How the Closet Really Works

The Atlantic

24-03-2025

Abigail Hawkes earnestly dreams of disappearing. The teenage protagonist of Emily St. James's new novel, Woodworking, can't wait for the day when she can slip out of Mitchell, South Dakota, and make it to a big city like Chicago; once there, she imagines, she'll shed her past and start over, and no one will know she's transgender. Abigail has seen this vanishing act referred to as 'woodworking' on the internet—picking up stakes, passing for cis, and fading into the woodwork. For now, Abigail is a pariah in her town and her school, facing discrimination both inane (locker vandalism, unsympathetic teachers) and terrifying (physical threats, a targeted bathroom ban). She's been kicked out of her family home and is living with her sister. It was 'a whole thing,' she says in a moment of profound understatement—a situation 'so ridiculous' that she laughed in the face of her violent father. Yet beneath her adolescent bravado, she's so unhappy that she's willing to jettison her entire life thus far to get away from prejudice.
The anonymous woman who brought up woodworking online was warning readers like Abigail against it: 'It destroys you. You can't pretend you're not who you are.' Abigail isn't moved by this argument. She is open about being trans only because she's been forced to be; she sees her public transition simply as a necessary first step toward the life she wants. But, as she quickly learns, no one gets to just come out once and be done with the whole mess. Many LGBTQ people face a lifetime of moments that require them to weigh honesty against safety—and transgender Americans are especially vulnerable in 2025, under an administration that has declared they don't exist and demanded their disappearance from the military, schools, bathrooms, and public life writ large. Woodworking is set in the fall of 2016, just before Donald Trump's first presidential victory, but its concerns are extremely of the moment. Yet the novel doesn't feel prescriptive, because St. James explores momentous personal decisions dramatically rather than dogmatically, making clear through a variety of perspectives that there are no obvious choices—only trade-offs.
Queer life is often described with the binary metaphor of the closet: You're in or you're out, your identity hidden or declared. But that's insufficient for many people, including Abigail. She's already sacrificed security, rejecting her parents' offer to take her back in as long as she pretends to be their son again. She won't renounce her gender—but she's all right with the idea of keeping her history secret. In Woodworking, St. James demolishes the simplistic closet concept, revealing lives that are marked by many transitions, and that pass through any number of gradations within the continuum of showing up, hiding, slipping under the radar, or openly demanding respect. Abigail will soon learn she's not the only trans woman in Mitchell—and that the people around her will each decide on a different path.
The first person we meet is not Abigail but an English teacher who supervises Abigail's time in detention (for calling her classmates 'fascist cunts'). Everyone knows this teacher as the jovial, mustached Mr. Skyberg, whose first name appears in the novel only as a blank gray box. But the teacher quickly reveals something to the student that no one else on Earth knows: Skyberg is trans, too, and her chosen name is Erica. Erica is struggling: She's divorced, in large part because she emotionally retreated from her ex-wife, Constance. Her only maybe-friend is her community-theater buddy Brooke Daniels, a member of Mitchell's most powerful conservative Christian family. Erica believes it's too late to transition and live as a woman, and definitely too late to woodwork. From her moderately safe hiding place, she feels as though she sees the world through a thick film (an effect St. James amplifies by narrating Erica's chapters in the third person and Abigail's in the first). Erica's old name sounds 'enveloped in fog' whenever someone says it aloud to her.
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And yet she shares herself with Abigail because the thrill of being seen is intoxicating. Abigail claims to be put off by Erica's sudden confession, but she is also genuinely glad to no longer be alone. The two form a strange, cross-generational friendship. The teacher has more life experience, but Abigail becomes, at 17, her mentor and mother figure, bringing Erica to a trans support group and complimenting the nail polish she's been brave enough to wear in public. They discuss Erica's work on a local production of Our Town that stars Constance, which is drawing the exes together. They talk about Abigail's romance with Caleb Daniels, Brooke's son, who initially hides their relationship out of shame and fear.
But by the middle of the novel, an unresolvable tension arises between Abigail and Erica. The former feels unsupported by her friend, left to weather transphobia on her own when someone else could be standing beside her. And Erica deeply envies Abigail's open future, when her own feels so foreclosed. She is terrified that someone's going to figure out her secret, and maintaining it requires more than silence: She knows that insufficiently masculine behavior courts rumors and harassment, and she has to actively pretend to be a different person to protect her relationships, her job, and her safety. Eventually, she panics, overwhelmed by the hazards ahead of her. 'She had given it a try, and it had gone poorly, and now she was going to give up,' Erica thinks, looking at herself in the mirror. 'There was power in knowing the obvious and choosing to ignore it.' She slams the door of self-knowledge behind her, losing Abigail's friendship as she does.
St. James makes both choices seem reasonable, but irreconcilable—only to break the stalemate with a late revelation. Another woman in their town is also trans, but she woodworked years ago, and made decisions very different from either of theirs. She's wedged so deeply into her conservative milieu that she now supports anti-trans candidates and causes. She has traded authenticity for stability, given up her old family for a new one, and made an uneasy peace with her own hypocrisy. Where another novel might conclude with either her downfall or her redemption, Woodworking chooses neither. Instead, the woman is left to live with the life she's made, just as she has every day for decades.
Despite the precariousness of coming out, only one path really feels viable for the two main characters. Abigail realizes she can't leave other trans women behind: 'We're all we've got,' she recognizes. 'We have to take care of each other.' And Erica decides she must find a way to live, not just survive. One crucial scene midway through the story illustrates the pressure that's been building up inside her and the benefit of letting it out. After deciding to deny her transness (which in turn alienates Abigail), Erica is miserable and exhausted. Remembering other people in her life who were punished for stepping outside gendered boxes, she weeps at the ways she's contorted herself in order to stay locked inside her own. Then she sees Constance, and in a desperate flash, the words tumble out of her.
Why only then, years after they first met, after college, after their marriage and divorce, does Erica share her secret? Because she is done running, St. James suggests; because she wants to be seen the way Abigail is seen, at least by the person who's come closest to knowing her. After that moment, Erica isn't 'out'—she'll still need to tell her boss, her family, and her neighbors, or else let the rumor mill do its work. She'll want to change her hair, her clothes, her grooming; she'll have to deal with the guesses and questions of strangers; people will likely misgender her or misunderstand her, and they have the potential to do much worse. But during this quick, unrehearsed grasp at connection, readers see clearly why the rewards of that recognition are far higher than its cost.