Steel Beach

I have finally got to the end of Steel Beach. I don’t have much to say about it beyond the fact that anyone who thinks that this book says anything worthwhile about the transgender experience probably doesn’t know many transgender people. I was particularly struck by Varley’s assertion that what is important in humans is not sexual preference but sexual orientation: that is, if you are sexually attracted to men as a woman then if you change sex to become a man you will immediately become sexually attracted to women, because what is important is your heterosexuality. Equally a lesbian who changed sex to become a man would immediately become sexually attracted to men in order to stay homosexual. There may indeed be people like that, but I don’t think I’d expound it as a rule.

As for the concept that the ideal human form would be to have a woman’s body but still have a penis, I don’t think I need comment further.

6 thoughts on “Steel Beach

  1. I believe the phrase might be wishfully simplistic.

    *sigh*

    Well, that’s one author I won’t need to read.

  2. Been thinking about this post. I never made it through Steel Beach, but when Varley first came out with his Eight Worlds stories (Steel Beach is set in that universe) like 20 years earlier, the sex changing didn’t (for me) have at all the same feel as what I get from people talking about transgendering today. This wasn’t particularly people who felt wrong in the gender of their birth (or variations on the theme), this was everyone. Changing sex was trivially easy and done all the time, people swapping back and forth at whim. Someone who *didn’t* change was considered odd.

    The feel I got was that his stories were about Joe and Jane Average playing with identity. In other words, his sex changing characters weren’t from the same pool of people as today’s transgenders. Their reasons for it were completely different, so it’s reasonable that their conclusions from it might be completely different.

    I only remember one story that really dealt with changing as a big deal, a story about a woman when it was new who decided to change, then change back. S/he was originally Cleo, then became Leo. When s/he realized that s/he was no longer man or woman but someone who would always be both or neither, s/he switched to the name Nile. Gender was no longer a permanent part of Nile’s view of self.

    Most of the stories were set many years later in this universe, when changing sex was about as important as changing hair color. Possibly less. Varley was conducting a thought experiment that was about something other than the current transgender experience.

    Or at least, that’s the sense I have…

  3. El:

    Thought experiments are entirely legitimate, and I can’t know what Varley had in mind when he wrote the book. However, up until we started getting actual transgender people on panels at Wiscon, Steel Beach was still being held up as a classic SF treatment of the transgender experience. In some places I am sure that it still is.

  4. Yeah, that would be a problem. Not to mention an annoyance, and possibly cause for grinding one’s teeth. Hmm……

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