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Many of us, when they think about it, can relate to stories of being forced to be male. It is a hinge point of many stories here, and it happened to me also, though in retrospect perhaps I was only impersonating one.
Forced Feminization is seen here but mostly in a lighter tone. In Thailand, I met a young woman at the clinic who has been born a boy but was given hormones by her parents beginning around age 4, though I doubt that hormones were her only treatment. In Thailand, "girly boy" did not seem to be a negative term. There used to be a person on this site who lived in Northern Thailand who would know all about this. She would be around 26 now, and when I think of her, I wonder how she is, does she yet live, what she is doing? I think her mom related to me through a translator that her "girly boy" daughter would work in their club. Had they kidnapped her? I understand it is very common there.
The story I am working on now has as one of the main protagonists a child that was kidnapped at age 4 as the son of a sheik and appears around age 14-16 as a woman. I have been strongly advised to have the child to be kidnapped past puberty, but the story does not work that way, and I feel I must honor that young woman I met in Thailand in some small way. To those who will not read such a story, perhaps we will meet in another?
And this brings me to revenge. In the story, her kidnappers are such evil people that they eventually bring about their own demise, and all's right with the world, sort of. Isn't that actually revenge on the part of the author, or is their misfortune simply a matter of natural consequences?
Right now, I am really exploring the idea of being forced to be one thing or the other, and now see that it happens to most of us at various levels throughout our lives. It is very clear to me that I was forced at a very young age to be male, and later was again forced but to be female. My only sorrow in all this is that those that I loved and loved me were hurt so much, and before that happened while I was miserable, I had resolved to finish my life as a male. I know some other people who are female at heart but have "complications" that prevent them from following their desires. For this I am sorry. Is there any justice in the heavens?
Gwen
Comments
No.
Next question.
Angharad
There's justice.......
And then there's vengeance.
It's been my experience that one seldom gets justice, but I personally spent a good part of my life as an instrument of vengeance for the US government.
Sometimes you have to settle for getting even. Personally, I believe that we all earn our own little slice of hell. Sometimes I still have trouble sleeping because of the things we did, the death we dealt - but in all honesty, it needed to be done.
And some of them didn't bother me at all......
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Conflict
In my waning years I study history and world religions quite a lot. It is bothersome to find that this waring and conquesting has gone on since our earliest history. I was about to come to the conclusion that 18th and 19th century European colonialism caused all the hatred and wars in the Middle East, but as I study it seems clear that they had conflict well before that.
Man seems unredeemable. I am one of those silly idealists hoping to make things better.
Gwen
Um...
It's a good thing that you reconsidered. But I wonder how one could even approach the conclusion that recent European colonialism caused the Middle East hatred and wars.
Remember the Crusades? Remember Rome?
The Bible describes plenty of conflict between the authors' tribes and other tribes. Assyria, for example, was IIRC the ancient enemy of Israel. Mothers weeping because their children were not? Bad only if it happened to "us". Good if "we" did it to them, except that "we" were supposed to kill the mothers as well. Yahwei's orders.
-- Daphne Xu
Justice
Gwen,
As a student of life, I look around me and see balance in nature all the time. When I see something that violates nature's balance I believe that the universe itself, whether it is the hand of God, karma, or the cosmic muffin brings things back into alignment. I see the universe as a force that we cannot truly change as it fights us and is far more powerful.
If you read 11/22/63 by Stephen King I feel it illustrates what I mean.
I do not believe that anything I do to offset or upset that balance will ever succeed.
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
Balance?
I assume that "nature's balance" doesn't refer to force balance or equilibrium of any sort. Perhaps something along the lines of "The Balance of Good and Evil"? If there's too much evil, something brings in good to restore the balance. If things are too good, evil is brought in to restore the balance.
If one observes nature too closely, the proper conclusion is that "Old Mother Nature is a witch with a capital B."
I seriously hope nobody has any idea that balance is somehow preferred, or that more evil could be better than less evil, or that somehow there could be too much good, and it's good that evil come in to balance it out. There's a more reasonable alternate idea, that balance is the best we can hope for. Any imbalance is almost invariably on the side of evil. That fits in with the notion that Evil doesn't give a darn about the balance between good and evil.
I'm reminded of something from a parody fantasy, "The Thirteen Clocks": after the clocks start up, someone comments at a departure of something dark, "That was Then. It's now Now!"
-- Daphne Xu
Nature?
Calling Mama Nature nasty names is somewhat inadequate IMO. I'm of the school of thought that says "The universe actively wants to kill you and will take any chance it can get."
Any notion of "Balance" of good and evil does not seem to be borne out by reality. From what I know of human history it has mostly been nasty, brutal and barbaric from our perpective. I can't think of a single society I would actually have wanted to live in, not even the America or Europe of 50 or 60 years ago.
To be fair, a part of that prejudice is technological. I've lived with it and without it and I much prefer with, thank you. Another part is because I'm trans. Despite prejudice and hatred, this is the best time in the history of the world to be trans because we can actually do something about it. Likewise it has never been a better time to be a woman, at least in much of the world.
Its likely that a future age will bemoan our barbarism and rightly so I think. We are pretty barbaric.
Just my $.02
Abby
I'm Bitterly Negative
"Isn't that actually revenge on the part of the author, or is their misfortune simply a matter of natural consequences?"
I would call it wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. Perhaps it's a mandated trope. At one time in American Cinema, it was pretty much encoded that any time someone went on trial, he was innocent. The villain was supposed to be killed in justified circumstances, although it may have satisfied the requirement that the movie end with his arrest.
Actually, wish-fulfillment for the author is not a bad thing. It might be good in that it gets across the idea that the evil really is evil. In the real world, the villain somehow has good publicity, and people support him. Even when the crime is as manifestly evil as aggressive war.
"Is there any justice in the heavens?" Life's a bleach, and then you dye.
-- Daphne Xu
Enough hell on Earth
I purposely write stories that have a nice ending and good guys. Culturally, I have good Arabs and good Aliens. WWII American Media became accustomed to having boogie men in the closet. As to the End Time model, every belief system I have studied has one.
Gwen
End of time
The world will end, we know that as the Sun becomes a white dwarf and burns helium instead of hydrogen and everything this side of Jupiter will be scorched to hell. Either that or the universe continues to expand and fades away. The good news is that it's a few billion years away so still time to start reading Bike.
Angharad
Since the USA...
The boogiemen in the closet were even a bigger thing during the Cold War than they were during WWII. But detente, and the realization that the ICBMs hadn't fallen on us yet and might not in our lifetime after all, relaxed us to the point where we rooted for the kids to keep E.T. away from the authorities, Wookiies were our friends, and aliens landing in department store parking lots were more likely to be exploited by big business or run over by cars than to pull out their rayguns and attack us. Things turned back around after 9/11/01, when we in the U.S. suddenly discovered that our continent wasn't as invulnerable to world terror as we had assumed: invaders from space came back onto our movie screens, the Zombie Apocalypse was nigh, and it was time to relocate all the Muslims before some imam in Saudi Arabia declared a fatwa against us and all our middle-class, seemingly assimilated Islamic-American suburban neighbors started murdering us in our beds.
Point here -- referencing your comment about good guys, good Arabs and good aliens -- is that when the U.S. and the rest of the West feels vulnerable, we assume everyone's out to get us, including Others that we "know" are there but can't identify, and our stories, films and mindset reflect that. When we're feeling secure, those ideas aren't nearly as prevalent, and those who entertain them come off as paranoid.
We're insecure at present -- and expect to stay that way for much of the foreseeable future, as we expected during the Cold War -- and our stories and mindsets proceed accordingly.
Eric
(Re insecurity and fear, I feel I should note somewhere in this mess that the famous Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was announced to have been moved closer to midnight again, after the most recent round of tests began in North Korea. The trouble was that they'd run out of room to move it; they'd brought it up to a minute before midnight two years ago -- closer than it was through most of the Cold War.)
(And I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention David Brin, who presented a lot of this in an essay in the 1990s -- before the tide turned -- and in a lecture I heard around a decade ago.)
The study of world history
I am a casual student of world history, particularly the last 200 years. As I read it, I sometimes shudder at what America, controlled by the greedy rich, has done in Central America and parts of the Middle East. Of course most of the places where we have done these dastardly things, the evil greedy there were quite cooperative. I would even venture to say that all of the world's warnings were driven by greed. I think that these aggressions were supported by conscript soldiers, unwilling slaves to the greedy.
Gwen
Actually, conscription....
Has not been the norm for our armed forces throughout much of our history. Of course, with several notable exceptions - The Civil War to a limited extent, WWII and the time period up to the end of Vietnam immediately come to mind - but at most times our armed forces have been all volunteer.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Other countries
I was thinking of the English Press Gangs and so forth.