NNRM #7: Darryl

by Jackie Ess

"You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys that fuck my wife. But sure, okay, I'm the weird one."

Darryl Cook is babygirl.

Few art forms are as hallowed in trans media as the eggfic. An eggfic is a coming-of-gender story, where the protagonist "egg" goes from being an unaware boob to self-actualized and (typically) having boobs. Usually, a tremendous about of cringe and a comedy of errors accompanies this transformation, as well as a thoroughly unrealistic amount of People Being Nice To The Trans Girl, but hey, what's fiction without a bit of wish fulfillment?

Babygirl begins as a proud, yet meek, cuck. He is thrilled to have a parade of well-hung men to come fuck his wife in front of him. He lives his life in one long fugue state, interrupted only by the session where he asked the cucker(?) to literally kill him. Babygirl learns to pay attention to his own feelings, and starts changing his presentation. The book proceeds, with a skeletal thriller plot in the backdrop of babygirl realizing he's trans.

But is he trans? He doesn't ever change pronouns - in fact, he vehemently denies being trans. But If you look at his behavior there's, as the kids say, no cisgender explanation that exists. But is trans an umbrella term, or a concrete identity? Who decides who gets to be cis anyways?

In some ways, it was easier to be trans before the proliferation of the internet age. Sure, information was scarce. My mind was blown, when at the age of 12, an AskJeeves search introduced me to the word "transgender"^[1]. A hostile home environment meant my only connections to those who saw me had to be redialed any time a phone call came in. But there wasn't a reactionary movement yet; the microscope of society hadn't come to focus on trans people yet.

Identity politics was always there, but it calcified around trans identities in the 2010s, as we passed the transgender tipping point, and the neoliberalism (and neoconservatism) bubbled up in response. With social and legacy media galvanazing group labels, the pressure to sublimate yourself into a label has never been stronger.

Are you a transwoman? A trans woman? trans* woman? Woman, womyn, transsexual, transgender, trans gender, transgendered? To engage is to invite critique, to worry that the difference of a single keystroke will invite the collective wrath of thousands of people who will never even see your face.

For someone who grew up in the old world, the new one is confusing, arbitrary, and more than a little terrifying.

Under the cloak of humor, this book interrogates these ideas. Babygirl's endearing self-centeredness, and the absurdity of a forty-something nepobaby failson with a wife he can't fuck and a son he doesn't even think about, struggling to figure out who he really is, doesn't wear out early.

It ends abruptly, but I just laughed at getting metatextually cucked out of a denouement.

This is eggfic has a lot more meat on its bones than I thought, and I'll be chewing on it for a while.

4/5

Ebook available on Kindle and Apple Books and whatever, paperback available at Clash Books.