Jessika Bouvier: I'm curious how the story came to be. Do you feel it's transformed a lot over iterations before it came to Chatterbox?

Caio Major: Definitely. It came out of me thinking about those groups of childhood friends hanging out in the woods, like in Stephen King novels—Stand By Me, It. I think of it as this classic configuration of a bunch of kids, usually boys, hanging out in the woods and having their own magical world that they either can't or won't share with the adults. I wanted to do the trans version of that, where this group of friends has a magical secret among them that's just theirs, belonging to this special forested place they're not sharing with the cis adults around them. And the Magic Jizz thing came out of that.

JB: It was an opening that made us sit up. Like, whoa, what's happening?

CM: When it occurred to me, it had the same effect on me. I knew I had to write it. It's too weird to leave on the table.

As far as iterations, I started writing this story back in 2021 or 2022. For the longest time I couldn't figure out the ending. I played around with darker endings, where the boys weren't friends anymore, but that never felt right. I had encouraging feedback along the way: I read it at a trans open mic in Brooklyn, and the audience reaction was so enthusiastic that, even unfinished, I knew I had to stick with it. Then the ending—them all coming together and taking T together—came to me. It was one of the first stories I workshopped in my first semester of my MFA program, which gave me useful feedback about structure, causality, and drawing an emotional through-line so Pete's reactions at the end made emotional sense. I even wondered if it should be a novella or novel, but it felt like it wanted to be a short story. I had to figure out how to make everything fit together.

JB: We do sometimes get stories where we think, this is actually a book. But I agree this piece always felt self-contained. We're also obsessed with finite time, and I love that the story takes place over a specific stretch, especially with them being young. It feels true to that age: I've seen a problem, and I'm going to solve it, even if the solution is fantastical. I think all those components worked well.

All of the boys live in a very conservative town in Indiana, and they're all touched by how oppressively religious the place is. I'm interested in how that background informs the lens through which they see themselves and their transness. The finer point I'd put on it is the intertextuality of Cody as the Chosen One, this prophet figure, and how even Pete thinks of him as a bit of a martyr. 

CM: When I was writing this, I realized how much religious material was in it. Three of the four boys come from heavily religious backgrounds and have rejected them, though their parents are probably still trying to drag them to church, so they can't help but see the world through that lens. They also see the world, and Cody, through nerd properties—superheroes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all these Chosen One narratives, which are themselves influenced by religion and myth. That's the soup they're all swimming in.

For Pete and Cody, Pete has rejected religion, and felt rejected by it, so when he sees Cody as this mythical figure, it sets him up to feel rejected by that figure, or to check him. What I was trying to do with the ending, with them all coming together to even the playing field with Cody—I wanted that to be a communal moment, a shared divine or spiritual experience. In the story, transition is a divine, righteous force. It's what makes Cody special. I wanted the ending to make them all special, part of this experience together—more communal than individual.

JB: It's funny you mention Buffy, I hadn't thought about it. But that reminds me of the [spoiler for readers!] finale, when she says, why does only one of us have to be the Slayer? We're all the Slayer. Though I think it works better here than in Buffy.

CM: (laughing) Thank you, that means a lot. 

JB: I do think that spirit of collectivism runs through the heart of this story. When you were thinking about the four characters, were you approaching it as, I want them all to be dorks? You mentioned nerd properties, the way they see the world.

CM: They're all fairly dorky, social outcasts because of their gender nonconformity. Alec is the only one with a cool factor, some swagger. The rest are dorky teenagers. Especially at the time I was writing this, superhero movies had inflected our culture so much that they'd stopped being nerd properties—they're just common cultural knowledge now. But for these four especially, they play video games, they've seen all the MCU movies. That's part of how they interpret themselves and the world.

There's definitely a lot of me in them. When I came up with the four of them and their dynamic, I was thinking: if I were writing a fantasy novel, and I wanted a group of friends to go on an epic adventure, what would their personalities be like? How would they interact? It came a lot from that kind of thinking.

JB: That actually leads well into my favorite part of the story: the brotherhood, their friendship, and how much levity it brings to what could otherwise be a tragic trans narrative. It's rare to read something where they're allowed to be playful and safe with one another. That's special to read.

I'm curious how you approached giving them space to indulge in their adolescence, combining friendship and trans boyhood specifically. 

CM: That's a good question. If I'm honest, part of it was wish fulfillment. I wrote this early in my transition, when I didn't know many other trans guys or how to meet them. I kept thinking, where are all the trans guys? So I decided to write a whole pack of them with a tight friendship, hanging out in the woods together. It was also about modeling bonds of trans brotherhood you don't always see day to day.

It was important to portray them as accurate teenagers—a lot of angst, but also playfulness, wide-eyed wonder, and strong emotions about each other. That us-against-the-world feeling is harder to hold onto as adults, but so many of us had intense adolescent friendships where someone was your person, and it was you against the world. I was trying to capture that. Trans joy has become a catchphrase, but I wanted to give them lightness and joy alongside the friendship's complications.

The idea of kinship between trans people was very important to include. It's what saves these characters in the end, and sharing T is what brings them back together. Transition has the power to be a righteous force in the world, the power to save people.

Solidarity among trans people is really special and important, though also complicated, since envy factors into every human relationship. Among trans people specifically, there are differences in access to medical care, and the genetic lottery of how well someone can pass in the cis world. Envy often complicates those relationships. But our bonds of solidarity have the potential to, and often do, reach beyond all of that. 

JB: The nuance of the friendship is so well rendered. There's both love and envy, which feels true for friendships at this age, when you're trained to compare while going through puberty. 

When constructing the group of four characters, how did you approach it? Which character came to you first?

CM: It started with Pete. I knew from the start that this wasn't going to be the POV of the character with the magic ability. I was more interested in a character on the sidelines who doesn't have it and wants it.

I envisioned Pete having a group of four friends who became friends in high school, but also this childhood best friend—they realized they were trans together and played together as small children, so Danny came out of that. And the Pete-and-Alec thing—I thought it would be an interesting twist to add a romantic story.

Adolescent crushes are so fun to write. I'm from Utah— I didn't grow up Mormon, but I grew up surrounded by Mormons, and it's informed my writing a lot, so I wanted to give Alec that backstory and have a Mormon in the group. In early drafts there was more backstory for all of them, and it slowly got chiseled out , hopefully implied more than stated outright.

JB: The implication worked for me because it supports the idea that the friendship is a sacred space those backgrounds don't necessarily intrude upon. But it's interesting that they're discovering their backgrounds are informing them in subconscious ways. 

On the topic of medically transitioning, and how it intersects with trans embodiment—getting into capital-D Discourse—I'm interested in how you see it functioning in this story, and whether it's in conversation with other aspects of this topic.

CM: I do see it as being in conversation with that discourse. It was important to write a story where even the characters who can't medically transition are still boys, regardless of medical transition, and are deliberately socializing each other as boys. That's part of what their hangouts are about, learning how to be men together.

I wanted to portray that as authentic, even though it's not a cis man teaching them. They get that socialization from each other. But I also strongly believe that medical transition is a right, so I wanted that in the story too—they are boys, bottom line, but they also want to medically transition, and they should be able to. It's a big deal, and it's harmful that they're denied it. The story ends with them all choosing this path because it's something they want and need. But needing it doesn't negate that they've been boys the whole time. 

JB: The T isn't what makes the men, exactly. I love that the story honors their autonomy—that's part of why we wanted to publish this piece.

I was interested in Pete, because adolescents live in this binary of severity: I have to do this in order to be this. We see sections where Pete craves, or imagines banishing, what he thinks of as evidence of femininity—crying, even desire. When he and Alec hook up, he's preoccupied with his expressions of desire and pleasure.  It's fascinating how, even as they're teaching each other how to be boys, external perceptions and standards of masculinity intrude. I wouldn't quite call it toxic masculinity, but it smacks of that a little. I'm interested in how all four of them, or just Pete, are struggling with what it means to be a boy, or a man.

CM: Pete is the one whose head we're in, so he might be struggling with it most. Cody, probably because there are fewer barriers between him and being a man, feels freer to be himself. Not to go too much into my own history, but I had more issues with crying in front of others before I transitioned. As soon as I transitioned, I could see it wasn't that big a deal, because I felt less need to prove my manhood.

Most people of any gender have to reckon with toxic masculinity as a cultural force. With trans men, internalized misogyny and dysphoria can get knotted up. That's the case for Pete, and probably most of them. That's something all men should reckon with, whether or not they do.

I also think all of these characters had traumatic young experiences not fitting in with groups of cis girls, feeling rejected by them. Those experiences, and the stereotypes on top of them, shape how they approach this friendship. We're not going to be passive-aggressive with each other, because that's something girls do; we're going to have these bonds of brotherhood. Part of the story is them figuring out that passive aggression and envy aren't limited to any gender.

Those young experiences with groups of girls lead to internalized misogyny for adult cis women, too—you see it in feminist discourse, with people calling someone a mean girl, or a pick-me. Whether experienced directly or watching play out in media, it shapes how you think about female friendship. One thing I was trying to do in this story is show it's wrongheaded to think this is something only girls do. They're adolescents, they have a lot of growing up to do. My vision after they go to New York is that they do that growing up, and end up with a more mature view of friendship, of women, and of how they relate to each other. Hopefully less toxic masculinity and more honesty.

JB: As you mentioned earlier, the story evokes superheroes, and plays into mythology and nerdiness. In that vein: what three superheroes are the most trans-coded to you? 

CM: Great question! I was a big superhero comics nerd as a teenager, then largely left that behind in adulthood. I just saw The People's Joker for the first time a few days ago, so transing superheroes is fresh on my mind. You should see it if you haven't—directed by and starring a trans woman, a DIY reclamation of DC superheroes through a trans lens. Hilarious and great.

My number one would be Superboy—Conner Kent, or Kon-El. He's got multiple names, but canonically he's the cloned love child of Lex Luthor and Superman, so queerness is already embedded in him. He's trans-coded because his arc is about wrestling with this inheritance of evil from his father, deciding who he wants to be.

I'll also say Wolverine. A silly answer, but he's canonically very short in the comics, not so much the movies. A short, hairy man reads easily as a trans guy character.

And Rogue from the X-Men! Her backstory is really queer. She was raised by two women, essentially two lesbian moms, and started out as a villain before becoming a hero—a moral, ethical transition. Her power is that anyone she touches, she drains their life force and gets their powers. Her whole identity changes when she touches Captain Marvel too long and gets her powers permanently, triggering her breakdown and decision to become a hero instead. She's a character with a lot of transitions, a lot of queerness embedded in her. Even more than most X-Men, she has this angsty veil between her and the non-mutant world, since she can't touch anyone's bare skin without affecting them. Another layer of potential trans-ness. Give me a week on this question and I could write you a whole dissertation.