It was sometime in 2015. Obama was still president, Twitter wasn’t quite a cesspool and I was about to start a new job in a new city. To train for the new job, I was sent to Toronto for a week and put up in a hotel. I brought along a copy of a book I’d just heard of and bought from Glad Day in Toronto: Nevada by Imogen Binnie.
I can’t remember exactly where I heard about it. Probably on Tumblr, where I followed a bunch of trans people like Winter Lake or Merrit Kopas. Not because I was trans myself, but because I wanted to learn more and be a good ally. So when they started posting about this new book, one that was really good, I bought a copy.
Maybe I should back up a bit.
As far back as my teens I had this inkling that I wasn’t a guy. Little things, like how I couldn’t care less about the same stuff they all did and I had to pretend and force myself to have an interest in their interests: sitting around bullshitting about girls, having a favourite football team, that sort of thing. I sort of wanted to be a girl, too. Enough so that I looked around online, and found concepts like Autogynephilia: was that what I was? Just some weirdo with a strange fetish for wearing women’s clothing? I took the test online, the one where you had to rotate imaginary boxes in your mind and struggled with that.
Maybe I wasn’t trans - which might have been just as well, since I lived in a small town and nobody was gay, nobody was different. I can’t have imagined what it’d have been like to come out as trans. I did the homework: I knew I’d have to transfer to a special high school in Toronto, go to CAMH and get a diagnosis. I knew a person on a chat room named DJ Izumi - she spoke about her transition freely and frankly. CAMH sounded like a snake pit.
So I shoved it all down and went about my life. I went to college and put myself together as a new person. Instead of a weird high school kid who listened to music all the time and read a lot, I became a Sports Guy. I studied Bill Simmons columns for how to do this, the kind of things and mannerisms to have. I bought several baseball caps, a few sports jerseys and studied ESPN. I spent a few years like this, trying to will myself into being this image of a guy. I’d meet someone, get into a relationship and all these pesky feelings would fall from me, like so many scales from my eyes.
That didn’t happen. I started hanging around the college pride group, making friends with a few of them. I was a pretty obvious closet case, but none of them forced me, just occasionally asking if I would ever date a guy. Maybe, I said. Through them, I met a woman I fell for. Almost immediately we got drunk together and I showed her a story I’d written where I was a girl.
She thought it was cute. Until I brought it up again later, and then suddenly it wasn’t. We stopped talking.
Meanwhile, college was going weirdly. I would write and write, article after article. Reviews, feature stories, little personal columns. Our marks were based on the amount of content we pumped out and I finished right at the top of the class. I got the prized internship: CTV, where I’d be working at a national newsdesk.
It fell apart almost immediately. This was a place where you had to report, not just repeat. I was unsuited for this, I was someone who would look at the wire copy and want to rewrite it. There were several women working there and I was jealous of them all. I’d spend my days rewriting stuff from Canada AM and stealing glances at the women who worked there. I was miserable, and then it ended, and I was back home, like I’d never even gone to college.
So, in 2015 that’s where I was. Since my internship ended in 2009, I wrote online here and there, mostly for free, mostly about sports and music. A lot of my pieces, looking back, had to do with gender and self-expression, like this one about gender equality in sports. Funny story about that one: when I emailed to ask for an interview, the reply was “Why is a man covering this?” and my initial response was “Oh right, people see me as a guy.” I’d been isolating myself for so long, and shoved feelings so deep inside me, that after a while, I wasn’t even aware I was doing it anymore. Enter Binnie’s book.
Nevada was the rare book that I couldn’t put down. I thought about it when I was at work, I read it every chance I could when I was free. Maria’s problems sounded interesting to me, and I underlined her advice on stuff like shaving. Piranha was like the cool friend I never had, and I hope wherever she is, she’s doing okay. But mostly I identified with James.
The questions and anxieties James had mirrored my own. I thought I was broken, I thought if I bought a dress online it’d come in a big pink box, and I thought I wasn’t deserving of love. Like James, I worked retail, and where he was into movies, I was into music. When Maria entered his life, with hair so red it looked like it’d smear on the walls, I found myself wishing that I had someone like that in my life, someone to take my hand and listen, to help me process these feelings, someone who’d been there before.
I never did get that person, the “Trans Mom” as they say in trans circles. But I had Nevada and I read it two, three times. It was so good, I ordered the other two Topside Press books: A Safe Girl to Love and The Collection. They were great, too, and looking back, my reviews were very eggy: I was circling around trans issues and myself, but reading between the lines, they were there. I read Gender Outlaw and Whipping Girl, and although I liked them both, neither of them resonated with me quite the same way.
I look back on Nevada now and I see how much it shaped the arc of trans literature to follow. WIthout it and without Maria’s messy approach to making someone aware they’re trans, I don’t know if we have Little Fish and it’s disastrous armed forces veteran; I don’t know if we have Detransition, Baby and it’s messy approach to motherhood. It was a book that showed trans people in all their complex, messy selves, not as weak-wristed stereotypes or clunky metaphors. For me, it was a game changer.
I think about how it influenced my writing, especially the way Binnie uses dialogue to develop her characters. It wasn’t the book that made me want to write - Little Fish was the one that did that - but it definitely informed the way I approach fiction. The way I consume fiction, too.
And I think about how it shaped me as a person. In James and Maria, I saw people who I could finally relate to, people who had gone through what I had and had answers. They had dealt with the worst of things - Maria’s parents rejected her, and she got misgendered at work - but they kept on living. James showed me that it was possible for me to transition, too, and that I wouldn’t lose myself if I tried. I bought a dress online the day I finished that book, an Old Navy number with blue and white stripes.
It’s been about six years now since I read Nevada and it’s still a book I think about often. Sometimes I’ll flip it open randomly and read a page or two. It’s a book that’s remained fresh for me and one I still aspire to write like. If I can make a book that’s half as good as it, gives somebody the same sense of connection it gave me, then I think I’ll have succeeded at writing.
It’d been unavailable for years after Topside went under; copies were available on Amazon, but my understanding is there’s issues around royalties. I don’t know, I’m not privy to anything special. But it’s getting republished by an imprint at FSG later this year, and I think after the success of D,B and it’s considerable word-of-mouth reputation, it’s primed for the success it never had before. I’m excited to read it, and I’m glad I did back in the day, too.