My book: Binary Talk

I wrote a book called Binary Talk. It’s about Leandra, a young trans person discovering their identity concerning their gender and their language, Spanish, after a bunch of radical college students and an attractive agender person rock Leandra’s world and show them they aren’t the girl their best friend Jimena always thought they were.

Jacket copy (the stuff that goes on the back or the inside flap):
Leandra and her best friend since forever, Jimena, are determined that their friendship is not going to fade when Leandra goes to college. After all, Leandra’s going to be a Spanish major, and their mutual fluency in the language is one of the things that keeps them together. But when Leandra gets there, she meets students who identify as transgender—and quickly figures out that there are words for her growing hatred of everything female about herself from her body to feminine words in both languages, including Jimena’s pet name querida. This discovery of a new subculture that she may, by no choice of her own, be part of, unseats Leandra, and her struggle to regain her understanding of who she is may cost her Spanish—and Jimena.

Check out the character bios!
Read all my posts about it, most recent first!
Check it out on Tumblr!

Why?
For those of you who don’t speak any Spanish, all nouns are either feminine or masculine. La mesa (the table), la abuela (the grandmother), and la mano (the hand) are all feminine. El mapa (the map), el abuelo (the grandfather), and el lápiz (the pencil) are all masculine. And adjectives match. La mesa sucia (the dirty table), but el mapa sucio (the dirty map). Spanish speakers don’t use these to mean that tables are female or pencils are male, so most of the time gender is just part of the language. The trouble comes in when you’re talking about people. Talking about people in the third person comes with the same problems as in English. “She’s really funny.” Cringe, goes the trans boy. In Spanish: “Ella es muy chistosa.” Wrong pronoun AND wrong adjective ending. Now think about how in Spanish, that cringe extends even when you’re being spoken to. “You’re really funny” becomes “Eres muy chistosa” or “Eres muy chistoso” depending on whether you’re a guy or a gal.

Finally, think about how badly it works if you’re genderqueer, agender, etc.—let me sum all of those and their relatives under gender nonbinary. “This person is really funny” is still gendered. And there is no useful equivalent to ‘they’, nor, worst of all, any ending to the adjective that doesn’t gender a person. Even if you use a shortened name as a pronoun: “KC es muy chistoso. Chistosa. Chistoso/a. Chistos@.” Both those last two are in relatively common use as a shortening in print, but a) can’t be pronounced (@ is pronounced like o, which completely defeats the purpose) and b) still implies binary.

So naturally, I came up with two characters. Main character, Leandra, grew up with she/her pronouns and a best friend, Jimena. Jimena and Leandra met in kindergarten, and have been inseparable ever since. Jimena’s family is Puerto Rican, and so Jimena is bilingual, and indeed, tends to switch to Spanish when she gets excited. Naturally, Leandra started picking up Spanish as well. Noting this, Leandra’s parents arranged for Spanish lessons from a very young age, and Leandra grew up with a fascination for the language and pretty near fluent in it. Leandra and Jimena grew up considering it ‘their’ language, and switch to it whenever they want to have a private conversation in public.

Then, Leandra finds out what it means to be transgender, gets the yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for feeling, and suddenly Jimena doesn’t know how to speak ‘their’ language to Leandra anymore. Think how tricky it can be to suddenly switch all your pronouns when a friend comes out—now double that to include your adjectives. To top it off, Jimena’s got the whole Puerto Rican cultural
background informing her values—how well do they accept trans people? It’s tricky enough to switch to masculine words, but then Leandra decides what they really are is genderqueer, and suddenly there isn’t any language to use. Part of the story is choosing first a masculine-coded name, then a neutral-coded name for Leandra, and it’s Jimena’s idea to pick names that mean the same thing as ‘Leandra’.

ETA, 11/17/19: Due to the lack of response from, well, most people, I haven't been pursuing this project any further. I only got fifteen preorders, which doesn't bode well for being able to sell it, and no publisher other than vanity and hybrid publishers want it. One wrote back to tell me that the concept was cool, but the writing not strong enough. I put a lot of time and energy into writing this, and a lot of time and energy trying to market it, and there's no emotional payoff for that in the praise of three people. I'm happier doing visual art, where I don't feel the need to make other people like my work.