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Why Couldn't It Have Been Me?
Trans Envy and Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing
Trans Envy and Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing
What do we do with trans envy?
It's one of those ugly feelings that seem enmeshed with the very experience of transition. I'd wager that there are few trans people out there who have never felt its bite. All too often, the source of it is a fellow trans person, one perceived to be better at passing, lucklier in their transition, more likely to live the deep and fulfilling life that so many other trans people seem to struggle to achieve. All too often, the joy of watching other trans people flourish carries a poisoned sting of why couldn't it have been me?
Maya Deane, the author of Wrath Goddess Sing, a trans retelling of the Iliad, knows well about it. In one of the early scenes of the book Achilles – a Myrmidon trans woman hiding from her family on the isle of Skyros, among her fellow transgender kallai – celebrates a gift she has just received from her divine mother, Athena. It is a miraculous transformation of the body into the one she had always wanted to inhabit, and never thought she would get to. Understandably, she is overjoyed, and rushes to the chambers of her kallai lover, Deidamia. What follows is one of the book's first of many heartbreaks:
Article: Damia's eyes hardened and slid away, averted from Achilles's nakedness.
"Please put on a robe," Damia said, pointing to the linen chest. Her voice was suddenly empty.
Achilles moved sideways toward Damia's gaze, and Damia's eyes slid away again, refusing to look at her.
"Look at me! My mother answered my prayers. I'm even bleeding."
"Put on a robe." Damia turned her head away from Achilles, walked to the linen chest, pulled out a white robe. She tossed the folded wad of cloth over her shoulder. "You are naked."
Achilles caught it. "We're always naked with each other."
Damia's shoulders tightened, and her hands bunched. "I always told myself that this might happen, but in my weakness I never truly believed."
Achilles slid into the robe in confusion. "Why won't you look at me? You told me to worship the gods. For a year now you told me to believe. Now I am proof—"
Damia spun suddenly. Her eyes flashed. "Yes! You are proof. I have to be Deidamia."
It made no sense. It was not fair. "I prayed tonight," Achilles said. "Why are you angry? If it's envy, I can pray for you too, and my mother—"
Damia stepped back as if struck. "I am not a goddess's daughter," she snapped. "I am a mortal. The gods destroy those who demand too much. The best I can hope for is the knife, and it will reshape me only a little. I'll bleed once. Thanks, flint. Thanks, immortal Aphrodite. Mortal Damia can only hope so much."
Suddenly all Achilles could do was stare at Damia's face, cataloging the minute details of her expression. Damia had stuck her chin out in that truculent way she sometimes had, set her jaw, narrowed her eyes—which were wet but also hot with an intensity that hardly matched the stoical set of her features. A vein throbbed in Damia's throat. She was angry.
She was angry?
Rage surged up in Achilles, drying her throat and curdling her stomach. She felt her lips curl back from her teeth and—too late—felt the hate reach her eyes. "I thought," Achilles said coldly, "that I was beautiful in your eyes, but I see now that I was only beautiful when we were mirrors of each other."
"That is correct," Damia said, equally icy, drawing herself up to her full height and looking down at Achilles with haughty emptiness. "We were twinned in an egg, but we were not the same. The gods chose you to be like them; they chose me to worship them. Rejoice, Achilles. You have been given what we all pray for. You are not kallai. You are kunai now, a woman like the rest."
I quote from this scene at length, because it hits on something vitally important. Transformation fantasies are one of the most common themes to be found in SFF literature featuring trans characters, and unsurprisingly so. I don't think I have to explain their source, or their appeal. But they also have a tendency to, at times, fall curiously flat.
The reason for this is somewhat distantly related to what is possibly one of the most common critique of minority group representation in this branch of literature: the "man with boobs" type of "strong, female characters" written in such a way that the only thing that distinguishes them from the men in the story is their rack. Magical transition stories often end up feeling similar: a trans character that is, for all intents and purposes, indistunguishable from a cis one will not read as trans.
For better or worse, transness is more than just an identity, in the same way that womanhood is more than just a gender. It indicates a specific relationship with the sex/gender system one exists within it, one contingent on a particular understanding of what gender even is in the first place. It is grounded within specific conditions of production and use of gender – and it is also intimately tied with its own forms of sociality. Hence, envy.
Trans envy is intensely social, just as transness itself is. Whether this sociality takes the form of local support groups, t4t dating circuits, ballroom cultures, pastel-smeared Discord servers, or – as in Wrath Goddess Sing – a cult of Aphrodite on a Bronze Age Greek isle, rarely are trans lives led in isolation from one another. Quoth Torrey Peters: transness is like an STI; you catch it from others. But it would be naive to believe that this fact of our togetherness will always cure alienation and solitude that so often attends to individual trans lives. The bitter irony is that just as often, it can excarberate it, as it brings us closer to happiness that we believe – rightly or not – denied or impossible to achieve. Hence, Deidamia.
Deidamia's rejection of Achilles hurts, because it is a cruel action, though one that is clearly understandable. The princess of Skyros and the high priestess of the kallai cult of Aphrodite feels inadequate and rejected in the face of her lover's exaltation in the eyes of gods. There is no reason, after all, other than the blind luck of birth, that it was Achilles who received divine parentage and its gifts, instead of Deidamia herself. And of course, it makes Achilles no more guilty than anyone is of inherited happiness, and of good life circumstances, but the judgment passed in the moment is not about facts of justice, but feelings of inadequacy.
But more damningly yet, Deidamia's rejection hurts because she is wrong about Achilles being a kunai, and no longer kallai. The great strength of Wrath Goddess Sing is that it manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of transformation narratives, and allows Achilles to stay legibly trans throughout. It's a book that stresses the fact that the attributes of the body are not what determines one's transness, but rather the relationship to gender. Throughout the Trojan War, Deane's Achilles remains at a remote from cisness, living a life of gendered displacement, dissociation, and confusion; living a trans life. This makes her no less of a woman, but reminds the reader that there are many ways to be a woman, whether kallai, or kunai.
But – and that's a crucial but – there is also a certain wisdom in Deidamia's cruel words, the kind of foresight sometimes found in ugly feelings, that neither justifies, nor redeems them, but shows that they are not from nothing, and not for nothing. Allow me please a digression – it should help to explain.
Here's a story most of us have heard of, in one way or another: in 1958, a woman known as "Agnes" in the case files, reached out to Robert Stoller, one of the pioneers of contemporary trans medicine. To cut a long anecdote short, Agnes managed to convince the doctor that although assigned male at birth, she was congenitally transsexual, which was proven by tests showing that her gonads were producing high levels of estrogen. As such, it was agreed that she should be allowed to undergo a sex reassignment surgery that would resolve any ambiguity regarding her sex. Of course, the punchline is that after the surgery, Agnes confessed to having fooled the doctors: the high levels of estrogen were coming not from her gonads, but from estrogen pills she had been pilfering from her mother. The doctors were disappointed and infuriated at having been played, and Agnes – well, Agnes passed into the trans mythology.
When this story is told, it is usually – and rightly so – presented as one of a trans girl's cunning and drive towards self-actualisation, but also of cis doctors' cluelessness and the terrifying intellectual ignorance underpinning the sordid history of medical gatekeeping that has defined so much of trans medicine since the 1950s. It is a potent illustration of how trans women had to fight by hook and crook for their right to exist, and how they have often won those fights.
What is mentioned less, as Jules Gill-Peterson notes, is some of the structural framing of Agnes' history. As she notes, the fact that Agnes had access to estrogen pills through her family situates her in a particular class-and-race position. To quote: "Agnes may have been able to manipulate her doctors and psychiatrists, but the availability of estrogen pills in her white, middle-class home in 1950s Los Angeles was an integral part of why she was of such interest to doctors".
This is not a charge against Agnes, obviously, nor does it take from her wit and dedication – but it is an important reminder that the stuff of which trans lives are made of is never fully separable from the material conditions through which sex and gender emerge. To use a different example, it's been long established in black feminist studies that one of the aspects of American chattel slavery was the ungendering of the Black woman, against whom – through separation from whom – the codes of white femininity came to be established. It is why trans studies teach how being gendered and being racialized are phenomena that have so much in common. The word "woman", ostensibly denoting little more than a combination of sexual characteristics and social roles comes to stand for a particular configuration of race, class, ability, and so many other contributing factors. Even if those meanings are not meant, even if they remain unmarked, they nonetheless anchor womanhood (and any other gender) to its context, dragging it stubbornly back into history.
Trans women tend to know a thing or two about that, even if this knowledge isn't, exactly, cognitive. Just as easily, it manifests in the facts of our embodiment, and of the felt and lived experiences of being in the world that is likewise marked by our shared history. My proposition here, shamelessly cribbed from the writings of Hil Malatino, is that envy is one of the ways this knowledge manifests.
As I have already noted, buried in Deidamia's rejection of Achilles is a sense of deep wrongness. Between the lines, the princess of Skyros asks why should it be Achilles who had the fortune to be born of the gods, and not her? Why should the divine gifts be limited to the precious few, instead of given to all who pray and ask? The answer is so obvious it does not even merit mentioning: because divine favor is not just, nor is the world. This injustice is what envy indexes. Still, if Deidamia points that out, then Achilles does not believe her – and what reason does she have to hold herself culpable for her own happiness? There is none, and there should be none. Would it only make the wretched sense of cosmic injustice go away!
The cruelty of the situation is that although envy marks its injustice and highlights its arbitrariness, it is not an answer to it. But it perhaps points us in its direction. Again, Malatino captures this far better than I ever could:
Article: Envy takes us beyond the self (though not without difficulty), as it is motivated by desires that we are too often shamed for, desires that are too often compromised or foreclosed. To grant trans envy its power is to admit that it's okay to want what we want: a different kind of embodiment, another gendered modality of being in the world, at least some measure of comfort in the dwelling-place of our enfleshed and carnal selves.
To this I would add that those desires are political. When Gill-Peterson draws our attention to what made Agnes' success possible, she doesn't do it just put a needle in an inspirational trans story, but rather to name the injustice of such life possibilities being available to some trans women, and not others, and therefore demand a remaking of the world in which it is not the class and race position of one's parents that determines if one's gender will be treated as fascinating, instead of errant, by university doctors.
A blanket refusal of trans envy can, all too easily, become a quiet submission to hierarchies of happiness that structure the landscape of trans life chances, hierarchies that render some trans girls far more likely to flourish than others. And flourish they should; each and every of them deserves, because each and every one deserves it in general.
Crucial here is the way that Malatino frames the issue. He doesn't suggest we should wallow in envy, or encourage it. He says instead, very precisely, that we should "grant trans envy its power", which is to say that we should make peace with facts of our wanting, instead of suppressing them into some false pretense of contention; it's a demand to not settle for less, and not concede to the powers and structures that would make us so. But this granting is also not an answer to injustice; at best, it is an impulse towards answering it. There is no alchemical process that redeems the ugly feeling from its ugliness, and Deidamia is still cruel towards Achilles in a way that is hard to justify, hard to excuse, and painfully easy to understand.
Achilles chooses not to.
Article: "May you never be reminded of me, then." She stepped past Damia and through the doorway, and suddenly her limbs felt charged with a terrible grace, and she knew that Damia was staring after her. Let me look as beautiful in her memory as she in mine, she thought, and let the memory of my beauty sting her like a cut that never heals. It was horrible to feel this rage, horrible to think that the person who had loved her most at sunrise was her enemy at moonrise. "Perhaps," Achilles said in parting, "I'll pray for you anyway."
I picked up Wrath Goddess Sing in no small part out of frustration with patently absurd negative feedback the book has been receiving on some social media – TikTok mostly. I will not go into the details of those assertions, that should be easy to imagine to anyone who has ever seen the language of social justice be used like a cudgel to batter away at bad feelings. But reading the book, I think I came to understand what the source of those bad feelings is.
Deane's work is not light. It has a lot to say about the uglier side of trans life, and does not attempt to excuse it or shield from implications and consequences. Deidamia's rejection, Achilles rage-fuelled wishes of hurt – those are just some of the ways that Wrath Goddess Sing speaks to the dark side of trans sociality. Ultimately, however, what is most striking about it is that it is not a book – though the opening passages may mislead the potential reader – about a trans woman bravely dealing with transphobic relatives and a prejudiced society. It's not a story about an innocent, maidenly Achilles thrust into a masculine war she wants no part of. It's, instead, a story of a complicated woman, who comes into the world from a position of incredible privilege and power, and slowly learns how to be held accountable for her own actions. It doesn't excuse trans women from responsibility towards others, nor does it offer them refuge from ugly feelings that structure and propel their lives – but no more does it condemn those very same feelings, instead allowing them the kind of complexity and ambiguity that is so often denied to pedagogical portrayals of gender variance.
Wrath Goddess Sing's treatment of trans envy is a manifestation of precisely that. As Malatino implores, it grant it its power, and in doing so, works towards fulfilling the old postulate for trans literature that Casey Plett left us with: to write about trans people who "go about the world: mundane, beautiful, wholly un-Jesus-like, having every kind of dream".
