I want someone to write a book where Mermaids are the women thrown off ships when the sailors got afraid because having a woman on the boat is bad luck. And as they sink to the bottom, legs tied together, they change slowly until they can breathe, until they can use their tied up legs to swim. And they drown sailors in revenge, luring them in by singing in their husky voices still stinging from the salt water they breathed.
someone please write this
“Please, don’t do this!” her voice comes out hoarse, cracked. The men leer at her, their gazes cold.
“Storm is comin’ now” the captain says. He is the worst, because in his eyes there is regret. Compassion. Pity. He doesn’t want to do it. Not like the others do. But that won’t stop him.
“Told your father a ship is no place for a girl,” he says. “Told ‘im to find another vessel, told ‘im to just keep you home, if e’ had ta. But did he listen? If you want someone to blame, miss, blame him. Tha ocean is cold, cold and cruel. And she ain’t gonna let us through this without payment, without a cost.”
The wind blows his gray hair back from his face, and he nods at one of the crewman – the one who’s eyes always linger on her for too long – and he steps forward and jabs Alice in the side with a paddle from one of the rowboats. She cries out, even though she doesn’t want to, even though she wants to scream instead, scream and curse the way a lady of her standing is never meant to do. She wants to curse them all to a watery grave and watch as they suffer.
She tries to move, tries to run past them, to break the rope binding her legs at the ankles through sheer power of will. She fails.
The crewman jabs at her again, and she spits at him. The glob of saliva hits him on the face, spittle clinging to his sun-tanned skin. His crewmates laugh.
Alice realizes her mistake too late.
His eyes darken, he steps forward – and he strikes her across the face with the paddle so hard she’s twisted around, so hard she sees black and careens of the gangplank and plummets to the dark, thrashing water below.
The captain was right: the sea is cold. Colder than any hell she’s ever imagined. Colder than the time she fell face first into a deep puddle on the street in the dead of winter. She feels the ice flood her mouth, fill her lungs, turn every vein and bone bitter blue with frost. She can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move.
The water tosses her against the hull of the ship and she feels her skull crack against the worn wood. The world fades, and she begins to die…
She remembers the sea, through the darkness. Remembers tossing her friend Lydia into the waves at the beach, remembers their laughter as Lydia pulled her in as well. She remembers dunking her head under, feeling the rush of cold fill her up as she became lighter than she’d ever been, became part of the water.
‘The sea is cold,’ she remembers the captain saying. Yes, she thinks, but I am colder.
And the ocean? she realizes. The ocean is her sister.
She feels it filling her up, feels it caressing her body, enveloping her. Not killing her, but cradling her. A sister holding up her own blood, a mother, soothing her wailing child, kissing the hurt away. A goddess, hearing the prayers of her devoted believer, and answering them.
I have salt and seawater in my soul, Captain. I will show you how cold these waters can be.
She feels the edges of her body fading, feels herself stop being a me and become a we, become an us, become every drop of water and every clump of foam and every weed and every wave. Feels herself changing.
Her dress is pulled away by the waves, button by button, seam by seam. The sea strips her, soothes her skin. She feels herself swaying, feels her injuries healing. Feels herself become something more than a scared girl or a single spot of death in a pool of life, as her body flares like a fire, as her legs brush together, as they begin to fuse…
She feels herself heal, and she feels herself change.
When it is over, she is bare, but she feels no shame. Her tail twists in the water beneath her, swaying, more natural than her legs ever felt. Stronger, too. She runs her hand over the dark blue scales, the same shade as the surface in a storm. She feels herself smile.
Siren, she thinks, mermaid. Sister of the sea.
The captain was right; a ship is no place for a woman. This is the place for a woman.
And when she drags him screaming down into it, he will realize: the ocean may be cruel…but her sisters are worse.
Alice smiles again, and begins to swim after the ship fading into the distance.
Holy fuck this is amazing.
Month: July 2015
My transgender sterilization, or why my consent meant nothing.
StandardIn 2009 I was sterilized against my will.
And it didn’t happen the way I expected. I wasn’t strapped to a bed or dragged screaming into an operating room. If that had been the case, at least I would have had an easier time understanding what happened to me.
Instead it was the slow mounting of circumstances. I was told that without proof of sterilization, I couldn’t change the gender marker on my passport. I learned that without that change I couldn’t find a job. I couldn’t go to a bank, hospital or dentist without being publically humiliated as I was forced to explain the discrepancy on my passport. I couldn’t get through passport control to leave my country. I couldn’t safely go to a bar at night. And since I didn’t get sterilized, doctors doubted my ‘commitment’ to being transgender and refused access to further transition related care.
Eventually I gave in. I needed to get on with my life. I was done screaming, crying, fighting. I made my appointment, packed up my own bag for a 3 day stay at the hospital and checked myself in for my own sterilization. The one I really did not want.
When I made my appointment, when I checked myself in, when I went through preparation for surgery, I must have signed over half a dozen consent forms. It seemed that at every turn there was a new form for me to sign saying that I did in fact want this. That I was giving my full informed consent to the procedure. I’ve had other surgeries that did not involve this pile of paper work and looking back, I’m sure all that extra attention to consent was there precisely because I was being forced into this position. I was being sterilized against my will, but I had to put on a performance of consent so the agents within the system could never be held accountable. I do not know if the nurse who handed me my 5th consent form and prepped my for my surgery knew that I really wanted to run out of that hospital. I don’t know if she knew that I felt broken, defeated, hopeless. Sometimes I feel guilty about allowing her to be an unknowing participant in my violation.
I hated the consent forms more than anything.
I had the surgery and I went on, as I did before, to campaign against sterilization as a requirement for legal gender recognition. And in 2014 sterilization ceased to be a requirement for legal gender recognition in the Netherlands, where I live. I celebrated that day. I am really happy that the next generation of transgender people will not have to go through the same thing.
But I never forgot what had happened to me or considered it a finished chapter. I never forgot that consent can be a performance, enforced to cover up a great coercion. I never forgot that the participants in a consent violation, doctors and nurses in my case, may not even be aware of their role because they did not witness the coercion taking place. They did not see how my options were limited until I got to this point. Consent can be a choice made because all the other roads you would choose are blocked. Consent can be the mask violation wears. And I am very skeptical when I see consent hailed as the highest standard for ethical conduct. So there is a ‘yes’, maybe even an eager, informed ‘yes’. But what’s the rest of the story? Where there are those with power and those without it, consent is not a good measure for whether abuse occurs.
I am sure others are at this very moment signing consent forms or saying ‘yes’ to things they really do not want.
Please reblog this if you follow me.
So this is where I’m at.
Me: *has meltdown over a papercut*
Me: *likes being slapped during sex*
talking about 9/11 with white people is literally one of the most frustrating things ever because they won’t stop talking about their experiences (even if nothing happened to them personally), and when i, a middle eastern person, try to contribute to the conversation, i can’t get a fucking word in.
like what the fuck, nothing happened to you on that day – which, you know, thank goodness – so why the fuck do you insist on dominating the conversation? my daily life is still being effected by this even now, over ten years later.
but you’re not interested in hearing about how my fifth grade health teacher never again called on me or the arab girl in my class. you’re not interested in how whenever my family travels, all fourteen of us (a number that used to include young children) get “randomly” searched. you’re not interested in the fact that when i was asked to buy a propane tank for a barbecue, i spent the rest of the day stressed out and worried that the attendants at all the stores visited to inquire were all going to think i was making explosives (all stores in the neighborhood mysteriously were out of propane tanks in the middle of summer). you’re not interested in the fact that whenever my cousin prepares to fly on his own, his mother calls him to make sure he’s clean shaven so he doesn’t look “like a terrorist.” you’re not interested in the fact that when i was you’re not interested in the fact that i once witnessed a whole family of white people bypass the x-ray scanner for the old fashioned metal detector, but when i asked for the same treatment, i was denied; when i pointed out the (many) signs claiming that i had the right to refuse going through that machine, the tsa agent who mere seconds earlier berated me for my request went conveniently deaf. you’re not interested in hearing about how my sister was told “sorry about your leader” when osama bin laden was killed.
i could reference personal anecdotes until i went blue in the face.
there are countless people who have stories like this, stories that are grotesque and demeaning and terrifying. these are everyday occurrences.
but you’re not interested in any of that. frankly, you’re not even that interested when middle eastern and muslim (and sometimes non-muslim desi) people are subjected to extreme violence or killed. you guys got over chapel hill pretty damn fast. if you noticed it at all.
you don’t give a fuck about us, or our ongoing 9/11 stories. you just want to tell me about how horrible it was, sitting in class and listening to other kids get their names called on the pa system.
but i totally get it. it was really hard for you.
Furniture and interior made of malachite minerals.
*immediately thinks of Steven Universe*
