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Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a magical mystery tour to find the source of these surreal missives. Misadventures abound: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a sixties femmebot; she writes a Juggalo Ghostbusters prequel and a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of a quiz show. Or is it vice versa? As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colors.
With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.
With more dick jokes than a transsexual should be able to pull off, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.
284 pages, Paperback
First published February 8, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 104 reviews
January 25, 2022
come for the blissfully brash exploration of transness, stay for the QI porn parody.
March 13, 2024
برای اینکه دستتان بیاید ایدئولوژی ترنس تا چه اندازه زنستیز است، نگاهی بیندازید به این کتاب مشمئزکننده. اگر برتری مردان در دنیای امروز مصداقی داشته باشد، همین است که مردی کتابی سیاه کند در وصف آلت جنسیاش (کوچک یا سفت شدنش، نعوظ کردنش)، بیضههایش یا انزالش* و در همانحال حق مسلم خود بداند که دیگران "خانم" خطابش کنند. عباراتی که نویسنده، با ذهنیت پرنوگرافیکش، در شرح بدن و روان زنانه بهکار میبرد، بهقدری تحقیرکننده و شرمآورند که روی تمام زنستیزان تاریخ را سفید میکنند. نویسنده حسابی از خجالت زنانی که جرات کردهاند دربرابر ایدئولوژی ترنس بایستند هم درمیآید. در ضمن این موجود جهشیافته استاد دانشگاه کالیفرنیا در برکلی است (درست حدس زدید، استاد مطالعات جنسیت و مطالعات فمینیستی ترنس) و فکر میکنید اگر یکی از دانشجویان یا همکارانش هویت خودخواندهی "زنانه"ی او را نپذیرد، چه در انتظارش خواهد بود؟
اینها را کاملا جدی دارم میگویم. قصدم شوخی یا طعنه نیست. عنوان فرعی کتاب گویای مطلب است*
January 26, 2022
WOW. This was... something else entirely and goes without saying obviously that it could only have been written by an academic. I rarely get a chance to read something quite so demanding, a book that warrants one's full attention, that is not interested in making the reading experience easy or linear and (queer) realities digestible or simple, not looking to pay fealty to or live by the strictures of a status quo, to stay enclosed within the hastily drawn lines of genres, to play at an affected coyness and withhold any detail.
Lavery's memoir mixes memoir with autofiction with literary and cultural criticism. It has parody and satire, pastiche and comedy. It imagines, it reimagines, probing "the difference between a material body and the body as it is fantasized into existence, formalized and mythologized", a trans memoir that aspires to much more, a vehicle to explore the multi-faceted nature of transness: from the pornographies in Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop) to genital imagery in Wilde (Salome) to trans femme revolution in Mars Attacks!
The book has missives from a clown adversary, sections written as a play, almost skits with Grace cast as herself, interesting placement of text, and use of different fonts. It is meta and tears the fourth wall, going from conversational to academese. Its most alluring aspect is how irreverently hilarious it can be, nothing too pure or sacred to be untouched (mediated by sound advice from her lawyer of course). It can be frustrating and delightful both, and it has sections that are abstruse. Still, oh so brilliant.
(I received a proof copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
Lavery's memoir mixes memoir with autofiction with literary and cultural criticism. It has parody and satire, pastiche and comedy. It imagines, it reimagines, probing "the difference between a material body and the body as it is fantasized into existence, formalized and mythologized", a trans memoir that aspires to much more, a vehicle to explore the multi-faceted nature of transness: from the pornographies in Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop) to genital imagery in Wilde (Salome) to trans femme revolution in Mars Attacks!
The book has missives from a clown adversary, sections written as a play, almost skits with Grace cast as herself, interesting placement of text, and use of different fonts. It is meta and tears the fourth wall, going from conversational to academese. Its most alluring aspect is how irreverently hilarious it can be, nothing too pure or sacred to be untouched (mediated by sound advice from her lawyer of course). It can be frustrating and delightful both, and it has sections that are abstruse. Still, oh so brilliant.
(I received a proof copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
March 7, 2022
While it is clear that Grace Lavery is an articulate, well-read academic, the author's preponderance for priapic proclivities in this stream of consciousness memoir quickly grows tiresome. Admittedly, there are a few chuckles from literary references that span "Jude the Obscure" to "Mars Attacks", but the overall effect is as much fun as humoring a preschooler's poo-poo joke heard for the hundredth time.
March 18, 2022
At first, when I discovered GRACE LAVERY'S PLEASE MISS! A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGER PENIS i found myself blindsided, unsettled, squicked out, yet incongruous titillated. It seemed mostly about her Penis, it's shape, reliability, erraticness, undissassiate ability, parties it goes to and movies it likes. I skipped ahead a few pages and it was all like that! My insides twisted like I was in that dream where you're in school again and your school is in BERKLEY CALIFORNIA and you're taking Post Transgender semantics in Trans Human Sexual Discourse and Post Modern Media 421.
Then Suddenly my hot 27 year old roommate burst into the room! "I just got 'SIR'ed aggressively by some teenagers! Should we go fight teenagers ?" and then she saw what I was reading. She picked it up and leafed it open to the BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES AND INDEX SECTION. "Gawd, what is this? She's citing Judith Butler, Conrad Black, Dr Who (F), and Oscar Wilde? This is a lot of Oscar Wilde! Is this some book of Philosophical… Penises? Is this real?"
That's nothing! Once you slog through her getting topped in to disassociate reintegrating her own ass She destructs Austin powers into a performative nightmare of maleness, The kind of which that only american anglophiles might concoct, to be the male object counterbalance to the femmebot. The Femme-bot trope is perfected by 1990s movie MARS ATTACKS defining her as a [artificial, ultrafemme, antagonist} who is undoubtedly up to something. Then it turns into erotic fanfic of the front bench of the tony blair and the new labourites and the school boys who love them who you might blow at a party? Coming home from the gender wars we'll have become addicted to scarcity and unable to function in times of plentitude. Then Susan Stryker appears and takes her hand and takes her to the 1930s were transvestites were rounded up in raids of speakeasies and then made in to an elite undercover special forces of spies who later m*nipulated WWII. Her phys ed teacher Dismisses the notion of fantasizing about transing gender, blurting, It's normal to have all kinds of fantasies. There are bullet point lists of semantic semiotix about if trans is more real or valid than lint or the insurrection or luddite, the desire to be a hermaphroditic conch of the briny deep or Frankenstein's monster, putting women in quotation marks of recalculating trans algorithms to accommodate occasion gender euphoria! Then she grabs Cummy Simon's dick through his jeans until he thinks he's a main character with an author's omnipotent view of his thoughts or something. The only reason there are hardly any Freud jokes is cuz Freud got everything he knew about transgenderism from Charles Dickens! Oscar Wilde may have laughed when Little Nell died of consumption but her dream's question of personhood vs wax-personhood create the conditions of possibility for its own interpretation. The intersectionality of PornClowns and Edward Penishands and Trans women with Penis Problems. Porn clowns gather around her and bombard her with childhood memories and wish ill of the Queen.
Guilt, anxiety, perversion and cackling mirth can only be aussaged by devouring analogies gluttonously like the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD zombies who fiend for brains to however briefly mute the pain of being dead. Zombies fiend for the ioniC salts in spinal cerebral fluid and keep on moving because of 2-4-5 Trioxin reactivates their nervous systems with some kind of not yet understood ionic salt osmostse. Trans women are obsessed with Pickles; there are no coincidences and Lavery has itemised hundreds of them.
STAGGERING PENIS attempts to corral and make sense of every conflicting 2021 theory of transness pitting them against each other to divine their complete sum and describe the universal being of trans. Before you're anywhere near chapter 2 the grand unified theory explodes throwing us both through a black hole in to an Indiana Jones like temple of snakes and all the snakes are eating their own tails and respawning until one can only go mad or masterbate.
Then Suddenly my hot 27 year old roommate burst into the room! "I just got 'SIR'ed aggressively by some teenagers! Should we go fight teenagers ?" and then she saw what I was reading. She picked it up and leafed it open to the BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES AND INDEX SECTION. "Gawd, what is this? She's citing Judith Butler, Conrad Black, Dr Who (F), and Oscar Wilde? This is a lot of Oscar Wilde! Is this some book of Philosophical… Penises? Is this real?"
That's nothing! Once you slog through her getting topped in to disassociate reintegrating her own ass She destructs Austin powers into a performative nightmare of maleness, The kind of which that only american anglophiles might concoct, to be the male object counterbalance to the femmebot. The Femme-bot trope is perfected by 1990s movie MARS ATTACKS defining her as a [artificial, ultrafemme, antagonist} who is undoubtedly up to something. Then it turns into erotic fanfic of the front bench of the tony blair and the new labourites and the school boys who love them who you might blow at a party? Coming home from the gender wars we'll have become addicted to scarcity and unable to function in times of plentitude. Then Susan Stryker appears and takes her hand and takes her to the 1930s were transvestites were rounded up in raids of speakeasies and then made in to an elite undercover special forces of spies who later m*nipulated WWII. Her phys ed teacher Dismisses the notion of fantasizing about transing gender, blurting, It's normal to have all kinds of fantasies. There are bullet point lists of semantic semiotix about if trans is more real or valid than lint or the insurrection or luddite, the desire to be a hermaphroditic conch of the briny deep or Frankenstein's monster, putting women in quotation marks of recalculating trans algorithms to accommodate occasion gender euphoria! Then she grabs Cummy Simon's dick through his jeans until he thinks he's a main character with an author's omnipotent view of his thoughts or something. The only reason there are hardly any Freud jokes is cuz Freud got everything he knew about transgenderism from Charles Dickens! Oscar Wilde may have laughed when Little Nell died of consumption but her dream's question of personhood vs wax-personhood create the conditions of possibility for its own interpretation. The intersectionality of PornClowns and Edward Penishands and Trans women with Penis Problems. Porn clowns gather around her and bombard her with childhood memories and wish ill of the Queen.
Guilt, anxiety, perversion and cackling mirth can only be aussaged by devouring analogies gluttonously like the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD zombies who fiend for brains to however briefly mute the pain of being dead. Zombies fiend for the ioniC salts in spinal cerebral fluid and keep on moving because of 2-4-5 Trioxin reactivates their nervous systems with some kind of not yet understood ionic salt osmostse. Trans women are obsessed with Pickles; there are no coincidences and Lavery has itemised hundreds of them.
STAGGERING PENIS attempts to corral and make sense of every conflicting 2021 theory of transness pitting them against each other to divine their complete sum and describe the universal being of trans. Before you're anywhere near chapter 2 the grand unified theory explodes throwing us both through a black hole in to an Indiana Jones like temple of snakes and all the snakes are eating their own tails and respawning until one can only go mad or masterbate.
February 28, 2022
2/25/2022 Full review tk at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.
2/28/2022 Well, that was certainly... something.
In all frankness, it felt very much like reading the screed of a 1980s British academic, who is quite erudite but also monomaniacal about a particular subject, in this case popular culture of primarily English extraction. Whether we're reinterpreting Dickens through the (honestly valid) lens of pornography or skewering various obscure late 20th century BBC comedians, there is a lot to elicit the polite smile that betrays only the vaguest comprehension of what the writer is going on about. No wonder the book leads with chatter of Juggalos, the Little Shop Of Horrors and Mars Attacks before swerving hard into semi-famous Brits by way of Austin Powers: get the more recognizable bits out of the way first so that anyone who's gotten this far is willing to just shrug and turn the pages for the sake of completion, no matter the perishingly narrow appeal of the subject matter near the end.
If I sound somewhat harsh, it's likely because I still don't understand the clown subplot, despite the chapter heading that promised to explain everything. Even more annoyingly, I was getting a distinctly Martin Amis vibe from the entire exercise, and if that's your thing, then please, enjoy. It is not, alas, mine.
Which isn't to say that Please Miss is without its merits. Grace E Lavery's creative autobiography is absorbing, and often surprisingly empathetic. Her struggles as a trans woman coming to terms with her body and what it means to renounce her penis are gripping when presented frankly, as is her continuing engagement with her sexuality. I was less convinced by her attempts to psychoanalyze her upbringing and the people who raised her: there was something oddly glib about the presentation that was at odds with the openly messy expose of everything else about her life. And oh, the palpable desire to impress the reader was just... unnecessary. We get that you're smart, Dr Lavery. But I would much rather hear about what you feel about your personal life journey than I would your learned dissection of The Old Curiosity Shop as Victorian porn, with a side trip through Edward Penishands.
Yeah, I value sincerity over intellectual razzle-dazzle, in large part due to the fact that something truly thoughtful doesn't need all that shyster-adjacent frippery. There's definitely value in this exercise tho, even if parts of it made for slow or even painful going. I guess I'm not a fan of the kind of fabulism that was liberally applied here, which felt a bit like an easy dodge when wanting to vent spleen or avoid acknowledging things best taken to therapy. The honest accounting bits were nice, tho.
Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace E. Lavery was published February 8 2022 by Seal Press and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!
2/28/2022 Well, that was certainly... something.
In all frankness, it felt very much like reading the screed of a 1980s British academic, who is quite erudite but also monomaniacal about a particular subject, in this case popular culture of primarily English extraction. Whether we're reinterpreting Dickens through the (honestly valid) lens of pornography or skewering various obscure late 20th century BBC comedians, there is a lot to elicit the polite smile that betrays only the vaguest comprehension of what the writer is going on about. No wonder the book leads with chatter of Juggalos, the Little Shop Of Horrors and Mars Attacks before swerving hard into semi-famous Brits by way of Austin Powers: get the more recognizable bits out of the way first so that anyone who's gotten this far is willing to just shrug and turn the pages for the sake of completion, no matter the perishingly narrow appeal of the subject matter near the end.
If I sound somewhat harsh, it's likely because I still don't understand the clown subplot, despite the chapter heading that promised to explain everything. Even more annoyingly, I was getting a distinctly Martin Amis vibe from the entire exercise, and if that's your thing, then please, enjoy. It is not, alas, mine.
Which isn't to say that Please Miss is without its merits. Grace E Lavery's creative autobiography is absorbing, and often surprisingly empathetic. Her struggles as a trans woman coming to terms with her body and what it means to renounce her penis are gripping when presented frankly, as is her continuing engagement with her sexuality. I was less convinced by her attempts to psychoanalyze her upbringing and the people who raised her: there was something oddly glib about the presentation that was at odds with the openly messy expose of everything else about her life. And oh, the palpable desire to impress the reader was just... unnecessary. We get that you're smart, Dr Lavery. But I would much rather hear about what you feel about your personal life journey than I would your learned dissection of The Old Curiosity Shop as Victorian porn, with a side trip through Edward Penishands.
Yeah, I value sincerity over intellectual razzle-dazzle, in large part due to the fact that something truly thoughtful doesn't need all that shyster-adjacent frippery. There's definitely value in this exercise tho, even if parts of it made for slow or even painful going. I guess I'm not a fan of the kind of fabulism that was liberally applied here, which felt a bit like an easy dodge when wanting to vent spleen or avoid acknowledging things best taken to therapy. The honest accounting bits were nice, tho.
Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace E. Lavery was published February 8 2022 by Seal Press and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!
July 20, 2025
If you’ve always wanted to read a book that refers to sperm as “c0ck porridge”, this is for you! I so badly wanted to like this but I just didn‘t. It was by no means all bad, but stream of consciousness paired with being so overtly academic made me dread reading it. That kind of writing style is just not for me (except for you, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, love u). I enjoyed the fourth chapter, it was the only one I understood tbh. I definitely gained some new insight into life as a trans woman & her life in general- but given that it was supposed to be a memoir, all the academic talk about Renaissance porn & Charles Dickens‘ works wore me out. It went on for so long & lost me in the process. While I don‘t doubt that Lavery can probably write wonderfully & I appreciated how raw of an insight it was, it just didn‘t feel accessible to me at all. I had actually started reading it multiple times since buying it three years ago & always put it down because it was exhausting. Now I listened to the audiobook but somehow the first third still flew over my head completely. It was definitely very niche, with lots of references to both academic research & very specific pop culture. Maybe it‘s me.
March 21, 2023
If you, like me, are married to a trans woman who’s prone to being occasionally a kind of chaotic gremlin shitposter, then you will really enjoy this book because you will find her tendencies reflected in the prose of this book, and you will find it really endearing.
If you are not me (or yourself a trans shitposter) I don’t think I can in good conscience recommend this over the top, self consciously intellectual, crass, navel gazey pastiche of traditional reflections on transition and of academia broadly.
Still, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Five stars.
If you are not me (or yourself a trans shitposter) I don’t think I can in good conscience recommend this over the top, self consciously intellectual, crass, navel gazey pastiche of traditional reflections on transition and of academia broadly.
Still, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Five stars.
February 11, 2022
It! is! about!:
What we expect a body part to represent or communicate (obscenity, eros, grossness) contrasted with that body part's material reality (softer, smaller, therefore "disappointing" our expectation for it).
and:
Whether the body part's meaning and/or materiality is context-dependent. You may have legs, but when do you have a lap?
Yes, this is about a trans woman's attitude toward her penis. "Penis" is in the book's subtitle, so do not claim to be surprised. Be mad about it if you must, but also buy the book.
It is about things a person tells themselves when they are trying to argue themselves out of being trans. Newbie trans person says to their nervous tranself: Everyone feels this way (no they don't); your society's sexism is what makes you feel this way (maybe, maybe not); if you acknowledge, modify, or shape the way you are sexed/gendered by either conforming-or-not-conforming to expectations, specifically by calling yourself trans rather than cis while you do your gender management, you are contributing to the world's sexism and oppressing others (nope nope nopeity nope); it's better to keep transition as a philosophical thought experiment or a private fantasy (but why?); there is nothing really to be known or to get out of life, so why bother asserting any truth, wanting any outcome, pursuing any goal, by which the adversary means rather more narrowly, why be trans rather than cis; actually transitioning is somehow extreme; you mustn't touch any of the transition control panel buttons unless you are already convinced you will die if you don't; ultimately sex/gender isn't erasable and thus cis-ness isn't undoable, so don't bother; isn't transness just a metaphor for something else? (I mean, maybe being trans is a metaphor for being cis. Has anyone ever given a fair shake to the theory that just maybe everything is about cis people? Hmm?)
"Important ideas," Lavery says of this Listicle of Self-Doubt, which I have roughly adapted to express in my own voice, "and worth grappling with. But I regret having spent so much time with them." THANK YOU
Some cis people who'd like to style themselves as progressives (at least in other respects) say that trans people epitomize the error of "buying into commercial solutions to structural problems, buying and mutilating ourselves out of suffering that we should be forced to endure." Am hearing this feedback and am responding, like, have they never in their life spent a coin to solve a problem. Like if their finger were cut they would be buying a band-aid, yeah? RIGHT-O And if the problem were structural, they might try to overthrow the whole political system in an anarchist revolution, but meanwhile they would be trying to survive within the system so they would be alive to go to the anarchist basement meeting next Tuesday night. They would.
Some of us want to be the opposite sex, and, as Lavery puts it, "you don’t have to believe that 'the opposite sex' is a defensible phrase, in any sense, to experience that desire." The linguistic distinction between binary and nonbinary gender is itself a false binary (I am editorializing a bit) in part because "people who transition in non-binary directions often, although not always, embark from desires very similar to those who transition within the binary." Also, if you don't think being trans is a real thing, or that it is not a thing that you might hypothetically be able to do (if your circumstances allowed and if you resolved to do it) — I mean, if you don't recognize it as a real life trajectory that moves beyond the conceptual — just look at a trans person: "some people really do transition, and just live lives that are profoundly different from those they had before." But isn't "trans" better as a concept? Isn't it better just to sit and think about it? Not really, sorry! The realness of trans life makes the "theoretical" aspects of trans-ness "more interesting," not less interesting. Thanks for playing, though! (said in the general direction of the devil's advocate)
Also, trans people are natural. When we talk about "a toxic stereotype" of gender, this "activates a rhetorical register of plastics, industrial run-off, premature or ungodly creation," but we all live in "a world made livable through plastics, bleaches, Pine-Sol," so why is the metaphorical weight of eco-cide being dumped on the trans person, eh?
Also, trans feelings come from psychically deep places that are somewhere-and-not-nowhere, just like any other meaningful human feeling.
Also, we are allowed to want things beyond what we tell ourselves we deserve and that seem just at the edge of possibility, and we are allowed to be thrilled when we finally have them.
Also, we are allowed to feel disappointed after we work very hard to reach a goal and when, sure, we always knew it'd be a see-saw trade-off and yet still it's a little underwhelming when the see-saw descends sharply and we bump our ass in the sandbox and just please let us have that melancholy moment too, our "aw shucks, this sucks" does not invalidate our entire gender, really.
Also, plenty of cis people grok other people's gender transitions and aren't phased by it, something perhaps worth mentioning considering the extent to which cis people's perceptions and validations might matter to the trans person, even if that extent is, you know, [::whispering::] finite. (do not let the cis people know about this finitude) (most explosive transqueer secret ever)
Also, "trans life is wild and joyous and sometimes you just cry at a friend at the surprising possibility of it all."
Anyway, you might not get to choose to be trans. As Dr. Lavery wrote: "when people ask me how I chose my name, I respond, 'grace is the thing you don’t choose.'"
(There are many things I wish to make of her observations and arguments, using keyboard characters more numerous than I can type in this box, for future purposes of my own that shall be more elevated than a Goodreads review, and it will be worth the wait, promise.)
I would buy this book a birthday cake, but since books don't eat cake, I would just buy the book itself.
Yes I like the blend of memoir and theory. No there's not a bookstore shelf for it. Yes a writer is allowed to do it anyway. Yes to grasp some parts it is helpful for a reader to have a literature-degree-or-equivalent (like, having spent many evenings in sweet-and-sour angst about the hidden meaning of a film everyone else thinks they understand but doesn't, and understanding why this is deadly serious business, and if you don't know what I'm talking about then we are different genders). Yes I like that she wrote "penis" in her subtitle. I would not have had the balls. No that's not a license for you to go around saying "penis" to every trans woman in your line of sight. Yes "go around saying" is a Briticism, not an Americanism, which I learned from this book. (Speaking of binaries.) Yes trans and nonbinary people are valid, whatever the fuck "valid" even means, jfc.
She also raises the question of how you can want to be something that you already are. Doesn't your claim to want it undercut your claim to be it? (Especially if you're trans, of course!) No, it doesn't. (This is one of the topics I will be publishing on separately.) For now, a quick illustrative example, coming in at an angle: I would like Goodreads to offer contributors a way to turn off the "comment" function (though sadly it does not), and specifically I would like this review not to have the comment function. Comments are turned off.*
*For clarity, mutatis mutandis for all previously mentioned arguments that only applied to trans people:** Comments are turned off if you are cis.
**If we are cis and do not, on that basis, appreciate being socially excluded nor accept being ontologically excised from the imagined Platonic form of the Goodreads comment feature, what did we just learn about rhapsodizing about the way we want the world to be and recommending our behavioral constraints only for trans people?
What we expect a body part to represent or communicate (obscenity, eros, grossness) contrasted with that body part's material reality (softer, smaller, therefore "disappointing" our expectation for it).
and:
Whether the body part's meaning and/or materiality is context-dependent. You may have legs, but when do you have a lap?
Yes, this is about a trans woman's attitude toward her penis. "Penis" is in the book's subtitle, so do not claim to be surprised. Be mad about it if you must, but also buy the book.
It is about things a person tells themselves when they are trying to argue themselves out of being trans. Newbie trans person says to their nervous tranself: Everyone feels this way (no they don't); your society's sexism is what makes you feel this way (maybe, maybe not); if you acknowledge, modify, or shape the way you are sexed/gendered by either conforming-or-not-conforming to expectations, specifically by calling yourself trans rather than cis while you do your gender management, you are contributing to the world's sexism and oppressing others (nope nope nopeity nope); it's better to keep transition as a philosophical thought experiment or a private fantasy (but why?); there is nothing really to be known or to get out of life, so why bother asserting any truth, wanting any outcome, pursuing any goal, by which the adversary means rather more narrowly, why be trans rather than cis; actually transitioning is somehow extreme; you mustn't touch any of the transition control panel buttons unless you are already convinced you will die if you don't; ultimately sex/gender isn't erasable and thus cis-ness isn't undoable, so don't bother; isn't transness just a metaphor for something else? (I mean, maybe being trans is a metaphor for being cis. Has anyone ever given a fair shake to the theory that just maybe everything is about cis people? Hmm?)
"Important ideas," Lavery says of this Listicle of Self-Doubt, which I have roughly adapted to express in my own voice, "and worth grappling with. But I regret having spent so much time with them." THANK YOU
Some cis people who'd like to style themselves as progressives (at least in other respects) say that trans people epitomize the error of "buying into commercial solutions to structural problems, buying and mutilating ourselves out of suffering that we should be forced to endure." Am hearing this feedback and am responding, like, have they never in their life spent a coin to solve a problem. Like if their finger were cut they would be buying a band-aid, yeah? RIGHT-O And if the problem were structural, they might try to overthrow the whole political system in an anarchist revolution, but meanwhile they would be trying to survive within the system so they would be alive to go to the anarchist basement meeting next Tuesday night. They would.
Some of us want to be the opposite sex, and, as Lavery puts it, "you don’t have to believe that 'the opposite sex' is a defensible phrase, in any sense, to experience that desire." The linguistic distinction between binary and nonbinary gender is itself a false binary (I am editorializing a bit) in part because "people who transition in non-binary directions often, although not always, embark from desires very similar to those who transition within the binary." Also, if you don't think being trans is a real thing, or that it is not a thing that you might hypothetically be able to do (if your circumstances allowed and if you resolved to do it) — I mean, if you don't recognize it as a real life trajectory that moves beyond the conceptual — just look at a trans person: "some people really do transition, and just live lives that are profoundly different from those they had before." But isn't "trans" better as a concept? Isn't it better just to sit and think about it? Not really, sorry! The realness of trans life makes the "theoretical" aspects of trans-ness "more interesting," not less interesting. Thanks for playing, though! (said in the general direction of the devil's advocate)
Also, trans people are natural. When we talk about "a toxic stereotype" of gender, this "activates a rhetorical register of plastics, industrial run-off, premature or ungodly creation," but we all live in "a world made livable through plastics, bleaches, Pine-Sol," so why is the metaphorical weight of eco-cide being dumped on the trans person, eh?
Also, trans feelings come from psychically deep places that are somewhere-and-not-nowhere, just like any other meaningful human feeling.
Also, we are allowed to want things beyond what we tell ourselves we deserve and that seem just at the edge of possibility, and we are allowed to be thrilled when we finally have them.
Also, we are allowed to feel disappointed after we work very hard to reach a goal and when, sure, we always knew it'd be a see-saw trade-off and yet still it's a little underwhelming when the see-saw descends sharply and we bump our ass in the sandbox and just please let us have that melancholy moment too, our "aw shucks, this sucks" does not invalidate our entire gender, really.
Also, plenty of cis people grok other people's gender transitions and aren't phased by it, something perhaps worth mentioning considering the extent to which cis people's perceptions and validations might matter to the trans person, even if that extent is, you know, [::whispering::] finite. (do not let the cis people know about this finitude) (most explosive transqueer secret ever)
Also, "trans life is wild and joyous and sometimes you just cry at a friend at the surprising possibility of it all."
Anyway, you might not get to choose to be trans. As Dr. Lavery wrote: "when people ask me how I chose my name, I respond, 'grace is the thing you don’t choose.'"
(There are many things I wish to make of her observations and arguments, using keyboard characters more numerous than I can type in this box, for future purposes of my own that shall be more elevated than a Goodreads review, and it will be worth the wait, promise.)
I would buy this book a birthday cake, but since books don't eat cake, I would just buy the book itself.
Yes I like the blend of memoir and theory. No there's not a bookstore shelf for it. Yes a writer is allowed to do it anyway. Yes to grasp some parts it is helpful for a reader to have a literature-degree-or-equivalent (like, having spent many evenings in sweet-and-sour angst about the hidden meaning of a film everyone else thinks they understand but doesn't, and understanding why this is deadly serious business, and if you don't know what I'm talking about then we are different genders). Yes I like that she wrote "penis" in her subtitle. I would not have had the balls. No that's not a license for you to go around saying "penis" to every trans woman in your line of sight. Yes "go around saying" is a Briticism, not an Americanism, which I learned from this book. (Speaking of binaries.) Yes trans and nonbinary people are valid, whatever the fuck "valid" even means, jfc.
She also raises the question of how you can want to be something that you already are. Doesn't your claim to want it undercut your claim to be it? (Especially if you're trans, of course!) No, it doesn't. (This is one of the topics I will be publishing on separately.) For now, a quick illustrative example, coming in at an angle: I would like Goodreads to offer contributors a way to turn off the "comment" function (though sadly it does not), and specifically I would like this review not to have the comment function. Comments are turned off.*
*For clarity, mutatis mutandis for all previously mentioned arguments that only applied to trans people:** Comments are turned off if you are cis.
**If we are cis and do not, on that basis, appreciate being socially excluded nor accept being ontologically excised from the imagined Platonic form of the Goodreads comment feature, what did we just learn about rhapsodizing about the way we want the world to be and recommending our behavioral constraints only for trans people?
March 2, 2023
A fun time, loved the dual audio narration, the exploration of t4t love, sobriety, and femininity.
January 16, 2022
3 stars
A sometimes delightful, sometimes baffling, yet almost always entertaining ride. It is memoir, literary criticism, parody, & wit. And probably other things I didn’t quite comprehend. I’m not sure this will appeal to all readers, but I picked it up since I follow Grace Lavery on Twitter & enjoy her thoughts there, & I continued to enjoy them in this book.
[What I liked:]
•This book is funny! Sometimes in an absurd way, sometimes in an observationally witty way, & sometimes it’s just plain fun!
•I enjoyed the passages of literary criticism and pop culture commentary that featured largely, particularly the bits about The Old Curiosity Shop & Little Shop Of Horrors. Not necessarily what I was expecting in a memoir, but I enjoyed it.
•There is an ongoing mystery of the clown letters, which does get explained in the final chapter. It created some nice suspense.
•This book has a lot of personality & a lot of heart. There are some sweet & touching moments in among all the fun & brilliance.
[What I didn’t like as much:]
•There are several passages in this book that I don’t understand. Which is mainly a me problem, but also at times I got very lost in what was happening & the text wasn’t very forgiving in helping me re-orient.
CW: homophobia & transphobia, sexual assault, substance abuse, misogyny
[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]
A sometimes delightful, sometimes baffling, yet almost always entertaining ride. It is memoir, literary criticism, parody, & wit. And probably other things I didn’t quite comprehend. I’m not sure this will appeal to all readers, but I picked it up since I follow Grace Lavery on Twitter & enjoy her thoughts there, & I continued to enjoy them in this book.
[What I liked:]
•This book is funny! Sometimes in an absurd way, sometimes in an observationally witty way, & sometimes it’s just plain fun!
•I enjoyed the passages of literary criticism and pop culture commentary that featured largely, particularly the bits about The Old Curiosity Shop & Little Shop Of Horrors. Not necessarily what I was expecting in a memoir, but I enjoyed it.
•There is an ongoing mystery of the clown letters, which does get explained in the final chapter. It created some nice suspense.
•This book has a lot of personality & a lot of heart. There are some sweet & touching moments in among all the fun & brilliance.
[What I didn’t like as much:]
•There are several passages in this book that I don’t understand. Which is mainly a me problem, but also at times I got very lost in what was happening & the text wasn’t very forgiving in helping me re-orient.
CW: homophobia & transphobia, sexual assault, substance abuse, misogyny
[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]
May 30, 2022
Really good I think? Wasn’t prepared for the amount of textual/critical readings within this & got a bit lost in the English lit sections. & struggled w the twee affectations and caricatures - reminded me of the desperately comedic tone of contrapoints, which feels a bit trite & forced now. but in general: really wonderful & candid & young! The play between fiction/memoir was novel & fitted the subject matter perfectly. Enjoyed the pockets of self awareness, the references to the imperfect history of trans storytelling. I think there’s definitely more to this book than I found @ first read.. will have to return when I’m less smooth brained.
April 25, 2022
Male privilege at its finest.
November 2, 2022
El primer capítulo es increíble lo mejor que he leído en centurios.
Es cierto que algunas partes me ha costado de leer, i didnt capiscio...
Per definitivamente rompedora miss lavery en la forma y en el contenido.
Al final del libro hay una playlist, me dirijo a spotify a crearla. Mi salto a la fama ESPERO.
Es cierto que algunas partes me ha costado de leer, i didnt capiscio...
Per definitivamente rompedora miss lavery en la forma y en el contenido.
Al final del libro hay una playlist, me dirijo a spotify a crearla. Mi salto a la fama ESPERO.
June 9, 2022
Lavery has a lovely way of writing in very funny circles around the thing she’s getting at, coming up with fun diversions and going off on little tangents that anyone who has ever neurotically attempted to suppress a thought or feeling and then attempts to communicate it will entirely understand. Such diversions include clowns, analysis of great works of pornography and literature, the Batman/Star Wars dichotomy, etc, and by the end, like most discussions with the sort of friend who has these sorts of tendencies, you understand what she’s getting at, and love her all the more for all the pleasant little flights of fancy and intellectual day trips, which really do add nuance to the situation and are rather fun to read, although perhaps of secondary importance to the point, which is maybe simply this, that intimacy is hard, especially when something intrinsic to your being has inspired hate or anger in others, although perhaps I’m misreading the good doctor, and the point is still eluding me yet.
April 5, 2022
Thanks to Hachette Audio for sending me an audiobook copy in exchange for an honest review.
1,5 stars.
Full review on my blog.
I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately I didn't.
1,5 stars.
Full review on my blog.
I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately I didn't.
didn-t-finish
March 13, 2022Not for me. This should have tipped me off: Grace E. Lavery is assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Program in Critical Theory ... at the University of California, Berkeley
I'm pretty much allergic to "Critical Theory".
I'm pretty much allergic to "Critical Theory".
Read
February 10, 2022GRACE LAVERY’S BOOK SOUNDS INSUFFERABLE.
April 18, 2022
Read chapter 1. did not finish the book. It was a piece of trash.
May 3, 2022
I understood maybe 25% of this.
tried-sample-didn-t-like
March 7, 2022Not for me!
June 16, 2023
Unreadable. Too niche for me.
August 16, 2022
I tried hard to like this book but was ultimately defeated by Lavery's tangential narrative style and relentlessly demanding literary and cultural references. This made for an exhausting read which is a shame, as parts shine with what feel like honest and important truths. Unfortunately, I had to kiss too many frogs to find them.
August 26, 2022
Absolutely not what I was expecting when I first began reading, but in the best possible way. Touching, irreverent; flitting from comedy which had me audibly guffawing, to dense academic review, often within the space of a couple of pages. Honestly unlike anything I’ve read in ages. I recommend it, not least because I need to discuss this with other people to truly decipher all of its meaning.
April 3, 2022
Took a bit to get into this , cannot really compare it to anything I’ve read before, but I found that I couldn’t put it down , thank you for your voice Grace Lavery.
April 1, 2025
this book should have been a DNF but mama didn’t raise no bitch so i finished. i spent 80% of this book confused. if you want to read a book composed almost entirely of tangents, this one is for you.
i could not tell you the purpose of this book. i thought it was going to be a memoir with a touch of queer theory and i don’t even know if i’d call it a memoir… what the hell was up with all the clowns? it feel like a poor and disjointed attempt at like shocking the reader with crude jokes and sexuality? also, the portion of the book taking place in the doctor’s office where Grace was talking to the doctor and acted like a petulant child in response to the doc asking about sperm banking and asking “oh have you banked your vaginal discharge??” like babe… grow up? also, vaginal discharge isn’t the same as sperm?
i don’t know, the whole thing felt performative, jumbled, directionless, and just not well written? i hate to give a bad review to a, from what i can tell, well respected trans writer but yeah… this one wasn’t good. then again, perhaps i wasn’t the target audience, and that’s also okay.
i could not tell you the purpose of this book. i thought it was going to be a memoir with a touch of queer theory and i don’t even know if i’d call it a memoir… what the hell was up with all the clowns? it feel like a poor and disjointed attempt at like shocking the reader with crude jokes and sexuality? also, the portion of the book taking place in the doctor’s office where Grace was talking to the doctor and acted like a petulant child in response to the doc asking about sperm banking and asking “oh have you banked your vaginal discharge??” like babe… grow up? also, vaginal discharge isn’t the same as sperm?
i don’t know, the whole thing felt performative, jumbled, directionless, and just not well written? i hate to give a bad review to a, from what i can tell, well respected trans writer but yeah… this one wasn’t good. then again, perhaps i wasn’t the target audience, and that’s also okay.
May 22, 2025
The thing IS, I loved so many parts of this book. It’s playful and daring and funny and I can so see why Maggie Nelson gave it such rave reviews. It subverts any narrative expectation and Lavery is so incredibly intelligent and dazzling. That said, I found some parts so hard to digest. Towards the end I had to force myself through the Dickens porn critical thinking, and I lost steam a bit before this. I found myself relieved to get to the end of some sections, and immediately reached for an easier to read book when it was done.
But, that said, still amazed.
But, that said, still amazed.
August 24, 2024
- shocking in lots of fun & crass ways!
- intellectual / abstract /erotic / silly
- neat exploration of t4t love
- at moments I was a tad lost & others I was like dang okay this is so creative
- 3.5 stars!
- this will not be everyone’s cup of tea
- intellectual / abstract /erotic / silly
- neat exploration of t4t love
- at moments I was a tad lost & others I was like dang okay this is so creative
- 3.5 stars!
- this will not be everyone’s cup of tea
March 4, 2023
DNFed at half way through. I couldn’t make sense of this book but it did have some beautifully written passages
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