who only by moving can balance

Hello,

you all seem like proper awesome types, so I'm hoping that by e-mailing this address the concrit can get passed on to the appropriate people! :-)

Background: I'm a trans* person and my university's trans* rep; I recently bought the eARC of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance.

I've previously really adored the Vorkosiverse in part because of how well it handles queer, trans*, disabled etc characters (I'm all of the above!), how accurate the science is, and so on - I'm a scientist & I am always overjoyed to get to read hard SF that doesn't act like I'm, well, an alien in the bad sense.

So I was very, VERY shocked to find some egregious (and apparently plot-irrelevant!) transphobia within the first ten pages of CVA. The passage I'm concerned about is:

"I am fairly certain she's a real girl, Ivan."
"You think? With you, one never knows." He eyed By dryly, and By had the grace to squirm just a bit, in acknowledgement of his cousin Dono nee Donna of lamented memory. Donna, that is. Count Dono Vorrutyer was all too vivid a presence, on the Vorbarr Sultana political scene.

There's a number of problems with this:
(1) By's line, taken in isolation, suggests that trans women aren't "real" women.
(2) Ivan's line slightly salvages this - by acknowledging that trans men aren't women. HOWEVER:
(3) "nee" is the feminine. Using "nee" to discuss a trans man is incredibly undermining. I appreciate that a lot of the time people don't bother preserving the distinction - but I tripped HARD over it here, given the preceding lines. In this context, that distinction is important.
(4) Dono is being "outed" in a way that is (so far) plot-irrelevant - and is lampshaded in the very next line as irrelevant! That is, attention is being drawn to Dono's trans status for no obvious reason other than to treat him as a joke while the "real men" talk. I don't see any way that this is justifiable, and it made my skin crawl.
(5) There is no POSSIBLE way in which By is responsible for his cousin's transition. Implying that he is, again for the sake of a bad "joke", is really, really gross - and treats Dono's transition as a bad thing.


Basically, there's an awful lot wrong with those six lines and it's massively soured my appreciation for a book I was so excited about that I spent $15 on the eARC (I don't currently have any source of income, and bought it as a treat for myself after a really rough week). I've reached out to my friends to ask if there's anything similar in the rest of the book, because I can't continue reading knowing that I might be surprised like that again.

You're all great; you've historically been fabulous at this sort of thing; I would be eternally grateful if you fixed this before the final manuscript goes to print, and if you let me know what action you were planning to take.

Yours sincerely,
-alex.