This was a present I got my boyfriend for Christmas, genuinely not as an excuse that I might borrow it once he had read it, but it’s a happy side-effect, I suppose. It was a stocking stuffer, a small little book in the same series as one he had got me last year about Doctor Who (not a theme from the last entry), that I happened to spot on a browse, not particularly looking for anything.
Said boyfriend is a trans man, and as such it should be obvious why this book, subtitled “transmasculine joy in a transphobic culture”, would be something I happened to spot. I am very conscious of the - inevitable, understandable, depressing - tendency for non-fiction books about the trans experience to be towards the negative, and - less depressingly - also towards the transfem rather than transmasc. To find something ostensibly about joy and specifically the transmasc experience, yes please.
It takes a lot of sorrow to find the joy. The Appendix is named for Konemann’s somewhat masochistic project of just keeping a log of every transphobic headline or comment he came across in daily life. It sucks that this is the world we live in. I am conscious of the way I send stories to Alasdair, and that can’t help. An unfortunate form of penguin pebbling.
There is a wonderful passage about the shy secret smiles of trans kids when they are seemingly mistaken for their correct gender by innocent, unknowing grown ups. It’s not an experience that I can directly relate to, but I know what the feeling of it is, and it’s beautiful.
It’s not that The Appendix is lacking in hope, but it’s hard to see the intervening two years as having improved much. Or maybe things have improved. Maybe I’m just more aware of the bad stuff but the larger trend is better. Maybe it’s both, maybe it’s neither. I generally take hope in the thought that it will follow the same path as gay rights - what we’re seeing now are the death throes, god willing.