About TheSusie Books
From my “TheSusie FashionMemo: A fictional art memo”
Updated 12/9/24 at 4pm ET: My novel is my work of fiction. My names, characters, places, and incidents are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.
NOTE: Unless the material is quoted clearly, I never copy and paste words from AI or any other source into my self-published books — please go to fashiontext.com for more info.
__Afterword by Todd__
TheSusie books and zines specify a 360-degree view and backstory of a fictional character named Susie, and these materials are on track to become like the DNA, source code, and foundation for various catalogues of AI-generated videos, chatbots, interactive book interfaces, next generation social networks, and community-organization footprints.
TheSusie books are also very much about living with facial disfigurement, because there’s a lot of opportunity going forward to constructively, if not advantageously, disagree about whether or not it makes sense for mainstream business people to recognize the disfigurement of my face.
But it’s a well-documented fact that there’s been a subtle displacement of my right cheekbone ever since I sustained a facial injury in 2001, when I was enrolled as an undergraduate student at a Palo Alto area university.
And there’s a strong argument to be made that essentially all people develop unconscious bias toward me — unless they don’t…
But is it justified for more and more people to not acknowledge the increasingly demonstrable facts that relate to this matter?
And so in the interest of navigating — or at least holding space for — potential disagreements, I started writing fiction about a billionaire journalist in tech named Susie who has an optimal platform for telling the story of another fictional character named Conri.
Like so, here’s an example of what AI can generate, but this is just the beginning — because the bigger opportunity with AI will involve making arguments like this to audiences while elaborating conversations between the fictional characters in TheSusie books.
So then the next two paragraphs are best understood as, “An AI chatbot that’s imitating the aforementioned fictional character named Conri, within the fictional world that he shares with Susie…”
“My facial disfigurement is subtle — so subtle that most people instinctively assume it couldn’t possibly qualify as a disability. But it is. For over two decades, the trajectory of the law, both in America and beyond, has been steadily converging toward formally recognizing the scientific reality: subtle facial disfigurements like mine constitute disabilities because they trigger an extremely predictable and well-defined pattern of unconscious bias in others.
When people act as though it’s a false belief to say my facial disfigurement is a disability, they’re inadvertently revealing something deeper. Their actions signal a struggle with self-reinforcing patterns of false assumptions, rooted in ignorance of a cold, hard truth: my facial disfigurement has always been a disability.” (NOTE: AI ended with “That’s the reality at play here,” but I truncated that. I like ending AI’s quote on the word disability better.)
For more info, please see my Book1 “TheSusie FashionText” on Medium:
Indeed, my Book1 (aka. TSFT) translates my truth-is-stranger-than-fiction life story into a form that’s easier to comprehend and build upon.
NOTE: I’m sharing my Zine1 “TheSusie FashionZine” at thesusiefashiontext.com/zine — so that anyone can mention the first 30-pages of my Book1 in a magazine format that includes a few dozen AI-generated images from TheSusie universe.
Because the essence of what’s going on in my life is that I don’t immediately need anyone to recognize that I have a facial disfigurement disability — thanks to optimism w.r.t. AI.
I also started dressing up like a “Blonde woman” when I was in my 20s during the aughts.
But I never stopped identifying as a man named Todd who takes the masculine pronouns he/him/his.
And, my Book1 and Zine2 explain how Facial disfigurement relates to gender norms from my perspective, using fiction.
But the conclusion that I’d like to keep on exploring with new scientific research and political discourse, together, is that maybe it doesn’t matter why people (including people like me) gender bend.
And for people who don’t agree, my fictional character named Susie is available to emulate, in the sense that people can describe billionaires like her who don’t agree with me. It’s a free country.
So then I’ve been only taking masculine pronouns for several years.
As I’ve consistently gone out of my way to clarify that my real name was never Susie or Suzy or any name other than Todd Perry.
For I’m a man named Todd who has always taken masculine pronouns, with or without mentioning that I never particularly wanted to have pronoun preferences for myself.
But now I do prefer taking the masculine pronouns, only, because that’s what’s preferable for me, and so I prefer masculine pronouns he/him/his — no matter how I’m dressed. I also live with Facial disfigurement.
And, I’ve never identified as having any official name other than Todd.
Therefore — even though there will always be more facts and memories out there to review — a good summary of all the data about me is that I’ve never used the name Suzy, Susie, or Su* in any kind of formal or legalistic setting, because the names that any person identifies with are really serious, and I became fully aware of that soon enough.
But my fictional character named Susie probably continues to be compatible with all the major religions and churches, etc.
Like so, I’ll hopefully keep expanding her fan fiction universe, feet first. Language model: TheSusie femme.
And, if my Book1 is a map of reality, then my Zine2 “TheSusie FashionMemo” zooms into a place where I can thrive…
NOTE: I plan to be sharing my Zine2, which includes this article, as a magazine at thesusiefashiontext.com/memo in 2025 and beyond.
Please go to thesusie.com for more info.
Last content change: Dec. 9th around 4pm ET
Copyright © 2024 Todd Perry. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
