Everybody Knows

Introduction

Introduction

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A lot of readers, writers and people in general seem fascinated by the idea of having s*x with someone who identifies as transgender—with trans women, in particular. I guess that’s why it’s such a thriving theme in e*****a and p**n. But, with the exception of marvellous projects like the Crash Pad Series and Tristan Taormino’s awesome anthology Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer e*****a, very little of the stuff that’s out there is produced with trans people in mind.

If you know me, you know my girlfriend is trans. When we were first getting to know one another and I told her I write e*****a for a living, she shuddered. She told me she hates the way trans people are represented in erotic content. Rather than seeing a trans character in an erotic story and being like, “Oh, hey, I am in some way represented here,” she’d read it and wonder why trans people were being characterized solely in fetishistic and derogatory ways. Instead of being turned on, she’d get pissed off.

She set me to the task of writing books that featured trans characters who weren’t stereotypes. She wanted to see herself and her friends represented in ways that did them justice as individuals. That was just the starting point.

I’ve spent most of my career as a short story writer, but over the years I’ve written a few longer works with the focus of honouring my commitment to my Sweet. My novella Friday Night Lipstick is loosely based on a friend of hers: an older trans woman who was trapped in an abusive marriage to a transphobic wife. I also wrote a trans lesbian Christmas novel called The Red Satin Collection and it won a Rainbow Award for Best Transgender Romance. I assembled an anthology called My Mistress’ Thighs and it was awarded an honourable mention in the same category. Tristan Taormino contacted me out of the blue to ask if I would contribute to her book Take Me There: trans and genderqueer e*****a, which went on to win a Lambda Literary Award.

The story I wrote for Take Me There (The Therapist and the w***e) also appears in this anthology, alongside a wide array of content. Some of these characters identify as trans while others view themselves as genderqueer or non-normative. Max (of Max Alone in See-Through Panties fame) gets off on women’s lingerie. Neil from Bertie and the Vamp doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t dress like his favourite competitor from the Gender-Non-Normative Arm Wrestling Association.

Some of these stories (like Hot Oil Treatment and More Than Anything) are blatantly about me. I’ll tell you that upfront. They’re first-person accounts of stuff that happened. SM, or How I Met My Girlfriend in a Queer Theatre is a more fictionalized version of same. So is Eclipse the Stars, in a sense.

Not all these stories are real-world-y, though. Licorne is historical fantasy about a unicorn saving a damsel in distress. Lust in Translation is about a trans guy who invents a freak-to-geek translator to woo back his ex-girlfriend.

Some of these stories have appeared in celebrated anthologies like Best Women’s e*****a. Others are brand new. I made an effort to include a higher than usual percentage of never-before-published fiction for those readers who’ve been voracious consumers of my work over the years. I wanted there to be something new for everyone.

The title of this collection, Everybody Knows, comes from a Leonard Cohen song. It’s also the title of one of my favourite stories in this anthology. For years, my girlfriend asked me to write a heartfelt love story between a trans woman and a trans man. I finally did, in 2013, for a Rachel Kramer Bussel book called Baby Got Back.

At first, the sentiment behind the words (and the song) Everybody Knows seems slightly jaded (okay, extremely jaded), but to me, it represents a fundamental fear that sits in my girlfriend’s heart: that she doesn’t “pass” as a woman. Everybody knows she’s trans. They’re laughing at her behind her back.

Everybody knows.

Let me tell you a quick story that redeems the concept of Everybody Knows, in my mind:

My girlfriend belongs to a number of women’s social groups. She feels comfortable in these spaces. She can be herself. You and I can be anti-social as we like, but she enjoys going out and meeting people.

As many of you know, Sweet isn’t out with her family. She’s an older person and she’s just too afraid of losing them. So when she spends time with her siblings and her adult children, she presents male even though she doesn’t identify that way.

One day she was out with family and she spotted a friend from one of her women’s groups. Her friend spotted her presenting as him. Recognition sparked. When she got home, Sweet had an email from this woman saying, “Let’s get together for a coffee.”

Sweet freaked out. I’d never seen her so panicked. She was afraid this woman would out her to the whole group and there’d be a bleed-through to other groups of friends. Her world would fall apart. She’d lose everything, lose everyone.

I held her hand and walked her to that coffee meeting, waited on pins and needles, and met her afterwards. She was still shaken, but in a different way. She told me this woman had chosen not to come over and talk to her that day, when she’d been presenting male, because the coffee friend didn’t want to make Sweet uncomfortable or put her in an awkward situation.

The woman said, “I think I always knew about you, or at least suspected. But it doesn’t matter.”

What about the rest of the group? What about the other women?

“I think everybody knows, probably. But it’s not like we talk about it. You’re one of us.”

We hear about transphobic violence. We hear about trans women being murdered all over the world just because they are who they are. We don’t tend to hear tales of discovery like this one, but they do happen. And this event in my girlfriend’s life drove me, the jaded pessimist, to see the world in a slightly better light.

If everybody knows and nobody cares, we’re taking a step in the right direction.

Giselle Renarde

Toronto

2015