“Even the term ‘detransition’ seems wrong. I haven’t gone backwards. There was no reversal.

I’m not the person I was before I transitioned. I’m not even the person I was yesterday!

Everything in the universe is in a perpetual state of flux. Change is the only stable truth of our

cosmos. Like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. Earlier I said I don’t see myself as a woman.

but I’m also not sure I see myself as a man. The reality is, I just don’t care that much anymore.

My sense of self isn’t tethered to superficial concepts like gender. I care less and less about what I 'am,' and more and more about what I do.”

      – Miss Unity, Who Killed Mabel Frost?

Mathias Mietzelfeld, formerly known to the literary world as Miss Unity, is one of the people I’ve met through the literary world who I consider a very close, dear friend, with a beautiful, empathetic, kind spirt, and a gentle, loving soul. Anyone who wants to fuck with him has to come through me.  He is also an amazing fucking writer. Everyone who has ever been or loved a drug addict or had mental health problems or loved someone with mental health problems or who has been twenty and partying and struggling and loving and fucking should read Who Killed Mabel Frost? If you order it and don’t love it, email me and I’ll refund your $$$. Dead serious.

-ee

First things first: you no longer go by Miss Unity? You now go by Mathias Mietzelfeld?

Correct.

It seems your book – Who Killed Mabel Frost? – is more controversial than I would have thought going into printing/publishing it. It is not getting reviewed or you interviewed and one of the bookstores I work with did not want to carry it (they did not say outright why and I believe it would fall under discrimination, violating inclusivity rules bookstores must adhere to, so going to follow up on this). Does this surprise you? It seems akin to the “old days” of discriminating against gay or trans writers. Feels pretty ironic, honestly, and disappointing. Your experience is as valid and human as anyone else’s. What are your thoughts on the reaction to your book being out in the world?

I had no idea any bookstore was refusing to carry the book, or that people might decline to read it due to the ‘detransition’ topic. It’s kind of heartbreaking because the book is mostly about trans people, sex (including sex work), mental illness, addiction – topics I’d think would appeal to a queer/trans audience, and really, I wrote it, with love, for that audience. I would assume that any controversy would be coming from people who hadn’t actually read the book, and most likely from people who are afraid of reprisal from the trans community, as opposed to trans people themselves.

Were the reactions similarly negative both when you initially transitioned and then when you detransitioned? Rejection and alienation each time from two different communities? I just don’t see how detransitioning should be any more or less political or acceptable than transitioning. In either case you cannot help how you feel, your experience. In either case it is not a political statement but a human experience.

The reaction from family and close friends in both cases was most akin to mourning and loss. When I transitioned, my mother told me she felt like she was losing her son. When I detransitioned, my late friend Joy wept, saying “But I don’t see you as a man.” In both cases, it was like they thought I had died and been replaced by someone else. The experience of being with Joy as she mourned the loss of her friend Mabel was extremely illuminating for me. It helped me empathize with my mother, who, prior to that, I’d assumed had simply not accepted me. After seeing Joy react that way, it helped me realize that my mom had always loved me, and had simply been scared that she was losing some part of me, or that I was going to get myself in trouble or get hurt.

How have you seen detransitioning talked about/handled in general and prior to your own coming out as no longer a trans woman?

It’s not really a subject I have followed or have much interest in. It seems to be talked about in a highly politicized way, which I don’t care about at all. I used the concepts of transition and detransition to write about my own life more for convenience than anything else. In writing about my life – in taking the woman I was as my subject – I was and am most interested in the mythological, supernatural, and spiritual concepts of transformation and change. Who Killed Mabel Frost is a story about a spiritual journey. Specifically, it’s about what happens when you succumb to your demons. It is not a political screed or a treatise on gender (at least, it wasn’t intended to be, and I hope it doesn’t read that way). To quote my friend William Duryea, it is ‘a journey into hell.’ In my opinion, that journey didn’t have much to do with ‘transition’ or ‘detransition’ as such, but about the lostness and woundedness of my soul.

You are the second author I have published who has detransitioned. The first one was in the process of transitioning when I accepted her book. A few months post publishing, she identified again as female, after a year or so of identifying male, and asked me to take her book off sale/off the SF/LD site, and I said I couldn’t, that I had put money into the book, that the book was its own thing, under contract, but I offered her a chance to put a note up on the site with her book, which she did. if two of the three trans authors I have published are no longer identifying as trans, isn’t this a valid conversation to be having? This experience? As valid as any other? I don’t understand anyone being shamed for being trans, not trans, gay, straight, any way they identify.

I agree 100%.

Your book is beautifully written (quote August), one of the most beautiful books I have published through SF/LD books and it sort of breaks my heart more people are not open to reading it because it does not fit what they want your narrative, your life, to be. But the book is about transitioning and detransitioning, both. It’s about being a sex worker, a drug addict, having mental health challenges… it’s, honestly, everything most people I know want to read, except for the detransitioning part. Which feels so close minded to me. Like if people had refused to read Chloe Caldwell’s book Women while she was married to a cis gendered, straight man. If they had burned Women during her marriage, then once she was divorced and back to dating women again, put the book back on their shelves, proudly “in good faith” displayed it once more. I though the whole point was to support people, writers, everyone, for being their authentic self, no matter what that authenticity looks like? It’s kind of like Hillbilly Elegy. Hillbilly Elegy, in my opinion, is a great book. I don’t think it’s disputable it is well written and engaging and a good read. But the author is a Republican. So, we in the literary world are supposed to trash it. like, if the author, Tara Westover, of Educated suddenly flipped and came out Republican we would no longer acknowledge having ever read or liked Educated. We would remove it from our bookshelves. This makes no sense to me.

Well put.

Why do you think detransitioning is so polarizing? You can write about (and do) hooking, doing meth, gay sex, having a mental break down, pretty much anything else, but not the fact at some point you no longer felt female anymore? Was this scarier than transitioning? Or equal?

Honestly, the realization of my non-transness was an incredibly freeing, lightening experience. At the time I was living on the street, squatting when I could find it, I was psychotic, in and out of psych ward, my friends had all abandoned me and being a woman, and a trans woman specifically, just felt like this immense pressure or weight, like chains I needed to throw off. And when I did it – and it’s symbolized in the book by getting my hair lopped off at the barber – when I did it it just felt freeing and amazing and like this pressure had been lifted. And it’s funny because I was completely insane and broke and hungry and was putting myself in situations of near-constant peril but at the same time I had this incredible, shimmering sense of inner peace. That’s what it felt like: peace. Like coming home.

Why does an individual detransitioning have to mean you no longer support the trans community or trans people in general or as individuals? When Chloe Caldwell married a man, she wasn’t giving her middle finger to lesbians or the gay community. She just in that moment fell in love with a man and married him. She still 1000% supported the gay community. Or am I wrong to assume you still support an individual’s “right” to come out as trans? To live as a trans man or trans woman? what are your feelings on this? you know, your peer, another SF/LD author, and my personal very good friend Garielle Lutz is a trans woman. it would shock and sadden me if you did not support and have love for her and respect her as a trans woman.

I love and respect everyone! Every human being is a masterpiece sculpted to perfection by God. How much of a hypocrite would I be if I had judgment or contempt for people who’ve made the exact same choices I made, who have gone through the same struggles, who have wrestled with their identities and their demons and have struggled to find their place in the world, just because we happen to be at different stages in the journey?

How have you been feeling/doing since the release of Who Killed Mabel Frost? You seem to have been sort of … you seem to have left the literary scene, for the most part. Is this due to the controversial nature of your book? To you feel alienated in writing it? or by its reception? How are you??? I have been concerned about you since the reading in New York in early May. Are you okay?

My retreat from the art world (specifically ‘online indie lit’) had less to do with the content of Who Killed Mabel Frost and more with my disgust at the person I had started to become in creating it, and in creating a marketable persona/online brand to go along with it, in the person of Miss Unity. I think that in writing about the monster I used to be, I started to become a whole new kind of monster – or, and maybe this is even more frightening, began re-summoning the same demons I had devoted so much of my time and soul and strength in exorcising. My predominant sin has always been lust – I mean read the book, I was a drug addict, sex addict, attention addict, always thirsting for more more more – but in navigating the intensely competitive, hierarchical world of ‘online indie lit’ I wedded this lust with near-constant envy, joy at others’ failures and bitterness at their success, as well as pride, overweening pride and ambition through which I degraded those around me by thinking myself better, more talented, more worthy of praise, likes, exposure, $$$, clicks.

I had a mystical experience earlier this year, which I have struggled to describe or even comprehend, but long story short it resulted in a near-miraculous healing of some crippling chronic health issues I’d been dealing with, as well as a kind of thunderbolt-from-God realization of my religious belief, which in turn resulted in my conversion to Roman Catholicism. And on the heels of that experience, I realized that for the past few years I had been devoting myself to a project which was taking away all my peace, and chipping away at my soul. My reaction to that realization was to delete my social media, to run away, rebel against that world and my participation in it. When I saw you in New York I was really in the midst of that rebellion. I had done several events where I read from the book, including a launch party where I symbolically ‘killed’ Miss Unity and I was kind of just wanting to put all this stuff behind me and put a new and different kind of energy into the world...and I wasn’t thinking at all of the social niceties involved or anything other than trying to wrest myself free from the cruel, petty, insecure person I’d become.

You can tell everyone I went nuts, though.

Do you have any regrets in publishing Mabel? Or about any of the writing within the book? Have you had any positive reactions to it? people writing you thankful or admiring emails?

A dear friend recently asked me if I thought that pouring out the wounds and hurts of my past into the pages of Mabel Frost carved out the space in my soul for the light of Christ to awaken. And when he asked that it made me reconsider my answer to this question, which I’d been struggling with, because honestly there is some material in the book I wish I’d handled differently. Writing as Miss Unity I was so eager to shock, to be brash and bold and crude and obscene in ways I recoil at today. I wish I had handled some topics with more subtlety, more grace. I was also worried that I may have hurt people’s feelings, people I wrote about in the book. Although, to answer your other question, I have heard from at least some of the people I wrote about in the book and the reaction was quite positive. But anyway, when my friend suggested that writing the book helped me get rid of the crud and detritus weighing down my soul, that writing the book opened the space for spiritual awakening, that made me see things in a different light. And I do think the impulse to write the book was similar to the impulse that draws faithful people every single day to places of worship: to confess, to repent, to receive absolution and grace. Writing the book may not have absolved me of my sins but it may represent the beginning of this process, this new awakening. And so, I’m happy with it, even in its crudeness and its crassness, because it represents a genuine artistic outpouring, a reflection of where I was at a moment in time, a true confession, and an attempt, however clumsy, at prayer.

Lastly, I took your book to a good friend who I take all the SF/LD books when they are out. It just so happened she told me that day her child formerly known by a male name was now known by a female name and identified now as female. I still put the book on her table but I had the sense she wouldn’t read it “in support of” her child. Which both makes sense to me as a mother wanting to do everything possible to support your child but didn’t make sense to me as a curious open-minded person and reader. Maybe some time in the future she will read it, maybe not.

I have faith that the book will find the readers who need it.

Oh wait, final Q: do you still do drag?

No.

Oh, wait, wait: did you make up with Anika from Forever Magazine?

Yes, we had a special moment after the Brooklyn reading in May, where I was able to apologize to her in person and express my profound admiration for her as an artist and entrepreneur. (she laughed when I said the word entrepreneur but it’s true). There are thousands of literary magazines and the vast majority are never read – by anyone – so the fact that Anika and Madeline were able to create a genuine cultural institution in such a short time is an astonishing achievement. They are beautiful, talented, accomplished young women and I have nothing but respect for both of them.

I’m happy you and Anika made up. I am very fond of Anika and Forever Mag is one of my favorite literary mags. At our KGB reading she insisted on putting a ribbon in my hair. I still have it. I made sure to save the ribbon.

Thank you, Mathias. I love you forever.