David Davis

what is the trans experience without trans people?

Last year, shortly after publishing my second book, X, I was invited to speak on a panel about gender and literature. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to me very often, but as a trans artist writing about trans people, I was happy to be included, especially because the cis woman organizing the panel seemed to have a genuine interest in my book. It was clear from her thoughtful emails that she had read X as closely as anyone else I had spoken to about it, perhaps even more so.

And then there was the social significance. The panel was important, the cis woman told me, because it was going to be attended by so many cis people, who would arrive unfamiliar not just with my book but transsexuals as authors. This population desperately needed exposure to trans people, the way that children need exposure to wild animals at the zoo—for their enrichment, which, it was implied, would eventually trickle down to the rest of us.

You may be able to guess how it went. The day of the panel, the cis woman began by misgendering X’s protagonist, Lee. Not just once or twice, but repeatedly. When I overcame my embarrassment to correct her, her apology was more than deferential. She actually seemed shaken by her error (and in front of an audience, too!), but nevertheless, she persisted in her misgendering, though she didn’t appear to be choosing her words maliciously. In fact, it was as if she was physically incapable of doing otherwise. I considered cuntiness, but instead I was gracious, which I still regret, and finished the panel without further comment.

Afterward, when I emailed the cis woman to tell her I couldn’t in good conscience promote her panel on my social media, her written reply was as effusively penitent as her verbal one had been, although this time she wondered if perhaps Lee had different pronouns and I had just forgotten¹?

The misgendering of an imaginary person that I made up for a story feels nothing like being called a tranny on the street or getting kicked out of the doctor’s office. This here was your garden variety micro-aggression, one from a lifetime of similar. You don’t have to be trans to find yourself someone’s empty vessel; of being not even an idea, but a void where an idea should be. Still, the whole thing bothered me, and if I think about it now, it still does. That cis woman had dehumanized Lee before she could encounter X as a whole—meaning I, as its author, had been disappeared before I could even be dismissed.

By the time I had begun writing my third novel, that panel had come to represent a nascent desire to make art about these experiences without having to metabolize them with my own body; this desire dovetailed with the ambient pressures of conducting myself as a TRANS writer of TRANS fiction—someone whose genre is necessarily informed by my genitalia, which I find to be so very unchic—in a political environment of genocidal transphobia. Why was it that I had to bear that burden alone?

Well, what if gave it to someone else? How would the normal version of me—a white genderqueer person—encounter the kind of entitlement, emptiness, and two-faced contempt that that cis woman has already probably forgiven herself for? What would it look like? What would it write like? How could I create a character to share this with me, and then take it for me? What would it be like to meet the world on its own terms: what is the, or at least a, trans experience without trans people? I realized that one way to replicate what the world presents to gender nonconforming people as our best case scenario for a trans public life—that is, a permanent, rigid, and violent sexualization, objectification, and infantilization—was to curse my protagonist, a straight-identifying white cis man, with an extreme and unrelenting beauty.

The first draft of Casanova 20: or, Hot World, my attempt at a trans book without trans people, is more or less finished². Below, you’ll find a short, unedited, and paywalled selection, which I read last week at San Serriffe in Amsterdam with my lovely friend Huw Lemmey.

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