“A game is an experience that happens to you,” writes Jean Thornton in A/S/L, a novel that queers 1990s internet nostalgia and celebrates the transfemme gaming community.  

A/S/L opens at a time after AOL Instant Messenger but before AI and the political oligarchy stronghold of Silicon Valley tech bros. Three teenagers dream of building a video game that will remake the world, Saga of the Sorceress, but they never finish it. The friends grow up and lose touch—until one of them begins the game anew. A/S/L follows these three characters, all transfemme—Lilith, Abraxa, and Sash—who, despite living in close proximity, have never met in person.  Each, in her own way, takes up the sorceress’s unfinished quest.  

Like Thorton’s previous novel Summer Fun, A/S/L is philosophically robust. Thornton asks, What does it mean for a trans woman to be good? Who benefits? What do we owe our friends?  She calls out norms and protocols that arise in lucrative, patriarchal, and historically transphobic arenas, such as the music industry and banking, while likewise interrogating the insidious, pervasive, and often unnamed cultural demands on trans women intended to make things easier on cis and straight people. The book is inventive and playful, especially with form—from emails to technical gaming notes to chat room (channel) transcriptions—and because Thorton’s imagination is delightful, there is lots of joyful discovery. And recovery. Almost anything can be a video game, Thornton reveals—real estate, running on a treadmill, sitting in silence, asking for forgiveness, setting someone free, being free.  

Jeanne and I have shared work, AWP panels, and dance floors. I am overjoyed to share our conversation about A/S/L.  

Annie Liontas: What was your relationship to gaming as a young trans person who grew up in the 90s? What worlds were available to you and other trans/queer folks in games that weren’t open to you in real life?

Jeanne Thornton: My friend Stephen Ira says that trans women get video games like trans men get fanfiction. Gaming is the socially acceptable way to live these other lives. Your physicality doesn’t matter. You get to play a girl, and it’s okay because you’re [a] warrior girl, you’re not going into the Barbie aisle or something. It’s defensible or socially viable.  

Like Lilith, I grew up in Texas. I didn’t have a lot of access—I didn’t know that trans people were a thing until I was in grad school in LA in 2005. I was a scout. I went to the scout camp and had this experience of being in these very, very southern, dude spaces.  Gaming is this shadow space that’s dissociative in a way that’s strongly gendered, where you go to be disembodied with other people. A lot of the characters are based on people I knew in my particular gaming community, which was the community around a game called ZZT (CraftQ in the book), and it was really nice to summon them all. The IRC [Internet Relay Chat] scene right at the beginning, that was actually quite a joy to write in part because that was a pretty faithful attempt to reconstruct without transcribing what those 1990s chats were like in all their toxicity, all their messiness.  

AL: The book is so dynamic because it’s taking on so many forms. It’s not trying to be a two-dimensional artifact, in the way that gaming also refuses to be two-dimensional.  

JT: One of the key realizations in the book was that anytime I’m writing about a video game, it’s actually a travel narrative. I was trying to think of what it [feels] like to be in a video game, and I think it isn’t a fixed point. It’s a place you go to, and your body kind of goes away, and you have choices within that space. I guess it’s true that gender is a little like that.  

AL: You’re writing into that historical period of early 1990s gaming and internet, (which you describe as “the adolescence…of the dominant art form of the 21st-century”). What was it like to capture this interstitial time for trans people and a trans youth culture, defining, and determining the internet?

JT: If we had just been in a cult, explaining why this was so important would make more sense (laughs). But a lot of the impetus for writing this book is to capture this really specific gaming world that I was part of, where everyone’s a teenager and both making games and playing games. I didn’t know what [my online] friends looked like during this period; we didn’t hear one another’s voices. Everyone is sort of making up who they are, but there’s a richness of going online and meeting other people. You are [being] your most essential self with other people who are being their most essential selves, and also you have so little information about the people you’re around that everybody is having this common fantasy together. 

At some point there was a switch, around the late 2000s, where being online went from being a place you went to be someone who wasn’t yourself to being your real life, almost your professional self, a brand that you portray. I don’t think I’ve ever made that adjustment well. I’ve talked about this with other people from the [ZZT] gaming scene. A lot of us from that world are really close, lifelong friends.  

AL: Abraxa, Lilith, and Sash move through the world so differently— Lilith shopping from the Macy’s sale rack, Abraxa breaking into church basements, Sash seeking creative autonomy and independence at the expense of financial stability. How do they conceptualize freedom as trans women, and what is the cost of that for each of them?

JT: I wanted this to be [a] multi-narrative, multi-plot book that has no canonical truth, where each of the three characters could plausibly be a main character, and any of the three storylines could be the primary one. I was also very under the influence of Georg Lukács’ Essays on Realism, where he says that the goal of fiction is to present the classes with a true account of one another. I very consciously wanted there to be three distinct trans women, rather than filtering all transness into one perspective—almost as a corrective to Summer Fun, which is about a famous and beloved musician. They’re each trying to approach freedom through a different means and a different attitude towards what financial freedom means. I had not thought of that in terms of freedom, but I really like that framing of it. 

Lilith works white-collar jobs—not to assimilate, because assimilation is not open to trans women—but with the idea that “I can move in a cis world; I’ll be one of the good ones. If I can do that, I will have freedom and stability.” Abraxa says, “I will be okay as long as I have a lot of skills.” Hers is almost like a blue-collar path. She can work on a boat or in construction—as long as she has independence, as long as she can leave whenever she wants and has the tools to be completely self-reliant. Sash is almost an academic, trying to arrive at a very pure knowledge that is not expressed externally. She makes no compromises [and] lives a life of keeping everything radically inside.

AL: Abraxa is your witchiest character. How does she, even in her most vulnerable moments, decide her terms?  

JT: I approached Abraxa with a great deal of compassion. I also went through some pains to make sure that Abraxa’s parts of the narrative are very magical, steeped in occultiness.  If you’re a reader who really wants to believe that all the magic in the book is real, nothing will contradict that. If you want to believe that this is a woman going crazy underground, nothing’s going to contradict that either. I wish I could be more like her in a lot of ways. There’s something about having a character who has that kind of radical freedom to just go off and reinvent herself, to go off and connect. I tried to show some of the price of that. She’s very isolated as a result in quite intense ways.  

Hands down some of [the] most brilliant people I’ve ever met in my life were from ZZT, where everything they did seemed so effortlessly magical. Some of these people burn extremely bright. I knew someone from that community [who] died of an overdose in their 20s [and] somebody who committed suicide, also in her 20s. [The book is] thinking about your brilliant friends from your adolescence and the sadness of seeing them continue to be brilliant, but in a form that the world can’t make that much use of.

AL: And Lilith, in a way, is a kind of counterweight to that narrative because, at least on the surface, she’s very successful. Yet, beneath, we feel there is a loneliness to her experience. You write, “You’d think you’d remember being trans all the time, but you don’t for a while. Just a vague sadness.” How is that true for you?

JT: I think this is a fairly familiar trans experience. I have a family member in the hospital, and when I tried to call him last night—at the moment I said who I was, what my relationship was to this person, using a gendered noun for this but also using my gendered voice—it immediately became like, “We’re not gonna let you talk to him.” I realize in retrospect, okay, that’s really trans, but it’s not [how it] felt in the moment. I’ve been out long enough that it’s weird to have flashes of what it was like before, to move through the world with a relatively greater amount of—grace is the word I’ve sometimes used for this. The assumption is everything is fine until a moment of friction. That’s a really common transfemme trap, where you don’t map it back to, this is because I’m trans, because you actually don’t know at all. The maddening thing is that you don’t know ever, and you will never know. You will go to your grave not knowing, because often the people involved don’t know either.

I do think that religious conversion is sometimes a good metaphor for transness. It changes how you stand in relation to the world and how people are going to meet you in relation to the world, particularly if that conversion is something that has friction with how people deal with you. 

AL: Sash asks, “Cis people don’t have to have [a] level of clarity about their history; why do trans people?” Her journey is especially moving for me, a trans person who came of age at a time in the 90s when gender was communicated as a fixed point. What does Sash’s trajectory reveal about the layered, complex trans experience in America?

JT: The dungeon of Sash is quite deep, and it’s very intense. I do think this is important, how Sash is trying to insist on that transition on her terms. My feeling of coming out at that time was, I better have my shit together before I cross this line, because it’s gonna be really intense, and you can’t go slowly. It’s jumping into the deep end of the pool, I think. That’s a lot less true today, in ways that are more palpable. My sense in 2025, and this is something that is terrifying to the right wing, is the idea that you can view transness as something you can experiment with, you can play with. You can dip your toe in the water, you can manifest it in different ways at different times. With Sash, both Lilith and Abraxas think of her as a cis woman. And actually, early readers of the book didn’t realize Sash was trans also. It’s one of those ways that online-ness [worked] in the past. 

AL: What would it mean to listen to trans women’s stories? What is the power inherent in that act, both for storyteller and listener?

The way society treats women generally, it doubles down for trans women. We’re women, so it’s okay to hurt us. There’s actually a specific gaming-related story, an arcade game called Final Fight. It’s about three burly dudes, one of whom is the mayor of a fictional city, punching their way through a wave of bad guys. Some of the enemies are women. When they tried to bring the game to America, execs said, “We can’t have these dudes beating up women, so let’s just say they’re trans women.” Everyone accepted this. One of these women, Poison, is a beloved, almost-saint of transness, canonically trans, because we needed to have a woman we could beat up.

Trans inclusivity is this crisis point for understanding how our society constructs gender in general, how we construct womanhood in general, and I think that’s urgent. Given the eternal war on women, an understanding of the way that transness manifests in this is absolutely critical.