96, NG19, F49, E95, NA3 / WG77, M47, MF0, B9, D1, Frz0, B7, C1

Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan, Mad Honey

Jodi Picoults Bücher, obwohl echte Süchtigmacher, wirken auf mich so intensiv, dass ich sie lieber etwas vorsichtig dosiere, auch wenn ich sie vorbestelle ohne groß in die Synopsis zu sehen. Hier reichte schon der Titel, weil ich die Story von dem Mad Honey schon einige Male anders verarbeitet gelesen habe und völlig faszinierend finde. Wie immer lernt man auch bei diesem Buch unendlich viel dazu, nicht nur über Bienen und Transmenschen, und wie immer wurde die Liste der zitierenswerten Stellen viel zu lang. Das Buch wird auf jeden Fall noch etwas nachwirken bei mir, und ich denke von der Co-Autorin Boylan sollte ich auch mal etwas probieren.
.
.
I don't think it's an invisible chromosome, or the inability to get pregnant, or anything else, that makes people so cruel to transgender folks. I think what they hate is that the world is complicated in ways they can't understand.
People want the world to be simple.
But gender isn't simple, much as some might want it to be. The fact that it's complicated - that there's a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world - is what makes it a blessing. Surely nature - or god, or the universe - is full of miracles and wild invention and things way beyond our understanding, no matter how hard we try. We aren't here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We're here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.
.
For me, being trans was always more about the heart than any other organ. If I were, like, some disembodied spirit, a ghost that blew around on the wind, I would still be female. If I were a head in a jar, I would still be female. If I were just a piece of forgotten music played at night on a viola da gamba, I would still be female. All along, the only thing I ever wanted was for the thing I felt in my heart to find its home in the body in which it ought to have been nestled from the beginning.
.
And even though I am proud of who I am, proud of having fought against all these odds to become the person I always dreamed of being - it means everyone would know I'm trans.
When all I really want to be - all I've ever been - is a girl.
Is it so wrong to want to fit in, and to be left alone? Do I really have to spend the rest of my life as the emblematic trans girl?
But again: that's the question. Is being trans the truth of who I am? Or is it just the truth of who I was? Am I even still trans, at this point, after everything I've been through? What is it that makes me so different from other girls my age? Is everything that happened to me before the age of seventeen really going to be the most important thing about me for the next seventy?
.
I do not recall much of the book, except for Eowyn, the warrior facing the King of the Ringwraiths, who said no living man oculd kill him. But no living man am I, she said, pulling off her helmet so her hair cascaded to her waist.
Then she hacked him down.
I remember missing much of what Braden read after that, imagining what it would take to see being a woman as a strength, not a weakness.
.
This has always been my favorite fact about bees: in their world, destiny is fluid.
You might start life as a worker, and end up a queen.
.
(Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan, Mad Honey)
.