Do you ever think about running away? When I first began writing this, at the beginning of September, Texas had just passed a bill banning trans people from using public restrooms. At the same time, the U.K.’s Equality and Human Rights Commission had submitted a formal guidance to do the same, and worse, over there. Now, just a few weeks later, the Trump administration is reportedly once again trying to ban us from fixing our passports and attempting to further limit how we can pay for our hormones and surgeries, and it’s, what, day 28? Or maybe 29 of politicians pushing the narrative that we, collectively — somehow, some way — pulled the trigger on the gun that shot and killed Charlie Kirk.
So, yes. To answer the question that I myself posed, I do fantasize about getting the hell out. Of moving away to whatever country will have me, or hurtling myself so far off the grid that no one could trace my trajectory. Or else listening to the old-school transsexual in my head. Skip town, she tells me. Get more work done. Settle down somewhere new and quite normal. Adopt a persona so different from my own that not even the mass of incriminating evidence that I call “my body of work” could taint me.
Rationally speaking, I know that wouldn’t work, that no matter how hard I might try to assimilate, I can’t, in the end, expect to simply live, laugh, love my way out of fascism. But maybe what I really want is another form of escape, one in which I don’t change myself but change the people around me, together creating a whole new world built for the “girls like us.” If cis people don’t want to live with us? Fine. Let’s give them what they want. But would that in the end solve anything at all, or is it just a nobler delusion?
If cis people don’t want to live with us? Fine. Let’s give them what they want.
Three new works of fiction this year explore that fantasy: All of them set on radical communes, all of them written by trans women writers, and all of them grappling with this question of separatism and whether or not it might save us. As such, they make for timely reads, even though, of course, their origins far predate the current news cycle. It’s not like Grace Byron drafted the manuscript for her debut novel Herculine yesterday, pulling an all-nighter hammering away at the perfect response to those recent reports of a transgender gun ban. Nor did Torrey Peters or Mattie Lubchansky, whose latest releases, Stag Dance and Simplicity, respectively, came out earlier this year. Yet for however timely these books may be, the questions they ask are timeless, demanding our attention, even when we live within the bounds of mainstream society. Questions like: When must we run and when must we fight? Can you truly love other trans women as long as you hate yourself? How do you build community without reproducing harmful dynamics? And can I still be “in solidarity” with you even if I can’t fucking stand you?
Political separatism, of course, is far from a novel concept. Lubchansky drew inspiration from “pre-Marxist socialist groups” from the 19th century as well as various other queer and trans separatist movements from the past few decades to sketch out Simplicity’s world. “I think I’ve just always been fascinated with what makes a person drop everything and join one of these groups,” she told Vogue’s Emma Specter in July, when her book was released. “People feel like they don’t have control over their own destinies, their own bodies, their own communities. So there is this weird pull of, like, ‘I’m gonna go start a new society. Everyone’s gonna see how good it is.’” The Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde wrote about the appeal of separatist spaces in her essay “Man Child,” published in 1979. “Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message,” she explains. Still, she notes, “The question of separatism is by no means simple,” a conclusion informed by her experiences as a Black woman partnered with a white woman who, together, were raising two Black children.
She denounced, for example, the “oversimplified approach” taken by some lesbian feminist organizers of her time, who banned the presence of boys over a certain age in their largely white spaces. On top of forcibly excluding mothers who couldn’t afford child care, the move also reinforced a host of racist narratives positioning Black boys like her adolescent son as a threat to those women’s safety. “Our thirteen-year-old son represents as much hope for the world as does our fifteen-year-old daughter,” Lorde writes, “and we are not willing to abandon him to the killing streets of New York City while we journey west to help form а Lesbian-Feminist vision of the future world in which we can all survive and flourish.”
Having been assigned male at birth, trans lesbians also risked encountering hostility in such spaces due to similar practices of sex-based exclusion. Organizers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, for instance, explicitly intended that their annual retreat be reserved for “womyn-born-womyn,” i.e., cis women. (Trans women still attended the festival every year, as both Transexual Menace co-founder Riki Wilchins and the late writer Bryn Kelly have attested.) But transphobia wasn’t limited to the relatively short-lived Womyn’s Land movement of the 1970s and ’80s.
Then, as today, trans people have historically been pushed out of mainstream political organizing, shut out of the labor market, regularly denied access to health care of all kinds, and faced discrimination when trying to find housing, all of which has led to increased rates of violence and countless untimely deaths. (I’m thinking now of Michael Eads, a trans man who was routinely denied medical care because of his gender, much like the protagonist of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, and ended up dying of ovarian cancer after years of such discrimination and medical neglect. His story is the subject of the 2001 documentary Southern Comfort.) Thus, the need for STAR House, where Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson housed and fed young trans New Yorkers back in the 1970s, and the Orchi Shed, a secluded tractor barn in rural Washington State where trans women performed orchiectomies, a procedure that would typically cost thousands of dollars, for a mere three-figure fraction of that. “No one was going to take care of us,” Eilís Ní Fhlannagáin, one of the women who ran the surgical clinic, told The Independent in 2022. Thus “we had to take care of ourselves.” If they didn’t, nobody else would.
Byron and Peters confront this t4t ethos head-on in their work, neither of them uncritically. The former’s novel tells the story of an unnamed trans woman in New York City who is haunted by her demons — some of them metaphorical, yes, but also some of them literal. Desperate for salvation, she flees the city to her home state of Indiana to join her possibly toxic ex-girlfriend’s probably toxic all-trans-girl commune. The horror unfolds in the first person, a wise choice on Byron’s part, as it allows her to deliver the same wry, arch, punch-line-driven prose that propels her best published writing. “They were clearly not influenced by Andrea Dworkin’s take on pornography,” Herculine’s narrator observes while filming an orgy. “SWERFs and TERFs alike would’ve had a field day analyzing a trans commune that made porn for profit.”
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Having the protagonist speak directly to the reader also lets the author indulge in frequent polemical asides without weighing down the text or rendering her narrative a dull or didactic read. Being right there in the character’s head, we sympathize with her trauma as a sexual-abuse survivor who now, as an adult, lives in constant economic precarity, and we can understand why these factors might lead her to think that her toxic ex-girlfriend’s commune is her only way forward. Ash, her ex, is the only yes in the narrator’s world of no. Is she manipulative and off-putting? Concerningly persistent in her claims that only trans women will actually “protect the dolls”? Yes to all of the above. But she’s also giving our viewpoint character food and a bed. A roof over her head. Community. Hormones. Orgasms. Does all of that sound too good to be true? It is — but the book just came out. I won’t spoil precisely why here.
If Herculine’s narrator is susceptible to harm, vulnerable to further predation, the unnamed protagonist of “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” the story that opens Peters’s Stag Dance collection, published in March, is hardened to a fault. Her ex, Lexi, is also trying to get her to join a separatist trans-girl collective, one that then morphs into a full-blown commune after Lexi unleashes a devastating viral contagion that strips the world’s population of the ability to self-produce hormones. “In the future, everyone will be trans,” Lexi says, explaining her reason for wanting to make hormones a constant, active choice for every person on earth. Her sidekick, Rayleen, backs her up: “I want to live in a world where everyone will have to choose their gender.”
After society falls apart, her choices dwindle: the commune or misery.
Beyond that, though, Lexi’s similarities to Herculine’s Ash are largely superficial. She’s not abusive or manipulative, cloaking her harm in a radical vernacular. Her biggest crime, to the narrator at least, is that she’s unassimilable. She’s loud. She’s brash. She doesn’t pass. And worse: She doesn’t care to. She’s cringe, to put it bluntly, in the sense that writer Charlie Markbreiter unspooled in an essay on cringe and trans assimilation for The New Inquiry in 2022. “We cringe at others when they remind us of what we hate in ourselves,” he wrote. As such, “trans people cringe at each other constantly,” and Peters’s narrator, who longs to live the normie life with all of its bourgeois comforts, certainly does. The narrator rebuffs Lexi time and again, and by proxy her whole local scene. After society falls apart, though, and the life she’d once yearned for with it, her choices dwindle: the commune or misery. Lexi is all that she’s got.
Peters originally published “Infect” as a stand-alone novella in 2016. Its story concerns solidarity and what it actually means to be in community with others, even if — perhaps especially if — you really don’t get along. “A girl could be your worst enemy, the girl you wouldn’t piss on to put out a fire,” one of the trans women from Lexi’s separatist commune explains to the narrator. “But if she’s trans, you’re gonna offer her your bed, you’re gonna share your last hormone shot.” There are details in the story that betray its true age; a trans guy, for example, dismisses Lexi’s anarchist crew as “a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking … to the soundtrack of Skyrim on PS3.” But as the tides of fascism continue to rise, pushing us toward further division, the questions it poses remain just as relevant as they were when Peters first wrote it.
The protagonist of Lubchansky’s Simplicity, Lucius — at last, a named main character — battles a similar, deeply ingrained resistance to joining the graphic novel’s titular commune. It’s not because the Associationists, as the members call themselves, are too trans for his tastes. In fact, the word trans never once appears in the text. There is transness on just about every page, of course; Lucius is trans, something we know not because he literally says “I am trans,” but because we can read context clues: He has bilateral top-surgery scars, and when he’s naked — trust me, I’ve done the research — he looks like a naked trans man. The Associationists are technically gender abolitionists, but that’s more so incidental to their broadly abolitionist stance on all aspects of contemporary society, which, for Simplicity, is the year 2081. They’re pleasure-seeking hedonists who live and farm collectively, closing every day with a cathartic, ceremonial orgy.
Lucius, meanwhile, lives in the heavily surveilled police state that used to be New York City, ruled by a trillionaire mayor who made his money in Big Tech and real estate — a techno-dystopian vision of the future that is so cartoonishly evil, yet feels not wildly improbable. He’s been sent by his employer, a museum that’s owned by the mayor’s corporation, to research the Associationists’ way of life, though he later comes to realize his mission may not be as benevolent as he thought. Throughout his stay, he tiptoes his way toward joining up with the commune: participating in its rituals, playing an active role. But every time he gets too close, he retreats, preferring instead to remain “a camera with its shutter open,” as Christopher Isherwood once wrote, “quite passive, recording, not thinking,” much less daring to revolt. I mean, he was able to transition within the police state. What more could he possibly want?
Short answer: Everything — or Everything for Everyone, as the title for M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdulhadi’s novel from 2022 put it. The book, a work of speculative fiction about a series of insurrections in the middle of the 21st century, did the rare thing of making me feel hopeful — even, dare I say it, politically optimistic — by showing me that we can still topple oligarchs, mitigate climate change to an extent, and restructure society as we know it. Sure, it might mean shooting a bunch of billionaires into space — just paraphrasing the book here! — but what matters is that we do something, and that book made me believe that we could. By the end of Simplicity, Lubchansky left me feeling similarly activated. It’s a book about action, being willing to do things, and in a way, all of these books are. Their separatist settings, as in real life, allow their characters, and by proxy the reader, to imagine their world reborn, and should that world resemble the old one? Trash it and build it anew.
