We all know someone who worries that love is not for them. Perhaps there was a relationship, long ago, the end of which affected them deeply. As the years pass, another one eludes them somehow, and a complex forms about love: the brain is caught in an endless whirr of self-analysis. There might be the eureka moment, when observing a happy couple, that one is not looking in the right places: that sensible people seek peace, while others are hardwired to chase a more acute and painful feeling. The fear of being hurt can be erotic. To Shon Faye, each break-up confirmed “that I was especially complicated to love, and was doomed to be abandoned”.
Faye, who is transgender and authored the 2021 book The Transgender Issue, examines the problem of love, and the expectations around it, in a beautiful little book that looks like it was printed in the 1930s. Most people these days, she points out, go to therapy, then spend their lives blaming their relationship problems on their mothers. Faye was born into a matriarchal Irish family in Bristol in the late 1980s, and was raised by an inspirational single mother who worked full time. Her father was an alcoholic, and her grandfather was recently deceased, so her grieving grandmother lavished love upon her.
Faye’s interest is not in the “bad parenting” that preoccupies so much of modern therapy, but the politicised nature of love itself: “We are encouraged to see our emotional lives as apolitical… If love is a private matter, then we believe ourselves culpable for our own feelings of lovelessness.” Faye saw in her 35th birthday with the episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie Bradshaw turned 35. She repeats Charlotte’s words about friendship, revolutionary at the time: “Maybe we could be each other’s soulmates, and then we could just let men be these great guys to have fun with.”
It appealed to me, Faye’s exploration of the argument that marriage – an institution I’ve never fully understood – is a political structure: “Sadly, making women happy was never part of the heterosexual project.” It chimed for me “as a mother” (that phrase!) to see the words of Engels again: “The first division of labour is that between a man and a woman for the propagation of children.”
But the shifts in the book’s tone, between the personal and the political, can be alienating. Faye does not want children (“I can barely keep my aloe vera plant alive”), though she counts her grandmother’s adoration of her as a “foundational lesson in love”. Yet her cluster of negative associations around the maternal drive – “a patriarchal society wants to promulgate the idea that the work of gestation is the apogee of womanhood” – can’t help but give the impression that she suspects women, cis and trans, who long for children may have drunk the Kool-Aid of oppression. She quotes the 1970s radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, who claims that pregnancy is barbaric, and we should stop pretending it is beautiful or joyous.
She says that the women who notoriously post anti-trans sentiments on Mumsnet make their attacks because they are resentful of the unpaid labour they are doing, and their loss of identity. My Facebook feed abounds with cartoon strips fetishising mothers’ exhaustion and self-sacrifice – there is a massive social problem here. But I found it painful to see maternal love framed as a cover for vindictive politics, conservatism and hate. “Frankly, I struggle to understand anyone who desires motherhood so strongly that it overrides reasonable arguments for not having children,” says Faye. In overlooking love itself as the main driver to have children, Faye undermines one of the great powers of mothers both cis and trans – or any parent for that matter – which I’m sure she does not intend to do.
In another way, the book’s tonal shifts dramatise the tension between political radicalism and the often messy, contradictory nature of the life behind it. The latter is the book’s great strength for me and, I think, the real source of its political power. Words like “capital” and “peasant class” do not capture the heart as Faye’s poetic writing does. Since transitioning, Faye has moved from dating gay men to straight men, and the portrait of the “pantomime” she enacts under the male gaze strikes a piano’s worth of chords. Trans people are, she points out, still perceived through the lens of male fantasy: “transgender” was the third most searched term on US porn sites in 2022.
What Faye suffers is, in some ways, what so many women suffer: the murkiness over the nature of our desire; the awareness that a man’s turn-on confirms one’s femininity. To be smaller, to be less physically powerful than a man, is to be “feminine”: to act otherwise, sexually, is often for their benefit too: “I did what I was told and in service of his desire, acted as the confident aggressor with his body.” The vivid vignettes of her dating life moved me: her smiling ability to swallow deep insults in order to keep being wanted (I remember laughing gaily when one man, after many whiskies, told me, “For a beautiful woman you’ve got f**king ugly hands”).
Yet I cannot claim the same experience: as Faye writes, “The real transexual body – my body – is not a neat metaphor to be instrumentalised to spice up a cis woman’s feminist theory.” She recalls the feeling of men “scrutinising the harmony of my features for any evidence of the ‘man within’”. She scrawls “F**K YOU” in the margins of The Female Eunuch, alongside Germaine Greer’s description of trans women as the “disgraced unsexed” – then grudgingly agrees with some of the book: “If Germaine Greer is sick of being made to perform sexless, sanctioned femininity like a trans woman, imagine how tired I am of it.”
Faye has experienced love and infatuation, many times over, as have many people who believe it will forever elude them. You hold your breath reading about the first dates with floppy haired boys at the National Gallery, hoping that this one works out, this time. She has also had those strange relationships we have all had at least one of, which feel more like addictions than love, because something is missing at their core. Faye was an addict too, an alcoholic like her father, until she got sober in her twenties. Drink, not some man, was her first love, she says: “Retreating from the world to have private time alone with my drunkenness felt to me… like a bond between a married couple, who established their own secluded little world.” I winced at the level of self-criticism in the paragraphs about her relationship with drink and dating in this book. But then again, as an alcoholic, it was different, harder, for her. Like much of her experience, in so many ways the same, but harder.
Love in Exile
Shon Faye
Allen Lane, 208pp, £20
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[See also: Eimear McBride’s literature of desire]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone