by James Wallace Harris, 8/9/26
“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder returns to the assertion that reading makes us more empathetic. The 2020s are difficult times for trans people, especially for those who live in the heartland. Emma Binder tells us about Cody Hartbrook, a trans man, whose father kicked him out of their Wisconsin home when he graduated high school. Cody found love, acceptance, purpose, even happiness in Massachusetts. Then his father got cancer, and Cody returned to Wisconsin to help his mother.
Unfortunately, you can’t read this story online. You’ll have to buy a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2025. I understand publishers need to make money, but I wish literary magazines would publish their stories online. Few people read little magazines, and not that many people even buy the annual Best American Short Stories.
Writing short stories is how new writers break in. They need the exposure. According to the Colburn Classroom, the Michigan Quarterly Review had a print run of 1,000 copies in 2020. I doubt most little magazines are for-profit concerns. Leaving their content offline is only hiding their light under a bushel. The world is giving up on reading short stories, and paywalls are only accelerating that decline.
But you should buy The Best American Short Stories every year. It makes you a patron of the arts by supporting budding writers. Most of the contributors will have names you don’t know. A few of them will publish a bestseller in years to come. Who knows, you might even buy their first novel when it comes out because you loved reading their short story.
Emma Binder said this in their contributor notes:
One of my obsessions, both artistically and in life, are the stories of queer and trans people who come from rural places and small towns, who may be omitted from the acknowledged social fabric of these communities but still shape them and are shaped by them. Queer and trans people are everywhere, so if their existence is not visible in a certain place, that erasure has been somehow designed. I also wanted to write a story about the feeling of freedom, and how some environments allow us to feel free while others are designed to constrain us—perhaps we experience that constraint through fear, shame, self-hatred, or an ambient hunch that we need to hush some vital part of ourselves in order to make our lives simpler. And maybe we love and miss those places regardless. So the emotional and thematic context was very clear to me, but the actual events of the story—Cody seeing a man falling through the ice, saving him, meeting him and his friends at the bar—took shape slowly and organically, during a warm winter when I was taking a lot of walks past ice fishermen.
I started this story in 2022, amid what I already thought was a harsh political climate for queer and trans people in the United States. Looking back on this story in the even darker and more oppressive landscape of 2025, I feel compelled to say that the ability to live in environments where we feel free, and where we can experience self-determination and authenticity, is literally lifesaving; it allows us to move past raw survival and access deeper, human, complex modes of living. It allows us, as Cody says in the story, to experience such essential things as “love, family, peace.” That is true for trans people and for every person on this Earth.
“What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” really is a test for that common assertion that reading makes people more empathetic. I can’t believe anyone can read this story and not feel for Cody.
Like I’ve said before, literary stories are often like experiencing telepathy. Cody saves an ice fisherman, Greg Parham, when the ice breaks. Greg invites Cody out for a beer to say thanks. Cody doesn’t want to go because he’s afraid the locals will discover he’s trans and beat him up.
Cody does go to the bar, but is unnerved when Greg shows up with Kevin and Nick. Cody drinks and shoots pool with the guys while they ply him with friendly questions.
From that, we experience the anxiety Cody lives with. It becomes even more complicated when the guys discover Cody went to high school with them. The guys are baffled that they can’t place Cody. It makes them pry even more. Cody doesn’t lie, but he doesn’t tell them he was much different back then. He just says he was a loner.
Evidently, Cody wants to be one of the guys, but knows, or fears, being beaten up. I’m not sure I like Emma Binder’s ending. It works realistically, but not dramatically. She shows a gun in the first act, but it’s never used. What if Greg, Kevin, and Nick did learn that Cody was trans? How would Greg, a big, burly, bearded guy, feel about having his life saved by a trans guy?
Greg, Kevin, and Nick are ordinary guys, but they’ve probably never met a trans person. As readers, we feel tension from their masculinity. But aren’t we prejudging them too? Would they beat up Cody?
Other Takes
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 