‘Help! I’m Addicted’ is yet another self-obsessed trans memoir lacking in self-awareness that adds nothing to the gender debate

Rhyannon Styles’ new book, like so many of its type, has plenty of sex, drugs and dancing in drag, but misses the mark completely when it comes to helping our understanding of the culture battle raging over gender identity.

It seems like confessional literature from the trans genre is suddenly everywhere. Just like mushrooms, there are countless books, largely written by individuals born male, detailing their endless journeys to self-discovery while, bizarrely, seemingly lacking in any sort of self-awareness.

If you’re interested in clogging up your bookshelves, there’s an entire oeuvre out there, with titles like‘Transitions: Our Stories of Being Trans’, ‘Yes, You Are Trans Enough: My Transition from Self-Loathing to Self-Love’, ‘Trans Power’, ‘To My Trans Sisters’ and most recently, Rhyannon Styles’ ‘Help! I’m Addicted: A Trans Girl’s Self-Discovery & Recovery’, a follow-up to ‘The New Girl’, a collection of columns from Elle magazine.

It’s a cross-pollinating environment where authors contribute chapters, testimonials and marketing blurbs for the book jacket in the all-too-familiar transactional ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,’ all coincidentally publishing under the same imprint.

The problem is that trans confessional writing is now a crowded market and, to be perfectly frank, many of the stories start to read the same: unhappy childhood, bullied at school, early drinking and drug-taking which escalate into bad choices in relationships, self-loathing, belief that if they could just transition then everything would be fine, transitioning, everything’s not fine… And on and on the story goes.

So what Styles has done is overlay experience of addiction on top of the whole gender identity theme to create a mash-up of misery-encompassing addictions covering everything from drug and alcohol abuse to over-eating to sex and love to a group that meets under the flag of Under-earners Anonymous. This is addiction to addiction.

It’s the result of the piles of books now competing in the trans field that demands authors find a different peg on which to hang their new identity. So why not as a trans woman addict? It could be just as easy to write of the escapades of a trans woman architect, but there’s little potential in that genre for lurid detail, masturbation marathons, excessive pornography consumption, vomit-inducing overeating, sex gone wrong and endless lists of pharmaceuticals abused and their mind-numbing effects.

The problem with ‘Help! I’m Addicted’ is that all those gory details lack just one thing: genuine interest. And because of that, it’s hard to empathise with the author’s alternative spells of rehab and relapse, to the point where you have no idea if you should be uplifted by the retelling of a night out spent dancing in drag or wondering how it all went wrong.

And because of the chaos that surrounds the life of Styles and the other contributors to this book, in which no one seems to achieve the happiness they so desperately seek, it’s hard to see where the insight lies or what lessons have actually been learned through all those AA, NA and SLAA meetings in smoke-filled church halls. Self-awareness is in critical short supply, while an all-consuming need to be the centre of attention and desired by other men – never women in this book – apparently leaves little time for worthwhile reflection.

Granted, the story of one contributor named George is the exception, with what seems a genuinely honest, matter-of-fact retelling of transitioning. But as just one of eight authors in the book, that’s atypical.

But let’s not blame the authors entirely. The reason this book is even out there is the result of the culture war raging over critical theory on gender being fought in publishing houses, universities and across the media. Academic Kathleen Stock, who dares to question the idea that ‘trans women are women,’ is receiving death threats and having her book,‘Material Girls’, removed from bookshops by the woke gender gestapo, while lightweight collaborative efforts like those from trans women like Rhyannon Styles are taking their place.

It’s hard to see the value books like ‘Help I’m Addicted’ add to the broader debate, because they’re not part of the debate in any meaningful way. Among the author and contributors, there is never any questioning of the critical theory that holds gender identity and natal sex can be unhitched from each other. And so there is no recognition that there is even a flipside to this particular coin.

Books like this are shelf-fillers in the ‘gender studies’ section, simply taking up space to make an argument seem more weighty than it might actually be. It’s the equivalent of a social media pile-on in a bid to win an argument. There’s sex. There’s drugs. There’s hard partying. But in terms of understanding anything further about the transgender debate? Sadly, there’s nothing.

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