "even today", I wonder and suspect that some things may actually have gotten much worse than they were in 1979 -- for all kinds of things, actually.
> It was an oddity, but trans was perhaps not the cultural flashpoint like it is now.
That's a wonderful wish, but I don't think it holds up to the evidence.
Off the top of my head:
1. If you watch HBO's Lady and the Dale, you'll see that in the mid 1970s a local reporter was hounding the company not because he suspected fraud. (Apparently the entire company was fradulent.) Nope, he wanted to reveal that Carmichael was really a man who was dressed as a woman. (If someone told me that Eugene Levy's character from Splash was based on this reporter, I'd believe them. :)
That documentary had later commentary from the same reporter (in the 80s/90s, I think)-- still proud that he outed a trans person.
2. Check out Gloria Steinem's mid 70s musings on transgenderism. Her thoughts in a 1977 essay on the subject would be right at home today on the alt-right podcasting space, and there are probably also many HN'ers lurking here who agree whole-heartedly with her anti-trans surgery statements.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to the relevant article ATM, but I'm pretty sure this quote was written in the context of the same anti-trans-surgery chapter-- "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
The point is-- we're talking about Gloria fucking Steinem! And her non-apology apology to the trans community didn't appear until 2014 or so[1].
The fact that Amazon sells trinkets with the "shoe doesn't fit" phrase tells me that there's probably a lot more anti-trans history that's been swept completely down the memory hole.
> in the mid 1970s a local reporter was hounding the company not because he suspected fraud. (Apparently the entire company was fradulent.) Nope, he wanted to reveal that Carmichael was really a man who was dressed as a woman.
That local reporter was Tucker Carlson's father, Dick Carlson.[0] Let's just say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
"In a way, transsexuals themselves are also making a positive contribution by proving that chromosomes aren't everything. By ignoring this internal structure they cannot change, and focusing on external body appearances and socialization, they are demonstrating that both biological women and men may have within them the qualities of the opposite gender and thus the full range of human possibilities. Unfortunately, this point isn't made in the popular press. On the contrary, transsexualism is used mostly as a testimony to the importance of sex roles as dictated by a society obsessed with body image, genitals, and 'masculine' or 'feminine' behavior. But the main question is whether some individuals are being forced into self-mutilation by the biases around them, and whether their self-mutilation is then used and publicized to prove that those biases are true.
"Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism. Even while we protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision, and to be identified as he or she wishes, we have to make clear that this is not a long-term feminist goal. The point is to transform society so that a female can 'go out for basketball' and a male doesn't have to be 'the strong one'. Better to turn anger outward toward changing the world than inward toward mutilating our bodies into conformity. In the meantime, we shouldn't be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals. Sex-role traditionalists know a political tribute when they see one.
"But the question remains: If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"
This point of view doesn't seem typical of your average alt-right enthusiast to me, she's considering transsexualism within the context of radical feminism, specifically the abolition of gender.
I'm trans myself, and my general belief is that Steinem's position is far more defensible if we didn't have our personal lived experiences with gender dysphoria, or the evidence for things like regret rates for gender-affirming surgeries being very low. Second-wave feminism on trans issues was largely incorrect and harmful, but that is mostly a contingent fact rather than a necessary one.
This is as opposed to second-wave feminism on, for example, sex work issues, which is necessarily bad because it is more interested in moralizing than in caring about freedom or materiality.
Of course, anyone spreading the same propaganda now will not be part of the global struggle against fascism, as Judith Butler put it.
> Second-wave feminism on trans issues was largely incorrect and harmful, but that is mostly a contingent fact rather than a necessary one.
Not sure I understand what that means.
Just to clarify: I don't have the research in front of me, but I'd be willing to bet that by 1977 there were at least two or three decades of research on trans issues relevant to Steinem's words about trans people. E.g., more than enough to persuade any good faith writer on the topic (or even a writer who knew and talked to a friend in that field of research) that the "shoe doesn't fit" quote is at best wildly misleading.
In other words, I'm claiming Steinem was wrong by 2022 standards, wrong by 1977 standards, and non-apologetic by any standard.
> Of course, anyone spreading the same propaganda now will not be part of the global struggle against fascism, as Judith Butler put it.
I agree.
For some reason, Steinem's words on this topic irk me, it's my day off, and I want to keep writing this post. :)
I get that Steinem was writing a political essay. And I can even imagine a line of thinking that says, hey, good for trans people, but that's a medical intervention for a specific condition (that turns out to apply to both sexes, btw), and I think it's a distraction from the specific feminist battle against oppression I'm trying to describe.
Then all she would have had to do in 2014 is say, "Sorry trans people, your battle should have been part of my battle all along. Accept my apology, and let's work together!"
But nooooo, she had to concoct her own artisanal justification to exclude trans people, using only wit and first principles, and add a little zinger for book sales. Then, when called out, shift the conversation away from her previous lack of knowledge, and claim a lack of understanding on the part of her opposition.
Well, the issue is that a lot of the trans research that had been conducted by then got burned by the Nazis. The modern idea of gender identity which is now widely recognized as the best possible explanation for the empirical outcomes we see was just being formed, and the dominant players in the field were still "sexologists" who decided whether someone was trans based on how attracted they personally were to their patient.
(John Money, who created the idea of gender identity in the 50s, was wildly off base about the specifics, which resulted in the tragic human rights violation of David Reimer, a cisgender man forced to live as a girl with crippling gender dysphoria. He also lied about the success of his forced gender reassignments, which resulted in routine intersex genital mutilation -- the one procedure that every single right-wing US bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors carefully excludes!)
Or at least that's my read of the situation! I could be wrong.
I actually had an endocrinologist who interned with John Money and was horrified by his actions.
Money's main failure was his belief that gender is more or less exclusively a social constuct. Gender roles certainly are, but one's innate sense of their own gender is not.
> This is as opposed to second-wave feminism on, for example, sex work issues, which is necessarily bad because it is more interested in moralizing than in caring about freedom or materiality.
The radical feminist position on prostitution is about reducing harm to women as a class. That a minority choose to willingly engage in sex work doesn't negate the structural issues at play here. Most women in prostitution are from marginalized backgrounds and many are trafficked. Where is their freedom?
Fundamentally this is about men holding physical, sexual, and economic power over women, enforced by violence or the threat of it. Treating women as a product to be consumed and profited off, rather than co-equal individuals. What is so bad about wanting an end to this?
I'm specifically talking about people like Andrea Dworkin, who said:
"Prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman's body. [...] In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after"
This doesn't distinguish between survival sex work and people who are doing it more by choice, nor does it seek to improve the material conditions behind the lives of those forced into sex work, so that they have other choices and survival sex work can organically disappear. Nor does it connect survival sex work to other sorts of difficult jobs with great bodily risks.
Instead, politically, second-wave feminism has sought to orient the full weight of the carceral state against sex workers (i.e. the Nordic model), with all the expected consequences.
> If anyone was sympathetic to the struggle, it was Dworkin. She just acknowledged that it was also harmful and contributing to oppression.
Lemmy read the quote again:
> "In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after"
That's a strident statement that leaves no room for interpretation. It's clear that it's the stated opinion of the author that no woman who was fully informed of the nature of the work beforehand but prostitutes herself, could ever do it by choice, ever enjoy it, or ever have it be a meaningful, beneficial part of her life.
That right there is my problem with Dworkin's statements and other statements like them. At best, they entirely ignore (and at worst, they seek to silence so as to make the discussion "focused and un-muddled") people who enjoy fucking, and also enjoy fucking for money.
Dworkin had to prostitute herself in order to survive in the 1970s. I think you're barking up the wrong tree. If anyone was sympathetic to the struggle, it was Dworkin. She just acknowledged that it was also harmful and contributing to oppression.
That seems sensible too. What then do you make of Carlos' quote there from 1979? Maybe not even true for her as she was saying it? (why might she have said it then?) Or she somehow had very unusual experience? (for unclear reasons?) Other? Who knows, but you don't think it was an accurate or representative thing to say?
Look back in the article at what she was sacrificing in order to avoid potential problems. She had Stevie Wonder and George Harrison in her house and couldn't make herself walk down the stairs to meet them. When she did meet face to face with people, she pasted on sideburns and dressed in a suit to appear as a man.
I mean, think about that last part for a moment. Gender dysphoria caused distress in Carlos. Transitioning eased that distress for her. Then she was dressing in drag to present publicly for her career-- dressing in the exact way which previously caused her so much distress that she decided to transition in the first place!
Those practices are almost certainly the "monstrous waste of years of my life" she's talking about.
Anyhow, both things are true. First, the public was vastly more tolerant/indifferent than what she was protecting herself against (and, therefore, the precautions she had taken turned out to have been too extreme). Second, transphobia was so common during the time that even well-known feminists could spew forth with literally no repercussions for decades (and even then, no discernible repercussions AFAICT).
In short, Stevie Wonder and George Harrison are pretty cool guys. :)
Makes sense. Do you think a public musician today might have the experience of "“The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent", though?
It still seems to me that something has changed here, for the worse. That it's very unlikely that such a public figure today could discover that despite their fears"the public" was largely indifferent and unconcerned about it. sassyonsunday below, who I was replying to, seems to agree at least in part too. Which doesn't necessarily conflict with anything you said.
Anyway, either it is or not, we can have different takes, and we're not going to work out the answer here!
> I actually wonder if things have gotten worse over the past few years.
They've gotten consistently worse since about 2015.
I started transitioning in 2009 when I was 18. I come from a very conservative environment and growing up I'd even tried to come out as gay a few times only to be "shot down" more or less but in college I used my own money and I found doctors to help me look how I wanted and I started dating men openly and as awful as it is to say, because I looked and acted the part people got over it pretty fast and begrudgingly accepted that I - at least - wasn't a man. My parents even got upset with me a long while ago when I insinuated that I was a part of the gay community because they said it was disrespectful to my then boyfriend who is now my husband (he had only dated cis girls before me and is straight to anyone who hasn't run a DNA test on me ha).
These days I can feel a change even from people who were kind to me before. All the coverage on conservative media outlets, the JK Rowling "trans women are a threat to women" and the Matt Walsh "trans women are mentally ill perverts" talking points have eroded goodwill so much that more religious and conservative members of my own family avoid me now as where they didn't before and I feel that I'm only able to have a good life because I'm in the fortunate position of being "passable" and attracted to men.
In 2012 when I came out to someone they'd usually just be curious about my experiences. Even conservative Christians and Republicans. In 2022 almost nobody is curious except about which surgeries you've had because they've already made their mind up about how they feel about you. For about 50% of the population that means you're a piece of scum who deserves ridicule and punishment (if it looks like you could still pass as male physically) or excommunication (if it looks like you're so feminine and far gone that you couldn't fit in as a man), for about 40% of the population that means indifference akin to what you'd get back in the good old days and for about 10% it means an outpouring of support and love in an attempt to make up for the 50% who are openly hostile.
I think more and more trans people are taking the Wendy Carlos approach these days because of this. Much of the community wants to avoid attention and get along with their lives. There's a growing trend of people "boy moding" or "man moding" which is where they take hormone replacement therapies but dress in drag to try to fit in as their gender assigned at birth in public the same way that Wendy did. As an amusing sidenote, many of these people begin "male failing" which is where the hormone replacement therapies make it impossible for them to pass as their gender assigned at birth and so they are read as being trans still but coming from the other direction.... It's so sad that it has to be this way.
Being trans myself, I start to feel that the tolereance upward trend I noticed while growing up has stopped and even coming down in some cases/niches. I started transitioning in 2020, live in a relatively tolerant country like Argentina but feel that it's not like 5-10 years ago. IMO it has to do with the global economic downturn and political polarization, I think there is a correlation between tolerance and wealthiness
I am happy if gender therapy helped you I think it is fine for society to be critical however. I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets.
Sadly any discussion is immediately considered a personal attack so we two camps.
Every single person on the planet will have regrets in 20 years. A significant portion will have large regrets about things they cannot undo. This is human. It is not your job to make trans people miserable today because of your worry some of them might hypothetically have regrets in the future.
It is actually not fine for society to be "critical", when it means discarding the metaethics of reducing suffering in favor of the metaethics that flows out of believing that their interpretation of a 2000-year-old book is the absolute truth.
What percentage of detransitioners have been taken in by anti-trans panic and social contagion? What percentage will regret detransitioning? There are already quite a few examples: Elisa Shupe and Ky Schevers, who were both politically active in anti-trans movements, later retransitioned (and/or found a gender identity that works better for them) and regret the time they spent organizing against trans people.
That's a narrowly individualistic view of the role of medicine in society.
Medicine has a social context as well. This relatively recent idea that someone can become more female or more male through drugs and surgery is one that has repercussions on how we as a society view the two sexes, what constitutes a woman or a man, and what is an acceptable expression of one's masculinity or femininity.
Maybe it's the right idea. But we should all reserve the right to be critical and consider alternatives, for this and any other idea with broad societal implications.
> This relatively recent idea that someone can become more female or more male through drugs and surgery
The Hijra community (Indian trans/non-binary) has been around for thousands of years, and surgical castration has been one traditional way for them to achieve their identity during that period. It's not relatively recent.
In any event, I think in a free society we must start with the premise that all things are permitted and only with valid reason restrict that freedom. There are many valid reasons, but merely being critical of someone else's means of existence is not what I would regard as sufficient reason to restrict their personal freedom. At a minimum, potentially cognizable harm should be shown. And to be clear, I don't think there's any potentially cognizable harm to be found in someone conforming to their own gender identity.
A castration cult that abducts young boys, chops their balls off, and sells them into the sex trade is not really a great example of this. It baffles me why people who support Western transgenderism liken it to the hijra, as it's hardly a flattering comparison.
Correct, the hijra community is an abusive set of cults with strict hierarchies. It is, however, what appears to be the least bad option for a lot of Indian trans people facing ostracism. This reflects incredibly poorly on Indian society at large.
Many trans people that join the hijra community leave it due to the abuse. The ex-hijra community is one of trans women that has been around for roughly as long as the hijra community has been.
Here's a project from former members of the hijra community that left because of the abuse they faced in it: https://aravaniartproject.com
In any case, trans people have been around for as long as people have been around.
Trans is a Western cultural import applied to the hijra, this isn't how they traditionally see themselves, nor wider Indian society, e.g. if we look at misogynist cultural practices such as sati, with widows immolated on their husband's funeral pyre, these never applied to hijra as they aren't considered to be women, or men. If the idea of hijra was imported back to the West and applied to transwomen here there would be an uproar.
Not everyone, but plenty of people in the community and outside of it see themselves as trans women.
The western idea of transness is better (more freedom, less suffering) so of course it is seeing adoption worldwide. I'm the exact opposite of a cultural relativist. I think it is morally
good for the best cultural ideas to win.
In any case it still doesn't change the fact that something resembling trans people have been around in every single culture for a very long time. It is because transness is universal, a part of the human condition.
I don't have a right to determine how you use and/or modify your body and you don't have that right over me. That's called bodily autonomy, and is about as clear cut a human right as you'll be able to articulate.
The social context has nothing to do with it, that's just a way to say that if enough people say that you can't do to yourself what you want to that that makes them right, which has historically led to all kinds of wrongs. See also: the right to euthanasia, abortion, being gay and so on and so on. It's always the sanctimonious groups that are hell bent on telling others how to live, but it never was any of their business.
How 'we as society' view this has no bearing on something that is ultimately the domain of a single individual, the person affected.
In the United States this is codified by "The right of the people to be secure in their persons" though of course there is plenty of hairsplitting going on about what that actually means, even though the simplest reading is to take it for what it says.
The implications of this are far reaching (for instance: I'm on the one side against a vaccine mandate because it would infringe on that right, on the other I think that a lot of people have allowed themselves to be pushed towards this on a pretext).
That is your opinion, but consider another topic: elective disablement. Some people are very insistent on having their spinal cord surgically severed or getting their arms and legs chopped off or being permanently blinded, or similar.
If you naively consider the topic only from a bodily autonomy perspective, then the answer is deceptively simple: get the blades out and start slicing. But this ignores the wider medical ethics concerns over whether it's the right thing to do for the patient, if the surgeon is causing harm by doing so, if gratifying the patient's short-term desires genuinely helps them in the long-term over their entire life, if it's reasonable to expect a surgeon to perform such a procedure and how they may feel in the aftermath, if there are any other interventions that would be more effective. And societal questions over whether it's ethical to deliberately add new members to a population who already find it difficult to find the support they need, how this will affect others who may now be situational obliged to assist with this person's new disability, and so on.
It makes no sense to focus solely on the individual and ignore the wider context, when there are so many other factors to consider.
My existence hasn't been a burden on anyone. I worked hard to make sure that I put as little stress on my parents and grandparents that I could through everything and took out loans to pay for everything and paid the loans off. I've had surgeries but I'm not disabled. I work and pay taxes and have friends and a husband and participate in a large social circle. Forcing me to live as a gay man with gender dysphoria would have limited the possibilities in my life with no discernible benefit to society.
The only joy I found in life before I transitioned fully was in doing drugs and hooking up with guys. I could have maybe started a career and settled down with a man while living as a gay man but I doubt it. My misery was all consuming. My goodness, when I was 5 or 6 I remember bargaining with God to make me a girl and vowing to hold my breath until he would. I passed out many nights doing that in bed when I was alone with my thoughts and my sadness about not being a girl hit the hardest.
As a teenager I could barely function and nearly died from an eating disorder. I hated every masculine thing about my body and with testosterone pumping through me the only thing I could do to feel less masculine was starve myself, to try to be smaller.... In short I wasn't functional and I was physically withering away to the point where pneumonia nearly killed me because my body was so weak.
After I transitioned I stopped living in survival mode and started building an actual life.... I also gained a few pounds and got fit instead of being a shambling skeleton. I doubt my story is unique among gender dysphorics.
So whatever. You can debate the ethics of whether or not society was better off with me being a starving depressed twink versus a trans woman I guess but if you think it's bad for society that I was able to look how I want and start a family and feel happy I think you've got weird ideas about how the world works.
This is apples and oranges. Let's agree for the sake of argument that people do not have the right to turn themselves into burdens on society. Mutilatory spinal cord surgery falls under that category, but gender corrective surgery does not.
Well here's the thing, this has already been a hotly debated topic by medical ethicists and philosophers, who have indeed considered many factors other than the individualistic bodily autonomy viewpoint.
That's a mis-representation of what bodily autonomy stands for in the context of elective surgery. The ethics of medicine are a complex and very well established domain that extremely cautiously moves forward to ensure they get it right. And when they do not the damage is incalculable, for instance gay conversion therapy and other such niceties.
So before you go off on a tangent about what is and is not accepted practice and which things doctors are required to do and which things they abstain from on ethical grounds I will have to bow out because we are at the limits of my knowledge on the subject and that's not for want of reading material. Let me close with: I know where the line lies in simple cases, but if you start dragging in things that I have not spent enough time on/read about/have knowledge about then I simply will not be able to hold that conversation. If you have this knowledge then more power to you, but so far you have not convinced me of it and you come across as an ideologue.
Of course. Critical in the sense of skeptical. However a lot of "critics" of trans people act much more like schoolyard bullies or people worried that rock 'n roll music will make the children worship satan than people with fair concerns about the wellbeing of others.
> I don't want to see documentaries in 20 years about people having regrets
There isn't any decision that people can make that will leave 100% of people satisfied. Gender therapy has existed in its modern form for about 100 years now and in that time study after study shows that people who go through with it are happy with the results 90%-98% of the time. This is higher than most treatments of any kind.
You'll find that almost every commentator who talks about detransitioners or trots some out for a political show has the end objective of ending all gender affirming care for all people and replacing it with conversion therapy due to their ideology. In the case of someone like Janice Raymond that reason is radical feminism. For someone like Matt Walsh it is traditional Catholicism. In both cases they are misleading the public by insinuating that gender therapy is some sort of factory process where hapless victims are swept onto a conveyor belt and mutilated haphazardly.
People who transition and then regret it will always exist. Just like people will regret getting any sort of elective surgery. Just like people will come out as gay and then later regret it and then later regret that they regretted it and so on.... It's a story as old as time.
This study tracked people over a 50 year period and found a regret rate of 2%.
> The FM:MF sex ratio fluctuated but was 1:1.66 for the whole study period. There were 15 (5 MF and 10 MF) regret applications corresponding to a 2.2 % regret rate for both sexes. There was a significant decline of regrets over the time period.
The worrying thing is not that 2% regretted their decision, the worrying thing is that the people who are against trans people would be LESS happy if the figure were to be 0%. They want 100% of trans people to regret transition and repress because that would make reality conform better to their ideological leanings where "men are men" and "women are women" because God made them that way.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the source of regret is... people being jerks. Upon transition, transgender people often lose the support of their friends and family, and endure abuse by the public at large. The anti-trans community is abusive and repressive, and they (if indirectly) point to the results of those efforts as a reason not to transition.
This reminds me of Henry Rollins' song, "Icon" from his Weight album. It's about the trappings of fame/being a rock star. I feel like he wrote it as a reminder to himself, just as much as he wrote it for others.
The lyrics[1] to the song are great, but one line in particular:
I have to imagine living in New York in the late 60s through 70s also contributed to the acceptance/indifference that might not be afforded to others at that time (or even today).
In retrospect this was sort of mean of you to say:
> It doesn't help either when males who opt-in to this beauty standard
Do you go around telling girls they have to try to look less pleasing to men and more pleasing to your own sensibilities? Aren't you just taking the place of the "male gaze" at that point and replacing it with your own gaze and your own demands to be satisfied? I like looking a certain way. I also like when it gets me attention from men. I have the same motivations as the majority of heterosexual women and I'm trying to live a fulfilling life. You don't need to make it all about you.
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I only felt the need to point it out to drive home the point that there is/was no winning move as a trans person. I feel the need to do this because I've met many people in my life who've tried to tell me things like that it 's obvious that I was "born to be a woman" so I shouldn't worry about transphobia because they think transphobia is only directed at people who look masculine but wear feminine clothes or sex pests who change their pronouns to try to seem less creepy. It's led me to believe that this might be a common position among people who are anti-trans. They think: "these bathroom policies will only hurt the bad ones who don't pass, the passable ones will be fine" as a way of soothing their conscience.
> Aren't you just taking the place of the "male gaze" at that point and replacing it with your own gaze and your own demands to be satisfied?
No, women should be free to present however they please, that's my point. We shouldn't feel pressure to conform to imposed ideals of femininity, to be praised for it or knocked for not complying.
> No, women should be free to present however they please, that's my point. We shouldn't feel pressure to conform to imposed ideals of femininity, to be praised for it or knocked for not complying.
I agree with you 100%. When I was in middle school I wanted to look very neat and proper and it caused me problems with boys. I can remember getting picked on for looking too... well groomed? I feel like the opposite pressure exists for people assigned female. I was born with the default option of not needing to look "pretty" in the sense of enhancing my feminine features with clothes and makeup but I enjoy life a lot more when I'm allowed to. I feel for people who have the same problem but from another direction.
> This is unfortunately yet another gendered imposition, with women feeling like they have to adhere to a beauty standard that comes from the male gaze.
Women who are trans feel this pressure enforced against them with public humiliation, overt misogyny, and violence.
> It doesn't help either when males who opt-in to this beauty standard for their own pleasure get praised as if they are being good women.
Trans women aren't males and don't opt-in to the male gaze. Are you referring to drag queens? There's a more nuanced conversation to be had there, but not in the current climate of terroristic acts against transgender people. Drag is often a critique of gender roles.
There is nothing grotesque about femininity or a trans woman expressing it.
> This is unfortunately yet another gendered imposition, with women feeling like they have to adhere to a beauty standard that comes from the male gaze.
Beauty standards are set and enforced by both men and women. A lot of women dress up to impress other women, not just men.
Kind of interesting how electronic music then got taken up by the [ware]house scene which made the form into a kind of social public sharing experience yet was also strongly influenced by gay and trans communities.
I have this two CD compilation of Carlos' work on The Shining, probably a bootleg but how else could I get it? It's quite interesting and I think Kubrick ought to have used more of it.
I was working behind the counter at a booth at Macworld, Boston — maybe 1991 or so? A woman behind the booth with me suddenly said, "That was Wendy Carlos!", about someone who had just walked away from the booth. Dumb me was busy doing something and hadn't been paying attention.
Ha ha, those little moments in life when you're asleep at the wheel.
I still have the vinyl of switched on Bach and one day I'll get a record player hooked up and play it from there instead of the mp3s. Fantastic record and given the time when it was made absolutely incredible, keep in mind that this was before MIDI and most music related software that we take for granted today.
I have an early copy of Switched-On Bach, and I sometimes wonder if I should put a bit of tape on the front. It's probably sufficient to remember, and call her Wendy.
I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film production I can't believe it was even made.
One day I looked up the soundtrack at the local record store and bought it..."Composer Wendy Carlos" huh, never heard of her and couldn't find anything really other than contributions to Clockwork Orange and Hooked on Bach and not much else. I moved on.
Later, when there was more Internet to be had, I decided to look up Wendy and was shocked to learn she was trans. It started me down a journey of reflection, challenging my upbringing, and reexamining many "truths" that I had been taught. Along that journey I learned about the tragedy of Alan Turing and other stories.
Wendy's music planted a seed that significantly transformed my inner life, much for the better. It helped me develop significantly in my thoughts on freedom, empathy, justice and the kind of future world I'd like to live in and leave behind.
In 1982 it took a lot of daring for a Disney exec to green light bringing her music to their audience. This was during an age of great an unjust moral panic on a variety of topics.
for reference: I remember my mother receiving a letter from her pastor outlining why "Back to the Future Part II" was the work of Satan and they should never allow it in their household. The central argument was a table that counted the number of time the seven dirty swear words were mentioned in the movie, challenged its rating, and attributed the low rating (PG I think) to a conspiracy by Satan worshipers to corrupt God's youth. This was 1989.
Thanks for sharing. I think for some, that could have been a very uncomfortable story to share, but it's just so important that stories like this are spoken out loud. We all have capacity for such growth.
Regarding the BTTF 2 is a work of Satan anecdote: it's so convenient that any time the actions of any authority are at odds with how a group expects/wants things to work, instead of challenging their own priors ("why did the majority steer so far from our beliefs?"), they just declare it a conspiracy by Satan. This is exactly what we see in politics these days as well.
It's exceedingly difficult for one to completely up-end their foundation of understanding, culture, and being. It's easier to do absolutely ridiculous things like declare a contrary outcome as a conspiracy by Satan or the Deep State or whatnot. I think that overcoming that ontological inertia speaks volumes to your individual strength as a person, and the power Carlos' brilliant work.
Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" is a great read; it puts into many important words the capacity that we all possess for growth and large mindset changes, which you mention in your first paragraph
It's quite strange that someone clearly nuts like that pastor can be considered sane, wise, and morally authoritative. While in the same circles a trans person like Carlos is considered inherently deviant and somehow immensely threatening - even though all they have to offer is a life-long list of creative achievements, and absolutely no evidence of harm to anyone.
My conversations with my deeply religious grandmother left me with the impression that religion is a very dirty game: it inserts itself into your psyche in a way that it can become nearly impossible to distance yourself from it without massively breaking open what you consider to be your identity. This makes what the OP did all that much stronger, to be able to overcome that conditioning.
My grandmother never managed to, but, to her considerable credit, she did realize that some of her views were no longer supported by the evidence available, she was just too rooted in her ways to change.
I agree with your observation, but I don’t think religion is uniquely notable along those lines.
Ideology comes to mind as a pretty clean analog.
But looming in my mind is culture. Terminally, it seems indistinguishable from religion: it’s arbitrary, self-perpetuating, operates by getting deep psychological hooks into people and relies on (often blunt) communal enforcement.
And further, it seems “culture” has been elevated to the exalted, sacred status religion once commanded in society. In my view, this shift happened over the latter half of the 20th… cemented by 2010.
You are probably right, but because until very recently here religion was so strongly intertwined with culture that it is hard to see the difference and that the bulk of the people that stepped out of it haven't had time enough to establish a real culture of their own other than some common labels it is hard to make the distinction (for me, at least). This is probably yet another example of such conditioning. And in the meantime Islam has made an appearance and is gaining a lot of strength, to the point that it is only a matter of time before it will be the dominant religion, and given the cultural distance this is likely only going to cause even more issues.
That may be so, but religion seems to go out of its way to embed itself in the psyche of its subjects to the point that they experience severe identity crisis when trying to break free of it.
There are other groups that employ the same mechanisms.
Idk what maladaptive from an evolutionary basis means, dude. We’re not beholden to survival of the fittest anymore. We got glasses, bro. We do shit like microdosing, keto, and cryo therapy.
If someone wants to take estrogen and call themselves Jessica, why should I give a shit any more than when some gym rat (therefore on artificial testosterone) wants me to call him Jake instead of Jacob?
I don’t think there’s any religion in this, just good ol fashioned icky feelings about things that aren’t really a problem, they’re just icky feeling.
Idk what you’re talking about… I don’t look at depressed people like some evolutionary whatever whatever lol
If they want therapy I can pay for the therapy, if they want me to call them depresso mcfesso I can do that too idc. There’s no reason to be all high minded about stuff like this, man
Your understanding does not match the scientific evidence. One of the reasons being trans is not a mental illness is that cis people experience gender dysphoria all the time as well, like cis men when they're called girls, cis women with facial hair, or the revulsion many cis people experience when they even so much as think about the idea of taking hormones that don't align with their gender. To the extent that this is a "mental illness", the vast majority of people have it.
Rather than maladaptive, I’d characterize being trans and in the early stages of the journey to be painful emotionally and physically.
Merely having to look in the mirror and think constantly “this is not who I should be” is damaging. That’s why people deserve sympathy and aid from society.
When people say it’s maladaptive and characterize it as psychological disorder they are falling into the trap of believing that mental anguish must always have a mental solution. Thus they would prescribe therapy, drugs, and asylums.
On the converse, it is much easier in reality to change physical gender than it is to change one’s mind.
The times when we had to run and hide from tigers, when men were real men and women were left behind in the compound to rear the children is long behind us. And the simple fact is that even then there were gay and trans people, they just weren't recognized as such and ended up having problems to fit in.
I was a huge fan of Switched-On Bach. My dad bought the album for me and it said "Walter Carlos". Many years later I was in a music store and saw the CD and it said "Wendy Carlos". I thought it was a typo and would be worth lots of money so I bought it.
Years later I learned the real story.
I'm still glad for my purchase and Wendy Carlos has made my life just a little bit better because of her art.
Thanks for the recollection, it is a nice testimony to how prejudiced we can become due to our environment, and props to you for recognizing it for what it was and dealing with it the way you did.
> “I can't remember last time when I've seen(in person) a transexual person.”
How do you know? Presumably you’re not doing a genital inspection on most people.
If you assume you can just tell, it’s easy to err into many false positives. (A section of the American far right seems to genuinely believe that Michelle Obama is trans — not just as an insult they like to throw around, but literally.)
> A section of the American far right seems to genuinely believe that Michelle Obama is trans — not just as an insult they like to throw around, but literally.
Which is pretty incredible all by itself. But people seem to be very susceptible to contracting this kind of mind-virus and then becoming instrumental in spreading it. But at the root of these things are some very malicious people. One of them is on trial in NL right now, and I'm really happy to see the structural and deliberate approach to finding out where the limits on just being able to spout off are. The damage these characters do is real, and - ironically - the biggest risk to free speech comes from them.
Such a weird meme, why are people so obsessed with this idea of genitals being inspected these days.
Feels a bit like the obsession with koro or fan death. Like come on, no-one wants to look at your nob or your gash, no-one is demanding this. A very silly suggestion.
I was raised in a fairly religious household and taught to respect everyone including everyone in the lgbtq community
This was in the south as well. I grew up in the 90s if that means anything.
In Amsterdam drag and trans people always were part of the background and not considered anything special, they sometimes looked extravagant but they were simply also people. We're talking 1970's or so here, my earliest memories of that.
> I wonder, who was raised to think well of trans people?
Well, we should all try and make the world better, right? Many kids and young adults today have been raised with a sense of curiosity and empathy rather than one of scorn and judgment, and that includes fully supporting trans people. That is surely true of older adults as well, especially those whose parents are trans themselves or have close friends/relatives who are trans.
This is a bad take both on the nature of art and Wendy Carlos.
Art encompasses all aspects of the human experience. How could this not include identity and sexuality, and yes, the treatment one lives through as an aspect of those things. Also wrong is the supposition that a ideological art is somehow a lesser form of creativity. Some of the greatest works in history were made by "ideologues", and made specifically as tracts for their beliefs, either expressly or subtextually. To demand that art be politically inert and sanitized of the identity of its creator is to demand art that says nothing to the viewer and means nothing to the artist. It is to chide a mural for not being a wallpaper.
But even then: Wendy Carlos is perhaps one of the weakest examples of someone doing this, as the article itself makes abundantly clear. Her identity as a transgender woman was something she had to hide for over a decade, and even then the social stigma has driven her into seclusion ever since. Rather, the story of Wendy Carlos is one that massively underscores the sheer importance of having the loud-and-proud expressions of people's identity and experiences that we're (and I am) fortunate enough to have today. If you don't like that, well, maybe you can be the one to close your blinds this time.
Bingo, you get it exactly. It's Wendy's reluctance to "flaunt" it that makes her all the more appealing as a person. I understand that she regrets her time in seclusion, but it makes her unassailable as somebody who was "throwing it in your face."
You seem to think that an artist by default creates art that is purely impersonal and unconnected from who they are and then manipulatively goes back to add stuff that you don't like. But it's the other way around. If the work is divorced from who they are in favor of consumer needs, it's just craft. Art is inevitably personal.
So what I think you're really asking for is for people to hide who they are if you don't like parts of them.
There's also the documentary "Sisters with transistors" about women pioneers of electronic music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-3hlzpV7M