Trans Women in the Heartland

Lori Marso examines “Woodworking,” the debut novel from fellow South Dakotan Emily St. James.

By Lori MarsoJune 23, 2025

• Fiction

• Politics

• Gender & Sexuality

MY MOTHER, a retired home economics teacher from my small town of Miller, South Dakota (population 1,349), recently recounted some gossip she’d heard about the conditions of in-state secondary education. Teachers were having to deal with requests from “furries” to use litter boxes in schools. Could I believe it? (No, I could not.) I gently explained how these rumors are planted to stoke fears about trans kids. I’m now an educator myself, a college professor who teaches feminist theory and cinema. Playing my role, I decided that on my mom’s next visit to see me in New York City from her hometown of Parker, South Dakota (population 1,194), I would counter those ugly stories with better ones.

We streamed two movies about trans characters: Jacques Audiard’s controversial, genre-defying Emilia Pérez (2024), about a Mexican drug lord who transitions (in part) to escape a criminal past, and Josh Greenbaum’s documentary Will and Harper (2024), featuring comedian Will Ferrell on a cross-country road trip with his recently transitioned Saturday Night Live pal, Harper Steele. These films have their charms and surprises, not to mention their flaws, some deep. I will now assign my mom Woodworking, the new novel of cultural critic and television writer Emily St. James.

Set in South Dakota, Woodworking deftly captures what it feels like to grow up in the heartland if you don’t feel that you belong. “Polite South Dakotan decorum” is what St. James calls the cloying air of sometimes comforting, but often deceptive, Midwestern niceness. South Dakotans who agree that such kindness is only skin-deep tend to find each other out in the world and share stories of escape. As living proof, earlier this year, I was given a preview copy of Woodworking by a former South Dakotan, Walker Iversen (hometown Murdo, population 475), the events director for the Strand Bookstore in New York City. Iversen had booked an event for my recent cinema book and was excited to tell me that yet another South Dakotan, St. James, was coming to the store the very next month to talk about her new book. St. James hails from the small town of Armour, South Dakota (population 698).

A former cultural critic for Vox, St. James came out publicly as a trans woman in 2019 by penning a powerful piece called “The Catastrophist, or: On Coming Out as Trans at 37.” She credits a television series, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as helping her notice how women see each other, how they might support each other, and that she might be a woman too. In 2023, for its third season, St. James joined the writer’s room for Yellowjackets, the television series about members of a high school girls’ soccer team who survive a plane crash, then relive this trauma, and the circle of support and betrayal it engenders, into adulthood.

Woodworking is St. James’s first novel, and its setting, a high school in Mitchell, South Dakota (population 15,660), is central to her story of two trans characters, a teacher and a student, who find each other there. They experience their share of trauma but also enjoy some surprising moments of support, or at least curiosity and good faith, so much so that you start to think that things might turn out okay for them. Readers also might hope (just a little bit) that the people around them might change and grow too.

Erica, one of the two main characters, is known to her students as Mr. Skyberg. The first sentence in the book reads, “Erica didn’t know any other trans women.” This compelling opening line portends the novel’s various emotional registers—empathetic, terrifying, infuriating.

To fit in, Erica has been practicing several painful and life-defying versions of “woodworking”—hiding in the woodwork to adopt, or at least blend in with, the “common sense” of her surroundings. In a recent interview, St. James described woodworking this way:

Woodworking, to some extent, is just about blending in with society in a way that doesn’t scare or offend people around you. Trans people make this overt in a way that threatens and scares some people, but we’re all going through it. Woodworking is setting aside questions about yourself, your environment, and society to be able to more effectively hide within it.

To avoid being noticed (or worse, called out) as what feminist and cultural critic Sara Ahmed calls an “affect alien,” Erica resists pesky thoughts about wanting to wear pink nail polish. Woodworking is a coping mechanism that, while seeming like survival, is as enervating and destructive as being addressed by your deadname. (To mark this as the violation it is, when Erica is called by her deadname, it appears in the text as a redaction.) Erica has embraced her conventional identity as “Mr. Skyberg” so completely, thoroughly, and invisibly that it has become a mask for herself and others. But when, immediately following the novel’s opening sentence, Erica hears about trans student Abigail, her desires for connection bubble to the surface. Abigail’s reputation precedes her: “[W]hen she learned Abigail Hawkes had called everyone in her current events class ‘a bunch of fascist cunts,’ Erica switched detention duty slots with Hank DeWaard to be able to talk to Abigail one-on-one.”

Set across three short but intense months (Monday, September 12, to Friday, December 16, 2016, including the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump), Woodworking’s genre is hard to classify— elements of horror, fantasy, and the quintessentially American story of courage, uplift, and transformation vie for dominance. I detect horror (why would people remain in, or return to, suffocating towns like this?) and fantasy (residents often express enormous pride in such communities) maybe because of my own complicated emotions about my origins. Mirroring its small-town setting, the writing itself is kind of kooky—sometimes scripted, ever so slightly earnest, and often defying belief—but for the most part, it avoids the saccharine and the sentimental.

Short chapters named by dates move back and forth between Erica’s and Abigail’s perspectives. Inviting readers into the inner thoughts of the two characters, St. James makes us familiar not only with the everyday aggressions and microaggressions directed at these women and people “like” them—those who move “against the grain” of the wood—but also with their specific neuroses, worries, longings, and fantasies.

Abigail is younger but more cynical, having lived as a woman much longer than Erica and having faced the consequences for doing so. She has been rejected by her parents and lives with an older sister and the sister’s boyfriend. Abigail projects a steely exterior but aches for her mother’s acceptance and works at keeping the attention of her popular boyfriend, Caleb. Still, these problems don’t make Abigail question her choices or her identity. Abigail already takes hormones and, although everyone at school knows she is trans, can easily pass as a cis girl in other spaces.

Erica, on the other hand, is still living as a man and is afraid to come out, which becomes the main source of tension between the two. Abigail is frequently annoyed and irritated by Erica. “Abigail: Monday, October 3,” for example, begins with a text to Erica: “you HUNG UP ON ME??? AFTER ALL I’VE DONE FOR YOU?? you are such a DUMB SLUT, ERICA!!”

Thirtysomething Erica is less brave, more stuck, too practiced at woodworking. She worries what she will lose if she transitions: “It’s just easier to keep being a guy. There’s less painful bullshit. When you’re my age, you already know how to hide inside your own life. So I can keep doing that.” Tolerating an openly trans teacher goes way beyond “polite South Dakotan decorum,” Erica thinks. More tolerance than she has come to expect from her friends and neighbors.

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But the desire to be with women, like women, to become a woman continues to nag at Erica. Really, what is a woman? she wonders. Abigail assures her that she can do it, that she should try to follow her feelings. When you look closely, Abigail insists, “natural” sex difference is neither natural nor obvious: “[O]ne day, I looked at my mom, and I realized she had a hairline that almost made it seem like she was balding. My dad couldn’t grow a beard, like, at all. I started looking at other people, really looking at them, and saw that nobody passes.” Tallying names on her fingers, Abigail continues: “Your bestie Brooke Daniels’s voice is almost as deep as mine. Megan Osborne? Enormous Adam’s apple. And Caleb has tiny little hands.”

Erica has looked closely, and she thinks a lot about what she has in common with other women, how to look like them, and how to connect with them. What she knows for sure is that she has never really felt she could fit in with men. She has always paid close attention to her ex-wife Constance’s way of dressing, her moods, her speech patterns, her walk and gait.

Despite their recent divorce and the fact that Constance is remarried and newly pregnant (another plotline involves Constance trying to decide whether to get an abortion), Erica is still in love with Constance. She runs into her far too often because Constance is starring as Emily in the community’s production of Thorton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, which Erica is co-directing alongside Mitchell’s top busybody, Brooke Daniels, a Stepford wife and the adoptive mother of Abigail’s boyfriend.

Small towns are not all the same, but they have things in common. Though set in New Hampshire, Our Town is sparsely populated, parochial, and isolated, just like many communities in South Dakota. Constance describes its fictional setting of Grover’s Corners as “a town where a man can literally tell you who’s doing what at any given time of day.” Under this kind of surveillance, one requires excellent woodworking skills to defy detection. You have to be able to blend right into the corn of the scenes in the World’s Only Corn Palace, the most visited (only) tourist attraction in Erica and Abigail’s hometown. Citing specific place names, habits, and cultural references, and deftly conveying the feeling of longing to be in a community that is sure to reject you, St. James manages to enter the genre of small-town literary storytelling while also being specific about what it feels like to be trans in South Dakota right now.

Most important for St. James is, in her words, to show that “rural trans life exists, and that there are people who are going through these things every day.” As for politics, in the author’s note that ends the book, St. James explains: “Despite setting my book during an election, I really did not want to write a political treatise. I wanted to write about trans solidarity and unlikely friendship and the ways in which women build shadow communities amid oppressive power structures.” She admits that the book will be “interpreted as a political one whether I like it or not,” but what is apolitical about challenging oppressive power structures?

Those caveats aside, St. James creates a fictional election battle for a South Dakota Senate seat—between a virulently anti-trans man named Isaiah Rose and Helen Swee, a Democrat and ally to Erica and Abigail—that will be decided on the same day as the 2016 presidential election. On “Monday, November 7,” we hear Erica’s thoughts about Isaiah:

The thing about a man like [him] is that you don’t have to know his particulars to know him. He is the same man everywhere. To try to understand him is to try to understand a sinkhole. He is sure of himself, and he likes feeling sure of himself, because he has built a world in which he can always be sure of himself. He is a feedback loop that exists only to perpetuate himself. I could tell you every word he said, and you could try to find meaning in it, and you would learn the meaning was always right there on the surface. He doesn’t need subtext because text is built to encompass him.

Isaiah is the color, the texture, the very essence of wood. He doesn’t have to work at woodworking because he created it, breathes it, and reproduces it.

Even if it shouldn’t be so, or if St. James didn’t plan it to be so, Woodworking’s stories are at the center of current political debates. Isaiah Rose’s vile political positions represent an attempt to make life close to unbearable, even unlivable, for people like Abigail and Erica. Recall Donald Trump’s viral 2024 campaign ad: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

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It’s serendipitous, then, that Woodworking has dropped into this particular moment—a truly terrifying hellscape for trans people, especially trans kids and those who support them. St. James adds in her author’s note: “In the years since 2020, despite several electoral setbacks for those who run on anti-trans platforms, the number of bills aimed at curtailing the rights of trans people—especially trans kids like Abigail—has skyrocketed.” The rumor about furries that was circulating in my mom’s town and in many towns in South Dakota is but one example of the way right-wing media and influencers stir up fears about strange creatures lurking in our bathrooms. MAGA teaches that the enemy is within.

Woodworking fills in the blanks at the heart of these ugly stereotypes with loving descriptions of who shows up at the Sioux Falls (population 192,517, wow!) Public Library’s trans support group, like the “guy […] in overalls and a seed-corn cap,” and the lady “dressed like she’s going to prom in 1955.” There are notable stories of South Dakota characters who participate in Erica’s online trans chat group, and a surprise twist recounted in a first person–voiced chapter. This one is about someone in the closet, a town resident who acts in bad faith and fails to trust others with her story until a lot of damage has already been done. Maybe this is the (or one?) moral of the story. What’s the matter with Kansas, or South Dakota, or much of the heartland, is all the woodworking—dare I say, it’s an epidemic—and too little asking why (or why not). By the end of the novel, Erica and Abigail have made plans to embark on separate journeys out beyond Mitchell. Will life for trans women be a bit easier, sweeter, and less dangerous beyond South Dakota?

These days, South Dakota is most often represented in the news cycle by former governor Kristi Noem, now Trump’s secretary of homeland security. Noem made a name for herself by killing her dog with a shotgun to show how tough she is and now creates photo ops such as the one where she posed in front of a Salvadoran concentration camp where tattooed, shirtless, unlawfully deported male immigrants stare out blankly at the camera. Noem proudly wears a Rolex, femme hair extensions, a baseball hat, and expensive leisure wear. When we look at her through Abigail’s and Erica’s eyes, what do we see? Unreformed woodworker? A tool of men like Isaiah Rose?

Woodworking doesn’t offer easy lessons. Ugliness and hate rub shoulders with glimpses of freedom, growth, and transformation. Like St. James, I believe in the magic of television, films, and books to transform hearts, and I hope that for readers, her authentic, though fictional, stories might create a little space to counter the lies of those currently in power. It may be that I’m investing too much in the wish-fulfillment aspects of the novel, but it comforts me that South Dakota is able to produce people who are not Kristi Noem and are, instead, Emily St. James.