Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

I grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina and for the past decade I've lived in the major metros of San Francisco and NYC. Reading Tar Hollow Trans felt like catharsis. My relationship with “home” is complex, and I often feel culturally homeless—severed from my birthplace but not fully comfortable in the city where I now live. How refreshing to have those complexities echoed in Stacy Jane Grover's work.

I'm going to share a subset of the passages I underlined in the book (of which there were many!):

[Speaking of childhood] “I dressed and played how I chose, hidden by the trees and valleys that surrounded me, unencumbered by the terrible burden of gender.” (p. 12)

“I moved to the state capital, where I found not the expected freedom but constraint, not the promised anonymity that would allow fluidity in my expressions but constant surveillance. I inherited a new queerness, one that was now a mark I was told how to wear, shaping me into contours I didn't recognize. I was what was restraining my transformation, and to grow into the shared vision of metropolitanism that would lead to my salvation, I left behind all that the country planted in me. That seeing stars was a part of being, that horizons were literal, that backwards was a direction that most often led to family, that sunsets couldn't be blocked by anything but mountains and only if one decided not to climb them—these things I could not bring into the dusty confines of the metropolis.” (p. 13-14)

“The mountains have opened my senses to a different way of knowing, of being, so that no matter where I go or who I encounter, I weave them into the quilt of my past.” (p. 16-17)

[About adolescence] “What happened, what changed so that I felt excluded where I had always felt I belonged? [...] I didn't fit in with the boys and I didn't want to, yet I was ever increasingly pushed toward them, and it hurt me.” (p. 22-23)

“I looked at my family and I knew that I was not growing into their shapes.” (p. 27)

“I don't want to create a dominant narrative at the expense of the more complicated reality to gain the acceptance of legible visibility over authentic representation.” (p. 34)

“My girlhood became a dusty dresser in a forbidden room.” (p. 55)

[About funerals] “The absurdity or mourning food, flavorless subsistence food: pale cornbread, anemic potatoes, strips of dry chicken, as if no taste exists in grief, as if savoring while mourning equates to savoring death.” (p. 59)

“I can't answer why I went through what I went through, only describe the way I ended up there.” (p. 66)

“In the uncertainty and confusion of cyberspace, at least I could exist in the correct body[...] The digital world carried our burdens for us, and we could rest knowing that the next time we dialed up, our other selves would be waiting.” (p. 85)

“[...] rural small towns in the US are imagined not only as places but also as times.” (p. 95)

“[...] rural places, especially Appalachia, are excluded from being the sites of queer and transgender life. Instead, urban locations become the sole loci for queer and transgender communities, and queer and transgender people's flight from rural locations to cities seems inevitable, even compulsory.” (p. 98)

[Citing anthropologist Kath Weston] “[...] when rural queers arrive in cities and find these supposed queer havens, they are often disappointed and alienated. [...] To flourish in the metropolis, the community there needs a backward place like Appalachia to exist to define itself against. The deeply felt effect of this binary is that queer and transgender people who live in rural areas, or who have moved to major cities but retain a deep love and attachment to their home regions and people, are told that they are not fully queer or transgender, and that they invite whatever alienation or violence they experience.” (p. 99)

“Maybe I see community as a solution to capitalism. But I know that this too is a myth.” (p. 102)

“When I try to claim the scenes I've inhabited as communities, I foreclose on the possibility of growing and shifting as a person by locking myself into a rigid field of belonging. [...] I also foreclose on that same possibility for others who inhabit them. I reduce my friends to only one facet of their existence, like their sexualities and genders or subcultures.” (p. 103)

“I've clung to the idea of my lost queer Appalachian community because I know deep down that I've never experienced one.” (p. 104)

“I can allow symbols to lose their meaning. I must let structures crumble.” (p. 113)

[On the notion of “true” identity] “The quest to write one's transgender story thus begins with rewriting one's past. We must transform our histories to fit a rigid narrative assigned to us, much the way our gender/sex assignment at birth shapes and limits the possible narratives of our entire future. [...] This is part of the reason why people invest so heavily in questions about origins, because if there were other narratives, other possibilities, the asker of such questions could come to understand that their identities could have been and could still be otherwise.” (p. 123)

“Rendering various forms of living legible for the mainstream offers no protection, no privacy, no right to interiority, no ability to be otherwise.” (p. 125)

“When we are lost, unstable, unsure, everything in life opens and expands and we become able to wonder, able to think from within and beyond what can be readily understood.” (p. 126)

Thank you, Stacy Jane Grover, for sharing yourself with such honesty and curiosity. I feel less alone because of your writing.