> Outlawed
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Outlawed
by
Anna North (Goodreads Author)
Connor's review
Jan 12, 2021
did not like it
bookshelves:
dnf,
owned-not-tbr
DNF’d on page 118 specifically.
Until that point, I was willing to overlook a lot.
There are a lot of strange gender and gendering decisions, especially when there is a character in the synopsis who is not a man or a woman. A character that I don’t think was handled all that well, as far as I got.
I was sold this book on the idea that it was going to be a gang of barren women and genderqueer people, so that it was all these people who are harmed by “being able to bear children” being the definition of womanhood. But instead the gang is barren women and genderqueer people as long as they are afab. The Kid is first described to our narrator as a man, and when she meets The Kid (who is not given pronouns at all) she doesn’t perceive The Kid as a man or a woman just as a person, which was a decision I understood from the author as a way to respect a character who does not exist in the binary. Except, after that she suddenly misgenders The Kid just for the sake of explanation and then we are all told what genitalia The Kid is working with anyway.
Which is. Exhausting.
That The Kid and the narrator continue to constantly gender everything else from inanimate objects to the size of hands (even with women you know are large and, again, a character who isn’t a man or a woman at all) and the presence of calluses (as if we aren’t talking about a gang of outlaws and as if calluses aren’t from working)... just a bonus.
I wanted to believe, and I am still willing to believe, that the kind of terf-y aspects in the book are in service of “this mentality is harmful” and not something more insidious. I really am. I think it’s possible. I want to believe that the narrator’s bad takes and rough opinions (“this cow was more woman than I would ever be”) are supposed to be a show of how she needs to be exposed to more of the world and needs to, and will, grow as a character.
But then I got to pages 117-118, where three of these women start discussing how they have, can, and should disguise themselves as men (“that’s the best way to charm some men”), get into sexual relationships with cowboys who like other men (“plenty of cowboys like other cowboys”), and “do whatever you want to them, but your clothes stay on. And sometime while you are drinking together, you mention a horrible accident you were in a while back. Gored by a bull, whatever. That explains anything they feel or don’t feel on your body.” Because, “the good news is, most men are pretty stupid, and pretty gullible. They want to believe what you tell them.” So yeah. I do in fact draw the line at casual discussions of women tricking gay men into sexual interactions with them under false pretenses and, as a friend pointed out when the passage was sent to them, painting the queer men out to be the predators in that situation.
As a trans man, and a queer man, absolutely not. I’m done. I thought I left girls trying to catfish gay men back in high school when they were doing it on the internet. I can’t go any further.
Also, maybe don’t read if you have dysphoria/are worried about picking up new insecurities within dysphoria, I’d say especially if you are transmasc but since that’s what I know, I’m not sure it’s any worse.
Also if it was sold to you as a sapphic book as I’ve also heard, I wouldn’t say it is. A lot of the women in the book are sapphic, but that does not include the main character and I believe she starts a romance with a man. (In the pages in question, she seems to confirm that she is in fact straight)
That doesn’t discount that there are sapphic characters in the book, and I think we have all read a book for the gay side characters, but I do think it matters to say that it is in fact the side characters.
Also the heists are not very detailed, the first one in plot is not discussed at all. The world building, in particular the danger that women are in vs the standing they have, and what places do and do not still exist in this alternate timeline- sometimes feels inconsistent. Some of the more brutal details or grim descriptions can come out of nowhere and feel edgy rather than genuine. And often enough something is repeated or over-explained in a way that feels like the author doesn’t doesn’t trust the audience to read and understand what she is writing. It can feel like you are being spoon fed information that you already picked up on a few pages ago. But in its defense there was one specific instance that felt that way the most, and I was probably being pretty critical following that, and of course I did dnf the book so these might not be issues that continue further in the book.
