When Harvard professor and celebrated poet Stephanie Burt listens to Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen,” she doesn’t just hear a bittersweet teenage memory wrapped in twangy chords and locker-lined hallways. She hears the sound of a girlhood she never got to live — but finally can.
“I have listened to ‘Fifteen’ over and over and over, of course,” Burt tells QBurgh, speaking about her new book examining Swift’s evolution as a songwriter and pop icon. “I am told not just by my friends who were relatively popular in high school who were cis girls that that’s what it’s like, but also, at this point, tens of millions of cis girls who I’ll never meet.”
As a trans woman who transitioned in adulthood, Swift’s music unlocks something powerful for Burt: access to the emotional landscape of a teenage girl, one that once felt out of reach.
No wonder the track resonates with her at 54. “I’ve found time can heal most anything, and you just might find who you’re supposed to be,” Swift sings, adding, “I didn’t know who I was supposed to be, at 15.”
That kind of deeply personal connection isn’t mentioned at all in “Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift” from Hachette Book Group’s Basic Books imprint. The book, out Oct. 14 — coinciding with the release of Swift’s 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl” — is Burt’s rich, cerebral dive into the artistry of one of pop’s most analyzed figures. But even if her story is absent from the page, it hums quietly beneath the surface. There’s an inherent queerness in Burt’s lens — sometimes explicit, as when she explores the Sapphic undertones between the two girls in “Seven” — that adds emotional texture to her critical analysis.
Her connection to Swift’s work is rooted in the ache of what she missed. “I did not get to dress up dolls. I did not get to have a pink room,” Burt says. “I did not get to have the kinds of friendships that I wanted and the kinds of social groups that I wanted — not only with girls, though that too.”
And perhaps most poignantly: “I didn’t get to have the kind of intimacy that Taylor sings about with girls and with teen girls until I was a grown-ass adult,” she says. “And I have it now.”
That deep sense of personal reclamation naturally leads to broader cultural questions about Swift’s place in the queer canon. When asked directly whether Swift qualifies as a gay icon, Burt’s response is characteristically nuanced: “Yes, but no.”
She explains her complex position: “A gay icon is someone who gay people think about a lot, gravitate to and form social groups around and want to talk about and keep track of. Of course Taylor’s a gay icon in that sense.”
But Burt draws important distinctions about the nature and depth of Swift’s gay icon status: “What percentage of Swifties treat her as camp? What percentage of Swifties treat her as for the gays, and not for the straights? Much lower, I think, than for other world famous pop performers.”
She contrasts Swift with artists like Chappell Roan and Kylie Minogue, noting: “Those are people where, if you’re not looking at what it means to be a gay icon, and you’re not looking at how queer communities support these artists, you will not understand their rise or their art at all. That’s not true for Taylor.”
Her final assessment: “She happens to be a gay icon because she has worked in a thoughtful, inclusive way that includes a lot of same-sex attachments to become an icon for a lot, a lot, a lot of people. And many of those people are queer.”
But for Burt, Swift’s impact goes beyond labels and iconography. What Swift’s artistic journey represents to her is something larger than entertainment — it’s a validation of experiences that society often dismisses. Her book serves multiple purposes: “It’s a defense of girlhood, which Taylor is also doing. It’s a defense of the stereotypically teenage experience as a valid subject for deep art.”
This defense feels particularly urgent in the current political climate. As someone who says she can’t “pass” in traditional terms (“because here’s my voice, right?”), Burt sees Swift’s unapologetic visibility as a model for resistance.
“Especially for trans people who can’t pass, the current federal government is telling us to hide,” she says, defiantly adding: “And no, I’m not hiding.”
Swift, she says, has challenged cultural expectations that tell girls and queer people to minimize themselves. “A lot of girls and weirdos are told, ‘It’s OK to be you. Just don’t flaunt it,” Burt observes. “Make sure it’s very niche, and that no one notices. Have plausible deniability. Don’t stand out.”
Burt admires Swift’s unashamed ambition — something she argues is particularly revolutionary for women and marginalized people. “She really wanted that. And she even wrote songs about wanting it — that it’s OK to want to be seen.”
As a scholar analyzing Swift’s work through a queer lens, Burt sees intentionality in the artist’s choices, particularly in her live performances. She points to Swift’s diverse casting of dancers and other performers during The Eras Tour as evidence of thoughtful representation.
“Do I think she’s seeing the people in her massive audience who are not like her, including us queer people? Yeah, I do,” Burt says. “She really wants to support people who aren’t like her — groups, she says, that she’s not a part of. As someone who plans her stage act and her performances and hires her dancers, she knows exactly what she’s doing.”
However, Burt notes the limitations of expecting Swift to write explicitly political songs. When Swift attempts overtly activist messaging, as in “You Need to Calm Down,” the results are less successful artistically than, say, “Miss Americana.” “When she writes subtextual queerness, it’s great. When she tries to write a song that is overtly and publicly about how she sees and wants to protect her queer fans, which is what ‘You Need to Calm Down’ was about, that’s not great.”
While Burt wishes Swift would take stronger political stances in the current moment, she understands the limitations. Having watched Swift’s previous political endorsements largely fail (noting that most candidates she’s supported have lost, including Kamala Harris and Phil Bredsen, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Tennessee who lost in 2018 against Marsha Blackburn), Burt believes the artist has learned hard lessons about the limits of celebrity influence.
“She’s seen the limits of top-down, celebrity-oriented, national-first politics in a way that the chuckleheads who have been running national Democratic politics have been slow to see,” Burt observes.
Instead, she argues that Swift’s primary contribution may be modeling the very visibility that authoritarianism seeks to suppress. “Taylor is absolutely telling us not to hide in the Trump era when we’re being told to hide. She’s not saying things she doesn’t believe, and she’s writing the songs she can write and being the person who she can be.”
This act of courageous authenticity sets the stage for not just a new era in Swift’s career with the announcement of “The Life of a Showgirl,” its title seemingly self-reflective, but the larger themes Burt explores in her book. Ultimately, “Taylor’s Version” is about more than one artist or even one fan’s experience — what Taylor’s saying changes depending on who’s hearing her message. But Burt adds that the book is also about the right to dream beyond the limitations society imposes, whether based on gender, sexuality or any other form of difference.
“It’s also a book about ambition — about making awesome works of art that not only endure and speak to a small number of people deeply, but that obviously endure, get noticed and speak to a large number of people.”
For Burt, Swift represents proof that such dreams — of girlhood, of emotional clarity, of being fully seen — can be realized without compromising authenticity. It’s a lesson that resonates far beyond pop music, especially for those who’ve lived outside its most visible narratives.
Throughout our conversation, Burt returns again and again to the deeply personal nature of her connection to Swift’s music. Songs like “The Best Day,” about Swift’s relationship with her mother, stir something bittersweet. “My parents were great, but they weren’t that, and they couldn’t be that,” she says. “Partly because boys are socialized to seek more independence from parents.”
But Burt doesn’t dwell on what was missing. Instead, she turns toward what Swift’s music has made possible — moments that feel like reclamation, like arrival. “All of these experiences that I wish I had had,” Burt says, become possible “for the space of about three-and-a-half minutes per song.”
In “Taylor’s Version,” the word “aspirational” surfaces often — a reflection of what Swift has represented to her fans over the years: someone to look up to, to grow alongside, to believe in. For Burt, that aspiration has become something more tangible. A Guggenheim fellow, a past judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a board member of the National Book Critics Circle and the author of over a dozen books on poetry and pop culture, she’s carved out a singular space where deep feeling and academic thought meet. Another major milestone? Teaching Harvard’s first-ever course on Taylor Swift — a boundary-breaking class that didn’t just cement Swift’s place in the canon, but Burt’s place at the center of the cultural conversation.
In some ways, that’s the full-circle power of aspiration: Burt has become, in her own right, exactly what Swift has long been to fans such as herself — someone who proves it’s possible to rewrite your story and make it count.
