Philip Larkin, Egg

Was Philip Larkin transgender? Not quite, by modern definitions. Nevertheless his work and his life, by those same standards, come very close to the life stories of transgender women before and when we come out: early on he sees himself in women and girls, and in lesbian sexuality, and sees himself as fundamentally immature. His evolution from unpublished to published writer, and from novelist to poet, shows him settling into, or settling for, an adult masculinity he portrays as fundamentally unsatisfying and wrong for him: late poems generalize from his own sadness (linked to gender) to a tragic sense of sadness everywhere. This pattern fits what Grace Lavery calls “egg theory”: the feelings and patterns through which AMAB people unable or unwilling to come out as trans persuade themselves that they have no choice. Egg theory provides a way to see Larkin’s career, and to view his powers: it also lets us connect his work more accurately to his own biography, and to twenty-first century trans life.