Trans Lies Are Lies
a review of Lionel Shriver's new novel
This review of Lionel Shriver’s novel contains some spoilers, but they’re handled lightly and this review does not give away all of the crucial plot elements. I believe anyone who reads this review will still enjoy the book, but if you want a totally not-spoiled reading experience, you should probably stop reading now.
Mandatory disclosure of biases affecting the review: the book seems to have as a fundamental notion the idea that IQ testing is a valid, reliable, and extremely valuable measure that accurately measures human intelligence. I do not believe this to be true to nearly the extent that the smart, sympathetic characters do (and presumably that the author does). I have had my IQ tested multiple times, and my scores have ranged from perfectly average (literally 100, the mean adult score) to the 99.4 percentile. To the best of my understanding, the variability was solely dependent on my mood state and where I was in my PTSD symptomology. Also, I suspect, I do better on tests that have a higher proportion of number play and pattern recognition problems, as those are my bailiwick. Thus, if I had to guess, neither of those extremes are accurate—I suspect that I have above-average intelligence but not 99.4th percentile levels of “above,” and that despite having taken a number of IQ tests, none of them have accurately placed me in the distribution as of yet.
My experience points to an extreme vulnerability of using IQ testing as a proxy for something important—testing someone on a bad day or when their psychological disorders are flaring up can present a false picture. Which is why I would adamantly oppose using IQ testing as a gatekeeping measure to anything important, especially for children.
At best, I see IQ testing as a badly calibrated compass — it points in the general direction of something important, but doesn’t really get us there with accuracy.
Trans Lies Are Lies
Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Mania, is an alternate history of the United States beginning in 2011, during Obama’s first term. She creates a world where a social movement sprang up and quickly overtook education, government, medicine, and other important institutions: the Mental Parity Movement. It sets up the pretense that there is really no such thing as variable human intelligence: everyone is just as intelligent as everyone else. There are some people who are “alternative processors,” but this is just a different kind of intelligence, equal to the intelligence of everyone else. The most egregious social sin imaginable is to express the opinion that there is anything such as a smart or stupid person.
This is so flagrantly ridiculous that sane people understand that everyone is merely pretending to believe it, in order to be kind and avoid accusations of bigotry. And yet, as it takes over the government, education, medicine, and society at large, people pretending more and more effectively becomes a social requirement.
People begin to stumble over their language, communicating their affirmation with buttons and yard signs like WE SUPPORT COGNITIVE NEUTRALITY.
In short, it is a pitch-perfect parody of the trans movement. Looking at the world around us and the way that people who know damn good and well that “woman” is more than a feeling in the mind of a man and that expecting gay men to go down on women to prove they aren’t bigots is, itself, homophobic insanity, it’s a direct parallel to the world of the novel. In the alternative version of our world that Shriver creates, elite universities proudly announce that their admissions will be done by lottery, apologize for their past bigotry in not letting everyone in, and the same types of people who chant “Trans women are women!” are the ones who pretend to not care where their surgeons went to med school.
The parallels are endless, including universities opening up offices of Cognitive Equality. They’re hilarious despite being very on-the-nose, up to and including the way that in liberal areas, parents have to pay lip service to the movement in order to avoid losing custody of their children. The protagonist is reported to Child Protective Services after using the S-word (stupid) at home, something that her youngest child, who is fully brainwashed by the movement, having been steeped in it since her first day of preschool, mentions to a teacher who has encouraged her charges to report their parents. In the mandatory parenting class she has to take to keep her kids out of foster care, there is an in-depth discussion of the need to change language to affirm the identities of alternative processors, including switching from “dimmer switch” to “switch that makes things more seeable,” the “deep end” of the pool to “the end with more water in it,” and changing “dumbbells” to “weights.” Sometimes “crash test mannequins” would be held in place with weights, especially when crash tests were done in a heavy (not dense and not thick, two words that become verboten for their implications regarding intelligence) fog.
Speaking as a uterus-having bleeder with a front hole, I think that was my favorite part of the book, next to the brilliance of the ending.
The book is, true to Shriver’s skill as a novelist, more than just a parody. The characters are complex, especially the protagonist, Pearson Converse. She is not a good mother (she’s not abusive per se, she’s just not particularly good at nurturing, fairness, and other crucial aspects of mothering) and her sole redeeming quality in that regard is that she knows it. She is also shown to have a lifelong friendship with an opportunistic bitch, a woman to whom she feels great loyalty because when they were both sixteen years old, her friend’s family took her in when her Jehovah’s Witness family shunned her. The limits of friendship, loyalty, and related issues are explored.
As someone who is alive only because a few friends loved me long before it made any sense for them to do so, the way she got that aspect of the story—the feelings it engenders when someone has saved you, which is (for those of us from terrible families, anyway) something that nearly always happens on the way to your becoming capable of saving yourself—so entirely accurate was highly discomfiting. She nailed it. Bullseye, dead-center.
The story also has quite a few quasi-Easter-eggs for people who’ve followed the fight between trans and reality. Each school, including the one that the protagonists’ children attend, has a mental parity champion (an MPC, ha ha). And the uses of TERF that happens in 2024 are lightly—she doesn’t wear this out, but I noticed—parodied in the book by a parallel use of “brainiac,” which is hilarious.
The political implications of this movement become apparent in short order. Barack Obama is forced to serve one term only, as he’s much too smart to be electable in a world where it’s suddenly cool to be an alternative processor. Biden runs and wins in 2012, and populates his administration with only people whose IQ is below 100.
The ongoing consequences of this worldview become disastrous quickly, as IQ tests become illegal, pass/fail becomes the norm in colleges, dumb people are passed in school regardless of how little work they do, or its terrible quality. Wealthy people start importing food, cars, and other important products as American companies hire as many alternative processors as they can to show their commitment to cognitive neutrality. These scenes are funny but also scary, as there are so many elements of the present day creeping into them.
There are funny consequences, too, including Young Sheldon being discussed as a show that shows young Sheldon Cooper as identical to his classmates, nothing special at all, someone who simply got the right encouragement and opportunities and then turned into the adult character of Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory.
The climax of the story comes when the protagonist, who has begun lying and censoring herself to avoid losing custody of her kids, loses her shit and delivers a painfully true rant while teaching a university literature class. The number of video streams that hit the internet roughly equals the number of students in her class, and we see a cancel culture story that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s been paying attention play out for the protagonist—only unlike the ones we’ve all heard of, we follow the consequences and not just the two days of trending on Twitter.
Shriver is a prophet, and her novel in which “the calumny of IQ” is called “the last great civil rights fight” parodies the trans bullshit so well that it’s blood-curdlingly terrifying.
The end of the book fast forwards the story a few years and shows what America (you know, the country that went from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, from slavery and Jim Crow to choosing the goddamn Vice President of the United States on the basis of immutable characteristics alone) has done in the wake of coming to its senses — an overcorrection.
Which is, of course, an important and salient risk to bear in mind as America shows a few hopeful signs of waking up on the trans movement, on local levels if not (yet?) on the level of government, education, and medicine.
I can say little more without real spoilers, so I’ll stop now. Just read it. It’s hilarious, brilliant, and absolutely pitch-perfect.
About the Author (of the book I reviewed)
Lionel Shriver is an American woman who has lived most of her adult life in the UK. She first came to prominence for her novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, which is a brilliant novel written from the perspective of a woman whose son carried out a school massacre.
In recent years, she has become just as well-known for her courage in being an anti-Woke commentator, particularly in defense of imagination and the right to write fiction—for people to write characters of other sexes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, disability status, etc. She has quite a few excellent interviews that can be found on YouTube.
I haven’t read her entire oeuvre, but am slowly working my way through it. I highly recommend Kevin, but it’s an absolutely brutal read and should be undertaken thoughtfully by readers who are sensitive to horror.
Always love your book reviews. Thoughtful, and informative enough to let the audience understand how and whether their milage may vary.
Insightful review. This experience comes to mind. In our two room school house our teacher was a shell shocked WW2 veteran who delegated everything he could to me because he was barely functional. That included me marking all the IQ tests for all six grades. I discovered that middle class kids considered bright had so so IQs and that some poor kids living in tar paper shacks had IQs in the 120s and 130s. And that one kid I knew had an IQ of 83 which just qualified him for the military. He served in Korea and managed to remain employed at low level jobs all his life in our rural area. He raised a family. I read his obituary recently and discovered he spent his retirement volunteering at a local food bank. That was a life well lived. Many of the more intelligent simply waste their lives and others use their intelligence to perpetuate evil unintentionally and otherwise.