'Bad Habit' by Alana Portero: 'The binary was fiercely constructed and defended'

This is an actual novel in the world that you can read:

"The first thing a trans girl in a hostile environment learns, even before she knows it's hostile, when everything is still pure intuition, is to control her eagerness or to fake it until not even she herself can tell if it's genuine. In that early part of the decade, the binary was fiercely constructed and defended. The androgynous splendor of the eighties was just a mirage that both stimulated our desires and made our longing more painful, being so present and yet so very far away. For me, a secret little trans girl in a working-class neighborhood, who had no idea what in the hell she would end up becoming, seeing Boy George in all his cheerful femininity or Prince in fishnet stockings was like seeing lightning bugs in a damp black cave. A flash of hope so fleeting that you weren't even sure it had existed.

The boldest section of The Girls stocked clothing inspired by the hedonistic cultural wave known as the Movida Madrileña, which to us was something we saw on TV, like Anillos de oro or Dallas....Fiction about a world that wasn't ours. A wild carnival, alien to our human lives, that hovered over our reality there at the end of the number 7 metro line. Onscreen they said that Madrid was a city where boys in makeup danced till dawn; in San Blas, grown-ups would seriously debate whether it was worse for your son to be a drug addict or a faggot. They also talked about AIDS, everywhere, all the time, shifting between disgust, cruelty, shame, and pity in every conversation, predicting death sentences and loneliness for its sufferers."

— Alana S. Portero, Bad Habit, originally published as La mala costumbre, 2023, translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, 2024. HarperVia, 2024. pp. 42–43.