All That Lovely Old Transsexual Shit

Agnes Borinsky appreciates all the ways Vivian Blaxell’s does transness in her book-length essay “Worthy of the Event.”

By Agnes BorinskyMay 26, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

“MY VAGINA DISAPPOINTS me.” This is the opening line of Vivian Blaxell’s new book Worthy of the Event. It’s a mischievous moment of jujitsu. So often, the leering cis view of trans bodies starts (and ends) with genitalia, so why not get the topic out of the way? Blaxell, a writer and scholar based in Australia, wants to get ahead of our reading of her as a “trans writer”—whatever we take that to mean. She also wants to make her opening irresistible. She proceeds to tell us that she “got” her vagina in 1972, in a public hospital perched between a racetrack and an airport, with “the burning plumes of an oil refinery wavering night and day in the distance.” (A decade later, in the early 1980s, she helped found Australia’s first shelter and resource center for and by trans people, Tiresias House.)

Worthy of the Event isn’t, like much of what the mainstream has picked up as “trans writing,” a work of autobiography. At one point in the book, Blaxell describes a set of conventions for the transsexual woman’s memoir, expressing her disappointment there too. The genre, she observes, often “cleaves to and grips” a certain propulsive narrative arc: “[T]roubled child, realization that there is female inside the male body, a bad case of gender dysphoria, much suffering, coming out, gender transition, oh joy!, more suffering, then some sort of détente. All that lovely old transsexual shit.”

One relishes Blaxell’s brisk précis of the form—we have all of us read it. Some of us have written it. On we go. But slow down and reread, and the heart sinks. This propulsive arc, Blaxell reminds us, is built on a fantasy of progress. For a fantasy of progress, that suffering bit seems awfully persistent. “Détente” is hardly a word that gets you out of bed in the morning.

We’re lucky to be witnessing a tremendous flourishing of brilliant, complex, formally inventive writing by trans writers—sometimes about transness, sometimes not. We’re less lucky to have become, along with immigrants and Muslims, our nation’s scapegoats in chief. So cartoonish and obsessive are the current characterizations that the whole thing would be ridiculous if the consequences weren’t so catastrophic.

And yet, here we are. We could ask what makes writing trans, but there’s not much juice in fussing over classifications. Representation alone is weak medicine. We need stronger stuff, and the value of a potential antidote lies not in the mere fact of its existence but in what it does, its capacity to treat or cure. What is it that “trans writing” does or can do?

In Blaxell’s case, the answer isn’t memoir, though we do get delicious snatches of her life. The book reads instead as an unruly kind of philosophy: Worthy of the Event goes, seemingly, everywhere. Beyond the neovagina of its opening, it contains so outrageously, variously much: Māui and nuclear bombs and Catholic school and Gertrude Stein and Spinoza’s God and Brahms and Rachel Dolezal and sex work and the first Qin emperor and the idea of homesickness and the idea of a feline kiss and the practice of translation and Indigenous theories of dreaming and asshole magistrates and Dionne Warwick and Fukushima and whiteness and “Deleuzian indignity” and a catfish the size of Tokyo—here I gulp air, and continue—and Homeric Greek and J. M. W. Turner and Buddhism and smallpox and Sufi mystics and a coral reef and Artaud’s drawing practice and Florence Nightingale.

I could go on. Maybe this sounds exhausting to you. Or maybe it sounds like erudite spam. But behind so much of this restless historical and philosophical searching is heartbreak, and a kind of moral and existential wrestling. There is so much to be heartbroken about. There is the heartbreak of natural disaster and colonial violence, the heartbreak of a lover’s abandonment, the heartbreak of the unrelenting cruelty of those in power to those without power, the heartbreak of murdered trans girls. I almost said “the heartbreak of losing people you love,” but Blaxell reminds us that “it is not dying, nor even the manner of dying so much, that causes the suffering of sufferers, human beings and other animals. It is life and conditions of living that hurt and misshape all living beings, some more than others.”

Blaxell’s writing tunes us to the countless frequencies of human cruelty. And yet, her words remind us that we’re here. There may be suffering, but there’s also joy. We’re trying to make it work. We’re laughing. We’re alive, reading Vivian Blaxell.

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The book’s title is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze, who writes that “self-enjoyment is being worthy of an event, knowing how or managing to be worthy of the event. […] Whatever the event might be, be it a catastrophe or falling in love, there are people who are unworthy of what happens to them.” This insistence, this measure of a life—goddess, let me be worthy of what befalls me!—is the test Blaxell applies to herself and others over and over throughout her book. Take Lana Luxemburg, 18-and-a-half years old, in whom “the spontaneity and creativity in revolutionary action” of her namesake Rosa Luxemburg lived on; who screamed “Your end is fucking coming!” at startled men in bespoke suits and women in designer dresses as they passed her on Sydney’s Elizabeth Street; who saved all but $400 of what she needed for a rhinoplasty by picking up johns. Lana Luxemburg was worthy of the event. (Her father, who refused to acknowledge her after she was murdered by a trick and dropped in the harbor, was not.)

The task, Blaxell suggests through stories like Lana’s, is to set aside fantasies of progress—however alluring those may be—and practice ways of meeting one’s circumstance. That circumstance may be a tidal wave, a nuclear meltdown, a colonizing conquest, a bad nose, or a world that refuses to assign value to one’s life; whatever the event may be, the task is to meet it, to be worthy of it. And, in so doing, to notice, invite, and name—in short, to create—moments of beauty. It’s a sexier, more defiant version of the serenity prayer.

The question of form doesn’t come up until close to the book’s end, though the cover calls it an “essay.” The essay, as freshman comp teachers are eager to remind us, is a capacious little satchel of a genre. To essay, one is reminded, as the reading glasses slip down the nose, means simply to attempt. Isn’t that wonderful?

Blaxell, an academic herself, seems agnostic on the question of how far into the weeds to get while theorizing form. “I still don’t know if form controls content or content controls form,” she says, then bunts. She brings in Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, and aesthetic philosopher Morris Weitz for help, weighing each of their claims on the subject before returning to the real heart of the chapter, which is barf and shit—literal human shit. (Bellamy and Myles have both written barf pieces, and Blaxell explicitly enters that conversation here as a way of thinking about what the body does to literary convention when its messy materiality enters the picture.) Blaxell worked as a nurse and recounts an occasion when she used her gloved hand to clear an older gentleman’s rectum of stalled, impacted pellets of poo. What is a body if not form, and shit if not content?

Call it content, call it form—Blaxell’s superpower is the way she moves. The book is organized into seven sections. Each orbits a single word or philosophical concept: the first chapter is about disappointment; the second is about the idea of becoming; subsequent chapters consider beauty, disaster, and infinity. Often, they start with a story, some anecdote involving “Fairy” or “Big Denise” or “Norma Mapagu” or “a.k.a. Victor Mature” or “Miss Sibyl Fontaine” in her imitation Chanel. From there, we veer into history, philosophy, religion, poetry, ecology. But just when we suspect we’ve located ourselves, Blaxell pushes further, slides us along a particular word’s startlingly long latitude into unfamiliar territory. We find ourselves swerving left yet again, shimmying out along some seemingly insupportable mental limb, only to be whisked back up, brought on one last flying leap before we land, flawlessly, 10 out of 10, in the story’s tender center. Blaxell’s sentences buck and slither, even as they feel like talking, like taking a walk. It’s kinetic; it’s intimate too.

The result is astonishing. I would say “dazzling,” but there is something immobilizing about dazzle. Never do I feel that Blaxell is trying to impress me, pin me in place with her erudition. Her prose makes me want to get up out of bed and dance with it. I find myself emulating it here, trying to find some version of her motion inside myself. To be a trans writer is, potentially, to feel stuck. One writes against erasure, against violence—but writing from a crouch is bad for spine and spirit.

In this way, Blaxell writes transness. She writes transly. And writing transly means more than writing a body. It means writing a world in which world and body are kin. This transness doesn’t turn backward toward a body’s past or away from the gazes of others, back into solitary orbit. When Blaxell does transness—and she’s not just writing transness; she’s doing transness—it turns outward. It lives. It makes. It meets you.

It’s good writing, and it’s good philosophy too. Carry a thought or a question between realms. Test it, shake it, drop it off a building, leave it in a corner only to notice its shine, eat it, shit it. The critic Jacqueline Rose has argued that Simone Weil, another poet of living, worked essentially through analogy. Analogy, Rose writes, was for Weil “a spiritual principle,” since it is through analogy that “our attachment to particular human beings can be raised to the level of universal love.” Blaxell works similarly. There is an analogy between the presumptive empathy of a medical professional and the way her mother speaks on behalf of her pet magpie. There is an analogy between the lifelong impact of a sexual trauma and the generational impact of an airplane disaster. To listen for this kind of situational rhyme is to tease out each circumstance’s paradoxes and tensions. It is to coax us out of our particular attachments, and into something larger. Weil, intense and brooding, might seem a strange sister to Blaxell. But the two walk a similar beat, lifting our gaze to more expansive views of suffering, love, and the divine.

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White settlers brought smallpox to Australia in the 1830s. There, it ravaged the Wiradjuri, one of the Aboriginal communities living in the southeastern part of the continent. In response, Blaxell tells us, a Wiradjuri leader, Mooinba, “organized a metaphysic” in the form of a dance, meant to materialize the creator and sky father. “That Mooinba died shortly thereafter,” Blaxell writes,

and that his retooling of a Wiradjuri metaphysic failed to send white settlers to hell and keep country in the hands of traditional guardians should not be seen as a failure of Wiradjuri metaphysics, for Mooinba’s Baiame waganna might be one of the things that has kept Wiradjuri peoples alive and fighting through disaster after disaster, two centuries of it, to keep and reclaim country yesterday, now, tomorrow.

What makes a metaphysic powerful is its insistence on expansion. It gives shape to the way we situate ourselves in the universe and connects us to forces beyond ourselves. It may not save all the lives that need to be saved. It may not eternally damn colonists or depose autocratic leaders. But what a metaphysic can do is help a community—on the whole, and in the long run—survive.

Blaxell never quite claims the label for her book, but I read Worthy of the Event as a metaphysic. As a dance, like the one Mooinba revived. It feels useful for the project of human survival in general, but it feels essential for trans folks in particular. Blaxell’s dance moves with, through, and against. It offers us the grace of transness not just as an experience of gender, or as a tale of surgery in a public hospital. Worthy of the Event urges us to consider: What if transness is something wilder than that? What if transness—and by extension, trans writing—is better understood as nothing more or less than an experience of beauty?

“I could throw my own body at the essay form,” Blaxell writes in the book’s final pages. The image recalls a moment some 200 pages earlier, in which she describes the “knowing immanence that haloes every human being who throws their body at the cruel and false unnecessary binomial gender order.” In a global moment that seems to invite only fear, anxiety, and rage, what gives me courage (emphasis on “coeur,” or heart), what moves me so deeply about the thrown bodies in this book, is how fully Blaxell makes me feel their velocity. Their pure, unrelenting gorgeousness. Their song, flying into living.