Up a Road Slowly - Picking A Side, Part Two.

One year ago, I took screwed my courage to the sticking place and decided to make a phonecall. I'd been prevaricating for a while, but decided that it needed to be done.

Actually, I picked a bad time to call and - not wanting to cause worry them - I didn't make a big deal about it and said I'd call back later. Then, I scheduled one of my encyclopaedically long texts to be delivered to them both of my parents the next morning - the jist of which was, "Not in fact a girl. Pretty sure I'm non-binary. Probably gender fluid. Thought you should know."

Yes, I did include the links.

Thirteen days later, the entire internet knew. 

This is less to do with the fact my parents are terrible gossips, or demon bloggers with a penchant for outing their children than the fact that I am rash, impulsive, and the human version of the expression, "without further ado." Basically, I lost my temper on Twitter and what started out as a rant aimed at Germaine Greer turned into me shamefacedly saying more or less the same thing I'd told my parents less than a fortnight earlier.

In retrospect, this was a mistake.

As with stories about religious conversions, people like transition stories to be neat and finite. It is a genre of absolutes and binaries - male and female, pre-transition and post-transition - a genre of certainties. One says I always knew, I always felt. The end point is a clear, an obvious stopping point, the movement from one category to another - the pay off.

I don't wish to say that no trans people ever experienced gender and transition that way - I'm sure many have - however, that particular story has a certain cultural capital. It is the accepted narrative, the story that one is pressured to present if one wishes for support or medical transition, the one that flatters cisnormative and patriarchal ideas of gender. The more often this story is repeated, the more it becomes default, and the more that recently out trans people are expected to conform to it in order to be perceived as valid.

And the harder it becomes to recognise what is going on if you don't quite fit the model.

My journey to tranition is a mess. 

I couldn't say that this time last year. I had to be together, to be bullet proof in the face of saying something pretty major about my identity on a public platform. But how I felt then was just a brief moment of calm in the middle of a life-long muddle.

After all, I was pretty sure I wasn't a boy. I wanted to be one, sometimes. It would have been simpler. If I could just fool them in thinking I was one of them, then I could have lived with that - but I knew I'd be faking it.

And as to being a girl? Well, people kept telling me I was, so I supposed they must just be right. There was no repugnance there, per se, just a discomfort - the sense of jumper that was too tight around the cuffs, a skirt that kept riding up and tripping me, a label with a panic-edge scratch on the back of my neck. I had to trick them, too. Pretend I knew the rules when I didn't.

It took me a long time to work it out, an embarrasingly long time. I edged and shifted around the cracks of what I could do. My life - from the age of twelve to twenty one - was a long process of working out a kind of femininty I could inhabit without turning myself in to a quivering, self-hating wreck.

I assumed that this was me growing in to womanhood, that it was an Anne of Green Gables affair, that I would emerge from this tumultuous journey, ready to take up the mantle of adulthood, all the awkwardness grown out of me. That I would rebel, but keep my rebellion within certain limits. That I would thereby succeed. This is the cultural myth we give non-conforming AFAB children. We tell them that they will soften, the will learn, and will eventually prove themselves. We tell them that they will get there.

Instead, what I got was a series of costume changes, a womanhood that was entirely performative, that had no substance beneath its layers of ruffled lace or fragile silk. It was less an identity than a set of masks that dodged and evaded such absolute terms as "woman". I was a flower child, a Ren Fayre type, a tomboy, chic vampire, rocker, manic pixie, punk, goth, earth mother, pantomime boy, or riot grrrl.

And, of course, I cross-dressed quite a bit.

I was mildly notorious for all this - showing up massively over-dressed, like the whole world was my costume party. I was striking, unconventional and, frankly, weird. Then, just when you were wondering what I'd pull from the wardrobe next, I'd appear in standard gear - black t-shirt, a paint-spattered army surplus shirt, a pair of torn jeans and my hair over my face. Sorry - but I'm not a performing monkey.

Because every time a role or identity or performance began to chafe, I'd chuck it back in the cupboard and pull out another one. Yeah, I never felt like I belonged, that I was entirely convincing. There'd still be the days when I couldn't look at - let alone touch - my breasts or my stomach, the days when I'd look at my face and body and ache for something different, when I'd yank handfuls of my hair and shout about just hacking it all off, but hey. Time for another costume change.

You can survive like that. You can survive like that for a very long time.

Until you have children.

It's not just that getting pregnant makes your body do that horrible puberty thing where it changes without you asking it to, not just that your breasts swell up and you stomach bulges out and your skin gets spotty and your muscles melt away. It's not that, afterwards, you're tired all the time and can't be bothered with hair or make-up.

Actually, that (or most of it) was pretty good for me. I stopped giving a fuck. I stopped seeing myself so much through other people's eyes (Do I make a convincing woman? Were they fooled?) learned to rejoice in slobbishness and practicality. But the costume changes were harder.

No - I can't wear that, it has a fiddly side zip and I can't breast feed in it. Recycled silk tears if you wear a sling over it. Floaty layers of dragonfly colours snag on changing bags and push-chairs. Tight lacing means you can't bend down to hear what they're saying. Long skirts tangle in your legs when you go from standing and kneeling. Mirrors stitched in to clothes scratch little faces. Velvet does not appreciate having noses wiped on it. And the second there was clumsiness, mess, rips and shabbiness, I wasn't convincing any more. The mask was ripped away and underneath...?

No. Shrink. Find a niche where you can hide from it.

My in-use wardrobe became three pairs of jeans and an endless succession of black t-shirts, my social circle to the other mothers at parent and toddler groups. And there, I began to see just how very binary the world still was. I'd forced myself to look away from it, to see presentation as play, as dress up. But for the first time since my early teens, I was surrounded by women - real women - who apparently didn't feel like they were faking, who said things like, "we're all girls together" and actually seemed to mean it. People who believed gender was innate and meaningful.

Meanwhile, I was trying to be a gender neutral parent, trying to bring up the Sprogs with a wide range of interests and the knowledge that they could do and wear and be anything they wanted. I pushed (very gently) against the waves of pink that threatens to engulf AFAB children and put blue ever so slightly forward, hoping that this would counteract the inevitable wider socialiasation. More than that, I pressed for green, red, yellow, purple, orange. I read them books with a wide variety of protagonists who did gender non-conforming things. I bought them lots of animal toys, bricks, musical instruments, duplo - but very few cars and even fewer dolls.

And I had to face other parents saying things like, "That's right dear, pink for girls and blue for boys."* I had to hear every, "typical boy" and "daddy's little princess", had to nod vaguely at every "Well, you know what men are like. I think women are just more ____, you know?" When, in truth, I didn't know, and was obliquely offended by the implication.

I spent a lot of time getting angry on the Sprogs' behalf.

And, to preserve my sanity, I got on Twitter and made all sorts of interesting friends, and found myself involved in intersectional feminism - rather than the second wave variety on which I'd been raised. I discovered and read and educated myself. I learned about queer theory, trans rights. Things formented. I decided this was all very well, but I was too far along in my life to do anything like that any more. That this was great for the kids, but I was more use, more radical, as a Gender Non-Conforming woman.

My body returned to its usual shape. I found I could - occasionally - wear my nice clothes when the children were about, provided we weren't being too active. I stopped breastfeeding. The end of nappies was just visibile on the far horizon. I tried to grab with both hands the next bit of the journey, the bit which all the stories promised would come next - the unconventional but totally respectable adult womanhood.

 And I found my tenuous peace with my dangling mammary glands had come to an end. That I hated the weakness in my shoulders and my core. That I had an anxiety attack if I went out in a dress unless I'd spent an unconscionably long time getting my 'mask' in place. I tried to ignore it making a desperate bid for femme-ness, for my birthright - even as I acknowledge all that was rubbish. I was desperate for confirmation, compliments on how well I did this woman thing, but getting them sent me into a spiral of self-hatred.

I made a few stupid decisions.

I tried very hard to be normal for my children.

And one night, sick and furious and reeling from a tough year, I sat in the bath cut of all my long, red hair with nail scissors. It felt incredible. Men hated it.

I hit Google, trying to work out what was wrong with me, why I couldn't pull it off any more. Why people were seeing through me, recongising me for a confused kid playing dress-up rather than the confident woman I wanted to portray. I wondered why the fury I felt at every "it's a girl thing" felt less like an attack on the Sprogs, and more like a knife under my own skin. I wondered why, when I kicked off about it, I raged not about essentialism or sexism, but the gender binary.

In retrospect, I am astonished at how slow I was.

My partner listened to my rants and my angsting. My searches changed from things likes, "male identified woman" and "am I a man or a woman" to "diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria" and, finally, "how do I tell if I'm gender queer?"

It took months of emotional upset and yet more angst. If you see my blog posts from this period, I use strange (and probably inappropriate) circumlocutions to talk about bodies and gender - things which still interest me a lot. I'm letting them stand because they show a point on my journey, to remind everyone that no-one is born knowing everything.

My partner assured me that - whatever I did, whatever I decided - he would still love me. With him, all labels were temporary, open to change and flux as I tried to work it out. I started lifting weights and looked in to taking up a martial art. I looked at the cost of binders, built up shoes. Sometimes, I stole his clothes. Then I realised that I'd always done that.

Once, mid-freak-out, I called my sister and she talked me down and gave me love and reassurance. After a time - a very long time - I had something approaching a label (gender fluid) and a sense that it probably applied to me. I had a list of websites and resources, and a binder on order from eBay. I was seeing my parents at Christmas. I didn't want to hide - not from them. I also definitely did not want to come out on Christmas dinner after far too much wine and my usual absence of tact. ("So, I'm BI!" - yes, thank you for the memory.)

I did not have pronouns. I did not have a plan or a referel to a GIC. I had no real opinion on hormones or top surgery (second question my mum asked). I had no idea how this was going to affect my life, my relationships, my self. I'd not even really squared it with my faith. All I actually had was a starting point, a label, a subject heading.

I've spent the year trying to work out what to write underneath that. 

Slowly, tenuously.

But after outing myself on Twitter - then following it up with a blog post which is even more popular than my one about Alan Garner -  I have done a lot of that in public. More than I'm comfortable with.

Currently, I am in the unenviable position that most people in my daily life perceive me as cis female, but that my gender identity is one of the first things that comes up when you google my name. I still have no idea how to correct someone who misgenders me - and I remain by turns rubbish and embarrasingly blasé about coming out.

But I'm getting there. I'm on my feet and I'm fighting it. You all help - lovely people. If I'm ever awkward about it, it's because I've put myself in this place, not because you aren't wonderful.

If you want to know how I'm getting on: 

I have pronouns now (they/their/them), and a noun (I am an enby.) I've started using the label non-binary trans. I still don't know how I feel about the medical aspects of transition, but have switched Ms for Mx, and am lobbying for the use of Myr as an alternative to Sir or Ma'am.

More importantly: in my small, old-fashioned town, I get a lot of funny looks and the occasional slur yelled from passing cars. Then again, I was goth for most of my adolescence so that's nothing new. I'm more concerned that - now I present as fairly masculine - my partner and I will get hassle for being a same sex couple, and that serves to drive home how much privilege I've had in my life thus far. Also, I'm exhauseted by the balance of being 'authentic' and remaining safe when it comes to things like changing rooms and public toilets - where there often isn't a gender-neutral option.

However, I get less bog-standard street harrasment (WIN) and while people do try to figure me out, they do it more through intense and disconcerting stares than intrusive questions. I've also noticed a slightly increased tendency for my Martial Arts teachers to use my name rather than call me Ma'am, and for unfamiliar shop keepers to avoid honorifics all together.

 Oh, and disapproving matrons give me 'the look' a lot. For the first time in my life, I am not cowed. You are not seeing through me - you are seeing me.

No, I probably wouldn't have chosen to do it this way. What's more, I worry that sometimes I go on about this whole gender thing too much - we're here for the vampires and the folk songs, right? But if my being out and loud about it helping anyone else struggling with this, then, honestly, it's worth it.

Besides, we all know that genies don't go back in to bottles.

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* Yes. This happened.

Kill the Moon: Maidens and Mothers in Doctor Who

After Saturday's Doctor Who, Kill the Moon, I went into the kitchen with my husband and dredged up some pretty tough things from the last five years, and cried for a good twenty minutes.

Then I drank a glass of wine, watched two episodes of Blackadder and - typing this twenty four hours later - am feeling a lot better.

Better enough to say some things that have been on my mind for a while.

It is a truism in some corners of the interwebs that while Doctor Who under RTD was a joyous experiment in tolerance, feminist messages and the trampling of conservative thought patterns, current showrunner Steven Moffat is a misogynist dinosaur who is intent on dragging our favourite show back into the Dark Ages™ and normalising all kinds of horrible things. While this is an opinion I do not share, I can see some aspects of justice in it. RTD's vision was carefully inclusive, squeaky clean and PC (not a criticism), whereas Moffat seems to have an much more cavalier attitude to such matters, instead telling the stories he wants to tell (and using the writers he wishes to use) while letting the pieces fall where they may. Moffat's showmanship seems characterised less by wilful offence than by unexamined prejudices and whilst I agree this is a problem, I'm not sharpening my guillotine about it. 

So, yeah. There are problems. There are also - despite all his best efforts - problems in RTD era Who, as well. As I've said elsewhere, we live in a society that is by its very nature unjust and problematic, so that - however hard we try - we cannot make our work just and utopian. No, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, but we should also accept that however hard we do try, we're still going to mess it up. And,when we spot it, we should call it out. So, it's calling out time.

Some people just can't hack it.
One of the things that bothers me enormously in RTD era Doctor Who are his concepts of worthiness. In classic Who, companions travelled with the Doctor because they wanted to, because they needed a lift home, or because they were refugees with nowhere else to go. Under RTD's guidance, they travel with the Doctor because they are 'worthy'; they ask the right questions, they make the right choices, they can - in short - hack it. Throughout the series, we repeatedly meet people who 'fail' this simple companion litmus test, they attempt to exploit the possibilities of time travel, they assert themselves in a non-Doctor approved fashion, or they simply fail to have the stomach for the role.

In some ways, this was an improvement. Eccleston and Tennant's companions are no wilting flowers, they do not archetypally 'fall and twist their ankles', they do rather more than pass the Doctor his test-tubes and tell him how wonderful he is. The problem comes, however, in the dynamic it creates in the relationship between the Doctor and his companion. Classic Doctors were frequently exasperated by their co-travellers, and companions were often hurt, dismayed or angered by the Doctor's less pleasant attributes. There was spark and conflict in the TARDIS - companions were anything from colleague to antagonist, friend to grudgingly accepted stow-away. The Doctor was generally kind towards Nyssa (refugee), playfully scornful of Tegan (getting a ride) and openly abrasive to Adric (stow-away). However, if a companion needs to pass a necessary test of worth to gain admission in the first place, an immediate onus is placed upon the Doctor to respect that worth, to give Nu-Who companions a kid-glove treatment that those in the classic series were not guaranteed. This is not to say that he is uniformly kind, gentle and forgiving to them (the writing is too good for that), but that their relationships are more static and less conflicted.

It also raised the question of what constitutes worthiness. All three RTD era consistent companions are female, human. They all have an implicit, absolute dependence on the Doctor. None of them have a serious romantic relationship at the time of them travelling with the Doctor. None of them have children. 

All three of them have a bad relationship with their mothers. In fact, all three of them come from what are arguably single parent homes - Martha's parents are divorced and one assumes the mother had custody, Donna's father is absent, Rose's is dead. These are mothers who have fought everything to raise daughters who are worthy, daughters who are strong, confident and feminist-icon enough to go to the distant ends of time and space with a man they hardly know, daughters who are clever and articulate and compassionate.

Yet, the mothers are unarguably awful. Shrill and hysterical to a woman, they cannot be trusted not to start making a horrible fuss. They don't trust the Doctor, and are not happy with their child's new-found adventurous life-style. They attempt to stunt, to close in, to drown these wonderful children of theirs in domesticity - arguments about laundry and marriage and car-sharing schedules. Every time these daughters leave their mothers in the lurch, with every blasé, "I'll be fine!" kiss goodbye, every, "but I trust him!" truism, every pair of car keys thrown into a bin, we are supposed to smile and nod and applaud their liberation from the cloying maternal clutches. Of course, we sympathise with poor old mum getting a call that says, "I'm okay, but I'm being shot at," from God knows when, meant to congratulate her on each, "You'd better take care of my daughter", but ultimately, these women are not worthy. They are not companion material. Unless they learn to sit back, have faith in the Doctor and allow him to send their child into whatever danger he so chooses, they are in the wrong.

Feminism has always had a problem with motherhood

To accept the role of motherhood implies a biological imperative, a role which women naturally fulfil, for which they are uniquely suited. Essentialism, determinism, biology as destiny. Of course, it postulates a utopian ideal of childrearing, one which is split equally between the parents, one which pays no heed to a person's chromosomal make-up. But, ultimately, it is the female-bodied who pay the toll of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding. It is the female-bodied who have a hormonal response that makes the cry of their child physically painful. Regardless of the intentions or ideals of the people in your life, it is the female bodied who have to take the rap for this one.

And it's such an awful job. The pay is terrible and the hours are crap. You will be hit, kicked, bitten, shouted at. You have to clean up all manner of bodily fluids. You are responsible, ultimately, for the way this child grows up, for the actions they make as an adult, for the people they hurt. Parenthood; someone has to do it and, despite all the rhetoric and the promises of equality, the majority of unpaid carework in this country is done by the female bodied. In the main, it is done by mothers. Every lunch box to be packed; every tantrum to be endured; every boundary, lesson, hygiene rule to enforce; every broken heart to console, this is on you, girls.

Motherhood will rip you apart.

No wonder so many feminists want no part in it. It's hard to do your best thinking when you've had an hour and a half's sleep because a there was a baby with colic who wouldn't latch and then wouldn't settle.

And here's a thing - it's difficult to write your Master's dissertation when you're freaking out about teething, or to compose a letter to an agent when you're busy sewing name-tapes into school uniform. No matter how loved your baby, no matter how wanted, when you're neck deep in dirty laundry and there is Lego everywhere you aren't thinking about travelling the world, or activism, or fighting the Daleks. No. You're hoping that the kids will stop fighting long enough for you to get the house tidy and that the baby won't choke on something your elder child has left on the floor and that you set the timer on the washing machine correctly because otherwise no-one will have anything to wear tomorrow. In those moments your ambition shrinks to managing the school run, to at least sweeping the kitchen floor, to getting five minutes by yourself with a cup of tea. It sets you down a few levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It trivialises you. It limits your horizons.

It makes you unworthy.

But there's a get out, of course, isn't there? There's a way not to get ground down into that biological essentialism that is forced by way our society manages leave, finance and expectation around childbirth. Simply don't have kids! Be young! Free! Single! Travel the universe and really far-out stuff. Join the boy's club by virtue of not being a housework-bound-child-rearing-drudge. Be the exceptional woman. Be worthy of the Doctor.

Never mind who you leave behind. They had it coming, after all. They chose that life, didn't they? They opted to give it up.

But who else was going to do it?
 
Amy and the tragedy of motherhood:

One of the most vicious criticisms I've seen levelled at the Moff during his tenure on Doctor Who is that Amy Pond was "just a womb to him". Because, of course, in between her many adventures and her active role within them, she married, got pregnant, had a plot significant baby and then a plot significant discovered infertility. As though to turn an unflinching eye at the choice of motherhood and its unwilling denial utterly deleted her person-hood. As though this wasn't an issue women faced, as though it wasn't a terrible, silent tragedy in so many people's lives.

As though there were a 'just' in this scenario.

I'm sorry, I'm getting fervent. The thing is, though, with Amy, Moffat turns the gaze of the viewer onto a woman who has made a choice that does not fit into the comfortable worldview of someone who has her 'freedom', as someone who turns her back on the grant of tolerance we give to an unattached young woman who doesn't bring her messy, fertile 'baggage' on an adventure with her. But we condemn this because mothers are not 'worthy', they do not count as people.

Moffat, for all the questionable things he has said about women, for all the legitimate complaints that can be raised against his tenure, has a respect for motherhood that RTD seemed unable to compute. Yes, I admit, he takes this too far at times (The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe...) but that is always the danger. If one treats motherhood as a valid choice, an honourable choice, a worthy choice, one does play into the hands of gender essentialism - and the aforementioned cavalier attitude to nuance really does not help with this. But not running this risk is a far more questionable strategy - who is raising all these strong, remarkable, forthright women who cheerfully clutch the ninth and tenth Doctors' arms? Who is doing the grunt work, the laundry, the duty of care while being shoved into the background as hysterical, demanding, unreasonable?

And, dear God, the pain that comes with motherhood, with its creation, with its denial. With Amy Pond, Moffat delves deep into the territory of the 'lost' baby, the 'missing' baby, the baby 'denied.' With the everyday tragedy that women you know will have faced, and will almost certainly not tell you about.

 I am pro-choice. I am not ashamed of this. A bundle of cells is just that - a growth which has a very low chance of survival. An embryo, a fetus, is not a baby. It cannot survive independently, and actually, its chances of surviving with a maternal body are not that hot; 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, usually in the first twelve weeks.

But I also knows what it feels like to want a baby, painfully, physically with a gut-deep ache of need, a constant, nagging absence in your head, with tears of frustration at each little, blue 'negative' pregnancy test. The difference between an embryo and a baby is not scientific, it is emotional, it is philosophical.
The month before I conceived my first child, my period was a week late. When it came, there was a sense of loss, of mourning. What I had lost was not simply that month's blood, it was a baby. Not a real baby - it's likely I hadn't even conceived - but a baby nonetheless. With that week of negative tests, that thundering torture of hope, I was building a narrative in my mind. A baby. Nine months of pregancy, childbirth, a little downy head snuggled against my chest. The warmth of it, the smell.

Gone.

As soon as I got a positive the next month, it was confirmed for me. What I was carrying was not a bundle of cells, was not an incidental meeting of sperm and ovum, it was immediately all the potential of an entire life. It was a baby. My baby.

1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, usually in the first twelve weeks.

Amy tells the Doctor she's pregnant. A week later, "I was. I mean, I thought I was. Turns out I wasn't."

You just have to get on with your life.

Even if you're lucky, even if you are the three in four, there is terror there. You are powerless to stop this little life growing inside you in whichever way it chooses. There is nothing you can do if one day it stops moving, stops growing, if it develops a disorder that threatens its life, or your own. Every moment of a wanted pregnancy is like this, fear and helplessness. What if it goes wrong? What if it can't live? What if it kills me? When the longing, the need, is so intense, when there is so much love for a thing the rational part of your brain knows isn't even alive...

Motherhood rips you apart. 

In some families, there is a baby who is missing. Late miscarriage, stillbirth, cot-death. They are so frail, so vulnerable. I know women who will say they have two children, even though only one survived pregnancy. I know women who will still choke up when they talk about that missing baby, ten, twenty, sixty years down the line. Ordinary women. Women with lives, and interests and passions. Women that you might know. 

Having a wanted baby is an amazing thing, a bliss and a joy, a struggle and a chore, it is also an investment in fear. They can just melt away into nothing. That's the terror of it. When they are so small, so vulnerable, they could vanish and leave no trace except the scar you do your best to hide. Two days after my first was born, I was beginning to feel human again. My baby was asleep in my arms and I was back in something approaching 'my' body as I like to perceive it. There, in a moment of bliss, of peace, I had the sudden terror that this had all been some kind of mistake, that the 'real' grown-ups were going to be back any minute, that they were going to take this baby away. That she would simply vanish, melt, just like little flesh-Melody.

That horror is primal, absolute.

For some mothers, it is also real.

And you just have to get on with your life.

The same goes for infertility, that final, grace-note of cruelty that Moffat throws in from The Church of the Papal Mainframe. "Whatever they did to me at Demons Run, I can't give you children."

Dear Christ, that line hurts. The sense of total loss, the feeling of failure and bewilderment. 'Whatever they did to me' - because you never know, really. There's no sense or logic or kindness to it. And as somebody who has wanted a child, wanted a child the way Rory probably wants a child, this is a huge deal. When it becomes an absolute like that, a 'never' rather than a, 'maybe not', a 'not now', an 'I'd rather not'. All of those others suggest a mutability, a possibility of change, or retraction at some future date. One can live in hope, even if that hope is never satisfied. There is no 'over-reaction' when feelings that strong are at play. And Amy, knowing the irrevocable truth of it, that one child lost, and all possibility of another snatched away. Because it feels like a theft, it will always feel like a theft, like someone has cheated you of it.

There's a lot of talk online about the fact that Doctor Who is a sci-fi universe, that somewhere, there must be a 'cure'. But that misses the point. Science fiction gives us metaphors through which to understand the world, and sometimes - in the world - there is no fix, no get-out, no reset button. There are all kinds of things people can try to overcome infertility, but there is no guarantee that it will work. Sometimes the sentence is immutable.

Being a Mother, being a person:
Also, because this is fiction, just because the character of Amy has been used to explore the darkest sides of fertility does not mean she can't be utilised to explore a more fully realised, sympathetic version of motherhood. After all, the whole tragedy of infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, is that they are invisible. One can already have children, or (infertility aside) go on to have more. The lost child becomes simply a mark in your life, as you continue and are not defined by it.

And, of course, having children, these children grow up, they become independent, outgoing, confident people in their own right. They fly off around space and time, making decisions that are not necessarily healthy and bringing themselves into all sorts of danger, and - as a parent - you kind of have to live with that.

Don't get me wrong, I think we are much too harsh on the 'overbearing', 'over-protective' type of mother. One of the things it is very hard to lose is that sense of frailty, of vulnerability that your child has as a very small baby. They will always be your baby, no matter how big and independent they get. Personally, if someone was dragging my child into the firing line of Daleks, Cybermen and evilly inclined Time Lords, I wouldn't be bawling, "You take care of her!", I would be finding out in a very visceral manner just how many regenerations the Doctor had left.

You don't mess with my kids.

At the same time, you do have to accept that your child will run risks on their own, will have to make decisions and mistakes and - I hate typing this - suffer the consequences. You have to accept that one day you will hand them off to people you don't entirely trust - schools, partners, friends - who will take them away and turn them into someone that you don't quite recognise, who cannot be the same little baby who didn't recognise anyone in the world but you.

Hell, I still have a nervous collapse when I consider letting my eldest walk to the swings on her own in a few years. But in another six, she'll be walking across town (or getting the bus) to get to school on her own. In another ten, she'll probably want to be going out of an evening, with all that entails.

I'll probably be letting her. You just have to set your chin and deal with it.

Motherhood. It tears you apart.

But Amy handles it, just like most of us have to handle it. She lets River have her independence, and they remain on good terms. Not cloying, patronising, 'dear old mum', terms but as two separate adults with their own lives. Motherhood is a part of Amy, it is a part of her and Rory's marriage, but it does not define her in the way it defines Jackie Tyler, or Francine Jones, or Sylvia Noble. She continues as herself, a woman with her own interests and pursuits, while also having a good relationship with her daughter. Even if, for story reasons, she missed the messiest and most exhausting bits of parenting.

Frankly, that's why I prefer Moffat's stuff. I'm a mother, and I get the feeling he takes me seriously.

Finally, to Kill the Moon.

Okay, I went on a bit.

The thing is, Kill the Moon - while not written by Moffat himself - is another story commissioned and approved by him that gives a serious, thoughtful look at some of the terrible dilemmas around parenting, most specifically around motherhood.

Obviously, Kill the Moon engages with this in relation to the question of abortion. It looked at the matter as being a 'woman's choice', as being something private and personal that cannot be decided by opinion pole. Yes, on some levels it had an anti-choice (or, more generously, a pro-life) message that as a pro-choicer, I found deeply unsettling. But, as science fiction, as metaphor, it had the possibility of asking a bigger question, of addressing a wider set of concerns about parenthood and risk and life.

Every pregnancy is a gamble for the female body that hosts it. However wanted, however desired, however remarkable you are sure the offspring will be, however invested in the philosophical ideal of 'baby' lodged in that fetus - it could kill you. In pre-modern times, every pregnancy carried a roughly 1 in 13 chance of mortality for the mother (if I remember my figures correctly). What's more, once labour starts, it cannot be stopped. Every action is made in a pressed time-frame of irreversibility. Decisions have an effect that is immediate, and potentially fatal.

A friend of mine haemorrhaged and, without modern medical care, probably would have bled to death.

During my first labour, my heart-rate went from around 80 to about 120 in the space of five minutes, which isn't too much of a worry, except I'd been lying down for four hours and my contractions had all but stopped. It was also weak enough to be mistaken for the baby's. Hers, however, had dropped from around 120 to about 80 - and become so weak as to be difficult to find. I was on the sofa in the front room, a fifteen minute drive from the hospital, with no ambulance present and six inches of snow on the ground.

An hour earlier, the midwives had suggested going in to hospital, but my birth partner had convinced them to wait. I wanted a home-birth so badly.

They said they could leave it another sixty minutes.

Perhaps we would have been okay. Perhaps another couple of lacklustre contractions and she would have been born. Perhaps neither of our lives were ever in danger. The speed with which the midwives acted suggests differently.

You get one shot of this, one try, one chance, and, ultimately, it is down to you.

When my second child turned breech at 36 weeks, I had to make the decision of whether to stick to my principles (natural birth, home birth, low-intervention), or take the medically recommended Caesarian at 39 weeks. I had to research things like cord prolapse, foetal brain damage, popliteal pressure, Lovset's manoeuvres. I read that extended breech births were perfectly safe if delivered by a confident and experienced midwife, but that few midwives felt that way because of the ubiquity of Caesarian for breech delivery. I had to decide whether my baby's personal safety was more important to me than the preservation of skills in the community for the furtherance of natural birth.

And the choice was mine. I had brilliant doctors, consultants and midwives (thank you NHS!), I had a supportive family and the best husband anyone could hope for, but the choice was mine. My body, my baby. Ultimately, I got to hit the switch. The stress, the trauma of those three weeks is still with me.

There was no right decision.

Actually, the wriggly little beggar turned back at 39+1, the day after I would have had the Caesarian, had I made that choice. Like Clara, I lucked out. I never had to live with the consequences of fouling it up. It still hangs over me. If I had folded at the last minute, I would have had an unnecessary medical procedure, a scar, a weakened uterus. If I hadn't had that thousand to one luck, I would have had to live with the consequences of attempting home-breech birth, whatever they may have been.

You can't know. You just can't know, and you can't ask anyone else to make that decision for you. You don't even get to say, stop, no. I don't want this. It's too late for any of that. You missed your chance on that call. You have three weeks, 45 minutes, one hour, whatever - you can open it up to a poll, you can take expert advice, but no-one can tell you what to do.

The decision you make will always be the right one, because it is the only one you get.

That doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't make it comfortable television.

But necessary?

Yeah. Maybe it does make it that.

Won't Somebody Think of the Children? Problems of gender in vampire fiction, part 3:

This is the third in a series of posts about 19th and early 20th Century vampire fiction, the first and second can be found here and here.

Bad Motherhood and Hungry Vampires:

Perhaps the most significant difference between male and female vampires in the late 19^th Century is this: female vampires are hungry.

Oh, male vampires eat people, don't worry about that. But they are not ravenous about it. No. Male vampires may be calculating, conniving, vengeful, insidious. They may be as loathsome and inexplicable to good WASPy masculinity as any stereotypical seducer, but of the bunch only Varney approaches that desperation, that female need for his victims. Besides, even when he gets to that state of frantic single-mindedness, the object of his interest is beautiful, innocent young women. It's peculiar, perhaps, but it isn't unhealthy. Female vampires can't even manage good ol' heterosexuality. Oh, they may bite the odd, unwary man but that's more of an afterthought. Female vampires have a very particular form of sustenance.

Children.

The fear in these narratives, the terror of female sexuality is as nothing to this fear of the influence a corrupt woman might have upon the innocence of youth. As early as Varney, the Vampyre we are told that this is the peak of all horrors the vampire can bestow. When asking Charles Holland if he would wed a woman who has experienced vampiric attack, Marchdale's strongest argument is, “if you wed, you would look forward to being blessed with children—those sweet ties which bind the sternest hearts to life with so exquisite a bondage. Oh, fancy, then, for a moment, the mother of your babes coming at the still hour of midnight to drain from their veins the very life blood she gave to them.”

What an image! It calls to mind Lilith birthing monsters, of Lady Macbeth calling on the spirits of the air to 'unsex' her. A woman who walks outside the divinely ordained strictures of behaviour is, after all, made unfit for her purpose. That purpose being, of course, the nurturing children.

So these vampire-women are a monstrous inversion of the female-biology-as-destiny. Not only are they 'failed' women, rendered incapable of 'normal' reproduction - their appetites, their hunger, lead them to steal that role, that purpose from other women. Harriet Brandt – oh, unwittingly – causes the death of Margaret Pullen's baby by her smothering, off-putting attentions. Sarah, cruel, wicked, sexually deviant, steals the village children to extend her cursed life. Lucy Westernra is a siren, calling toddling East End babes from their games. Dracula's 'brides' fawn and squabble until they are handed what is generally assumed to be a baby in a bag.

The combined image of violence and motherhood – the vampire in her bloodstained shroud, clutching a child to her breast, her face buried in its neck – is such a stark perversion of breastfeeding, of a mother's kiss, that it sits uneasily even with the modern imagination. If we add to the mix the Victorian preoccupation with eugenics and social reform, we see the vampire as the 'unfit' mother, causing the death of her own, and other women's babes. In the light of the high infant mortality rates of the time, this serves to make all women deeply suspect.

Of course, male vampires also suggest an amalgamation of violence and reproductive capacity but, with women, this implication is intensified by the non-supernatural reproductive aspect of femininity. The preserve of life and death, the role of judge and creator are – in Christian iconography – male. The taking and creation of life is pre-ordained – it is God's will, God's plan.

Vampires reproduce in a way that has no divine sanction, they live through taking life. They are an attempt, by a bodily entity, to take control. It is no surprise that Dracula is an alchemist, a proto-scientist, a necromancer trying to wrest control away from divinely ordained means. In becoming a vampire, he is seeking knowledge that, properly, belongs to God. Vampire women, too are attempting to move one step up that hierarchical ladder that places men above women, God above men. They are taking agency, attempting to control their own reproduction. But, like Dracula, they merely find themselves sliding lower. As he attempted to attain the heights of knowledge, of immortality, he became instead grotesque, sub-human, effeminate. Likewise, these women become not liberated or rational, they become mindless sleepwalkers, clutching after their own failed femininity. They become desperate gluttons, furious seductresses, snatching the children they have denied themselves with bloodied hands.

By inference, of course, this warning applies to all men who would be gods, to all women who would be men, who would through sexual agency, through abortion or contraception, seek to attain the male privilege of manoeuvring in the world. By seeking to become masculine, all these women do is fail in their femininity. The men have it worse, of course, by seeking Godhead, they fail in their humanity, because what fate could be worse than becoming a woman?

The Vampire as Cougar:

Of course, if it's difficult being a young, sexually desirable female vampire/victim, if it is all always your fault on account of your weird sexual desires, your frankly alarming reproductive capability, and your inexplicable desire to be something more than a smiling supporter of the substandard men in your life, it sucks¹ even worse being a female vampire if you are past nubility.

After all, the sole function of both women and sex is the divinely ordained function of reproduction, and that power is made to be legislated and controlled by men. So, if you can keep these naturally perverse women under control for long enough, then at the age of... oh, somewhere between 35 and 50... they politely disappear. God alone knows where they go, although we suspect its something to do with charity drives and hospital visits. It's not like they have anything left to live for.

Bitter irony aside, even I was surprised by the number of these 'middle aged' female vampires. Oh, they have no representatives as iconic as the white whiskered Dracula, but they exist in some numbers, and the chaotic implications effect they have upon patriarchal and reproductive norms is remarkable. Not only do these cougar-vamps refuse to have the decency to remain in their places and their graves, they have the unspeakable audacity to want to cling on to life beyond their reproductive prime. Again, it's almost as though they want to be men.

They can't manage it, of course. So, we have Mrs Amworth (1922/3), a widow and gadabout who stirs up a small rural community with her whist drives and dinner parties. How are these men to cope? Especially as she refuses to do the decent thing and quieten down into respectable, invisible middle age? Yes, that Mrs Amworth, who has the audacity to look ten years younger than her actual age! I mean, what kind of irresponsibility is that? She might almost be giving the message to men that she is reproductively available! Heavens, if she looks that young, they might almost be deceived by her!

Still, she embarrasses herself as our culture tells us all mature women must do if they attempt to be sexually active. She throws herself at confirmed bachelors, makes unwelcome moves upon respectable, married women and tries to bite the boy who mows her lawn. Shocking stuff. No alternative but to drive a stake through her heart.

Or we have Lady Duncayne (1896), a withered old hag: improper, idle, grotesque. She is a contradiction, a recluse who spends her year circling the pleasure spots, she hungers after continued life long past the date that nature would have told her to be off this earth, to stop being a bother.

Hugely rich, she squats over opulence that she cannot enjoy; too much money to spend it,too much life to enjoy it, she clutters up the fictional landscape, monopolising doctors, hotel rooms, attention, refusing to move over and accept that her bit is done. She employs young women, healthy, robust, nubile young women, steals them away from families and beaus, stifles them in aged company and lack of occupation. If this weren't enough, of course, she literally steals their life, transfusing their fresh, young blood into her withered veins. There is a terrible selfishness in Lady Duncayne; refusing to accept that her day is past, that all the things her gold can buy should pass on to other, younger pairs of hands. She even tries to steal the love interest of the heroine, buying his services as a doctor so that he would be incapable of marrying, of joining the wider current of young, attractive life.

And, like the vampires that have gone before them, these women are effeminate rather than masculine. In refusing to be demure, retiring, they have cast aside what little elevation brought to them by the civilising property of being 'feminine' and are instead sunk to the level of 'bad women'. They are immoral, lacsivious. Lady Ducayne, we are told, reads French novels and laughs at them, while she sleeps through English sentimental literature. She thinks that anyone, anything can be bought. Her power of temptation is not her sexual allure, but her money - the filthy lucre offered to those for whom liquidity is a pressing need. The cost, however is either the life or the morality. She is the Marxist vampire in the truest sense, exploiting the working poor, bleeding them dry, failing even to show the 'feminine charity' expected in one of her rank.

Mrs Amworth seems harmless in comparison, a mere gossip, a mayfly, a flirt. Still, she is disturbing to the established order. She dares to be sensually aware after the death of her husband and her fertility. She speaks warmly, even lasciviously, of the caress of the earth which one feels in the grave – that perverse female sexuality at work again. When she desires a man,she will claw at his window, screeching and battling to get in. If she slips through a crack in his armour, she will stifle him with her neediness. The image – a woman-become-animal scrabbling for admittance – leaves one in no doubt as to the view of female desire or affection held by the authorial voice. To let her in, after all, is to chance damnation. It is telling that she is 'discovered' by a trope often found in the folklore surrounding witches – an injury inflicted in her transformed state being noticeable upon her human body. Like a folkloric witch, she is a mature female body out of control, in need of reprisal.

Just as male vampires defile the sanctity of female chastity and young female vampires bring corruption to the sacred role of motherhood, so mature female vampire unsettles the balance, the equilibrium of the family unit. If Mrs Amworth can get a respectable village of middle-aged rustics behaving like excitable teenagers, what hope then for the younger generations? And it is at the younger generations that she is casting her cap, barging younger, more viable, women out of the way. Who does she feed upon but her gardener? A scarcely legal boy, who is doubtless utterly overcome by the attentions of an experienced woman who looks younger than her years. And when the gardener ails, she attempts to 'trap' other men into relationships, or she displays her sexual ambiguity by attacking a woman only identified as 'the Major Pearsalls's wife.'

To a certain extent, Luella Miller (1903) can be seen in this way, although she is by no means 'aged'. She is desirable, improperly so for a married woman. She draws people in – male or female – she enchants them, makes them lose all sense of self-preservation. Like Harriet Brandt, she is suffocating, bringing on an unexplained malaise to all who are foolish enough to help her. Again, like Harriet, she seems unaware of the effect she has. However fatal, she is no femme fatal. The pain she causes leaves her hurt and bewildered – pathetically so.

Pathetic is the word for it: A feminist hatred of effeminacy? 
 

To stay with Luella Miller for a moment, it's interesting the way this discourse of good and bad women plays in to early feminist discourse. After all, much has been made of Wilkins Freeman's feminism, the way that her story critiques the society which requires women to be beautiful but useless, the way she contrasts Luella Miller's repellent babyishness with the brusque, working class practicality of Lydia Anderson. Yet however scathing a critique this is of the society that keeps women of a certain class unable to help themselves, the very vitriol of Lydia's narration establishes it as a tale of woman against woman.

Lydia's first grief with Luella is that ever popular one, the one that stems from the fear patriarchal culture drills into women from so young an age – the belief that other woman are the enemy because they are trying to steal your man. Indeed, the whole conflict of the story is framed as the struggles of a 'good' woman against a 'bad' one. After all, Luella is indolent, alluring, and callous whilst Lydia is hard-working, compassionate, practical, something that echoes the femininity/effeminacy discourse so closely that I am uncomfortable to claim Luella Miller as a feminist vampire text. Yes, it begins to unsettle that set of expectations but the demands of the vampire narrative are too strong. Luella's behaviour could easily be understood through the prism of Mrs Amsworth, Harriet Brandt. She preys on the children she teaches, the much younger men who admire her. Young women, full of hope and life, fall victim to her unnatural, widow's vanity. Rather than settle to housework and charity to her neighbours - as a woman without a man should, as Lydia did - she continues to intrigue. She even (how dare she?) marries again.

No, Luella is not the model of sedate, culturally acceptable femininity. She is a caricature of effeminacy, she is all the worst bits of which a bad woman is capable. That these are the necessary product of constructed, social femininity is besides the point. Everything she gets is got on the back of those feminine wiles of hers. A 'good' woman has no time for those - Lydia, pipped at the post on her one prospect of heteronormative life settles herself down to spinisterhood, to housework and to helping her neighbours. However, we know Luella is a bad 'un, from a patriarchal perspective, because before she married, she even worked. Shocking, isn't it?

Unsettling the misogynist discourse – where is the blame?

So, for all the questioning that Wilkins Freeman did of that model of gendered expectations (and Lydia certainly does unsettle them) the only vampire story I have found that directly addressed this culture of blame, of 'bad' women, is August Derleth's The Drifting Snow(1939). Here, the vampires are oddly helpless, revenants who have no power to leave the place where they died, no hope but to lure those who wish to aid them out to the same snowy death they encountered on the hill.

Their method of hunting is, of course, codified as feminine: their very existence draws men to them. And, of course, it is always men. The helplessness of these vampires entices the virile, the courageous to assist them, any 'feeding' that occurs is the parasitic effect of weakness upon strength. Naturally, in being drawn to this softness, the man is emasculated, is made a soft snow-vampire, is forced to wait and draw the attentions of those stronger than himself. We could expect, then, the old saw that if a woman is attractive to a man in any way, the consequences of that attraction are entirely her fault.

But Derleth undermines this, specifically and directly. “One night” the explanation goes, “[my father] found out that one of my brothers... had been very familiar with one of the servants, a very pretty girl, older than I was. He thought she was to blame, though she wasn't, and he didn't find it out until too late.”

"Though she wasn't". Three words. Three words and this story is turned on its head. The first vampire, it seems, is a woman wronged, a woman whose obvious allure meant the blame for a man's corruption was laid upon her head. But that assignment of blame is incorrect – the simple fact of her attractiveness does not excuse the male approach. The woman's death, cruel and unearned, finally imbues her with that power, that ability to draw men in to their destruction. But it is interesting that she does it not through her wiles, but through her very real, irredeemable helplessness - a self-effacement that is feminine rather than effeminate, a state to which she was already condemned by the moral laxity and prejudices of men. In under ten words, Derleth addresses the underlying prejudice of most late 19^th and early 20^th Century vampire fiction, "He thought she was to blame, though she wasn't".

The Alchemy of the Screen Vampire:

But here, in 1939, we have a break, because here comes the screen vampire, the cinematic history. Certain expectations, certain cliches emerge from the stories and become gospel. The vampire ceases to be an almost-ghost, an almost-witch, a borderline thing and becomes, triumphantly, a genre in its own right. There come a generation of vampire writers who have not read Dracula, or at least not until after they have seen Lugosi and Langella and Lee. 

What this does to the perception of the vampire as a gendered being may go some way to explain why a woman's lust for a vampire goes from deviant to predictable, and why it becomes so much harder for women to become vampires at all. 

Part 4 will come after a short hiatus.

1Pun totally intended.