Shon Faye is the face that launched a thousand projections. Depending on what you want her to be, she is not just a writer but an influencer, an activist (a term she dislikes) and the UK trans community’s great white hope. The Transgender Issue (2022) – her best-selling debut book – was a rigorous and precise intervention into Britain’s anti-trans backlash, and she remains one of the UK’s most prominent trans voices, someone who is rightly thought of as an intellectual and who is just as outspoken on issues such as Gaza as she is on trans rights.
At the same time, she is adored by her audience for being funny and glamorous: her column in Vogue, which mostly deals with matters of the heart, is warm and wry, closer to Nora Ephron than Judith Butler. A quick scroll through her Instagram brings up pictures of her modelling, hanging out with celebrities, and floating through London in flawless glam. This is an image I have bought into myself, despite having met her in person several times, to the point that when she offered to pick me up in her car ahead of our interview, I was shocked that she knew how to drive. My surprise deepened when the day arrived and I found her idling outside a tube station in south London in a perfectly ordinary hatchback, not a vintage Corvette, and dressed casually in a sports sweater, not a headscarf and duck-rimmed sunglasses. Shon Faye is, of course, a real person, and her new book, Love in Exile, reads like an attempt to take herself down from whatever pedestal she’s been placed on.
Love in Exile is a memoir and political critique that explores different aspects of love in modern society. It traces Faye’s journey from a deeply rooted idea of herself as inherently and irredeemably unloveable to an understanding of lovelessness as a systemic problem, bound up with misogyny, racism and the alienating effects of free-market capitalism. Unlike its predecessor, which was measured and sober by necessity, Love in Exile is lyrical and often laugh-out-loud funny: take the description of her hurrying around Harrods to trying to buy her ex-boyfriend’s family “fancy biscuits that carry the subliminal message, ‘so sorry again that this man you all love so much is dating me, a barren transexual’”. Shot through with warmth, solidarity and a kind of expansive, sororal love for the world, it’s a bracing and often sad book – but never a depressing one.
“The exile can see what’s wrong with the society from which they’re excluded. It’s a banishment, but being on the outside allows you to see things that people on the inside can’t see” – Shon Faye
Love in Exile is exceedingly frank in its account of Faye’s sex life, her desires, her childhood, her relationship history and her past struggles with alcoholism and mental illness. In ‘Blackout’, a chapter dealing with addiction, she recounts waking up with cuts and bruises she couldn’t explain, or having passed out on public squares. In ‘The Pantomine’, a chapter about sex, she describes drinking through the “stomach-churning discomfort” she felt when a man on a date used a transphobic slur in front of her, and how she slept with him anyway. She recounts, too, the harm she caused other people while in the grip of addiction, the friendships she destroyed irreparably. It does not read like the work of someone who is concerned with being a respectable community representative.
Inspired in part by Torrey Peter’s 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, Faye says she wanted the freedom to portray herself as messy, flawed and complicated, even if her people might use this against her. “The more you take on the inner transphobe and the more self-censoring you become, the more you regress into party lines and platitudes,” she explains. “There are times I had sex that was probably objectively degrading, either in terms of the actual sex or in terms of the social attitude of the man towards me. I was debasing myself, but I did it because there was desire and arousal. It was important for me not just to render myself [in the book] as this perfect, feminine traumatised subject who was only ever looking for love.”
Faye notes that she didn’t want the book to be entirely focused on herself, however, instead aiming for “memoiristic elements in a political book, rather than a memoir that strains itself to include politics”. And while Love in Exile is informed by her life, it’s not really a book about being trans. Instead, Faye’s transness operates as a lens through which to analyse relations between men and women in a much broader way. “With The Transgender Issue, I was explaining to cis people what it’s like to be trans. Whereas in this book, being trans is a way that helps me to explain to cis women their own experiences back to them,” she says. “I have a specific life experience, where I didn’t just get raised as a boy but I also went to an all-boys school, which was a very hyper-masculine environment. Then from 19 to 25, I had a pretty good stab at trying to live as a gay man. It doesn’t really fit the standard trans narrative of ‘you were always a woman’, but my social reality changed a lot.”
It wasn’t that she ever had a particular desire to date straight men: she wanted to become a woman, became one, and then realised that, almost by default, that demographic was now who she dated – she was, as she puts it, a late arrival to heteronormativity, someone who wasn’t conditioned into it from an early age. This experience of outsiderdom, she believes, lends her a particular perspective on heteronormative dynamics which, to a lot of cis women, are so familiar they are often rendered invisible. “It’s like the idea that the exile can see what’s wrong with the society from which they’re excluded. It’s a banishment, but being on the outside allows you to see things that people on the inside can’t see.”
As a gay man, there was plenty in the book I found relatable, but a lot of it is about dating men as a woman rather than the broader experience of desiring them. “To be a gay man is to be, to some extent, defined by one’s own desire, whereas to be a heterosexual woman is, still so often, to be defined by someone else’s,” Faye writes. I was curious to know what, for her, was the biggest difference in sex and dating after she had transitioned. “It’s interesting to consider, because even when I was trying to have sex as a gay man, it wouldn’t have been how a gay man without gender dysphoria would have had sex,” she says. “It wasn’t the gold standard experience, because I was often using sex to create a faux sense of a gender divide.”
Still, dating as a woman turned out to be very different. “First of all, I’m a bit of a biological essentialist in that I think your hormones and endocrine system do have a huge influence on your desires,” she says. There was also a social element: it soon became apparent that sleeping with straight men as a woman was inseparable from a broader context of misogyny, dehumanisation and the threat or reality of violence. There are more opportunities, Faye suggests, to feel disrespected and used, and in response more social messaging, which she has now internalised, around self-respect and refusing to be treated in certain ways. “I’ve now come to the conclusion that if you’re a straight woman and gay men are being like ‘slay!’ about your sex life, you’re probably having some kind of breakdown,” she says.
“I’ve now come to the conclusion that if you’re a straight woman and gay men are being like ‘slay!’ about your sex life, you’re probably having some kind of breakdown”
Faye writes a lot about intimacy in Love in Exile, often noting its absence or the things – like intensity, passion and excessive candour – for which it’s commonly mistaken. What does real intimacy mean to her? “In the chapter on addiction, I write about a very short-lived relationship which moved at quite an unhinged pace,” she says. “We both shared a lot with each other and made big emotional declarations. I thought at the time that it was intimacy, because I was letting my guard down and telling someone secrets that even some of my friends didn’t know. But I learned that actual intimacy can’t be achieved that quickly. It’s an iterative and gradual process that requires a true understanding of and acceptance of a person as they actually are, not just what they represent to you – that takes time and observation of their character.”
At both a cultural and individual level, Faye argues we often mistake fantasy for love, and elevate intense infatuation as the highest form of romance. “I would call myself a fantasy addict as readily as I would call myself an alcoholic,” she says. “There’s a neurochemical element to it. As a form of childhood dissociation, it predated me finding drugs.” She doesn’t think that fantasy is inherently bad but, like alcohol, she simply can’t handle it. “Romantic obsession is never really about the object, it’s about the gratification of the obsessed,” she says. “People who engage in obsessive thinking about romance – including full-on stalkers – normally believe that the object of their obsession is both the cause of their pain and the solution to it. And usually that person is neither. Often, our fantasies of love are actually a form of addiction.”
Faye has such an air of wisdom that, as the interview ends, I realise I have been mining her for romantic advice, which isn’t Love in Exile’s exclusive focus – to the extent that she is offering solutions, they are as much about community, friendship and spirituality, rather than simply finding a boyfriend. The book ends on a hopeful note, a moment of grace which doesn’t feel cheap or sentimental: Faye is too honest a writer to try to convince the reader there can be such a thing as a permanent happy ending, or that with enough self-knowledge we can lead lives free from pain and longing. But as Love in Exile and Faye’s own example shows, we don’t have to be locked into the same destructive patterns forever.
Love In Exile is published by Allen Lane and is out now.
