Synopsis
Naomi Soloveitchik has taken the first steps towards medical transition and with them, the womanhood she hopes to embody. However, she does not really understand what that means for her relationships, both to friends and lovers, but also to her own body. She wrestles with the more masculinized forms of womanhood she had admired and aspired to all her life, asking herself if it is possible for a trans woman to be that kind of woman. As she attempts to find her body and her body’s place in this new, exciting, and at points terrifying world she encounters a cast of characters both from her immediate past, who haunt her and leave her wondering what their roles served to do to her, and new ones who she must learn if she can trust enough to love.
In addition to the central story, also included are a small collection of poems and a brief essay on trans femme butch identity.
Praise for Reverse Tomboy
“Sweet, poignant, and achingly honest, Reverse Tomboy is a gorgeously-sketched portrait of trans loneliness and pleasure.”
- Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt, Cuckoo, and Black Flame
“Reverse Tomboy opens with a moment of ekphrasis, in the whelming domestic soundscape of a laundromat, in a perfectly mundane and usual scene of dissociation and the impossibility of reading another sentence when there's so much stuff to process right in front of you; Naomi's thoughts travel, as she lovingly side-eyes rituals of youth, of second puberty, of too-small dating scenes, and undergoes less a journey of 'transition' than a journey of 'ease,' to learn leisure. An extremely personable writing voice, with moments of various joy — overwhelming joy, a stopping joy, a we-must-sit-in-this-joy — cut against usual romantic woes and the sense a fuller life, a social life, can lead to total ease, the opportunity to be newly still. Allusive and sweet and insightful with no caricature bogeymen or manufactured hand-wringing necessary, as AA brings an incredible millesimal fineness to bear on the Bildungsroman to fill out its every nook and cranny instead. In turns light as Hemingway and as funny and sharp as Torrey Peters, Reverse Tomboy is a remarkably brisk and exacting novel of small and sure steps toward grace in the garden of untamed harmony that is made by trans people alive and well in the public sphere.”
- Benjamin C. Dugdale, author of The Repoetic: After Saint Pol Roux
“Reverse Tomboy offers an intimate exploration of the lives of trans people today. Following in the footsteps of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Imogen Binnie's Nevada, Autogyniphiles Anonymous shares a semi-autobiographical narrative of how one becomes oneself. Wedged in the intersection of trans literature and philosophy, readers won't be able to put down the hilariously scathing — and satisfying — critique of the gender roles our society still clings to.”
- Eli Erlick, author of Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
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