Imogen Binnie first published Nevada nine years ago. In the near decade since, a renaissance of trans fiction bloomed. Now republished this summer, Binnie talks about the pleasures of making art for trans audiences.
will be receiving a splashy reprint from FSG Originals. Here, Binnie speaks withover Zoom about writing for one’s own community, how it’s hard to transition if you’re not ready, and the novel that would remind her of Chuck Palahniuk if Chuck Palahniuk wasn’t obnoxious.Nevada
James’s story is directly addressed to that thing of, “I should have transitioned sooner.” But if someone had shown up in your life when you were 19, if a trans fairy godmother had shown up at your work and said, “You’re trans, and I want to help you transition,” if you weren’t ready for it, you wouldn’t have done it. So have some compassion for yourself.is a key point of the entire book. How did you come up with it?is that the second half of it, set in Nevada, is actually the story.
And now, there are so many, which is rad! But I don’t have anything intelligent to say about them. I readand I was like, “Yeah, Torrey [Peters] is fucking great at writing!” There’s a book calledcool. I’m so stoked to get ahold of it.was so good. It felt like if Dennis Cooper was Chuck Palahniuk but if Chuck Palahniuk was not obnoxious.
And from the start, PrettyQueertook trans writing seriously. So when they pivoted to publishing fiction, it was kind of like, “Okay, y’all are still doing this!” There was a book fair in Brooklyn where they had a big sign on their table that said, “TRANS LITERATURE IS REAL.” Which is so funny, and also was a thing that needed to be asserted at that time.