14. Nevada
I was hungover today and wrote this in bed on my iPhone Notes app after I ran out of characters on Instagram
I read Nevada by Imogen Binnie while I was in India earlier this month. This was my second attempt since downloading a copy on my Kindle in 2015 when I first realised I was trans. After reading about twenty pages I gave up because I had no way of relating to the main character Maria’s experiences. I suppose I was looking for a guide to be trans through literature at that time as a recent English Lit grad who was still closeted. Now that I’ve got a bit more RLE under my belt (to borrow the term of our oppressors in the medical profession) I found Nevada to be far more accessible albeit bitter reading.
A big part of the paratextual narrative of Nevada is that it was the novel which ushered in the contemporary era of trans literary fiction. The back cover to this 2022 Picador edition features a quote from Torrey Peters proclaiming it to be “the book that launched the trans writing scene”. Binnie herself is a lot more gracious and sceptical of this claim in her afterword, drawing attention to her influences and the people who helped make Nevada possible. However it’s important to recognise the unfair weight of influence on Nevada, which wasn’t as pronounced as when I first tried to read it.
The novel is split into two parts. The first follows Maria Griffiths, a white, underachieving, college-educated trans woman living in New York (how many other characters like this are there now?). It opens with her disassociating during sex with her cis girlfriend and now I can better understand why my younger, unfathomably more repressed, self struggled with this. From this point Binnie charts Maria’s journey of self-destruction, employing a free indirect narrative voice that has become far too familiar to me in my personal life. Maria is someone who is hyper-aware of systemic oppression, yet this does not drive her to any meaningful action. She is someone who is clearly well-read but has little sense of self beyond her own transness and is merely coasting through life on autopilot. To quote a shitty Logic song “who can relate? Woo!” By the end of this section, Maria’s been fired from her job, dumped by her girlfriend, and has alienated her only close friend, another trans woman in far more difficult circumstances. Faced with the disintegration of her personal life, Maria steals her now-ex’s car and goes on a road trip in the doomed belief that this will provide her with the personal growth she needs.
The second section follows James, a stoner in the middle of buttfuck nowhere Nevada. He displays signs that he might be trans and like Maria is just letting life wash over him. Their paths cross as Maria briefly stops by the Wal-Mart James works at while on her quasi-spiritual journey. They end up smoking weed together and Maria starts to probe James about his gender. Maria sees James as a potential project, gripped by the belief that through helping him figure out his own transness she can find some semblance of meaning in her own life. The results are predictably disastrous. If I wasn’t reading those last fifty pages to get through a bad bout of diarrhoea (sorry for the TMI) I would have had to keep putting the book down to pace around and swear for a bit.
Binnie says that she wanted to write a novel about trans people for a trans readership, feeling that writing by trans people up to that point, largely through memoir, had been attempting to explain the trans experience to a cis audience. Knowing this while reading Nevada in 2024 is a peculiar experience because there are points where Binnie, through Maria’s voice, seems to be making observations that are Trans Womanhood 101. This more than anything is what ages Nevada poorly more, although it does mostly fade away as we move into the second half of the novel. Which is not to say that Binnie’s portrayal of trans women’s experiences is false or in anyway inauthentic; it’s just that when reading these snippets one can sense the anxious look over the shoulder to check for a cis person peering at the page.
If this comes across as an uncharitable takeaway from Binnie’s writing then I would hasten to add that one of these moments, which comes near the end of the novel in a conversation between James and Maria, is for me one of the most moving moments in Nevada. The subject of autogynephilia comes up, because James believes he’s AGP. This drives Maria into an impassioned, semi-coherent rant about J. Michael Bailey and the way people like him and Blanchard create these bullshit labels that stifle the richness of our experiences as trans women: “It’s just that once you start using their terms you’re putting yourself into this restrictive box they made up that doesn’t leave room for figuring out who you are or what you want.”1 The hurt in her words is palpable; it’s one of the only moments in the novel, after a couple hundred pages of disaffected punk trans girl schtick, where Maria comes across as completely unguarded. We get a glimpse into some of the pain that can’t really be made palatable to cis readers. It’s here more than anywhere else that Binnie achieves her stated goal to write about us for us.
I was around James’ age when I first attempted to read Nevada. Now on the successful second attempt I am slightly older than Maria. I see in her not only myself, but many trans women I’ve known as well. It’s an unsettling feeling. Maria is a trans woman who has come through the other side of transitioning as an adult. She’s a little bit longer in the tooth, picked up some psychic scars, and now has to face the ‘now what?’ reality that comes with moving forward as a trans woman once the sense of adventure has worn off. As irritating and cringe as she can be, I like Maria and I’m grateful she was waiting for me until I was ready.
Postscript: This long-dormant newsletter has film in the title, and in order to keep things on brand I thought I’d add bit here to say that filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is apparently going to be adapting Nevada for the big screen. You may remember I wrote about their film We're All Going to the World's Fair for this newsletter, but that’s not important.
Wow! So pertinent to how some internet-poisoned trans women really invest their identities into this HSTS/AGP crap online!