#tyburn

I don’t think we are thinking about the Rivers quite right yet, and that’s why this conversation is confusing. This isn’t really a headcanon but more me-using-a-queer-concept/queer-reading-to-explain-confusing-metaphysics.

My Hot Take: All the Rivers are trans, actually.

And we keep talking about them in cis-terms, and as cis-people, and that’s why Bev and Beverley are so confusing, because they fundamentally do not fit in that concept.

0. Preamble (because this got long wtf)

This is from the lyrics of Laura Jane Grace’s ‘The Ocean’, which she wrote while she was questioning her gender and before she publicly transitioned, and I’m going to quote it here because it’s a) FANTASTIC and also b) an eternal Bev and Lady Ty Mood (and I hope you’ll agree or at least understand why I read them like this by the end of this):

‘If I could have chosen where god would hide his heaven,

I’d wish for it to be in the sound and smell of the ocean,

(...)

And if I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman

my mother once told me she would have named me Laura

I’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her,

One day I’d find an honest man to make my husband.

(…)

There is an Ocean

in my soul

where the waters

do not curve.

(...)’

1. How Peter thinks the Rivers work and what they actually work like in-universe (presumably)

In RoL, we are introduced throught Peter’s eyes to Beverley Brook and Tyburn as women who have magical powers and who are also, in some nebulous ways, magically connected to a specific river each. But Peter Is An Unreliable Narrator, and never more so then when it comes to the rivers. Beverley has to correct him almost immediately (orishas, not goddesses) but he never quiet catches on.

And I think the problem is that Beverley and Tyburn aren’t women connected to rivers, they are Rivers. They are their River first, and then they are magical beings, and only then are they also manifested as women.

You know that post that goes around sometimes, about Jesus being Gods ‘humansona’?

I think that’s pretty much exactly what’s happening here. Hilariously.

There’s a river, first, a geological feature, and a River, secondly, a magical being tied to that geological feature. And under specific conditions these Rivers create Personas, most (but not all, remember King of Rats) of them vaguely human-shaped, and some of them, presumably, vaguely (cis-)woman shaped. So saying that Bev and Tyburn are woman who are also Rivers is … like really, really going at this the wrong way around.

2. Interlude: cis and trans are kinda dumb concepts to apply to non-human people, actually, so let’s talk about that

But when we read RoL we default to reading them as cis, because they are women who have, presumably, conventionally female bodies, and our society always defaults to cis-ness. So obviously, when there was no further elaboration, we defaulted, as a fandom, to reading the Rivers in the context of cis-ness.

But the Cis-Trans-Dichtomy presumes that Identity follows Body. You have a Body, and you cannot choose it – you can change it, but not pre-select it, and there comes a pre-selected societal identity with it, and you can reject that thrust-upon-you identity, and you can change that body, but you cannot pre-choose your body to fit your actual gender identity from the beginning, and you cannot pre-choose your actual identity, either. But your Identity in a Cis-Trans-Dichtomy context always follows Body, because whether you are sorted as trans or cis by society depends on whether our actual gender identity matches societies presumed identity. Does this make sense? I don’t know if this makes sense.

But along come’s THT, and we learn something incredibly important about the Rivers, from Lady Ty: They’re Personas change based on their self perception. Lady Ty felt younger, so she became younger. And she did this subconsciously. And then she didn’t want that (was, even, disturbed and distressed by that) so she changed back, but not all the way/in all ways.

Thus, for Rivers, BODY follows IDENTITY.

They literally cannot be cis.

Like, the Rivers’ Personas weren’t born. The Rivers created a body for themselves. ‘If I could have chosen’ - they can. They did. And apparently, that body follows identity. Assuming that Lady Ty and Bev are woman right now,  and thus their Rivers picked bodies that would be percived as ‘woman’ by society is textually more logical then to assume that all these shape shifting river-ladies just happen to be ‘cis’ by human standards.

(Bodies aren’t gendered. They are gendered by society, and they are gendered (or de-gendered, in some cases) by their ‘inhabitants’. I don’t know where to put that, so I’m putting it here)

This isn’t the best explanation I can give of this, and I’m sure there are other concepts or models to explain the same thing, but it boils down to this: If a Being exists that can mold it’s body based on it’s identity, and that identity changes over the course of it’s life, and that, presumably, can pre-select it’s body, and can pre-select it’s body multiple times throughout it’s life, applying a Cis-Trans-Dychtomy model to it is useless.

But we don’t have a different model at the moment, and a lot of the rivers experiences map onto Trans-Experiences the second we stop thinking of transness only in relationship to cisness (as in, ‘cis as default’ and ‘trans as devination from default’, ‘trans as not cis’, which is exactly what we have been doing until now.) and start thinking about transness as a thing itself (as in ‘transness is all the things where ‘I have a body and then society decided that body was such-and-such gender and I went with it because they were right’ doesn’t cut it’).

4. Tyburn is confusing so we all just pretended there were actually two of them

Lady Ty and Sir Tyburn are not the same person, we said, because how could they. Except the Tyburn used to be Sir Tyburn, and now she is Lady Ty. Sir Tyburn isn’t a different person, but a previous version of the same entity. She doesn’t like to be reminded of that. She doesn’t want to be called Tyburn or be confused with or compared to Sir Tyburn. They have gendered titles. I genuinely don’t understand how I only caught this now, but, as tumblr likes to say, there’s nothing cis about this.

Tyburn reads honestly … like a kinda bad binary-trans-metaphor written by a clueless cis guy from here. But hold on! I’ve got more hot takes! Non-binary spectrum here we coooooome.

Hot Take Two: The Rivers don’t fit into our concepts of gender, but the closest equivalent is that they are all Genderfluid.

Let’s talk about Beverley Brook the River.

Beverley Brook, on the other hand, didn’t change her name when she came back, and unlike Lady Ty doesn’t have a clear cut-off between her Identities, as it seems. Peter meets Guy!Bev in the past and Guy!Bev is dtkiss and calls him babes. Admittedly we had very little pagetime for Guy!Bev, but from what we can see, there’s no big difference between their core identity traits. They share memories and relationships. Almost as if they are actually the same person (It’s because they are. They are the same person.).

And like. That’s not how genderfluid humans work, but also like. Eldritch-River-Partner.

Coda

Bonus: Peter is Very Definitley Bi.

(Implicitly this would also mean they changed their race, ------- which I’m not gonna touch with a ten-foot-pole and a hazmat-suit tbh. Let’s sort this under ‘unfortunate coding because the author Did Definitely Not Think Of This’)

(This is extremely Death-of-the-Author)

(Laura is great go listen to her shit.)