I was sold on this book way back in 2022 when I saw @dessayo’s review. As somebody who wonders what gender even means weekly, I was instantly hooked when she wrote that the book was “casually obsessed with gender… What IS gender? Does anyone know??” And now I’m regretting not writing this review sooner. 

Maria is a trans woman living in New York, slouching her way through her job, her relationship with a cis woman, and her life. Finally living as a woman, she’s still unhappy, and eventually, she buys a bunch of heroin, and steals her girlfriend’s car to drive to Nevada. Partway there, she meets a man in a Walmart who she sees as being trans, but he doesn’t know it yet. She befriends him and invites him on her pilgrimage in a bid to mentor him and help him come out, but even that goes wrong.

Nevada is a fascinating, thought-provoking read. As Maria is a punk, it is perhaps fitting that nothing fits a standard narrative, or matches a reader’s expectations. Nobody has an epiphany, nobody dies, nobody falls in love. In a weird way, Seinfeld-style, it is a book about nothing. OR that would be the case, except for the internal narratives. We spend most of the book with Maria, who ponders gender, relationships, social justice, privilege, gender, the 2010s-era internet scene, drugs, the Womyn’s Music Festival, hormones, gender, and more. It wasn’t an uncommon experience for me to find myself staring at the book but thinking along a tangent. The other characters we follow, a chapter here and there, all ponder some of the same things, but add Maria to the mix (“How do you solve a problem like Maria?”). 

I really enjoyed Nevada. It is intensely quotable, and I filled up my camera with pages of the book for transcription later (haha, as if). I’ve read this book doesn’t show transness for the curious, it shows it for trans people. I’d add that it shows it for anybody who has maybe thought a little too much about gender. “While gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.”