Trans Fiction, Trans Sports

But you know, I am a transgender. One of the ways that we have been like depersonified via transgender is through a you know, a massive attack on trans like trans women in sports, and this has led to you know, like the acceleration of like the broad scale attack on

all of us being able to exist as people. And with me to talk about this is someone who has written a book that is about this and also kind of not about this in a lot of ways, and that is Victoria Zeller, who is a writer author, writes about the Buffalo Bills for our friends over at Defector sometimes and is the author of a new book What are the Boys Out Today? When you're listening to this, wow crazy, While yeah it is, it has SYNCD up

like this completely on purpose. We were one hundred percent planning this from the beginning.

totally blacked out actually writing it. And I'm like, that's crazy. Who did that? Couldn't be me? But yeah, in terms of like how I would like very quickly pitch one of the boys, high school senior named Grace comes back to her high school football team. She quit over the summer because she came out as trans because her teammates want to make a push for a state title and it's like trans coming of age, Friday night Lights handshake meme.

But also when I was like big picture thinking about what I wanted to do with this, I wanted to tell kind of a like traditional high school sports story, but through an outsider lens. Like if you think about the average like high school football story, you think like, well, what we're gonna do is we're gonna win state, we're gonna get the scholarship, and we're gonna get the girl.

And I wanted to sort of like deconstruct those three things by making the protagonist trans and making the protagonist a kicker instead of like a linebacker or a quarterback or whatever. And that is who I am.

can like call down a little bit. Uh, But yeah, writing about football for an audience of like teenagers is like fascinating because you have to assume that the audience knows very little and you have to figure out how much you want to give them so that they get it without like overwhelming them, which is like really just

not at all what I wanted to do. But also yeah, if you're a sicko like me, you can be like, ooh, I'm really into what this offense is doing or I am really into this like on side kick play design. So I tried to like do I tried to do a little bit of both. And also, again, this is a transcoming of age story, so yeah, it's also dealing with you know, the horrors. So yep, ball plus horrors is what we're working with here.

our best wide receiver. We're just gonna put you a quarterback and you know, we're just gonna see what happens and that's like that was the fun of writing fictional football is that I can make my fictional football team do whatever I want and I don't want to ever see conservative trickery that is the forward pass, get it out of here. Yeah, it's is.

is on the field. I don't have to get into like what a football team that like never passes the ball, like is doing on a technical level. We don't have to do all that. I give you just enough that if you are a sick oh you're like, yeah, baby.

surgeons emergence. There we go, there we go, there we go. Yeah, of trans literature, and I think this is a very interesting angle to take on it. And it's you know, when I say scriplessness, it's about the ways in which trans women in particular don't have you know, sort of

examples and paths to like follow. Right, there's not like a you're supposed to go from A to B two C. This is like what you're doing with your life and you have to just figure it out because suddenly you're you and you just you just have to you know, there's no rails, there's no guide, You just have to do it. I think the Sapatista line about it is

that the road is made by walking. Can you talk about how like having to just figure the shit out influence the way that you write Grace and the way that you sort of write this book.

like never existed before. But I think, like more broadly and more like thematically, there is that like Grace is also frequently I call her stupid and I don't think that she's stupid, but calm up. But Grace struggles a lot to like express herself. I would say, and like, I wanted her to like challenge what a reader might expect from a trans girl in young adult fiction. Specifically, we're like I think she's like frequently kind of like grading, or at least I find her grading. She is not

traditionally feminine. I don't think she's unfeminine, but she like struggles a lot with like feeling okay enough to like express that about herself. Yeah, and like, I feel like a lot of stories about trans kids have this view of being a like younger transperson of like, well, it was always easy for me, and I took to femininity like a fish in water, and like this was like

natural to me. I wanted to write a character for whom it is not necessarily natural for Grace to be this person, and I wanted her past and the way she is now to sort of like challenge a like cist reader specifically, but also in terms of scriptlousness in a more like macro way. There's not a lot of

hya contemporary fiction about transgirl characters like at all. There is now, thankfully, a good amount of trans male representation in the genre, but there are a few authors who are out here writing transferm contemporary but like not a lot so like figuring out like where I wanted to like slot in to this like genre that is kind of like struggling to be born, you know, not a lot of transferm like seventeen year old protagonists who are like going to like parties and beer and worrying about

whether or not they want to go to college, which is all is all stuff I wanted to like touch here.

what the fuck do you mean I'm doing this? And it's like, you know, I got think about this, Like doing this job was like wait, what the fuck I'm a trans podcaster? Like what like I can't even do my makeup? Well, Like, what the fuck are we doing here?

and be too much. But like, especially trans kids, when you transition at any age, you are building the plane of your personality while you are flying it baby, yep, And like that's so much pressure to put on anyone, but like especially anyone who is a kid, is just like there's a lot of pressure, and I wanted to I wanted to like juxtapose the parts of Grace's experience that like a like sis boy or girl could read and be like, yep, I also don't know where I

want to go to college. But also like sort of like show like well because she is like this, she is facing this like unreal level of scrutiny that is like not normal, deeply unnatural and like fucked up and like unfair.

talk about masculinity. We are back. So One of the Boys is weirdly the second football involved book about a trans woman that I've read in the last year, And I think it's fascinating because in the like pure archetypal sense from like structuralless anthropology, it is like a pure structural inversion of Alison Greeves is how to Fly, because how to Fly is this is also a good book.

But How to Fly is about a girl getting forced femed to escape masculine violence, why they come and a cheerleader and one of the boys is about a trans woman going back into, like into a hypermasculine space to become a football player. It's like they're just literally perfect

structural versions of each other. And so I wanted to ask you about how are you thinking about doing this thing right, which which is going back into these these hyper masculine spaces that a lot of people come out of pre transition, you know, when when you were sort of writing this, because this is not a thing that people tended to write when they're writing about transfems.

like interesting relationship with masculinity. And as much as I'm like fascinated by it, like I think it is like endlessly interesting to see the ways that like men construct the like various kinds of masculinity that they live in and the like various outcomes that men can end up

finding via their weird distinct masculinities. For instance, for me personally, I'm still in my like old high school like boys' group chat like that we like started like a decade ago, and like I have never once had a problem fitting in there. When they all found out I was trans, was like, oh shit, cool, whatever, we're gonna keep talking

about like the Knicks, you know. And like, again, Grace's journey with masculinity is different from mine, but kind of like her, I have like some amount of like difficulty and like very masculine sports spaces when I was a kid. But then like once you adapt and once you like learn how to like perform this thing, Like I never

had a problem existing in these worlds. And like something that Grace is really annoyed by is that people are always like I just can't believe that, like you would be trans, And what is hidden in there is like you were kind of a dick. You were like kind

of a douchebag. Yeah, So, like I very much wanted to write a trans protagonist who has a relationship with like her past self and with her male friends that was like a little more complicated, where like she has a like very good, solid group of like male friends who are not like perfect, but are still like that's my friend. So like I think for my friends and for a lot of trans women's male friends, they're like, well, I was friends with you before, so like you're still

like you know, you're still you. I'm still gonna be cool with you. So I guess that means that I have to think about like that I have to like, okay, now I have to like think about how like trans people are like treated by society more broadly. And it's like interesting seeing men in my life like suddenly become like cognizant of like transitions, and it's all like personal. It's all like, well, I know this person, and therefore I'm going to show compassion to this person that I like.

And then you know, politics starting at the personal and sort of like growing out from there.

gaming me. I'm still sort of gamer, but I had, like you know, I had I had like like top point two five percent heartstone player, like the ag a wreck a disasters, substantively a worst person. Yeah, and you know so and like that's the thing that has a lot of complicated social ripples. Were like this this process if like like doing this, you know, sometimes it's like your final them. It's just it's just what you're doing

to try to get by. It's like trying to force yourself to be a man and like do this masculinity in a way that's like really shit because you're trying to like reconcile it with yourself. Yes, So this is like a thing that a lot of like transforms experience. I think it's written interestingly in this book. I was

always wondering. I don't know, like like the way you talk about being in this in like fitting into these spaces is as like okay, well I figured out how to like do the performance okay, and then it was sort of fine. So I'm wondering, like this is almost universally seen as like this is like a formal structural violence enacted on you that you sort of have to

like do this. But there's also a kind of, I don't know, a kind of complicated dynamic of like these people are still like your friends and you like them, and I guess I want to know sort of how how you've been thinking about like that specific angle and like this sort of process of fitting in and becoming it also just this is sort of unbecoming you have to do to like become yourself.

I want them to feel like jarring and I want them to feel like Grace is being a bastard in a lot of these flashbacks, but like I also wanted to show like how she gets there in terms of like various moments earlier in her life where she was sort of like shunted into this more like masculine path in order to like pass and like not be bullied

or like other eyes, and like it definitely is. It's tough, and I think that I think that I personally have a like complicated relationship with Like, yeah, like I hated football when I played it, and I did it because like I like the sport obviously because I'm a fan, and because I wrote this book about it, and because I write about football sometimes and I boast about it a lot. But like playing it made me miserable, But like I also be friends with that team who I

still talk to. So it's like I definitely wanted to feel like violent and imposed, but also like it isn't something that can be like erased. It's something that you have to deal with. It's something that like as you grow up and as you continue to self actualize, you have to like decide what parts of that version of yourself are worth keeping. And what parts aren't. And that's like something that I wanted to show, like Grace struggle

through kind of in real time. She's like very early in her transition, and she doesn't know how she wants to present, and she doesn't know how much of her old life and the people in her old life that want to associate with her, or does existing on this football team dragger back towards something that she doesn't want to be anymore. It's all stuff that I wanted to play with. And it's not like overtly political, but is like subtextually political, you know.

is by convincing you that this is the only you're the only person's ever gone through this m and there are always going to be unique aspects of it. But like, you know, one of the ways that alienation has maintained is by convincing you that no one else can understand the thing that's happening to you, and that because no one else has ever done it. And it turns out like, no, actually, this is something that like all of us have gone through.

And when you sort of start to realize this and the kind of solidarity that they could be built based on this collective well of experience we've all gone through, and how it can be you know, changed by actual actions of a bunch of people working together. It changes things.

So I think I think it is in a lot of ways political in the sense that like, in order to have politics, you have to have sort of like collective assemblages of people who fucking understand each other and to understand that they're not alone, that they can do things totally. And this is part of how you get to that.

this shit out as she goes yep. And I wanted it to feel rough and like ad hoc y because like that's how it is for a lot of people. That's how it was, like.

We'll get aired one one day. We already can't go there for our coverage of Kurdish gorilla movements. Very good stuff. You'll find many, many such things, as I think, But like one of the interesting persons about this is that Grace is like not political, right, and most of the people in this aren't. And there's kind of a divide between the politics knowers who are like the more uh you know, who are like okay, yeah, like we are

like the queer kids. We are like the activist kids, and then like the you know, like the ballplayers, and then Grace sort of fits more into the like not even more into Grace isn't like a politics person. Grace is a like, hey, like transphobia is bad, we shouldn't do that, but also like just wants to fucking go kick a go kick a rock between two posts. So yeah, can you talk about like how you sort of decided to make her just be like kid who doesn't follow politics.

But or also we know that her friend tab who is Bori, has been like educating her on like Puerto Rican independence, which was like, which was a like that was a very funny line, right because because Grace is just like dumb as shit white kid from the suburbs.

But so like inasmuch as she's like piecing together the person she is bit by bit, she's also kind of like piecing what she thinks about the world together along with that in terms of like most of the straight white players on the football team like do not have like basically don't have politics. There's a scene where one of my minor characters is like, yo, I just figured out that, like trans phobia is bad, and I loved

I fucking loved writing that. But like, I imagine that up until recently, Grace was exactly like this and just like just like yep, I'm a middle lower middle class white straight boy, air quotes on all of that, she

never had any kind of like thought about that. That does not reflect what was going on in my life when I was a teenager, because I was a very annoying oh like me and a friend of mine, Chavon, got in trouble for putting a Bernie Sanders twenty sixteen sticker on her locker, because that's the kind of shit we were doing in high school in twenty fifteen. So like, I was like very much had sort of like vacant liberal,

middle class kid politics, but like Grace Grace is. I imagine that like later in her life she kind of has more political thoughts in her head. But I also kind of imagine that her brain works like I don't know if you've played Disco Elysium, but I kind of imagine. I kind of imagine Grace has a like thought cabinet, and it's like she has like she has like two slots in it. Oh, she just like cannot hold that many ideas in her brain at once. So she's she is in all aspects of her life trying her vest

and trying to get better. And yeah, I want to like I feel like a lot of contemporary YA that comes out these days, a lot of the kids have like overly coherent politics. I was like, nah, nah, I wanted to write a kid who has like good intentions but has no idea what she's doing.

football politics, let's talk about the politics of football. Because one of the things I think is fascinating about, you know, the way you're sort of talking about this, and the way that Grace like runs into this, and the way that this is just like a thing that happens in the US, which is that like giant portions of the entire US economy and like like structural elements of the US like education system from like the ground up, and like all of these sort of contracting services, like massive

portions of like how every single part of the education system from like fucking like middle school through college are

all bent around this game, yep. And I think one of the things that happens there is that like the kind of like default ambient politics, it is very conservative, and I think in ways you know, are very easy to understand, and that when people tend to talk about this, they immediately go like, well, yeah, so, like you know, like the left is talking about football it's like you're talking about the militarism, which is like, yeah, I mean they're fucking flying jets over games like there, we're not

even in wars anymore. In terms of like US ground troops deployed, Like why the fuck are their troops showing up on the field. There's like the cult of masculinity stuff. There's you know, I mean, like there's been some engagement now with the racial politics of it with Kaepernick. People realize like, holy shit, wait, there's been like stuff happening here for ages, and you know, when you get sort

of the masculinity politics. But there's I think a lot of stuff here that we don't talk about on the left in terms of like the class dynamics of this and the way that football I'm just like functions in a lot of very very weird ways in terms of like sucking together this weird pool of a bunch of like non white working class kids and like, I don't know, fucking see, if I knew ball, I could I could pull an example off the top of my head of

like some some quarterback prospect you'd spent these family had spent like two million dollars on like personal trainers for him.

like football, so it happened. Man, like most of my earliest friendships with black kids with Hispanic kids was like all through football, and like it is a like very interesting sort of like class and racial melting pot at least at like I went to a like pretty big suburban middle and high school, but like lots of lots of very different kinds of people ended up at my school, and lots of very different kinds of people ended up playing football, And like you're gonna get a more diverse

slice of that student population on a football team than you will on the fucking yearbook committee or in like school band, class government, whatever. All of that came very naturally to me in terms of writing this book, where like I've ended up with a book that's like quite diverse. But I didn't really do that on purpose. I just kind of like, who are the kinds of kids who

end up playing football? And it's like everyone you have like Poorish kids like Grace, and then you have like Ritish kids like Ahmed or Dre in my book, who like I very much wanted to like show that, like maybe one of the reasons that Grace is going to end up having a more coherent politics is because, like she has friends of different backgrounds that she might not if she had not ended up playing this this like

fucked up, evil, violent game. To be clear, Yeah, I mean, I think any football fan who is honest with themselves and has his politics that are not evil has a very complicated relationship to the game for a like variety of reasons. Because it like chews up people's brains and there's that, but there's also like implied conservative politics. There's also a big factor here is that high school football, even at a public school like mine, the religion is all over it, baby, like all over it.

fucking everything is God. Like every single time someone holds a thing in front of a player there there's like at least three lines of like all of this is possible because of God, and like someone's like it's like that the only place you see people regularly saying Christ is King where they're not also like holding an ar to like a non white person's head, you know. So so that there's all of this like really really conservative

religious shit. But then also there's like a union, yes that everyone's in and it's like a large like I mean, it's not that powerful. And there's there's weirdness there too, because you get to see all of the really interesting dynamics of unions that you don't really get outside of kind of like I mean, like I guess like SAG kind of has this, but it's this union in this place where one the owners have like an unbelievable amount of control, like a hideous amount of power, and they

can turn through people really quickly. They have you know, these are some of the richest people in the world. And then also secondly there's there's this like marketization force that's happening where you know, you get to see in miniature the way that capitalism has like moved to to sort of deal with with unions, to deal with sort of the class movements of the twentieth century, which is that like they're also trying to turn all of these kids like into entrepreneurs.

But again it makes like I remember, like I'm not on Twitter much anymore, but like in the like early Elon days, you started getting Twitter ads and these were sixteen and seventeen year old high school football players.

from your time as a amateur college athlete. And this was the ironclad system for like seventy years, and then it kind of got like destroyed overnight. Yeah, when the NCAA finally legalizes players profiting off of their name, image, and likeness, so that means that they could sign like

endorsement deals. And when this was first made a thing in twenty twenty one, it mostly manifested in like the coldest Crawford for the Nebraska football team is filming a ad for a local air conditioning company because his name is Coldest And it was sort of like very like quaint and cute at first, but then nil collectives got going, which are these I don't even know how to how to like God described nil collective is these are like

investment groups that operate independently of universities that pool resources and then pay players for like extremely scant public appearances so that they can say that they're just profiting off of name, image and likeness, but in reality they exist as a way to pay college football players without paying them via schools. Now there is the house settlement happening right now, which colleges will soon be able to probably maybe God who knows, will soon be able to directly

pay college athletes a certain amount of money. Lord knows where that's going. Like this stuff is all changing at like lightnings at like yeah, so like we have just have gone from like nobody gets paid for anything to like we are in fucking like gilded age robber bear and shit where like yeah, because none of this shit is regulated, schools or an aisle collectives will go back on agreements and everything's negotiated every year. They're like like

it's it's a fucking mess. Yeah in the college game right now. So I mean all of that makes the like NFL having a kind of shitty union look a lot better.

but now it's it's it's been increasing shows for me into like you're selling like the image of yourself. You're selling your identity, you're selling like yeah, you know, you're selling your personality. You're selling as much of like and this is this is what name image likeness is.

for like this nebulous image of yourself. So you get all these people who like are are you know, you're forced to turn all of yourself into an object for consumption, and like I think that's the thing with like fucking I don't know, That's what I'm doing on this show right to a large extent, like I am like the Asian transgender and like, yeah, obviously, like all of this is like research, but it's also you know, this is what like brand and identity is, and this has had

these like seismic impacts on the entire global economy. Like I talked about this in an episode on when I talked about Temu, but like Tamu is literally the product of

this happening with Chinese farmers. We're like Chinese farmers were doing this like farm social media thing, and so almost like holy shit, what if we like become these things where they were selling food but they're also just selling that like the identity brand of like themselves as farmers, and Timbu was like, well a PDD, which is the Chinese company, was like, what if we just brought all of these things together in one spot so you could

just do directed like consumer sales through it. And now that's like the entire fucking economy is just this morass of like selling every single part of yourself and I don't know, like I'm wondering how much of yourself did you have to do you have to like leave in a book like this, and how much of it can you like kind of like keep away from the market.

very particular way. You're supposed to You're you're supposed to make your cute little canva graphics, uh, and like talking about your character and engage with like prompt posts on Instagram and you know whatever social media du jore And like, my personal experience is a little irregular because I do have some amount of like sports, Twitter, niche micro celebrity posting, so like I'm not out here making promotional tiktoks for one of the boys. That was like something that was

very important to me. Was like, oh, I'm not going to be doing that, thank god. Fuck that shit. Yeah. And the way that authors have to promote themselves and turn themselves into brands is like a whole other can of worms.

Because I think a lot of people react to women's fiction this way, because I think a lot of people subconsciously have a hard time believing that like women have interior lives and can like imagine things, you know, Like, I think a lot of people assume that authors are always writing about themselves and writing about the people in their lives, and uh, I mean, I'm writing about experiences that I have had similar ones too, but like naw dog, that is not how this works.

I think it was Columbine. It's like some mass shooting that was like a Korean kid did and his friends were like, hey, you're Asian right about this, Oh God, and he you know, for a bit he was like he was like duh, Like he was like he was like the guy who was like the big like Asian American, like this is like the literary thinker. He was like

interviewing Aaron Schwartz. He was doing like profiles of a bunch of like interesting people, and then he just became this like incredibly boring, bog standard reactionary and he became one of these A very common kind of person who you experience on the right is like someone who's experienced who's like understanding of race comes from like watching sports where they're like there are black players in basketball and there's a bunch of them, and because of that, this

means that like actually black people like overrepresented and like as a class, they're like privilege or whatever the fuck because there's just like a bunch of black basketball players and I don't know, I think it's like there's like a really interesting intersection here of like the way that people understand politics as just like politics are just like the thing that I see on my screen when I'm watching football, and how we have to sort of like just deal with that shit and deal with the sort

of micro identity formation that is real but also isn't like a depiction of what the world is.

you know, trim et cetera. But like, originally it had a lot more of that stuff, and there were like interstitial snippets from a fictional sort of like football podcaster guy who is like Pat McAfee and all of the like barstool former athlete podcasters, Yeah, in a blender, and he like he was this like really pathetic former like special team or linebacker who just like keeps reliving the

fucking glory days. Yeah. Eventually I just had to like refocus and like, yeah, yeah, bring that conflict closer to home with like school administration's kind of shitty, and like there are plenty of dudes on the football team who also suck. So I kind of like left it in via some like shitty tweets that you see, or you get a lot of it, like indirectly you can imagine what is happening on the fucking Pat McAfee show.

like really like form up a drill time. This is not the world that I thought I was gonna write my stupid little football book. Yeah, and like have it emerge into a lot of people are say that this book is very timely, and I'm like, dog, this is a Biden administration sept for him through.

Gray's Abel. You got Jalen Milroe, who Jalen Milroe isn't good at football right now, but a sports media friend named Derek klass And put it that he's He's the kind of player you want to bet on and then be wrong about, just just because he's fun, because he's a like legit, actual like special athlete, special with the ball in his hand. He's cool. I really like Jaylen Milroe. But you also drafted later on. You took Tory Horden and Ricky White, who are two of my favorite sort

of like small school wide receivers in the draft. You took Damien Martinez, who is a running back who I think could end up being a lot better than someone who's drafted in the seventh round would indicate. And also you took a full back. You took Robbie Oates. That's great.

Smith good. No, oh god, So that's unfortunate.

my home bookstore, So there's that. Hell. Yeah, but yeah, my website is a Victoria dot monster and all my links are there.

want to do. I think in a lot of ways, my book is about how we ask teenagers to be braver than they should be, and I think that's bullshit. So I'm not gonna put it on. You have as much fun as you can, like ball if you can, but do what makes you happy and what feels safe to you. Is like really, all I've got, Like, you know, just have fun while you're able to as a child is like yeah.

able to be kids, that shit's on you. Yeah, all of the rest of you who listen to the show, If you are also like the fucking one bazillion trans people listen to the show, this is like a bit less on you than it is on fucking everyone else. But yeah, but the best time do I started organizing was like five years ago. The second best time is right now, and the best time after that is tomorrow. So go fucking build a world where trans kids can be kids and fall out.