Member-only story
Ironic Fiction Doesn’t Tell You Who Trans People Really Are
It’s rough entering Grace and Rubie’s restaurant. Good thing it’s fiction
“A Women’s Restaurant” is a short story by T. C. Boyle, originally published in Penthouse (1977) and reprinted in his collection The Descent of Man (1979). It is deeply ironic, reaching the level of parody. The male narrator is sexist; the story plainly reveals it. Whether the story productively challenges his sexism or merely reproduces it is a matter of personal opinion.
What interests me is how Janice Raymond brought up this story in her 1979 book to make claims about what trans women are really like.
The Joke of Trying to Enter the Restaurant
Boyle’s story is only 16 pages, and the premise is simple: A man is fascinated by a women-only restaurant, and he schemes on how to get inside. The epigraph is: “…the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.—Melville, Moby Dick” The point, you see, is that this man needs to gain access to this restaurant like Captain Ahab needs to find the white whale, even if he is maimed in the process.
“It is a women’s restaurant. Men are not permitted.” That’s the opening line. The paragraph ends: “What goes on there, precisely, no man knows. I am a man. I am burning to find out.” It’s run by Grace (“tall, six three or four”) and Rubie (“five feet tall, ninety pounds”).
If you haven’t gotten the tone yet:
“I have watched women of every stripe pass through those curtained front doors: washerwomen, schoolmarms, gymnasts, waitresses, Avon ladies, scout leaders, meter maids, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, spinsters, widows, dikes, gay divorcées, the fat, the lean, the wrinkled, the bald, the sagging, the firm, women in uniform, women in scarves and bib overalls, women in stockings, skirts and furs, the towering Grace, the flowing Rubie, a nun, a girl with a plastic leg — and yes, even the topless dancers. There…
