I don’t know what the “best” LGBTQ+ memoir I’ve read (or will read) is, but Sissy is definitely my favorite so far. Tobia is from my hometown, and only a few years older than me, so it was SUCH a delight encountering place after place that I knew, or could picture.
Their Toys R Us was my Toys R Us. Their mall is not “my” mall, because it’s on the other side of town, but it’s certainly a mall I’ve been to many times. The coffeeshop they mention writing the end of the book in? The same coffeeshop I treasure my annual visit to when my cousins and I do homework together over Thanksgiving break. Their church and relationship with church is different from mine, but their church is just down the road from the one I grew up in. They’re also definitely one of the people I would have envy-resented in high school, since they went to the special progressive charter schools that were definitely Better Than My Schools, but that I also hated because Charter Schools Are For Rich Preppy Snobs (sorry Jacob). And also Governor’s School, definitely the dream summer program for every middle class North Carolina nerd and NOT one I was accepted into. And also Duke, the school pretty universally hated by public school kids in the Triangle. (As they say, Duke is Puke, Wake is Fake, the One I Hate is NC State. You can’t go to heaven in a red canoe, ‘cause God’s favorite color is Carolina Blue!) (Except if you’re an engineer you go to State and if you’re a rebel you go to literally any other UNC school besides Chapel Hill.) (I went to UNC-Greensboro, formerly the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Once a Spartan, Always a Spartan)
As you can see, I have a lot of local feelings. And certainly have never read anything that better represents my exact brand of race-class-regional background.
I laughed and laughed at all of their Cary jokes, their NC jokes, their Duke jokes. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart when they described their campus organizing around Amendment One, our state’s anti-marriage equality amendment that passed right as I was coming out to myself. I vaguely remember hearing about the campaigns for gender neutral housing at nearby universities that they must have been involved with. I spent a little too much time on their Instagram looking for posts tagged with place I knew.
But all of this made me ask: Who is this book written for? Originally, I intended to recommend it to every nonbinary person I knew from Cary. But as I read, that seemed less and less appropriate. Some of Tobia’s goals in the book seems to be demonstrating to others 1) how deeply pervasive and painful gendering is, 2) how everyone, including cis people, has gender trauma, and 3) that “trans” is much more expansive than binary transitions to the “opposite” sex, that sometimes “passing” is both definitionally impossible and not desirable, and how gender nonconformity poses unique everyday risks and struggles.
It seems like a nonbinary person would not need to be told these things, so while many nonbinary people might enjoy reading the book and be happy to see their community represented in memoir, they are not the intended audience. (What would a nonbinary memoir written for nonbinary people look like? I don’t know.)
As I got further into the book, I thought maybe I would recommend it to my parents instead. They understand that some people use they/them pronouns and reject the gender binary, but they don’t really understand why someone would want to do that or what it really means. I thought a memoir that’s otherwise from a very similar cultural position as them could be an easy way in to greater understanding for them. Certainly, in the afterword, Tobia notes that they hope other parents of gender nonconforming children find the book helpful.
But, it’s not really written for cishet people either. Tobia specifically says they were not interested in writing a Trans 101 book, and it’s not. There’s a lot of gay dialect and colloquialisms that might be alienating or at least unfamiliar to a cishet person. They don’t define terms, or even talk about how they first learned about different identity terms— just how they came to embrace the ones they use now. There are casual references to queer history icons and queer theorists (Sedgwick, Butler) that anyone with a little WGS background will know, but anyone without it will not. Tobia doesn’t explain for those who will not. (I might still recommend it to my parents.)
In the end, I kind of ended up thinking it was written for people like me— queer people who are not themselves nonbinary, who walk and talk in similar circles but can still benefit from an inside view + greater understanding of a particular way of experiencing gender. I have already recommended the book to my sister, who also matches this description.
But that doesn’t seem quite right, either. In the footnotes, the last couple chapters, and in the interview included in the back of my paperback edition, Tobia repeatedly talks about how therapeutic the writing process was, how it brought them closer to their family members, how it helped them unpack and process different experiences and gender traumas. They say they tell all of their friends to write a memoir too, because it’s better for you than years of therapy. So maybe it’s just written for themselves. Which, if true, seems like the best intended audience for a memoir.
At the very beginning, they talk about the typical arc of a trans memoir: always knew you were different, trauma trauma trauma, serious serious serious, big coming out, difficult transition, find acceptance. They reject this arc. They want to write a funny trans memoir, they want to be honest about their many privileges while also simultaneously experiencing oppression, they want to express how coming out is a long process, and parental reactions are complex, not Yes or No, and how they haven’t “solved” the “problem” of their gender. It is ever-unfolding, ever-being-discovered, and while they have found significant professional success in the years since they’ve graduated college, and in many ways get to express themselves in comfortable ways, they still experience nagging self-doubt, confusion, pain, and loneliness. They write about how they have to exclusively try to date bi/pan guys, since just straight or just gay guys aren’t interested in their fluidity. (Which is very sad and frustrating, but also, hell yeah bi and pan guys, who don’t get acknowledged enough.) And they do do all of these things! And it’s great! But they also still kinda do follow the traditional arc— most explicitly in the front matter that introduces and frames the book.
So I’m asking myself, what genre features are “quintessential” of the “typical” trans memoir (to the extent that there are enough for anything to be typical)? Does it really matter that the arc is in some ways similar, if so many other features (like the tone, like the “conclusions,” like the emphasis on fluidity and inbetweenness, like the near-total lack of discussion on hormones/surgery/other physical changes that people may do as part of a transition process). Unlike every other memoir I’ve read so far, they also talk very little about books/other media that was important to their gender and sexuality journey. We don’t learn about how Tobia learned about the concept of being gay, or being trans, or being nonbinary. We even get a relatively small amount of discussion of their activism work (other than the run across the Brooklyn Bridge), although it’s clear that they put a lot of time into many different activist projects.
A lot of queer memoir is full of queer trauma. That’s certainly a difficulty of the genre, that the stories are both true but also send harmful messages about the queer experience. (That it’s always traumatic, or just traumatic, or you need enough trauma to be properly queer.) And this book does have some of that. But this book also has a lot of queer joy in it. Parts that are unabashedly HAPPY and made me feel happy as a reader, even though they are also totally upfront about their pain and many struggles.
I think the end message is fully hopeful: that if parents can be more affirming and encouraging of gender nonconformity in their children, that if people can get more comfortable with people who don’t easily fit into boxes, that if we can change social structures so that there is room—and welcoming room— for all genders, then life doesn’t have to be this way.