When the novel appeared, she was mainly known as a columnist for the punk zine Maximumrocknroll. It is, if you like, punk rock.Īnd Binnie knows punk rock. And, in sixty brief chapters, it strenuously resists the stance my friends call “Trans 101”: it will not, as Binnie says in a new afterword, seek “validation from cis people.” The novel is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip (where Feinberg is bluntly earnest), addressed to people who think they know. In particular, it’s about the groups we create in the age of the Internet, encouraging one another in our new freedoms and in our self-destructive fallacies.

Published in 2013 by the trans-focussed (and now defunct) Topside Press, and just reissued by the mainstream trade publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, “Nevada” is hardly the first novel about trans characters, or the first by a trans author for the queer community-Leslie Feinberg got there in 1993, with “ Stone Butch Blues.” Still, “Nevada” seemed to be the first book-length realist novel about trans women, in American English, with an ISBN on it, that was not only written by one of us but written for us. Imogen Binnie’s “ Nevada” might be, in that extended, contentious sense, the first t4t novel. These days, it’s not only an erotic preference but a statement about solidarity, about membership.

If you spend time around transgender people, you may notice, on badges and buttons, on sewn patches, or even as a tattoo, the sigil “T4T,” or “t4t.” The characters stand for “trans for trans,” and the usage began as shorthand on dating sites.

Imogen binnie