Harron Walker is the Last Normal Woman

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It didn’t seem like there was a better time for transgender visibility than the 2010s. Companies like Instagram and LinkedIn allowed their users a space to place their pronouns on their profiles. Shows like Orange is the New Black, Pose, and Transparent have been showered with both critical and mass acclaim. Laverne Cox became the first openly transgender woman to be on the cover of Time magazine, while Caitlyn Jenner made her transition debut on Vanity Fair. 

Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman is Harron Walker’s dispatch from these particular years as a transgender writer working in digital media who was often tasked with being a first responder to whatever was happening sociopolitically with transgender people. Whether it was about anti-transgender legislation or some new trans cultural milestone, Walker built her career often transcribing these moments for cisgender readers. 

As she would write in her debut collection, however, many of the things that came to her as potential stories were often the more absurd inevitabilities of what happens when corporations and the media attempt to (financially) meet the moment. Such as the time she recounts going on a trek of different Lush stores after receiving a press email from the company that they would be “elevating the voices of trans employees.” Walker writes: “How many trans people were even working there? I knew firsthand just how difficult it was to get hired somewhere as a transwoman.” The journey ended with her back in her apartment using one of Lush’s “trans-themed bath bombs, half pink and half blue” that they were promoting. 

Even what comes across as trivial now, however, seems like a distant past as the climate has changed when it comes to transgender people in the United States. Attacks have only increased against transgender people on a state level, while it seems that the culture has only receded in its attempt to even posture as concerning itself with trans people. Leading Walker to joke about how she longs for even a little bit of “pinkwashing.” 

In her book and during our conversation, Walker also talked about the fatigue she experienced from traditional media as she dealt with terrible bosses who exploited Walker’s trans identity to drive traffic to their website without treating her work with the care that it deserved. Including one boss at a job she refers to as “Free Surgery Depot Dot Com” who repeatedly rejected Walker’s pitch of covering transgender mothers, sending her articles about transgender men who had given birth as proof that the publication had already covered the subject. 

My interview with Walker about her debut book, Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman below. 

What made you wanna write Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman? 

The literal impetus was an editor at Random House had reached out to me like four years ago, around the time I was doing this column for W’s website, and he was like I'm a fan of your column and your writing,  have you ever thought about writing a book? And I was like, maybe about a year out from getting laid off, following like a string of jumping sinking ships in different newsrooms. Each one of them being sucked down by new management or mismanagement or venture capitalists buying the places up and squeezing them for all they were worth until they were non-functional basically.

I was feeling very burned by traditional media style writing and nonfiction. So by that point, I was writing fiction, but then an editor at Random House reached out to me and was like, do you wanna write a book of essays? And I was well, yes. I'm glad that I followed that instinct instead of my burning rage at how I felt about my experience working in media newsrooms, because I really like the book-length work that came out of it. 

You were transitioning and also coming into your writing career during what many might consider this golden age of capital “I” identity writing, when writers from marginalized backgrounds were effectively being coerced by editors into using their identities to drive traffic to their websites. So what are your feelings about that now, looking back on that time? 

 I don't know that I have like one distinct feeling about it, per se. I think it's a very fascinating time period in the recent past to look back on. Right now, I'm having lots of conversations with friends about this sort of ongoing joke that has come up a lot of just [us saying]: oh, can we have like a little pink-washing back? Sort of in the wake of that whole Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light Fox News media implosion as part of this ongoing, broader, reactionary backswing around the world and the ways that it's focused on trans people.

It's so bizarre and fascinating to think back in that regard on even as recently as 2019, just how corporate sponsors were just fighting tooth and nail to throw money at a random trans influencer to do an ad for a gender-segregated men's and women's watch company. I think of it as like this period where for trans people and other marginalized groups there was this way in which, through whatever boardroom calculations went into this, were deemed like more profitable as either a marketable demographic or at least like a profitable face, whether or not we were the intended demographic they were selling to. 

I do think it's fascinating to see how quickly the pendulum will swing back and forth, I would say. 

Especially because we never know when it's going to swing back, because we haven't gotten to that point yet. And also what that will look like when/if it does. It would be so easy if history and culture and everything were actually linear as we're often told it is, but it's not.

In chapter three, you write a Devil Wears Prada and The Intern fan fiction as a sort of meta auto fiction about the pitfalls of girl-bossism and your experience as a trans woman in digital media. What drew you to those films in that way that you wanted to write in that format?

That essay originally was focused squarely on Working Girls, the Lizzie Borden movie from 1986 about a sex worker at this upscale, discreet Manhattan brothel who's on shift and has to cover another girl's shift and can't leave. Her boss just keeps demanding she stay, and the boss character herself, she said in the film, she used to work at one of these places, and now she owns the place, and she's always like “my girls, my girls.” I started writing parts of that essay about other examples of female bosses on screen, and I think somewhere between that, I just got to thinking about The Devil Wears Prada. Anne Hathaway is like the employee who's being abused. The Intern she’s suddenly in charge 

She's not abusing anyone as far as we know, textually within the film, but I started to think, what if she was? I also, at the time, was coming off of being laid off, and I was thinking of how do I write about this experience in a way that isn't like –- I wasn't interested in like, naming names. I wanted to write about those experiences of working in these digital media environments as a trans woman, specifically, where, for the most part, it was actually like bosses who were cis women who were like often my antagonists. I also didn't think I had this airtight case and that's part of why HR isn't a thing that has ever been helpful in the experiences that sort of inspire this because you kind of need this like airtight case that doesn't actually exist a lot of the time in order to demonstrate mistreatment but if I transform what I wanna write about into a fictionalized version of it that also changes so many details and goes beyond what my experience was then I can kind of say it all and not worry about legal repercussions.

I felt like that chapter was oddly sympathetic of the boss you were sort of alluding to, because like at the end, you were saying maybe if I had somehow gotten into a position of power, I would end up just inevitably repeating these cycles. Do you feel like female bosses just 

I guess the intention behind it wasn't so much like, “oh, I totally understand why she did it” or why any of the women who inspired these composite characters why they acted the way they did with employees or demanded what they did as much as it felt more honest to have the character who one might argue is like closer to me in that story then start to almost become a part of that cycle once given the opportunity. 

Which isn't to say, therefore, nobody has agency, it just felt more honest not to write it from a place where I was exempt from the gravitational pull of that dynamic, and that perhaps it's just the fact that I had never had proximity to the role of the boss in the workplace. It felt more honest to remain self-critical and not sort of act like by virtue of being a trans woman, I could never participate in a dynamic like this from the position of the more powerful person misusing that power.