In Benedict Nguyễn’s debut, Hot Girls with Balls, a sports novel becomes a workplace drama, becomes a social media thriller, becomes a love story between two star-crossed trans women lovers on opposite sides of the net who somehow make it to the end — traumatized but alive. As a former volleyball player, I picked up this novel excited for all the pettiness, betrayal, and intrigue found in the world of high-level sports. What I found in Nguyễn’s pages was so much more — a genre-defying book that charts new satirical territory for the novel as a literary form.
It’s no surprise that a novel written in the tradition of trans and queer fiction would fuck with form, but Hot Girls with Balls does it in a way that feels especially fresh. The novel documents a universe just a few degrees separate from our own, where, during the lockdown of the “COVIS” pandemic, an international volleyball league grows to the popularity of international soccer, complete with million-dollar sponsorships and celebrity players. Most famous of all are the novel’s main characters Six and Green, two Asian American trans women who, over the course of the novel, must maintain the balance of performing — online and on the court — as long-distance lovers, trans celebrities, and professional athletes competing on rival men’s volleyball teams. Its publication is devastatingly prescient after the alt-right outrage expressed last fall over the participation of a trans woman on San Jose State’s volleyball team (in spite of the fact that she had competed on the team for multiple previous seasons), as well as under the current MAGA administration’s continuous policing, punishment, and violation of the rights and lives of trans people and athletes.
Playing with performance, the transcripts of polyvocal social media comments on “Instagraph,” interludes of almost-reality television, and the gaze (and gays!), Nguyễn has created a novel entirely unlike any I’ve read before. Her debut’s collapsing of traditional genres and constructs of fiction don’t just occur through the fragmentation found on the page or the at times claustrophobic interludes that the novel spends in the digital space but also in the physical spaces that the characters of the novel move through, for, as Six asks, “What sports arena was not also a theater?” Everything — sports, love, grief, the self — is all layered performance. Even the sections that the novel is broken up into — “Dig,” “Set,” “Kill,” and “Assists” — playfully layer the game of volleyball onto the writing of fiction.
“What sports arena was not also a theater?”
Marketed as satire and obviously identifiable as a sports novel, Hot Girls with Balls hybridizes traditional genres of mystery, reality television, social media, romance (between Six and Green), and even soap drama — the reveal of Instagraph user @transaretrans’s identity as being one of Six and Green’s best friends and fellow queer Henry is so Gossip Girl (Dan Humphrey, is that you?). Described by the author herself as an “office novel” in a Publishers Weekly feature, Hot Girls with Balls dives into the intense labor that athletes, especially Asian American trans women athletes, put into not only the training required to excel at their sport but also the strategized personal branding necessary to build the social media empires that will feed them after their bodies can no longer run, jump, and sprawl on the hardwood floor of volleyball courts. Throughout the novel, we tune in each week to Six and Green, the two women’s “Instagraph Live” show, following them over “SpaceTime” as they compete across the world and, ultimately, against each other in the international volleyball league’s championship game.
Everyone wants a piece of Six and Green: Phil, the VP of Sonus Volleyball Network, who relies on the two women to generate income for his company; gender essentialist “Instagraph” account @transaretrans, who discredits Six and Green’s womanhood because of their decisions not to medically transition or play for the women’s volleyball league; Alan, Six’s younger teammate, who has developed a fixation of a crush on her; Walt, Green’s closeted trans teammate, who constantly compares herself to the two women in a mix of admiration and envy; Six and Green’s agents, Brent and Yemma, who profit directly off the women’s lives; and the women’s coaches, teammates, and fans. And everyone, too, has an opinion on how the two women do and should live their lives.
But even as we watch Six and Green through the eyes (and comments) of their chorus of followers, we read, too, in sections from each of the women’s point of view, the love and comfort that the two women find in each other, as well as the insecurity, pettiness, resentment, and, especially in Green’s case, the jealousy they harbor: toward their cis teammates and opponents, their fans, and even toward one another. In Hot Girls with Balls, bodies are commodified, most obviously through sports. Six and Green’s fans vocalize this throughout the novel and, in the chorus of the novel’s culminating championship game, state the obvious: “So you mean sports are like some VR game where people vicariously live out political fantasies through … athlete’s bodies?”
Ultimately, personality is the final commodity of Hot Girls with Balls. Adding to the conversation on the commodification of personhood that’s present in so much of popular culture — from the increasingly urgent debate concerning the ethics of AI to reality television shows like Love is Blind and prestige dramas like Severance — Nguyễn’s debut utilizes a rotating and at times polyphonic narrator to reveal what Jeanne Thornton calls the “violent poetry of online trans discourse.” Through conflating the often gendered “low brow” media of reality television and sports broadcast (and, later in the novel, porn), Nguyễn reveals that, in the end, we’re all just trying to escape our lives. And often, we realize, this escape comes through the exploitation of other people. Nguyễn’s novel is directly in conversation with Jia Tolentino’s “The I in the Internet,” which defines contemporary culture’s commodification of the self in late/end-stage capitalism, saying: “Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized — not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging on the door … ”
Green constantly compares her body, her Instagraph likes and comments, and even her future opportunities after retirement from the world of professional volleyball to Six’s larger following. The expectations of the nameless chorus that consume her and Six’s content results in a tension that is ever-present, even as Six fights for the starting middle position on her new team, Czwartek, and Green tries to make sense of the attention of Walt, her backup setter. It results in an unspoken competition that is layered over the physical competition between the rival teams that Green and Six play on — Czwartek and Regalado — testing a relationship already strained by distance.
When three Asian American trans women — Suzy Akhter, Bea Tran, and Clarisse Valdez — are murdered just days before the volleyball league’s championship tournament, Six and Green are not allowed to grieve on their own terms. The tournament is just days away, and besides, as trans celebrities, the two women are expected to make a statement.
The tension inherent in the responsibilities of activism under influencerdom is present throughout Hot Girls with Balls. Even before their public statements on the murders of Clarisse, Suzy, and Bea — which include a joint Instagraph Live statement, a statement they make for Sonus Sports, and an interview that they do with the historically transphobic media platform The Pacific — Six and Green are criticized both for their past statements and for their lack of stance on social issues, along with their participation in a sport consisting of games that double as COVIS superspreader events. Everything the two women do is either too much or not enough to their fans, haters, and followers in general.
For a novel with few sex scenes, Hot Girls with Balls is extremely erotic. A large part of this comes from what Jasmine Gibson, in her blurb, calls the “transphobic/fetish gaze” found in the novel’s conflation of sex with social media, marketing, and sports. Another is the leak that occurs when Henry, who Six and Green think is their friend but who is in fact behind the gender essentialist hit account @transaretrans, uploads the two women’s sex tape to “PornTub.” His betrayal is magnified by its timing — directly after one of the novel’s rare moments of physical tenderness and intimacy between Six and Green in bed together and the night before the championship game. Though we watch the sex tape through many eyes — Walt’s, Six and Green’s fans, and Henry’s (as he masturbates to it) — we never see it through the eyes of Six and Green themselves. Because after the tape is leaked, the moment no longer belongs to them. It belongs to everyone else, just like so much of the two women’s lives.
Everything the two women do is either too much or not enough to their fans, haters, and followers in general.
What should be a time of happiness and pride, as Six and Green’s teams have each made the finals, is instead one of deep shame and violation. When the championship game happens later that day, the competition is narrated for us, once again, through the chorus of spectators and followers. After Regalado wins and Six is awarded MVP despite getting injured, the two women are finally left alone. But so much has happened that Six and Green cannot relax and instead argue. The argument evolves into processing, into a reveal that we as readers have known all along — that Green has not been giving Six the attention she needs and that Six has been unable to communicate just how much she needs comfort from her girlfriend. The processing of their own relationship turns into a conversation about how to be trans in a world that always has commentary on how Six and Green live their lives, that wants everything and nothing from them. Once again, the women are flattened by their followers’ desires. The chorus, though not present physically on the page, still does not give Six and Green the time they need to grieve Suzy, Bea, and Clarisse, or to process their own personal violation. Instead, they lurk in the two women’s minds, who know what their audience desires: “They wanted theater.”
The novel ends with Walt publicly coming out and leaving the men’s volleyball league to take a year off before possibly trying out for the women’s league. It ends without anyone ever discovering that Henry leaked Six and Green’s sex tape. It ends with a social media announcement from Six and Green: on being trans women who don’t pass, on the violation of their leaked sex tape, on continuing to compete for the men’s league, and, most importantly, to promote their new platform, 6&G Moves, which is aimed at uplifting trans athletes and positioning them for success after they retire from volleyball. It ends with the promised satire of the book’s blurbs and marketing and an almost caricature of the two women through the eyes of their followers: “For a second longer, before the episode shut off and their screens went blank, thousands of viewers felt it: the conviction radiating from Six and Green’s faces and refracting onto their retinas was theirs too. Now that was female empowerment.”
While Hot Girls with Balls encompasses the commodification of the self, the attack on trans rights and lives, the presence of trans athletes in sports, and the questionable ethics of social media, the heart of the novel is about who gets to grieve and when, and whose lives, to the public, are worth grieving. In witnessing the lack of care or even recognition by Six and Green’s teammates and the volleyball world concerning the murders of Bea, Suzy, and Clarisse, we are made aware of our own silence in the monthly, weekly, and daily atrocities that populate our world. We are made complicit in the onslaught of comments from what Nguyễn, in the same Publishers Weekly feature, calls her “doomscroll polyphonic narrator.” We are forced to think about what we create and what we consume — and to realize the violence present in both actions.
As a queer, mixed-race person who comes from a family of All-Americans and Olympians, I often dream of more sports representation in literature and especially more queer representation in sports novels. I spent my formative years as a volleyball player — a larger percentage of my life, I realize, than I’ve spent writing. In my late teens or early twenties, as I came into my queerness while navigating life as an athlete, I never imagined that these two pieces of my world could not just coincide but coexist and even thrive. I hadn’t seen it happen before — in life or in fiction. I sometimes worry that what we do as writers feels frivolous, a scream in the face of an unfeeling world that will not change — or at best, a reflection of that world. But in spite of (or maybe because of) all the fun it pokes, the genres it absolutely blows up, the exploitation and commodification it interrogates, and the hurt and grief it documents, Nguyễn’s novel debunks that worry, imagining a world that, as a sweaty 16-year-old, pulling on my spandex, I never dreamed could be.
Mariah Rigg is the author of the short story collection Extinction Capital of the World (Ecco, 2025). Her work has received support from organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere, along with being published in The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Chicago Review of Books, among others.
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