by Saturn Guo
art by Sam Kang
Ponyboy, authored by Eliot Duncan, is fundamentally a story of unraveling – in the half-world of pre-transition, the main character, a trans man, is electric. Despite his initial implacability, we meet him in his alternating philosophizing and arrogance, a man crafted by trauma and becoming. In a twist of narrative norms befitting the subject matter, the story rapidly and often disorientingly alternates between Ponyboy’s fall into drugs and his childhood in Western Nebraska, a killing zone for nontraditional bodies. Despite the story’s narrative focus on addiction and Duncan’s skillful mastery of crafting and centering settings, its essence — and eventual conclusion — is a reflection and near-resolution of transness.
“We won’t be making love. Fucking, maybe, but not love.” Sex in Ponyboy is unbecoming — rather than described physically, Duncan paints it opaque and dark through harsh language and unspeakable pain. At the core of each of Ponyboy’s sexual experiences is an undeniable disjuncture between the masculine body that he envisions and the feminine nature of the intimacy that he experiences. The novel starts by placing Ponyboy in what the blurb describes as a messy love triangle. On one hand, Ponyboy’s childhood best friend and forbidden lover “bends… before him,” “allowing him to [fuck] like [himself].” Intimacy with Toni is masculine and fulfilling, it allows him to breath and be. On the other, his girlfriend, Baby, whom he dearly loves, casts him into shapes of “woman, d***, girl,” unable to see herself with a trans man. While intimacy for Ponyboy can be masculinizing, without Toni, no one is willing to fuck him as such. Indeed, the writing itself becomes more unraveled as Ponyboy (in)coheres into woman for Baby. For Ponyboy, the disjuncture he feels is startling and disgusting. He re-ravels with drugs, a hit of ket or line of blow, and so the writing swings rapidly between rejection, sex, and Ponyboy’s writing, which is influenced by a haze of substances so potent as to be dizzying.
Ponyboy’s self-destructive feminization in sex is perhaps best encompassed in a poem he writes labeled “Baby, Paris,” which he describes as not a poem, but his biggest fear:
“Chop off my chest / you’re my surgeon just cut me open / pull out the tissue and / feed it to your dog / he’s a good boy / like me / adrift and afraid of the name they / gave me he can’t make this about my / social capital again / Baby cries I say / it’s murder the way no one is stunned / by your form / lit from behind / the loud cars get fucked by rain / later / her handsome, veiny hands hold up / Catherine Opie’s photos / this is it / she / shoves it in my face: / a woman with a cartoon home cut into her back / this one is it for you / you hold the knife at your own back / but instead of words I / surrender to something ancient / churned-up desire melts into another aimless
hand job engrossed in / sticky affection cumming / again and again Baby says / we’re fucked / and at dinner I’m tying Baby up / their conversation lulls and praises and then dies / drunk eyes glance over at me / me, perversely fingering the thick metal ring / it’s loud and I look unhinged but / mentally I’m hooking it all together / Baby’s tiny wrists here and her torso on the table / my cock / blank, raw / harder their table conversation goes on in that language I won’t learn / I told you Baby I told you / I told you / you erode my solitude you golden / slut.”
Top surgery —gender-affirming, man-making — is described not as freedom but as a brutal murder, flesh discarded and fed to the jowls of a hungry beast, a “good boy / like [him].” Indeed, in Ponyboy’s work, he consistently describes transmasculinity in the context of his own repulsion — he figures himself as “perverse”, a sex toy, “unhinged,” “blank,” at best a vehicle of “churned-up desire,” at worst a defiler of his “golden / slut.” In other words, transmasculinity in its incompleteness and continued attachment to the feminine sex he knows is, to him, deeply repulsive — his “biggest fear.”
Sex with Baby is indicative of perhaps the broadest contributor to Ponyboy’s incoherency — he is unable to depart from femininity. His inability is despite his efforts — throughout the novel, especially with Toni, he sees himself only when the taste and bubble of beer erases him until he only knows the masculinity of his mind. In other words, Ponyboy abuses substances until he can temporarily forget his girlhood — “[He drinks,] fast, fast, and then faster… [he wants] to not be a body anymore.” This is startling in light of feminist theorization that yields connection between the body and the feminine — for example, Judith Butler critiques the dualism of the mind (subject) and the body (object) as the unifying force in the gender binary. In other words, Ponyboy’s wish to be more-than flesh is a wish to be more-than sexualized, more-than fuck-toy, more-than woman. Looking at a mirror (self) disrupted by lines of cocaine, he sees and calls himself by name: “Ponyboy.” While inebriated, he describes himself as “cock-intelligent,” “cock-conscious,” masculine only in mind and numbness.
Beyond merely sex, the inseparability of his femininity from his transmasculinity is seen in all his experiences, both past and present. As masculine as he knows his mind, he is touched as girl, seen as girl, affected purely by womanly experiences. The most impactful of these upon Ponyboy’s psyche is his experience with sexual assault. In a section titled “An Interlude of Becoming,” Ponyboy describes being raped at fourteen, “all wide-eyed, unmoving, coming to.” The titling is indeed significant — while every other section is attributed to a person and place, this experience transcends physical descriptors: violence in this form for Ponyboy could be nothing but becoming, nothing but formational, nothing but incoherent and yet engrained, feminine scar tissue upon a masculine mind. How is Ponyboy meant to cohere himself when the root of his addiction and the beginning of his sexuality comes from a feminine violence?
This is not to say that sexual assault is a violence enacted against women, or that there is a universal langauge or experience of sexual assault. Instead, I make the argument that Ponyboy himself experiences perceived feminization post-assault — by linguistics, language, society, and especially himself. This is, again, not universal, but a common experience known by many — on the scientific side, Mulder et. al describe how “the label ‘victim’ elicits connotations of passive femininity” and how men who were victims of rape experienced what they felt as demasculinization — in being fucked, they felt woman. Rape is hence perceived as subordination and submission so destructive as to create feelings of femininity and weakness within the victim.
Furthermore, though theory on and genealogies of rape are disturbingly sparse (there was only one article on sexual violence in Feminist Studies in the past ten years), even a cursory viewpoint of theory yields the same conclusion. Though this is a grossly short and simplistic description of rape’s effects, when taken within the context of the common claim that gender itself is an embodiment (in any fashion) of certain constructed standards as opposed to a set of sex characteristics or genatalia, rape has an actively gendering effect. This is best summarized by Bonthuys: “a man who is raped loses his masculine status and becomes, in terms of his sexual role, a woman — while the sexually subordinate status of a woman who is raped is thereby confirmed.” For Ponyboy, mentally man and yet trapped within what he feels is a girl’s body, the effect is twofold: he is relegated over and over through habit and force into the feminine role, “sexually subordinate,” dysphoric, tortured.
The effect of sexual assault upon Ponyboy’s psyche is painted in artful prose, but still evidently significant nonetheless — in both instances of rape that he experiences, he describes the incident as “fucking dreams and breath out of [him] forever,” implicating his masculine futurama itself. However, this is perhaps most evidently shown in his exploration of and co-existence with Dora, a Freudian case study of sexual assault, who he finds himself in front of in “dreamy admiration… Dora. Dora. Dora.” Dora is, to Ponyboy, an honest reflection of his own self. Though he imagines a future where him/Dora can overturn their trauma, overcome the imperatives of gender and sex, sit shoulder to shoulder and roll cigarettes, and live a life of dancing and wine, in a stunning act of self-defeat, despite “begging for [her] story,” Ponyboy acknowledges that she, like himself, is “gone.” In his mind, both himself and Dora are without dreams or breath, have been lost by violence to history and heterosexual summation.
Beyond mere physical illegibility, however, Ponyboy’s move towards the world-making of drugs is a symptom of his (linguistic) unthinkability. Without drugs, he not only feels feminine, he often doesn’t feel within the world at all. This is attributable to what Luce Irigaray describes as linguistic illegibility — the “subject” feminized by a metaphysical definition of what it means to be is simultaneously excluded from subjecthood altogether by the unintelligibility of womanhood in a phallogocentric language. Ponyboy, despite feeling man, is feminized, Ponyboy, despite being, is denied. The lived effects of this denial are best described in one of his many drunken poems: “What dreams do I live with ink on page / how do I know which words and when / how do I know I’m man[?]”
How does the transmasculine subject know which words and when? How to overcome the incoherence of a feminine intimacy in a masculine body? Neither Ponyboy nor I can come to any totalizing antidote, but he himself finds an antidote, ironically in intimacy itself. Later on within the novel, Ponyboy meets and fucks a cis male named Gabriel. The photographer is gentle and affirming, calling him “a gay boy,” “a pretty boy,” but though the intimacy they share casts Ponyboy in a traditionally feminine role, it finally makes him feel as if he “could breathe.” A direct and oppositional parallel is drawn between the assault Ponyboy faces, described at-length above: “[Gabriel] listened with his whole body, thrusting dreams back inside me forever.” What is different about this intimacy? What allows femininity to finally become a part of healing rather than fracturing?
Ponyboy’s fate is not to be fucked by man into healing — after Gabriel leaves him, he snorts and drinks like never before and ends up in a hospital bed. Instead, Duncan’s purpose in juxtaposing sex as affirmation (with Gabriel, with Toni) and sex as fracturing (with Baby, in violence) is to contrast a pair of differing relations to femininity. While the latter demonstrates Ponyboy’s inflicted incoherence as felt due to a failed departure from femininity, the former shows Ponyboy as departing from gender-mimetism altogether. When Ponyboy attempts to imitate masculinity and depart from femininity altogether, his inability to cohere a “feminine” violence/intimacy/sex with a “masculine” mind causes an internal fracturing. For him, the solution is to understand that “the rainbow can become a skin.” In “Can the Monster Speak,” Paul Preciado, a trans man, states to a crowd of psychoanalysts: “I am the teenage boy kissing a girl behind the church door. I am the young girl who dresses up as a Jesuit and learns screeds of Spinoza’s Ethics by heart.” Similarly, Ponyboy learns the self by becoming both cocksharp man and fucked feminine, gay boy and pretty girl.
Where, instead, can Ponyboy find a formal definition of identity? If his suffering comes from his attempts to depart from femininity, how else can transmasculinity be explained? In a satisfying conclusion to his battle with the self, as Ponyboy finally recovers from his addiction and substance abuse in rehab within his childhood home, he both denies definition and solid identity and instead accepts a trans kinship. In a letter to Brandon Teena, a transgender man who was killed and violated near Ponyboy’s hometown, Ponyboy describes how “I never met you, Brandon. But your life lingers like a fiery exponent, always in my peripheral, illuminating new shapes of myself. I learn, with you, that my wingspan is greater than the threat of death.” With Brandon, Ponyboy traces a track of lived experiences and survival, of trans-ness as gnostic and fluid and beautiful. In kinship, in lived brotherhood, he becomes.
[1] Duncan, Eliot, Ponyboy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023), 35.
[2] Ibid, 4.
[3] Ibid, 72.
[4] Ibid, 44.
[5] Duncan, Eliot, Ponyboy, 44.
[6] Ibid, 8.
[7] Ibid, 11.
[8] Ibid, 11.
[9] Ibid, 11.
[10] Eva Mulder, Antony Pemberton, and Ad J. Vingerhoets, “The Feminizing Effect of Sexual Violence in Third-Party Perceptions of Male and Female Victims,” Sex Roles 82, no. 1–2 (March 27, 2019): 13–27, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01036-w.
[11] E. Bonthuys, “Putting Gender into the Definition of Rape or Taking It Out?” Feminist Legal Studies 16, no. 2 (2008): 249–260, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-008-9091-4.
[12] Dora, after being assaulted by her father’s close friend, had difficulty breathing, historical choking, a loss of voice, and fainting spells. Freud attributed this and her disgust at the assault as hysteria – as Ponyboy puts it, “Freud can’t understand why a girl would be revolted by such advances.”
[13] Duncan, Eliot, Ponyboy, 48.
[14] To Ponyboy, cigarettes are repeatedly interpreted as a symbol of masculinity. He often admires the way men smoke. He was once told by his sister, correctively, that the way he smoked was “like a boy.”
[15] Duncan, Eliot, Ponyboy, 48.
[16] Duncan, Eliot, Ponyboy, 67.
[17] Ibid, 83, 84.
[18] Ibid, 84.
[19] Ibid, 84.
[20] Saoirse Caitlin O'Shea, "Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts,"review of Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, by Paul B. Preciado, trans. Frank Wynne. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021. Gender, Work and Organization 30, no. 3 (May 2023): 1152–1154.
[21] Ibid.