Welcome to issue no. 2 of Read Something Queer! I hope you’re as excited to have me in your inbox as I am to be here.
As a quick note, I was asked last week whether the Queer Points at the bottom of these reviews mean anything. The short answer to that is no and the longer answer is that they are assigned in an arbitrary manner based on how gay I think things are.
If you ever disagree with a point value, feel free to reply directly to these emails and let me know. Just keep in mind that I will only consider you qualified to argue if you aren’t straight.
— Becca
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
Fiction, February 2013
Let me start by saying that I realize I’m late to the party here.
Nevada was hailed as revolutionary when it was first published, topped countless best-of lists of books by trans authors in the following years, and has since become a go-to recommendation for young trans readers. I didn’t know any of this until last year, but ordered a copy after reading the following line from this review:
I love how it’s a novel specifically about trans women, for trans women, written by a trans woman (any of which has rarely existed let alone all three at once) and that it talks about shit that probably only trans women know about and in a totally real and unbullshit or snow-covered way.
It sounded like nothing I’d ever read, which was confirmed when I cracked it open to a sadomasochistic queer sex scene on the first page. Things only get more interesting from there.
The book mostly centers on Maria Griffiths, a 29-year-old queer, trans woman. At the start, she’s living in Brooklyn with her girlfriend and working a job she hates at a thinly veiled version of The Strand. About a hundred pages in, she gets dumped by her girlfriend and fired from the bookstore, then reacts by stealing her now-ex-girlfriend’s car, buying $400 worth of heroin, and leaving on a “trip out of town” that lands her in—surprise!—Nevada.
Maria’s a bit of a mess.
She’s also funny, irreverent, and can’t seem to stop delivering lengthy monologues, both internal and otherwise, on gender and sexuality. Her thoughts while she’s biking through Brooklyn make up a large chunk of the book and are often punctuated with lines like, “Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars.”
I really liked these monologues even though I found Maria’s voice a bit grating at times. There are a lot of “like”s and “whatever”s and Maria uses the phrase “This rules!” a bit more than I’d expect from someone who’s almost 30. Amy Dentata touches on this in her review, writing, “the word “whatever” is just shorthand for when it hurts too much to say how you feel. But trans women who transitioned sometime after four years old become teenagers all over again because of it, and we tend to hurt a lot, so you’re going to get a lot of whatever’s in this book, whether you like it or not.” As a cis woman I’m certainly not qualified to weigh on this, but it feels like helpful context.
All that aside, this book is worth reading. It feels like a window into the life of a trans woman just trying to exist in the world, from her extensive morning routine to her internal conflict over whether to play the “sweet het girl” around men so as not to raise suspicion that she’s trans. She struggles with her relationship to her body, her difficulty to remain present with other people, and her inability to rid herself of the coping mechanisms she used to survive as a closeted trans kid.
The second half of the book shifts its focus to James, a stoner in Star City, Nevada, who’s maybe questioning his gender identity. When Maria meets him at the local Walmart, she takes it upon herself to become his mentor, blatantly attempting to use him for her own personal growth.
They’re both frustrating characters. They avoid their feelings and other people, and are at times completely checked out thanks to whiskey (Maria) and weed (James).
They feel human, and they give a look at what the trans experience is really like that’s unlike anything I’d ever read before. Their stories also work well together, as Maria views James as a younger version of herself. But the book doesn’t take the easy way out by letting him be a stand-in for young Maria, and instead lets him be a complex character all on his own.
Plus, none of their more frustrating moments are presented without commentary. The novel is written in a sort of third-person, stream of consciousness style and the perspective shifts between chapters.
As much as each of the characters seem unable to resolve their own issues, they have no trouble identifying each other’s flaws and self-destructive tendencies with blistering accuracy. Maria’s ex, for example, not only knows that she’s going to steal the car and attempt to go on a journey of self-discovery, but that afterwards, she “will feel like she’s really accomplished something and like everything is different now, like she’s figured out her shit. Only nothing will change.”
She’s right.
Queer points:
+4 for the aforementioned sadomasochistic queer sex scene on page one
+8 for the fact that Maria met her ex at a "big art-dyke collective apartment" in Bushwick
+13 for introducing me to the concept of autogynephilia, and how it’s used to deny the existence of trans women who don’t fit into straight men’s narrow ideas of femininity
Buy it from Black Stone Bookstore or download a free PDF at haveyoureadnevada.club