Darryl: Gender and the binary 'trans novel'
Must we think of transition as a binary? Perhaps not.
I finished reading Jackie Ess’ wonderful debut novel Darryl this week, of which I wrote about in more detail on Goodreads a few days ago. It’s caused me to think a lot about the question of the “trans novel” and, more specifically, the narratives we tell ourselves as trans women about gender transitioning.
What follows are spoilers for the book as well as spoilers for Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. So if you’re one to be displeased with those, I suggest reading this post after you’ve finished both books (don’t worry, they’re equally short reads).
With that out of the way.
Darryl defies expectations. It’s something I admire greatly about Ess’ story, actually. The book follows Darryl Cook, a self-identified cuck who sees manhood as largely split between bulls and cucks—those who fuck other men’s wives, and those who enjoy the experience, respectively.
Darryl, who is quite new to the cuckolding “lifestyle,” starts out strongly believing in his role in the world as a cuck. Cucking is not a kink for him, but a philosophy, or maybe moreso an astrology. He is born subservient to the men who fuck his wife, and, as he so poetically opens the novel, lives “vicariously through the guys who fuck [his] wife.”
This may be so, but masculinity doesn’t quite click for Darryl, and it’s something he grapples with throughout the book. As the narrative unravels, Ess drops more and more hints that Darryl suffers from gender dysphoria. In fact, Ess sets up the narrative to make the reader suspect that gender transitioning will be Darryl’s saving grace. During the first half, Darryl takes a road trip to Reno and meets Oothoon, an aspiring trans girl poet who quickly gains his attention. Darryl relates pretty strongly to her—he sees himself in her as a man who is “built to take it, just built wrong”—and he quickly strikes up an online friendship with her, exchanging emails about poetry, gender, and cuckolding.
But something is amiss with Oothoon. She is not as cool nor suave as she appeared over drinks in Reno. In fact, she’s sort of annoying online. And she’s increasingly convinced she has Darryl figured out. In her eyes, Darryl is a transgender woman who simply needs a push in the right direction.
Darryl suspects Oothoon may be on to something at first. As the book continues, Darryl starts to leave behind his old ways of thinking in exchange for new ones. Heterosexuality becomes less and less relevant to him as he experiments more and more with his gender presentation and sexuality. He tries to “soften [his] body” in “subtle” ways, shaving his body hair, experimenting with feminine-leaning clothing, and even trying out sissy crossdressing play. To the trans reader, these are all hallmarks of pre-transition experimentation, ones that feature prominently throughout Detransition, Baby’s before-transition segments.
But as time goes on, Darryl decides that womanhood may not be the right fit for him after all. He begins two new sexual relationships—one with a spiritually-minded polyamorous woman named Satori, the other with a blue-collar socialist named Bill—where he gradually finds a home for himself as a gender nonconforming and genderfluid man. Cuckolding becomes less relevant. So does gender. Darryl has made up his mind, and life seems good.
Yet for the trans reader, the gender question still lingers. Conclusion is needed. Ess gives this to us, but not in the feel-good way we’d prefer.
Shortly after Darryl has found peace between his two lovers, he follows through on a promise to visit Reno, where he promises to pay for Oothoon’s bottom surgery. Oothoon’s life is kind of a mess. She lives in a punky trans house that’s both metaphorically and literally “disgusting”: The house is never clean, everyone is accusing each other of abuse, and Oothoon isn’t even that good of a poet to begin with! Darryl quickly realizes Oothoon may not be a great advertisement for gender transitioning after all, and yet she still tries to convince Darryl that he is transgender.
“She was dropping these details into the conversation to make it tantalizing, as though I didn’t know how. But I did my own research. I really did think it through, it just isn’t me,” Darryl says. “It actually made me wonder if it was her either, like how insecure can you be, to have to recruit like this. […] I’ve got a show-me-attitude about this stuff. Show me that you can be happy. Right now I don’t see anything here to aspire to. Where’s the Oothoon who swaggered up to us at the pool hall? Where’s Oothoon the poet?”
Darryl is full of literary callbacks—one of the book’s main plot threads involves a retroactive reinterpretation of Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts—and this one is to Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. In the book’s second half, Binnie’s two main characters converge in Reno, where post-transition Maria decides to take pre-transition James H from Star City, Nevada to Reno.
Maria is the every-trans-woman, a few years out with a life that’s surprisingly stable, yet always feels three steps away from falling apart. Maria meets James on the road and decides he can help James on the path to womanhood and help him avoid the pitfalls she once stumbled across. Here’s a problem that she can fix, she decides. Here’s a version of herself that she can help.
Is James trans? Probably. But Maria’s plan to convince James that he’s transgender falls flat. James knows a lot about autogynephilia, he believes he’s an autogynephile of some kind, but James is taken aback by her implication that he should just transition already. As their time on the road to Reno continues, it becomes increasingly obvious that Maria’s infatuation with James’ gender isn’t so much about him as it is about her: She starts choking up as she rants about how autogynephilia isn’t real and kink is just an outlet for gender dysphoria.
“James hears a hitch or a pause in her voice at the end there that makes it clear that she thinks he’s a dumb kid who just doesn’t understand yet that he’s transsexual so he just keeps glaring and doesn’t say anything and she drops it,” Nevada reads. When the two finally reach Reno, James bails on Maria altogether, knowing he’s “a project she thought she could solve, but since he’s not doing whatever she wants now he’s old news.”
For a lot of trans readers, Oothoon and Maria are set up to be the self-insert, the trans girl who shows the dysphoric, pre-transition protagonist that he can solve all his problems by taking the girlpill and becoming a kinky queer trans girl. Nevada insists the great tragedy is that denial is part of the process, as is confronting your own pre-transition trauma after you’ve transitioned.
But Darryl goes one step further and questions whether Oothoon even has the right to lecture Darryl in the first place. At least Darryl is trying to figure himself out and live his best life, whatever that means for him. Oothoon is stuck on page one, living vicariously through others. Ultimately, Darryl feels condescended to by Oothoon and regrets that her own inability to treat him like an equal prevents her from being part of his life. Instead, he parts with thousands of dollars so Oothoon can get bottom surgery, partly to fulfill a promise he made earlier to her, but also because he believes she’ll move on from all the horizontal violence and 20-something immaturity once she gets her basic needs squared away.
Is Darryl really a trans woman? I think that’s the wrong question to ask. Oothoon’s need to convince Darryl that he’s transgender isn’t just self-defeating—no one confronts decades’ worth of gender dysphoria through 30 minutes on a crusty trans punk couch—but it does a disservice to Oothoon, who really needs to figure out her own life first before sticking her hands into someone else’s.
Some trans readers may scath Darryl’s satire. I caution against it, because Darryl is not invested in transition as something that fixes our lives nor makes them worse. Rather, Darryl sees transition as a decision one must decide on their own and based on their life circumstances. It argues that Darryl’s personhood and agency does not rely on whether he is the “correct” gender. Nor does the decision to (or not to) transition negate the road we’ve already taken in our lives. When Darryl comes back to Eugene, Oregon, his life quickly falls apart largely due to his own insecurity. Trans womanhood would not have fixed this for him. Darryl has to own up to himself first instead of looking toward others to fix his problems.
What makes Darryl resonate for me—and why I think it will rub some trans women the wrong way—is that it challenges the idea that transition completes us and solves life’s problems. What Darryl ultimately wants is to be treated like an equal regardless of who he is, what he looks like, or how he has sex. That’s something he gets from Bill and Satori, who challenge his politics and encourage him to grow as a person.
But Oothoon, for all her insistence that she has the answers, cannot treat Darryl as anything but a shell of a person. She sees the things she fears and hates about herself in him—and knows she must convince him to be like her in a desperate attempt to accept herself through him.
So sure. Maybe Darryl does need to transition. Maybe James H does too. But what they do not need is Oothoon nor Maria’s insistence that transitioning alone will fix all of our problems. It’s just not true for them, nor is it true for us, either.