gender reveal party for theo flowerday
on craft, reviews, trans-coded characters, and being in a pissy little mood
Hello, substack subscribers! I’m alive!
I planned to make my triumphant return to substack in so many different ways. I’ve been feeling out exactly what I want to use this space for. I was working on roundups of my 2023 favorites, essays about niche pop culture topics, deleted passages from first drafts, et cetera, but something always seemed to get in the way. First I was recovering from surgery, then it was work, then travel, work travel, good things, wonderful busy things, stressful things, the body keeping the shit out of the score, but I swear – I swear! – I have been meaning to get back here with something fun. And here I am! But I am sorry to report that I’m here today because I’m pissed off about something.
I began working on this post almost immediately after receiving the first trade review of my newest book (for the less industry-adjacent, I’m referring to the official reviews from publishing trade publications). It may seem silly for me to be mad about a review that called my book a “mouthwatering feast.” True, it didn’t have anything negative to say about my craft or the way I used it to create the experience I was going for (high marks there actually). But it did also basically accuse me of doing transphobia to my own character.
For context: Theo Flowerday, one of the two leads of my upcoming book The Pairing (the strawberry blond on the cover), is nonbinary. Gender reveal!
Generally speaking, I avoid responding to negative reviews. I avoid reading them as much as I can, and when I do read them, I know I only have myself to blame for taking the lid off that jar. A while back, I came across a negative review on one of the big reviewing platforms that didn’t like the book because Kit never messes up Theo’s pronouns after Theo comes out as nonbinary to him around the midpoint, and they felt that was distractingly unrealistic. Did I want to respond when I read this? Of course. But I also didn’t (still don’t, please don’t do that) want anyone to seek that reviewer out for harassment or make a reviewer space feel unsafe. Enough time has passed that I feel okay mentioning it now, but I do want to clarify that this is not the kind of thing I typically do. In fact, this is the kind of thing I would usually advise against writing.
But! When it’s a review in a trade publication saying something about my work that I feel is both inaccurate and damaging to me personally, maybe I get a little pissy about it! And this is my substack, so I get to be pissy about it for as many words as I want.
Here is the exact line that got me so mad:
[...] marred only by the fact that Theo, who is nonbinary, is not identified as such until more than halfway through, meaning they are misgendered by other characters and readers alike until that point—a distraction from what is otherwise a near-utopian vision of queerness [...]
I have a few things to say to that.
When I worked up the nerve to finally write my first romance novel with a nonbinary main character, I knew it was a gamble. Up to this point, my success has come from writing about cis people. I know that a huge portion of the average American reading public must first be convinced of life beyond the gender binary, full stop, before I can convince them to read a they/them love interest. A lot of the people who pick my book up will put it back down the second a character calls themself nonbinary in chapter one. Remember that reviewer who was (ironically) annoyed by the lack of misgendering in the book? For every person who welcomes a trans protagonist, I know there are five more I have to actively talk into caring about one. So, I knew I had to be deliberate and strategic in how I wrote Theo’s gender, and how I chose to mete out explicit information about it.
I also knew I was tired of the expectations that come with Writing About Identities. In the months leading up to the release of my first book, I was pressured into being very public about my own private life sooner than I was ready to. I have gotten to experience something many fictional characters get to experience, including Theo: an audience eager to file you away into a category, a marketing tag, a search engine optimization bubble, a criterion to round out a listicle. People – almost always cis people – want me to come packaged with a label that will allow them to feel ethically pure and morally good while paying money to consume my art. They want me to give it to them neat, explicit, and up-front, in a way that does not ask for anything more than the lowest effort form of acceptance. And they want the same thing on the page.
So, when I thought about the story I wanted to tell with Theo, I felt deeply, fiercely protective of them. I decided to be tighter-lipped than usual about the main characters’ genders in official promo. I didn’t want this book to be about Theo’s gender, because Theo’s life isn’t about their gender. Theo’s life is about wine and food and sex and being hot and fearing failure and living in others’ shadows and learning what they can do with their own two hands. There’s a vitality to them, this totally visceral nature in which they are happiest when they’re most embodied, and so much of their life up to the point we meet them was limited by how much of their full range of self they were allowed to embody. Gender was not just a representation choice in Theo’s story; it was a craft choice. It was something I wanted the reader to get to know about them organically. It was something deliberately woven into their character and into their romance with Kit as both a basic material and a channel through which growth, vulnerability, and connection are expressed as the book goes on.
I think, maybe most of all, I didn’t want to make Theo come out to the reader. I’ve written before about how tired I am of coming out (ironically, this was published back when I was still using she/her in many work-related spaces despite using they/them in almost every other area of my life, see it happens!). I was interested in writing Theo coming out to Kit when they were ready, but until then, I wanted to just let them live.
When I finally cracked how I would do this, I really felt like I was galaxy braining it. I was seeing colors only birds and shrimp can see. I decided I would split the book into two first-person POV halves, with Theo taking the first half, and Theo would come out to Kit at the top of his half of the book. I wanted to write the moment that Theo finally comes into focus in Kit’s eyes and the absolute intimacy of the immediate, seamless, unceremonious pronoun switch in Kit’s narration. Until that point, I would avoid using anything other than first-person pronouns for Theo as much as possible. I would write Theo living their life as a nonbinary queer person whose gender is not always top-of-mind on a European tour, with enough details that if you knew, you knew. Just enough to believe that Kit wouldn’t have figured it out on his own, not so much that the kind of reader who might overreact to the simple fact of Theo’s gender would be able to clock it right away.
The trade review docked points for this choice. To me, the reviewer seemed to suggest that this was a sloppy or irresponsible or flippant (or, I guess, cruel) thing for me to do as the author.
And, you know, I will accept being called sloppy or irresponsible for a lot of things. I am late on 100% of my emails, and I am very liberal with adverbs and comma splices. I have caught at least two minor continuity errors in this very book since it hit the printing queue. I think every author should welcome criticism, because it’s our job to create opportunities for people to read with their brains and form opinions.
But this review, and specifically the word “misgender,” is casting some aspersions that I don’t really appreciate. So, let’s get into it.
Off the rip, I have to say that I did not set out to write a teachable moment. There’s this crushing pressure on queer artists to be marketable by appealing to the public good, like my existence is a duck pond at a public park that needs funding approval. My writing is not a municipal duck pond. It is not a theater for an allyship win. It is not a template for correct representation. It is a place where people are human and do hot freaky sex to each other, and it is not obligated to serve any higher purpose than that. (Though, is there any higher purpose than that?)
I also did go to journalism school, so I have to have my CQ corner here and point out that a large portion of Theo’s coming out scene addresses this exact issue of pronouns and misgendering. Kit asks if he’s been using the wrong pronouns, Theo explains why they still allow she/her pronouns for certain situations in which they’re not comfortable being vulnerable, and I trust the reader to understand from this conversation that every instance in which Theo is she/her’d in the book falls under that heading. I would not describe any of what is said to Theo on page as actual misgendering. Whatever else happens inside the reader’s heart is their own business.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want to start with the implication that I handled Theo’s gender thoughtlessly. I made a lot of purposeful choices around the slow burn exploration of Theo’s gender, self-concept, and presentation in this book. One of these choices was that the Theo we meet would be past the point of their life when they were actively grappling with gender angst. I made that decision partially to spite the kind of reader who needs a character’s transness to be painful in order to be legible. But, maybe more importantly, I did it to keep this big, beautiful, sensuous story from piling up behind the eternal blockade of explaining gender to cis people.
Still, Theo’s gender is very much part of their narration, if you care to read for it. They use a gender-neutral version of their birth name and frequently admire the ambiguity of their own body. They sometimes compare themself to cis women, noting all the ways they can never be one. They describe seeing themself in older men and feeling most at home in their body when taking the penetrative role during sex. They talk about feeling attraction to different people from different sides of their gender. They bristle at being seen as actress Sloane Flowerday’s sister “for more than one reason.” They contemplate the “second coming out” they’ll have to do with Kit now that he’s back in their life. I mean, the first two scenes of the book literally feature them wearing boy drag and thinking about their strap-on, respectively. No, Theo does not ever think the words “I’m nonbinary” to themself, because that is not a novel thought to them, and they’re presently more interested in what they’re going to taste next.
I think there are certain expectations of what a legibly nonbinary character looks like, and I can see how Theo may not meet those expectations. Theo isn’t giving themself T shots or recovering from top surgery on the page (neither of which are a nonbinary requirement, but that’s another essay). Most strangers abroad still assume they’re a woman, no matter how androgynously they present. They don’t correct every unfamiliar person who addresses them with feminine words, even when it chafes. Theo is an established, mid-transition nonbinary person with vulnerability issues on a European tour with their ex. Their narration reflects their reality.
Respectfully, it strikes me as such a missed opportunity for you as a reader to breeze past all of Theo on the page, get to the part where Theo explicitly states that they’re nonbinary, realize you assumed the wrong gender all along, and then get mad at me for it. My friend, please! You got so close to learning something about yourself!
Secondly, I want to talk about what it adds to the story to hold this information back until the moment I chose to spell it out. What narrative sense would it make for someone like Theo to immediately tell Kit their new pronouns after four bitter years apart? Why would they choose to open up to someone who broke their heart? And what does it mean when they do finally feel safe enough to do it? How can I cultivate the same feeling of revelation and release within the reader? Romance is an emotional craft, and a huge part of it is earning those moments of emotional payoff when the walls come down. I would argue that the act of coming out – the production of it, the when and how and where – is also an emotional craft. It changes a relationship permanently. It has a narrative value, and in a story about two people rediscovering each other after years of separate growth, I couldn’t let that moment happen off page or get shunted into an obligatory first act label drop. I don’t think this “mars” the representation on the page or “distracts” from the “queer utopia” some might expect from a book of mine. I think it reflects a measure of intention in making a character’s identity a meaningful part of their composition and story.
Not to get in the weeds here (this is a 3,000-word essay, we are in the weeds), but I often worry about where we are as a reading public. Do we have the patience to let a character unfold over the course of a couple hundred pages? To see what the author may be working toward and trust that they’re doing things for reasons? Is it okay to not know exactly what we’re getting into, or to be surprised by being wrong in our interpretation? I came up through an era of media consumption when subtext was everything, especially when it came to whatever queer or trans things were happening under the surface, and it genuinely bums me out to think we may be losing the attention span and the curiosity for that. Do I need to check a census box for something to be represented on the page, and is that conducive to good art? Is it enough for me to write the feeling of it and trust the reader to know, or at least be curious enough to welcome an answer they didn’t expect? And, I guess, what must I prove to earn your good faith?
The last little point I’d like to make is a bit more cynical, which makes me hesitate to say it at all, because I try to aim for the opposite of cynicism as an author and a person. But the truth is, I am trying to sell romance books in a sea of cishet romance, to a predominately cishet market. This is my job. I have to find my way through marketability and industry gatekeepers and risks to my own personal safety to write what feels worth writing to me. And if I try something new that fails, I’m not the only one who will notice. I try not to always bear that in mind when I write, but I do.
All of which is to say, I think it’s much easier to demand explicit trans representation from page one than it is to convince a big box store that stocking a book is worth the risk of backlash. It’s easier to have prescriptivist expectations than to make complicated, strategic choices. Pronouns on a book jacket are important, but they are not required for the representation inside the actual book to be meaningful or thoughtfully executed. And quite frankly, if I have to Trojan horse my genderfucky romance into a straight person’s grocery cart, I’ll do it.
Ultimately, while I’m very proud of this book, and while I’ll admit my brain and heart are not really set up to take negative feedback well, I don’t need everyone to like what I write. The beauty of fiction is its subjectivity, the broadness of unexpected perspectives and interpretations that every reader brings in and carries out, and even if it was possible to write something universally loved, I wouldn’t want to write it. I want to write specific things that work for readers who want those things, and if it’s not for you, then it simply isn’t for you, and that’s fine. I’m happy to accept that everyone’s mileage varies. If that trade review had simply panned my book on a quality level, I would have taken the L, had a little cry, and moved on with my life knowing someone else would love it.
But I just couldn’t let this one slide.
If you’re still reading by this point, I’ll leave you with a little passage from The Pairing. This is written from Kit’s POV in a section that happens after Theo’s coming out, in which he’s sort of joyfully and romantically integrating what Theo has told him into his larger understanding their lifelong relationship. It’s one of my favorite moments.
I don’t know how I didn’t guess it sooner. I certainly felt it long before Theo put a word to it. How could Theo not have always had everything I want? Everything I’m most attracted to, every aspect of masculine and feminine I like best. I don’t know if I love Theo because I’m queer or if I’m queer because I love Theo, but I know there’s nothing I need that Theo doesn’t have. If I’m a man in constant pursuit of decadence, Theo is the ultimate. The most of everything.
I wonder, if Theo had never been on their own, would they have ever discovered this? Or did safety and familiarity keep them smaller? Would there have always been a limit to how much they would know of themself, how much of them I would get to know?
What tragedy that would have been, a comfortable, diminishing love.
I’ll be back again soon with something more fun, I promise. Until then, thank you for letting me get this off my chest. xoxoxo