Benedict Nguyen’s ‘Hot Girls with Balls’ is an honest look at Asian American trans women

What do you get when you bring together queerness and sports? Hot Girls With Balls.

Benedict Nguyen’s cheekily titled debut novel is a hilarious and heartwrenching exploration of professional sports, social media influencer culture, fan parasocial relationships, and the cruelty of transmisogyny, told through the lives of two Asian American trans women, Six and Green.

The two are professional volleyball players, women playing in the men’s league, who also happen to be Internet famous influencers in their trans, sporty, Asian niche. In addition to being on-court rivals, the two are also off-court romantic partners. The two protagonists work through their journey of being the token queer players of color in a pandemic-era volleyball tournament—attempting to navigate their grief amidst violence against their community, while balancing the necessity of building their brands online as the public watches. Throughout the book, readers experience the constant barrage of unsolicited opinions from both the players’ fans and haters, as much of the book features comments sections of Six’s and Green’s social media posts.

The satirical nature of the book allows for Nguyen to both poke fun at her main characters and their various identity markers, as well as the absurd nature of the world around them that necessitates these jokes. “Thank god Green is trans because if she was cis, she’d find a way to make this about how her parents wanted her to be a doctor and the kids said her lunch smelled,” one fan comment in the book reads. But, while it is a satire, make no mistake—Hot Girls With Balls is deeply real and brutally honest. In a world where the bodies of transwomen are constantly up for public debate and the necessity to perform plagues us all regardless of how many followers we have, Nguyen’s story is sincere, sharp, and satisfying.

I recently sat down with Nguyen to talk about the book, which was released last week, where the story’s Internet humor is borne from, and what tensions are explored by Six and Green’s story.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Vandana Pawa: Why did you choose satire for your debut novel?
Benedict Nguyen: I think satire can allow a reader to understand a realist phenomenon from a different perspective. I wanted to write something funny and long form, and see if I could keep the jokes coming. I also wanted to see if I could find a balance between levity and “haha” moments and some more earnest moments of seriousness. Interestingly, over the course of writing and revising this book, it wasn't always clear to me which moments were which. I found that ambiguity fun to explore as well.

VP: You’re telling a story of our contemporary, conservative landscape through the lens of sports. I think it will be pretty easy for readers to understand why that's the case, with everything trans athletes have to deal with when they're trying to play the sport that they love. But why volleyball specifically?
BN: It's just the most spectacular ball sport there is. One day I was just flipping channels and saw indoor volleyball on and I was immediately captivated by the intuition that players on the same team have for each other, the particular kind of athleticism that volleyball encourages from its players, compared to other more aggressive contact ball sports, and got hypnotized.

VP: Much of the humor in the book comes through the Internet. Tweets, comments on an Instagram (or, Instagraph, as it’s called in the book) post. How did you go about translating the comedy of being online from our tiny screens to the page?
BN: I have a tension where I really resent my phone at times, but have also been thankful for some truly stomach busting laughs that I've gotten from doom scrolling. I was curious about taking the late-2010s and 2020s vernacular and logic of humor and novelizing it without relying on language that felt too meme-ified. So I was trying to create attitudes and showcase thought patterns, but without the actual meme. In 2021 the catchphrase was, “I want so-and-so to step on my face.” That expression of fanaticism that isn’t as popular in our daily lexicon anymore, so I didn’t want to use that kind of an idiom but I wanted to convey that exact sentiment. I also wanted a sense of mocking derision to translate to the narrative sections of the book as well, so when we’re in a scene with Six or Green, the narration is making fun of them as we’re observing them. It’s always at a slight slant.

VP: Six and Green are athletes navigating a relationship with each other, but they're also influencers. The way that they interact with the world, with each other, with their fans, the Internet is at the center of the story. What were you hoping to convey in utilizing the point of view of social media?
BN: Because they have such large platforms, Six and Green could seem unrelatable to most readers who are not “famous.” But at the same time, they also exist in an extremely particular niche of Internet fame, they're famous within their sport, but having less than a million followers doesn't make them household names. I think the logic of feeling pressured by how they present themselves, how they express their political opinions, how they perform their grief, and wanting to do it sincerely, but also for the Internet—those are questions I hear among ”ordinary” people regularly.

VP: The book takes place a year into a COVID-like pandemic. What role did you need the pandemic to play in the story?
BN: I started writing it at a time when the literary discourse online  was like “no one wants to read your self-indulgent pandemic novel.” I heard that and turned it around and thought, “But what about me?” [Laughs]. I think within the novel structure it sets up a reason to put them in a closed container because of testing protocols and pandemic rules, which creates a fishbowl effect. In the 2021 timeline of the novel, the pandemic can exist as a parameter and a constraint without the characters trying to analyze too seriously what it means, which I agree would be annoying.

VP: The idea of appearances, perception, bodily autonomy are a question that Six and Green are constantly working through, which I think stems from being both very visible and being trans women. What do you hope for readers to understand about the lives of the characters, and maybe their own experiences with autonomy through the lens of Six and Green?
BN: There are snippets in the novel where the narrator tells us about when Six and Green came into each of their hotness and how it changed them. And this is also filtered through them choosing to become—and succeeding in becoming—professional athletes. Expectations for athletic performance are high and regimented. So in a sense, they're expected to maintain a functional level of fitness that at the same time also shapes the aesthetics of their bodies. They both experience misogyny differently because of the kinds of trans girls they present as, or are interpreted as, and that’s another tension within the novel. Six is taller and presents more androgynously, while Green is slightly shorter and presents more femme.They're grappling with not just how they're understood in the public sphere, but also how certain stereotypes of lesbian relationship dynamics are played out or are called into question by their romantic relationship.

VP: What do you hope for Hot Girls With Balls to do once it's out in the world?
BN: I won't make the mistake that a character in the novel makes, getting captivated by trying to have grand ambitions. But if a reader reads it, has a great time, then that’s amazing. I’m trying to make Six and Green Summer happen.