Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

According to the Ancient Greek and Roman myths, Tiresias lived as both man and woman at various points in his life. He then told Zeus and Hera that sex was nine times more pleasurable as a woman.

Skipping ahead a couple thousand years, Paul Polydoris has a similarly genderfluid life. He is a shape shifter who likes to alter his primary and secondary sexual characteristics. These biological traits loosely influence his gender, though his actual identity is never made clear. He uses masculine pronouns, but his story does not privilege readers with any further information about his gender.

Unlike Tiresias, Paul has entrenched himself in the American queer community of the nineties. In this environment, he is afforded the opportunity to engage in a lot of gender and sexual experimentation. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl opens with Paul’s decision to find out what it’s like to have sex as a girl. (Afterward he doesn’t claim that it’s nine times better than sex as a man. He seems to enjoy almost any kind of sex.) From there, the story only gets more unapologetically queer and sexual. Nothing is taboo.

Like a shark, Paul had to keep moving. He slept only when necessary. He had business with the world, codes to crack, so many questions. Tonight, for example, Paul needed to know what fucking was like for girls.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, chapter 1

In this modernization of the Tiresias myths, the story becomes less like an epic from classical antiquity, and more like a chaotic fairy tale. (It’s probably not a coincidence that “fairy” is an old homophobic slur.) It also takes explicit inspiration from other modern stories about characters with fluid genders. But in spite of the modern styles and influences, the book leaves the impression that progress still awaits. The gay scene in the nineties isn’t portrayed as a magical utopia. Paul is the one with magic, and he doesn’t fit in. Because he’s a shape shifter, he can’t find a label that works for him, and he ends up being an outsider or infiltrator in every community he encounters, though he usually refuses to apologize for it. One lesbian community in particular subscribes to ideas around gender essentialism that today’s queer theorists would consider outdated. When he finds himself among people this community, Paul must put on a performance just to be included. While he’s aware that gender is a performance anyway, many people around him aren’t yet ready to embrace this idea. A handful of his lesbian friends and partners would feel deceived or taken advantage of if they were to find out about his ability to grow male genitals, which is why he engages in the deception in the first place. He wouldn’t have to deceive anyone if being a shape shifter were an accepted identity, but unfortunately, magically growing a pair of boobs and a vagina is apparently not considered a valid way of presenting as female. They expect you to be assigned female at birth, so Paul pretends. He lies. He performs. He closets a part of himself.

Contrary to what might be expected, Paul doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that he sometimes must conceal the truth. For him, hiding is part of the fun, a good challenge. Queerness doesn’t exist without being queer -- different, other, strange, transgressive, unknowable, and deviant. Paul is partially closeted, othered, and forced to consciously perform, so even as lesbians accuse him of being inauthentic, he embodies queerness more authentically than most. He is determined to enjoy his uniquely queer existence. He doesn’t always succeed, and he hasn’t exactly had the easiest life (having been impacted by things like bigotry, assault, AIDS, and poverty), but he tries his best by adopting a hedonistic lifestyle that involves parties, sex, romance, drugs, music, fashion, petty crime, and experimenting with gender and sexuality.

And Paul and his peers aren’t the only ones experimenting. The book itself is also stylistically and narratively experimental. Brief fables and fairy tales appear sprinkled throughout, and there’s abrupt transitioning (pun intended) between perspectives. The result is a fun and chaotic mess, much like Paul himself. To the extent that a plot exists, it is a strange, nontraditional, and -- well -- queer one. The story feels mostly like a series of sexual and romantic escapades. It’s very episodic and directionless, and Paul doesn’t grow, learn, or change. He begins and ends the book a little bit lonely. He achieves basically nothing of note in between.

One other shape shifter does appear in the story: Robin. Paul chases after, pines for, thinks about, and catches glimpses of Robin, but he never fully finds what he’s looking for. Like Robin (and everything he represents to Paul), the promise of a better future is always just out of reach. Robin tells Paul that he’s asking the wrong questions, which is why Paul can’t get answers about who (or what) he is. However, from the perspective of readers in the twenty first century, if Paul waits only a decade or two, he might obtain the clarity he wants, a chance for him to find the cathartic and satisfactory conclusion to his story that the novel never gives him. He just needs to stick around for when nonbinary identities become more mainstream in queer spaces. (To be clear, Tumblr didn’t invent gender neutral pronouns, and queer people in the nineties should have at least been able to theorize about how gender is a social construct, but Paul himself rarely meets people who fully understand him. He hardly understands himself.) Paul’s own identity is never clear, but had the book been set one or two decades after the nineties, he -- like author Andrea Lawlor -- would probably at least experiment with pronouns. It seems like parts of the book are autobiographical, so it’s not a stretch to make this assumption.

However, as tempting as it is to assume, Paul’s identity doesn’t matter. A label shouldn’t be something he has to achieve. As Robin says, it’s not necessarily a question that requires an answer. Since Paul achieves nothing throughout the story, you almost feel compelled to imagine him achieving something -- such as a more complete understanding of his identity -- in the future, but in truth, he shouldn’t feel forced to put that kind of pressure on himself. Identity isn’t a puzzle that anyone is obligated to solve. No matter where he ends up, readers should resist the urge to see him as incomplete before he gets there. Perhaps Lawlor’s autobiography can offer modern insights and interpretations into Paul’s story (in the same way that Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a reinterpretation and reimagining of the Tiresias myths), but perhaps not. At times, Paul wants a label, but he doesn’t need one, and if he finds one, he doesn’t have to share it. He owes nobody an explanation. Though fictional, he resembles enough nonfictional individuals, author included, to make speculation feel intrusive.

Therefore, if Paul wants to remain directionless and uncategorizable for the rest of his life, he can do so. While it goes against capitalistic sensibilities about ambition, Paul does not need or want to allow capitalism to fetter him. He likes his freedom, and he might not want a label to pin him down. The semiautobiographical nature of his story means the pages themselves don’t even pin him down: a version of him exists in real life, though the author’s biography need not limit what his future looks like. The communities that Lawlor has access to, while more willing to acknowledge nonbinary gender identities, are hardly more utopian than the queer scene in the nineties. Every era has its flaws. (The word utopia comes from the Greek, meaning nowhere. It’s possible that such a society can only exist in myth. The world that birthed the Tiresias myths tolerated queerness and gender fluidity far more than a good chunk of contemporary society, and it does well to remember that the future does not always bring linear progress.)

The novel, with its queerly structured narrative, lacks a satisfying closing, which almost forces readers to invent one. It’s an approach that asks people to construct real meaning out of chaos. The easy answer is to treat the page with the author’s biography as epilogue, but I challenge readers to do something a little different, perhaps even a little harder, but I think most people should be able to do it if they try: I challenge readers to envision an ending that involves a radically improved future for Paul and also for everyone else on Earth. It might sound cheesy and naive, but sometimes, it's okay to give ourselves permission to dream big. After all, if we're being asked to construct meaning in a chaotic world, doesn't it seem counterproductive to be defeatist and cynical? I certainly think so. I certainly want to dream big sometimes, and I encourage others to do the same.

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