I always have trouble writing reviews of literary novels, so OKPsyche is going to give me a hard time. It's just so difficult to condense the weird, meandering surrealism into a summary. Like, the plot is almost beside the point. I loved this book, is maybe the point. It made me cry! It's intense, and strange, and somehow perfectly captures the bewilderment and alienation of (one kind of) trans experience.
I have always been jealous of trans women in one very specific way: to be an out trans woman is to be certain in your woman-ness. There's no other option. Everything else aside, in order to be out and transfem, you have to know that you know. Which is something that always felt inexplicable to me, completely beyond my grasp. All my life I've been told I'm a girl or a woman or a lady and the thing I've always known is that I don't know how to be that.
So I get jealous. I wish that I knew that I knew, rather than knowing that I don't know. Not that it's easier, just. I guess people want what we don't have, and in my case that's: a gender.
Maybe jealousy isn't quite the feeling, actually. I'm curious, you know? I want to know what it's like to know your gender, because I've never done that before and I just... want to know. But I don't. Anyway.
OKPsyche is a short novel, but a heavy one. I guess it's a heavy time to be trans. Everywhere on my social media people are sharing quotes from that Project 2025 document about how writers who 'promote transgenderism' are 'pornographers' who endanger children and ought to be put in prison. Meaning both me and Anya Johanna DeNiro ought to be imprisoned. The Republican National Convention is full of nice white ladies holding up pre-printed signs that say "Mass Deportation Now" and smiling like they're proud to be part of the new Nazi Party. Meaning those prisons are actually going to be roving death squads and death camps. If they win. Which they might not.
And then there's the trans loss of family members who separate themselves from you. There's the loss of a child...
I can't touch that, today, not at the same time as the death camps thing. That's the part that made me cry. So it goes.
n.b. I acquired this book via my public library, which didn't own it until I requested it. Request trans books at your library!
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