The last few days I’ve been reading Casey Plett’s new collection of stories A Dream of a Woman, and it’s great. Stories about transition, about trans people struggling with addiction and figuring their shit out, boozy nights of Smash and PBR. We’re about the same age, I think, and it’s like she was taking notes back when she was in school. It resonates with me; I had a lot of those nights on residence, myself.
There’s some good stories in the book (I think the way “Hazel and Christopher” subverts the reader’s expectations is great), but today I want to focus on one that comes in the middle of the book: “Couldn’t Hear You Talk Anymore.” It has me thinking about trauma. The kind of shared trauma it seems every trans person I know has dealt with. In two parts, it follows a young woman named Tiana who navigates life in Winnipeg and wonders what might’ve been with another, nameless trans woman who’s vanished like a ghost. She looks back on her transition:
“Tiana knew how lucky she was. It hadn’t always been this way; she really did know how lucky she was. There was a short but formative time when all she wanted was her mother back, and now she had her mother back. She knew how lucky she was.” (pg 98)
But is she really that lucky? Her relationship with her mom is fraught with anxiety, one she drowns in alcohol. When she has a day to herself, she bikes around town, drinking out of a flask. And when she thinks about her friend, she says: “To know you is to know how you drank.” Like Wendy Reimer in her cups, Tiana is both a melancholy drunk and a romantic drunk, someone who’s trying to drown a part of themselves they can’t stand to think about. And yet - she feels lucky.
***
When I came out, I lost a good friend of mine. They sent me an email asking “I’m really supposed to call you Roz now?” and I never heard from them again.
It was too bad, I used to drive down to the city and see them all the time. We would go to lunch at Teddy’s, sit around coffees and smoked meat sandwiches and talk about all kinds of bullshit: pro wrestling, the Blue Jays, what our old journalism-school classmates were up to. I can remember the time we road tripped to Hamilton, driving along the 401 and parking on a front lawn out in front of the old Ivor Wynne Stadium. I shivered in the cold, autumn light and they lent me their jacket. That was one of the first times I felt, well, like a girl, even though I was barely out to myself that night.
When I came out, I felt lucky, too. And I was. Work was accepting, even anticipating. People knew. I couldn’t keep the secret, and it spilled out in little ways they picked up on but thankfully never asked me about: lipstick traces, bits of nail polish, the way I always seemed cold, the way I winced when something touched my chest. There were rumours, I’m sure, and people who saw me around town. But what could’ve been an awkward, mean-spirited confrontation was quiet acceptance, a lot of “Yeah we figured you were going through something.” I even got a smile and thumbs up the first time a customer used the right pronouns.
I’ve been lucky in other ways, too. Unlike the characters in Plett’s stories, I’ve never experienced violence. Nobody’s ever approached me for sex, cat-called me in the streets, thrown a bottle at me. The worst I get is constant misgendering (I don’t pass, whatever, I’m over it) and the occasional guy calling me a freak or whatever to my face.
The worst came at work when someone yelled at me, tried to start a fight and called me a tranny. I cried that night, long sobs in the fridge at work while a concerned co-worker left me alone and kind of avoided me. I wrote about that once, and how it connected with a lot of other stress in my life and how it made me want to de-transition. And I’d be lying if I said I ever got past that feeling. Just a few weeks ago I had the same thoughts and stopped my hormones, stopped shaving and generally leaned into being called sir all the time.
But I’m lucky, I know how lucky I am. My friends are supportive. They’re all still alive, too. Gosh, I think about the funeral scene in Detransition, Baby a lot and how it was inspired by the losses to the trans community. And like, I think about myself: how would I handle these stresses? I’m lucky, up here in Central Ontario, because people have this “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone” kind of vibe, and I’ve gotten away with so, so much because of that.
If I had to deal with assholes calling me names every day, with people throwing bottles at me, trying to peek under my dress, with the kind of stuff that Plett’s characters do every day… I think I’d drink, too.
***
There’s a part in “Couldn’t Hear You Talk Anymore” where Tiana says she’s played too many rounds of Show-Your-Scars. And I get that. I can’t go to a trans space without people talking about the collective traumas, the times they’ve been yelled at, the people they left behind. I mean, shit, Twitter was practically made for this. So here’s mine:
I have a bad relationship with booze. It makes me sad, it gives me headaches and it makes me want to self harm. So I avoid it. I’ve had maybe three beers this summer, all of them with my girlfriend, and before she came up I hadn’t drank in over a year. Alcohol is not my friend, and it’s not a welcome houseguest.
I used to drink when I thought I was cis, because taking a pull from a bottle of vodka (the heavy-hitters always drink vodka, said Roger Ebert) and getting that warm, fuzzy feeling was so much nicer than the one I had every day of not recognizing my reflection. Or of wanting to be a writer, but only being able to write when I wore a dress and stockings and rolled up a t-shirt and gave myself boobs.
When I read about people like Reimer or Tiana, and the way they drown themselves in booze, I think about myself, and the way I’ve lucked out in some senses, and gotten a bum deal in others. I’ve been lucky: I was able to realize alcohol was bad for me without an intervention. But the way Plett’s characters struggle with addiction, shared trauma and just generally getting through life.
That resonates with me, and that’s what I keep thinking about when I put A Dream of a Woman back on my nightstand. These are people, doing the best they can in far-from-ideal circumstances. And, for me, their humanity, the compassion Plett has for her characters and the way they seem fully-formed in only a few pages. That’s what’s making this book seem like a knockout.