by Ethan Seavey
September 7, 2021 (roughly 11,000 years ago)
A sad young novelist named Ethan Seavey wrote this sad scene in which the love interest is brutally honest and is revealed to be less loving of Peter the person and more loving of Peter the artist. At the end of a three month long workshop, Peter invites only the love interest, Noah.
//
Seavey wrote:
I sot [sic.] on the floor of the empty gallery for a while and waited. I finally hear the door open and he walks in and I pat the ground next to me. He sits next to me and glances around the room.
“Yours isn’t here,” he says. “But I bet that Joan of Arc painting won.”
“It’s not even biblical.”
“Where’s yours?”
And so I took him all the way to the top, to the dome and to my great failed masterpiece, a graffiti tableau on top of the old cathedral. I thought I’d shock him but it had no such effect on his face. He frowned and looked on.
“It’s not your best. Just your boldest. The Joan of Arc one deserved the win.”
I look at him and wonder how he can be so cruel.
“Your use of color is all over the place. You can’t see the whole picture. All you can see is each little vignette. In one corner a man is flayed by the beast; in another four horses jockey for first place and over there is the heavenly sphere you have broken up. It is biblical but not in grandness or nuance. It is a meaningless bastard tomorrow without implication.
“But Joan is assertive and beautiful and unsure. She says a lot without opening her lips. The artist has less talent than you but they knew how to fight with integrity.
“You see that. You know this isn’t the peak of your work. But you’re stubborn and sad. And that will offer no more opportunities than…” and he gestures at the dome, “this soulless failure.”
I listen until those last words and then I leave him alone on the roof. I’m walking down the stairs and yes I am gone but I am picturing him sitting alone and glowing in his genius like he always is.
//
After discovering this text, my team of archaeologists focused on two main points. One is relatively short compared to the intricacies of the other.
The first surrounds the constant changing of tenses in the text. It’s typical of this draft of Seavey’s novel. One linguistic anthropologist M. Crawley left this note: “The deliberate inconsistency of tense in this text is a marvel which is an early indicator that Homo Sapiens was questioning their rigid system of time, even 11,000 years ago. It serves as a precursor for the destruction of the barrier between present and past which would enter the global sphere roughly 5,500 years later. Because the author keeps the present and past very flexible and connected, without complicating the future, it appears to this archaeologist that Seavey was aware of this theory.”
Historic archaeologist P. Frankle criticized this idea, writing that M. Crawley “ignored the respected rule of Occam’s Razor and decided that the author was worthy of praise when it is very likely not the case. […] Seavey, being young and naïve, likely hadn’t developed the skills to commit to one tense. If it can be chalked up to carelessness, it should be. Consider that this Homo Sapiens lived 11,000 years ago, prior to any of the modern inventions we take for granted. They were likely uneducated by our standards, and they were certainly full of Red 40.”
The second point surrounds the gender pronouns used for Joan of Arc. Compared to the theoretical number of texts which once existed in this era, very few texts from the period of 13,000 – 10,000 years ago survived the PostNational Crisis. As far as the authors can tell, Seavey is a relatively unknown writer, a common person, which serves as a good source for unbiased linguistic anthropology.
Seavey uses she/her pronouns for Joan of Arc. The same pronouns are used in the other two extant books that mention him. This is an indicator that in 2021, humans still had not embraced posthumous changing of gendered pronouns, even in the most obvious of cases.
For scholars who have never heard of Joan of Arc, he was a very important figure to Pagan Europeans in Western Europe, who later became a Catholic Saint. The legends tell the story of Joan like he was a myth, but by all indication his life was fact.
At the age of 17, Joan met the ruler, called a King, of her region, which was called France. The king of France was losing a war against a rival nation, and in his desperation appears to have given Joan total control over a peasant army of 10,000. Joan, with no military training, led this army across the country, taking every town until he had conquered a critical city in the war.
Knowing now what we know about the latent power of Gender Fascination, it should not be surprising that Joan had female anatomy but dressed and acted within a gender role associated with males. Of course, this is a key explanation for his ability to assemble and effectively wield such an enormous army. The Pagan peasants of France, who had already revered the powers of Gender Fascination for many years, were very susceptible to Joan’s will.
After taking this key city, Joan was captured by a rival. The king could have chosen to pay for his freedom, but ultimately it was decided that Joan’s imprisonment was beneficial to the king. Joan’s influence was too strong. So, Joan was tried. There is one extant copy of his court proceedings. It is clear when reading this text that Joan was tried for two offenses: witchcraft (which was quickly dropped) and crossdressing. For his crime of acting as another gender, the rivals put him in jail. They forced him to sign a contract saying that he would never resume male dress. Two days later, he was back in male dress. He said to the court that it was the will of God, and he couldn’t stop it. Then the rivals executed him for his gender identity.
Any Gender Anthrolopologist will know that she/her pronouns have not been commonly used to refer to Joan of Arc since about 10,000 years ago. The Undoing of Gender brought about many changes but this is one that contemporary scholars may never think about. Homo Sapiens were so caught up in attaching gender to biology that in a time where an individual like Seavey was writing transgender characters, they were still using she/her pronouns.
The debate surrounding this pronoun change is all about agency. Scholars form around Seavey’s time have argued that one ought to use she/her pronouns because Joan was no longer alive to explain his gender. However, contemporary scholars of course have realized that using she/her pronouns as the default is also an assumption. It is impossible to hear from Joan that he is trans. Today, we use he/him pronouns because of the abundance of support in the case of Joan being a transgender man.
He died because he couldn’t present as the gender he was assumed to be at birth. If that wasn’t enough proof for the scholarly culture of Homo Sapiens at this time period, nothing else would be.