Daniel's Updates

"I am genuinely torn with this collection: "The Chaser" is an incredible, poignant, incisive story. Set in a Quaker boarding school, it depicts a fragile and confusing romance between a straight boy and his feminine room-mate, Robbie. The story expertly captures the competitive bravado and boisterous masculinity in the all-male dormitory. The boys shower naked without doors or curtains, and they even remove the shower nozzle and spray up their bottoms in front of one another with complete nonchalance, all an ostentatious show of their indifference to the male body. Shameless nudity and homoerotic horseplay are, ironically, a sure proof of straightness. In contrast, it's Robbie, the effeminate, maybe gay boy, maybe trans girl, who is self-conscious and hides his body, and is ridiculed by the other boys. To fear the male gaze is to show that one is beholden to the male gaze—something only a girl or a gay boy would worry about. The narrator of the story shares a room with Robbie and, during the night, after some exploratory fumbling, they soon find themselves in a nightly routine of sexual play and cigarettes. Robbie, however, never lets the narrator touch him—it is the male's role, in both of their adolescent minds, to be pleased sexually and the girl's role to please him, and, since the narrator perceives himself as straight, and since Robbie perhaps sees himself as a girl (though never articulates this explicitly), Robbie is always the one to jerk the narrator off. It is not until the narrator steals a pair of girl's underwear for Robbie that things go awry. The narrator thinks of the act as a simple kinky gift; Robbie sees it as an act of love and this more than anything disturbs the narrator. Over the course of the story, troubled by Robbie's gender nonconformism and his dalliances with him, afraid of what his feelings for Robbie might be and how he might be perceived by the other boys and girls at the school, the narrator regresses into a more atavistic masculinity—rough, aggressive, homophobic, menacing—all a cover to protect his teenage insecurities and any hint of effeminacy. In order to understand love, he has to reexamine what straightness, femininity and masculinity mean. Robbie, however, is not an innocent character in this, either, manipulatively playing the victim and spreading gossip, unsympathetically torturing the boy who also has to figure out his own identity. I thought the whole story was captivating and original.

"The Masker" is a similarly compelling short story. It follows a trans woman on a Las Vegas trip who falls for an abusive fetishizing transvestite. Her trans friends warn her against him: he offensively wears a mask and he dresses in women's clothes and he's not a real trans woman—more of a freakish pervert like in Silence of the Lambs (not an insult that trans women would throw around lightly, considering that this film has often been panned as perhaps the most insulting representation of trans identity). Yet it is precisely his commanding and abusive tone that infatuates her. It forces her into the submissive femininity that she has idealized. Their gender fetishes align. I liked both "The Masker" and "The Chaser" because they so artfully scrambled traditional stories of trans women—with imperfect characters betraying the people who care about them, destructively acting out the gender roles they have romanticized for so long, perversely relishing a victimhood that affirms their gender transition. "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" and "Stag Dance", both speculative and fantastical, were, for me, flops. "Infect Your Friends" is about a trio of trans women who are the source of a global pandemic which wipes out human sex hormones, leading to a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone has to source the sex hormones they need in order to live out their gender identity. Everyone, in a sense, is trans and everyone must consciously choose their gender. "Stag Dance" was more a gothic story about a group of lumbermen out in the wilderness, some of whom, wearing a pink triangle over their crotches, adopt the ritual role of a woman—but they all must be wary of police and the mysterious Agropelter. Both of these stories were a little too bizarre and silly for me—they either had to be developed further into full novels or whittled down into shorter vignettes to lend a more plausible realism to them."