Not Another Trans Movie -or- Jack Halberstam, I Love You (But You’re Bringing Me Down)
I know it’s démodé to pit the transexuals against each other, but I read Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters and Lote by Shola Von Reinhold in the last couple of months, and, having had at least two thoughts about each (rare for a dumb blonde brunette like myself), thought I’d write some of them down. Spoilers ahead for both, if you care about that.
My initial reaction while I was reading Lote was that here was the parade of High Femme Camp Antics that I had wanted DB to be. Here we had some ungainly gal after my own heart waltzing round somewhere European, shoplifting, eating and drinking decadently, disrupting the assorted straight-laced stuffed-shirts, along with a whimsical friend and a bemused Stone Cold Bitch™.
My initial reaction to DB was mixed. I tore through it yes. Peters is a hilarious writer and social commentator, and sure can tell stories, but the pacing felt so off, and it got so caught up in itself. Had it been hyped a little too much maybe? The heaviness of the constant flashbacks and laying out of past trauma felt extraneous to what I was coming into it for. Oh god, do we have to have a flashback to a dodgy sexual encounter and the failure of Dressing Up? It’s just Nevada all over again, I know about this stuff Torrey, you really don’t need to go into it! The whole trip to the Glamour Boutique in particular felt unnecessary regurgation of shitty early transition experiences that just got a little Danish Girl, and got in the way of the trashy fling promised by the premise (yes please give me a zany threesome parenting romp).
Speaking of glamour… One really has to consider it when talking about the dolls. It recurs in our history, from Sir Lady Java to Freckle — from the gold leaf on the virgin mary to Roberta Cowell, from Baphomet to Venus Xtravaganza. Just look at the pictures from Casa Susanna, the 1960s retreat for trans women, crossdressers, and those in between, of which we only have a visual record for because furniture dealer Robert Snope found a set of negatives in flea market (and worth noting that it, as with the archive in Lote, features mostly white faces). Morgan M Page talks of gossip and glamour as a feminising of history, making the stories exciting to listen to when talking about her trans history podcast One From the Vaults. The boring reason for it is that in learning to fancy ourselves up it’s easy to just lean fully into it, especially given our traditionally limited career prospects encouraging it, but it’s so much more fun to look deeper into it, for something higher.
DB has a pretty unusual relationship with glamour— none of the three main characters could be said to have much of a relationship with it, and it mostly appears through Reese’s friends Iris and Thalia. In the specific scene that stuck with me, Amy is talking about Candy Darling, as we are wont to do (tangent — I dislike this trend of not having contents/list of chapters in novels nowadays, what am i meant to do, read it again?) (also, this is brought up right after the funeral — keep that in mind). Amy complains about Candy and muses blah blah blah, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis actually did things blah blah blah, and, in a moment of style and grace, Iris wordlessly shows off her thigh tattoo of the star herself. It’s a reported scene, a mini-flashback instead of the full chapter ones, but it showcases the theatricality of the trans gal community in DB in its way that our central transexual duo, and the book as a whole, seem cut off from. The book wanders round the outskirts of glamour without ever really delving into it: Reese’s fashion job is downplayed, and Amy’s beauty is commented on but never truly glamorous, always understated and cool (any relationship she might have with it was thoroughly torn to shreds by the mother/daughter intelopers in the Glamour Boutique). Katherine is disregarded due to her heterosexuality. Reese gets there to an extent with her affairs with Stanley and The Cowboy, but that always veers too quick into tragedy and consequence to ever get the roar of gaslights fully going.
Lote’s glamour is one of its most discussed aspects. We see it directly from Erskine-Lily and Hermia , and the Thought Artists vehemently opposed to it (although our two most prominent, Griselda and Hector, both feel the draw towards it). Its linking of the queer glamour and aesthetic to the angels/luxuries rings true through art and history to Nina Arsenault and Angel de la Vega, and its view of the intertwining of historical blackness and glamour is one of the more didactic parts, but it’s done so elegantly with the characterisation around the Transfixion that one barely notices (likewise in DB this is done with the Baby Elephants speech — it’s a symbol of Ames’s relationship with transness and community before it’s a direct analysis). Hermia’s is what marks her out in history, what allowed her entrance to the parties — Mathilda rejects the Kantian/Wildean idea of beauty as Purposiveness without Purpose or Uselessness as we see for her, for Malachi, for Erskine-Lily, and for Hermia, it’s a vital tool of their blackness. It’s already been talked about a fair amount so I won’t go on but it’s worth noting this from Von Reinhold in an interview with The Modernist Review:
How do glamour and decadence operate as a form of resistance in the novel?
Interestingly, I don’t think the book really directly deals with glamour as a category but glamour does correspond in that LOTE is interested in ideas of ornament, artifice and beauty
In its unwillingness to properly revel in the glitz and soapy drama, DB kinda comes across as an (intentionally) failed sitcom. Lote, on the other hand, happily offers you the chance to Escape along with Mathilda, bundled with the adventure of unveiling the history of Hermia. While it doesn’t shy from honesty around racism and transphobia, it comes across as having more fun, with the underlying failure of the cycle of Escapes as background texture rather than the swampiness of DB’s flashbacks.
When I first mentioned this comparison to my friend Ro (who has kindly since read and commented on this before i hit that awful publish button), she said that she thought the two books were attempting radically different things: Lote is at home in the spiritual realm and is built on mystification, whereas DB takes care to uncover and de-exoticise transness. This is kinda what I’m talking about, as I think this is true, but rather than marking them as especially different, it’s more two types of conflict with reality.
For me, DB moves into the hyperreal — the zaniness of the premise, the symbolic natures of Reese, Katherine, and Ames as Transexual, Cissexual, and Other, and then we see other symbols, who are even less fleshed out: The Cowboy, The Abusive Ex-Boyfriend, The Snarky Drag Queen, The Fetus. It then collapses that towards the end as The Cowboy is revealed to be multifaceted in also being a Philandering Husband (a different archetype) and also unexpectedly connected to The Cissexual; The Fetus becomes The Aborted Fetus and our Bodacious Protagonist tries to kill herself. It fails (intentionally) as a sitcom by twisting the archetypes, but still feels a lot like a New York fairytale.
Conjunctly, Lote, while it lives in the spiritual, up the rafters, feels a little more grounded in terms of characters. Once we get through the fancifulness of arriving at the residency and figuring out what Thought Art is, we hit the very real struggles of the cast: Erskine-Lily’s wavering gender and denial of their history, Griselda’s struggle with art and justice, Hector’s steady opening up colliding with his coarseness when it comes to Erskine-Lily, Elizabeth/Joan’s assorted crises, or Agnes’ slow and steady research finally coming to fruition. Likewise, we see Mathilda’s distance from Erskine-Lily’s more earnest fervour at the religious aspect of the Lote society, referring to it as auto-suggestion even while going through the ritual. There’s a detachment there that places her between Erskine-Lily and Griselda/Reese/Ames.
The hunt for Hermia alongside the plot with Agnes’ research does stand in for the larger-scale discussions on how we keep histories etc., but largely the stories and observations remain specific, almost esoteric, whereas DB is more observational of communities in the way it talks about the white trans girl suicide epidemic, or baby elephants, or vitamin parties.
There’s other overlaps here. DB is much more focused on the trappings of transition, thinking about clothes and expression and feelings and estrogen shots, whereas that only appears briefly in Lote, and particularly when the illusion starts to fall apart. Mathilda finds Erskine-Lily an epilator, gets frustrated correcting Hector’s misgendering, and is told Erskine-Lily’s deadname (what is more tragic than your cool new friends meeting the people you went to school with).
Conversely, DB veers towards the metaphysical when we get to the suicide attempt — Reese makes a connection to Virginia Woolf in her walking out to sea, failing to live up to the stones-in-the-pockets eleganza extravaganza (Woolf being explicitly noted as the very person Hermia avoided like the plague). Whereas, back in London, Mathilda finds the mystical nectar of Orion in a supermarket! Horrible! Hideous! It’s like finding out the cool shirt you found in a thrift store is actually from Zara. Both these shifts come after the deflating incident (the dinner at the fancy restaurant, Griselda turning in her project).
So both books are playing around with this failure and deflation of grandeur, showing us the self-mythologising we do to make it through trans life, and presenting as literature the mess that emerges there. We get some antics, some trauma, and a good story while we’re here (as these books tend to, one of the big counterexamples is probably Freshwater which just leans harder into it at the end? Again here I go throwing kinda disparate trans books at each other, although they do share that whole self-discovery journey situation). The two of them are doing different things, DB is intentionally fighting back against the wackiness of the premise while still playing with it and making these grand observations, which leads to a dissonance. Lote goes all in, interweaving its cutaways to the historical excerpts about Hermia as part of the intoxication of research. Our perspective is much more along for the ride with Mathilda, whereas with DB we’re decidedly an external audience, being shown this jumble of personal history.
Is there much more to this than coincidences and structural similarities? Maybe, maybe not. I enjoyed both books, and I think it’s in this comparison that I think I appreciate Detransition, Baby more, in how it makes me think about what the janky pace does. Do I feel it’s pushing that too hard for a cis audience? Eh, to an extent, there’s a lot there for the trans reader too. Have I come across as not liking it? I didn’t mean to. I did enjoy it, I’ve had a good time talking about it with some pals, it’s a good book.
Still, I’m recommending Lote to everyone I meet, and I feel I haven’t laid out the entirety of its brilliance here, but this is just a quick spiel. There’s more unformed thoughts I have: what’s with the revolution at the end? What is the book’s relationships to protest politics and communism? What exactly is it doing with historicity and storytelling? I saw the ending as a tragedy of our protagonist falling back into old routines, whereas other people see it as more of a shift in the cycle of the Escapes to something bigger, more authentic maybe? I suppose it’s ambiguous, or maybe I’m just looking at it wrong. Many questions, no answers, not today.
