ENTER THE GRAVEYARD

I am not my gut, damn it. Plus, a deranged screed against the individual.

Let’s try something new. 

Yesterday, I posted a half-essay, half-review about Sarah Hill’s book This is Your Brain on Birth Control. As with all my essays, much of what I draft gets deleted before it ever reaches you. This happens mostly because it sucks and doesn’t deserve to see the light of day.

Other times, however, the deleted stuff isn’t so bad, occasionally even pretty good. But I might delete because it is a new argument for me and I haven’t worked out the kinks, or because I am touching on topics I feel I should better understand first, or because it is just a bad “fit”, or because it is too ranty, or too wild….

I think better writers don’t have to worry about this so much, but I like to run away with tangents and have to do this all the time, and it is awful because I grow attached to all my darlings and hate to kill them. 

So I figure, why not occasionally share the passages I mourned the most for with you—a little peak behind the curtain? I will explain the context when it is necessary, but otherwise will not add anything else.

Welcome, friends, to the Graveyard.

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Deleted passages from Reduced to Ourselves, published 12/19/2022 

Passage 1: My Gut and Me

…The other day, I stumbled upon an article which foresaw at some point in the near future, uterus transplants for transwomen. Quoted in the article were various researchers who believed that not only would this be possible, that it will be a reality sooner than we expect. Males will become pregnant, thanks to science.  

Now, I am not a biologist, gynecologist, or surgeon. I have (to my parent’s extreme disappointment) no medical degree. But I have no problem saying that such a thing is a laughable pipe dream–borne of several compounding delusions. The most fundamental of which is one that even I engaged in not too long ago: what I think of as the “modular understanding of the body”. This is the idea that our body is not as a whole organism, but as a system of divisible components that can be (to some degree) substituted or recombined without compromising on the integrity of the “self”.

That is to say, it is thinking about the body as if it were a machine possessed by a ghost.