Other people’s words about … identity
Ed is never sure if he is a man anyway. Sometimes, he’s certain he’s a woman. Other times, he feels like nothing at all. When it comes down to it, Ed isn’t sure if he wants to belong, not to gay clubs, or queer spaces, or straight bars. He doesn’t want to decide on his pronouns with confidence and clarity, and he doesn’t want to announce them to the world via his Twitter bio or email signature or when introducing himself at parties. He doesn’t want his identity to be valid. He doesn’t want his feelings to matter. He doesn’t want to change his name, or his life, and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all. He doesn’t want to be seen as a man, or a woman, or a non-binary person. What Ed wants is to be invisible. What Ed wants is to disappear entirely. He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.
He can feel himself start to wheeze again. He struggles to catch his breath.
From ‘Evenings and Weekends‘
By Oisin McKenna
I grew up as a member of a generation that didn’t recognise people who have the kinds of feelings that Ed expresses in the passage I’ve quoted above, a generation that didn’t have the words that a person like Ed — a person who feels that the body they were born into doesn’t reflect their true gender — might need to reach for. That is to say, the vocabulary that Ed and his friends use in Oisin McKenna’s novel, Evenings and Weekends, isn’t a vocabulary that I or my contemporaries used or even had access to. As a corollary of this, the space that Ed and his friends occupy in the world isn’t a space that many people knew how to occupy when I was in my teens and early twenties.
This isn’t to say that people didn’t question their gender identity in those years, only that the conversation around gender identity barely existed. As a consequence, many people — many, many people — didn’t recognise that it might be a conversation they wanted to have, either with themselves or with others.
And yet when I read the passage above, I am moved less by Ed’s uncertainty about his gender than by his unwillingness to be labelled. In theory, the language of gender identification that’s available to him, which wasn’t available to people of previous generations, should free him to articulate his identity, but in practice he finds the labels as constraining as they are freeing.
For better or for worse, this is the power of language. It gives us the tools to express ourselves, but in doing so it determines the way we experience the world. I’m no discourse analyst but this, I think, is what Ed is struggling most deeply with. Kudos to McKenna for finding a way to put it so succinctly and movingly in fiction.
Still, for me the most devastating thing about this passage is that even though Ed has the language to express the way he feels, he remains ultimately so unhappy, so desperate, that his deepest, truest, most instinctive response is to wish to be obliterated.
The language may have changed, but the sadness, the desperation, hasn’t. What Ed wants is to be invisible. Indeed. I don’t have any answers, but I’m glad that novelists like McKenna are brave enough to explore these ideas, because they matter. As language changes, so does the world, and if fiction can help us to explore the consequences, then fiction, too, matters.
Lizzie, January 2025. (Okay, so, unlike Ed, she may not have words or language to express herself … but she is still a very effective communicator!)
Lately I’ve been reading …
- Within certain suburbs of Melbourne, you’re increasingly the odd person out if you aren’t queer and ethically non-monogamous: On the topic of the changing world of sex, gender and sexuality, Mx Sly describes their experience of living as a non-binary person involved in polyamorous relationships.
- In these books, the settler child is positioned as inquisitor and mini colonialist. Their discovery of the landscape through fictional encounters positions them to craft the nation in their image: On the subject of language and fiction, meanwhile, Lauren A Weber and Sara Fernandes explore the legacy of Australian children’s book writers and illustrators like May Gibbs.
- The band became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by divorce; four unimpeachable heterosexuals beloved by multiple generations of gay disco dancers; a gender-balanced quartet where the men put words in the women’s mouths: Chal Ravens discusses ABBA’s legacy.
- In 2013, a highway project was halted until Iceland’s Supreme Court considered its impact on elves and the environment: Kaja Brown explores the Huldufolk of Iceland, elves in whom 62% of the population believe in.
twenty-one words 