“Daring to Be True and to Shine Brightly in the Time That Remains”: Imagining Transgender Ageing in Fredrik Ekelund’s Q

ABSTRACT This article explores imaginings of transgender ageing, and more specifically visions of transfeminine ageing futures, through an analysis of the auto-fictional novel Q by Swedish author Fredrik Ekelund. The novel tells the story of Fredrik, who comes out as transvestite at the age of 60, and subsequently struggles to come to terms with and explore their transfeminine identity as Marisol. Overall, cultural representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer ageing are rare, and often tell tales of misery. As such, Q is a unique example of a complex and relatively positive narrative of transgender ageing. On the one hand, transgender ageing is portrayed as a potential escape from both time and growing old, a form of “rebirth”. On the other hand, failure emerges as a constant threat, including both the failure to perform age-appropriate femininity and failure in the sense of becoming stuck with self-loathing and shame. The protagonist’s struggles to age successfully become intimately connected with pride and standing up for oneself, struggles that are in turn bound to homonationalist discourses of Scandinavian progressiveness and LGBT exceptionalism.

Does coming out as transgender in old age equate to ending up with a miserable later life, marked by loneliness, shame, and despair? Or even the end of life-the loss of a future? In the opening scenes of auto-fictional novel Q (Ekelund, 2018; referenced henceforth only by page), the 60-year-old protagonist is out for a walk when they suddenly realize that they are transvestite. 1 Upon returning home, they share the insight with their girlfriend, a coming out which is described both as a relief and as "sealing a pathetic destiny" (p. 12). 2 The girlfriend is a long-term partner with whom they have been living for years, and coming out marks the end of a life defined by coupledom, family, and domesticity: "The end of us. The end of our family. The end of our life in the terraced house" (p. 12). The girlfriend reacts with silence, grief, and confusion, and shortly thereafter the couple breaks up. Coming out as transvestite equates to shattering the nuclear family, a both symbolic and literal collapse of a heteronormative life course.
The opening scenes of Q evoke a wider question about the possibilities of imagining ageing beyond the realms of heterosexuality and the gender binary. Overall, cultural representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ageing remain scarce. Those that do exist often tell tragic tales of misery, reinforcing negative stereotypes of LGBT individuals as sad, lonely, and bitter (Goltz, 2010;Hess, 2019). Linda Hess, in her groundbreaking work Queer ageing in North American fiction, even suggests that: the discursive link between successful ageing and heteronormative life trajectories is so strong that it habitually erases alternative ways of imagining one's progression through life and of seeing growing older in a positive way. (Hess, 2019, p. 7) The image of a shattered life and a ruined future in the opening scenes of Q seems to reflect this proposition. But while Q starts out by reinstating transgender ageing as a loss of future, it also provides multiple representations of what transgender ageing may also mean. The end of family life is, after all, the beginning of the novel and not the end. And, as this article will demonstrate, the novel presents complex visions of ageing futures.
Cultural representations, including literary narratives, are significant for the ways in which we imagine gendered subjectivities and social realities-including ageing and growing old (Chivers, 2011). Rather than being merely a matter of biological facticity or chronology, ageing is indeed a social and cultural phenomenon. We are, as cultural gerontologist Gullette (1997) has proposed, "aged by culture"; the cultural discourses that surround us enable the ways in which we emerge as aged subjects.
Despite the broad range of feminist literary research on the intersection of gender and ageing (see e.g. C. McGlynn et al., 2017;Richardson, 2019;Whelehan & Gwynne, 2014), research on ageing beyond binary gender remains scarce. The few studies on cultural representations of queer ageing have almost exclusively dealt with lesbian and gay narratives (Hess, 2017(Hess, , 2019. As a rare example of a cultural representation of transgender ageing, the novel Q offers an interesting and fruitful starting point for exploring ageing futures beyond binary gender. Consequently, this article aims to explore imaginings of transgender ageing, and more specifically the visions of transfeminine ageing futures in Q. What is narrated as desirable ageing in this novel? And what constitute the possibilities and threats to an ageing transfeminine subject?

Queering ageing studies, ageing queer studies
This article is situated at the intersections of comparative literature, cultural gerontology, and gender studies. Theoretically, it draws on queer theory and its "evil twin", transgender studies (Stryker, 2004). During the last two decades, a notable proliferation of queer studies has brought the ideals of progression within dominant understandings of linear time under scrutiny (e.g. Boellstorff, 2007;Edelman, 2004;Freeman, 2010;Halberstam, 2005;Rohy, 2009). Lately, the role of transgender within such temporalities has also been theorized. Trans temporalities have emerged as a new line of theoretical inquiry, signalling a "trans turn in temporal studies" (Fisher et al., 2017, p. 6; see also in particular Sundén, 2015). Still, very little attention has been paid to ageing subjects and the life courses that are enabled within these temporal narratives.
There are, however, a few notable works that explore queer ageing and how gendered and sexual norms intersect with temporal norms to dictate what is a desirable and successful ageing and later life. These include the work of Hess (2017Hess ( , 2019, Goltz (2010), Siverskog (2015Siverskog ( , 2016, Fabbre (2014Fabbre ( , 2015 and Pearce (2018). Sandberg and Marshall (2017) have argued that dominant discourses of successful ageing-focusing on healthy, independent, and active ageing-are not only ageist in their disavowal of ill, frail, and dependent ageing subjects/bodies, but also intimately intertwined with heteronormativity. The popular imagery of successful ageing is suffused with "hetero-happiness": smiling heterosexual couples engaging in leisure activities or in happy intimacies with children and grandchildren (see also Marshall, 2018;Sandberg, 2015). This imagery also constitutes a promise for the future. Living hetero-happily ever after becomes the only imaginable ageing future, and Sandberg and Marshall (2017, p. 8) thus call for a "queering of aging futures" to "challenge the dividing practices that consign some aging bodies and identities to unhappy or nonexistent futures." This article builds upon the work of Sandberg and Marshall by interrogating how ageing futures are imagined in a particular literary narrative in the context of transgender ageing in contemporary Scandinavia. As stated above, the opening scenes of Q indeed reiterate a cultural narrative of decline and loss-of LGBT ageing as a non-future. The straight life course is narrated as representing stability, respectability, predictability, and promises of a happy life (Ahmed, 2010;Halberstam, 2005). Conversely, its disruption represents a lonely and unhappy life trajectory. However, and as we will argue in the course of this article, Q is also invested in a progress narrative in which the protagonist increasingly learns to find pride in their transgender identity. This progress narrative is firmly situated in a Scandinavian homonationalist context, a region portrayed as progressive and LGBT tolerant and contrasted both with a backward past and the backwardness of racial Others.

Q and self-writing as a transgender genre
The 2010s saw a notable upsurge in autofiction in both Scandinavia and beyond, through the work of authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Karolina Ramqvist, Johanna Frid, Maja Lee Langvald, Lars Norén, and many more. And from a transgender studies perspective, self-writing in general, as well as the specific genre of autofiction, has been described as particularly important in the formation of transgender subjectivity. Transgender studies scholar Namaste (2000, p. 273) famously described autobiographies as "the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak". Since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, self-writing has constituted a major part of the transgender literary canon. As several historians have discussed, the case studies written by, with, and about socalled inverts, hermaphrodites, and persons of contrary sexual feelings helped to shape the emergent identities that are now gathered beneath the umbrella of transgender (e.g. Gill-Peterson, 2018;Oosterhuis, 2000). Scandinavia is no exception to this rule (Holm, 2017). The importance and influence of such writings for gender-variant people during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are also well documented (e.g. Hausman, 1995;Koch, 2017;Meyerowitz, 2002;Prosser, 1998).
Q ties into this literary tradition. Although labelled "a novel", the publication was in fact a performative coming out story. The author, who shares their name with the novel's protagonist, was already established as a writer and had published a number of novels. But while Ekelund was relatively well-known within the Swedish literary scene, the publication of Q prompted much wider public attention. When Q was released, Ekelund appeared in several interviews on television and in major newspapers in Sweden, sharing a personal story that resonated with the novel's narrative. Since then, they have also published a collection of poetry on being transvestite, now under the names "Fredrik Ekelund/Marisol M." (Ekelund, 2020). The author's coming out story has also been made into a documentary (Erixon Ekelund & Berg, 2021), as well as a stage performance (Kristersson, 2021).
Central to the plot of Q is the 60-year-old protagonist's discovery of a transvestite identity, and how they set out to explore their female self: Marisol. Their quest involves overcoming shame, and accepting and finding pride in their transfeminine identity. Fredrik/Marisol becomes a proper woman by learning about the literal clues of dresses and makeup, and finds a new community as well as re-establishing contact with old friends and family. The novel is set in Sweden and Denmark; for the most part in Malmö, where the protagonist lives, and the larger, urban Copenhagen-no more than an hour away-where they explore their female self. While following a classical dramaturgical trajectory in which the protagonist rises from shame and failure to find pride and success, the novel also ties in with several different genres, using newspaper clippings and letters as well as stream-of-consciousness writing. As we will demonstrate, it is also a complex narrative that presents the reader with multiple possibilities for interpretation. Fredrik/Marisol's progression towards a transfeminine (later) life moves between the poles of becoming a pathetic oldie and living as a proud, successfully ageing transvestite, equally longing for and shunning their female self.
"Like ill-dressed, ill-painted birds": The failed age of pathetic oldies The opening scenes, in which the protagonist describes coming out as "sealing a pathetic destiny", is characteristic of a recurring theme throughout Q. The divergence from a straight life course places Fredrik/Marisol in a precarious position, which may be described as the fear of failed elderly femininity. At the beginning of the novel, Fredrik/Marisol grapples with imageries of the ageing future as a dreadful destiny which LGBT individuals should try to avoid at all costs (Goltz, 2010). Their fear of being or becoming pathetic is specifically located in the dreaded destiny of a pathetic oldie, an aged transgender figure characterized by failure, loneliness, unhappiness, and passivity.
The most notable illustration of this destiny is a group of "older trannies" (p. 24), who are among the protagonist's first encounters with a transgender community. Upon coming out, Fredrik/ Marisol seeks community and friends at the organization "Transvestites in Denmark" (TiD). At a social meeting arranged by this organization, however, Fredrik/Marisol is seated with this group of "shy, older trannies" during dinner, and soon feels acutely bored. These older women are portrayed as failed in terms of both appearance and behaviour. The "older trannies" reappear later on, and are described as "poorly made up," "ill-dressed birds," and "shy, stiff, odd, big, rugged" (p. 99). Their failure lies, first of all, in their unsuccessful performance of femininity. These older women who cannot dress well or put on makeup signal a contrast with cisgender femininity, and their failure seems to represent a failure of "passing," of being read as cisgender women.
Throughout the novel, cisgender femininity is highlighted as a femininity to aspire to. As noted by Sandy Stone (1994Stone ( /2006 in one of the founding texts of transgender studies, passing is regarded within cisheteronormative, majoritarian culture as "the most critical thing a transsexual can do, the thing that constitutes success." Stone's classic call to refuse the ideals of passing has since been taken up by several scholars, but passing remains a valued ideal within a cisheteronormative framework-and very much so also in Q. Implicit in the normative model of cisfemininity is also youthfulness, and quintessential to femininity is thus to resist signs of ageing. The failure of the older women at the TiD meeting-what makes them look "odd," "weird and wrong" (p. 25) -is thus a simultaneous failure of femininity and youthfulness.
In effect, the oldies at the TiD meeting become a counter image of everything to which the protagonist aspires in terms of the future. It is not only the older women's feminine and aged appearance that is a failure but also their position as old; something which is characterized by dullness, passivity, and inertia. During the dinner, Fredrik/Marisol thinks to themself: What am I doing here really, I'm asking myself, and just want to leave. What am I doing here with these wax dolls? I want to dance, live, party! (p. 24) The assertion that Fredrik/Marisol wants to "live" is here understood as a clear contrast to the older women, who are described as lifeless "wax dolls." These pathetic oldies at TiD thus embody a failure of being and becoming old, by being passive and dull and reinstating a decline narrative of ageing (cf. Gullette, 1997). What Fredrik/Marisol identifies with instead, as well as aspiring to, is movement, activity, and excess-aligning themself with a discourse of successful ageing, underpinned by ideals of staying active and "ageing without growing old" (Calasanti & King, 2005). This is most tangibly illustrated by the vibrant nightlife that Fredrik/Marisol finds in Copenhagen; the city that enables Fredrik/Marisol to explore their femininity and eventually find community and a sense of belonging. In contrast, the oldies at TiD are marked as lonely, something Fredrik/Marisol fears will be their own future: Many of the older trannies are sitting silently like ill-dressed, ill-painted birds. Fellini birds. Hopelessly trapped in their loneliness and, I imagine, their destinies. Do I look like them? Am I one of them? Will I become that kind of bird myself, poorly made up, my wig tilted, in a wheelchair at an LGBT-certified care home for impoverished retirees? (p. 99) Poor makeup and a tilted wig appear to accompany the wheelchair; hence, becoming old equates to the failed femininity of the "ill-dressed, ill-painted birds" as Fredrik/Marisol describes these older women. Evidently, the choice of a care home to describe this dreaded future is not coincidental. As suggested by Chivers and Kriebernegg (2017, p. 26), the care home persistently figures in culture as a "failure, a last resort, and a fate worse than death." In the quote above, the care home, as the affective social imaginary of dreaded old age (cf. Higgs & Gilleard, 2017), is also combined with the fear and abjection of disability, poverty, and failed gendered performativity as a way of underlining the undesirability of transgender old age.
Loneliness seems to be reiterated in Q as a cultural trope and a negative affect that "sticks" to queer bodies in particular ways (Ahmed, 2004(Ahmed, , 2010Carroll, 2013). This applies to transgender bodies in particular, always on the margins of what Spade (2008, p. 53) called the "LGB-fake-T." Throughout the novel, loneliness is characterized as the quintessential state for transgender people in general: "being transvestite is an education in absolute loneliness" (p. 102). In Q, the stickiness of transgender loneliness is conjoined with cultural tropes of old age as a lonely state. The pathetic oldies at TiD are described in terms that combine a failure of ageing with a failure of femininity, thus embodying the antithesis of the kind of ageing to which Fredrik/Marisol aspires. Failing at both femininity and ageing, these pathetic oldies are presented as a cautionary tale, a dreaded ageing future that the protagonist fears and seeks to distance themself from.

Abject old time: "Tage Tosa" and the failure of past times
The undesirable transgender subject is not only a present-day character. Apart from the pathetic oldies at TiD described above, another cautionary tale of failed femininity is presented as a memory from the protagonist's youth. The recollection of the transfeminine "Tage Tosa" haunts Fredrik/ Marisol's present with a worst-case scenario of transgender identity. "Tage Tosa" functions as the antithesis of happiness, belonging, and pride-an exemplar of failure.
"Tage Tosa" is presented in the novel's prologue, where Fredrik/Marisol recalls a memory from their teenage years during the 1970s. While the novel is set in contemporary Scandinavia, marked by a paradigm of "new openness" and a self-image of progressive, positive, and liberal attitudes towards gender and sexuality (Rosenberg, 2002), the prologue in contrast captures memories of a transphobic, pre-pride past. In the prologue, the young Fredrik goes out for a drive with their teenage mates to "watch the whores" in the red-light district of their hometown Malmö, "a reality very distant from our bright, terraced-house world in the city suburbs" (p. 7). On the drive, they encounter "the creature", an older transfeminine person wearing "worn down high heels, greybrownish tights, a pale coat, and a red scarf covering their hair" (p. 7). Just like the pathetic oldies at TiD, her failed femininity is manifest in a face that is described as "crude, masculine." Here, however, failed femininity means not only becoming a pathetic oldie but also being a freakish object of fear and disgust. Presenting her as "the creature" marks her unintelligibility-the teenagers are unable to interpret her other than simply as a freak. This is the epitome of the failed future; of becoming unintelligible and thus inhuman (Butler, 2009).
Throughout the novel, "Tage Tosa" is recalled as a personification of shame, and the memory of her is marked by contradictory feelings of scorn and contempt as well as self-loathing, shame, and identification. The defamatory nickname "Tage Tosa" in itself captures two of Fredrik/Marisol's fears: failing at femininity and becoming mentally ill. Tage is a man's name, in contrast to the name that she herself uses (Anita); and when the lads shout it at her they are thus signalling a refusal of her femininity, insisting that-despite her female clothes and identification-she is a man. The second part of the name, "Tosa", is a colloquial expression for a crazy, tossig, person. Fredrik/Marisol's attempts to shy away from "Tage Tosa" are thus based upon a complex dis/identification. "Tage Tosa" is not only what they distance themselves from, but simultaneously what they most fear being and becoming. This is repeatedly described in the novel as "the Tage Tosa shame," or as tumbling into the "Tage Tosa pit" -falling into disgrace, self-loathing, and mental illness.
This descent into a pit of shame is a temporal rift in time, falling back into the past. While an omniscient threat relating to the ageing future, the "Tage Tosa" figure is also a literal reminiscence of former times. The "Tage Tosa" figure functions in Q as a reminder of pre-pride times-the times before Scandinavia became liberal and progressive. This past is characterized by shame, and the "Tage Tosa" shame is an effect of being stuck in and/or contaminated by the past. While firmly positioned in the past, "Tage Tosa" is thus nevertheless both a source of identification and an ominous threat in the present.
As discussed by Love (2007), pride discourses of the post-Stonewall era are deeply invested in never returning, in not going back to the past of shame and negativity that has defined queer history. Love (2007, p. 9) argues that: while it was once the case that admitting homosexual feelings meant acknowledging one's status as a tragic figure, gay liberation has opened multiple escape routes from those doomed cities of the plain. This is clearly the case in the context of Scandinavia, where the struggle for LGBT rights in general has undergone significant changes during the twenty-first century. Within Sweden, legislative changes such as halting the forced sterilization of transsexuals, hate-crime legislation, and marriage and reproductive rights, have attracted widespread public attention. Over the course of only a few decades, such matters have transitioned from controversial minority issues to consensus, encountering relative political unanimity. While Sweden and Denmark are presented primarily as opposites in Q -Denmark being brighter, livelier, and more open in contrast to the repressed and conservative Sweden-they are also described as mutual participants in an LGBT pride discourse. However, Love (2007, p. 9) contends that this "brighter future for queers" seems to rest on the premise that "one must leave the past behind" -that historical shame and stigma must not contaminate the present. The "Tage Tosa" character in Q reiterates Love's point that the shame encountered in the past cannot be fully jettisoned. No matter how progressive the "now" may be, the shame of the past continues to haunt the present.
In the ageing future that Fredrik/Marisol fears, they are stuck with this backward queer shame from the past, as well as gendered failure. Shame is epitomized in the "Tage Tosa" character, but it also sticks to the pathetic oldies at TiD. These older transfeminine persons appear to be remnants from the past, stuck in "Tage Tosa" time. They are described as "trapped in their destinies," as lonely, sad, and pathetic. While they are relics from the pre-pride past, they also present Fredrik/ Marisol with the prospect of a dreaded future: they are a tangible imaginary of what happens to an ageing transfeminine subject who fails at femininity and becomes trapped in shame. But, as we will discuss in the following, the narrative of transgender ageing in Q is not only fuelled by old-age negativity and the failures of past times. It is possible to avoid this dreaded future, and a different, more positive transgender ageing is achievable.

Transfemininity and the flight from old age?
Q also tells a tale of transgender life as a challenge to the inevitable progression of time. Ageing as a transfeminine person is associated not only with misery and decline in Q, but also with rebirth, of becoming a woman but also growing young once again and finding a life trajectory beyond cisheteronormativity.
In the novel, Copenhagen nightlife functions as a possible avenue for Fredrik/Marisol to flee the expectations of their past life, and instead explore their female self. The nightclub is described as a place of ecstatic joy, dancing, drinking, and desire-a space of youthful excess. It is narrated as beyond or out of joint with time; a place where "Chronos has infinite possibilities" (p. 45). The fact that the protagonist is 60 years old does not seem to matter in this context. Hence, the description of the nightclub in Q resonates with Halberstam's description of the "dark night club" as "queer time" and a "perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence-early adulthood-marriage-reproduction-child rearing-retirement-death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility" (Halberstam in Dinshaw et al., 2007, p. 182). For Fredrik/Marisol, moreover, the nightclub is described as a literal rebirth as a woman, and their first night out as a woman as a "birth night" (p.22).
A similar jubilant image of a transgender escape from ageing emerges in the description of putting on makeup as a way of becoming young: [I'm] feeling that this trans struggle is also a struggle with death, against death and dying. The euphoric sensation every time I apply my makeup, primer, foundation, powder, rouge and how the years are peeled away, disappear in a couple of minutes, wrinkles and ugly creases hidden by makeup and how a new, younger face emerges, just as real as my other "real" face, but much better. A mask? Well sure. But isn't all of life, regardless of whether we're orchids, bumblebees, doves, or humans, a great masquerade? (p. 80) In this passage, gender performativity is closely intertwined with the performativity of age (Laz, 2003;Siverskog, 2015). Becoming Marisol means not only becoming a woman and escaping the confinements of binary gender, but also becoming young and escaping the confinements of linear time. The claim that "all of life" may in fact be a masquerade suggests that transgender can reveal the very performative and non-essential nature of both gender and age. Becoming young is not only possible, but seems to be a self-evident part of transgender ageing, as the transgender subject has already ruptured linear time by coming out (Halberstam, 2005). In contrast to the way in which cisfemininity has been described as a constant struggle with time (Lövgren, 2009), transfemininity here appears to provide the possibility of challenging both time and ageing. Watching the years "peeled away" and a younger face emerging in the mirror creates a "euphoric sensation" in Fredrik/ Marisol, reflecting gender euphoria as well as the desire for youthfulness-the accomplishment of a successful ageing that signifies never growing old.
Nevertheless, although doing transfemininity presents the possibility of escaping the progression of time, it is also a painstaking performance. Fredrik/Marisol describes a constant fear of failing at femininity, being "scared pretty much all the time of doing it the wrong way: picking the wrong wig, putting on makeup the wrong way, walking the wrong way, standing the wrong way" (p. 36). Dahl and Sundén (2018, p. 273) argue that "the default mode of ideal femininity is failure," and that "the further away from white, bourgeois, de-sexualized modesty, the harder the fail." As a transfeminine subject, Fredrik/Marisol is in a position that is far distant from idealized femininity and thus very vulnerable to failure, in particular because a failure to pass entails particular risks of harassment and violence (cf. Chamberland, 2016). Learning to become a "proper woman" is thus crucial.
In order to perform femininity, Fredrik/Marisol must carefully balance the expectations of age. As discussed earlier, in Q, doing femininity successfully is linked to not becoming a pathetic oldie. As normative femininity equals youthfulness, resisting signs of ageing is something both ciswomen and transwomen must struggle with (Lövgren, 2009). But as transwomen occupy a more precarious position in relation to femininity to begin with, becoming/being seen as old posits a greater threat. But at the same time, the protagonist must not become too young. Learning to become a proper woman eventually entails acting one's age despite the possibilities of fleeing time-learning ageappropriate and respectable femininity.
The learning process towards performing age-appropriate femininity is guided by female friends and lovers. In particular, the two cisgender women Camilla and Louise teach Fredrik/Marisol how to dress, walk, and put on makeup, not only as a woman but as a respectable and dignified woman. According to Louise, learning "to be fully a woman" includes things such as knowing how to "ride a bike with my legs together and eat peanuts one at a time and not throw them into my mouth like a chimpanzee" (p. 142). Staying within the boundaries of respectable femininity means having a constant awareness of one's appearance and behaviour. Being their feminine self, Marisol-in contrast to being Fredrik-entails constantly asking themself "where does my skirt end, how does my wig fit, is my makeup and mascara perfect?" (p. 141). In a list of advice on makeup that Fredrik/ Marisol receives from Camilla, she also adds the note: "Ask yourself, who do you want to be, Elegant and Dignified or a Slut?" and admonishes Fredrik/Marisol to be aware of details such as the length and tightness of their skirt (p. 98).
Complementing this cisgender guidance in proper femininity, Fredrik/Marisol is also provided with guidance in the unique aspects of transfeminine life by their friend Soledad. She is at ease in her transgender identity and functions as both role model and advisor. She and Fredrik/Marisol have only met once, but they exchange letters in which Soledad shares her thoughts on female life in general, and transfemininity in particular. While she underscores that transgender women are just as much women as cisgender women, she also positions the latter as more competent in femininity. She explains this in terms of time, and narratives of cis-and transfeminine ageing. She describes how, when exploring her female self in the early days, she often experienced that cisgender women were uninterested in discussing makeup with her. This, Soledad argues, is because such discussions were a preoccupation of cisgender women's teenage years and that "they had left that state behind" (p. 93). Cisgender women are presented as on time in terms of gendered performativity, following a linear narrative of ageing. While this results in being uninterested in discussing makeup, it also enables them to guide and correct transgender women into age-appropriate womanhood. In the voice of Soledad: What I appreciated about my friends (the biological females) was their honesty. When they discovered something that did not look good, they immediately said so: that the makeup I was wearing was too daring for daytime, that my skirt was too short or my heels too high. Or that the garments I was wearing suited an 18year-old but not, as I was at the time, a thirty-year-old (p. 93).
Transgender women, according to Soledad, accept age-inappropriate appearances: "that a seventyyear-old tranny could dress like a teenage girl is not something we react to" (p. 94). As Sandberg (2008, p. 127f) argues: "failing to perform one's age could imply a failure to perform an intelligible and culturally acceptable gender," in particular for women, who may be castigated as "mutton dressed as lamb" (Twigg, 2007). According to Soledad, this appears to be a particular risk for transwomen. Transfemininity may be a longed-for refuge from ageing decline, but it also entails the risk of becoming stuck in the phase of a teenage girl, instead of developing into a mature woman.
In the eyes of both Soledad and Fredrik/Marisol, the narrative of transfeminine ageing appears to be inherently disrupted. Coming out as transgender is a rupture of linear time-it means starting over, not just figuratively, but quite literally becoming young. The decline narrative that we detailed in the previous sections, in which transgender ageing equates to loneliness and tragedy, is thus complemented by a contradictory narrative of transgender as a flight from time. This requires careful navigation, however. As we have demonstrated above, Q presents its protagonist with cautionary tales of failed age: the pathetic oldies of TiD, the shame of pre-pride "Tage Tosa", and being age-inappropriate, stuck as the teenage girl. Finding happiness requires the protagonist to avoid all of these temporal failings. Desirable transfeminine ageing equates to progressing into ageappropriate, respectable femininity; and avoiding the loneliness and shame associated with pathetic oldies and the pre-pride past. Or, to put it more concisely: of becoming a proud transfeminine self.

Coming to Pride: Homonationalism and the prerequisites of transfeminine ageing futures
Pride is not only desirable in the novel, but essential. Indeed, it appears to be the sole possibility of imagining the future, a prerequisite of transfeminine ageing. Early on, Fredrik/Marisol is encouraged by another transfeminine person to "walk through the streets with a straight back, daring to meet people's gazes: that's the only way we can survive" (p. 21). Walking across a cemetery, Fredrik/ Marisol later reflects that: Regardless of where I'll be buried, right now it's all about standing up for who I am, daring to be true and shine brightly in the time that remains (p. 62).
In other words, standing up for oneself -"daring to be true and shine brightly" -in the present is essential for the future. But the expression "in the time that remains" also hints at a curtailed future for the ageing protagonist and how developing pride has a specific poignancy when coming out as transgender in later life; one has to live now because tomorrow may be too late (for similar discussions from a sociological perspective see Fabbre, 2014;Siverskog, 2015) But if pride is what it takes to progress into a desirable (later) life for the ageing transfeminine subject, then what does it take to develop that pride?
A central element of Fredrik/Marisol's progression towards pride is going out into the public city, walking the streets dressed as a woman. These acts of coming out, which are referred to as "transenades" (orig. transenader, combining "trans" with the Swedish word for a stroll, promenad) are repeatedly described as a sort of colonization of urban space. In "a deliberate attempt" to broaden their territory, Fredrik/Marisol describes themself as "a conquistador" in ladies' boots (p. 142). A walk through Stockholm is similarly described as meaning to "colonize, or alternatively liberate, areas of the city" by "marking them with my heels"(p. 218).
The choice of words such as "colonize" and "liberate" is not coincidental. These walks are depicted as risky, with the threat of violence constantly lingering. What Fredrik/Marisol mostly fears is groups of young men-mirroring the gang of teenage lads they were themself a part of when harassing "Tage Tosa" back in the 1970s. But, more specifically, the modern-day teenage gangs that Fredrik/Marisol encounters often consist of a particular type of young men. Time and again, while conquering the streets, Fredrik/Marisol is aware of "men with immigrant looks" (p. 218). Upon first coming out, they are warned about gay bashing "immigrant gangs" (p. 22), and later they describe the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen as potentially "lost for people like me" due to the "young immigrants" who "demonstrate that they own the place" (p. 66). In other words, access to the public sphere is clearly posited as threatened-not just by anyone, but by men of colour.
The streets are thus essential for the protagonist's progression towards pride, but it is a spatiality that is jeopardized by racialized Others. Puar (2007) famously coined the term "homonationalism" to describe how LGBT struggles have come to be used in Western nationalist understandings of progression. The homonationalist paradigm often includes transgender, as pointed out by Haritaworn (2015, p. 85), and there is a "need to take concepts such as homonationalism or homonormativity beyond their privileging of the 'homo'." Haritaworn, moreover, describes how European LGBT pride discourse has repeatedly positioned "queer lovers" against "hateful Others." In Q, the homonationalist discourse is very much tied up with the progression towards pride. The hateful Other, emerging as "black men" or "men with a migrant background" is positioned in opposition to Scandinavian LGBT exceptionalism. To achieve an (ageing) future, the transfeminine subject must conquer, repossess, and defend LGBT pride as part of the Scandinavian way of life.
This applies not only to the streets, but to all public life. The vibrant nightlife that provided Fredrik/Marisol with their "birth night" is equally important for the progression towards prideand equally threatened. As we described above, the nightclubs of Copenhagen function as a refuge for Fredrik/Marisol, and as such they are a spatial condition for the emergence of pride. Nonetheless, they are also locations in which the threat of the racialized Other is imminent. In a dream sequence, Fredrik/Marisol imagines their favourite nightclub being targeted in a terrorist attack by "a young ISIS sympathizer from some suburb of Copenhagen." This vision is a nightmarish excess of blood exploding "Jackson Pollock-y across the walls as the bodies are ripped apart" (p. 196). This imagined terrorist attack resonates with the cultural discourse discussed by Haritaworn (2015) as "the homophobic Muslim", "as a new folk devil who joins an older archive of crime, violence, patriarchy, integration and segregation." This folk devil emerges as threatening the open, progressive, and LGBT-tolerant European society. As such, Fredrik/Marisol's personal coming out story and progression into pride is bound up with a narrative of progressive Europe under Salafist attack. Standing up for oneself and challenging fear by continuing to party thus intertwines personal and societal struggle for LGBT pride, as Fredrik/Marisol explicitly states that the nightclub will "never, never" be "defeated by the fanatics" (p. 195).
The imaginary of this racial Other is also located in a fear of backwardness. It is not only the direct fear of physical violence that is at stake here, but also a homonationalist discourse of Scandinavia as being at the forefront of LGBT progression. As argued by Kehl (2020, p. 20), "LGBT rights have come to act as performative of nation-states, a symbolic marker of countries' in/ tolerance and constructions of modernity and/or backwardness." Thus, the novel provides an imaginary in which immigrant young men in the present mirror the protagonist's own teenage gang, but also threaten to drag the protagonist back in time-back to the pre-pride years of "Tage Tosa".
Near the novel's end, the complexities of this temporal fear are captured in a scene that mirrors the prologue. On their way to a night out, Fredrik/Marisol and their girlfriend Alice are harassed by "three or four black guys." Echoing Fredrik/Marisol's own slurs aimed at Anita/"Tage Tosa", the young men drive past them in a car shouting "You fucking psychopath," while laughing scornfully. Fredrik/Marisol is "shocked and reacts instinctively" by giving them the finger and calling them "fucking assholes" (p. 314).
At the same time, I hear another sentence within, which lies there structurally stored within me but never comes out: Go home to Africa, you assholes! It hurts and, once again, I tumble down the Tage Tosa pit. The Freak pit (p. 314).
It is not completely clear what the "It" that hurts in the quote above refers to. Is it the verbal attack that makes Fredrik/Marisol tumble down the Tage Tosa pit? Or is it rather the suppression of the racist slur-the "Go home to Africa," that is "stored" within the protagonist but never spoken? No matter which, the protagonist has apparently failed to perform the pride that is so vital to survival. The progression towards pride, illustrated in going out with Alice, on their way to the ecstasy of the nightclubs, is interrupted by the men in the car. And as Fredrik/Marisol fails to stand up for themself-fails to talk back-they regress back in time, "down the Tage Tosa pit." It is thus precisely because they fail to articulate the racist slur that Fredrik/Marisol is placed in the position where they once put "Tage Tosa". Back into the transphobic environment of their youth, out of step with Scandinavian LGBT progression.
Later the same evening, the narrative takes a new turn. While walking home, the couple is approached by "a young, black man" offering them cocaine. As they decline, they are once again harassed by a group of black men. This time Fredrik/Marisol does not hold back, and screams the "Go home to Africa, you assholes!" that they suppressed earlier (p. 316) This outburst is described as an expression of self-esteem, and standing up for themself, in contrast to the events of earlier in the evening.
Fredrik/Marisol is still afraid, "prepared for anything, an open fight in the middle of the street," and later on the same evening once again tumbles into the "Tage Tosa pit" (p. 317). Overall, their feelings afterwards are contradictory. "I know, Alice, it was wrong," they say, and Alice fills in by quoting Michelle Obama. "When they go low, we go high" (p. 317). Defending oneself by a racist outburst is, in other words, certainly not presented as an ideal solution. But one is only human, Fredrik/Marisol contends: "Only an ordinary fucking human" (p. 317). And in the end, voicing the racist slur has been a form of defence. It is the counterattack that has allowed Fredrik/Marisol to walk away with "my back even straighter, even more feminine and more proud" (p. 316).
Personal progression is thus very concretely connected to the expression of racism at the end of this novel. To continue their progression towards pride, Fredrik/Marisol needs to stand up for themself, and telling black men to "go home to Africa" is their way of doing so. Moreover, this is narrated as a vital step on their road towards a successful future of transgender ageing.

Concluding discussion
Most studies on queer ageing are sociological, and they have been of immense value for understanding the lived experiences of LGBT people, including the experience of both challenges and resilience during the course of ageing. However, turning to literary works such as Q does provide a different lens, through which the cultural narratives available for (re)imagining gender and ageing become further highlighted. In a world where the imaginaries of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ageing are scarce, and where successful ageing is often equated to hetero-happiness, Q is one of very few novels enabling more complex and positive visions of transgender ageing. The novel offers a unique cultural representation and enables new ways of imagining a gendernonconforming ageing future.
The ways in which ageing is imagined in Q are manifold. On the one hand, transfeminine ageing is understood as an escape from time; makeup and clothes as well as the "dark nightclub" provide alternative routes towards ageing and growing old, separate from heteronormative modes of successful ageing. As such, the transfeminine subject detours around some of the struggles with ageing with which cisfemininity is often associated. On the other hand, the transfeminine subject is also portrayed as even more precariously situated in relation to femininity than cisgender womenand especially so when it comes to ageing. Transfemininity is described as a careful navigation of ageing appearance and the performance of an age-appropriate femininity-not too old but not too young.
The threat of failure is constantly hovering over the protagonist in Q. They need to be watchful not only of failing to perform age-appropriate femininity, but also of becoming stuck with the selfloathing and shame embodied in the pathetic oldie. The desirable ageing future is instead that of being out and proud, where the ageing transfeminine subject "shines brightly in the time that remains." While Q is in many ways a classic story of individual progress, of the protagonist increasingly coming to terms with and finding pride in their transgender identity, the personal narrative is also interwoven with a wider narrative of Scandinavian progress and LGBT exceptionalism. Self-hatred, along with homophobia and transphobia, is positioned primarily in Scandinavia's past, and contemporary Scandinavia is described as a region that has progressed into openness, tolerance, and transgender self-esteem. Sweden and Denmark are presented as sharing the same liberal, secular cultural values, and thus as also sharing a discourse of LGBT pride.
The Scandinavian LGBT pride discourse presents a coming out story of later life such as Q with an interesting set of problems. If transgender persons are now accepted and appreciated, why would anyone come out as late as in their sixties? Why does shame still endure in the lives of transgender Scandinavians? Can there be any problems at all, in these most LGBT-friendly countries in the world? In Q, this conundrum is solved by locating shame in the backward-either in the literal past of queer history, or in the backwardly uncivilized racial Other. Memories from the "Tage Tosa" times of the protagonist's youth function in the novel not only as a ghost in the present, but also as a mirror of the immigrant youngsters whom the protagonist encounters. To imagine a transfeminine ageing future entails resistance to the temporal drag of the past; to reiterate the words of Love (2007, p. 9), "moving into that future: one must leave the past behind." From our analysis, we conclude that, in some respects, the narrative of Q establishes binaries between successful older transfeminine subjects, those who perform age-appropriate femininity successfully and who are out and proud, and pathetic oldies, marked by failed age, failed gender performance, and still lumbered with shame. In effect, these binaries produce a particular form of successful ageing for transfeminine subjects, in which successful ageing is intertwined with an LGBT progress narrative. To age successfully as an LGBT subject equates with overcoming shame and failure-never returning to the old "Tage Tosa" times.
However, this binary is also clearly unstable, and the novel is not simply a story of success, progress, and happy endings. In the closing pages, the protagonist gets back together with their previous girlfriend. The nuclear family that was shattered at the novel's beginning is thus repaired, but with a queer twist-incorporating the openly transfeminine protagonist. Still, despite this "happy ending" and the increasing sense of pride and joy of becoming "whole" that Fredrik/ Marisol experiences, the Tage Tosa shame cannot be fully expurgated. The protagonist's feelings of "despair" and doubt are still pervasive (p. 323). Hence, the novel does not provide a narrative merely of decline/failure versus success/progress, but rather one in which ways of imagining ageing futures are about continuous struggles for liveability (N. McGlynn et al., 2020). Struggles that involve both joy and despair, pride and shame, becoming young and growing old. Notes 1. We will refer to the protagonist of Q, the transfeminine Fredrik/Marisol, with the singular "they" as a genderneutral pronoun. In the novel, Fredrik/Marisol describes themself as transvestite, "tranny" (transa), and various combinations with the prefix trans. We will use the terms transvestite and transfeminine to describe the protagonist, and the umbrella term transgender as including but not limited to those identifications. 2. All quotes from Q are translated from Swedish by the authors.