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April Daniels Tackles Trans Teen Trouble in Superheroine Story Dreadnought
Too often, fiction that deals with transgender issues is written by cisgender authors and casts trans characters as tragic, unlovable figures. In her debut novel Dreadnought, book one in the Nemesis series and out January 24 from Diversion Books, April Daniels shatters those preconceived notions of what trans narratives can look like. After gaining incredible powers and a brand-new body from a dying superhero, Danny Tozer is excited to finally live her life as a girl—but she may not be ready to juggle a violently transphobic father, newly creepy best friend, and lack of acceptance from other superheroes, all while there’s a killer on the loose. Daniels spoke with B&N about what went into crafting her bold new vision and what’s next in Danny’s saga.
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How long have you been planning the Nemesis series?
There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of planning involved at all. On Halloween of 2013, I thought it would be cool to have a superhero book for young trans women. I wanted to write the book I wish I’d had when I was that age. So I sat down and outlined it for about an hour or so and got a very rough idea of what the book would look like. Then I started writing it on November 1 (yes, it started as a spur-of-the-moment NaNoWriMo project), and by the time January came around I had something I could show to beta readers. It was only after the first manuscript had a complete draft that I started thinking about sequels.
Dreadnought opens with a deeply personal look into Danny’s thoughts as she struggles with some intense gender dysphoria. Was this a hard scene for you to tackle, emotionally?
No. Dysphoria is, by now, background radiation for me. The hard part was putting it into words. I’m still not sure I got it right, but I hope I did well enough to accomplish what I set out to do.
Is Danny representative of your experience of transness, or is she more of a pastiche?
She’s definitely a pastiche. My own experiences play in heavily, yes, but I didn’t transition when I was young, so to an extent I have had to extrapolate from my experiences and fill in the gaps with the second-hand experiences of others. All that being said, she is not, and is not meant to be, a cipher for all trans women everywhere. She is situated very deliberately as a lower middle class white girl from a dense urban city. It is by being particular about the specifics that we avoid erasing the experiences of others. Danny does not represent all trans women, because not all trans women live in cities, or are white, or are from a lower middle class background. She represents only herself, and with that acknowledged and put up front, trans people from other backgrounds can (hopefully) find more to identify with about her than they could if there were a lot of off-putting assumptions about her supposed universality encoded within her story.
There’s been a little hesitance from some trans readers regarding Danny’s “magic” transformation. What were you setting out to accomplish by getting Danny’s physical transition out of the way in the first chapter?
There’s two reasons: First, the process of transition is hugely fetishized in the media. There’s a strong focus on The First Stockings, and The First Lipstick and a whole range of montages that in effect make transition seem artificial and fake and insubstantial. I wanted to bypass all that as fast as possible. The media shapes our perceptions of ourselves so much that I didn’t want to risk recreating some harmful nonsense by accident.
Second, when I was still in the closet, the process of transition is not what I daydreamed about. Being transitioned is what I thought about. I used to have this recurring daydream where I went in for some unspecified surgery and woke up in a body that fit me that they had put my brain in “by accident.” The doctors would be super apologetic, but I’d tell them no, this is fine, and then everything would be better. I used to spend a lot of time in this daydream. That’s sort of what I was trying to appeal to with making Danny’s transition happen so fast and painlessly. If this is a power fantasy for young trans women, why focus on all the crappy real-life details that are painful and difficult and hard to come to grips with?
Will we meet other trans or gender-nonconforming characters in the series?
Yes. There’s a genderqueer superhero named Kinetiq who will show up in the second book, Sovereign, that is due out this July. They’re an Iranian American queer anarchist from the Bay Area with energy powers. They’re heavily inspired by a lot of the punks I lived with when I was homeless in San Francisco for a time, and I think a lot of people will really like them.
What are you hoping trans youth take away from Dreadnought, and what lessons should cisgender readers learn from it?
I just hope that some scared kid out there can have something to read and get away from the bullshit for a few hours, and maybe feel a little better when they’re finished. I can’t say I am too concerned about what cis people take away from it; I really didn’t write it with their needs in mind. I hope they enjoy it and want to give me more money when the sequel comes out in July.
Dreadnought is available now.