Intended Audience: Adult
Sexual content: Explicit
Ace/Genderqueer characters: yes
Rating: R for heavy sexual violence, suicidal characters and disturbing imagery
Writing style: 5/5
Likable characters: 4/5
Plot/Concepts: 4/5
Valerie has never met a Gammadian bland before, but when Tedla is found half-dead in an alley, Val is called in to make sense of this sexless being. Tedla’s life has not been easy, not least of all because blands are treated as a nonhuman slave class by the males and females of Gammadis.
I had misgivings about this book when I first heard the synopsis. Would this be another story in which a sexless asexual “non-human” would become human through discovering sexuality and gender? Given that so many becoming-human stories have such a discovery or relationship as an important milestone, I was worried this would be the same, and thus invalidate Tedla’s identity. I also balked at the name “bland”, since this seemed like just another instance of thinking that nonsexual means boring. And yes, this is another story in which the sexless characters are referred to as “it”. This serves the double purpose of not sexing the blands but also illustrating their nonhuman status in the eyes of the other Gammadians.
But this book is not just about sexuality or gender. There are so many social themes, from exploring information-based economies to eugenics to suicide and environmental responsibility. The Gammadian culture seems in some ways very backward, living as they are in a post-environmental-collapse sort of state, trying to balance their population carefully, deeply ingrained with the fear of waste. There is a lot of fear in this society, invisible at first as it often is in societies which depend on the support of a huge slave class. Despite the complexity of all these themes, I never felt wholly lost, and everything fit together so nicely and made so much sense. In fact, sometimes it fit together almost too nicely so that events became a sort of conspiracy in the end. That’s my only complaint with the plot structure of this book. That, and I often have difficulty swallowing the extremity of violence which is culturally accepted in these dystopian worlds as a reinforcement of power. Not to say that I don’t believe such atrocities have happened in our own world (I know they have, and that they’ve been hushed up), but to have them openly displayed is another matter entirely; I can’t wrap my head around such universal brutality.
Tedla is a wonderful character. It (and I say “it” because that is what Tedla prefers to be called, and what all blands are called) has a complexity of emotion and motivation that borders on the contradictory, but is still consistent within itself. I loved how when we meet it and ever after, its emotional state greatly informs its thoughts and decisions, and we see mirrored in Tedla our own state of constant change contrasted with the deep internal truth of who we are. The other characters the book actually spends time on are also well drawn and believable, each locked in their own cultural sphere, so that conversations actually contain a great deal of subtle and not-so-subtle conflict as each speaks from their own culture and tries to make sense of the other. There were even many instances of unspoken dialogue shouting from the page in the little pauses between each character’s words! We get to know each character so well that we can tell what they are not saying even without the author explaining this to us.
Tedla in particular stands up for Gammadian and bland culture at several points, calling Val out on her assumptions or biases, and this gives Tedla a strength that I appreciated. This especially soothed my worries that Tedla would be required to abandon its asexual and agender identity in order to achieve humanity. One of my favorite moments comes when Val’s husband, Max, is baffled at Tedla’s lack of anger at its misfortune.
“Unable to contain himself, Max burst out, ‘Don’t you have any anger, Tedla? Any indignation at what was done to you?’
Tedla gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean done to me? Nothing was done to me. I’m perfectly natural the way I am. Why can’t you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender?'”
I’m sure I’m not the only nonbinary person who often feels “afflicted with gender,” so this bit of dialogue really spoke to me, and it also illustrates an important aspect of Tedla’s journey in separating what parts of its identity as a bland are natural and healthy for it (asexuality and nonbinary identity) and which are socially imposed and unhealthy (such as feelings of inferiority or worthlessness, or a stagnant unquestioning mind). Gammadians are all more or less neutral in body before puberty, and are only considered “born” after their body develops sexual characteristics. Thus, Tedla looked forward to becoming human while simultaneously dreading the process of becoming male or female, even having a dysphoric nightmare the night before the ceremony. It also protests against being put in what it sees as male clothing, uncomfortable with being seen as a man. It is baffled and slightly annoyed by the fact that many well-meaning people recommend surgery to “correct” its “problem” of not having genitalia or an obvious sex.
Tedla also has some deep-seated disdain for how sexualized society is, although it has had to learn to deal with that in the worst possible ways. This is where things get truly difficult to read. Blands being childlike in their lack of sexual characteristics does not, unfortunately, prevent them from becoming objects of sexual desire quite frequently. The problem of consent is quite complex here, since from the Gammadian perspective blands don’t have the ability to really make decisions on their own. In that case, having sex with a bland can be considered a form of pedophilia or child molestation. And indeed Tedla is repeatedly raped, sometimes in gruesome fashion—it is a part of Gammadian culture which is simultaneously widespread and taboo. And yet at one point Tedla decides to willingly grant sexual favors to its guardian because it feels great affection for him and a debt of gratitude for his protection. Tedla even goes so far as to say that it is in love with its guardian, although it still never feels sexual attraction, just a desire to please. Knowing that Tedla is much more mentally and emotionally sophisticated than most Gammadians would admit, does this mean that its consent in this case is valid, or is it still trapped and merely choosing the lesser of many evils, using sex to please its master and keep itself safe from abandonment to some worse fate?
I believe that by the end of the book, Tedla is at least beginning to learn how to separate the injustice it has suffered from the truth of its identity. It has come to understand what parts of its life were due to class difference and oppression rather than its gender and sexual identity. It is learning not to see itself wholly through others eyes, nor throw out the good with the bad, the true with the false. I do have some concern that readers who are less familiar with the issues surrounding asexuality or nonbinary identities will not really “get” a lot of the messages here and instead fall prey to some of the stereotypes both Gammadians and humans have about gender and sexual development being an intrinsic part of human development. I think Gilman does a good enough job of portraying Tedla’s character that no one should walk away from this book believing that Tedla’s humanity rested on its ability to be not-a-bland. It was different from other blands in the sense that it was able to question whether it was inferior for being different from other humans. And I’m pretty sure it decided that being asexual and agender did not justify its being treated as less than human, even if it does struggle with irrational residual guilt. That’s realistic.
I’d say Halfway Human is a must-read for any ace or trans* person who can stomach the sexual violence that it covers. I mean, Tedla relates what has happened to it bluntly, not skirting around it nor wallowing in gory detail. Still, it might be a bit much for some readers. I found the story ultimately empowering because of how much I could relate to Tedla’s process of coming to own its own life, and how difficult that can be when you’ve relied on others to shape you and think for you for years. I feel like this novel needs to be read and discussed, and I’m sure that, given the multitude of themes it covers, there is something that will interest anyone who picks it up.