It’s a rare privilege, I find, to reconnect with subjects years after one’s first interview. Inevitably, the interceding years result in an accumulation of worldly experience which makes for valuable new material, and—more often than not—the strict division between interviewer and interviewee is muddled by time and familiarity.

For few people is this more true than Autogyniphiles_Anonymous. Back in 2021, in my first summer at Arthur I interviewed the account’s Arendt Administrator about the difficulties facing trans content creators in the face of pervasive Terms of Service crackdowns by Instagram parent company Meta.

In the time since, we’ve come to know one another personally, and (I hope) consider one another friends both in the cyber-ether and those rare occasions when we share a room in meatspace.

In another timeline, she and I are sitting down on the patio of the Only Cafe, sipping on sangria and eating sandwiches. Alas, that is not this timeline, and summer has gotten away from us, so we’re once again sat down to speak to each other through the magic of videoconferencing.

“I regret my background is not as visually interesting as yours,” she says, pointing at the thick paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in the back left of my frame.

I laugh. “I call that my ‘virtue signalling’ shelf.”

As a matter of coincidence, we’re here to talk about books. Well, one book specifically: a book she has just written.

Titled Reverse Tomboy, the short novel follows Naomi Soloveitchik (named after the biblical Naomi, not the Neutral Milk Hotel song—I asked) a young newly-out trans woman as she navigates her interpersonal relationships and tries to reconcile her desire to transition and be seen as a woman with her tomboyish presentation informed by a childhood spent envying more masculine, subversive cis women.

Over three parts chronicled through a series of vignettes, Naomi reckons with her new place in the world and her transition. Conscious of the disparity between her and the strictly gendered expectations people seem to want to impose on her, she struggles to walk the line between the expectations of her friends and intimate partners with her desire to be herself on her own terms.

A couple weeks ago I received an Advance Reader Copy (ARC), courtesy of the author, and read the book in the course of one evening on the August long weekend. When she askled me whether I’d like to do an interview to catch up and talk about it, I was happy to oblige.

Now, we’re sitting down to discuss its contents, conception, and place within the respective landscapes of trans and Canadian contemporary fiction.

Evan Robins: This is not a visual medium but for those reading, I have the book in my hands.

Auto Anon (she holds up her copy): I have no way to prove this is my author's copy, other than, well, I signed it. 

My copy says “Not for Resale, but yours doesn't. So presumably, were I to resell this book, it would be worth 500 times what yours is.

(She laughs)

So you’re coming out with this book. It’s called Reverse Tomboy. Tell me a little bit about it.

I think it’s primarily a coming-of-age story, but albeit in the most traditional sense of the term—which is to say that it isn't part of the coming-of-age genre with its tropes of teenagehood, high school parties or whatever.

But it is coming-of-age, in the sense that it is about finding oneself and figuring out how to navigate the world in a way that suits not only who you are, but also the time and place you exist in. And I think this can be interesting, because in this sense, there's an overlap between coming-of-age stories and apocalypse stories.

In what sense?

One of my favorite movies, In the Mood for Love, and its sister movie Lost in Translation are both sort of apocalypse tales. They are about characters who've been ripped out of their time and place, either geographically or—in the case of In Mood for Love—by the pressures of rapid globalization and modernization, which corresponds to a sudden change in the social sphere and how to navigate society around you. 

In both these settings, the characters meet people who have adjusted far quicker to themselves to these new settings, this post-apocalypse world, than they have. I think to some extent that is also true of a lot of transition books, a lot of books that focus on early transition, whether they be memoirs or fiction, as in the case of Reverse Tomboy. 

You get a character who is leaving an old world—a world that is dead to them—behind, and attempting to figure out how to exist in this new world, and how to become who they need to be, or who they are going to be in this new world.

I think Reverse Tomboy is thus an apocalyptic tale, especially with its flashbacks. It tells you how the world ended. It also asks how the world is beginning and how you are finding your spot in it, and who you are going to be.

I want to pick up on that piece about existing in a way that suits the space and time that the world exists in. In the introduction to this book, you talk about how you've been sitting on this manuscript for a while—since before, even, “trans lit” was much of a codified genre.

I think one of the interesting parts about reading Reverse Tomboy is that you get this sense of time and place in the Toronto of 5, 10, years ago.

How do you see the cultural landscape having changed in that time, and how did that influence the book?

The fact that the book is, you know, it was finished over five years ago now, in more or less its current form.

This is a post-tipping point, pre-backlash word—or at least the cultural backlash is only just beginning. And one of the strengths of Reverse Tomboy, I think, is that it is a period piece without being written in the present. 

That it is from, you know, six years ago or something when I wrote it—God, going on seven—the fact that it's quite an old manuscript gives it the benefit of saying what it was to be in that time, without the self consciousness of looking into the past.

I recently reread one of my big influences for this book, Hemingwasay's The Garden of Eden, and Hemingway has a bunch of asides in the sort of meta-narrative where the character David is writing a story within the story.

And one of the big challenges for this David character is to put down how he felt about it at the time, and not how his thinking had changed in the time that had elapsed since. 

And this was true of the novel itself, despite the fact that it tries to sell itself as something that was written, you know, in time with the characters. You kind of get this false impression that Hemingway was going right after each chapter to slam down the next. 

The truth is that this is a manuscript that Hemingway obsessively touched up over 15 years, and then eventually decided that it was too risqué, too transsexual, to publish.

Archive Of Our Own has not been invented yet.

(She laughs) Exactly. But I didn't actually answer the question. 

I think that the weakest part of my writing is that I couldn't do that, and I didn't do that. I think when I reopened the manuscript after six years, I thought to myself, ‘Do I want to add to this?’

This is a fairly short manuscript [the fiction portion comprises just 74 pages], and I considered a lot of different ways to expand the story, to lengthen parts of it that were short in the middle, or to simply add on to what happened after. But I decided against it. I decided that, at least from my first book, that I was not confident in my skill as an author, to not taint the story with this Godly knowledge that I've acquired of what the world would become. 

I thought I would be imbuing the characters’ feelings with how I feel about things now.

It would become very Landian, I suppose. A recursive history, wherein the future creates the past.

Exactly. And instead, this book is pure. It is a product of its time, even though it's only being released now.

And why choose to release it now, then?

As you said, the market has changed, but one of the things that the backlash has not destroyed is trans literature. Trans literature has flourished.

However, still kind of a hole in the market is talking about non-feminine trans women and specifically navigating that desire [to not be “traditionally feminine”].

You see it talked about on Reddit. You see it talked about on Tumblr. You see it talked about on Instagram. But I don't know of any literary fiction that takes the topic of transfeminine masculinity seriously.

There’s a tension I see within the online trans community. There’s a lot of, I almost call it like dogma, saying, “trans women don't have to be dot, dot, dot”—whatever boxes we in the West have imposed on women through our very Eurocentric view of beauty or femininity. 

But ultimately that rhetoric, I think, seems to create this situation wherein the thing they’re quietly saying is “trans women don't actually have to transition,” like: “you're valid as you are, and to change that is actually assimilationist/regressive/anti-revolutionary.”

I get the impression that's something you implicitly rebut in this story.

Definitely. And, I think when I first started transitioning in 2013–2014 that was the narrative being pushed on Tumblr and other places.

At the time, I was increasingly considering how I wished to be perceived, and what it meant to transition, and what it meant for me to desire this when I had no visuals, no iconography, no point of reference other than drag queens and Laverne Cox, and these very feminine women.

Access to medical transition was also more cut off back then. You know, this was pre-informed consent. And so the narrative appeared there for, I think, these very material reasons. But as you see today, it is more repeated by non trans women than by trans women, and carries with it the undercurrent of “You don't actually need to do that disgusting thing.”

As you say, I think this narrative has re-emerged after many years. 

[Reverse Tomboy] carries this tension of you know, just a lot of people telling us that we don't need to transition, whereas this is a narrative is about what it is like to transition, even though you were successful as a man, even though you have an affinity for aspects of masculinity, even though you were popular and well-liked.

This is to some extent, a rebuttal to, I guess, of the egg archetype you see in Nevada [by Imogen Binnie], where eggs are all, you know, self-hating losers who have deep and visibly obvious-at-a distance issues.

This is a narrative where you get to transition. Despite fitting into society, despite everything being fine for you. And in that way, perhaps it is more affirming, and perhaps is a way of saying “this isn’t a failure at masculinity,” it can simply be an affinity towards a gender modality, to use Florence Ashley's term. It's not about what gendered acts you wish to do, it simply is about what angle you wish to approach them from.

“Yes, I'm a woman. Yes, I drive a Subaru Impreza. Yes, I play Call of Duty. Yes, we exist.”

Exactly.

But since you mention Nevada, this book is—whether intentionally or not, given when you wrote it—now exists implicitly in conversation with other works in the trans lit landscape. You see authors like Gretchen Felker-Martin and Alison Rumfitt consistently publishing books that, if not achieving mainstream popularity, at least achieve such a popularity within their genre niche—I mean, the cis guys that run my local independent bookshop really love Brainwyrms.

Gretchen just messaged me the other day to say that, you know, Black Flame is already in its second printing.

Maybe we’re winning the culture war!

(Laughs) Yeah. But I think the case that this belongs to the CanLit genre is also very strong.

As I mentioned in the book, the only two people who've ever actually taught me to write [Phil Hall, and Nancy Richler] are two pillars of CanLit.

Nancy Richler was a huge influence—may she rest in peace. There's an older novel that I wrote in about 2012 which I actually never published, but I still have a physical copy with all of her liner notes. 

She read two or three different editions of it and scribbled all the changes I needed to make in it, and that itself was kind of a fun little passing down of knowledge.

It is interesting that CanLit can be such an insular scene at times—that for as much as it is held up as this encompassing idea of Canadiana or Canadian culture, a lot of CanLit owes a lot to a handful of Jewish writers in Montreal. Much like post-rock in some ways.

I love Judaism and its proximity to perversion.

You can read Sander Gilman, and you can understand historically why this is a horrible thing and why it is tied to, you know, theories of male menstruation and syphilis among the Jewish population, and all these fears of the 19th and 18th century in relation to Jewish men, primarily. 

But I have always really loved what came out of that. I've always really loved, you know, Mel Brooks, Noah Baumbach, Mordecai Richler, Rachel Philpott, and these characters who provide a fun, naughty take on it.

So, you know, if my book can be a contribution to, you know, a little bit more Canadian Jewish perversion.

I mean, I come at this is having written my undergraduate thesis about vampirism, lesbianism and transsexuality—like I wrote an entire chapter about rabbinic Kabbalah and how there's this esoteric tradition from the 15th century that is basically like “Lilith had a penis and she and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden for having GAY SEX,” which I think a lot of biblical scholars would think is beyond the pale, but I'm on board.

I mean, if you’re going to talk about the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Eden has been a great ground for transsexuals.

Reverse Tomboy plays into this with some of its imagery. But also, of course, Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden engages in this gender bending where, you know—you can't tell who is a boy and who is a girl.

I think there's a misreading in the book because the character David calls the character named Catherine “the Devil.” If you look structurally at the narrative, it is these two transsexual perverts who are having a great time in the Garden of Eden until this cisgender woman shows up.

And at least if you're looking at it from that perspective, she's the snake. Narratively, the gender bending gets a lot less once she arrives. She feels so much shame and introduces tensions and violences into the narrative that didn't exist before her, when everyone was just, you know, doing a weird somno–incest play.

It’s funny what gets canonized. I mean, I was even reading Casey Plett’s A Safe Girl to Love the other day, and she is, I think, regarded as one of these significant contemporary CanLit authors, and that book is FULL of fucking.

Yeah, it's perhaps because we have a smaller literary scene. We don't have the overbearing inspection of the American right. We're not as concerned about book banning and stuff, you know, I think we at least get away with publishing things that are a little bit more scandalous than you know what might win an award in the U.S.

That said, I did have a book reviewer turn [Reverse Tomboy] down, because it was so “raunchy,” 

(I gasp) Really?

Yes, a queer book reviewer.

Oh, Wow, interesting. I don't find it particularly raunchy. I hesitate to call it “tasteful” because I think that that is like, implicitly demarcating what is tasteful or like, what is mature and what is explicit or obscenity, which is a very slippery slope in many respects. 

Things can at once be extreme, and even offensive, and still be artistic and worth talking about.

I don’t think books like Chuck Palanhuik’s Invisible Monsters or Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada are necessarily aspirational in the content they depict, but they have artistic merit nonetheless.

And even then the most “extreme” stuff in Reverse Tomboy isn’t half as bad as what you see on trans Tumblr.

This is true. I'm working on a second book that is perhaps more adjacent to what you might see on trans Tumblr.

Sister-wives?

I don’t want to give anything away.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Reverse Tomboy is available in e-book format through Amazon Kindle, and available to pre-order in paperback through IngramSpark.