Acclaimed author Jennifer Finney Boylan’s new book about life as a transgender woman, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, published Tuesday, comes out at a time when trans people are under attack from the White House, state legislatures, and more. But no, Boylan didn’t write it with the ability to see into the future.
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“I’d like to say that I was trying to be prescient and aware of the perilous moment that we all find ourselves in here in the beginning of 2025, but to be honest, I’ve been working on this book for at least five years, if not longer,” Boylan, who is also the president of the board of trustees at PEN America, tells The Advocate. “I found it a difficult book to write. It just took me so long to get done that it’s coming out now as opposed to in some happier time.”
In Cleavage, Boylan deals with topics including her life before and after her transition, the differences in the ways men and women are treated, and her relationships with her wife, Deirdre (a.k.a. Deedie), and their children, Sean and Zai. Zai is also a trans woman, and her coming-out and transition are detailed in the book. Boylan, who writes as always with humor, heart, and ample cultural references, considers Cleavage a bookend to her first memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, which came out in 2003, five years after the author began to come out.
“It is a chance to look back over the last 20-25 years to see where we have been and where we have failed to go,” Boylan says of Cleavage.
“There’s two things I wanted to write about here,” she says. “One is just the difference between men and women, as I’ve lived it, and after 25 years, there’s a lot of stories to tell. The difference, in my experience, in friends, in food, in love, in my sense of voice, the way I feel unsafe in this world in a way that I didn’t use to feel unsafe. There are all sorts of differences like that I wanted to write about.” These include pressures on women to be thin and beautiful, how men are taken more seriously than women, and some men’s aggression toward women.
“I also wanted to write about the difference between coming out as trans now and coming out 25 years ago,” she continues. “In some ways, things were harder back then because it was such new territory. … It was like being in the French underground. I was in a support group where you literally had to know the password to get in. In some ways it’s easier now because this path has been blazed. But at the same time, when I came out 25 years ago, people were generally nice to me … people like my Republican evangelical Christian mother. No one had received formal instructions on how to hate me.” Of her mother, Boylan recalls, “she put her arms around me and said, ‘Love will prevail.’”
She’s Not There carried “an air of apology,” Boylan writes in Cleavage, while “People coming out as trans now aren’t apologizing for who they are.” But some nontrans people have received instructions on how to hate them, including from the current president, Donald Trump.
“To some degree, I think Trump’s genius is in finding scapegoats, finding small, vulnerable populations, redefining them as threats, and getting people in a very middle-school way to kind of mock people for their difference,” Boylan says in our interview. “Transness, as a way of being in the world, is not an easy thing for people to get their minds around. It requires imagination, it requires a willingness to understand nuance and some of the complexities of science. … We are living in an age where subtlety and nuance doesn’t go over very well.”
“On the one hand, if we’d worked a little harder to win over straight, cisgender people, we might not be in this situation,” she says. “On the other, I feel like, Is that really our job? Why is it my job to win over someone who doesn’t have love in their heart? To some degree, we are in this moment because of a lack of imagination. Because our fellow countrymen and women have decided that imagining the lives of someone like me is too heavy a lift. It takes too much time.”
Cleavage, however, may stir some of this imagination. “The book is a bunch of stories,” Boylan says. “They’re good stories. They’re interesting to read, and I kind of believe that’s the best advocacy you can do, is just through the act of storytelling. We open people’s hearts by letting people see our lives as stories, see us as characters, rather than as issues in some sort of debate, and that we are real humans with real lives. If people are taken by the stories, I think that will be its own form of activism. I hope that people will put this book down and have a sense of love in their hearts.”
One of the stories is about Zai’s coming-out, which took place about six years ago. “My very first reaction was I felt scared for her, because I know that this is not an easy life, and you don’t want your children’s life to be hard,” Boylan says. “On the other hand, I hope I raised her to be generous and kind and smart. She’s 31 years old; it’s not really up to me to protect her anymore. I mean, actually, it is. It’s always my job to protect her. But she also can protect herself.”
Asked for advice for other trans people, Boylan says, “I’m not really in the advice business. I hope to be an example of someone who’s lived a particular kind of life. … When I give advice to people, I have this acronym TRUE, T-R-U-E.” T stands for talk or therapy, R stand for read, U for you, and E for “euphoria, ecstasy, happiness,” she says.
Cleavage will probably be Boylan’s last memoir about trans issues, but she will write novels and likely nonfiction, she says. She has two novels in the works, one of which she describes as “very literary and David Lynchian,” and the other as a big commercial book from an idea that came to her in a dream.
She is the writer in residence at New York City’s Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University, and she may retire after another year. “But I’ve got a book to promote and more books to write, and we’ll see what lies ahead,” she says.
Of what lies ahead for trans Americans, she says, “We’re down, but we’re not out. We’ll continue to fight, and it’s not over, it’s not anywhere near over yet. Everyone, take care of yourselves, take care of the people you love, and then we’ll get back in the game.”
Cleavage is out now from Celadon Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers. Find out more about Boylan at JenniferBoylan.net.