Jennifer Finney Boylan won’t be defined by controversy. One of the challenges transgender people are facing now is the tendency to reduce their experience to an argument.
“In a way, it’s just unfair to reduce people to that,” she said in a conversation with Colm Tóibín at Vroman’s bookstore in Los Angeles. “And it’s one of the good the things that stories, I think, are our best at, is turning people or characters from an issue into human beings, and if you see someone as a human being, instead of being viable controversy, then your heart opens, and maybe you begin to realize that the world is more complicated than you thought. And maybe you can make room in your heart for people.”
Boylan, the bestselling author and PEN America president, spoke at an event hosted by PEN America in partnership with Vroman’s bookstore to discuss her new book, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us. The book examines the divisions and common ground between the genders and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.
Boylan said she wants to educate people about the lives of transgender people and her own experience – but she also wants to entertain. Fortunately, she says that the absurdity of her situation lends itself to humor.
“It’s kind of like being born with an existential dilemma. Because, you know, there you are, you’re like, six years old thinking about the mind-body problem,” she said. “There’s a reason why most of the transgender people that I know are actually – in addition to being just lovely, amazing, fierce souls who have to be fierce right now, don’t we? – but also very funny. And I think that one of the things about being born with a kind of absurd environment in this world is you develop a sense of humor to survive.”
Boylan noted that more than half of the books banned in U.S. schools in the past school year featured LGBTQ+ identities, characters of color, or discussions of race and racism. It’s part of the larger problem in the current political climate of “trying to deny certain realities, to deny certain problems, to erase things, to erase people, to erase a whole class of people.”
Asked if she writes differently now, Boylan reflected on what it means to write like a man or a woman. “You know, do men write about submarines and not use adjectives? And women write about salad and use lots of adverbs?”
But in thinking back to her memoir She’s Not There, Boylan said she realizes there was an “air of apology to it, or an air explanation, or an air of ‘please read my story and you’ll learn I’m not really a bad person.’”
“And I think if I’ve changed as a writer, I’m not begging for your love anymore. I simply expect it.”
