“Messiness is the most human thing”: an interview with author Florence Ashley
Guest writer Noah Berlatsky interviews the author of "Gender/Fucking"
Hi all, Parker here.
As it’s Pride Month, I wanted to try something a little different for today:
of will be interviewing Florence Ashley about their new book, Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body, here at TPA. If that’s your jam, stick around. If not, TPA will be back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.So, without further ado, I will hand the reins over to Noah for the rest of the newsletter. Thanks!
- Parker
Cordoning off the erotic from intellectual life, Ashley argues, harms many marginalized people—including trans people—whose identities are targeted as being dangerously or inappropriately erotic, and as simultaneously desexualized and disgusting. “Suppress sexual desire and, over time, no room will be left for the sex workers, the sluts, and the perverts; for those whose sexuality is pushed to the shadows as they hunger for the liberty and safety to express it.”
Ashley embraces the erotic in their book not as the only approach to discussions of trans people, but as one important component of humanness and human messiness. They mix theory, memoir, fiction, analysis, and (very explicit) erotica to show that trans people, as a subset of human people, have bodies and minds which think and feel together. Everyone is a mixed mess; you can’t take the sex out of us.
I spoke to Ashley by phone at the end of May. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Noah Berlatsky: The title of your book is Gender/Fucking. Why did you want a title that included profanity?
Florence Ashley: I pretty much try to write “genderfucking” in as many titles as I can! I have a law review article with “genderfucking” in the title. And I have another one forthcoming. So this is just really part of the trend.
But in this particular case, it’s the fact that the word “fucking” has some kind of crudeness to it. It’s associated with sexuality in a way that's not euphemistic, right? It avoids the euphemism of “making love”; it hones in on the sexual.
And given the book’s ideas around arousal as a site of knowledge, it’s a powerful way of performing the lesson of the book and resisting calls to be more euphemistic. This is a book that has a certain crudeness to it. There’s erotica in it. And I didn't want to leave that out of the title.
N.B.: I wasn’t clear on the extent to which the erotica was memoir, or was it fictionalized?
F.A.: It’s a little hard to explain the balance of fiction and memoir—but let’s put it this way. Obviously, there were no mermaids or vampires actively involved. Right?
I followed the logic of composite case studies for medicine, in that I mix and match. Everything in the book is real in some way, shape, or form. But most of the vignettes incorporate elements from different people or different encounters for an artistic purpose. There are some that are more directly accurate. But for many of the other pieces, there's a mix and match.
N.B.: Currently the far-right attack on trans people is often focused on accusing trans people of being sexually deviant or of dangerous sexual behavior. Why do you feel like it's important to nonetheless talk about sex explicitly in these ways?
F.A.: Well, for one, when people already think the worst of you…anything I say is not going to change that much.
So I'm not writing for the haters. I'm writing for other trans people and other queer people. And for other people who are cisgender and heterosexual, but they're more favorable to trans existence and want to know a bit more what it's like to be trans and really delve into the complexity and messiness of trans experience as itself a microcosm of the messiness of human experience or knowledge.
I don't think there is much benefit here in pretending that the complexity doesn't exist, and that the messiness doesn't exist. Because it's a distinctive feature of humanity and trans people won't be humanized until they get to be messy—until they get to fuck up without that being seen as hurting all trans people.
Would I write differently if I were appearing in the New York Times? Yeah, but this is not a New York Times article. It’s a book in a very cool indie press that's going to reach primarily progressive, trans queer feminist folks.
It's not like I'm the first to do anything here. I'm following in a long line of people who have been discussing the bad feelings around being trans and experiencing transphobia and experiencing violence within the community.
I'm thinking notably of The Terrible We by Cameron Awkward-Rich or Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad by Hil Malatino. There’s a lot more discussion going on right now about the way that, yeah, being trans kind of sucks sometimes because the world sucks, and because, you know, having a body and being human just sucks sometimes. And that's not specific to trans people, even if it's more intense in certain ways for trans people.
N.B.: One interesting thing you talk about is how in the past trans women were attacked by comparing them to the Frankenstein monster, and how the Frankenstein monster has been reappropriated by trans women themselves to some degree. Could you talk about why the Frankenstein monster is important to you?
F.A.: Janice Raymond [one of the most influential anti-trans feminists] has this idea that trans women are medical constructs. Not conceptual constructs, but physical constructs. And then [trans theorist] Sandy Stone came back and said, “Yes, but, the thing with creation is that you're always more than your makers.”
And this is something that's really a lesson within Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, right?
Frankenstein's monster does bad things. But he's the victim in the story. He's the first and the last victim in the story. And all of the bad things that he does are due to the sheer dehumanization he faces. When you dehumanize people, sometimes they start acting less than human, right?
In the case of Frankenstein's monster, the monster started acting less than human because of the persistent violence and alienation and rejection he faced, not because that was his fundamental nature as a monster. It’s a very powerful story.
Of course, trans people are not monsters in that same sense. Frankenstein’s monster was violent, and that’s not the case for trans people. The evidence doesn't suggest that trans people are more violent than anyone else.
But it shows the way in which monstrosity is socially caused and created and the way in which there's this projection of monstrosity onto people. And it also speaks of the relationship to creation.
And I think it also speaks to trans people's complex relationship to the medical establishment. That relationship has sometimes been very antagonistic, but it’s also unavoidable, because trans people want medical interventions. Not all trans people want medical interventions, but as a community as a whole, many trans people want medical interventions.
And so we are kind of forced into this relationship to the medical establishment, the same medical establishment that has played such a role in pathologizing trans people for so long. The idea of trans people as perverts, as fetishists, as predators, all of that came out of the medical establishment. The same medical establishment that later on started offering a little bit of gender-affirming care.
N.B.: You talk about your own experience with bottom surgery and try to reframe that discussion in a way that doesn’t center the perspective of the medical establishment.
F.A.: Yes, it’s an interesting chapter with like five gimmicks stacked on top of each other. There’s a very strong influence from particularly Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges.
The Beckett influence is from Malone meurt, which is basically an entire novel set in a “hospital room.” It’s not even entirely clear where it is, but it seems like some sort of hospital or hospice. It’s all just these intense moments of disorientation and, of course, absurdity. It is Samuel Beckett after all.
And so I was trying to draw upon that a little bit in having the doctors be strange, the strangeness of, “Who the fuck are those people?” And there’s a reverse gaze there.
And then there's also this patently absurd review of the journal [in the book the narrator, Florence, finds a journal recounting the experience of the surgery, which they don’t remember having written.]
And that situates itself as, “Oh, well, this couldn't possibly be me. Because I don't remember that.” But obviously it was me. So it’s a book review of something that you, yourself sort of conjured out of whole cloth. And Borges has done a lot of that in his short stories where he'll write book reviews for books that don't exist.
And that was one of my major inspirations. It also gave me an opportunity to give a sense of the limits of returning the gaze. Because at the end of the day, the medical gaze is structural. It’s not just a matter of individual power; it's an institutional and structural gaze. You can't readily escape it. Because it's not just a matter of individual attitude, it's this oppressive ideology and a societal structure that's imposed upon you.
N.B.: In the book it sounds like you experienced bottom surgery as fairly empowering?
F.A.: I don't know about empowering. I don't even know what makes something empowering. Empowering is one of those words where I'm just like, what does that really mean?
I certainly experienced bottom surgery as a positive. But also as a fundamentally human thing.
There’s I think a tradition of trans writing about surgery as this transcendent, quasi-religious, mystical experience that fundamentally changes you. And I'm just like…not really.
It was dope! But it was dope in that way that most human things are dope. After surgery, I wasn't a completely changed human being. Although, weirdly, in certain ways, over time, it did change me because it changed my relationship to other people and changed my relationship with my own body. And over time, that changes you because you are defined in part by your relationship to yourself and to others.
But what I wanted to share is the profound messiness of surgery. But a positive messiness! To me messiness is not a bad thing. Messiness is the most human thing. It's this complexity, this irreducibility of feeling. And of course, in this case, the majority of feelings are very positive. But even though the feelings are overwhelmingly positive, they’re also multifaceted. They are complex, they are interwoven with so many other things. And that's kind of the beauty of it.
What a great interview!! Kudos to Noah, and thanks to Parker for inviting Noah onto the party boat!
Bravo for the correct view of Frankenstein's monster. Frankenstein created an unusual being. The crowds that couldn't stand unusual created the monster part.