Dear friends,
I’ve been wanting to share a talk I gave recently. This was written in late March for the CityLit Festival in Baltimore, as part of a panel titled “Queer Possibility: Writing Catastrophe and Imagining What Comes Next.” Some notes follow the talk.
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“On Ponies and Possibility: Reflections on ‘AB-469: A Po(r)ny-ography in Three Parts’”
I thought I might take this panel as an opportunity to reflect on a short story I wrote in 2015/16 and recently republished in Slug. I wrote the story in response to the spate of anti-trans bathroom bills that Republican state legislators were proposing at the time. Like many of us, I’ve been returning to that moment in this present one, in which we are seeing an even more comprehensive – and more horrifyingly successful – coordinated attack against trans people. I want to revisit the origins and history of the story as a way to think about queer fantasy as resistance and comedy as creative response to the ongoing-ness of anti-trans legislative violence.
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On November 19, 2015, I attended the public hearing for AB-469, a Wisconsin education bill that stipulated that students must use the bathrooms and changing rooms according to the sex they were assigned at birth. The bill was part of the wave of anti-trans bathroom bills considered in state legislatures between 2013-2016. During that time similar bills were introduced in 24 states; only one was enacted, HB2 in North Carolina, where the portion of the law relating to bathroom restrictions was repealed a year later.
The public hearing for the Wisconsin bill was held at the Capitol building in Madison, where I lived at the time, and I was one of hundreds of Wisconsinites who showed up in opposition. Those of us in the overflow room watched the livestream on large HDTV screens. The vibe was so lively I had to remind myself we were not watching Drag Race. Groans and biting humor for the bill sponsors, cheers for the Democratic state assemblywoman whose practical questions about implementation were delivered with thinly masked contempt.
I had started taking T a few months earlier. Though I personally hadn’t had to deal with public school bathrooms and locker rooms in more than a decade, I was intimately familiar with the anxiety such spaces can produce. I had been avoiding public locker rooms for years; had not been to a pool in nearly a decade. If I needed to change at the gym, I used the single-stall bathroom and I waited to shower at home.
I should not have been surprised at how angry the sponsoring legislators made me. Many of their comments revealed a level of ignorance around basic facts of sex and gender that would have been pitiable if it weren’t so willful and weaponized. But in the relative safety of the queer and trans energy in the room, it was easy to access the scene’s ludicrousness—though I would not say that any of us were not also taking it seriously.
I was struck by a statement made by the Republican assemblyman who explained the bill’s origins. He had been talking (he told us) with a young cis woman about the prospect of her sharing the locker room with young trans women. He had asked her if she would be uncomfortable changing next to someone with “totally different body parts.”
The question stuck in my mind. Yes, I understood what he meant. He meant that a penis and a vagina—words he was reluctant to say—are (arguably) “totally different” genres of genitals—another word he was reluctant to say—and that this difference can be uncomfortable for young people who have grown up in largely sex-segregated spaces. But taken literally, the question struck me as absurd. Wasn’t it the case that everyone’s different body parts are totally different from everyone else’s? For example, his penis (presumably he had one) and the penis of his co-sponsor (presumably he had one, too) were also – totally different from one another, belonging as they did to totally different bodies? I supposed it came down to how we were defining “totally” and “different.”
I wondered if he knew, for example, that for most people who have grown up in the U.S., a public changing room is a totally different body part from the idea of comfortable space?
Or if he knew that sexual violence against young women is a totally different body part from trans people peeing into ceramic bowls?
Or conversely: Did he know that the cis youth he was ostensibly protecting might actually be or become the trans youth he was targeting, and therefore be totally the same?
Come to think of it – do total sameness and total difference ever actually exist?
As I listened, I became preoccupied with these questions of sameness, difference—and bodies. This led me to drift into fantasy and I conjured up the beginnings of what would become a short story named after the bill. The title is “AB-469: A Po(r)ny-ography in Three Parts.”
Part I is a locker room scene featuring two teens, Trish and Pammy. As they are changing into their gym uniforms, Pammy notices that they have totally different belly buttons: Pammy’s is an “innie” and Trish’s is an “outie” — Pammy asks if she can touch it. The scene escalates into a quite silly but dare I say hot intimate encounter involving many banal observations about the characters’ totally different body parts. When Trish gets embarrassed and leaves, Pammy is left alone to contemplate her difference. “Is it wrong, she wonders, to be curious about someone else’s totally different body parts? No. … She just doesn’t belong here, in high school. … She feels always this strong yearning for … somewhere else.”
Part II transports us to Equestria, the setting of the popular kids show My Little Ponies: Friendship Is Magic. The unicorn Rarity is at a public hearing where she is speaking in favor of a changing room bill that would segregate the ponies according to who is a Unicorn and who is a Pegasus. “It all began this school year,” Rarity tells us, “when one of the Pegasus ponies received accommodations to use the Unicorn changing room. At the time, I was as receptive to this as all of the other Unicorns. Why should we be threatened by any pony’s different body parts? As far as we were concerned, Fluttershy was one of us.” Well. Things quickly shifted after Rarity and Fluttershy fell in love and Rarity became insane with jealousy! After seeing Fluttershy with Twilight Sparkle, Rarity shoved Twilight into the mirror portal. Now Rarity is offering her tale of betrayal in support of this anti-Pegasus bill.
Each Friendship Is Magic episode ends with Twilight Sparkle writing a letter to Princess Celestia — Part III of my story is thus a letter from Twilight to the princess, reporting that when Rarity shoved her through the portal, she found herself in a strange locker room, where she encountered Pammy from Part I. Immediately attracted to each other, Pammy and Twilight explore each other’s bodies and their totally different body parts. Twilight brings Pammy back to Equestria with her, where Pammy becomes her true unicorn self.
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I wrote this story quickly and surely, and I found joy and pleasure in writing it. I had in mind a special issue of the journal SPECS [then edited by Kristen Arnett!] – the theme was UNICORNS. I submitted it and it was accepted.
Before sending in final revisions, I asked some friends for feedback. One of them expressed some concern—she suggested that the story might be too radical for the current climate, that we should first de-hystericize and normalize bathroom spaces for trans people before turning them into pro-sex spaces of sensual discovery. I appreciated what she was saying, and for the most part agreed. But for whatever the case, that was not the story I had written. Her comments helped me clarify my intention, which was to recast the locker room as a space defined not by queer and trans anxiety but by queer and trans desire.
The arguments made by the bill sponsors seemed founded on the assumption that these spaces are asexual straight spaces. That cis girls’ bodies are all “the same,” and so neither discomfort nor desire exist there. The women’s locker room is eroticized all the time, of course, usually for a male gaze – but the queer gaze finds its way in. What would it be like if the locker room were not only benign but a space of queer possibility and transformation? I made a few revisions and sent it in.
The story was published in March 2016, around the time the bill failed to pass. Like most things published in literary magazines, it received little to no attention and has lived a generally quiet existence.
The reactions it has received the few times I’ve read it out have told their own stories. Once, the piece killed. Once, it bombed. Once, it received a confused but not disinterested reception.
When it killed, it was the fall of 2018. We had a lot to worry about a year and a half into the Trump era—but bathroom bills were no longer an active concern. The event was at a makeshift speakeasy in Bushwick with a mostly queer audience; it was nighttime with nighttime energy. From start to finish, people were closely attuned. They got it, they loved it, I loved them. We had a thing. Afterwards, a friend in the audience said it seemed like collective catharsis.
In large part because of this success, I read it again at a university event a week later. But in this new context it bombed magnificently. I was a guest judge for a student contest, and I had been asked to read my work before presenting the awards. The audience was mostly undergraduates, some of them with their parents. I knew a page in that the story was making most people uncomfortable. Which may have been a worthwhile project, but I really just wanted to be loved.
The last time I read it was last year, at a bookstore in Manhattan, and it just didn’t quite work. Perhaps the period of bathroom bills was too far in the rear view, or this next phase of anti-trans legislation was already too close and too much. Or my energy was off, or I didn’t properly contextualize it.
I teach a course on comedy so I think about humor a lot. In her book Comedy Against Work, scholar Madeline Lane-McKinley compares comedy and speculative fiction. “Like science fiction,” she writes, “comedy can give us glimpses into other worlds…. Comedy can take what appears most inescapable and unchanging about the world and help us to see it, instead, for the joke that it is—however brutal.” (8-9)
Are now and then: totally different body parts? If the bill had passed in 2015, I’m not sure how I would feel about this story. I feel disinclined to read it in the present, such as it is, which is why I’m reading about it instead.
But it was written to help us see the joke. It was written to reach for queer joy in the face of attack, and to capture something of what it felt like to be in that overflow room, showing up in collective resistance.
/End talk.
I didn’t have the space to mention two other stories written around the same time as my pony story that took much different approaches: Charlie Jane Anders’ “Don’t Press Charges and I won’t Sue” (2017) and Ryka Aoki’s “The Gift” (in Meanwhile, Elsewhere, 2017). Anders’ story is a brutal dystopian horror story about enforced detransition surgery in a near future world. Aoki’s offers an alternate reality in which transness is normalized and benign. Though my tendency towards self-abasement compels me to want to diminish my story in comparison to these others, I will resist this compulsion. All three responses enlist fantasy to provide a range of potentially useful ways of thinking and feeling through a painful and alarming cultural moment.
In the six weeks since writing and giving this talk, anti-trans laws have increasingly claimed ground. I can and cannot believe it. It is horrifying, it is enraging, and it is dumb. I know that I’m tired and want to burrow into the ground. I also want to pay close attention, record, and resist.
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The rest of CityLit was great. The vibe was local while inviting the rest of us in. My co-panelists – Rhane Alexander, Tonee Moll, and Unique Robinson – dazzled. I showed up to the “Writers Room” to dole out advice to… no one… but the same thing happened to Carmen. I adventured north to Red Emma’s, the anarchist bookstore, and enjoyed a night to myself in a cushy hotel room, watching Decision to Leave and eating chocolate cake. Just before checking out, I ran into artist/curator/writer Ariel Goldberg in the lobby, in town for a different event. Then back to Brooklyn, where I’ve been ever since.
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News/updates:
I have a new short essay, “Night Milk,” up at Michigan Quarterly Review, reflecting on Maurice Sendak’s milk-centric children’s book In the Night Kitchen. It’s part of the SomaFlights special issue, co-edited by Vidhu Aggarwal (who founded the above-mentioned journal SPECS!) and Petra Kuppers.
I’m teaching another iteration of Experiments in Point of View, this time for the Work Room (RIP Catapult Classes) – it starts Tuesday 5/16. A few spots are still open; partial and full scholarships are available.
In two weeks I will be in Nebraska City for a one-month residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. I’m seeking friends and contacts in the Omaha/Nebraska City area – know anyone? Please be in touch!
Yours,
Megan
Love this and especially turning the space from fear to desire. Thank you
I love that you're still fascinated by & working with bathrooms. I was writing about the politics of the bathroom (criticism, not fiction) in 2021 because Halberstam touched upon bathroom panic in a chapter in Female Masculinity, even citing literary references at the time. They said the public bathroom is "a domestic space beyond the home that comes to represent domestic order, or a parody of it, out in the world," which I think about often. It's a space of anxiety and caricature.
The bathroom problem also has an interesting racial history that we can tie into the gender & sexuality (and sexual) history. During the abolishment of Jim Crow laws there were white segragationalists who were using the same rhetoric (about black men preying on white women) that is now being used against trans women preying on cis women.
Lee Edelman also has some interesting writings on the bathroom, but much more tied to cruising/homosexual anxiety than gender performance. There's a somewhat recent book by Sheila L. Cavanagh about Queering Bathrooms that you might also be interested in.