Dolls to Watch Out For: ‘Again, Harder’ by Alice Stoehr

The Minneapolis author and bookseller transforms the taboo into the banal while depicting the joy, despair and messiness of the contemporary midwestern transfeminine experience.

“‘I feel like every trans person has a secret power … And if we can bring that out, it’s amazing, as long as we have people to encourage us.’”

This line of dialogue appears on the 10th page of Minneapolis author Alice Stoehr’s debut title, “Again, Harder,” setting the tone for a short fiction anthology that reads as “Dykes to Watch Out For” for the 21st-century transfemme.

Stoehr, 36, and I meet on the patio of Reverie Cafe + Bar in Powderhorn Park on a sunny but blustery spring day. Seeds from overhanging trees land on our grated metal table, and she pushes them through the holes as she voices her thoughts.

Stoehr has been writing and publishing these stories online since 2021. In sardonic prose and shifting POVs, a diverse ensemble cast of trans women and transfemme nonbinary people navigate 21st-century life in a Midwestern city, navigating poverty, careers, family tension, dysphoria, mental health and other postmodern woes. And they have a lot of sex with each other in the meantime.

“I do very intentionally write a lot about sex, and I have a lot of fun doing it,” Stoehr says. “A handful of people over the years have told me that what I’m doing is a little different, especially when it comes to T4T sexuality in literature. There’s different kinds of physical contact happening — how can we be as honest and realistic as possible about what those kinds of contact are?”

The book’s title and cover art by artist Phobia Solana could be telling on its erotic content, but they also lend themselves to deeper meaning. Sex achieves a sort of banality over the course of each story that it can be seen for what it does for the characters involved in it rather than its mere occurrence.

“For me, as an artist, because art about sex is so consistently, thoroughly stigmatized, that does make it more interesting,” Stoehr explains. “I find it gratifying to try to describe it so much that at a certain point it gets rendered banal.”

In “Again, Harder,” sex serves as an escape from responsibility, an expression of love and an icebreaking exercise. It isolates and confuses characters as much as it connects and affirms them.

As for the title, its origin is much more dire. A trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) beats the trans woman she’s been stalking, Iris, with a baseball bat. Iris, however, foresaw this showdown and, in fact, handed the bat to her stalker in the first place. Instead of begging her for mercy, Iris barks, “‘C’mon, f—ing b—-. Again, harder.’”

Stoehr asks me for my take on this moment. It made me think of how the reality of violence is hidden behind a veil for a lot of people, and that they’ll never truly know what it means until they enact or experience it themselves. 

“That’s true,” she replies. “That story is drawing on a lot of real-life phenomena, but it’s also very exaggerated in some ways. To my knowledge, I don’t know if anyone is like ‘I’m a TERF, and I’m going to do this film noir style stalking and devoting my life to this.’ But that kind of harassment manifests in a lot of different forms. Public transphobic violence is real, and there have been a number of way too close and scary instances within the past few years, just in the Twin Cities.”

As for the moment itself, Stoehr describes it as Iris achieving Marina Abramovi?-esque agency via self-victimhood.

“I was trying to give her this almost prophetic, messianic sense of herself as this total victim,” she says of the character. “I really like these kinds of ideas of what you can do with your own victimhood in the way of agency. How can this be flipped around in this kind of masochistic way?”

Among the exploits other characters get up to, a struggling writer visits a transfemme liberation commune that quickly becomes culty, a social butterfly visits her standoffish relatives in her hometown with her girlfriend, one woman chases an orchiectomy as if on a hamster wheel and throuples bloom and wilt. The connections between characters slowly reveal themselves with each story, adding a satisfying groundedness to Stoehr’s world and both familiarity and complexity to her characters.

Bookending the anthology is a second-person prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, you’re a trans woman visiting her hometown for a high school reunion. In the epilogue, you’re the same character at 12, walking on the precipice of puberty. These sections immerse the reader in the perspective of the characters, regardless if they’re transfemme themself, making Stoehr’s writing all the more engaging.

Stoehr also says that while bits and pieces of her life appear throughout the collection, these passages draw the most directly from it.

“It creates a different tone, this kind of uncomfortable complicity,” she says.

If every trans person has a secret power, then Stoehr’s is making the stigmatized and forbidden feel typical and comfortable. By the epilogue, you’ve seen characters do so much that the most intimate details no longer stand out, instead fully integrating into the narrative. In other words, Stoehr’s perspective is that of a midwestern transwoman — outsider and taboo to some, but quotidian to her. 

“Just the fact that you can change your sex is so fascinating and powerful and bizarre, and despite writing about it and being immersed in it, I still think that’s true. But I also think that it’s cool that you can make transition feel boring,” she says. 

Still, she prescribes no approach readers should bring to “Again, Harder.” If they approach it like a peep show, she explains, they’re more than welcome to.

“Some people have been reacting to this like, ‘I’m getting gossip I shouldn’t be getting.’ If somebody wants to read it on that level, great, take it as that,” she says. “That’s part of the reason that we have art to start with. It’s not an inherently noble neutral thing, of, ‘I am sitting down and reading about an experience for entirely good reasons, not at all because this excites or fascinates me.’”

Overall, as a self-described “Twin Cities partisan,” Stoehr eschews coastal centricity and big media coverage, but still thinks the Twin Cities and the lives that play out in it, especially boring old trans ones, are worth paying attention to.

“My investment is in people in messy apartments and what they’re doing because I think that’s where the world happens,” she says.

“Again, Harder” is out now. Grab a copy from The Feminist Press online or a bookstore near you.