In January 2017, National Geographic magazine published a Gender Revolution issue, described by then-editor Susan Goldberg as an effort to acknowledge “new complexities in the biological understanding of sex.” The issue was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the few editions of the magazine this cisgender writer has kept on his shelf.

Seven years on, the national conversation about gender — poisoned by a politics that is rooted, at least in part, in a seemingly bottomless well of ignorance — is stuck in a cul-de-sac of yelling matches about public bathrooms, high school sports, gender-affirming medical care, and to a lesser extent, library books.

All those debates, civil or otherwise, ignore an essential point that National Geographic makes in the first few pages of the package with a remarkable photograph of 15 persons representing a broad spectrum of gender identity and expression: Transgender itself is not a binary—not, in other words, “just” biological males and females who transition to the “other,” as if there were only one “other.” In mainstream public discourse, the spotlight is almost exclusively on transgender women; transgender males get considerably less attention.

The rest of the spectrum gets sidelined, which amounts to erasure.

Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Portland writer Zoë Bossiere, published by Abrams Press in 2024 to critical acclaim, stands as a corrective, filling in a blank with a story about gender fluidity, about what that lived experience is actually like and the perspective it … well, engenders. One chapter, The Beetle King, was published last year in The Sun, a literary magazine.

At 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 27, Bossiere will appear at Linfield University Library’s author series,  Readings at the Nick, to read from Cactus Country and take questions.

Bossiere’s formal education included studying writing at Oregon State University. They are a working writer, editor and teacher. They were coeditor of the 2023 anthology The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins, and are also a managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. “Many people don’t know this, but Brevity is actually the oldest online-only literary magazine still in publication,” she told me. “We’ve been around since 1997 and still going strong.” Bossiere lives in Oregon with her partner and child.

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The conversation that follows was conducted by email and has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with a question I usually ask after wrapping an interview: Is there anything you would like to talk about that maybe doesn’t come up as often as you’d like when you do public appearances? 

You know, I feel like a lot of people tend to ask questions “around” the main concerns of the book — especially about the trans and genderfluid aspects of its story. Maybe because they worry about asking the wrong thing, or asking the right thing but in the wrong way. I’m hard to offend, and honestly I feel like no question, if asked in the spirit of better understanding, is wrong. I also feel like the opportunity to provide answers to these questions is especially valuable during a time when the public trans narrative is so utterly dominated by misinformation.

Well, not just misinformation, but also a lot of anger and hate, which makes me marvel, frankly, at the courage it must have taken to write this and then have it out in the world now.

To be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about any of that while writing the book. The bulk of Cactus Country came together in 2020 and 2021, and most of my concerns back then were about how my story would be received by my fellow queers. I had been following the rise of anti-trans sentiment in the UK and was watching, with deepening frustration, as the same talking points began to crop up more and more frequently in U.S. newspapers and media. But I would say many of the current attitudes are even more recent than that.

The number of anti-trans bills introduced in legislative bodies more than tripled between 2022 and 2023, and continues to rise each year. The Trump campaign spent something like $130 per trans person in the United States on hate ads targeting our community in 2024. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a scary time to be trans. But I also feel like now is an important time to speak up, because a lot of our lives depend on the public hearing our stories and deciding that our human rights are worth fighting for.

It seems to me that one bit of misinformation skewing the narrative is the idea that transgender is itself a binary, and one in which most of the focus is on just one half: those assigned biological males at birth who later transition to female, or who want to. One hears far less frequently about those assigned female at birth who transition to male. What’s so great about Cactus Country is that you blow through that with a story about another kind of gender experience altogether.

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Yeah, and I don’t think my experiences are all that uncommon. All of us are at least a little uncomfortable with the hand we’ve been dealt, aren’t we? Everyone embodies both masculine and feminine qualities. Nobody is all one way or the other. That’s what the phrase “gender is a spectrum” really means. I do think there’s a strong need in this moment for the public to hear as many kinds of trans stories as possible, whether “binary” or otherwise, because right now many of the stories told about us present our rights to exist and participate in public life as a “debate” in which our perspectives are not welcome or considered. This leads not only to widespread misunderstanding about who and what trans people are—and, just as importantly, what we are not—but also to startlingly false conclusions.

Could you give us an example?

One piece of misinformation I hear echoed quite a lot on social media is the idea that trans kids don’t exist, that they are a product of manipulation or poor parenting. I find that ridiculous not only because I was once a trans child, myself — I have photographic evidence and everything! — but also because, as a former early childhood educator and now as a parent, I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a child to do anything they don’t want to do, you know? Embracing our kids for exactly who they are, following their lead rather than prescribing gender to them, is a wonderful development because that unconditional love and freedom to explore leads to the kind of confidence and self-possession that benefits all children, trans or not.

I’m curious, how did you come to write the book? I gather from the acknowledgements that someone encouraged you to, so I wondered if you would have written Cactus Country without that.

That’s a good question. When I was a graduate student, I actually wrote an entire other, unrelated nonfiction book before Cactus Country. But the feedback I got most often about that first book was: “Where are you in this?” I spent a long time avoiding writing about my past because I didn’t understand how to make sense of my experiences. I didn’t yet have the language to describe myself as queer, as genderfluid, as trans. But the longer I lived away from Tucson, the more I began to reflect on my personal history, and to approach my past self as a writer, with curiosity rather than dread. I connected with the good folks in my local LBGTQ group and in the process of finding community was able to reconnect with the boy I had once been. The short answer to your question is that the time finally felt right. I was ready to face the past, to reckon with it, and to use those experiences to better understand who I am today.

How did you go about “reporting” the story? Did you interview people you’d known?

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Not as many as I would have liked!

Did you have journal entries to refer to?

As a teen I did keep a diary. But seeing my feelings on the page frightened me. I was a boy living in a girl’s body during a time when words like “transgender” had not entered the national lexicon. After writing an entry, I’d usually rip it out or burn it, so I don’t have many of those writings now. Any teenagers who might be reading this — don’t do that! You feel like you’ll never forget, but you do. In the absence of my teenage voice, I reconstructed as much as I could from memory. Fortunately I had photographs and home movie footage to reference.

When I felt really stuck, I turned to someone who’d also been there, if I could — my parents, and some of the folks from Cactus Country. But I didn’t always have a way to get in touch with everyone depicted in the book. Many of my fellow Cactus Country boys, for example, only lived in the park a few months at a time, sometimes as little as a week. I never even knew their last names, just where they’d come from and a vague sense of where they might be going. So I did my best to re-create the people and places of my youth as faithfully as I possibly could. Though I’m also proud to say my memory is overall pretty good! Often when fact-checking what I’d written, I would find that what I’d recollected was correct.

One thing that struck me was the sheer number of broken and damaged people you encountered growing up.

Yeah. Growing up in a trailer park, one does tend to encounter a greater concentration of folks who are down and out, who have struggled with things like poverty, addiction, depression, chronic illness, homelessness, and so on. I think culturally a lot of the people I grew up with and around are highly marginalized, and their stories aren’t often told—or they are told, but from a perspective that doesn’t consider the whole person. That’s why, in writing Cactus Country, I did my best to portray everyone in the book — and especially my neighbors — as generously as possible, even in instances where they were clearly not making great choices. Without excusing the bad behavior, my intention was for readers to have a chance to see and understand these folks the way I had in my youth, and perhaps empathize with them a little, too.

I won’t spoil The Beetle King for those who haven’t read it, but one quote that jumped out was, “Violence was the price of boyhood, of belonging.”

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I’ve actually gotten some pushback for that line. Some readers seem to think it means violence and boyhood are inextricably linked. I don’t think they have to be. But culturally, at least in America, there is no denying that young boys are often encouraged, even expected, to outwardly express anger and aggression over their more complicated emotions. I knew a lot of angry boys in Cactus Country. I was one of them. We lived in trailers. We were always too hot, our skin chapped and bleeding from the dry air. Our folks never had enough money. The kids at school called us nasty names. But we couldn’t talk about this stuff with each other. I don’t think we knew how. So we expressed our anger through violence — to our own bodies when we accepted a dare, to each other’s bodies when we fought, and to the bodies of the palo verde beetles we tormented simply because we could. Engaging in these acts together was our way of bonding, of proving to one another that we were the same. Violence is one way to be seen as a boy, even as many boys do ultimately go on to reject it, just like I did.

If you could pinpoint any experience or influence that saved you from a dead-end life, from a life where you didn’t write Cactus Country and we aren’t having this conversation, what would it be?

I don’t know. But I can say that, as a trans kid, I was very lucky to have parents who were overall supportive of who I was, even if they didn’t always understand why I felt the way I did. Neither of them ever suggested I should grow my hair long, or wear different clothes. I felt they trusted me to find my own path — or to forge it, if necessary — and their faith in me definitely translated to a confidence in myself that I’m not sure I would’ve otherwise had. I also had some really incredible teachers and other mentors who saw potential in me and encouraged me to have high aspirations for my future even when I wasn’t at my best — when I was coming to school dirty, or getting in trouble for using the “wrong” bathroom, or feeling too depressed to complete my homework. I knew a lot of adults who cared about me, and I think they made all the difference.

That leads nicely into my next question: How has the process of thinking through gender issues and writing the book informed your own practice as a parent?

Writing Cactus Country helped me to better understand how my circumstances shaped me, and through that process I gained a greater sense of empathy for the child I’d been, who didn’t have access to the language, media depictions, or role models to describe or understand himself. I think writing the book has made me more conscientious as a parent about providing my children with examples of the many ways people — and families — can be. Whether or not my children feel the way I did growing up, I want to foster a loving acceptance of and generosity of spirit toward those who are different than them. Instilling kindness in our kids is a value I feel all good parents should strive toward.

You say in the book that you’re not interested in writing fiction, so what topics are you interested in writing about that aren’t related to you directly?

You know, I find the more chaotic the real world gets, the more appealing writing fiction becomes! But jokes aside, next I’d like to examine pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. There’s a lot of great literature from the past few years such as I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, which look honestly at the emotional cost of having children for women in America. I think these conversations are long overdue, though many works I’ve read on the subject settle on the idea that motherhood is a primal state of being, that our bodies were made for this, etc. But that doesn’t reflect my experience at all.

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Let’s finish with a shout-out: Three books you’d recommend to ArtsWatch readers?

Books with queer and/or trans characters and themes are among the most targeted by book bans. One way to advocate for these books is to check them out at your local library and to express support for your librarians, who work so hard to fight these bans and keep much-needed books on their shelves. If you enjoyed Cactus Country and want to read more memoirs like it, be sure to check out Pretty by KB Brookins, The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Malcolm Belc, and Fairest by Meredith Talusan.

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Zoê Bossiere’s appearance at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 27, at the Linfield University Nicholson Library is free and open to the public. To reach the library, take Southwest Keck Drive off Highway 99W in South McMinnville as if you were going to Albertsons. Follow the road behind the shopping center and turn right on Library Court. The Nicholson Library is the second building on the left, and there’s plenty of free parking.