Trans-Sister Radio
by Chris Bohjalian
Review byThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com
I'm just never going to recommend books for this group any more, because it never works out. It was my fault we did The Well of Loneliness, too, which I hated; and Her, which I thought was interesting but which nobody showed up to discuss. Anyway, in the past the books we've read with trans content have always worked out well. A couple years ago we did Gender Outlaw, which has its flaws but which provoked a really good discussion, and then we did Sacred Country, which was very compelling although also fairly disturbing. And so when I saw the blurb about how this book was the story of a MTF who falls in love with a woman while still living as a man and then tries to make it work during and after the transition while living in a small town in Vermont, I thought, well, that oughta be an interesting story.
Well, it would be, if it were written by someone else.
The first warning sign was the author's bio and photo in the front, which revealed to us that the author was not transgendered, as we had thought, but rather a straight man with a wife and kids. The acknowledgments in the back--in which he lists all the books he has consulted and all the transgendered people who he interviewed for the book--confirm the sense that no, he's not FTM, he really has always been a straight man. The second warning sign was the framing device. I thought that the title would end up being either just a pun or some kind of deeper metaphor. No, it is merely an acknowledgment of the fact that this book is presented as the story behind a fictitious series of NPR pieces produced by the daughter of the woman who gets involved with the transgendered character. This means that each section is introduced with a transcript of part of this purported NPR series, a device which conveniently allows the author to wheel on fictitious experts who very politely explain to the reader/listener about why this or that preconception they have about transgendered people or sex reassignment surgery is in fact false. It's about as subtle as an air horn, and often it's just as annoying. However, it makes up a relatively small portion of the book and could be overlooked.
Unfortunately, the book isn't any better. It's written as a series of overlapping monologues by the various characters--Dana, the transgendered character, Allison, the woman who falls for Dana as a man, Allison's daughter Carly, and Allison's ex-husband Will. It starts out with Carly's voice, and on about the third page I was already worried. There's nothing outright godawful about the way Bohjalian writes; it's just that his prose has no personality. The only way I can think of to describe his style is that it's competent. Nothing is hugely out of whack and nothing smacks you upside the head and goes, "Yo, I was written by an idiot!" At the same time, he completely failed to convince me that this was the voice of a girl about to go off to college. The voice itself was uninflected by any of the emotions that Carly claimed to be experiencing; it was always the same deliberate, reasonable, moderated, expository voice. And, as I discovered shortly thereafter, it was the exact same voice that would be used by all of the narrators, all the time.
The key word, really, is expository. The author seems to have approached this book as a piece of infotainment, in which he would use the story to try to present as much information as he could dig up about the issue, with the object of convincing his readers that transgendered people were sane, well-adjusted, unjustly maligned people who have valuable roles to play in the community. It's not that this isn't a good idea; I just wish the guy would write a novel while he was at it. The characters are all very sympathetic, but they're also strangely static, given the amount of upheaval that takes place at the plot level. Not only do they all tell their stories as if their audience is exclusively composed of well-meaning but understandably freaked out elderly couples from Ohio, but throughout the story there are moments when the characters seem to be performing for that audience even when they are supposed to be alone. When Dana finally comes out to Allison, for instance, she delivers a perfectly turned, flawlessly articulate, clearly rehearsed speech about what being transgendered means to her and how she hopes Allison will still love her after the transition, which is certainly rhetorically effective, but which also tells me that this author has never come out to anyone. Memo to Bojahlian: when you're hyperventilating, it's often hard to complete complex sentences without pausing for breath.
Anyway, thus far what we have is fairly lackluster book which is not particularly effective as a novel but at least may be doing some good as outreach. Then, Dana has surgery.
Now, from the beginning, Dana has been identifying not just as a woman, but as a lesbian. She specifically states early on that she's not attracted to men and that every time she's tried to have sex with a man it's been a disaster. Initially, the only reason I found this irritating was that Dana didn't seem to be making any distinction between becoming a straight woman and becoming a lesbian; the author has Dana using Allison as her femininity role model, getting her to teach Dana her mannerisms, how to put on makeup properly, how to sit, and so forth. The idea that lesbians might do some of this differently didn't seem to be troubling anyone. All right, whatever. But then there's Will.
Will is Allison's ex-husband. Predictably, he is extremely hostile to Dana, even before he knows Dana is transgendered. But something about him made us wonder, about 20 pages into the novel, if Bojahlian was setting Will up to get involved with Dana. But no, we said, that would just be too Jerry Springer, I'm sure the author has something else planned for this character.
Nope.
As soon as Allison is done braving fierce community disapproval and refusing to either dump Dana or move out of town despite enormous pressure from the administration of the elementary school where she teaches, she discovers that she really is no longer attracted to Dana the woman, since the bottom line is she just really isn't a lesbian at heart and she can't make herself one just because she likes Dana. So eventually, when she can do it with dignity instead of caving to pressure, she breaks up with Dana and Dana moves out. Then, because of all these radio spots that NPR is producing about Dana and Allison, Will--who, incidentally, is the president of the local NPR affiliate--ends up spending time with Dana anyway, and starts falling for her. OK, fine; I'll believe that. What I don't buy is Dana suddenly deciding whoops, guess I'm not a lesbian after all, what I really want is a nice manly man with strong arms and chest hair and a big ol' penis.
I went back and reread the part of the book where Dana explains this transition, just to see if I had missed something. No, it really is that casual. Oh, well, after my surgery I discovered that sexual preference is much more fluid than gender and I started wanting men, isn't that funny. Well, it wasn't too fluid for Allison, was it? I mean, I'm sure SRS changes a lot, and maybe there would be a way to make this shift credible; but not over the course of one 3-page internal monologue. Much *more* time is spent on Will's journey from transphobia to transphilia, and way more time is spent on Allison's courageous battle to stand by Dana against the storm of public disapproval.
So in the end, this is a book about straight people written by a straight person for straight readers--and what's more, for straight people whose only exposure to thsi issue has been the daily talk shows. There's nothing offensive, per se, about the portrayal of Dana; if anything, Bohjalian has tried too hard to make her a model transsexual. Admirable as this guy's intentions no doubt were there's something about it that I found unbearably condescending--as if the author had walked in Dana on a leash and started showing her around to the timid Midwesterners in the audience. "See? You can pet her! Don't be afraid! She's really very friendly. There, pat her head, just like that. Good girl."
Anyway. It's not like I did that good a job of writing a transgendered character the only time I tried it; Lara came out a little too Paris Is Burning, and to a critical eye probably looks pretty stereotypical. But I do think I was at least able to give her a personality. This guy, well, he appears to be very successful but I cannot figure out why; it was like pulling teeth to get me through this thing. And I dunno why it annoys me so much, unless it's just that I was hoping to learn something from reading this novel, and instead I feel like I've just watched a 3-hour After School Special.
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