{"id":64768,"date":"2026-02-10T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=64768"},"modified":"2026-02-16T11:10:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T17:10:43","slug":"is-the-cis-literary-world-okay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/is-the-cis-literary-world-okay\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Cis Literary World Okay?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is there some reason why an author hitherto classified as writing \u201ctrans literature\u201d and \u201cdyke drama\u201d shouldn\u2019t publish a sprawling novel about a preternaturally sexy straight cis man, Adrian, and his dying older gay friend, Mark? Of course not. And if you search within Davey Davis\u2019s Casanova 20: Or, Hot World <\/em>for relevant terms just to be sure, you\u2019ll only find references to \u201cthe transition from sick to dying,\u201d a morning that has \u201cofficially transitioned from warm to hot,\u201d and eyes that have \u201ctransitioned from her phone to her computer.\u201d I swear Davis inserted these as a little (pointed) joke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another joke of sorts can be seen in Grace Byron\u2019s self-described \u201callusion to a performative trans history that tries to claim \u2018trancestors\u2019\u201d in her debut novel, Herculine<\/em>, set on an Indiana commune run by and for trans women. This \u201cdoll\u201d farm where the women live is named \u201cHerculine,\u201d after one of the \u201ctrancestors\u201d disparaged by Byron (Herculine Barbin was a 19th-century intersex woman whose memoirs were translated by Michel Foucault). The women at Herculine pool resources, make porn to sell to make ends meet, eat \u201cwatery macaroni and paper-rot green beans,\u201d and talk incessantly about \u201ct4t\u201d solidarity, all of which the unnamed first-person narrator of Herculine<\/em>\u2014a hater\u2014generally considers naive, corny, and gauche. She is a lapsed Christian, and an oil-cross-drawing amateur demonologist. She drinks hazelnut bodega coffee and hails from Indiana, whither she ultimately must return to join her poisonous lesbian ex, Ash, and confront her snake-like conversion therapist, Bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary trans literature\u2014as Casanova 20 <\/em>and Herculine <\/em>should make clear\u2014is thriving in a highly freewheeling manner. This has been true at least since 2021, in the wake of the breakthrough mainstream novel Detransition, Baby<\/em> by the wonderfully weird writer Torrey Peters, who has since been able to return to experimental form. From the body horror hits of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Alison Rumfitt, to the slant realisms of Shola von Reinhold, Emily Zhou, Jeanne Thornton, and Casey Plett, to the psychedelic offerings of Jordy Rosenberg, Jackie Ess, or Andrea Lawlor, fiction by or about transgender subjects has newly been receiving something of the critical acclaim it has\u2014in obscurity\u2014so long deserved. How revealing, then, that the New York Times<\/em><\/a> staffer David Brooks recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality, because of its supposed progressivism\u2014i.e., novelists\u2019 \u201cconformity problem\u201d\u2014and \u201ca general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture.\u201d Given Brooks\u2019s lament, we must ask: Is the cissexual literary world okay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n
\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \u201cConjuring and Reality\u201d: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Ryan Spencer <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

Of course, at the same time as this literary flourishing, a genocidal global politics has coalesced against trans life, catalyzing what critic Harron Walker notices is a strain of communalist escapism and trans separatism in some of the books in question. \u201cIf cis people don\u2019t want to live with us? Fine. Let\u2019s give them what they want,\u201d muses Walker, discussing Byron\u2019s Herculine<\/em> alongside Mattie Lubchansky\u2019s similarly themed graphic novel Simplicity <\/em>(2025), and Torrey Peters\u2019s newly reissued short story about a trans enclave, \u201cInfect Your Friends and Loved Ones.\u201d \u201cBut would that in the end solve anything at all, or is it just a nobler delusion?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This question is precisely what Herculine<\/em> leans into: via the medium of a horror adventure at a lesbian land project, a demon-slaying quest doubling as an ex-ex-gay road-trip bildungsroman. But veering in the opposite direction is Davey\u2019s Casanova 20.<\/em> Previously, Davis\u2019s apocalypse romance the earthquake room<\/em> (2017) and queer noir X <\/em>(2022) both featured leads with an explicitly drawn relationship with transsexuality; one of the lovers in the former lesbian scenario tried to be a man for a while, for example; meanwhile, quips the BDSM-desiring narrator of X<\/em>, \u201cI can\u2019t think of a bureaucratic process flexible enough to confirm my gender.\u201d How remarkable, then, that Casanova 20<\/em> departs from its author\u2019s previous two \u201ctrans novels\u201d (as it were) by declining to name cisness or transness at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, it seems, is where Davis and Byron overlap. For her part, Byron persuasively insists<\/a> on the importance of trans writers writing \u201cabout poorly behaved trans women\u201d and eschewing not only the dreaded commonplace of the trans \u201csob story\u201d memoir but all<\/em> forms of \u201ceasily digestible trans narrative.\u201d When it comes to fiction, she recognizes perhaps better than anyone what the worries are in having\u2014as she does in Herculine\u2014<\/em>\u201ca trans woman be the villain in a book about trans women, especially in this political climate.\u201d After all, she has written a great deal of earnest nonfiction for the New Yorker<\/em> about trans gun ownership, trans art, trans health care, and antitrans legislation; as a strong new voice in this so-called culture war, she has, as Dazed<\/em><\/a> put it recently, \u201cbuilt an impressive reputation in a relatively short time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Byron told BOMB<\/em><\/a> recently, \u201cBut I do find myself in the camp of saying, \u2018I\u2019m a writer who is trans,\u2019 rather than, \u201cI am a capital-t<\/em> Trans Writer.\u2019 It\u2019s a great starting point, but I don\u2019t think it should be an endpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both books quietly exalt real friends above other conceptualizations of love.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Today, writers who are trans \u201cwant to write more cis characters,\u201d as Byron remarked<\/a> in another interview. One such writer is, as I said, Adrian: Davis\u2019s eponymous himbo \u201cCasanova.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adrian looks so good that, during his infancy, his mother harbors \u201ca nearly unspoken regret for the tiara-crowned prizewinner her pretty son might have been.\u201d He is, at any rate, possessed by a mysterious power of attraction known only as \u201cit<\/em>,\u201d a gift he does not control but feels whenever it thrums to life, magnetizing passersby. It <\/em>compels all kinds of people; Adrian, however, prefers women. Casanova 20<\/em> is hence sub-subtitled \u201ca heterosexual novel,\u201d notwithstanding the thousands of male one-off hookups Adrian \u201cburned through\u201d in adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Davis arrived at this premise is explained on their newsletter David<\/em>: the experiment of \u201cgiving\u201d the burden of genderqueerness \u201cto someone else\u201d for the purposes of their third book. In an essay<\/a> reflecting on experiences in the publishing industry of being \u201cdisappeared before I could even be dismissed\u201d (i.e., circulating as a \u201cTRANS writer of TRANS fiction\u2014someone whose genre is necessarily informed by my genitalia, which I find to be so very unchic\u2026\u201d), Davis asks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

What is the<\/em>, or at least a<\/em>, trans experience without trans people? \u2026 I realized that one way to replicate what the world presents to gender nonconforming people as our best case scenario for a trans public life\u2014that is, a permanent, rigid, and violent sexualization, objectification, and infantilization\u2014was to curse my protagonist, a straight-identifying white cis man, with an extreme and unrelenting beauty.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Davis\u2019s character of Adrian is constantly fielding (from everyone but his friend Mark) an onslaught of extractive, incurious, and shallow adoration. As such, Adrian is a cis-het white male version of a perfectly exoticized trans character: \u201cthe most beautiful mirror in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It <\/em>is, ambiguously, a lightning rod for pure fetish, a dog whistle for chasers of all sexes. Often, he enjoys it; sometimes, he really doesn\u2019t; and above all, tragically, he fears losing it, especially after spending such long years learning to master and wield it for fun. The book opens with the utterly transfixing account of it <\/em>first manifesting itself in Adrian\u2019s infancy, much to the consternation of his embarrassed and resentful family. Later, adult women and men alike follow the child home from school, embrace or stroke him, attempt to kidnap him, and call the house only to breathe heavily down the line, declaring love to him, or swamping him with \u201camorous potscards, billets-doux, poems, and death threats, sometimes with cash enclosed.\u201d Waiters in restaurants touch his hair, and lifeguards administer unneeded CPR to his body. These bewitched individuals, whose desire persists unabated until it mysteriously falters amid the coronavirus pandemic, are Adrian\u2019s \u201cfriends<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, specifies Davis, Adrian does not actually belong to the \u201cclass of beautiful people,\u201d insofar as the ability to leverage looks as a commodity is concerned. What Adrian has is more occult, not the same as looks: \u201cit<\/em> was a sturdier, sexier thing than the skin stretched over his skull.\u201d It <\/em>is reducible neither \u201cto his appearance or to his personality.\u201d It <\/em>lets him absorb \u201cadmiration without question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether he is out fucking strangers, accompanying Mark somewhere, talking to Mark\u2019s also sick and dying sister Ruth, or hanging out with his lesbian friend Cora at the bar she tends, Adrian is intermittently pinned by the gaze of the friend <\/em>kink, as opposed to friendship. He barely works, always drinks, and frequently is housed, for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n
\n Related readings <\/div>\n \n \n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \u201cLiving in and as Refusal\u201d: Eric Stanley on Anti-Trans\/Queer Violence<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Sohini Chatterjee <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n

Fists occasionally fly at Adrian, and, once he is queer bashed at a laundromat. Still, mostly, Adrian is bombarded with compliments. But Herculine<\/em>\u2019s anti-heroine is treated very differently (or so it seems). Immediately in Herculine<\/em>, we read how \u201ca man standing in front of the ice cream section yelled something obscene about cutting me open and feeding me to the pigeons.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, Davis\u2019s Adrian neither reads nor knows art of any kind. Still, such is his beauty, he can hobnob with anyone: Mark himself, the chosen kin whose sickness and slow death occupies the other half of the novel (opposite all the sex Adrian is having) is a famous painter. By contrast, however, Byron\u2019s self-described \u201cslut\u201d thinks with Greer Lankton, David Wojnarowicz, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Assata Shakur; and yet no one is giving her a book deal, let alone a TV pilot, and no one seems to want to love her. Also, she has to contend with \u201cendless medical appointments where my dead name swung from the rafters,\u201d seething jealousy of successful writers, sleep paralysis, the obsessive compulsion to make lists, a landlord, a transmisogynistic boss who lays her off, and the various other subtypes of misogyny on display from men (specifically those she fucks, prolifically, via apps). Superficially, then, it would seem that New York ensures Casanova 20<\/em>\u2019s Adrian will want for nothing, while it spits Herculine<\/em>\u2019s Midwestern transplant back out to the no-place (u-topos) whence she came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all the obvious formal and topical differences between Davis\u2019s and Byron\u2019s novels, though, a striking similarity emerges. Firstly, both share the non-pathologizing and sex-radical orientation toward the pursuit of the erotic for both \u201cslutty\u201d and abuse-surviving protagonists. Secondly, both quietly exalt real friends above other conceptualizations of love. Not a cult, nor the cult of the couple-form is what is most needed for human flourishing; rather, what these novels call for is friend-love<\/em>\u2014beyond even the mutual mothering-imperative\u2014without any onus to heal or repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be sure, the damage our subjects bear is undeniable. Billy used to jerk his \u201cpatient\u201d off when she was a teen, sadistically daring her to stop him even as she dissociated and cried. Despite or conceivably (in part) because<\/em> of the hurt here inflicted and overcome, sex is now a source of self-fashioning for this survivor in adulthood: it has become her \u201cmagic release valve,\u201d whether it\u2019s with men in the city or with fellow conversion-therapy survivors at the rural cult. Slower magic, however, reveals itself when friends show up from Brooklyn\u2014Xiomara, Hazel, Nora (some of them, we suspect, currently fucking each other)\u2014to help orchestrate the escape from Herculine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all its avowed cynicism, Herculine<\/em> holds for a love neither gender-defined nor gender-abolished\u2014\u201cnot because of my gender or out of my gender\u201d\u2014but rather a love delivered through the body, in friendship as much as in courtship, \u201cso my body does not feel like loss.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one stage, it felt necessary, in order to heal, to repudiate Billy\u2019s contention that sexuality isn\u2019t fixed. Now, however, our girl feels no need to excuse her queer proclivities with reference to a born-this-way ontology. So what if traumas made her (choose to be) queer and trans? \u201cI can have my pussy and eat it too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

For his part, Adrian\u2019s sexuality is inaugurated early in life when he is waylaid by a perfumed female stranger \u201cthat day in the bookstore bathroom, the day he chose his own adventure.\u201d There follows a deflowering of sorts with a man\u2014when Adrian is just eleven\u2014in a car, \u201cunder a flowering saucer magnolia\u201d near Adrian\u2019s school. This assault, ambivalently, is conveyed in symbolic fragments; the petals turn into \u201cvermiculated mulch\u201d during the encounter (\u201cthough Adrian was not aware of this\u201d) and the memory retains \u201csome white crumbly crud erupting from the armrest\u2019s metal trash receptacle.\u201d As for the man from the car: we briefly follow him back to his home, where he weeps tears of shame over the sudden irruption of pedophilia in his life. He is never mentioned again. And yet, the experience does not, as far as we can tell, wound Adrian. It merely helps \u201csolidify his preference for women\u201d while simultaneously cementing his \u201cdeep, if distant, compassion for men as a group.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Davis is here respectfully leaving space for what the philosopher Avgi Saketopoulou would call a traumatophilic<\/a> approach to the bad things that others do to us. This particular child\u2019s sexual career is neither defined by, nor unshaped by, the afore-described abuse of adult power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In adulthood, Mark and Adrian\u2019s unsexual bond of mutual care, both for each other and for Mark\u2019s cat, carries the old gay man all the way to death\u2019s door\u2014and beyond. (Incidentally, Davis writes this cat, George, with astonishing tenderness; he was one of my favorite threads in the book.) Assumptions and insinuations from the public about the nature of their \u201cage gap\u201d signify little in the midst of the sponging, vomiting, collapsing, feeding, and nursing through which this love breathes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does it make sense to characterize this intimacy\u2014between a celibate gay widower and a heavenly stud who takes (in Mark\u2019s phrase) a \u201cgay approach to a straight life\u201d\u2014as heterosexual? As much sense as anything about gender makes sense, I guess. As much sense as the separatist logic and policing of queerness at a place like Herculine. \u201cAs gay people,\u201d Davis wrote recently<\/a>, \u201cwe are often forced to reconstitute straight notions of \u2018the family\u2019 in order to survive, and many of us do that by integrating it with the sexual and romantic. [Hence,] in my families, we fuck our siblings or parents or (adult) children, or maintain relationships with our ex-lovers, or engage in platonic romances, or raise children (minor and otherwise) alone and with non-romantic partners.\u201d Davis says they put a \u201ccurse\u201d on Adrian, fating him to inhabit a queer universe, in the body of a normative demigod.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there is wisdom to be drawn from this, it echoes the moment of realization in Herculine<\/em> that comes in response to the ex-girlfriend\u2014Ash the cult matriarch\u2014explaining the particulars of her collaboration with Satan. \u201cSo you brought demons here to make us cis?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contemporary trans literature is thriving in a highly freewheeling manner\u2026 How revealing, then, that David Brooks recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":64786,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[1416,863,2502,1095,2501,107],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1132],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-64768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-catapult","tag-literary-fiction","tag-saga-press","tag-simon-schuster","tag-trans-literature","tag-transgender","section-literary-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIs the Cis Literary World Okay? - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Contemporary trans literature is thriving in a highly freewheeling manner\u2026 How revealing, then, that David Brooks recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/is-the-cis-literary-world-okay\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is the Cis Literary World Okay? 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