WE BEAT THE NEWS MEGA
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Nevada's afterword, pt2
Aside from stuff I knew, like Binnie is friends with Sybil Lamb and Casey Plett, this afterword's look at Topside is cool and fascinating. I wasn't sure how close all the people at the label were, like if they were just associated or w/e but Binnie definitely knows who Ryka Aoki is, which is wild. Binnie asks the reader:
Yes, Imgoen Binnie, I know 6/7 of those names and have read 4/7. This is your fault inadvertently grrrrrrr The PRAISE FOR ORANGE BOOK segment is a Who's Who as well, Torrey Peters and Andrea Lawlor, also Rachel Pollack, how phenomenally rare. Very cool.
Binnie says she doesn't think Nevada is ground zero for trans literature but bitch, yes it fucking is. There are a few prior books like Luna or Being Emily, written usually by cis people trying to do the trans-memoir "you wouldnt be so mean if you saw all the pain I endured!" shtick, so fuck that. A couple of examples of the form also probably represent convergent evolution, like I've Got A Time Bomb by Sybil Lamb or Maxine Wore Black by Nora Olsen or indeed Otros Valles by Jamie Berrout. Nevada is where it fucking happened though, Nevada set the tone for like every subsequent piece of transfem fiction and probably some of the transmasc ones too? IMO every piece of trans fiction ever owes its existence to Orange Book Bad. I'm not even sorry.
I half expected to see Jamie Berrout mentioned in here though, where is she? Berrout continues to be the missing piece of the Topside story. Which fucking figures tbh.
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It's always wild when you learn how connected a lot of influential authors can be with each other. Or really any artists in general, it's how I keep perspective and remember that artistic expression isn't some purely personal thing but is also deeply collaborative and reliant on community at a fundamental level.
I'm not sure if I've seen so much influence from Nevada in the transmasc literature I've read. Like to take the example of Neon Yang's Tensorate series, the way they wrote their trans characters felt pretty fundamentally different compared to Nevada.
Honestly I could rant a little bit about how that series didn't include a single character even implied to be transfem despite having 4 novellas, like 5 trans characters, and a setting that is literally made to have gender being a role you pick as a central concept. But I won't because it was fine otherwise.spoiler
Oh yeah absolutely, the "EVERY TRANS NOVEL OWES ITSELF" is basically just cause Nevada is first. If you read a Little Blue Encyclopedia by Hazel Jane Plante, or Natalie Ironside's works, or Idk, Fluids by May Leitz? Lily Seabrooke novels? These are transfem fiction that don't really bear the title A Novel, and don't really relate to Nevada the way a Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt or a Little Fish by Casey Plett does. Which is nice, if everything was a Nevada life might be tough..
Hey look a Neon Yang reference =) Does this rule apply for transfem fiction too? Cause I can count the amount of transmasc guys in the books I've read on one hand, lmao
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Probably some of them.
I usually don't mind it when transmasc or fem fiction doesn't have any other sorts of trans character, just like I don't mind when feminist fiction focuses primarily on women. My issue with the tensorate books is that it isn't really marketed as a specifically transmasc series and so much of it is about how the setting's society interacts with gender and yet we never get an example of how that works in the other direction. There's plenty of exploration of transmasc and non-binary identities, even some detrans/repressor characters, but absolutely no transfem character. I didn't want it to be something major but there couldn't have at least been a single transfem minor character? Every single woman in the novellas is either all-but stated to be or heavily coded as cis.
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Ahhhhhh I see! That sounds really interesting and also really goddamn annoying =) very lame tbh. That does seem like a big weird hole to leave in your fictional world, huh...