There’s a lot of media I wish I’d been exposed to earlier in life. Nevada by Imogen Binnie is one of these pieces. It’s a pretty annoying book, because the main character, like, talks like this, and of course she lives in New York, and of course her voice is tangled up with the narrator’s in a way where you can, like, tell immediately that she’s a self-insert for the author, and of course there are a lot of small moments that attempt to raise various issues re: intersectionality but end up coming off as mostly self-flagellating and awkward, or preachy. Whatever.

It’s a short read, and it doesn’t bother to tie up all (or most, or many) of its loose ends, but it doesn’t feel like it’s supposed to be a complete, self-contained narrative. It’s a novel about a particular moment in a girl’s life, a trip to Nevada, a probable-girl-but-who-knows?, and a fear of injections. Characters orbit around revelations and self-discoveries, but Binnie doesn’t promise any collision: that is, the novel is more about the things we do to become and recognize ourselves, and not so much about what those selves actually are.

Nevada is a good book. It’s a good book because Binnie’s approach to the plot works, because Maria and James and Steph and Kieran and Piranha all feel like real and fairly-treated characters, because the narrator is really good at conveying the sense of almost-apathy which comes with years of repressing essential parts of your identity (even if it’s a bit weird that Maria and James, from Pennsylvania and Nevada respectively, seem to articulate their thoughts in more-or-less the same way). It’s a book I’m going to keep in a highly visible position on my bookshelf.

The book came out in 2013, which is about when I wish I’d discovered it. I was eleven years old then, a year or two out from discovering Lorde and watching the “Tennis Court” music video on repeat, with an admiration that wasn’t really comparable to that of a celebrity crush, or really fueled by teenage boy hormones, but I couldn’t have told you what it was then. It was just a feeling of, like, Oh, I wish I was you. One of those feelings which is frustratingly obvious in retrospect, but which I couldn’t articulate at the time. Even in high school, when I bought the Extremely Trans Album I Am a Bird Now by Antony and the Johnsons, on CD, and played it basically every day in my car, whatever—it didn’t spur any deeper revelation in me. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have the vocabulary for this revelation, maybe it’s because I was fighting it. Cool. I got my hair chopped off when I was 16 and pretended it made me feel better and graduated high school as a boy and left home for a far-away place.

Anyway—that’s what I mean when I say Binnie doesn’t promise any collisions. When I started trying to construct the history of my gender, back maybe around when I started transitioning, I kept looking for a moment. Like, some moment where I just Figured It Out. The shape of The Trans Girl Story, to me, seemed to be (1) the feeling that something is Off for most of your life, from childhood, followed by (and often coinciding with) (2) naïve attempts to subvert gender norms, and then (3) the moment where it all Clicks, where you’re like, oh, yeah, I am actually a girl and I always have been, and then it’s relatively smooth sailing (at least, in terms of Knowing Who You Are) from there. And I struggled with making my own narrative fit this shape, because I couldn’t locate that pivotal moment. I don’t think I had one—I knew things were off, and I can see looking back that I didn’t live my teenage years like a teenage boy is supposed to or whatever, but there wasn’t a discrete moment where it all clicked. I just made a lot of trans friends after moving to college, I talked with them about my own feelings I hadn’t been able to voice before, I drank an irresponsible amount, and at some point I started taking hormones. I couldn’t tell you what directly led to my decision to do that. It just happened at some point during the long realization that I had had enough.

This is a narrative which Nevada is comfortable with, that is, it doesn’t over-romanticize things. It captures the bumpy road of gender transition and draws attention to the potholes, not worrying itself with where the road is supposed to lead, or has to lead. Binnie lets us ride along for a small part of this road, but tosses us out after a few minutes, trusting us to imagine the rest of the road on our own. It’s freeing.

It’s 7 a.m. and I should sleep, even though I think there’s a lot more I could probably say about this book which would come closer to doing it some semblance of justice. Instead, I’m just going to paste a quote from it which, reading it after a year of hormones, sounds kind of annoying to me, but then I imagine a 14- or 15-year-old version of myself reading it and think, wow, this probably would have changed her life back then:

“The fact that your transition might not go smoothly because of the shape of your body or the shape of your family or the shape of your personality or the way that your sexuality has been shaped does not mean that therefore you can just decide not to be trans. You can’t will it away. Deciding to will it away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and you’ll be back where you started: trans. Just older and more entrenched in a life that itself is not much more than a coping mechanism designed to keep you from having to be trans in the real world. If you’re trans you’re trans and if you’re obsessed with whether you might be trans you probably are trans.”