When the women were too much in focus I felt an obligation to think of their characters as being more like me, to view the story through their eyes. I think I actively preferred books without strong female characters, which made it even easier to completely identify with the male leads. Although there were science-fiction authors whose worlds included gender bending and gender transformation, and alternatives to hetero sex, these were not the ones to which I found myself drawn. There are no consequences, and no one is harmed.Īt night, when I was alone, I became a sci-fi hero out for sex and adventure, with women as secondary characters, either falling at my feet or following my lead. What happens on casual sex planets stays on casual sex planets. At the end of the book, he returns to his wife. But there was no blouse-and her skin was warm and soft-and his hand moved slowly down her shoulder blade and down the hidden ridges of her ribs.” When he awakes, he finds that Gladia is really there, in his bed, giving him what he has desired without his even having had to ask. Then, when he is exhausted after a long day of gumshoeing, he dreams: “He was holding her again, as before. But because he is married, he doesn’t act on this.

The detective, Elijah Bailey, desires Gladia. For instance, an early break in the case occurs when the detective finds out that the robot’s owner, Gladia Solaria, not only had regular sex with the robot in question but even considered him a husband of sorts. Sex is integral to the plot from the start, which felt completely new to me at age 11 or 12. Instantly and unthinkingly I identified with the protagonist: a married male detective struggling with agoraphobia who travels to a foreign planet, where sex is casual and monogamy nonexistent, to figure out who has destroyed a valuable humanoid robot. In The Robots of Dawn, the third entry in Asimov’s Robot series, I found something else. I was trying to play a part based on the adventures of the Sweet Valley Twins, but I could never get it exactly right. This stood in contrast to the way I consumed girl culture: by trying to absorb and mimic the attitudes of straight girls, which I understood to mean crushing on boys, waiting to be noticed by boys, and sort of chastely desiring a kiss or a dance but nothing more. But I knew I preferred old-fashioned books by men for men (or adolescent boys), and I read these as if I were a native rather than a visitor to their world. In my case, the world certainly viewed me as a girl, and having no knowledge of any alternatives, I accepted my girlness as an unalterable fact. One of the weirdest things about growing up transgender is that a trans person can be socialized simultaneously as both a boy and a girl. Up until that day in the library, everything I’d read about sex had been morally instructive and geared toward young girls.Īt that age, I had no concept of what a transgender man was.

The robots of dawn