Wading into the morass of gender ideology via a book review; please don't come at me, though

a review of Shannon Thrace's forthcoming memoir, "18 Months"

I was sent a copy of 18 Months to review. All opinions are my own. Is that what I’m supposed to say? I don’t know. I’m just a person.

18 Months will be available on Amazon on October 16.

At its core, Shannon Thrace’s 18 Months is simply a memoir of a marriage unraveling.

Even if you’re fortunate in your marriage, as I am, you’re sure to know and love many people who have experienced separation and divorce—it’s impossible not to. This is not a new kind of tragedy. The stages of decline are so similar: one partner does or says something offhandedly that doesn’t feel quite right; more of that happens, until the partners realize they’re not talking about things they’re just talking around them; eventually they’re saying nothing, maybe even speaking different languages. And the center cannot hold. The stages of grief are also similar: trying harder, hoping to Do the Right Things to Fix This, realizing that in being people who are trying to fix this you’re not being yourselves, a breaking point, sorrow, anger, sorrow again.

What makes 18 Months unique—and culturally relevant, and challenging—is the reason for the unraveling of this particular relationship. Over the course of a year and a half, Shannon’s husband, Jamie, turns into her wife, before becoming her ex.

This memoir is frank about sex and sexuality, which can be uncomfortable, especially for a person (like me) who is what the kids these days call “cisheteronormative”: unbothered by my sex (biologically female), gender (how I present myself to the world, on the spectrum of feminine to masculine), and sexuality (I’m in a long-term monogamous heterosexual marriage).

For Thrace, no cloud of moral judgment about sex and sexuality looms above the narrative: when the book begins we soon learn that Shannon is bisexual, has previously dabbled in polyamory, and is not opposed to kink or pornography. Yet that sexual openness does not seem to intrude on every part of her life. She likes country style, approaches nature with joy, lives in the Midwest, has a job in programming. You know, she’s, like, a whole person. Whole personhood is at the heart of this memoir.

When Shannon’s husband expresses a glancing sexual interest in cross-dressing, she’s fine with it. When he begins embracing feminine-coded clothing all the time, she supports him—though he insists (to the world, via his blog) that he’s a man, he just enjoys gender bending. Still, when he decides to change his pronouns to she/her, Shannon is even the one to break the news to their family and friends. (So from here onward, I’ll refer to Jamie as “she/her.”)

The unconventional gender expression is not a problem for Shannon, and is not, in fact, The Problem. It is a fracture point which, combined with job insecurity and a lot of time online, sends Jamie on a radical trajectory of questioning—and remaking—every aspect of her identity.

“I always thought good mental health meant integrating the parts of the self,” Thrace writes at a point when Jamie has become deeply depressed. “The past and present, the noble and the embarrassing, the body and the mind—not fracturing them further. Healing from the regrettable, not disavowing it.”

Thrace doesn’t spend much time explicating Jamie’s online presence, but we know that Jamie has a blog, which begins as a diary of cross-dressing then morphs into an account of her transition, and along the way picks up the thread of political activism—or what sometimes passes for it these days: arguing with strangers online. Thrace doesn’t seem to have a political agenda here—though I am certain detractors will claim she does—because her focus is on the real, what’s happening in the actual world, in their actual home, to their actual relationship.

Jamie becomes highly insecure about her body, though previously no such insecurity existed. She agonizes over clothing choices and outfits, when throughout life she’d been known for her ranging, easy style. She spends a lot of time observing herself in mirrors (one scene involving a practiced wrist tilt is representative), studying various body parts and finding them wanting. As she makes ever more permanent changes, she spends more time crying, even as she claims she’s becoming her true self. Eventually Jamie turns completely inward—and online-ward—with language (political catchphrases, redefining words, etc.) becoming a major barrier to her relationship with Shannon, what the writer Michelle Jia describes as “the lexical mind [busying] itself with talk and its attendant fantasies.”

Shannon desperately does all she can to support Jamie, but no amount of support is enough. “The bulldozer destroys but it doesn’t create. So it is with your corset, your razor, your gaff. They whittle away your waist, your beard, the bulge between your legs. They make you less of who you are. But they can’t make you more,” Thrace writes, in the memoir’s affecting first-person narrative style. These entreaties have no effect on Jamie’s mindset.

If anyone is the villain—though Thrace doesn’t identify one—it’s the online ideological community Jamie joined, a funhouse of distress where she spent hours every day. This “community” offered a warped mirror into which Jamie gazed, seeing not the whole person that she was, but instead only her constituent parts, which suddenly and upsettingly appear not to fit together anymore. Through this lens, a supportive family instead looks like a jeering crowd. “What am I failing to do"?” Shannon asks in a moment of desperate frustration. “Does loving your transness mean hating the parts you hate, the parts you deem masculine? Does loving your transness mean, in practice, withdrawing some of my love? If so, I cannot help you.”

I have heard versions of this story before, many times. Struggling people go online seeking understanding and instead find a society of mutual self-destruction. Online subcultures that promote anorexia and self-harm. Others that cater to unsettling sexual impulses, leading the vulnerable down dark paths of dysfunction. Certain corners of disability activism that in fact fetishize illnesses and disabilities. “Wellness” influencers who peddle false contentment and impossible levels of control. Who among us hasn’t skipped happily into an online echo chamber of political outrage?

What these often noxious subcultures have in common is an obsession with granular focus on the self, and an almost alien perspective of the human mind and body—parts are individuated from the whole. In an interview with writer Luke Harrington, wellness-culture critic Rina Raphael confesses: “I wanted to maintain control over my body, but because I was so obsessed with trying to control my body, I was losing control of my mind.” As humanity enters a new normal—having access to millions of other minds, via the internet—we are struggling to stay whole, incarnate.

I worry about the backlash Thrace is certain to face for telling this story. I hope those who seek to discredit her will actually read the book, see that Thrace, like any good human, simply wants people to live their lives freely. “You are no poltergeist enmeshed in skin and bone and brain,” Thrace pleads. “You are skin and bone and brain. A war upon your flesh is a war upon yourself.”

Perhaps some of the ideologies du jour are not freeing if the things you believe are making you unhappy, depressed, lonely, and alienated from those who love you. This applies to the “alternate facts” crowd as much as the radical gender identity crowd (which, let’s be very clear, does not represent all trans or queer people).

If words mean whatever you want them to, make them mean something better than this.