If you follow me on Instagram you might know I’ve been doing Witchlandsalong hosted by Jade on YouTube, and while the liveshow for book two, Windwitch by Susan Dennard, was the weekend I started writing this there’s something that wasn’t mentioned but I had a hard time with and just wanted to get some messy thoughts down. This will have I guess spoilers? But only in relation to how a trans character is treated, especially by the pov character.
I do just want to say that despite giving this a lower rating than the first, I think this one had a stronger plot and characters / character development for the majority of the viewpoints. I was more generally intrigued, although the thing I want most answers about hasn’t really been touched since the beginning of the first book.
But.
I just want to talk about Cam. Especially in relation to Merik, who is the main pov character for him.
Cam is a trans man, something that is only explicit I guess in the last chapter, but it was something I assumed from the beginning. But he’s introduced on page 37 and only gets correct pronouns on page 456 (which Merik then struggles with for the last 4 pages), so that was something. I understand it ties into Merik’s character growth of understanding he and how he sees the world in particular is not always right, but it was incredibly uncomfortable to read and I nearly DNFed on several occasions because it got so bad. I messaged my friend just shy of 100 pages in explaining and asking if she thought I was overreacting, to which she told me no and to stop reading it, which I think I would have done if it wasn’t for a readalong.
But as it wasn’t raised in the liveshow, I was wondering if other people noticed, especially from the beginning, or if people believed Merik. One of the things about this books is that every single pov character is an unreliable narrator. Cam is introduced as ‘she’ but then immediately Merik says ‘she’ was ship’s boy and using male pronouns, but as soon as Merik got to know ‘her’ better, he realised that ‘she was actually a woman in disguise’. It was incredibly uncomfortable to for Merik to gender Cam correctly in speech, then be like ‘I know better’ and misgender him in the internal monologue / chapter narration, often in the same paragraph. It is so uncomfortable because there’s people like that in real life, who will do a lip service to your identity, but don’t believe and respect you and it’s can feel worse when it comes out from someone you trusted. Even when Merik confronts Cam and says “I can see you’re a girl” and Cam responds with “Is that what you think I am?” and “Stop seeing what you want to see, and start seeing what’s really here!” he still thinks he knows best and continues to misgender him.
It just didn’t feel right, and was very uncomfortable to read, for a trans character, the only one in the series I think, to prop up a cis character’s story in this way. And since starting this blog post I have read the next two books in the series, and though Cam isn’t misgendered, he’s barely in them so the fact he’s a major character only in Windwitch really emphasises that his character is really only there to further Merik’s story.
So now I’ve said uncomfortable about ten times, if you’ve read these books what did you think of Cam and the way he was handled?
Whoever Said I Was Wise? 