Precarious

On Harron Walker's Aggregated Discontent

The sheer administrative tasks required to transition are immense. It’s Kafka-esque. It’s, unfortunately, a job. Labor and work play a key role in a new selection of essays by one of our generational trans heavyweights. Culture writer Harron Walker's debut collection of essays, Aggregated Discontent, charts a new path for the sly, relatable journalist. Known as a keen profile writer with an incisive wit, she’s been a reliable heavyweight in the trans community. Whether profiling Chase Strangio, Ceyenne Doroshow, or Torrey Peters, Walker is often one of the first journalists on the scene. Her writing about plastic surgery and “flop eras” during early COVID went viral for her gentle but honest satire of the online trans community. It would even seem venerated actress Hari Nef played a version of Walker on the HBO miniseries The Idol. It’s fascinating that such an explosion of trans books are launching at the same time that trans people are increasingly under fire. Thankfully, Walker is often able to find levity despite our capitalist hellscape.

Subtitled "Confessions of the Last Normal Woman," Walker’s collection covers films like Monica and artists like Greer Lankton while interweaving personal reflections on dating, queerness, and the hamster wheel of freelancing at precarious online magazines. Walker's main aim is to contend with anti-trans labor practices. This means, of course, skewering messy cis women who think they're doing a good job just by hiring a trans woman. Boxed in and boxed out, Walker struggles against the unfair labor practices of nascent magazines like Vice only to emerge a stronger writer and—yes—woman all at the same time. Her labor experiences mirror her dating habits, an uphill battle where she's constantly on the outs. God forbid a man who’s crossed a woman writer. A lack of economic and romantic security dogs many trans women, echoing across all sectors of our lives. While Walker’s Aggregated Discontent is full of such painful reminders, she is also adept at giving out the best gossip. Reading her book is like grabbing a negroni with a cherished friend who holds all the intra-communal gossip. Across her essays, she brings you into the world of endless chatter, innuendo, exes, and reads that trans people dish out. She’s not above a takedown. She once wrote the most vicious review of Jacob Tobia’s memoir Sissy–and rightfully so. Not even trans people are exempt from being embarrassing.

Most often though, the target of Walker’s scorn, is “well-meaning” cis people. She walks past a sign that declares “in white, Helvetica, that ‘30% of transgender people have experienced homelessness.’” Oh what a difference a font makes. Further along in the essay, she is asked her pronouns. “I have a ponytail and tits,” she thinks. No dice. She must somehow get the words out of her lips: “She/her.” Instead, she must make the best of it. Joking that such neoliberal jobs are like “Free Surgery Depot Dot Com.” Translating inside jokes for a broader audience is not an easy accomplishment, though Walker often pulls it off, her discontent seething, nested in refined prose. A trans woman has to be presentable in this economy.

Walker often couches her vitriol, even when it’s warranted. Can grumbling about the past change the future? “It feels trivial to complain about a staff job I once had, given that those barely exist as it is. I don’t just mean for trans media workers; even cis people can’t catch a break,” Walker writes. “Of the very few trans women that I can think of who had staff jobs around the same time that I did, only one of them still has a staff job.” One wonders if she still does. The industry is clearly in free fall and trans people are often first on the chopping block. (I’m hard pressed to name more than a handful of trans editors or staff writers, many of whom are gathered at the Conde Naste-owned LGBTQ platform Them.) Interspersed with such musings, Walker writes fan fiction, ideas of how things could’ve gone differently, sliding doors of optimism and misogyny. She jokes about her facial feminization surgery: “Yes he might have hit the slay button, but I ask you: at what cost?”

An endless barrage of trans figures appear in the pages of Aggregated Discontent, a parade of who’s who in queer Brooklyn. Walker has befriended, met, or interviewed nearly everyone: P. E. Moskowitz, Nina Arseneult, McKenzie Wark, Thora Siemsen, Kay Gabriel, Cecilia Gentili, Rio Sofia. At times the book reads like a party. Walker waltzes the reader past revelers while the world is on fire. She knows it, too. She just wants you to have a good time on the way out. Maybe you’ll meet someone. Maybe tomorrow will be different.

Of course, the next gig is rarely different from the last. New problems arise, or the same issues arise under new management. Eventually, Walker leaves the staff writing world altogether after a fateful website shutters. The freelance world is a nightmare, so she finds a day job. She writes the very book we’re reading. The result is an astute book about the labor market and the specific difficulties trans women face–and Walker knows she’s one of the lucky ones. Of course, visibility is hardly a gift. Internet trolls and new problems abound. No one gets out unscathed, even the tokens elevated to receive prizes. (Think of the intense online bullying Dylan Mulvaney faced after her beer ad.)

Buried among the barrage of cultural references, Walker provides many layered readings of ephemera, enchanting us with her wry nuance. “Validity” is a beautiful reading of Jenny Lewis’ “Just One of the Guys.” Three long essays late in the book focus on trans motherhood, fertility, and child-rearing through the lens of both personal anecdotes and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. Most moving are her reflections on the way “Sometimes, things don’t fall into place because you chose that other things would. Sometimes, things won’t fall into place, but it’s fine. You chose something else.” There’s a beautiful pang to this free fall. The course of love and money never does run smooth. But you keep going, jumping through one hoop after another, intent on snatching some temporary security and stability. It seems Walker has. The opening chapter of her book is about going to see a movie with her current partner. Publishing a book with Random House seems like its own reward–-this from the woman who once wrote about being in her “Flop Era.” Navigating writing as a job is often a shit-show. But as someone in the same lane, Walker is often someone I look up to as a fellow kindred. She writes beautiful and comic prose, managing to fire on all cylinders at once. Aggregated Discontent is a wry romp through Walker’s world where the men are often lukewarm, the drinks are courtesy of obscure startups, and women aren’t above a little time theft as a treat.