Book Thoughts: Woodworking by Emily St. James

23 Jul, 2026

Oof. I feel like I need to write a post about this book because I had plans to talk about it with a book club member in depth, but my experience was basically reading this in 3 days, crying off and on, slapping a "5/5" on it in my brain, and then getting on with my life and wondering how fast I was going to forget all the details.

There's no single story for everyone out there, but this book is the most in-depth and nuanced trans experience that I've personally read.¹ The way it accomplishes this is by not locking us to just one trans woman's experience, but juxtaposing two — and then later in the book, three. The narrative is both self-aware of how all-encompassing the unmooring feeling of recognizing yourself as a gender contrary to society's desires is and that having these big feelings can actually be really annoying to other trans people you have one-sidedly made into your guide.

1.

One book review I read said they were annoyed with how Erica only ever talked about how much she wanted to live as a woman and didn't explore beyond that, but I actually thought this was completely fine because it was balanced by Abigail, who was already out and annoyed with Erica's self-absorbedness. Rather, one of the things that I kept thinking about while reading Erica's sections was a blog post written by some trans woman years back that talked about how the typical progression of realizing you're a trans woman is to become preoccupied with the whole weight of it; and then later as people complete their transitions and start to think about things beyond, they start to drift from these early communities that are basically held together with everyone's desperation. And they can even forget, sometimes, how dire it once was. But it's also hard to watch new people go through all the self-doubt, the unclear future, and to have to keep providing the same emotional support over and over when you yourself are in a different place now and just want to move on. (Or something like that. Let's hope I paraphrased that right across the time span of many years.)

Erica, who has very newly pulled back the final layer obscuring herself from contending with her true gender, is very understandably in the throes of it. To change your gender in a gender-locked world is fundamentally an occupational and existential hazard: Society at large does not like it when you do not agree to play the role they've assigned you, and cis people often feel threatened in their own sex/gender — and thus their own place in the world — when they are presented with the idea that sex/gender is not set in stone. Gender is occupational; this is something that truly clicked for me when I read "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall following its popularity in the discourse.

My own gender realization in 2023 similarly felt all-consuming at first. There was a distinct feeling of walking around, going about life as I already had, and realizing that the way I conceived of myself was suddenly entirely different. It felt like dumping a paint bucket over my head and then wondering why no one around me realized I was dripping paint all over the floor. What would they think if they knew that I wasn't who they thought I was; I wasn't even who I had been saying I was? I read a bunch of articles and the like, much like Erica did, and then, because I am not actually transitioning to a binary gender, I pretty much wrote on my Cohost at the time, "Why am I freaking out so much about this when fundamentally nothing about my life is even going to change because I'm not even going to really transition anyway?"

Hilariously, this is also what a friend at the time said to me when I came out to them. Given that most of my online friends at the time were trans, it wasn't thaaat hard to come out online,² besides the fact that I felt like I had failed at being everyone's number one shining example of a good "cis" ally — so much for proving that it was possible to care a lot about trans issues and not be trans yourself.³ I was actually pretty hurt by this friend's flippant comment even though I had brought it up first in attempts to preemptively fend off accusations of making a big deal out of nothing. Because the truth was, it was actually a big deal to me, even though very little materially would change.⁴

It turns out that changing the way you envision yourself and your place in the world — and crucially, how you want to be perceived by other people — is actually quite destabilizing. Even when almost all your online friends were trans and you've been making trans headcanons for characters and talking about trans representation in media for years and years. Thinking about it for other people and then thinking about it for yourself are really two different experiences, and I really kind of resented even being unable to hide this from myself. Like, who signs up to making their life harder just for kicks? To want to be seen differently was already making a demand on other people, and having really bad social anxiety, I already don't want to be making demands on others.

Realizing I was genderless and I couldn't even hide it from the people who actually knew me⁵ was way more destabilizing than realizing I was aromantic and asexual, which was an easy box check-off sometime in high school because I had known since I was like 8 and I thought it was more awesome to not give a shit about optional things other people were stressing about. Being aroace didn't mean I had to live differently at all — I could just flat out say that I wasn't interested in either of these things, and people would see me as someone meant to be a nun (as my mom put it). Being agender, though, well. That unfortunately meant I needed to make some changes, number one being doing something about the dysphoria instead of just making text post #23948 about how much I fucking hated breasts and wanted to chop them off because all they ever did was cause me pain and invite sexualization + how much I thought I should have always been on hormone blockers and never gone through puberty, even though you can't delay having a puberty of some sort forever without bad effects on your health. It meant I had to make asks of the people who lived with me to use different pronouns,⁶ and perpetually wonder, every time someone misgendered me, if I should correct them. I still fail this on the regular.

To be obviously different is to ask other people to change to be more compassionate, and sometimes we'd rather just be happy. Can't we just be happy without having to deal with other people at all? (Attempts at separatism generally point the answer to "No," because humans are social creatures with many overlapping identities and experiences and differentials in power, and siloing this is a fool's errand.) You can try to take up the least amount of space as possible, to not make asks of anyone, to be closeted in nearly all aspects of your life, and you will trade away parts of yourself as you do so.

One of the hardest things in this book is getting to the point where Erica tries to go back into the closet after coming out to herself mentally. I had to put down the book and cry. It is actually something I've thought about before; it'd be easy. I'd just grow out my hair again and continue doing the same thing as I've always been doing and just ignore the sandpaper of the wrong pronouns. I did it for so many years before and I don't even think it affected my happiness that much. But, oh man. I'm still closeted in a lot of respects and even thinking about giving up the little parts I have hurts. Why does it hurt when I don't have much gender euphoria to begin with (how does one have euphoria at being "genderless"? it's possible but fleeting) and my dysphoria is just static noise in the background? Watching Erica actually try this when everything in her body was screaming no and Abigail was calling her a dumbfuck really just cemented for me that I can't go back, not unless I'm literally threatened at gunpoint. I may exist in this liminal space forever, but if I can choose to suffer a little bit less, I will. Good riddance.

2.

This book is a masterpiece at answering the questions of transition:

• What if I didn't?
• What if I did?
• What if I started to, and then went back into the closet?
• What if I did and I was punished for it?
• What if I did and I erased my past so effectively that everyone thought I was cis? (This is what "Woodworking" refers to.)

The three trans women are spaced out in age and transition journey, and they all serve as mirrors to each other, showing both what is possible and what the pain of denying yourself your whole being looks like.

“Understand this: The world tells us we will lose everything, but look right next to you. The person you love most is still here. So already you haven’t lost everything. But you will lose something. All of us do. But we have no idea what it will be. I know how terrifying that is.”

“I lost my wife. I lost all three of my kids. I lost my siblings. I lost my job. But then I found new work I loved more. Bex came back to me, then my other two. My brother and I are going to grab lunch over Christmas.”

“Transitioning is like running a long series of tests on the old proverb about loving something and setting it free. I opened my rib cage, and a whole mess of birds flew out of it. Some came back bearing olive branches. Those that didn’t? Oh well! Their loss!”

“It will seem easy once you’ve done it and impossible until you have. But you can do it. Your imagination simply isn’t big enough yet. You’ll see.”

(Every time Bernadette said something, I was like, what the fuck!!!!!!!!!!! so true!)

3.

I don't think I've read any work before that made such good use of first/second/third person, with each representing a different level of alienation from the self.

I immediately marked this the moment I realized that Erica's sections were written in third person while Abigail's were written in first, and the addition of the second-person later had me put down the book again to cry.

Guess the English language is good for something!

[↓ The below sections have major spoilers. ↓]

4.

This post is already long, but I've only talked about (a fraction) of Erica's experience and nothing about Abigail, even though I actually like her more as a character. Without Abigail, the story could run into typical issues of the limited range of trans stories we're presented; Erica's narrative is far more typical in comparison. Instead, Abigail is here from the beginning, pointing out what thing not to say a trans person because it's extremely rude and transphobic (such as, "How did you know you were trans?") and is already calling out Erica's unwanted attachment to someone much younger than her — and her student to boot — because she feels like she has no other trans woman (in this case, girl) to turn to. Crucially, one of the best things that Abigail does is unintentionally get both of them to a trans support group.

5.

The sheer messiness of the relationships in this book are something I really appreciated, as it made them all people struggling with their own trauma and biases rather than an easy, unified skip into the sunset. The intergenerational flip in trying to mother each other between Erica/Abigail and the complex issues of how a relationship is regarded depending on assumed gender was really interesting. When read as a cis man, Erica is assumed to be a predator, but as a woman, characters like Helen can understand why she feels so attached to Abigail while also saying that she's still not acting like a proper adult.

There's a part in this book where Erica tells Abigail that she's not very careful with people's hearts. And then when Abigail doesn't want to cut their connection because Erica is the only person she feels like she can trust, she says, "But Abigail, I haven't been very careful with your heart." And then she accidentally slams her car into a deer. This segment is extremely on the nose, because all three of the trans women long for connection with each other but are wrapped up in themselves a little too much, which causes collateral damage on their relationships. Erica couldn't trust her girlfriend with her self for years, inadvertently sending the message that she didn't care about her girlfriend when she continued to refuse to communicate; she also trauma-dumped on Abigail and relied on her way too much for being a 35-year-old woman who is her teacher. Abigail constantly reacts with "fight" rather than flight, freeze, or fawn, and in doing so, she hurts people who care for her, such as Megan. Brooke abandoned her sister to their abusive parents when she ran away from home and neglected to ever get in contact. The main three all fail to be careful with other's hearts at times, and they're given a chance to try again and do better.

I'm not so sure how I feel about Abigail wanting to be a therapist at the end of the book as it can kind of be read as a, "Actually, people dumping their feelings onto me is something that I've learned to enjoy," but I know the intended reading is that Abigail has learned how to display care and to not fight with her own genuine feelings of wanting human connection, and relationships are something that she actually wants to nurture now instead of trying to become Brooke 2.0.

6.

Having Caleb's whole thing about being transracial (never using this term, but that's what you call adoptees whose adopters are of a different race) and his longing for a "history" being contrasted with Abigail's transgender status as something that shouldn't need a "history" to explain it, and how their experiences are completely different, was really good. Caleb's betrayal of using Abigail's dead name because he wishes himself that he had his own (non-white) name is a fantastic projection of his own desires for his identity and story of self, and it's an absolutely wrong choice. The amount of finesse that went into this was incredible. It really gets to the core of why people seem to want to know what the dead names and AGABs of trans people are, because they're caught up in their own ideas of what a story of a person must be, and that includes the idea of an "origin story," only the only origin story people want to accept are those that support societal norms.

Abigail's story of herself as a girl, period, is not enough for Caleb, who longs to know his origin story as "being born to biological parents of [ethnicity], with a non-white name." He didn't choose to be adopted by this family, so he feels like some part of him was taken; Abigail, on the other hand, knows who she is and is choosing it every day, and his insistence on her dead name as being at all important to who she is as a person is disrespectful and transphobic.

This also reminds me of disabled people describing frequently being asked how they acquired their disability by abled people, even straight up strangers. Abled people believe that they need to know this origin story because it is one of the most important facts of who these people are, regardless of how they feel about it themselves. Disabled people in community with each other don't bother randomly trading "disability origin stories" as some kind of all-encompassing fact; it doesn't actually matter that much if you're just looking to hang out rather than get medical advice. This is hard for abled people, like it is for cis people when thinking about transness, to wrap their heads around because they believe deviations from "the norm" must be explained, because "the norm" is aspirational and something that can never be removed from a person's sense of being, ever.

That said, I appreciated how Abigail saw her future in Brooke and realized that while she doesn't want people to look at her and write over her entire person with "Trans, aka Not A Girl," denying her transness in an attempt to assimilate into cisness means leaving other girls like her behind.

7.

There's more that could be said about this book, but this post is long enough and I need to move on with my life. Here's some basic other things I didn't talk about in depth but that I really appreciated:

• Brooke's whole character, deal, etc. She was actually my favorite character despite, as Abigail would put it, being "trans Darth Vader," because she really shows the degree of loss in woodworking, in assimilation, in prioritizing your own safety until you actively work to undercut the safety of those who share your fate. The section of her past was really hard to read and had me put down the book to cry, as alluded to above. As noted by St. James in the author's note, this story was conceived after a woman like Brooke came to a trans support group once and then never returned. The presence of Brooke and how she interacts with Erica and Abigail is what really makes this book incredible.

• Constance and her storyline about bodily autonomy was really good, as was the allusion to her own depth and choices that she needed to make. That Erica doesn't understand everything about her and that Constance doesn't understand everything about Erica either, but they still care deeply for each other. I really appreciated how Constance tried to be supportive of Erica even if she took it too far at times, while also providing pushback on Erica whenever Erica went too far into her self-pity hole. Suffering the experience of being closeted isn't something that only trans people experience, though the experiences of being closeted will be different in texture. Looking for this commonality and realizing that you're not the only one who has ever suffered in the most unique way ever is important if you're ever to unlearn victim mentality and show up for other people. (Not saying that you should ever deny being targeted or having suffered; Erica's suffering wasn't fake, for instance). The whole thing about how loving someone also means releasing them from obligations to fulfill your expectations is really poignant, and something that I don't think is emphasized in people's conceptions of loving relationships enough.

• In a related vein, trusting others with yourself is important not just for you, but for them, too. When you don't trust the people you love with who you are, you can also hurt them through a lack of communication. Constance wondered for years why Erica had abandoned her emotionally, but it didn't actually have anything to do with Constance. Knowing that was a freeing piece of information for her, because she had been drawing her own conclusions otherwise about how Erica must not have loved her, etc. Living inauthentically doesn't just hurt you, just like how acting like a martyr doesn't only ever hurt one person. Inevitably, it seeps out elsewhere and has the stress wears down on relationships all around. Freeing yourself is also an experience that can positively affect others. As for those who don't like it, well, as Bernadette says, those are birds that weren't meant for you.⁷

• I liked both the characters of Helen and Rachel and how they were characters in their own rights with their own struggles. Some fights are worth losing.

• For all the mess in Erica/Abigail's friendship, the theme of being seen remains as relevant as ever. Being understood is a deeply humanizing experience that virtually every person needs. Erica and Abigail are important to each other because they each understand exactly who the other person is and give each other the chance to grow. Everyone should have that — and not just with one person, either.

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"Choosing to be ourselves is a constant process, isn’t it?"

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Notes:

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