It begins innocently enough. A young man furtively developing a hobby online. Experimenting with secret identities. Being drawn into a world of transformations and mind bending designed in the recesses of their imagination. But what begins in the shadows doesn’t stay there forever. A secret self yearns to escape.
So goes the very familiar arc of Harper O’Neill’s Repression Queen: A Memoir About Gender Transformation Erotica, a book whose title insisted I had to read it. I never would have expected to read a nonfiction book about a TG fiction writer. The hobby is, in the grand scheme of things, extremely niche, secretive, and above all else, not prone to self-examination. In my experience, a lot of people who read and write TG fiction don’t want to think too hard about why they read and write TG fiction, because then a lot of narratives they have built around themselves in the “real world” will come crashing down.
But people ultimately have to face the truth. And the truth is, a lot of lives have been changed — maybe even saved? — in this strange little hobby. (I sometimes wonder, how many eggs has my own writing helped crack?)
The book unspools in a double helix of narratives: in “the real world,” a young male-presenting person known to us only as “The Author,” who writes in the first person, develops a strange hobby in “his” spare time. First, he pretends to be a girl online, to gain attention and approval. Then he begins to write stories about boys being unwittingly transformed into girls and made to play that role. These stories are published under the name “Kayla,” a moniker that appears frequently among characters in the stories.
Meanwhile, in the other thread, we follow a bodiless spirit calling itself — herself — Kayla, as she builds an identity of her own, first by chatting with others on AOL and weaving a web of deception due to her non-existence, then by building an identity around composing stories for others to delight in. Kayla, to her readers, is sexy, fun, free and living the good life… but she only exists when the Author moves their fingers around a keyboard.
Before coming to maturity, the Author has to navigate a traumatic childhood and the lingering effects it leaves in them well into adulthood, even as outwardly they seem to put it all together, building a career and a marriage while maintaining this sensational secret life online. Things gradually build as they have to confront the fact that they seem to have developed a dependency, a seemingly un-nameable addiction to being online, being “Kayla,” writing these stories and retreating to a world of onanism, receding away from their partner and their resopnsibilities.
Perhaps, in the end, neither the Author nor Kayla can live, but somebody can.
The story is interspersed with snippets of “Kayla’s” writing, the stuff that earned her/The Author/Harper so much attention and ultimately is at the core of her crisis. A preamble assures us that we don’t have to read it if we don’t want to, but I don’t think you’re getting the whole story if you don’t at least sample it. The stories tend to focus on scenarios in which a boy “happens” to be turned into a girl, and then, whoops, their taste for masculinity — or their memory of it altogether — is undone.
The stories rely on a heavy dose of identity death, which is a divisive plot point in TG fiction. Some readers dislike it, feeling it’s impossible to get invested in a character arc that becomes irrelevant. Some find it titillating for the same reason a writer might, the subversion, lack of control and destruction of inhibitions. But there’s also a deeper implication here.
In an illuminating article last year on the Transfeminine Review, writer Bethany Karsten examined, along with every other major category on Fictionmania, the meaning behind Identity Death, and its significance to the trans experience. She linked the use of this trope to the “collective, generational memory of the father who says ‘I have no daughter.’ It’s losing a family, a home, safety, security. It’s losing your life. It’s dying and being born again.”
O’Neill echoes these sentiments late in the book when she is forced to look back at what she has written and what it says about who she really is, that she wants an easy way to die and be born again as the woman she is inside, leaving the body that has left her empty and the unfortunate life it has no way of appreciating. It’s moving, moving stuff.
The story is compellingly told and intimately personal. Harper is a talented writer with a breezy literary voice, belied by the provided examples of her writing. These stories undoubtedly thrilled hundreds or readers — probably more than I have with my writing (not that it’s a contest) — but for their own sake they aren’t my thing. What I like is the way they provide context for what we are reading about The Author and Kayla (and Harper,) as the novel finds ways to depict something that is simultaneously ephemeral, yet more real than life.
O’Neill is able to get to a lot of hard truths, and I admired her candor even as the narrative itself feels, by necessity, shrouded in secret. Even with everything being laid bare, there still seems to be a darkness surrounding the Author, and a difficult-to-articulate nature to the relationship between the not-quite-fictional Kayla and the not-quite-real Author. I would have loved to learn more of what became of them after that big climactic moment, but I realize that is not part of the story. The story as it exists in this book culminates in that moment, a creative choice that feels correct even if it left me curious who I’ve actually been reading about and wishing I could follow them further on their journey.
Introspection is not fun, or sexy. A lot of people who could use more of it prefer to eschew analysis and focus on the parts of the story that make them happy (or horny.) So a lot of people who would benefit from reading this book probably won’t. But there is a bountiful contingent in our little corner of the internet capable of conversing about themselves and about the stories we tell with intelligence and insight. Harper O’Neill is a shining light among them and has done a great thing in writing her memoir.
If you are reading this blog, I think you should check out this book.