The Brooklyn Rail

Pride looked different just one year ago. Weapons manufacturers, fast food chains, banks—even Spirit Airlines—yassified their logos for the month. Consulting firms announced Pride-themed networking events, and Target stocked bedazzled tank tops and His and His bathrobes. Tech giants trotted out diverse employees for photoshoots and Pride parades all while queers on the internet lambasted the performativity of corporations chasing the gay dollar. Identity and branding fused together. Two sides of one fabulous coin.

This year, on the first of June, my social media feed was suspiciously quiet. Under the new administration and its all-out assault on equality for queer people, corporations are hesitant to celebrate the first brick thrown at Stonewall or bringing your “full self” to the workplace.

Don’t you miss it? Just a little bit?

Nguyễn revives this world in her hyper-stylized debut, Hot Girls With Balls. The high-gloss satire follows two trans Asian American women volleyball players—Six and Green—who are lovers, influencers, and rivals in a men’s global volleyball league. After a viral postgame kiss the year before, the league’s corporate overlords salivate over the sponsorship potential of a championship rematch. Devoted fans study their every interaction while online trolls scheme to break them apart.

Six and Green are happy to play along. In truth, volleyball mostly serves as fodder for their social media empire. The novel is structured around comment threads, brand deals, thirst traps, and tightly choreographed couple content across platforms like Instagraph, SpaceTime, Flitter, and TikTak. Green, more invested in curating her online presence, tells herself it’s about building a fallback for life after volleyball—but really, she loves the attention. They both do. Their presence in men’s volleyball inspires, infuriates, and titillates, and the couple fans the flames through a weekly livestream show and ads for the league’s new streaming service.

But when three Asian trans women are killed in a brutal hate crime just as the tournament begins, Six and Green must strategize how to best package and sell their grief—and their love. The result is a novel that skewers internet culture with its own language, laced with the grotesque mix of horniness, racism, and transphobia born in the dark corners of digital anonymity.

Nguyễn perfectly captures the exhaustion of online discourse. Commenters berate Six and Green for not condemning violence against trans women, for being performative when they do, for not medically transitioning, for being too sexy, too bitchy, too Asian. But it’s here that Hot Girls With Balls mirrors other recent novels obsessed with social media. Like Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts or R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, it knows the internet is vicious and profoundly flattening, but the analysis stops there. At times, Nguyễn seems satisfied simply replicating the pathology of the feed:

“I can’t believe someone let a jungle Asian like Green pollute our noble sport. A faggot like Six is worthy because of his talent.”
“Six, bro, your shoulders are amazing!”
“How can they be dudes who are women who are lesbians who are into dudes and play on the men’s team?”
“If fawning over them is a trauma response, they can traumatize me forever.”
“I’m pretty sure Green’s ace and they’re open and Six is a little slut.”

Yes, discourse is toxic. No, we cannot help ourselves but to engage. Yes, people are more cruel when hiding behind anonymity. No, that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Bump, set, bump, set, bump. Nguyễn exposes the hollowness of online chatter but skirts any real payoff.

Maybe this is intentional. Six and Green are caught in a dystopian present that consumes authenticity and spits it back out as branding. The discourse, positive or not, generates views, which generates profit. Hot Girls With Balls isn’t a story of rebellion, but of adaptation. Even in the climax of the novel, when faced with a gut-wrenching invasion of their privacy, Six and Green don’t smash the system—they surrender, becoming its most polished avatars. If there is a statement Nguyễn is making, it’s this: representation doesn’t set you free, it puts you to work.

And because much of the novel unfolds through curated posts and livestreams, Six and Green often feel more like influencers than real people. Their online love is perfectly packaged; offline, their relationship feels stifled and charged. Do they love each other or do they love going viral? Even side characters are sketched through their posts on social media. A closeted trans teammate envies Green from afar, but the two rarely interact. An anonymous player in the tournament plots their downfall but there’s never a confrontation. These characters are fascinating, but they interact mostly through retweets and rage-baiting. With this approach, Nguyễn teases questions about where the persona ends and the human begins but doesn’t provide enough of the latter for readers to answer.

Still, Hot Girls With Balls delivers a satire that defies every expectation of trans fiction. Nguyễn recounts high school volleyball, trans awakenings, and coming-out stories but trauma isn’t central. Or even adjacent. It’s off in the corner, out-of-mind so Six and Green can focus on being hot, world-class athletes. The pair navigates racism and transphobia without losing the confidence that made them known the world over. They sign sponsorship deals with pervy businessmen and give interviews to anti-trans media. Why? It’s good for business. Six and Green aren’t trying to be perfect; they’re trying to win. Few trans protagonists get that freedom, and Nguyễn makes the most of it.

Hot Girls With Balls is more spectacle than solution, but its horny humor and ruthless ear for digital language constantly delight. Its world is bizarre yet familiar, a gendered funhouse of rainbow capitalism and influencer politics that doubles down on ambition.

In a voice entirely her own, Nguyễn proves she can get you hot, but she may not get you off.