[“Imogen: Yeah, and I mean, I’m overstating it when I say I’m over it. It’s been really valuable and important to me to be building trans community. I’ve started a number of trans groups in different parts of the United States, and yeah. One of the things that was so rad about getting to publish Nevada with Topside Press, which was like, all trans people, was that they got it, right? The goal is not to get rich and famous. The goal is to get this into the hands of trans people who might like it or benefit from it or feel seen by it, I guess, most importantly. And so, if you’ve looked at the old interviews…. I can’t. But I remember talking a lot about the thing that really felt new, I guess, to me about Nevada was being like, “No no, I’m gonna write this for a trans audience rather than a cis audience.”
Because there was at the time, and I’m sure you still see this, but at the time it was very much like, if there was a trans character in a book then the narrative would fucking screech to a halt so that they could explain what hormones do and whether you know, if estrogen does anything to your voice, or like, what penile inversion surgery—or you know, it just felt like you could not tell a story about a fuckin’ trans person, and if they showed up they were either tragic, dying-in-a-gutter figures, or angelic… angels, I guess. [Both laugh] And so the idea really was, you know, let’s write this for a trans audience. And now to be like, oh, this thing that assumed some level of knowledge is suddenly going out to this wider audience which does not, like I said before, doesn’t have the same…I don’t know. I was gonna say, “which doesn’t have the same context,” but at this point, I guess people in general know more about trans people than they did 15 years ago, right? So like…. [Laughs] Are you kind of saying yes and no?
Tuck: I think the ones who are picking up Nevada does, yeah. I’m thinking about, a lot of my job outside of this is talking to cis people about gender, and I’m like, “A lot of them still don’t know any of it,” but they probably aren’t reading Nevada, so, I guess that’s fair.
