When I was 16, I decided that instead of killing myself, I would try playing quizbowl, a somewhat complicated game involving teams of up to four answering questions about academic topics. Quizbowl questions come in two varieties. First, there are tossups, paragraph-length descriptions of people/events/things that first describe obscure features of the person/event/thing and then describe progressively less obscure features of the person/event/thing until the final line, the giveaway. Because the most obscure knowledge comes at the top, and things get progressively easier, tossups are said to be pyramidal. Here’s an example:
Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde’s studies of this practice among First Nations suggests that it is “hedged” against by “cultural continuity.” The classification of this practice as “monomania” was dismissed by a thinker who studied the “different aptitude” of countries for it. That thinker considered this practice an example of a “sui generis” phenomenon and suggested that “free inquiry” led to it being more common among (*) Protestants than Catholics. Except among Asian-Americans, the frequency of this practice in the US is about three times higher for men than for women. Altruistic, egoistic, and anomic motivations for this practice were distinguished by a pioneering French sociologist. For 10 points, name this practice studied by Émile Durkheim (“ay-MEEL dur-KEM”) whose historical varieties include suttee (“SUH-tee”).
ANSWER: suicide [or equivalents like killing oneself; prompt on death; do not accept or prompt on “murder”]
The moderator reads the tossup out loud to both teams. At any point in the tossup, a player can buzz, allowing them to answer the question. If the player gives the wrong answer, no one else on their team is allowed to buzz, allowing the other team to wait until the giveaway and pick up their 10 easy points and bonus. A bonus is the second kind of question, and it really consists of three questions: one easy, one medium, one hard. They don’t need to come in that order, each question is worth 10 points, and unlike tossups, bonuses are for the whole team, so you’re allowed to talk with your teammates before you answer. Here’s an example:
In a 2017 paper, Curran and Hill implicated neoliberalism, meritocracy, and increasing parental demands in the rising prevalence of this attitude. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this attitude which D E Hamachek divided into “normal” and “neurotic” forms in one paper. This attitude can be divided into self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed forms.
ANSWER: perfectionism [accept word forms]
[10] Perfectionism is often cited as a cause for these disorders, which include bulimia and anorexia.
ANSWER: eating disorders
[10] Perfectionism has also been refered [sic] to as a risk factor for this behavior due to the tendancy [sic] of people with high levels of perfectionism to show a “perfect face” and set unreasonable goals. This behaviors [sic] “ideation” is strongly associated with borderline personality disorder.
ANSWER: suicide [accept obvious equivalents such as killing yourself; do NOT accept or prompt on “self-harm”]
Because this is an essay with literary pretensions, I’ve picked a tossup and bonus about suicide, but there are questions on other topics, too. Packets are written according to a distribution, which dictates the number of tossups and bonuses that a certain subfield will cover. For example, when I was playing, high school packets tended to have 4/4 Literature (lit), meaning that there were four lit tossups and four lit bonuses. The other big 4/4s were History and Science, with Fine Arts coming in at 3/3, and then some combination of Religion, Mythology (myth), Philosophy (phil), Social Science, Geography, Current Events, and Pop Culture (trash). There were usually 20 questions in a game, with additional tiebreakers. Each round’s collection of questions was called a packet, and each tournament used new packets. There were two national championships, which had fairly different distributions.
In theory, quizbowl questions can be about anything, but both answerlines and clues tend to be drawn from a common body of knowledge known as the canon. I liked novels, so I decided to be a lit player, and in 2012 – 2014, what was canonical in quizbowl lit was meant to track what was canonical in the academic study of literature. This meant a lot of what people sometimes call “classics” and also what people sometimes call “literary fiction.” But because quizbowl questions are written almost entirely by current and former quizbowl players, many of whom have their own idiosyncratic views about what should constitute canonical literature, people were always sneaking things in and out of the canon, getting caught, arguing about it online, doing it again, etc. What these fights about the quizbowl canon illustrate is something John Guillory argues in his 1993 book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, that “[c]anonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission.” A work of literature has to appear in enough packets to become quizbowl canonical, much as a work of literature has to appear in enough university syllabi to become literary canonical. So, these “judgments with canonical force are institutionally located” but largely decentralized: there is no single committee that decides what composes the canon, just as there is no single list that specifies what the canon is — this is why it’s “better to say that the canon is an imaginary totality of works. No one has access to the canon as a totality.”
There was a pretty convenient spreadsheet, at least. I found it online, and it had a lot of the answerlines that had appeared in high school tournaments over the years. This was not the exact high school quizbowl canon, as it was constantly being renegotiated, but it was a pretty good approximation — I went through it systematically, and once I felt I had a good handle on what was in the high school canon, I moved on to learning about what was in college packets. I read as much as I could and read about what I couldn’t, so, like any quizbowl player, my knowledge was a mix of real and fake: real knowledge came from reading the works of literature themselves; fake knowledge came from reading summaries and memorizing reused stock clues (memorable character names, choice details, etc.). Some players chose to make an obscene number of stock clue flashcards, and it was generally understood that this could help you reach a certain level of competency, though likewise, that this was no substitute for real knowledge. There was also a somewhat intangible skill known as lateral thinking, which was a mix of being able to contextualize things and being able to see through transparent tossups, a canonical example of a transparent tossup being one that repeatedly refers to an obviously twentieth century British leader in gender-neutral language, leading the lateral thinker to suspect that their gender is being intentionally obscured, leading the lateral thinker to conclude that the question is about Margaret Thatcher.
One advantage to learning about literature systematically was that literature presented itself as a system: it was not just the collected work of talented individuals but also a collective social enterprise, something not unlike what Pascale Casanova, in her 1999 The World Republic of Letters, calls the “world republic of letters:” “a literary universe relatively independent of the everyday world and its political divisions, whose boundaries and operational laws are not reducible to those of ordinary political space.” The story Casanova tells is one of increasing literary autonomy, in which the historical conditions that shape the development of literature are translated into literary features, which then become the terms on which writers engage each other, with varying degrees of historical awareness. For those with none, literature is a “pure, free, and universal” contest, any given work an “absolute exception, a sudden, unpredictable, and isolated expression of artistic creativity.” Of course, works aren’t produced in a vacuum, so literature isn’t a fair contest, but it is, in her view, a contest, and it’s that fact that holds everything together: in the literary world, “it is the competition among its members that defines and unifies the system while at the same time marking its limits. Not every writer proceeds in the same way, but all writers attempt to enter the same race, and all of them struggle, albeit with unequal advantages, to attain the same goal: literary legitimacy.” Whether or not all this is true, it’s certainly easier to think when you’ve spent a lot of time on Wikipedia, which, as a portal to the literary tradition, presents it in a distinctive, spatialized way, where everything links to everything else. This constructs a formally unified literary tradition but not a homogenous one: the literary tradition I imagined was, much like Casanova’s, constituted by all sorts of exciting literary conflict and held together by the feeling that any piece of it could, at one point or another, come up.
Many things didn’t. I don’t remember encountering any questions on trans writers in my time playing quizbowl, something that is hardly surprising, as trans people have not really had access to what Guillory calls “the means of literary production.” That’s not to say trans literary production didn’t exist, as it did, but it hadn’t usually resulted in the forms the quizbowl canon considered literature. A now somewhat common narrative about the development of “trans literature” sees things change in 2013, with the publication of Imogen Binnie’s cult classic Nevada, what Stephanie Burt, writing in The New Yorker, reviewing Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s 2022 republication of the novel, calls “the first book-length realist novel about trans women, in American English, with an ISBN on it, that was not only written by one of us but written for us.” This last bit is referring to the general sense that the two main kinds of literature about trans women that existed before Nevada — the cis-authored “gender novel” (to use Casey Plett’s term) and the trans memoir — “address a predominantly cisgender audience,” one of four points of convergence that Kay Gabriel, writing in The Yale Review, says make the two genres “basically conservative.” But Nevada did not do this: it is, in Burt’s words, “a book about leaving, about rejecting, about saying no: no to the standard Trans 101 narrative, in which, before transition, we’re all suicidal” — ah! My bad.
“I am exhausted from thinking about being trans all the time and I wish I could stop,” Maria, the protagonist of Nevada, writes in her journal, around 120 pages into the novel; it’s not the first time Maria expresses a desire to be “over being trans,” though this doesn’t seem especially likely, if for no other reason than Maria lives in a trans body, which is always “telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body:” she has to do her shot; she has to deal with clothes that don’t fit; she has to deal with her “junk;” she has to shave, and she has to put on makeup, and “[b]ecause shaving and putting on a bunch of foundation every day are emotionally exhausting reminders of being trans, she gets a step removed from them by monologuing like she’s explaining them to someone.” Maria’s compulsive explaining makes up much of the novel, and much of that compulsive explanation is made up of stuff about being trans, even if “Maria is totally exhausted by it and bored of it;” what follows that quote — “and if you’re not, she is sorry” — draws our attention to one of the interesting formal features of the novel: it’s narrated in the third person, but the first half is almost entirely focalized through Maria, so this is free indirect discourse, and these are Maria’s thoughts: that “you’re not” isn’t referring to us, the readers of the novel, as is conventional in some kinds of first person narratives, but to the someone Maria is imagining she’s speaking to, as if she were in such a narrative. So while Maria is not the narrator of Nevada, she is someone who thinks she’s the narrator of something. She’s a writer, of course.
Something else Guillory says in Cultural Capital is that part of the “liberal pluralist” critique of the canon is that the writing of both canonical authors and noncanonical authors is understood to be expressing their experience as “a representative member of some social group,” whether it be oppressor or oppressed. This is certainly how Maria self-conceptualizes. Throughout the novel, Maria’s thoughts about “what it’s like to be a trans woman” are mostly just her thoughts about what it’s like to be Maria: she happens to be the lucky kind of trans woman whose own experiences prove to be totally coincident with the experience of being a trans woman generally, and yet also the unlucky kind of trans woman who feels so different from, e.g., the other trans women in her abandoned support group so as to “feel all alienated from them.” Constantly running between these extremes does sound exhausting, but nevertheless, Maria prides herself on being “really good at being trans,” which turns out to mean, in the following lines, that people like her blog: being good at being trans is, for Maria, being good at explaining being trans.
She has competition, but none of it is literary: the ideas about trans women she takes it upon herself to dispel largely come from television and doctors. She reads mostly queer authors and thinks Hemingway “can suck a dick” but still “assumes one day she’ll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two.” Her relationship to the literary tradition is fraught, though not totally unfamiliar: however Anti-American her imagined Novel(s) may be, they’re still Great, evidence, maybe, in favor of Casanova’s claim about all writers craving literary legitimacy — who knows how Maria would feel learning that Nevada has since been included in The Atlantic’s most recent list of Great American Novels? Would she be pleased to learn that she is, as Lily Meyer writes in the accompanying description, “a great character?”
There is an idea in the Marxist literary tradition, put forth by Georg Lukács, who got it from Friedrich Engels, who got it from Aristotle, that a great character is the union of the universal and the particular. This is what Lukács calls a “typical” character, one who is individual, but who also, as Fredric Jameson glosses it, in his 1971 work Marxism and Form, “stand[s]. . . for something larger and more meaningful than themselves, than their own individual isolated destinies.” For Lukács, this can rescue the novel from the accusations of bourgeois individualism it is so often subjected to, a defense strengthened by the fact that realist novels, though undeniably the products of novelists’ imaginations, are also made up of what Jameson calls the “raw material” of their author’s social world. It would be nice if Maria could spend the whole novel going on adventures and solving all her problems, but she also sometimes has to go to work, a not untypical problem — as Jameson writes: “[a novel’s] story must find its elbowroom in a world in which men’s lives are divided between routine drudgery and sleep. So the novelist arranges his plot to take place on weekends (Camus’ Stranger), during vacations (Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain), during great crises in which the routine breaks down (war literature).”
And yet novels are undeniably the products of imagination: there’s nothing actually stopping the novelist from arranging their plot however they so choose. This tension, between the demands imposed by the raw material of the work and what the author wants the story to be, is why J. M. Bernstein, in his reading of Lukács, 1983’s The Philosophy of the Novel, says that the novel is a dialectic between “mimesis” and “form-giving,” an “attempt to write the world as it is in terms of how it ought to be.” What makes Maria a typical trans woman, then, aren’t just the things she thinks about being trans or the ways she acts on them — things that are all Maria — but how those things are held in tension with the facts that because she can’t afford electrolysis, because she can’t afford surgery, because she works a retail job where people feel entitled to say weird shit to her, she can’t stop thinking about being trans — she is inscribed in her transness not by some existential Trans Condition, but materially, socially.
In their navigating between the demands of the economic social structures that surround them and those of their own individual particularities, great characters are just like everyone else. If there can be said to be something called the “human condition,” it’s surely that we need to eat: “Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life,” writes Karl Marx, in the third volume of his Capital, “so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.” But people don’t read novels just to experience the same social contradictions they encounter in their daily lives; many read novels because novels, with their arranged plots, typically resolve them — if you believe the Jameson of 1981’s The Political Unconscious, the narrative form is always “inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions.” This is the side of the dialectic that presents the world as it ought to be: a world in which you can do things besides go to work.
Most novels, it should be said, don’t end with the whole world becoming as it ought to be. Nevada certainly doesn’t. Maria fucks off to the titular state with a bunch of heroin and spends the rest of the novel trying to convince its other protagonist, James, that he should transition; he doesn’t. We are left with the knowledge that Maria will need to find another job, that the capitalist world will grind on, that she’ll still be thinking about being trans. And we know that this will always be true. Every time we go to read Nevada, we will find Maria living in the same world, doing the same things, making the same mistakes — even if we find Maria relatable, we like reading about her precisely because we are not her: our lives are unfinished; we still have the power to do things differently. Thus, Catherine Gallagher writes in 2006’s “The Rise of Fictionality,” what “we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character.” We read in part to remember that we are not trapped in a novel, that we can still go out and do things, the proof of which is the very book we’re holding in our hands, something that has surely been done — hence Jameson’s claim that
for Lukács the most basic image of human freedom is not the hero of the novel, for he can never succeed in his quest for ultimate meaning, but rather the novelist himself, who in telling the story of failure succeeds — whose very creation stands as that momentary reconciliation of matter and spirit toward which his hero strives in vain.
So maybe transitioning is kind of like writing a novel — this has been my experience, at any rate, one of trying to resolve the tension between what is and what ought to be. There is the gender I started out with, the gender I wanted, and now there is the gender I have. I have been constrained by some material, biological, and social factors; I have been able to overcome others. Framed in terms as abstract and general as these, I suspect that this is true of every single person that has a gender, something they’ve no doubt forged in a similar dialectic of constraint — the difference between trans and cis people is not fundamentally one of kind: it’s just harder for us to get where we want to go. Society is structured such that our genders require more material intervention to achieve, which leads us to the conclusion that all it would take is a bit of societal restructuring, and Maria could stop thinking about being trans. It’s in this sense that Maria becomes, in one reading, an allegorical stand-in for all of trans literary production, at least as it is understood by Andrea Long Chu, who, in the 2025 afterword to her 2019 book Females, writes:
When my book Females first appeared in 2019, the vast majority of books by trans people were memoirs, and few of them were any good. This is still true today. The fact is that we are a young people, rapidly growing in historical consciousness but disadvantaged across every social vector, and most of us are still so occupied by the struggle to secure access to housing, employment, health care, and physical security that the question of our higher deserts — a proper literary tradition among them — remains distant and obscure.
There’s more than memoir1, but whatever Chu means by a “proper literary tradition” probably has something to do with what she says later in the afterword: “[i]f there is one idea that has unified my thinking as a trans person since I embarked on a career as a writer, it is that we must give up the dream of explaining ourselves.” A proper literary tradition might be a more autonomous one, one where we don’t have to write as representatives of transness, one where we could even write about, e.g., suicidality without having to consider how it will reflect on trans people generally, without having to think about how, as McKenzie Wark writes in “Girls Like Us,” “[a]nything you say or write about how raw you are can be used to vilify all of the sisters.”
I don’t know that I’d necessarily call the aggregate of trans literary production a “tradition,” though. We could, but then we’d be confirming Guillory’s observation that tradition “always retroactively unifies disparate cultural productions,” an observation he parlays into a characteristic move, one that relocates our focus away from the artists and onto the critics who produce our ideas about art: “the concept of a given tradition is much more revealing about the immediate context in which that tradition is defined than it is about the works retroactively so organized.” Doubtless, the fact that we have to make such an effort to define a tradition is as significant as any attempt to do so, and even if there was a general trans literary tradition, not every trans author could be said to be working exclusively inside it. Many are writing with others. Take, for example, the list of other writers thanked in the acknowledgments of Aurora Mattia’s novel The Fifth Wound (2023), which spans several different identity categories, languages, and continents, plus three different millennia.
So, the problem with trying to make our literary groupings entirely congruent with our political ones is that historical conditions have produced a literary world that is semi-autonomous. If by the twentieth century, it was commonplace for authors to be reading well outside their local literary tradition, in the twenty-first, it’s all but guaranteed. We might take it for granted that we can easily read whatever we want, but it’s crazy, and if handing it to the massive online retailers that enable this feels bad, consider that this same capability is offered by a library, whether public or pirate, as is the case with the various online “shadow libraries” like Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and Library Genesis. If nothing else, the internet has made it much easier for the motivated user to become idiosyncratic, something which is as true of our literary production as it is of our literary consumption. There’s no question that the internet’s absorption of the literary world and the ever conglomerating conglomeration of the publishing industry have led to precarity and homogenization, but historically, lots of good literature has been produced under similar conditions — as Jameson says in 2024’s Inventions of a Present, the “modernists (of all kinds) began to emerge when the institutions that guaranteed their social status (and their income) fell prey to market forces and excluded any number of ambitious and productive talents from relatively secure social positions.” We don’t even need to, as Virginia Woolf once did, buy our own printing press and use it to publish — we have the internet; it’s easier now, and cheaper.
And if we don’t want to involve ourselves with corporate printing options, we might even do everything ourselves. This is the idea put forward in Jamie Berrout’s 2019 Essays Against Publishing, where she outlines the alternative of the “anti-press” and gives very specific advice about how to deal with the concrete details of publishing, like slush piles, submission fees, cover design, page layout, royalty structures, and printing. Against this DIY ethos, we could oppose that of the “long march through the institutions,” the general idea that we can create radical change from within, but neither has worked. At the start of this year, in his first days in office, our current president issued a number of anti-trans executive orders, which, taken together, seem to have a clear intent: remove trans people from public life. Berrout anticipated it well: “[f]or them to feel disgust at the presence of a trans woman or the thought of their kids being trans must also mean that they feel relief at our absence.”
Disgust is an ugly feeling I encounter often in my daily trans existence; it is not one I really understood until I read the afterword to Sianne Ngai’s 2005 book Ugly Feelings, an afterword that made me appreciate how nice it is to be merely the object of contempt, pity, or disdain, the kind of inferior object, Ngai says, simply dismissed or ignored — better to be dismissed than disgusting, “perceived as dangerous and contaminating and thus something to which one cannot possibly remain indifferent.” It is as objects of disgust that we must be removed from sight and mind, lest we spread. In this respect, disgust acts as a barrier to envy, the subject of Ngai’s third chapter, a usually feminized emotion, and one conventionally understood to have a close relationship with the imitation of a pre-existing model; it is this relationship to exemplarity that makes femininity particularly infectious — what could be more feminine, after all, than wanting to be feminine? I knew I wanted to be a woman long before I knew I could be one. Seeing transition exemplified made it thinkable, but I did not transition to become another woman: I transitioned to become the woman I wanted to be. In that sense, I and others are what Ngai might call “bad examples,” ones “actively defining and redefining the category they would seem only to passively reflect.” If reactionaries have to portray us as disgusting, no wonder: how are you supposed to change genders without implicating the entire system of gender? Why would you want to?
A peculiar feature of contemporary American liberalism is that you are generally supposed to say what you think others want to hear. Insofar as we are tolerated, it is on the condition that we don’t affect anyone else — this is a hyperatomized and very medical vision of what transition could be: something is wrong with our brains (maybe the chemistry?) and the only way to fix it is to make various, doctor-approved interventions. The benefits of promoting this view are clear: with enough cash and/or patience for jumping through administrative hoops, some of us might get access to the medical procedures we desire. This view also benefits from the unimpeachable authority of Science, which has proven more effective at convincing people to tolerate us than, say, dense critical theory, which is, much like actual science, hard to read, full of references, and not always clear. Still, there is, maybe, a rationale for such a strategy: with a few prominent examples — perfectly calibrated to be the right level of respectable — they might just give us our rights.
One of the virtues of being a communist is that you can just say what you mean: I think it’s right to transition. I think it’s good! You should be able to change your gender as much and as often as you want and not have it matter for the simple reason that gender should be as superficial as liberals too often pretend it already is. But of course, it isn’t. It’s woven into the structure of our world, and presented with the daunting task of getting it out, many ask why we should change our whole society just to accommodate such a small minority of people. But this is the wrong way to think about things. We should change our whole society because it is bad and ought to be better. What else are we doing, if not trying to win?
We did, both national tournaments. In a moment of literary serendipity, the two quizbowl tournaments were split by the online publication of a Time Magazine article declaring that American society had passed “the transgender tipping point,” something I paid no attention to. It’s probably for the best. A few years later, I’d connect some dots and realize I could transition — kind of a mess, but it worked. A novel even came out of it. It was also a mess. Who knows if it worked.
I do still sometimes think about killing myself, for reasons that only sort of have to do with being trans: diagnosed bipolar, my life is marked by dramatic changes in my thoughts. Some days I feel grandiose; other days, worthless. To explain the purpose of serious fiction, David Foster Wallace gives the evocative metaphor of a reader “marooned in her own skull.” My mental landscape often feels like the opposite: it feels as though I am in the middle of a lake, one that is just small enough for me to see the shore and just large enough for me to know that I would never make it there. In this inverted solipsism, it is the outside world that is real, my thoughts and my perceptions that are not. Unreality is the water I swim in.
This is one reason I like fiction. I am delusional enough to write and think about life in these heavily narrativized terms. While narratives do have the benefit of enabling action and creating meaning, they also distort. In his 2003 book The One vs. the Many, Alex Woloch looks at “that particular and charged encounter between an individual human personality and a determined space and position within the narrative as a whole,” something like the fictional equivalent of the human condition we entertained earlier, that tension between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity. Woloch points us to the basic but very significant fact that in novels, not everyone can be the main character — the novel will have to distribute its attention somehow. Because we often access History in a narrativized form, it can seem that this is true there, too — only so many people can fit into the canon, so the thinking goes: we can only have so many exemplary people.
That’s not really true of life: life is not a novel, and real humans are not characters, even if we sometimes encounter them that way. It’s clearly how you’re encountering me. But we characters don’t always make for good examples: the strange idea that a writer always represents their social identity is matched in strangeness by the strange idea that a writer always represents themselves, that misguided belief that the way authors appear on the page is a faithful transcription of the way we are in real life and not a mediated persona we’ve constructed out of words to do something for you. But how could it be any other way? We will always appear as characters, those trapped in the form we were placed in; it’s you who doesn’t have to be.
See, for example, the works discussed in McKenzie Wark’s “Girls Like Us,” Wark’s “Trans Fem Literary Springtime,” Gabriel’s “Whose Trans Realism?”, Burt’s “The Invention of the Trans Novel,” Grace Byron’s “Very Special Episodes,” as well as the works found in projects like The Transfeminine Review, Trans Reads, and The Trans Literature Database. ↩