There are rules about this kind of thing. When you write about a trans person, there is to be no importunate “deadnaming” (that is, using the trans person’s pre-transition name). Do not suggest that trans people are “conforming to stereotypes” or “essentialising gender”, and never imply that some might be under the sway of a fetish. Gratuitous references to genitals should be absolutely avoided. How would you like it if people kept talking about your junk?
None of which, refreshingly, seems to hold any water with Grace Lavery in this trans memoir, Please Miss. Lavery, 38, was born in Birmingham, attended what she calls a “posh boys’ school” before going to Oxford, and is now a professor of English literature at Berkeley (specialities include critical theory and gender and sexuality studies). In 2018 she came out as trans, distinguishing herself even within the febrile atmosphere of the gender wars by her willingness to get into any and all social media dramas.
In keeping with that online persona, this is not a book that can be bothered with the niceties. Lavery gleefully throws around her birth name (it’s Joseph, or Jos for short). Her stories about the effects of synthetic oestrogen are straight out of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: “Within twenty-four hours [of starting hormones] I had bought a large spider succulent, an oil diffuser and a phial of lemongrass essential oil (or ‘essentialist oil’, you would call it).”
And there is so much penis here. Not just in the title (if there’s a better literary pun this year than A Heartbreaking of Work of Staggering Penis, I’ll be highly surprised), but all the way through. On the first page, Lavery is having penis trouble. Since starting on hormones, she’s been experiencing semi-erections: her penis (a phrase I pray I never get used to writing) feels “as though I were laying my own miscarried foetus across my hand”.
This is, of course, going to offend a lot of readers, especially the ones who believe that some trans women are co-opting female experiences for kicks. (Lavery is married to Daniel, a trans man — a union that they consider “extremely gay” but from the outside looks more like heterosexuality with pretensions.) The offence is the point: Lavery intends to provoke. The abortion-erection is a problem, she writes, because it carries the risk that “what they say about us [trans women] is true, that we are self-deluded boys attempting to get close to women for nefarious sexual purposes”. And Lavery is less concerned to refute that belief than to ridicule anyone who holds it.
While trans-inclusive feminist writers speak delicately about identity, Lavery goes on a taboo-trashing rampage. She doesn’t quite ascend to the outrageous heights of fellow trans author Andrea Long Chu (whose 2020 book Females: A Concern defined the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”), but Lavery seems to have a good time trying to match them.
So, when writing about the fraught issue of single sex spaces and whether the inclusion of trans women needs to be balanced against the privacy and safety of women, Lavery first attacks “the good women of Mumsnet” for being on a “sex panic tear” (how gross of them to think any male would get off in the women’s toilet!). Then, though, she admits that “going to the bathroom is kind of sexy? . . . Like, there is sometimes a frisson when people go to the bathroom together.”
I suspect that statement will get more recognition from cottagers (surely a retro activity now Grindr exists) than from the average female reader, but at least Lavery freely concedes that her history sets her apart from most women. Amid her biography as a boy and then a man, she clings to “strange, multiple glints” that suggest femaleness to her: “When I was fetishised not as an effeminate boy is, but as a slutty girl is; when I was assaulted as a girl is.”
You may object that being a woman is defined by more than sexy wees, being fetishised and being assaulted — and in fact, not defined by those things at all. But Lavery will not take you seriously. The other side of the debate is represented here in long parodies that are not as funny as they think they are: the diary of Germaine Greer as a provincial housewife, a monologue in the character of the comedian Robert Webb (whose crime is to have admitted to some uncertainty about child transition).
Such skits are not the standard content of a memoir, and this is a relentlessly non-standard memoir. Chronology is smashed up, genres are rifled, truth is very rarely the point. “I’m not trying to be clever,” she says at one point, before adding, “obviously the book in general is an attempt to be clever”. But the fourth-wall breaking and self-referentiality gets tired fast: BS Johnson, but with narcissism instead of mordant self-loathing.
Occasionally the pretentiousness lapses, and emotional honesty almost creeps in. Describing a pre-transition era of alcoholism, Lavery writes, “I remember it now as a series of chaotic stabs, coming at me from the night”, which is a good description of both blackouts and shame. Such moments are fleeting, though. More typical are the tortured jaunts into criticism, including a trans reading of Little Shop of Horrors, which have the chilling tone of a humanities symposium paper (Lavery is also an author of academic texts). Whatever your gender politics, no amount of penis can make this bearable.
