‘Woodworking’ is a funny, convincing takedown of American prejudice
When my fiancée, Denise, declared themself gender nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns, I didn’t get it. In fact, I fought it. I used grammar, biology, any stick I could grab to argue that humans come in only two genders – thereby proving two disturbing revelations of the 2024 election. One, the power of transphobia. It worked for Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, who spent $215 million on anti-trans ads ahead of the election. Two, despite our nation’s name (the “United” States) and founding principle (“All people are created equal”), Americans, including me, are prone to disparaging people who are different from us. Not because they’ll do us harm. Just because they’re different.
My relationship with Denise is not a deal I’m willing to break, so I started reading up. I learned that gender-nonconforming people have existed almost always, almost everywhere. Many cultures, including some Native American tribes, revere rather than bully them. My knowledge expanded as I studied; my understanding, not so much.
Then I read “Woodworking” by critic and journalist Emily St. James. I felt my fiancée’s heartache in the novel’s profoundly human trans protagonists. And I heard my own prejudice in their antagonists’ hurtful words. Immersed in their story, I began to grok gender dysphoria from the inside, where empathy lives.
The elder of the novel’s male-to-female trans protagonists is known as Mr. Skyberg, a divorced high school teacher in small town Mitchell, South Dakota. “Erica,” as she thinks of herself, is tortured by her own “woodworking,” disappearing into the woodwork so no one knows she’s trans; simultaneously wanting to come out and fearing it, ricocheting hourly between the anguish of her gender dysphoria and the consequences of resolving it. In a lunchroom conversation with fellow teacher Hank, “Erica realized she had been laughing a second too long, at something that wasn’t even funny at all. … She had the uneasy feeling lately that she was watching herself on a thirty-second delay.” When Hank, misreading Erica’s awkwardness, offers to pray with Erica about her recent divorce from Constance, Erica “didn’t even hear his prayer. She looked, instead, at her nails and wondered what they might look like painted pink.”
Erica’s unlikely gender guru is her 17-year-old student Abigail, the only trans girl in town. Abigail alone senses Erica lurking inside Mr. Skyberg and is instantly invested in ushering her out. “Imagine a teacher at our school treating me like anything other than a mess somebody else was supposed to clean up,” Abigail thinks.
Toward that end, Abigail sets about solving Erica’s nail polish problem. While Erica hides in her car, Abigail runs into Walmart, returning with the illicit goods. “‘Get in the car,’ Erica said, sure the entire world had turned its eyes toward the teenager and her teacher, who still had a mustache … leaning across the center console and attempting to drag the girl inside. Abigail sighed and withdrew a tiny bottle of nail polish from her jacket pocket.”
Abigail convinces her teacher to take her pink fingernails, and her female self, to school. “Erica was terrified. She tucked her nails up into the meat of her hand, where they couldn’t be seen.” Too late. A bro teacher in a crowd of bro teachers declares: “I see why things didn’t work out with Connie! Look at this guy’s nails!”
At home, Erica faces the firing squad in the mirror, overtaken by the dysphoric self-loathing many readers, trans and not, will recognize. Her rib cage is too large. The hair on her chest is disgusting, hiding “her ridiculous, tiny pink nipples.” Her arms are flabby. “These were not fingers that deserved nail polish. They looked so stupid with it on.”
“Why should I get to transition?” Erica moans to Abigail. “Lots of people want things they can’t have, Abigail. You’re lucky. You’re young. You didn’t have a life to screw up.”
Even after an annoyed Abigail reminds Erica – again – that she lives with her sister because her parents disowned her, Erica is adamant.
“I don’t know how to be Erica. I know how to be Mr. Skyberg. And that’s who I’m going to be.”
Unsurprising spoiler alert: That’s who Mr. Skyberg spends the rest of the novel trying, and failing, to be.
Writing a funny book is hard. Writing a convincing takedown of one of America’s most popular prejudices is harder still. Writing a funny novel in which complex, imperfect characters make a compelling case for one of our culture’s most maligned groups - that takes smarts and heart. Fortunately for her readers, St. James is in full possession of both.
People are funny, “Woodworking” says, even when their pain is anything but. People are resilient, even when prejudice forces them to speak dueling languages, wrestle with dueling personae and live dueling lives, sending the same student to detention one day and to Walmart for pink nail polish the next.
People are people, “Woodworking” says, regardless of the gender we’re assigned at birth or the gender we claim as our own. The book’s message is a simple one, often attributed to a Dutch proverb cited in 1622 and later adopted by the 1960s counterculture that made me the open-minded person I usually am, and by the Alcoholics Anonymous program that (mostly) keeps me that way. The phrase is “Live and let live.”
“Woodworking” convinced me to try it on my fiancée.
Meredith Maran is a journalist, a critic and the author of “The New Old Me: My Late-Life Reinvention,” among other books.