Letters to the Editor
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No Letter I Could Write Would Be Worthy
Wow. So much to consider and so little mental energy. A bit too much on the Pop psychology with the parental disapproval, attitudes, competition, etc. But it is rewarding to see such detailed, rich, compassionate, complex accounting of one case of human genius on the ashpile of unforgiving nature.
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Read many of her short stories and novellas as a teenager
And they've stuck with me for 25 years in a way nothing much else I read back then has. A truly gifted woman whatever her demons (perhaps because of them) who helped expand written science fiction beyond those clichés which, sadly, still dominate the visual form of the genre almost four decades later.
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Before JT Leroy there were...
...writers with non de plumes that weren't truckloads of bullshit, who didn't depend on starfuckers for their publicity, who wrote with style and wit. Writers such as James Tiptree, Jr.
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real
I wasn't familiar with Alice Sheldon before now, but after reading this review, I'd like to find out more about her. She was an actual person- complex, lovely. Instead of having any meaningful relationships, I have to find out about genuine people in other ways.
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Fascinating Author and Article
Much food for thought, had never considered the rewards of being a pretty women as addictive and negative - very interesting.
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James Tiptree Jr was a woman???
Thanks, Salon, for telling me more than I wanted to know about yet another author whose work I have enjoyed without feeling any need to understand, or even visualize, his / her private identity.
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Another possibility
I've been a Tiptree/Sheldon fan for years. In the 80’s, I wrote to her asking permission to adapt one of her short stories, "Lirios: A Tale of the Quintana Roo," for a screenwriting class. She wrote back an utterly charming note, cheerfully giving me the okay along with the name of her agent if I decided to pursue the matter professionally rather than just for a class.
I haven't read Phillips’ biography yet but I'm struck by another possible explanation to the puzzle of Sheldon's life. I think she may have been transgendered. Born and raised in an era before transsexuality was a popular topic of media attention, academic study and internet support groups, trying to sort out her feelings and establish an identity with no vocabulary or context would have been pretty much impossible.
The pervasive misconception, “trapped in the wrong body,” has misled many a transsexual. The reality is much more complicated. In my case, for example, I liked my body but was baffled my a society that could embrace such a simplistic notion that being a man or woman depended on something as irrelevant as what was between one’s legs. For me, it has always been more about where I felt most at home: in suits and ties, or dresses; in the company of guys or girls; shaving or putting on makeup; playing rough and tumble, or putting together teddy bear tea parties. Being romantically attracted to both women and men only added to my confusion and ensured it would take more time to figure out who I was.
Many aspects of Sheldon’s life point to the possibility that she may have been transgendered. Her unfettered joy and achievements as Tiptree, undercut by bewilderment, guilt, and feelings of frustration; her intermittent and acute discomfort living as a woman; her atypical career path; her constant quest to discover who she was and what she really wanted to be; her uncanny perspective into both genders and the relationship between men and women; even her strong feminism.
Had she been born later, like me she may have transitioned from female-to-male.
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Viva La Difference!
If only she were normal?
Great author, very normal article.
Someone with unique perspective and sensitivity looking at our community and its potential from beyond the standard points of view. And what is focused on is who she wasn't, and what she should have been.
Celebrate the diverse perspective but tsk at the eccentric life behind it. Much like people who pitied Spike Milligan for his depression. So often these brilliant refractions come from people who feel life intensely. Surely its about time we started to acknowledge that bipolar people and people with many kinds of non standard perspectives have something unusual to offer as a natural product of not being normal.
Perhaps then JTJr is the appropriate response to our social malaise of needing to unpack divergence and point at the box it should really fit into if it knew its place..
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I hope this book sends people back to his/her stories
Sounds like Phillips has written a terrific bio - and I argue that anyone capable of producing even ONE of Tiptree's most intense stories is not just "nearly great". I hope this book sends a lot of readers back to the greatest of his/her stories (many named in Miller's article). Thank you Laura - Julie - and Alice.
Tiptree/Sheldon's name lives on in an annual award for science fiction and fantasy that "explores and expands gender"; see tiptree.org for details. S/he also dissected imperialism and colonialism with a laser beam.
Even Tiptree's less-than-earthshattering stories are still terrific reads; my own guilty pleasure is "Faithful to thee, Terra, in our fashion" but I hope you'll have your own.
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Transgendered? Eh, maybe, maybe not...
You also have to consider that, in the era in which Alice Sheldon grew up, there was little or no frame of reference for a woman being attracted to other women. This was an era in which even most lesbians who were in relationships settled into pretty strict butch/femme roles (even several years ago, when I was explaining my sexual orientation to my mother, she asked me "Are you the man or the woman?") Within such a cultural paradigm, it's not difficult to understand why a woman attracted to other women would enjoy interacting with them while masquerading as a man.
There is a difference between gender identity and sexual orientation. My impression is that gender identity comes down to how you feel about yourself; sexual orientation regards how you feel about others (I have one transgender friend of mine, male-to-female, who was attracted to women while she identified as male and now identifies as lesbian). But, to the extent one defines oneself through interactions with others (which sounds like something Alice Sheldon probably struggled with), there's a lot of confusing overlap between the two, since we all still struggle with the concept of how a man could be attracted to a man or a woman to a woman without it reflecting upon their gender identity. It would have required a pretty talented and sophisticated psychotherapist to sort all this out for Ms. Sheldon, and unfortunately, I doubt any such mental health professionals were available to Ms. Sheldon during that era.