
[Noemi Press; 2024]
Oh no, not March 31st again! For over fifteen years, trans activists have celebrated this day as International Transgender Day of Visibility. The intention is to draw the world’s gaze upon transgender people and our right to live (while Transgender Day of Remembrance, its sister holiday each fall, commemorates our propensity to die). But, as trans scholars and activists have noted, visibility is a trap. In fact, it is a dangerous hypervisibility that follows trans women onto every street corner, every subway car, every first date with a man, making us less safe every day of our lives. “Day in and day out,” the author Alvina Chamberland writes, “I am a hypervisible object longing to be invisible.”
In Love the World or Get Killed Trying, Chamberland shows us how, in the course of just one summer in 2018, a trans woman’s desire to live and find love occasioned endless brushes with death. Indeed, the book starts off with a violent attack, an attempted rape, commencing with these defiant words mouthed back to her assailant: “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”(repeated seventy times, to no avail). The book concludes with Alvina celebrating her thirtieth birthday—if, by celebrating, you mean fending off more would-be rapists and misogynistic assailants.
Chamberland is a Berlin-based writer and performance artist who normally publishes in Swedish. In Love the World, her gripping English-language debut, she explores the tangled intersections of desire and violence—but not Alvina’s desire. No, this is not a book about what trans sex theorist Lucie Fielding calls trans women’s “desire-ability”—that is, our ability to freely seek out our own sexual pleasure. Rather, Love the World is a book about straight male desire for, and violence against, women. This is a book about how the sexualizing male gaze turns trans visibility into a struggle between predator and prey.
The book takes place in the summer of 2018 as Alvina finds herself on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday. We first encounter her in Iceland, where she has rented a room for a week, hoping to get away from her hometown of Berlin to focus on writing. A stream-of-consciousness “dear reader” account of her everyday thoughts and actions turns out to be the very book that she is writing—the book that we are reading. Alvina explains that she grew up in California as a “girlyboy” in a dysfunctional household, then moved to Sweden as a teenager (she holds both Swedish and American citizenship). A twenty-something in Berlin, she now lives as a straight trans woman. As she approaches her thirtieth birthday on vacation in Iceland, she pleads that she would like to just be left alone for one damn week, to breathe, to write, and to commune with nature. “I’m not here to meet people,” writes Alvina. “I came here to engage in existential ventilations with the Earth, to put miles of ocean between me and my 7 heartbreaks, the 9000 times I declined a sex invite, the few ‘ok, fines’ that only increased my lonely, the 8 no’s that didn’t stop him.”
In Berlin, as elsewhere, Alvina is frequently the survivor of other people’s sexual demands. But, in Iceland, with out-of-town excursions to glaciers and waterfalls, we encounter her own independent sexuality for the first time. In the chapter “A Hot Ice Land is its Own Romance,” she writes about sucking off a waterfall and touching the edge of a melting glacier. “Nature has never told me that I’m too intense,” she writes, referencing her own wildness, whereas “men have treated me as a zoo animal, forcing me to shrink my steps in order to fit into an enclosure.” Unfortunately for Alvina, even in Iceland circumstances threaten to draw her back into the urban queer spaces where her gender and sexuality are defined for her, rather than by and for her own pleasure—alas, it’s Pride Week in Reykjavik.
Undeterred, shortly after returning from Iceland, Alvina is off again: this time to Paris in hope of finding community, affection, and relative safety in yet another country. She travels ostensibly to perform in a theater, but it’s not clear what her performance is. When she’s not obsessing over the writers Clarice Lispector and Violette Leduc, Alvina is thinking about the Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, one of several artistic figures who haunt this dismal summer. Visiting Nijinsky’s grave in Paris, Alvina recounts how the dancer lost his mind at the young age of thirty. Turns out it is the day before Alvina’s own thirtieth birthday, and she has come to Paris to lose her mind.
As Alvina’s birthday approaches, Chamberland writes increasingly hurriedly and aggressively, showing us Alvina’s anxious brain spiraling out of control. For example, she just wants to read a book on a quiet park bench in Paris, but instead she encounters two men assaulting a trans woman. Soon enough, three men are sexually eyeing her. “Men consider me a living, breathing, mobile cruising ground,” she writes. “If it gives you a headache to read,” she says, addressing us, the reader, “what do you think it’s like to live”?
On the actual day of her birthday, the crescendo of men on the streets threatening her grows louder: Alvina first experiences an attempted rape along the Seine and, although she should be afraid of her attacker, she instead imagines the police arresting her for public sex, then being subjected to gang rape in a men’s prison. Next, she has a confrontation with teenage boys on a public bus; the boys throw a bottle at her but hit another woman in the head. The woman misgenders Alvina in response. “I am shaking,” Alvina writes. “Being sexualized is so much easier to handle than this violent hatred.” But what is the difference between sexualization and violence? Isn’t the sexualization of trans women itself at the core of anti-trans violence?
Later that evening, there’s more:
3 whistles & Hey babys. 2 I love you, marry me’s. 1 How much do you cost? 1 Barbie Girl, Pamela Anderson! 1 OMG that’s a man, she tricked me, science fiction-mental illness. 1 suck me, it’ll only take five minutes, open yr mouth wide, lemme imagine my dick touchin’ yr tonsils. 1 Tranny-but real pretty—definitely fuckable.
To which Alvina adds, “I think I understand why Aileen Wuornos finally exploded.” Wuornos, for reference, was the queer sex worker turned serial killer who inspired the film Monster, murdering over half a dozen of her male clients.
In the novel’s final pages, Alvina makes it—just barely—onto a bus back to Berlin. What a relief that she wasn’t killed in Paris. She is finally headed home, but home to what exactly? The continuation of all this horror? The ogling, all the “hey baby’s,” the rapes?
Somehow, amidst all this violence, an earnest idea is threaded throughout Love the World: Alvina believes that she can find ethical love with a straight man. This is the “love the world” part of the book, in contrast to the “get killed trying.” Alvina’s drive to keep living (and suicidal ideation is frequently hinted) is predicated on this belief that non-violent heterosexual love must be possible, and that she will find it one day.
Chamberland has an important point to make here about straight male sexual desire. Throughout the book, she is careful to delineate that there are, in Alvina’s estimation, two types of men who love trans women: the “softboys” who are “good allies” and will say “trans women are women” but refuse to fuck them, and the hetero macho dudes who “have no issues fucking OR raping us,” who really “see us as women and proceed to treat us as terribly as they wish they could get away with treating all women.” Alvina would like to find a straight man somewhere in-between these two poles: kind, respectful, nonviolent, but also willing to sexualize her and give her the pleasure that she so craves and deserves. She is asking: What would it feel like to be loved and fucked by a man confident in his masculinity and desire? But “in 4 years in Berlin,” Alvina muses, “I’ve seen just one man cuddle with a trans woman in broad daylight.”
By focusing on the power of straight men as the source of either a woman’s love or death, Chamberland’s writing aligns with historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s assertion, in A Short History of Trans Misogyny, that violence is “the currency through which trans women circulate.” As Gill-Peterson writes, “trans misogyny operates through the logic of the preemptive strike,” wherein the straight man “trans-feminizes” his target—marking her as both irresistibly desirable and a threat to his manhood. In other words, he can’t help but to want her, but his burning desire will also lead him to want to kill her.
The alternative to male violence, Chamberland suggests, is a kind of de-sexualization of trans women that often occurs in polite Western society. When straight men in cities such as in Berlin or New York achieve some modicum of privilege or power—via whiteness, professionalism, having a family—they are more likely to extend a basic recognition of humanity to trans women, but only on the condition that we are clearly understood as unfuckable. As Alvina puts it, “Liberal western culture however refuses to make room for trans girls as full womenhumans with needs beyond half-lives as asexual othered third-gendered symbols of tolerance.”
This half-assed acceptance—that trans women are women, but not the kind that you would date or fuck—leaves women like Alvina in a bind. The imprinted unloveability and unfuckability is itself a form of violence, Alvina writes, for “33 percent of us have tried to die by own hand.” A “lack of love kills more trans girls than punches, stares, stabs, dysphoria, rapes, gropes, guns, and bullying put together.”
And while the men in Love the World are, of course, the real monsters, Alvina can’t help but internalize the idea that she herself is monstrous. Monstrosity has long been a major theme in transgender studies, most famously theorized by historian Susan Stryker who likened herself to Frankenstein’s monster confronting her maker above the village of Chamounix in the Alps. The medical aspects of the Frankensteinian myth—that cis male doctors make trans women with scalpels and knives—are absent from Love the World, but Chamberland, dropping into the minds of so many of today’s straight men, still sees the transgender body as monstrous.
Alvina frequently references the abnormalities of her body, notably this “black hole” between her legs that she calls a “Vagina Dentata”: a vagina with teeth. Vagina dentata is a global mythology, rooted in the fear that a woman with a toothsome vagina might devour or destroy a cis man’s penis and emasculate him. Chamberland’s point is that, for so many straight men, sex with a trans woman carries this risk of emasculation, his loss of status as a bona fide man.
Near the end of Love the World, Alvina muses, “Am I a woman trapped in the wrong body, or simply a soul that is trapped in a body? And wants out?” Historically, transgender narratives have framed transition as the cure-all: If only Alvina could have a real woman’s body, then men would treat her with care and affection; then she would be set free from her torment. This ideology underpins nearly a century of transgender medical care. Indeed, the phrase “trapped in the wrong body” was invented by a male doctor in the 1960s, the so-called founding father of transgender medicine, Harry Benjamin.
Love the World tells a different story about trans bodies and transition: To become a woman—or as Gill-Peterson might argue, simply to be perceived as one—is no relief. Rather, transition leads to one becoming the target of societally ingrained misogyny and violently uncontrollable desire. It is hard to feel hopeful that life will progress in such a way that Alvina will someday find the openly soft and sexy love of a straight man. Indeed, Love the World enters the hands of its readers just as anti-trans political machinations and dehumanizing rhetoric have become a core talking point of aspiring fascist regimes throughout much of Europe and North America.
Alvina Chamberland tells it like it is. Ours is a dangerous world for trans women. She has written a book that exposes the dangers lurking inside the corneas of ravenous men. Love the World is a work of horror as much as romance, for Chamberland aims to frighten us with Alvina’s tight-rope walk between desire and death. Love the World is a document of this perilous time. Let us hope that in twenty or thirty years hence, this book will feel immensely historical, and we will no longer have to face down death, as Alvina does, just to love the world.
G. Samantha Rosenthal is Associate Professor of History at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and Visiting Assistant Professor of American History at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She is the author of two books, most recently Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City.
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