Harron Walker’s new book is a razor-sharp dissection of trans life

Award-winning journalist Harron Walker is best known for her bold, razor-sharp and often comedic reflections on the complexities of the trans experience. Whether it’s through her punchy pop culture commentary for Jezebel or her candid column on life as a 30-something woman in New York for W Magazine, Walker challenges how we tell stories about identity, culture and media. Her new book, Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman, is a fierce blend of memoir, cultural criticism and journalism that traces the writer’s journey through the trials and tribulations of gender transition in contemporary America. 

Across 16 essays, Walker examines the urgent debates of our time around gender, agency and power. She recounts traversing all the possible roads for transition in the US, including a job at a transphobic company with generous healthcare benefits. She examines trans women’s relationship to labour as an experience of misgendering and misogyny; the promises of rainbow capitalism by companies such as Lush, which offer shallow inclusion but no material change; the limits of trans representation in film and television, and how the politics of visibility comes into conflict with trans safety. 

Charming the reader with tender confessions and tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, Walker lends a more intimate vision of transness, one that brings our real relationships with friends, lovers and family to the fore of the conversation. But the throughline of the collection is how class shapes trans people’s experiences, an approach which challenges dominant narratives that divorce them from this crucial context and reduce trans lives to identity politics alone.

Here, we talk to Walker about trans people and labour, the shortcomings of their representation in film and television, and how trans writers can confront the absurdity of mainstream transphobic debates. 

What aspects of contemporary trans life do you think can be defined as an example of Aggregated Discontent? 

Harron Walker: The title refers to various freelance jobs I had years ago, which involved making what’s known as ‘aggregated content’. This would be something like: if Miley Cyrus made an Instagram post, then I would write 400 words or so about it for MTV, a bit like fan fiction. It was by reflecting on my experience of that specific kind of media labour that the play on words suddenly appeared to me. I was like, ‘Oh, aggregated content – aggregated discontent … boy, do I have a lot of that in my life as a trans woman in the US navigating work and other aspects of public life.’ 

I think ‘discontent’ evokes complaint. In my own circle of friends, I hear trans women making similar complaints about the obstacles they face. If you’re transitioning in the US, it can feel like you have to be the most knowledgeable person in the world just to access basic healthcare. Navigating all the various institutions required for surgery can take years. For me, it felt like a marathon, like a part-time job I was doing on the phone while at work. Making a phone call might not sound like a big deal, but doing that over and over while trying to prove your basic existence – who you are and what you need – is exhausting. 

In the first chapter, you reflect on Monica, a film about a young trans woman who returns to the home of her estranged family. You discuss finding it unrealistic that Monica is so isolated, with no friends or community to lean on during this time. It feels like a way to make the audience sympathise more with her experience. Do you think this speaks to a wider issue around how trans people are represented in culture?

Harron Walker: I would say that it does, yes. I think Trace Lysette was amazing in the role, but I did have some conflicting feelings about the movie. I don’t think that a cis person should never feel comfortable to direct a story related to transition, and I don't think it’s inherently evil or misguided to have media which concerns transness while being designed for a cis viewer. But also, what you see in Monica is a trans woman who exists like an island; she’s completely alone, and I think that speaks to the implicit demands of the cis viewer and the bias of the cis creator. Of course, I understand there’s a whole history of medical transition leading to isolation: in the mid-20th century, a lot of women who had access to medical transition through the work of sexologist Harry Benjamin would have to live in stealth and move to a different town, where they’d get a new name and cut everyone out. For trans women today, though, that’s not how our social worlds are formed. 

Something you explore quite heavily in the book is trans people’s relationship to labour. Why is that tension an important theme for you?

Harron Walker: The book covers many aspects of my life from 2017 to 2022. During those years, my day-to-day was really about trying to access trans healthcare through many different ways, through state insurance as well as employment. The US is a country, one could argue, that was founded on the idea that healthcare is a privilege, which is insane because everyone needs healthcare. When I transitioned, I was able to find access to healthcare through work, but for the generations below me, it seems like hardly any jobs come with healthcare benefits. 

When I reflect on my experience, though, it feels like a fever dream that could have only happened in the 2010s. Especially now, it feels like labour and transness are just so inextricably intertwined in an American context, particularly given the ways our healthcare system is inextricably intertwined with labour itself. That all comes down to the fact that the US doesn’t view healthcare as an inherent right, but rather as something you have to earn.

Navigating all the various institutions required for surgery can take years. For me, it felt like a part-time job I was doing on the phone while at work. Making a phone call might not sound like a big deal, but doing that over and over while trying to prove your basic existence is exhausting

In a later chapter called “Transgender Surgery Regret”, you reflect on the overtly minor and frankly insignificant problems that occurred for you post-facial feminisation. Why was it important for you to respond to the debate about regret in a satirical way?

Harron Walker: I think I just wanted to be a smart ass. I wanted to be an asshole. I wanted someone to pick up my book with the intention of finding passages to quote in bad faith, and just to be like, ‘here you go, here’s the chapter!’ The chapter is short; it’s one paragraph long, and it explains how, since my surgery, my chin has been too small and smooth to hold a pillow case underneath. I thought it would be fun to take on this preoccupation of transness as a minefield of regrets and complications; it felt important to pull the rug out from under that entire obsession. As I say at the end of that section, ‘Yes, he [my surgeon] might have hit the slay button, but I ask you: at what cost?’

In another chapter called “Validity”, you describe three categories of gender: “girls, the guys, and the ladies without babies”. Do you think our culture's exclusion of childless women from the category of womanhood also says something about its transphobia?

Harron Walker: I think that’s an element of it. Early on in my transition, when I started having laser hair removal, I remember speaking to two friends, both women, who mentioned that they had it done in the past, too. One of them was even like, ‘Oh yeah, I shave my moustache every day’. It was this great conversation that essentially kicked me out of this transfeminine myopia. I had this idea in my head about womanhood with a capital W, and that I was outside of it. But speaking to my friends helped me realise that actually so many of us are excluded from it in different ways. 

I think when it comes to childlessness, whether by choice or just by virtue of the body you have, it can make someone feel unmoored and pushed even further from womanhood with a capital W. Children and pregnancy are only one facet of it. There are many ways in which cis women are excluded from the category of womanhood. 

Aggregated Discontent is part memoir, part political and cultural theory. What do you hope audiences will get out of this book, published during a time of rising anti-trans extremism?

Harron Walker: Well, firstly, humour is such a big part of how I think, speak, and interact with my friends, and definitely how I write, too. It’s always a little awkward to say, ‘my book is funny,’ but I genuinely think it is, and I hope people laugh where they’re meant to. But beyond that, I also hope the more polemical parts of the book, where it gets sharper or more political, can spark something beyond just resignation or nihilism. Even if it’s generative rage or some form of constructive fury, I hope it inspires people to think and feel activated.

Let’s say it’s the year 2030 or even 2050 and the world hasn’t turned into lava by then, universities still exist, and people still have access to libraries — even though they’re being gutted right now. I like to picture someone in the future, maybe a trans woman 20 years from now, reading my book and getting a sense of what trans life, thought and culture were like during my time. I like to think my work could help contribute to that historical record in ways that might have otherwise been left out. 

Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of The Last Normal Woman is out now