First Attempt
I stumbled across a delightful 4chan post a few weeks ago. It read: “basically every trans book I’ve read felt like the author shaking me by the shoulders going ‘DON’T DO IT ITS NOT WORTH IT MY LIFE IS HELL.’” As examples, the post listed the names of many of my favorite writers: Casey Plett, Torrey Peters, Imogen Binnie, Alison Rumfitt, Jeanne Thornton, Grace Byron, Davey Davis, Emily Zhou. And there, down near the bottom, was my own: Katherine Packert Burke.
How nice to be included!
“It’s all just torture porn dude,” the post finished.
The real delight wasn’t being named in such auspicious company, but that I had, myself, written an essay about this very phenomenon back in 2022, when FSG reissued Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada. In 2019, I explained, I was “reading every book I could find by a trans writer. I read Casey Plett’s Little Fish and…Davey Davis’s The Earthquake Room…I read Torrey Peters’s Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. At the time, what stuck with me was how many of these books are about deeply unhappy people. How badly, I thought, am I going to fuck up my life?”
