The Bluestocking 374: Bad deaths and bad bets
the mistake that catches out a long-embedded Russian spy
Happy Friday!
The book launch has been intense—events in Bath, Cambridge and Oxford; a launch night in London to a sold-out Conway Hall; and a real mix of reviews (some places really dug it, others …. hated it, and me).
If you’re in London over the summer, I still have my event at Dr Johnson’s House with Henry Oliver to come, as well as one with top YIMBY James O’Malley. I’m also in Buxton in July, and Brighton in September.
Otherwise, normal Bluestocking service is now resumed.
Helen
Inside America’s Death Chambers (The Atlantic)
I volunteered to serve as a witness at Cox’s execution, traveling to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, in the low plains of the Delta. It was fall, but the season hadn’t yet touched the Deep South; there were still sleepless crickets in the evenings, and grand trees in summer dress. Prison officials directed witnesses into white vans, which took us along back roads to the execution chamber.
Cox uttered his last words, declaring in a short speech that he “was a good man, at one time.” In the moment, I didn’t know what to make of that statement, and truthfully I still don’t. Did he mean to say that he was irredeemable—that the path from good to evil ran only one way? Or did he mean the opposite? And which would be the stranger thing to say in his position? In the dim witness room, I transcribed his words. As for the execution, this time I was prepared. It didn’t turn my stomach when Cox’s face subtly changed color on the gurney, from pale to flushed, as the poison ravaged his body.
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Liz Bruenig has spent the last few years watching—witnessing—executions, in an attempt to understand why state-sanctioned killings are so appealing to some Americans. (Although not all families of victims, she discovered.) I know this work has taken a toll on Liz, and I respect her all the more for doing it in the face of such hostility from the Alabama penal system in particular.
How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost (NYT, gift link)
For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that “saved my life,” as he later wrote. “When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating,” Strangio wrote. “It is survival.” He vowed to work “to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility.”
Like Strangio, the younger people going to work at L.G.B.T.Q. groups leaned further left than their older colleagues. Often identifying as queer — a label that could connote radical politics as much as any sexual or gender identity — they resented the incremental, assimilationist politics that had won the right to same-sex marriage. They sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal — to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them. Strangio wrestled with how to achieve justice for trans and other marginalized people through a system he believed was designed to subjugate them. In interviews and on social media, he has described himself as “a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with “social power and capital and political power” and to the “fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.” The turn to trans rights would ultimately reopen an old fissure in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement: whether to seek civic equality — or liberation.
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Superb long read about the ACLU’s doomed attempt to have red-state puberty blocker bans overturned by the Supreme Court, which failed, and which has potentially opened the door to much greater rollbacks on contested medical treatments in the US. Great job, team!
Whatever else you could say about court cases, they do help get evidence out in the open and subjected to proper scrutiny. As I wrote after the oral arguments in this case, the ACLU’s Chase Strangio had to concede under questioning that underage transition treatment doesn’t reduce suicide rates. This was just about the key claim made for the Dutch protocol. But he couldn’t prove it in court.
This piece is also worth reading for its insight into the Biden’s administration’s lazy assumption that “protecting this vulnerable group was the natural next step toward full civil rights for all Americans.” Then the White House realised, too late, that wasn’t what was happening at all; instead of of their own senior officials was interfering in medical guidelines to remove lower-age limits for surgeries such as mastectomies. “There was now a dawning awareness within the administration, another Biden aide told me, that its allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care.” No shit.
Quick Links
“Finally I take my seat in the stalls… I end up sitting sitting next to the producer’s mother who is a veteran of previews. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ she says, ‘previews are always disappointing.’” I’ve really enjoyed Daisy Goodwin’s diary of her first time writing a play. My lord, watching something you’ve written be presented to live audience sounds terrifying (Substack).
Philippa Perry’s Observer advice column is now reborn as a Substack. Highly recommended for empathetic real talk.
Last week’s post on Hans Eysenck has some great comments; do catch up on the discussion if you’re interested in psychology.
Thanks to the only good fitness influencer, Joel Snape, for the link to this archive piece by Zadie Smith on what writers can learn from dancers (Guardian). The dance between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain is one of my favourite in all of cinema.
“There is also this much mocked line about British social interactions: “Many parts of the capital would fail my integration “bus stop” test — can you share a joke at a bus stop with a stranger from a different ethnicity about something you have both heard on national media?” I am slightly concerned that David Goodhart is not in fact British if he views this as a regular interaction among white British people in London. This feels like the kind of claim that would be the mistake that catches out a long-embedded Russian spy.” Ben Ansell on the discourse around “white British” citizens being the only real citizens (Substack).
See you next time! And of course, the book itself remains available:
Not a Brit, but from my time spent in London the appropriate integration test would be “Given that you are sharing a space with a stranger, would the death of the universe arrive before you made eye contact with them?” Happy to be corrected :-)
Had a look back at the Guardian review and ouch! Very much a two footed tackle from behind. I wonder if they had been waiting in the long grass to write this one? (No doubt you have been on their naughty list for some time). Still, if I were you, I would wear the badge of “bandwagon-jumping ambient philistine” with (if not at) pride.