Eisner-Nominated Comic Writer Lilah Sturges Talks Transgender Narratives, Coming Out, and the Importance of Names

Do you consider yourself “born this way” (i.e. you always knew you were trans and were consciously closeted) or did you come to realize your gender identity over time? On Twitter you said you “felt like [you’d] been fighting with one hand tied behind [your] back” your whole life; can you elaborate on that a little?
I didn’t always know. In fact, I didn’t consciously know until 2012. It was always clear to me that there was… something different about me, and that this something, whatever it was, was something that I needed to hide. I was a child in the 70s, and there was no tolerance for or understanding of gender difference whatsoever. It never occurred to me that I was a girl; I just knew that I wanted to be around girls, and that I preferred their company from a very early age. My mother has an entry in her journal somewhere of me being around three years old and playing “bunnies” with the little girl next door, which sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would have done.

By the time I was old enough for me to now remember it, I already had some kind of awareness that I had something to hide. Even at six or seven it was clear to me that there were things I wanted to do, ways I wanted to express myself, that were forbidden. I was an extremely sensitive child, and the idea of doing something that my parents or society would frown on was unacceptable to me. It never occurred to me that society could be wrong about something, so the only sensible conclusion was that something was wrong with me.

I spent most of my youth being an unpopular outsider; I got called “faggot” and “pussy” a lot. I never really wanted to associate with boys, and feared them, and I desperately wanted to be friends with girls. But I felt like I was “supposed” to be friends with boys, so I worked hard at it, grimly sacrificing whatever of my own personality needed to be shed in order to make that happen. Sometimes I would find myself in a position to be friends with girls and it was such a relief. Those girls always felt like peers; the boys I befriended felt like superiors, and I always had to watch what I said and did around them so they wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the real me.

I compensated for all of this by spending a lot of time engaged in fantasy and daydream. A big part of this daydream consisted of imagining a perfect girl who was my friend and confidante and, later, girlfriend. I spent a lot of time on this fantasy, imagining every aspect of this person. In a journal from college I found recently, there’s a six page detailed description of her, including her various wardrobe options. Like, detailed. I just thought of her as “her;” for years she had no name. I imagined her constantly; I dreamed about her. In one dream that I had when I was 19 or so, which I was lucky enough to write down upon awakening from it, I’m sitting with her on top of a giant boulder, overlooking a lush valley. I say to her, “This is a place where souls can come to contemplate each other.” And she responds, “That’s true. But it’s not so much a place of fulfillment as it is a place of longing.”

So I kept hiding myself away and kept feeling this longing for a very, very long time. I spend most of my young adulthood feeling pretty much totally miserable. I was aimless, melancholy, never really knew what I wanted or why. There were always these tantalizing clues that I never really followed up on; I remember reading Jenny Boylan’s book She’s Not There with a great deal of interest. But when I read about Boylan’s childhood and saw that she had always known she was a girl, I remember feeling a sharp pang of despair and thinking, “Well, I guess that’s not what I am.” I allowed myself that thought and then shoved it all back under the rug again. I didn’t quite recognize myself in Jenny Boylan; what if I had? Maybe that’s why I’m answering your question in such detail; I’m hoping that someone will see themselves in my story and figure themselves out a lot faster than I did as a result. The more trans narratives we share with the world, the more the world comes to understand us, and the more young trans people can discover their own identities reflected in us.

So, it took forever, but finally, in 2012, something got through to me, and that something was Lana Wachowski’s acceptance speech for her 2012 HRC Visibility Award. Watching her talk, I finally saw someone I identified with; not her story exactly (she is “born this way”, as you say), but her personality, her warmth, her humor. Something about watching her speak made me see that what she was was beautiful. Not scary, not monstrous, but beautiful. By the time the video was over, I was sobbing. After that, I knew, but it still took me years to figure out how to deal with it.

As for the “her” that I spent so much time thinking about, she did get a name at some point. I gave her that name, after careful consideration, years before I realized who she really was. Her name, of course, was Lilah. I took her name, and she vanished.

What made you settle on Lilah for your “perfect girl” ideal? Writers know there’s power in names, so I don’t imagine you chose this frivolously.

 I would love to say that its origin has some kind of deep import, but the truth is that I got it from Lilah Morgan, the evil lawyer who appears in the first couple seasons of Angel. Not that I have an affinity for evil or for lawyers, but I have always loved the name, and the “h” at the end gives it a roundness and a softness. And “Lilah Sturges” has a beautiful trochaic cadence, so that helped. I guess mainly it just felt classy, elegant, and lovely, which are all adjectives I’d love to be described with.

 Come to think of it, names are a big thing in fantasy specifically, which is a big part of your portfolio; what draws you to fantasy and magical narratives so frequently?

Somewhere in House of Mystery I think the protagonist, Fig, asserts that all magic is metaphor. Magic in stories is a way for us to project our concerns onto a larger, more colorful screen and to immerse ourselves in imagination, where anything is possible. It defangs things that are terrifying and confusing. For instance, fairy tales like “Cinderella” take something potentially terrifying like adolescence and turn it into something magical. That story also addresses our confusion about how mothers can be sometimes loving and sometimes angry, a relationship that often grows more fraught as girls come of age; that tension is resolved by having “mother separated into two people: a loving mother who has died, and a wicked stepmother.

So much of my own personal life, especially as a child, was spent indulging in fantasy. I used to watch Doctor Who and wish for a Time Lord to show up in my life and whisk me away to the other worlds and other times. The kids from the Narnia books are having a shitty time — they’ve been sent away from London during the Blitz and have nothing to do but play hide and seek in a boring old manse. Narnia is their escape. They are kinds and queens in a land of magic (and backdoored Christianity)! It appeals to the dreamer in me; I’ve long held this fantasy of turning a corner on the street and suddenly finding myself face-to-face with a magical ocean. The first time that actually happened to me in San Francisco, I almost started crying right there on the sidewalk. It’s hard to top an unexpected ocean.

Did your work play a role in figuring out/coming to terms with your gender identity? I’m looking at the copy for Beneath the Skin and already finding a whole lot of subtext…
 Yeah, the full sentence is, “Beneath the skin we are all monsters.” So, fairly apropos to how I felt about myself. My work is full of transformations. In the title story in that collection one of the characters is a selkie: a seal who turns into a woman. In House of Mystery, there’s a bit where Goldie the Gargoyle’s dream is to become a human girl, so she convinces another character to turn her into one. House of Mystery is especially revealing once you understand that Fig is just a stand-in for me. Pretty much everything she says and feels and huge chunks of her personal backstory are just me.

I guess it’s only natural that if you’re forcibly suppressing some part of yourself, that part of you is going to push its way out unconsciously in any way possible. When I was in my twenties I wrote a song that contained the lyrics, “All of your life you’ve been putting up with everything, while always putting yourself down./It’s time to loosen your tie and address this goddess that’s been inside you/All of your life./She will get her way.” She got her way eventually, but it took over a decade for me to loosen the tie and address her, as at were.

What’s your relationship with your deadname? Are you at all sad or bitter about having it on your past work? Are you intending to have your publishers change it on future editions?

 I have a weird relationship with it, obviously. I don’t prefer the term “deadname” for my own. It’s Matthew. It makes me a little dysphoric to see it and hear it, but I respect it, just like I respect the things that I did in order to make it through life, all those coping mechanisms that allowed me to survive, sometimes literally. That’s what that name means to me; pain, but also perseverance.

As for seeing it on my books, that’s also a little complicated. Some books I feel belong to that name, in a strange way that I can’t quite elucidate. Jack of Fables is one of those, and the hardcover editions coming out this year say “Matthew Sturges” on them at my request. I feel differently about some other books, but those aren’t likely to be reprinted, so it’s not a big deal.

A couple of people have asked me if I will sign books with my old name on it, and of course the answer is yes. I wrote them. As to whether I would sign using my old signature, I would have to say that I would probably decline to do so. That’s not my name anymore. I’m trying to come up with a new signature.

What’s next for Lilah Sturges? Are you still planning for Public Relations Vol. 2?

 We’ve still got Everafter: From the Pages of Fables going on. The first five issues are already out, and a trade is on the way. Issue 6 is a great little one-shot guest-penciled by Steve Rolston. Last year, Big Fish Games released a mobile game I wrote called Lifeline: Crisis Line, about a never-gendered police detective named Alex who is trying to solve a frightening  and possibly supernatural murder. I’m working on a new game right now, but I can’t say anything about it yet.

There will be a second volume of Public Relations that should contain everything through the series’ end at issue 13, so be on the lookout for it. We’re still hoping it’ll be a sleeper hit.

Other than that, I’m trying to find a way to fit a transgender protagonist into a supernatural mystery novel. I have all the big pieces, and now it’s just trying to fit them into place. Imogen Binnie’s must-read novel Nevada showed me that having trans characters is great, but having a story told from a transgender point of view is even better. So much media surrounding trans characters is beholden to the cis[gender] gaze and either romanticizes us or vilifies us, but always tends to show us as other, as something for cis people to respond to. I want to add to the canon of literature that employs a transgender gaze, one that’s accessible to cis people but is not created for them.

I’m also working on an album of songs whose them is universalizing my transgender experience. For instance, there’s a song called “Too Fast” that’s about my fear at the beginning of my transition where it felt like it was taking me over and I was feeling out of control. But that feeling is a universal feeling; we all experience that in some way. The notion is to collect all these facets of living my trans life and show that a lot of these facts, taken one at a time, are relatable to anyone. And then showing that some aspects, like in the song “Dysphoria”, that are perhaps inexplicable, that there’s a divide there that sets us apart from cic people and this song expresses that essential isolation. Oddly, I have no idea if I will ever release these songs for anyone else to hear. They may just be part of my own coping process. Who knows?