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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

> I’d have to be willing to admit defeat and pull the plug should it become clear that the book I was writing was misbegotten, even if that realization came after years of hard work. I would owe my friend Jenny and all trans people that much.

This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?

The author? The majority of people who share a characteristic with one of the characters in the story? A sliver of said population, who are very active on Twitter?

In an essay this long, I expected that this critical question would not have been glossed over.

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> > I’d have to be willing to admit defeat and pull the plug should it become clear that the book I was writing was misbegotten, even if that realization came after years of hard work. I would owe my friend Jenny and all trans people that much.

> This critical sentence is artfully written in the passive voice. Who decides if the story is misbegotten, inaccurate, offensive, etc.?

I think it’s not actually in the passive voice, except possibly that “become clear”. It seems as if you may be reading it as if the author is acting out of fear of others’ judgement, but notice that Russo doesn’t say “I’d have to stop if it was offensive”—a fear of others’ reactions—but rather “I’d have to [stop] if it … was misbegotten”, which I take in the sense of ‘ill conceived’. That is an internal judgement, not an external one, and in this context I think the answer to your question is clear: Russo, being the only one who knows for sure how he conceived his story, is the one who decides if it is ill conceived.

I think the only (grammatical) passive in there could be "the book was misbegotten", if it were the passive of active "Russo misbegot the book" (with Russo being the only possible subject, as you convincingly argue). However, the verb "misbeget" doesn't seem to exist anymore [1] - what remains is the old participle as an adjective, and as such the fragment is just a good old active sentence, like "the car was red".

But we're now sort of off-topic, methinks.

[1] Etymology Online: "bastard, illegitimate, unlawfully or irregularly begotten," 1550s, past-participle adjective from obsolete misbeget "beget wrongly or unlawfully" (c. 1300), from mis- (1) "badly, wrongly" + beget

Yes, "should it become clear" is the key passive language. Become clear to whom? This is at the heart of so many recent debates in the young adult fiction realm, where this issue has been most prevalent.

The essay seemed to me a very lengthy rumination on the question that ultimately got scared and ran away from actually taking an unpopular stance on the answer.

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