{"id":158998,"date":"2022-05-04T12:08:31","date_gmt":"2022-05-04T16:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=158998"},"modified":"2022-05-04T12:44:20","modified_gmt":"2022-05-04T16:44:20","slug":"notes-on-nevada-trans-literature-and-the-early-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/05\/04\/notes-on-nevada-trans-literature-and-the-early-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Nevada<\/em>: Trans Literature and the Early Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Imogen Binnie at Camp Trans in 2008. Photo courtesy of the author.<\/p><\/div>\n

Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>with a small press called Topside that doesn\u2019t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It\u2019s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print.<\/span><\/p>\n

People have called <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>\u201cground zero for modern trans literature,\u201d and while I get that\u2014before it was published, I don\u2019t think I\u2019d read a novel with a trans character who I didn\u2019t at least sort of hate\u2014I don\u2019t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel.<\/span><\/p>\n

FICTIONMANIA<\/b><\/p>\n

At one point in <\/span>Nevada<\/span><\/i>, Maria mentions the \u201cstupid 2002 internet.\u201d At a Q&A following a reading on the 2013 book release tour, I was asked what that meant. I struggled to come up with a decent answer. We are so steeped in for-profit social media today that it\u2019s hard to remember anything else. It wasn\u2019t until the night after that reading, lying awake and beating myself up for not having a good answer, that I thought of a pretty good one. It is a website called Fictionmania. It\u2019s still online. And if you\u2019re hungry for that post-post-vaporwave retro \u201c2002 internet\u201d aesthetic, great news: it hasn\u2019t updated its design since it came online in 1998.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fictionmania is a free archive of user-contributed stories on the theme of gender change. If you were trying to figure out what was going on with your gender in the late nineties and early aughts, you tended to end up there. Its stories, on the whole, are not politically or stylistically progressive, but it\u2019s accumulated, like, forty thousand stories over the last twenty-five years, so it\u2019s definitely doing something that\u2019s compelling for a lot of people. I mean, how many websites have been around since the late nineties?<\/span><\/p>\n

Fictionmania is the first place I was published, unless you count a short story in a high school lit mag that was about 40 percent unattributed Tori Amos lyrics. You\u2019d just send FM a story you\u2019d furtively made up instead of sleeping, and then they would publish it\u2014publicly, on the internet!\u2014and then strangers would tell you that they hated it. In the late nineties, for an English major who Wanted to Be a Writer, that was a serious thrill.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As a praxisless but punk-identifying teen with good intentions, no analysis, and no idea how to exist in a body, anonymously contributing stories with cuss words in them to FM was an empowering way to say, \u201cI have no idea what\u2019s going on with me or my gender, but I do not care for it.\u201d I lost interest pretty quickly and moved on to my own zines and in-person writing groups, but because those things involved identifying information, I put away the What Is Gender stuff for a few years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

CAMP TRANS<\/b><\/p>\n

As I processed the fact that I was trans, mostly on LiveJournal, I started connecting with a like-minded community of trans people who also were unhappy with the options for living we saw available as trans people. Brynn Kelly was one. Sybil Lamb was there. A lot of other people. And the smartest, funniest, and most intimidating people on LiveJournal were usually also on the strap-on.org message board.<\/span><\/p>\n

Strap-on was terrifying.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you\u2019ve spent the first couple decades of your life trying your best to be a straight white cis guy, you generally end up with some shit to unlearn, and the way you unlearn it is often by having strangers on the internet yell at you about it. The people at strap-on were more than happy to do that for you. You either learned to talk (and think) in a way that at least tried to take marginalized people\u2019s experiences into account, or you got flamed off the internet. It was exhilarating.<\/span><\/p>\n

There used to be a music festival called the Michigan Womyn\u2019s Music Festival. It started in the seventies. In 1991, a trans woman named Nancy Burkholder was kicked out of Michfest for being trans, and it became the official Michfest Policy that trans women were not Womyn. So some people started holding a week-long protest called Camp Trans outside the Michfest gate, which grew into its own thing, with music and food and camping and queer stuff in the woods. Sometime around 2005, its leadership fell apart and some people from strap-on stepped up to take the Camp Trans wheel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Camp Trans was a field in the woods deep in rural Michigan. There was a kitchen tent that didn\u2019t have access to refrigeration, a welcome tent where people hung out with acoustic guitars and dense zines of gender theory, more tents back in the woods, and a taped off area maybe thirty feet across dense with ground hornets. It was not impressive, but it was perfect. Camp Trans, for me, was where strap-on stopped being a place to post and became a thing to embody. I leaned into being a humorless dirtbag.<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019m bad at being humorless. Trans people are very often very funny. Jokes can be a defense mechanism, a trauma response: if you can make someone laugh before they remember that they hate people like you, you might get out of a 7-Eleven before they can hurt you. But I was good at being a dirtbag. I started wearing bandanas around my neck and romanticizing train-hopping without ever actually doing it. It would be impossible for me to overstate how valuable meatspace trans community is. Can I tell you something? We have bodies. All of us. Trans people maybe more than anyone else. And like it or not, the body keeps the score. (You should read Bessel van der Kolk\u2019s <\/span>The Body Keeps the Score<\/span><\/i>. It made me ugly cry on an airplane.) To put it reductively, trauma impacts our ability to exist in our bodies, which feels bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

You know what else can make it hard to exist in a body?<\/span><\/p>\n

Being trans.<\/span><\/p>\n

It feels bad not to be able to be in your body.<\/span><\/p>\n

The internet is great, but it is not a substitute for being in physical space with other trans people who care about at least some of the same shit that you do, smelling and seeing and hearing one another, nervous systems engaging directly. You might not realize how important that is if you\u2019ve never had it. I had never had it before Camp Trans. I mean, I\u2019d had meatspace trans friends beforehand, but I never got to spend a week with them. In the woods. With ground hornets. Experimenting with what it might feel like to legitimately trust another person in real time.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you\u2019ve learned to dissociate defensively around cis people, and you spend all of your time among them, and when they frequently make it clear that you are right not to feel safe around them, you can forget that it is even possible to let your guard down. That you don\u2019t necessarily have to be alone to feel safe. That it is even <\/span>possible <\/span><\/i>to feel safe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even with all the complicated things about it\u2014all the ways it probably was not safe\u2014Camp Trans was a space that centered trans bodies. Even, by the time I got there, trans women\u2019s bodies specifically. Camp Trans taught me that it is possible to feel safe in my body.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuck Michfest. Camp Trans saved my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hey, on the topic of Michfest and other regressive, transphobic things, can I give you a tip? If you find yourself interacting with someone who is \u201ccritical\u201d of \u201cthe transgender movement\u201d or whatever, ask them what they think trans people should <\/span>do<\/span><\/i>. If the only thing they can come up with is \u201cnot be trans,\u201d point out that the vast majority of trans people have already tried that, and it tends to make us suicidal. If they can\u2019t come up with anything better than \u201cdon\u2019t be trans,\u201d please understand that they very literally want me and at least 1.4 million other Americans\u2014not to mention way, way more people outside the US\u2014to die.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let them equivocate. \u201cWhat should trans people do?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

All they\u2019ve got is \u201cdie.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of intense.<\/span><\/p>\n

OTHER AUGHTIES QUEERS<\/b><\/p>\n

A lot of <\/span>Nevada<\/span><\/i> is me processing my 2007 move from New York to Oakland. Oakland fucked me up. When I moved there, I found myself spending a lot of time in a queer demimonde full of people who had graduated from Smith, which I understand was lousy with trans mascs at the time but which would not admit an out trans woman for another seven or eight years.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not like all the queers in Oakland were mean or anything. There was a lot of trans-inclusive language, and there were a lot of trans people. It\u2019s just that there were almost no trans women who weren\u2019t me. Which is not to say that there were no other trans women in Oakland, obviously. Or other queers. Just that I lived and dated and socialized in this tight community and nobody else in it was a trans woman.<\/span><\/p>\n

I blamed myself for feeling out of place. I mean, I had found a queer community! I was a queer woman, these were (mostly) queer women! They were explicitly okay with trans people! So why did I keep leaving parties and potlucks and performance nights crying?<\/span><\/p>\n

Long story short, the queer community just wasn\u2019t <\/span>there <\/span><\/i>yet. Y\u2019know? Plenty of good intentions, no idea what to do with them. It was like, one moment I\u2019m exhilarated, talking to trans women friends about this new book called <\/span>Whipping Girl<\/span><\/i>, and the next I\u2019m going to Dyke March where cisgender radical cheerleaders are yelling the word \u201ctranny\u201d at me.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was exhausting to be outside my house as someone who was read as trans. In retrospect, of course, it\u2019s clear that I was doing everything I could not to admit that it was also exhausting to be <\/span>inside <\/span><\/i>my house when the queers were there, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was lonely.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nevada <\/span><\/i>is dead set on treating one trans woman\u2019s experience with honesty because I was so fucking exhausted and sad that my own was never treated that way.<\/span><\/p>\n

I felt invisible to the world at large and also invisible to the demimonde, so it was kind of a shout that I\u2014and therefore we\u2014exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Around this time, I printed up some copies of a zine in which I reprinted three essays by trans writers explaining why we wanted cis people to stop calling us \u201ctrannies.\u201d I made them to keep in my purse and give them to people when they used that word, so that I could hand them a zine instead of having an emotionally draining and most likely pointless conversation. In a sense, <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>was an extension of that zine.<\/span><\/p>\n

THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

When I first moved to Oakland, it was into a big collective house called the Fork in the Rode. There were, like, eleven of us in a four-bedroom house on North Sixty-First Street. Somebody lived in the garage. Somebody else lived in a plywood shack in the backyard for a while. Two people lived in the driveway in a van that didn\u2019t start. At one point we had a rat problem, but to make it feel like less of a problem, we called them bunnies. I was a fucked-up mess. It was a great fit. And at some point during the year or so that I lived at the Fork, my friend Fischer loaned me their copy of an anthology called <\/span>This Bridge Called My Back<\/span><\/i>, edited by Cherr\u00ede Moraga and Gloria E. Anzald\u00faa.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I want to be careful, because while one of the stated goals of <\/span>This Bridge Called My Back <\/span><\/i>was to educate middle-class white women like me, it is not a book <\/span>about <\/span><\/i>me. What I mean is, I hope I\u2019ve been able to learn from its contributors. Anti-racist work is work white people need to be doing every day, and <\/span>This Bridge Called My Back <\/span><\/i>was a jolt\u2014a wake-up call\u2014in my own anti-racist work. Not to gush, but it remains an achievement that we\u2019re all fortunate to have. I just picked up my copy to flip through a little as I write this, and while the range of pieces by contributors including Norma Alarc\u00f3n, Barbara Smith, the Combahee River Collective, and Audre Lorde covers a lot of ground, the book remains as vital today as I imagine it was when it was first published in 1981. It\u2019s an absolute classic. Full stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

Picture me in Oakland in 2007. Six feet tall, only on hormones for a couple of years. My hair was part blond and part hot pink with dark roots. I remember a lot of hot-pink eye shadow. I was not subtle. But at the same time, I really wanted to be passing for cis. Or more specifically, I really wanted to <\/span>be <\/span><\/i>cis. It hurt that I was not. I got shit for being trans in public pretty regularly, and it shattered me every single time.<\/span><\/p>\n

So why didn\u2019t I learn to do less gaudy makeup and stop dying my hair? Why wasn\u2019t I making more of an effort to pass for cis, if it hurt so much to be read as trans?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A couple reasons. First, I didn\u2019t know how, which would have been a scary kind of vulnerable to admit. Also, what if I worked really hard on passing and couldn\u2019t? That felt like it would be even more heartbreaking. Further, I don\u2019t think I was able yet to articulate the trap that is \u201cI should be able to do whatever I want with my body, but I also shouldn\u2019t have to face unfair consequences for it.\u201d In other words, it was the transition thing of having a new, more vulnerable location under patriarchy, but not yet really having come to terms with the ramifications of that location.<\/span><\/p>\n

Complicating this was the fact that for years I had been devouring narratives of queer liberation written by cis people. I\u2019ve written elsewhere about how lots of ideas conceptualized by cis people to describe things experienced by cis people don\u2019t map neatly onto trans experiences\u2014like, for example, male privilege. (Do trans women have male privilege before transition? Kinda. Do trans guys have male privilege after transition? No matter what Maria Griffiths might tell you, the answer is probably also: kinda.) What I was learning\u2014and what I could not find language for\u2014was that the rules of liberation for cis queers are different from the rules for trans people.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is why I felt so lonely in my queer Oakland community.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now picture me reading the faded maroon cover of an anthology by a number of, at the time, woman-identifying writers talking about living at the impossible nexus of public vulnerability, as women of color under white supremacy, and private vulnerability, as women of color marginalized within predominantly white, lesbian, feminist, and other progressive\/radical communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The way that paralleled what I was experiencing\u2014of course, with different specifics\u2014was a revelation. The pain of feeling marginalized wherever you were, and the corresponding power of sharing space with people who got it. Who got <\/span>you<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

This Bridge Called My Back <\/span><\/i>wasn\u2019t about me, but it was talking to me\u2014on more than one level. Both deepening my own sense (and work) of <\/span>solidarity and giving me a framework for better understanding my own positionality.<\/span><\/p>\n

It led me to Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and other marginalized feminist\/womanist thinkers. I still feel like, if I have anything intelligent to say about being trans, it can probably be traced directly back to their work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

ALSO OTHER BOOKS<\/b><\/p>\n

There were a lot of books that influenced <\/span>Nevada,<\/span><\/i> of course:<\/span> Dennis Cooper and Junot D\u00edaz were enormously important to me while I was writing it. But here I want to focus on another writer who made it possible to write this weird little novel: the singular Joanna Russ.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I DuckDuckGo\u2019d it to see if her essay \u201cWhat Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can\u2019t Write\u201d was online anywhere, and it turns out that as of this writing there\u2019s still a scan of it on the Topside Press Tumblr.<\/span><\/p>\n

That essay, specifically, felt like it gave me permission to structure <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>the way I did. In it, Russ systematically breaks down all the ways that the Western hero\u2019s quest narrative fails women. It\u2019s incisive and funny in a way that I wish I could write: \u201cWhen critics do not find what they expect, they cannot imagine that the fault may lie in their expectations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She opens with a number of familiar premises with the genders flipped: \u201cTwo strong women battle for supremacy in the early West\u201d; \u201cA phosphorescently doomed poetess sponges off her husband and drinks herself to death, thus alienating the community of Philistines and businesswomen who would have continued to give her lecture dates\u201d; \u201cA beautiful, seductive boy whose narcissism and instinctive cunning hide the fact that he has no mind (and in fact, hardly any sentient consciousness) drives a succession of successful actresses, movie produceresses, cowgirls, and film directresses wild with desire.\u201d She goes on to write about patriarchy and gender and to outline the ways that what is coded as success for men tends to be coded as failure for women.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hold that thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to use the word \u201ctransition,\u201d but I\u2019m going to put quotation marks around it, because I think it\u2019s kind of a goofy framework: a cisnormative way of understanding what trans people do. I think a more accurate way to describe the process of being trans\u2014or the journey or whatever\u2014is as one that starts with a cisnormative framework for understanding what it is to be trans and moves to one that more realistically encompasses the complexities of the lived experiences of trans people. This means that \u201ctransition\u201d doesn\u2019t start with hormones or coming out. It starts way before, with the feeling a lot of us have pretty early on that something\u2019s wrong. Or maybe it starts with the early, initial work of trying to figure out what, exactly, it is that\u2019s wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think we live in a culture in which that particular transition has an end point.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the things I wanted to confront in <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>was this cisnormative idea that, for trans people, first you are one of The Two Genders, then you are in a fascinating in-between place while you transition, and then you are more or less uncomplicatedly the other of The Two Genders. And because the mysterious in-between phase is the most salaciously interesting thing to people who don\u2019t have to go through it, I decided to cut it out. I wanted to look at the ways that the part \u201cbefore transition\u201d and the part \u201cafter transition\u201d are not, actually, characterized by being a cisgender version of one or the other of The Two Genders. So I wrote a character who was \u201cpost-transition,\u201d whatever that might mean, who was still living with the fallout from a lifetime of repression as well as the trauma of that transition phase, and I wrote a character who was \u201cpre-transition,\u201d whatever that might mean, because the head full of mixed-up shit that you can\u2019t help but walk around with when you live in that state does not have a corresponding cisgender experience. Y\u2019know? The cisnormative approach to honoring this difference would be to pay attention to the difference during that middle \u201ctransition\u201d period; the approach that respects the complexity of trans people\u2019s lived experience says, Well actually, no, trans people are trans before and after \u201ctransition.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And I should be clear: even this model does not describe all or even, necessarily, most trans lives. Lots of nonbinary experiences don\u2019t follow this model, and even trans people who identify within the gender binary still have very different experiences. It\u2019s almost as if the white settler colonial construction of The Two Genders is violently inadequate.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the question, then, was: how do you fit all that into a story with a call to adventure, a road of trials, a vision quest, et cetera?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, you don\u2019t, says Joanna Russ. You don\u2019t have to. The first half of <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>is about a trans woman named Maria, and then the second half is mostly about a kid named James who\u2019s trying to figure out whether he\u2019s trans, because I wanted to interrogate both the \u201cbefore transition\u201d and \u201cafter transition\u201d stories.<\/span><\/p>\n

So why does Maria show up in James\u2019s half? Well, it\u2019s a separate thing, but it\u2019s because one of the most common ways for trans women to self-flagellate is with a whip labeled \u201cI should have come out sooner.\u201d It\u2019s unfair to ourselves. It takes as long as it takes to figure out what you need to figure out\u2014and to figure out what you need to do about it. But we still do it. I thought it would be funny to make that explicit: what if, while you were still unaware \/ in denial about being trans, some trans woman fairy godmother had shown up and not only told you to your face that you were trans but tried to convince you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Would that have made you come out sooner?<\/span><\/p>\n

I won\u2019t spoil the ending here, except to say that people have strong feelings about it. It\u2019s unconventional. And Joanna Russ gave me permission to write it that way.<\/span><\/p>\n

PRETTY QUEER<\/b><\/p>\n

Prettyqueer.com was a smart-ass website started around 2011 by the people who went on to start Topside Press\u2014Julie Blair, Red Durkin, Riley MacLeod, and Tom L\u00e9ger.<\/span><\/p>\n

At this point I\u2019d given up on <\/span>Nevada<\/span><\/i>. I\u2019d worked on it a lot, but the second half just wouldn\u2019t come together. I knew what I wanted it to do, but I didn\u2019t know how to make it do it. I\u2019d sent it to Soft Skull, but they were not interested.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuck it, I thought. I\u2019ll take what I learned from it and write another one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how much of an impact it made on anyone else\u2019s life, but to me, Pretty Queer was a very big deal. The editorial board was four cool trans people you wanted to hang out with. I knew Julie and Red from Camp Trans. They <\/span>got it<\/span><\/i>. We could write things that did not pander to cis people, and people actually read them. They published my friends. You would publish a thing and in the comments people would tell you they hated it, which meant they had read it!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If I recall correctly\u2014I\u2019m afraid to DuckDuckGo it on the Wayback Machine\u2014I mostly contributed fake interviews with trans celebrities in which they said the cool things I wished they would say, instead of the disappointing things they actually tended to say. And Pretty Queer paid me for that! In fact, in looking through old emails for this, I found one where I was like, \u201cYou guys I am working as many hours as I can get, but I can\u2019t afford hormones or rent\u2014can you front me money in advance for future articles?\u201d They totally fronted me that money. I doubt I ever actually turned in those articles.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019d been paid for anything I\u2019d written before.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Pretty Queer era bled into the Topside Press era. I was in Portland, Maine, and they were in New York, so when Topside\u2019s first book, <\/span>The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard<\/span><\/i>, came out, it was an easy bus ride for me to get there for readings. Plus, they chose a story I\u2019d written to open <\/span>The Collection<\/span><\/i>. I felt like a rock star.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those three years were intoxicating. At first, Topside Manor was Tom and Julie\u2019s apartment. I slept on their couch a lot. I remember many, many Bud Lite Lime-A-Ritas in what felt like an endless, endlessly hot and humid Brooklyn summer, talking shit all night about representation, literature, trans literature, how to be trans in the world, bodies, intersectionality, and what could be salvaged from transphobic seventies and eighties feminisms.<\/span><\/p>\n

Riley was probably the only real punker. He had one of those chain necklaces with a lock on it and a dog-bone name tag, and at one point I think he had lived on a houseboat that sank. Tom was connected to what felt like this whole other gay world: he knew a lot about ACT UP<\/small> and which gay men from the previous couple generations of activists were jerks. Also I think he\u2019d done a literal MFA. Julie was a hilarious and brilliant weirdo with an encyclopedic knowledge of nineties garbage\u2014\u201cI only happen to enjoy typesetting because I\u2019m perverted,\u201d she told Lambda Literary\u2014and Red is the funniest person you\u2019ll ever meet. Also I\u2019m pretty sure she said the If gender is a construct, so is a traffic light<\/em> thing that gets quoted sometimes from <\/span>Nevada, <\/span><\/i>and I stole it.<\/span><\/p>\n

There was a revolving door of other geniuses coming through all the time: wingnut San Francisco artist Annie Danger; Ryka Aoki, who publishes with Tor now; Brynn Kelly, again, a writer and genius who we all miss; a bunch of contributors to <\/span>The Collection<\/span><\/i>. Sometimes Sarah Schulman would just be hanging out. Casey Plett and Sybil Lamb were around. Loads of others.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, within a few years, the wheels came off. Topside fell apart and became something else and then fell apart again. Some people made some bad decisions, some people got hurt, and some people disappeared. Topside doesn\u2019t exist anymore, nor does Pretty Queer, but for a couple years, it was a legitimately beautiful thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Topside first asked to see it, <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>didn\u2019t work. But Tom encouraged me to send it anyway. I did.<\/span><\/p>\n

He agreed: yep, the second half doesn\u2019t work.<\/span><\/p>\n

But he shared it with Red, Julie, and Riley. They all saw something in it and worked hard with me to get it to do what I wanted it to.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d never been through such an intensive editing process. I pushed back pretty hard on what felt like MFA bullshit, which in retrospect probably was not (\u201cThis character doesn\u2019t actually want anything\u201d\u2014Imogen Binnie, 2012). I think the editing process of your first novel is probably always a bit of a rude awakening, and I was fortunate to go through it with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

NOW<\/b><\/p>\n

Nevada <\/span><\/i>opened a lot of doors for me. I sold a movie. People actually listened to a podcast I made, by myself, in a car. I toured the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland, crashing on the couches and floors of strange queers\u2014many of whom I had previously known as screen names from strap-on. I sleep in a bed now, instead of an old futon mattress on a series of Oakland collective house closet floors. That bed is in a house I share with my gay wife and two small, wild children. I\u2019ve mostly kicked social media. When I\u2019m not being a big-shot LA TV writer, I\u2019m a social worker and therapist.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve even had a few months here and there where money wasn\u2019t stressful, if you can believe that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Parenting kind of makes you a recluse, and trans women are prone to hermitism to begin with, and also our house is in rural Vermont, so I don\u2019t really do stuff or see people the way I used to. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m a different person\u2014but I might be less of a fucked-up mess. Which was all Maria wanted, too, wasn\u2019t it? To be less fucked-up?<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Topside Press era, we talked a lot of shit about the transgender memoir as a literary genre, because so often it felt like begging for validation from cis people: \u201cMaybe you wouldn\u2019t be so mean to me if you knew how much pain I\u2019ve endured!\u201d But it\u2019s been a decade. Maybe we\u2019ve opened some doors for the kinds of spaces that trans stories\u2014fictional or otherwise\u2014can occupy. Not to mention, Janet Mock basically turned the transgender memoir into something incisive, progressive, and cool all by herself. Twice. The cultural landscape has definitely opened up. Have you read Janet, Ryka, Torrey Peters, Casey Plett, Vivek Shraya, Jackie Ess, or Charlie Jane Anders? Have you seen <\/span>Pose<\/span><\/i>, or <\/span>Euphoria<\/span><\/i>, or listened to G.L.O.S.S. or 100 Gecs? I, personally, wrote on a TV show where Laverne Cox played a lawyer who had a season of ups and downs with a hot boyfriend, as well as trans friends with names and lines. There\u2019s still a lot of work to do, but things look pretty different. I don\u2019t know about <\/span>Nevada <\/span><\/i>being ground zero for modern trans literature, but I do feel fortunate that this funny little book was able to contribute to that.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Imogen Binnie is the author of\u00a0Nevada, which won the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. A writer for several television shows and a former columnist for Maximum Rocknroll, she lives in Vermont. This piece is adapted from the Afterword to Binnie’s<\/em> Nevada<\/a>, which will be reissued by MCD x FSG Originals, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in June.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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