I've Got a Time Bomb

"Sybil Lamb first came to my attention when we used one of her drawings for the cover illustration of an academic journal that I edit – TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly . It was a special issue on revisionist psychoanalytic theory, recuperating psychoanalysis for more trans-affirming ends, guest-edited by a Canadian psychoanalytic scholar, Sheila Cavanagh, who knew Sybil from Toronto, and who commissioned her to do the cover art. I thought it was a really fabulous illustration—Freud on the couch being analysed by a trans woman—and wanted to know more about this Sybil Lamb person, so I started digging around for more of her work. I was captivated. As I was saying earlier, what I’m most interested in right now are trans stories that help us reframe the way trans issues are being dealt with in the present. We’ve got our own problems over here in the US right now but when I look at what’s happening in the UK, one of the things that I see from afar is the moral panic around trans issues right now, and the so-called TERF wars. I wouldn’t frame it that way at all, because it suggests that trans activists are not feminist, and feminists are not trans. That’s a false dichotomy. Rather, the conflict is between two different versions of feminist critique—one of which includes and is in conversation with trans perspectives, and one of which imagines trans people to be antifeminist and therefore excludes them, hence the acronym TERF. At the risk of self-promotion, there was another special issue of TSQ on trans-feminisms that features work that addresses the many kinds of relationships that exist between transgender and feminist issues. And my own book Transgender History, for example, was commissioned by the feminist publisher Seal Books, for a series on contemporary topics in feminist discourse. That being said, for many of those feminists who are hostile to trans people, we present them with a seemingly intractable problem. It’s something on the order of the Israel-Palestine problem in terms of its intractability. Let me be clear that I don’t think we trans people are actually a problem, intrinsically. And let me be clear that I’m a partisan in this conflict. It’s that some people have a problem with us that is actually a problem in themselves, for which they cause problems for us. It’s not inaccurate to call their position transphobic; it is literally an irrational fear, that the mere existence or presence of trans people is somehow a threat to them. Personally, I believe this irrational fear is both a defensive reaction to, and an aggressive projection of, their own trauma over the non-consensuality of gendering and the very real subordination of women in a binary gender system. Trans women present a challenge to their particular way of psychically resolving the contradiction of both hating what being a woman can subject one to, while nevertheless feeling oneself to be a woman. I think they feel that for us to be women otherwise somehow threatens them with the spectre of their own psychical dissolution, and they hate and fear us for that. When all we want is the same ability to exist as anybody else. “We don’t share a consensus reality. So how does one intervene in that kind of conflict?” This is not something we are going to rationally resolve. It’s like arguing with Holocaust deniers, or people who think climate change is a hoax, or who think anything you disagree with is ‘fake news.’ We don’t share a consensus reality. So how does one intervene in that kind of conflict? Ideally, one finds a way to recast the ground on which the struggle transpires. The ultimate goal is no conflict, people living together harmoniously in spite of differences. Short of that, it’s to minimise the effects of the hostility directed towards us, and to change cultural attitudes about trans issues. Before moving on, I do also want to point out that however vitriolic the anti-trans rhetoric is that comes from the TERF camp, and however true it is that words can cause harm and influence social policy in ways that cause further harm, it’s actually sexist, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic physical violence from cisgender men, and the structural transphobia of the dominant society, that is most directly deadly for trans people, trans women in particular. But to return to Sybil Lamb and I’ve Got a Time Bomb —part of what I like about the book is that it doesn’t waste any breath on the ‘what are we to do with trans people?’ framework. Lamb just takes up her space—no more but no less than any other person is entitled to, with no apologies and no attempt to persuade or win people over in some argument over whether trans people are worthwhile human beings who can be proper citizens. She writes about very non-normative sorts of trans lives—not just trans people who want to be good girls and boys, and disappear into the woodwork and not rock the boat. Who just want to get their hormones and their surgeries and have their names changed and get their gender markers all lined up on their state-issued IDs and get married and live their lives. That is not the sort trans life Lamb is writing about. Like Jordy Rosenberg, Sybil Lamb writes fiction that uses a conceit about time to engage with society as it actually exists. I think I’ve Got a Time Bomb makes an interesting companion piece to Confessions of the Fox , because whereas Rosenberg links the present and the past in a way that creates a trans-temporal connection between them, Lamb gives us a dystopian almost-science-fiction novel. It’s not the space western with rocket ships and bug-eyed aliens sort of science fiction, but rather a very, very slight extrapolation from the present, where time is out of joint, sometimes slightly in the future and sometimes clearly rooted in actual historical circumstances, such as post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. I’ve Got a Time Bomb has nothing to do with respectability. The story is set in marginalized, uprooted, nomad, punk, trans, kink, drug, squatter subterranean countercultures. Lamb is someone who has moved through these scenes in real life, and like the protagonist of her novel, she is somebody who has experienced a violent hate crime. She was bashed in the head with a metal rod, left for dead, had emergency surgery to repair a skull fracture and had some traumatic brain injury that really affected the way that she communicates and expresses herself both verbally and visually, as a writer and an artist. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think it’s remarkable the way that she, as a writer, constructs her sentences and puts her scenes together, to convey the sense of a somewhat off-kilter main character that’s loosely based on her own persona, embodying the violence that can be directed at trans people, particularly trans people who are not aiming towards a certain kind of respectability or enjoying a certain class privilege or a certain gender normative manner of presenting themselves. The language of the book is deliberately, self-consciously cracked. I find it to be a very powerful way of aesthetically registering real life violence. At the same time, the zaniness and loopiness of the prose and the narrative also express an irrepressible will to live, and a joie de vivre. To me, it’s just a very, very powerful narrative based on what it’s like to live trans now, on the edge. When I first started looking for more of Sybil Lamb’s work, and found I’ve Got a Time Bomb , I was heartened to see that it was published by Topside Press, which is a small independent publisher in the US that specialises in publishing trans-women writers, providing a venue for new or emerging voices that are not necessarily going to get a mainstream publisher right, at least not right now. Jordy Rosenberg’s book, on the other hand…let me see who published it… Right. It’s one of the first novels by a trans author to be published by one of the big mainstream commercial publishing houses. Sybil Lamb’s book is, I think, at the other end of the spectrum. It’s published by a down low, small scale press – but one whose mission has been to highlight and uplift the voices of trans writers, particularly trans-women writers. While some of their titles are better than others, I appreciate the fact that all of them are in print. Topside has had some really amazing breakout titles. There was one a few years ago by Imogen Binnie, Nevada , that I thought was just great. Lamb’s I’ve Got a Time Bomb , in my opinion, is the strongest title Topside has published yet. It’s like Kerouac’s On the Road in that it is bohemian, for lack of a better word—maybe anti-bourgeois—and flits from city to city and from one local subcultural scene to the next: New Orleans, New York, Salt Lake City, wherever. One of the tropes or stereotypes of trans writing is the travel narrative—gender transition as travelogue. There was the movie a few years back, Transamerica , that narrates its protagonist’s gender transition in a coast-to-coast drive across the United States. I’ve Got a Time Bomb plays on those tropes of transgender as travel, but totally deconstructs it. It’s not a progress narrative that gets you from point A to point B. It wanders, deliberately. Anyway, the thing that I love most about the book—which admittedly can be difficult to follow in places, I think deliberately so—is the writerly voice. If trans people are often thought of as a crazy people, people who have a psychopathology, people who have some delusion, people who aren’t quite right in the head, if that accusation is the worst thing, the thing we must defend ourselves against at all cost—this book asks, ‘Yeah, so what if that’s true?’ Or, ‘Maybe I’m not right in the head, but that has nothing to do with me being trans,’ or even, ‘because I’m trans in a transphobic world, I’ve taken some blows, but I’m making my way, and my life is a life worth living.’ The authorial voice challenges us to move past rationality—which, as I was saying a minute ago, is what I think we need to do to get past the vitriol of the TERF wars and the moral panic over trans people in the public sphere. What if we all stopped trying to be so damned respectable, and figured out new ways to live together with all of our vulnerabilities fully on display, in the post-apocalyptic landscapes of a damaged planet? That’s what I see in I’ve Got a Time Bomb , and don’t see how anyone could read it and not come away with a very different, very powerful understanding of contemporary trans experience. I think that’s a complicated question, but yes. On the one hand, there is a politics of respectability that can lead one to say, ‘I am not that dirty crazy sick bad illegitimate creature that you imagine me to be. Look at how I embody values that you yourself hold.’ I liked I’ve Got a Time Bomb precisely because it chucked that entire framework aside. But on the other hand, I think any time you are a member of an oppressed or marginalised minority community there’s immense social pressure to be a ‘good one’ because you are aware of the reality of the violences and exclusions that keep you down. Being the ‘good one’ can be a way to take care of yourself—a way to not draw negative consequences towards yourself, even if you understand that the responsibility for the violence is in the system, not in yourself. Being a ‘good one’ can be a form of imperceptibility, a form of fugitivity, a way of surviving in a context that is actually hostile to you, that you can’t really get outside of."