Sasha Masha
by Agnes Borinsky
2020
Sasha Masha is a short YA, possibly even middle-grade novel about a teenager who appears to be on the cusp of a transgender identity. Alex is a high school junior, the same age I was when I started having the feelings that I initially understood as 'wanting to be a girl,' and eventually, later as actually being a girl, as being transgender. I think Sasha Masha is meant to be accessible to, and perhaps helpful to, other young people who feel similarly.
Throughout the book, Alex thinks of himself as a boy, but at the end you can see that perhaps he is about to start thinking differently. (He's asked his pronouns twice, in situations where it would be safe to answer differently, and says he/him both times.) Alex's specific flavors of social anxiety and identity confusion look a lot like mine did at that age. I don't think there's any one universal 'transgender experience,' but what author Agnes Borinsky has written here felt like a very accurate representation of my own path, and if Alex is at all autobiographical, then I guess Borinsky and I must have felt very similarly when we were first starting to understand ourselves.
Alex starts his junior year of high school in Baltimore missing his lesbian best friend Mabel, whose family moved for a new job, and kind of getting set up to date a girl in his class who thinks he's cute by a few of their mutual friends. Going on dates, having a girlfriend, those are nice, and briefly help Alex think he can overcome his feelings of always putting on an act to please others, of being somehow not-real in a way that other people seem to be effortlessly real. But instead, he keeps thinking of a time he and Mabel dressed up in thrifted clothes and made up new names as a game, and he wore a dress and called himself Sasha Masha.
Alex's girlfriend notices his distance, and when he tries to explain, she thinks he's mocking her. He briefly tries to tell his parents, but they think it's a joke. And Alex can't stop thinking about Sasha Masha and what it would be like if that were his name. He goes back to a LGBT center he used to visit with Mabel, and makes friends with Andre, who introduces him to an other friends and takes him to a teen dance night. Alex would kind of like Andre to be a boyfriend, but he's more like a mentor.
It's sort of astonishing, by the end of the book, all of Alex's relationships are in shambles, with his parents, with friends new and old, everything is a mess. But Alex can finally see a new possibility, even if he's not completely sure if he wants it, of stopping being Alex, and starting to be Sasha Masha. On paper, it doesn't seem like it should feel like a satisfactory resolution, but somehow it does.
Compared to other queer coming-of-age stories, there's virtually no misbehaving here - no drinking or drugs, no sex. The only real rulebreaking is Alex staying out past curfew a couple times, and not telling his parents who he's hanging out with. The prose is initially very simple, with short, direct sentences, but as Alex opens up, his narration also becomes more fluid and expressive.
Alex starts his junior year of high school in Baltimore missing his lesbian best friend Mabel, whose family moved for a new job, and kind of getting set up to date a girl in his class who thinks he's cute by a few of their mutual friends. Going on dates, having a girlfriend, those are nice, and briefly help Alex think he can overcome his feelings of always putting on an act to please others, of being somehow not-real in a way that other people seem to be effortlessly real. But instead, he keeps thinking of a time he and Mabel dressed up in thrifted clothes and made up new names as a game, and he wore a dress and called himself Sasha Masha.
Alex's girlfriend notices his distance, and when he tries to explain, she thinks he's mocking her. He briefly tries to tell his parents, but they think it's a joke. And Alex can't stop thinking about Sasha Masha and what it would be like if that were his name. He goes back to a LGBT center he used to visit with Mabel, and makes friends with Andre, who introduces him to an other friends and takes him to a teen dance night. Alex would kind of like Andre to be a boyfriend, but he's more like a mentor.
It's sort of astonishing, by the end of the book, all of Alex's relationships are in shambles, with his parents, with friends new and old, everything is a mess. But Alex can finally see a new possibility, even if he's not completely sure if he wants it, of stopping being Alex, and starting to be Sasha Masha. On paper, it doesn't seem like it should feel like a satisfactory resolution, but somehow it does.
Compared to other queer coming-of-age stories, there's virtually no misbehaving here - no drinking or drugs, no sex. The only real rulebreaking is Alex staying out past curfew a couple times, and not telling his parents who he's hanging out with. The prose is initially very simple, with short, direct sentences, but as Alex opens up, his narration also becomes more fluid and expressive.
In one autumn, Alex sort of speedruns a process that took me from spring of my junior year in high school to the fall of my sophomore year of college. I spent most of my life feeling different from other people without understanding how. When I was a kid, my classmates teased me by calling me a girl, until we became tweens, when they switched to calling me gay. I might've agreed with them, except I knew all my celebrity crushes were on women, none were on men.
In high school, one day, I complimented a girl's hair bow, and she said if I liked it, I should wear one, then laughed, and said she shouldn't say that to me because I probably would. I don't really know why she said that, but I also kind of took it as a dare, and wore one, as a 'joke,' on April Fool's Day. I got stared at, bullied; I spent the whole day feeling miserable, but also like there was some new possibility for me, a future where I wasn't just trying and failing to be a guy. I don't feel like the slang of 'cracking your egg' describes how I felt particularly accurately, but that one stupid offhand comment, and all the time I spent thinking about it, and that first day I tried it - for me, that was when everything changed.
I tried crossdressing some more my senior year, mostly without telling anyone what it meant. I told my high school girlfriend; I felt like it wrecked our relationship, and I was afraid that would keep happening. So I stopped all of it, and went all the way back in the closet during my first year of college (except for winning a Halloween costume contest as in a dress.) After that year, I realized trying to live like that was making me miserable. I couldn't imagine, and didn't want, a lifetime of feeling like that. My sophomore year I started attending the LGBT club on campus, and slowly stated coming out.
For the longest time throughout this process, I felt totally alone. At first I thought I might be the only person in the world to want to change genders. I became aware of the existence if other trans people, of the word 'transsexual,' only gradually. I found the memoir of someone who was institutionalized for being trans, a couple novels that treated it as a life-destroying tragedy, and learned about the psychiatric diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder.' I went from thinking I was alone to thinking I had something I absolutely had to keep secret. A lifetime of gender-based bullying seemed to confirm it.
Obviously, so much is different for queer teens today, but I think it would've been nice, when I was desperately, furtively searching for information to make sense of the unfathomable emotions I was feeling, if I'd found a hopeful, empathetic, teen-appropriate book like Sasha Masha. Borinksy doesn't prescribe any answers; what she does is tell the kids asking these questions about themselves, you're not alone. Someone else understands how you feel well enough to write about it. This doesn't have to be a secret, or something you feel but never act on. If you want it to be, this can be your life.
In high school, one day, I complimented a girl's hair bow, and she said if I liked it, I should wear one, then laughed, and said she shouldn't say that to me because I probably would. I don't really know why she said that, but I also kind of took it as a dare, and wore one, as a 'joke,' on April Fool's Day. I got stared at, bullied; I spent the whole day feeling miserable, but also like there was some new possibility for me, a future where I wasn't just trying and failing to be a guy. I don't feel like the slang of 'cracking your egg' describes how I felt particularly accurately, but that one stupid offhand comment, and all the time I spent thinking about it, and that first day I tried it - for me, that was when everything changed.
I tried crossdressing some more my senior year, mostly without telling anyone what it meant. I told my high school girlfriend; I felt like it wrecked our relationship, and I was afraid that would keep happening. So I stopped all of it, and went all the way back in the closet during my first year of college (except for winning a Halloween costume contest as in a dress.) After that year, I realized trying to live like that was making me miserable. I couldn't imagine, and didn't want, a lifetime of feeling like that. My sophomore year I started attending the LGBT club on campus, and slowly stated coming out.
For the longest time throughout this process, I felt totally alone. At first I thought I might be the only person in the world to want to change genders. I became aware of the existence if other trans people, of the word 'transsexual,' only gradually. I found the memoir of someone who was institutionalized for being trans, a couple novels that treated it as a life-destroying tragedy, and learned about the psychiatric diagnosis of 'gender identity disorder.' I went from thinking I was alone to thinking I had something I absolutely had to keep secret. A lifetime of gender-based bullying seemed to confirm it.
Obviously, so much is different for queer teens today, but I think it would've been nice, when I was desperately, furtively searching for information to make sense of the unfathomable emotions I was feeling, if I'd found a hopeful, empathetic, teen-appropriate book like Sasha Masha. Borinksy doesn't prescribe any answers; what she does is tell the kids asking these questions about themselves, you're not alone. Someone else understands how you feel well enough to write about it. This doesn't have to be a secret, or something you feel but never act on. If you want it to be, this can be your life.
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