Trans Literature Review: Golden Boy

Watch the Review of 
Golden Boy

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Happy Non-Binary Day!

Check out the new Intersex Literature Review on the Trans Literature YouTube channel! This week, we are discussing "Golden Boy," the story of an intersex boy and his politician family after a sexual assault prompts a reexamination of the veil of secrecy they maintain around experiences of sex and gender.

Comment to offer suggestions for upcoming reviews!

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Trans Literature: Review of Redefining Realness

Watch the Review of 
Redefining Realness

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The Trans Literature Youtube Channel continues!

Check out the review of "Redefining Realness" by Janet Mock! This is the first book in a series of memoirs about the journalist, director, and author as she grew up as a black trans woman on Hawaii and on the mainland. The book explores the inextricability of gender, race, and class as her experiences shape her professional and personal trajectory. Within the wider public and even within trans media, the stories of trans women of color are not given nearly the spotlight they deserve. This literature opens up conversations that are all the more pressing as black trans women are beaten, exploited, and murdered in record numbers. I cannot recommend this book enough, especially for teachers.

Comment to offer suggestions for upcoming reviews!

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Trans Literature Book Reviews: the Prince and the Dressmaker

Watch the Review of 
the Prince and the Dressmaker

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The Trans Literature Youtube Channel is continuing! 

Check out the review of "the Prince and the Dressmaker" by Jen Wang about the double-life of a young person who yearns for a life of gorgeous dresses while carrying the responsibility to be a marriageable royal man. The book also features the aspirations and work of a dress-maker who stands by the Prince as their partnership evolves and deepens.

Comment to offer suggestions for upcoming reviews!

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A Shelf of One's Own: An Argument for Transgender Literature

"I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, 

that the bishop was right at least in this; 

it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman 

to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare."

A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf

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Introduction

Sitting at my desk, I set down my copy of A Room of One's Own and look over at the shelves of my library and ask myself the question: where is the transgender amidst all this literature? I think about Virginia Woolf's shelf where she saw no plays by women and where she had to search hard for women and the fiction they write, the fiction written about women, or the texts where women, their fiction and fiction about them are all entangled together. And I ask, how can I constitute such a shelf of trans literature? Among what books should I find about trans stories? Among what books should I find trans people telling their stories? What books could make up a shelf of the theories that bind transgender and literature together? I ask this question not just because Woolf asked her question but rather her question gives language for a question, or more than a question, already inside me. 

Like the dysphoria that at once made my own lack of a shelf unlivable and made the striving for a shelf of my own a necessity, I feel such a dysphoria living also in my library. I feel the weight of fatalism, grave silence, and ghosts at the present lack of a shelf unbearable and also a euphoria at the prospect of a shelf of our own coming-to-be. This dysphoric need for trans literature, for a transition in the fields of transgender and literary studies, is as critical and consequential as the dysphoria felt in the chest of many a trans person. I see this need among the living, among individual trans people who are compelled to narrate and re-narrate their families, friends, jobs, doctors who recommend therapists, therapists who might sign their verifying letters, lawyers who might help translate those letters into name and gender marker changes, judges who approve those name and gender marker changes, the department of motor vehicles who make those changes to one's license, the department of social security who make those changes to one's social security card, the federal government who make those changes to one's passport, the therapist again to recommend an endochronologist or surgeon, the endochronologist, the sergeon, the pharmacist, the insurance company to cover all these expenses, and then and then and then more. 

I also see this in all those who never got the chance to tell this story even once or when they did tell their story then had their story untold: the Leelah Alcorns and all those trans people who are buried under the dead-names, names that killed them dead and now mark as dead the trans life that could have been. 

I see this in all the trans lives that still might be if only they knew how to tell their story, if only their family and school and doctor and church could hear and understand their story. And I see how often those transgender futures are denied like so much of our transgender past, how a recent 2018 study found that between 38-44 percent of trans people will attempt suicide in their lives. I see one in three transgender futures dissapear without anyone to tell their story. I see one in two transgender futures dispear without anyone to tell their story.

That is why I call the need for trans literature dysphoric. Because dysphoria is about disatisfaction with the present, about grief for what has been denied in the past, and about hope for the future. I call the need for trans literature dysphoric because I see the shelf of our own that may yet come to be and I see the library of shelves which might have existed but which were never allowed to exist. And so with these shelves of ghosts and shelves of dreams, I return to the question that Virginia Woolf showed me how to ask: where is the transgender literature? How might we have a shelf of our own and how might this shelf grow bigger, book by book, as we slowly try to make the library that is come close to the library that might have been. Perhaps one day we will find balance between the told and untold stories. Perhaps one day the living stories will outnumber the dead. But for now, today, I begin with a question, or something more. As I once did when I began striving for a shelf of my own, I will assess and plan, research and write, listen for and narrate the way trans literature might have a shelf of its own in our libraries and our classrooms.

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Five Hundred a Year
and a Room with a Lock

Virginia Woolf concluded that to make her desired shelf of women come into being, women needed five hundred a year and a room of one's own, with a lock on it. As a writer and mother myself, I can affirm the good sense of this. But as a trans woman who feels the dysphoric need for a shelf of our own, I would add a few more conditions. In the following sections, I will mark what I believe we need to not just ask the question but to establish a shelf called trans literature: (1) first, we will need to identify and liberate ourselves from some of the toxic tropes in which transgender has been defined within cisgender literature, or else we may never resurrect the trans figures and stories buried among other people's books and stories, (2) second, we will need to understand the stories we already tell and have already told for centuries, or else we may never know what trans literature looks like in order to recognize it on a shelf, and (3) third, we will need to examine what it means to read and write while transgender, or else trans lives will continue to be reduced to and by the theories of cisgender literary analysis. All this we need. Also, the stable pay-check and office with a lock which comes with jobs and job security would also be nice. Please and thank you.

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Trans Literature: Transgender as Literary Theory

"How, then, might the transsexual read?"

The titular question to an essay by
Alexander Eastwood

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Introduction

Thus far we have seen the distortion of reality and systems of abuse built into some of the most prominent tropes of transgender found in cisgender narratives, as well as a few forms of narratives that organized transgender literature which offer critical alternative constructions. Yet the danger in this contrast of thesis and anti-thesis is that a divide should form between cis and trans literature so that transgender becomes ghettoized to its own corner of the book shelf. As transgender often intersects with other forms of marginalized identity (race, disability, class, sexuality, religion, etc.) this separation has benefits as well as dangers, such as isolation and tokenism. One begins to fear that trans literature will become only a niche market and reading trans literature will become an identity marker that alienates or others non-trans demographics. While trans literature has good reasons to privilege trans voices, these voices and the ears with which to hear them should not be locked away in an echo chamber. To fight this impulse to isolate and marginalize, trans literature needs to amplify and incorporate trans voices and perspectives into the wider literary ecology. By promoting trans literature not just as an archive but as a method of literary analysis, trans voices can be brought to bare on the many texts, genres, and questions which are essential to the wider world of literary discourse. By developing trans theories of literature and trans ways of reading, one can trans literature (as a verb or action) that was formerly constructed as exclusively cisgender. One can read Pride and Prejudice in a trans way. One can trans War and Peace. One can see the dysphoria in the film Ted. One can examine the trans-operations at work in Game of Thrones. Thus trans literature becomes not only a discrete and insular noun but to trans literature can signify a critical verb that can transform the way one moves through the world of language arts.

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Dysphoric Ways of Reading

Dysphoria defines or contributes to many ways of being trans. Gender dysphoria is a term borrow from the medical industry, specifically the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). For this reason, many trans people identify with the diagnosis for professional and personal reasons. It is an institutional marker which provides access to a variety of services. For the same reason, many trans people disidentify with dysphoria because they do not want to be associated publicly with a condition under medical management and with a book that has the term, "mental disorders," in the title. Yet gender dysphoria is an improvement, in many respects, over the now defunct diagnosis, "gender identity disorder" from the DSM-4. One of the key victories was the removal of "disorder" from the title, as the DSM-5 reflects a change in the medical field from considering transgender a disorder to considering it a condition. As part of this shift, gender dysphoria locates the primary distress and suffering of the condition in an external locus rather than an internal locus. The short definition of gender dysphoria reads, "there must be a marked difference between the individual’s expressed / experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her, and it must continue for at least six months" (DSM-5). A careful read of this diagnosis will not that dysphoria occurs not because someone is born transgender. The cause of suffering is not internal. Rather, dysphoria arises because there is a conflict between their internal identity or mode of expression and the external environment that assigns another gender. The conflict is not between self and self, sane self and insane self. Rather, the conflict is between self and society. Thus, because it is based on social discourses and conflicts, dysphoria can become a way of reading and analyzing texts. How does the text embody or generate dysphoria? If one approaches texts from a dysphoric lens, one begins to see how countless texts and narratives depend on the tensions of the dysphoria it produces. These tensions and dysphoria may even affect people who are not transgender. In this case, the dysphoria is in the environment and not in the person.

Yet dysphoria is more than the sum of self and society. The longer definition of dysphoria from the DSM-5 does acknowledge a list of desires and disgusts that may rage within a transgender mind and body. For this reason, dysphoria does not represent the mere battle between a rigid social roles and a chaotic freedom that wants to go everywhere all at once. Usually, in the ocean of dysphoria there are tides and even whirlpools, where the dysphoric mind is drawn by larger forces (internal and external) towards specific loci of gender. These loci may be broad, such as womanhood. Or highly specific, such as pressed suits and short hair. As in the case of tides and whirlpools, there may be competing desires and disgusts that reflect ambivalence and gender fluidity. Other times, dysphoria is less like the ocean and more like a river, moving full force away from one place and towards another. Many trans men and women, especially those who live lives within traditional binaries, articulate their dysphoria in these terms. For instance, a trans man may have physical disgust at being made to embody or perform elements of femininity and may have an overwhelming need to embody or perform element of masculinity. In this respect, dysphoria is a conflict between self and non-self, one that does not necessarily extend very far into society. Non-self may be understood as those parts of one's body, genitals or hair style, that cause one great distress and disgust. Thus, dysphoria as an internal tension and trajectory of self and non-self often motivate transformation. Transformation is one of the visible functions of this aspect of dysphoria. In the first case, because change and transition mark the movement away from the non-self and toward the self. Or, in cases of oppressive social conditions or tidal backslides, from self to non-self. Additionally, transformation may also be read as trans-formation or the formation of the trans self. This may occur unencumbered as the formation of a self which happens to be trans. Or it may occur out of a rejection of the non-self. The trans formation arises out the failed and dysphoric cis formation. Thus, as a method of reading, readers can identify how texts reflect these competing tensions between self and non-self, between disgust and desire, whether the conflict is like a tide, whirlpool, or river. Because narratives frequently depend on tensions and conflict in order to motivate character change, the dysphoric reader begins to appreciate how closely tied storytelling and dysphoria may be.

Even in ideal conditions of access and acceptance, transitioning often takes time and may be incomplete in the mitigation of dysphoria. Most trans people and care givers are aware that transitioning can less dysphoria but will likely never may it totally go away. In part, this may be because dysphoria in society and the body cannot fully erase the affects and effects of the past. For instance, a trans woman who transitions in young adulthood still has the dysphoria caused by having to undergo a sort of imposed boyhood. When speaking about the past, this boyhood returns in the form of pictures, names, and memories even as they conflict with the current gender identity and presentation. This dysphoria across time may also be felt in the body, a body which may have had the marks of boyhood and adolescence which medical transitioning can mitigate but never fully remove. To use a metaphor from an article I've written on the dysphoria of medieval manuscripts: even after you turn the page, the writing and images from the other side can still bleed through to the present. Our experience of time is more fluid, non-linear and contested than we like the think. Thus, even the most directional river of dysphoria will find ways in which the tidal past causes momentary blocks, diversions, and backwash. Thus, as a method of reading one can analyze dysphoria in the way that time and narrative progression become jumbled by conflicting iterations of the self, whether the internal self of psychology and biology or the external self of identity and expression. Furthermore, one sees how narratives, especially about transgender, reflect and generate dysphoria through the difficulty they have in discussing the same person before and after transition. How do we talk about the non-self which was presented as the self for so long? Do we use deadnames and defunct pronouns or do we correct the past by naming the person more accurately? Often, texts don't have one way of answering these conflicts. The past affects the present and the present will affect our pasts. Recognizing and analyzing how this happens and how it is reflected in the text is another key element of reading dysphorically.

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Trans-Operative Ways of Reading

Transgender narratives often mark the boundary lines between identities, affinity groups, and associations. Operations (i.e. surgeries) emblematically mark the movement from one affinity group to another. Besides psychiatric diagnosis, "gender identity disorder" and now "gender dypshoria," transgender has long been represented and defined by such operations. Indeed, transgender is often presented as an embodiment of the power of operations. Following transition narratives of full change, with a definite before and after dived by the event of the surgery, trans people's narratives and identities become defined as pre-op (pre-operation) and post-op (post-operation). Yet dysphoria and other forms of trans narrative has since pushed against the full change story structure. Often the post-op self is present and active before transition and the pre-op self (or unself) is present and active after transition. This creates the dysphoria of narrative discussed in the last section. It might then be more accurate to say that most trans people are trans-op (or trans-operative) in some or many respects. Trans-operative means operating somewhat in multiple affinity grounds, multiple selves, and multiple timelines at once. Indeed, suspicion that operations will not provide a clear-cut pre-/post-op divide and a fully change lead many people to distrust trans people as potential traitors, spies, or trojan horses in their identified affinity group. The logic goes, "you turned your back on one gender, proving you are a turn-coat, so how can we trust you not to betray us?" Whether or not this is true, the narrative of suspicion in dominant in transphobic and trans-excluding discourses. This has led in part to the proliferation of "trap" tropes. And this mistrust is echoed by other groups, not just the one with which the trans person identifies. The identity which the trans person formerly occupied, by assignment or choice, can feel a degree of betrayal when the trans person transitions. One may see a bit of the spurred lover or spurred team-mate in lesbian feminist communities where one they formerly called their own, as a butch lesbian, comes out as a heterosexual trans man. The feeling is somewhat grief and somewhat a sense of betrayal that their friend would flip the script not only of gender (butch woman to trans man) but also sexuality (lesbian to straight man). In many respects, the person is still the same person and still loves the same person but they are not marked as a traitor by both the community they leave and the community they join. A trans-operative way of reading thus charts the systems of kinship alliances and associations which are crossing and conflicting in narrative.

Yet trans-operative ways of reading are not only about mapping power but about manipulating power. Because trans people are often mistrusted to some degree by their allies and kin, past and present, the change in circumstance can never be considered full, complete, and secure. We see this in a vast number of trans texts where potential and former allies turn their back on the trans person or when catastrophe hits in the form of sudden violence or backslides in progress. A lover turns abusive. A friend cuts off contact. An ally says they cannot help any more. An institution changes its policy or fails to fulfill their promises once real conflict emerges. A government overturns legislative wins. In these precarious circumstances, the trans person who has been considered a turn-coat or double-operative for so long may begin to examine other possible alliances. This does not necessarily mean a change in gender identity but may mean playing with the fluidity and trans-operative capacities that made them appear so dangerous. The trans-operative woman files for marriage to her wife as a man in order to circumvent a government that does not allow for same-sex marriage. A trans man uses a women's restroom or changing room in order to avoid the potential or active transphobic violence found in the men's room. A non-binary trans person presents as binary during travel so as to avoid some of the regularly harassment. Even beyond gender presentation, the trans-operative becomes aware and active across the many affinity groups in which they have experience. A trans woman utilizes knowledge of male culture and privilege as a may of combatting toxic masculinity. Trans men utilize their experiences growing up alongside girls to motivate and inform a dismantling of the patriarchy from within it. Thus, the trans-operative way of reading looks for the ways in which different lines of power, association, and alliance intersect within the life of a trans person. It allows for the considering how embody and utilize the pressure points of systems of sexism, homomphobia, transphobia, classism, ableism or more in order to enact power, especially in situations where they are put in a position of vulnerability or solitude. The trans-operative approach always asks to what extent does a trans person have their foot in the door and to what extent they must or may keep one foot in another room; as well as asks what other rooms might or does the trans-operative pivot when necessary?

The question can also turn back on the reader, asking them to consider to what extent they identify with the trans figure and to what extent they dis-identify with them? How does the text diminish, maintain, or further the contingency of ones affinity for the trans person? What factors outside the text (experience, prejudice, cultural assumptions) or inside the text (tropes, narratives, language) contribute to this relational distancing?

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Genres of Embodiment

Whereas dysphoria and trans-operation centers the conflicts or tensions often present in trans literature, genres of embodiment accretes around the creative impulse of transgender. Drawn from the theories of Sandy Stone, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, genres of embodiment is a way of approaching gender as a co-creative enterprise with a diverse ecology of lives. Using genre over gender plays upon the etymological root that genre shares between French and English, meaning gender but also a set of texts, especially those of creative literary or artistic works. This highlights the ways that gender is creative while also existing within patterns, tropes, narratives, and other discursive limitations. I distinguish genre-analysis from performance analysis to put a greater emphasis on construction over enactment. Perhaps this is the writer and technical theater nerd of me (I don't necessarily think like an actor or performer) but genres of art give a greater emphasis on the physical construction that goes along with the performative deployment of tools and space. As a genre, sculpture forces us to consider the materials and tools needed to construct the art as much as it makes us consider the social and cultural discourses that inform the art. As such, genres of embodiment double down on the way that art constructs the body (not just identity) and the body informs, limits, and frames the construction of artistic enterprises such as gender. A trans woman performs womanhood but has different materials to start with than cisgender women just like different sculptors with different types or shapes of stone with construct different forms of womanhood. Likewise, access to tools affects genres of embodiment. A trans man who has access to hormones but not surgery will embody manhood differently than an intersex or another trans man who has access to surgery (perhaps against his will in the case of the intersex man) but not to hormones. Likewise, a wood carver who has only a chain-saw will make a different sculpture than the wood carver who has only a chisel and hammer.

Beyond helping us consider the role of materiality in the co-creative relationship between body and identity, genres of embodiment also draw us towards the way that the literary informs the construction of one's life. A trans woman (like Caitlyn Jenner) who uses the full-change transition narrative will define herself and construct her life differently than a trans woman who uses the no-change narrative of transition. Following this example, after transition Jenner completely redid her wardrobe and house, claiming that they were the things of Bruce and Bruce is gone. She says that Caitlyn is only a few years old and she needs her own things. This contrasts with a trans woman who sees her whole life as one story and identity, who might not be so quick to let go of her old things because even though she was called by a deadname when she bought or received them, they are still a part of her story. Likewise, because the full-change narrative of transition focuses so much on surgery and operations as a central event, those trans people who consume mostly literature of that genre are more likely to pursue surgery as part of their transition. Whereas the trans person who develops in a context in which the no-change, born-this-way narrative of transition is dominant is less inclined to undergo surgery. Just as the absence or present of certain technologies (such as surgery) will affect what forms of trans life are composed within a certain context, so too the absence or presence of narratives that typify the tool and logic of the tool will affect what forms of trans life emerge. One can even say that the technology (surgery, hormones, diagnoses, clothing) and the narratives are parts of the same social operations. The technology promotes and allows for the narrative and the narrative promotes and normalizes the technology. One can thus trace the evolution of these operations over time, as technological changes affect literature and literary changes affect technologies and their use. Thus, genres of embodiment form what Andrew Solomon (in Far From the Tree) calls "horizontal identities," which are identities shared within a certain context. In an area where hormone replace therapy (HRT) is present, accepted and narrated, one are more able to create an identity of peers who likewise undergo HRT as part of their trans genre of embodiment. Horizontal Identities are like the books that sit next to you on a shelf. Yet across time, as the technologies and narratives grow and adapt, they form generation genealogies, or "vertical identities," which are genres of embodiment formed and shared from parent to child. While Solomon's work is more concerned with literal parents and children, genealogies of trans genres can be traced, for instance, from the sex change operations (castration) that formed eunuchs and which over centuries developed as a technology and narrative of gender change to later inform gender affirming surgeries for transsexual identities. A transsexual woman may not consider themselves peers (sharing a horizontal identity) with an eunuch who lived in different contexts and communities, but one can see how culturally they share a vertical identity that cuts across historical shifts in society, literature, and medicine.

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Trans Literature: Transgender as a Literary Archive

"When you hear the same stories over and over again, from people from all over the world, you start realizing that transgender is not an anomaly. 
It’s a part of the spectrum of people’s realities."

Susan Kuklin
Beyond Magenta

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Introduction

As a recognized archive, transgender literature remains largely on the horizon. There are no "trans lit" sections of most major book stores. Yet in recent years, feminist and LGBTQI book stores are beginning to have shelves or at least special displays that host a variety of books on transgender: history, medicine, self-help, family stories, memoirs, and fiction. As a field of academic study, trans literature is even further behind. This is ironic, given the number of transgender studies scholars who have degrees in English or at least have used trans films in their work. Yet even as transgender studies begins to break away from being a mere sub-set of queer or gender studies, trans literature remains largely subordinate to other fields of trans research: psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and media studies. Of them all, media and film studies has come perhaps the closet to describing transgender film as an archive worthy of study in its own right. As more trans films begin to win awards or at least get nominate, film may continue to lead the way in public awareness of the wider literary archive.

Yet once one begins to ask the question, the number of trans literary texts and narratives that begin to appear are massive. On the surface are those books and films that have begun to get some distinction. When one expands beyond those books marketed as "transgender" by publishers, marketing firms, or stores, one sees how trans literary archives have long existed. One finds trans narratives categorized in genres and archives defined more broadly as women or queer literature, as well as disability, post-colonial, and African-American literature. Looking further for trans narratives, genres, and literary forms, suddenly one arrives at medical, legal, religious, and historical texts that tell trans stories as pieces -- even center pieces -- of other agendas. At this point, one needs to begin to learn other methods of research, other professional and linguistic languages, in order to locate these trans narratives. But once learns how to find them in places not readily marked by the category "transgender literature here," the flood-gates burst open. Suddenly one begins to see trans literature all over the place, from media and books, to medical and government documents, to blogs and suicide notes, to historical manuscripts and saint's lives.

With such a massive and widely distributed archive, it is difficult to give a mere reading list. Such lists are available and reflect mostly recent English language publications currently sold in local book stores or films available on Amazon or iTunes. What I wish to provide in place of giving a "Top 10" or potential candidates for a new literary canon, is a method of categorizing and patterning trans literature as types of narrative. Through such an approach, my goal is to help you dig into the broad, interdisciplinary, and buried archive of trans literature so you will be able to grow the canon rather than merely reiterating the same handful of books and films on sale in specialty markets. So let's dig in and see where and when these narratives lead us!

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The Transition Narrative

As a formal genre, I argue that the transition narrative fits into the example (or exempla) genre. The example (or exempla) are defined by a doctrine (or dicta) that provides a theoretical concept for proof and facts (or facta) that provide the evidentiary grounding. In the case of most transition narratives, the visualization and narration of the facts of altering one's gender signifiers are supposed to fulfill the doctrine of one's trans identification. This doctrine may be as simple as "I am a woman, not a man," or may be as complex as "I have gender dysphoria." While other genres may utilize the transition narrative, the example is the genre most often used and most closely tied the rhetoric used for many transition stories.

Historically, the discursive context that produced and consumed the most number of transition narratives in the modern era is the medical field. In this case, the facts of case studies are given to prove whatever medical and psychological doctrines the researcher is trying to prove. For authors seeking to explore the histories and literary archives of trans persons undergoing transitions, one will spend a lot -- if not most -- of one's time reading such case studies from books written and consumed within a medical context. In some cases the dicta being proven are affirming of these transitions, offering advice for procedures, and others are critical warnings against transitioning. This tension is more pronounced the further one goes back in the study of medicine. If one pushes back even further, prior to the modern medical interest in transition narratives, a researcher will find them present within religious texts that also take the form of exempla. In this case, religious exempla are interested in using these histories and folk stories to prove doctrines of faith and philosophy. As in the early medical exampla, the dicta that accompany the trans facta are often not affirming of transitions, although there are some surprising examples of sympathy for the facts of the case.

The examples of transition narratives take on three dominant forms. These forms present the facts in different ways which correspond to different doctrines of change. The three dicta of change I highlight here are greatly influenced by Carolyn Walker Bynum's work on Metamorphosis. The three forms of transition narrative are: absolute change, hybrid change, and no change:

• The Doctrine of Absolute Change
• Facts are presented within a structure of before and after. There is often a defining event (such as surgery or a name change) which represents the transition. The narrative often diminishes the time given to this period of change because it represents the ambiguity that Absolute Change is trying to diminish.
• In this form, the narrative will often refer to the person's time before transition using the name and pronouns that accompanied that gender presentation (such as "he") and then after the event the person will be described using the name and pronouns that fit that gender presentation (such as "she").
• Examples using absolute change include: Caitlyn Jenner's The Secrets of My Life, The Danish Girl (book and movie), and many medical journals, especially the more sympathetic ones.

• The Doctrine of Hybrid Change
• Facts of different genders are presented alongside each other, before transition and after. Whereas absolute change tends to collapse transition into the short period of a single key event, hybrid change narratives tend to prolong transition to a much greater degree. One may see multiple transitional events, where the person is living one gender in one context and another gender in another context. The effect of this narration often supports doctrines of gender as a fluid spectrum, where male and female traits are present at the same time just in different degrees.
• In this form, the narrative will often switch between pronouns and names. Such examples will even favor the name/name or pronoun/pronoun way to describing a person, such as "John/Eleanor" or "He/She."
• Examples using hybrid change include: most discussions of Eleanor Rykener, Boys Don't Cry (and other discussions of Brandon Teena), and She-Male porn (a genre which depends on presenting trans women as monstrous hybrids, thus the choice and construction of the word "she-male" as "the best of both worlds").

• The Doctrine of No Change
• Facts are presented so as to foreground the present of the identified genders from the very start. The gender assigned at birth is presented as secondary and based on appearances and the identified gender is presented as primary and based on essences or predispositions. Also called the "born this way narrative." This is the most popular among current transgender stories because it affirms that transgender is a discreet and insular identity that is unchanging, based in nature rather than choice or nurture. These qualities have proven important and effective in convincing doctors, medical insurers, the courts, and government bodies to provide assistance and protection for trans people.
• In this form, the pre-transition name and pronouns are de-emphasized. Sometimes, the post-transition name and/or pronoun of the person is used from the start even while it records how other people used the socially assigned deadname and pronouns. Other times, these names and pronouns will be used in describing the person pre-transition but will come with an explanation, "scare quotes," or asterisk* denoting them as based on appearances rather than the person's identified gender.
• Examples using this form include: If I Was Your Girl, A Fantastic Woman, Trans America, and Leelah Alcorn's suicide note.

Transition narrative exempla are very effective and common in circumstances where transgender is considered novel or contentious. This is because exempla transitions are geared at showing as a way of telling. You get the theories of transgender communicated but in a way that typically does so obliquely through narratives and facts that work on the emotions of the audience. By giving case studies with facta that invoke pity (how terrible!) or identification (they use the same lipstick as me!) the dicta can be consumed without inciting the debates that tend to arise when discussions are based more in abstraction.

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The Memoir

Whereas Transition Exempla may be the most numerous in the archive, the confessional memoir is perhaps the most popular. It occurs with relative frequency since transgender has entered public discourse that a trans person gets told, "you should write a book! Tell your story!" Indeed, this turn towards memoir is often part of the process of marginalized identities entering the mainstream. When there is a recognized lack of fact or fiction (beyond the medical or sociological which can be considered to academic for public audiences) memoirs or biographies tend to be the first to fill the void. Whereas exempla demand that readers take some medicine with their sugar, some dicta with their facta, memoirs seem to offer pure sugar, all facts with no doctrinal agenda. Now, one may still derive theories and believes from reading a memoir but they are not nearly as important, if they come at all. Memoirs thus give the sense of learning truth (or truthiness) without the fetters of ideology.

Calling trans memoirs confessional gets at their rhetorical function and their historical genre. Because memoirs are typically highly formalized, edited, and published for a wider (if still somewhat niche) audience. As such, not every trans person will have the chance, means, or desire to write a memoir. Yet nearly every trans person will be asked or even required to tell their life story. This biography may sometimes be given by others but the first person confession is generally preferred as the most authoritative. This may take public form such as an interview, a vlog/blog, or a speech in front of a community group. This may also take an important institutional form, wherein the trans person must confess the truth of their lives to doctors in order to get treatments, to insurers in order to get coverage, to employers or Human Resources to get accommodations, to government agencies to get new documentation, and lawyers or judges to get protections or compensations. Confessional life stories also are frequently used to persuade friends and family members to cooperate with a transition. Rare is the situation where a trans person transitions name and pronouns without someone demanding to hear the life story of the person.

Historically, before transgender was accepted enough to get book deals, confessions were a prominent and important genre in establishing transgender as a discrete condition of life. Before a psychiatrist is willing to sign on to support an individual trans person and before the wider medical industry got into the business of publishing research on trans people in general, a trans person had to sit in front of a doctor and convince them of the veracity and necessity of their gender. The most common and effective way to get these authorities on their side was by providing the facts of one's life. Before doctrines (dicta) could be drawn up to explain the facts (facta) of trans people, making exampla possible, the facts were confessed wholesale to the best of the trans person's ability. And before the private confession of the therapist's office, there were confessions to priests and judges. For much the same reason, as religious institutions and the courts have dominated much of western culture, trans people historically had to also try to convince these authorities of their veracity as well. Thus we see the long history of transgender found in religious and legal documents. At times, the recorder of the confession imports their own doctrines and ideology, but often enough the confession is so surprising to the authority that they do not fully know how to make an example of it. As such, confessions often break free of over doctrine in order to persuade often suspicious audiences of the internal and external realities of transgender.

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The Journey

If transition examples frequently collapse time into a before/after picture and confessional memoirs often assert an essential truth that took a lifetime to unravel, journey narratives tend to fall somewhere in the middle. In fact, journey narratives are often all about the middle, extending the second act of a three into a narrative in and of itself. As such, even though transition narratives can at times be presented as journeys they are presented in ways generically distinct from examples of transition. In fact, they may be seen as inversions of each other. An example typically focuses the narrative on the trans person as the object of study. Even confessional memoirs are sold as the outside looking into the mind and soul the trans person. Yet trans journey narratives are more interested at looking through the eyes of transgender person outward at the world. The trans person becomes the subject and the world becomes the object. Whereas the before/after picture emphasizes the visual difference in the trans person, the timeline of a journey is more about the scenery and saying look at my life "here" and compare it to my life "there." At times, these places are literally different spaces, such as the move from a rural or suburban hometown to the city. Yet frequently, whether or not there is a journey through space there is a usually journey through time. And the goal of this journey from a narrative stand-point is to get the reader to come along with the trans person, to look along with them, to see how the world looks from a different perspective.

For a fan of pilgrimage narratives and travel narratives, it is unfortunate that the vast majority of such trail literature is not only cisgender but white able-bodied heterosexual and male. Yet tropes and narrative structures of these journey narratives are still at play in transgender journeys but in a different form. As noted, there are often physical journeys that define a trans journey narrative, moves across country, from a parent's home to college, going to a new job, getting a new place after a divorce. These physical moves often correspond to other changes in the trans persons life. Part of the journey may be transition but may also be coming out to the family, finding a safer place to live, getting a more accommodating job, etc. Such physical journeys are often described in great detail because journey narratives generically focus on environment. Details such as social contexts and the availability or absence of support are important features of the social terrain, even though the physical differences between one city and another may not be as drastic as walking from the mountains into the dessert. Yet any journey through space is also a journey through time. A journey narrative in this way may resemble a confessional memoir, insofar as it gives details of a life across time. Yet their purposes and foci are different. A confession functions to give insights about the interior life. A journey narrative on the other hand focuses more on the change of circumstances over time. How did moving in with Dad after your parents divorce affect your gender presentation? How did living in Boystown, Chicago affect your freedom of gender expression? How did taking the rural small town job affect your work life? The focus in these journeys are on the external life, which this genre considers no less important.

Because they often lack the typical markers of travel literature (a hiker with a backpack, a walking stick, mountains in the distance) it can seem tricky to locate trans journey narratives. Often you will find them located among other genres: memoir, transition examples and case studies, and histories. An interesting trend in journey narratives are the higher number written by activists or academics. This may be because the activist and academic are habituated in analyzing their surroundings as much if not more than analyzing themselves. For instance, when Eli Clare tells his life story, he will often pause for an extended consideration on his geo-social context, his historical context, his philosophical context. Thus one learns as much if not more about Clare's world as one does about him. Likewise, a characteristic of Laverne Cox's interview or lecture style is that she will introduce a piece from her own life story but primarily as a way to take a journey through the other stories that surround her social contexts: the experience of people of color, women, working actors, LGBTQIA people etc. Yet even non-activists and non-academics will turn to the journey narrative. If I Was Your Girl tells the story of a trans girl moving back in with her father after her transition and mental health breakdown while she lived with her mom. Thus the novel records being a fish out of water in her new school. Being a fish out of water is one way of describing many trans journeys but also travel narratives in general. This is because journey narratives give perspectives that allow us to see the world we live in through a new light and suddenly the world becomes stranger and more interesting. 

Admittedly, a specific form of trans journey narratives are beginning to develop utilizing more traditional markers: the trans road story. From To Wong Fu to Trans America, the trans journey on the road becomes a way of showing the different contexts and problems trans people experience as they move from one place in the country to another. These journeys typically involve many of the features of other travel narratives, including the negotiation of transportation, pilgrimage narratives, including a prophesied holy land or loca sancta on the horizon, or epic and romance, including strange battles, dangers, and veering.

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Next up: Transgender as Literary Theory

Thus far, we have consider the tropes of transgender often found in cisgender narratives as well as the common types of narratives written by or at least focused around a transgender person. Yet this still leaves trans literature largely in the position of text or object for academic study. What is important to consider are the ways in which transgender may affect our methods of reading or enacting literary analysis. What is a trans way of reading? How does transgender affect the way narratives and archives are formed? Stay tuned for the third part of this series as we consider transgender as literary theory!

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Genres of Embodiment: On Sandy Stone's Manifesto

"I suggest constituting transsexuals 
not as a class or problematic 'third gender,'
but rather as a genre "

Sandy Stone

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Transgender studies as an emergent field of study continues to wrestle between different definitions of transgender and trans. What the word means determines in many respects what the word does or can do. A landmark definition arrived with the first publication of the Transgender Studies Reader, wherein Susan Stryker writes of the words ascent within identity politics, “Transgender, in this sense, was a ‘pangender’ umbrella term for an imagined community, encompassing transsexuals, drag queens, butches, hermaphrodites, cross-dressers, masculine women, effeminate men, sissies, tomboys, and anybody else willing to be interpolated by the term, who felt the call to mobilization.”[1] What distinguishes this definition was both its investment in identity, inclusion, and volition. Transgender was not merely a relational term. While “queer” or “gender queer” is often defined in relation to some norm, transgender included a variety of identities that were, in a sense, fully formed constructs within their own rights and norms.[2] The second quality, the inclusiveness of this definition disrupts the settling or isolation of the identity. Transgender as an identity and a field of study was not just the study of one thing but many things. Entrance into this inclusive umbrella identity is determined by willingness. Stryker’s description suggests that while nested identities may or may not be choices, claiming the label transgender is chiefly an act of agency and one aimed at forging collective agency with other identities that also chose to be included. Within contemporary identity politics, this definition of transgender is effective insofar as it includes those who wish and does not presume to include those who do not wish. Yet the features that makes the definition useful for current politics makes it less useful for history and literature.

Historical figures and literary figures that do not exist within the sphere of contemporary identity politics are often excluded from the definitions of transgender because they cannot willingly vote for inclusion. The reason for this policy is that persons will not be feel that their identity is being represented by some monolithic figure which have not elected and might seemly wholly foreign to them, “that no voice in the dialog should have privilege masking the particularities and specificities of its own speaking position, through which it may claim false universality or authority.”[3] This refusal of transgender as a historical or literary term that scholars might apply is based both on the desire to present agency and ensure inclusivity. Yet by insisting on the power of voiced assent to transgender as an identity, a problematic tension arises because in fact this works against its goals of inclusivity. Modern transgender becomes, against its own best wishes, a universal authority that elides the particular features, circumstances, and genealogies of historical figures (real or imagined) that reflect and contribute to the cultural power of a transgender identity from which it is excluded. In some cases, those who might be recognized as historically trans find that the isolation and silence they experienced in their own time is reiterate and compounded by modern trans scholars.[4] Those who were rejected as men and women in their own time are denied the voice that a trans identity, history, and politics might offer by cultural descendants who likewise found themselves between the stools of male and female. As is the case in women and people of color who were not allowed to vote for their own enfranchisement, the masses are denied the ability to gain agency and voice due to they are required to already have agency and voice enough to vote. Transgender ends up limited and defined by those with the blessings of historical circumstance, agency, and language to show up.

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So what is the alternative to universal temporal supremacy of those familiar with modern English identity politics? Could we allow eunuchs or Amazons to join hermaphrodites, transsexuals, and cross-dressers under the umbrella of transgender? These are central questions that motivate a critical historical and literary mode of studying transgender. There are dangers in choosing the benefits of inclusion over exclusion for those who cannot vote in our modern identity politics. Yet Stryker admits that this danger exists within the inclusiveness of transgender at any level, “[t]he conflation of many types of gender variance into the single shorthand term, ‘transgender; particularly when this collapse into a single genre of personhood crosses the boundaries that divide the West from the rest of the world, holds both peril and promise.”[5] The central concern Stryker stresses time and again is one of complexity over simplicity and democracy over tyranny. In this way, if we understand the volition clause as aimed at protecting against universality and affirming multiplicity, than the goal of extending enfranchisement in transgender studies to those without the power to vote, such as medieval Pardoners and saints, would only further affirm that there is no one way, place, or time to be transgender. Dangers remain by simply and ignorantly calling eunuchs “transgender,” insofar as drawing on modern associations might dissuade readers from considering the medieval associations. Yet such short hand of volition based transgender definition likewise might affirm modern associations at the expense of multiple complex histories. In both reductions, eunuchs are erased from the conversation. An effective historical and literary mode of transgender studies thus must double down in inclusiveness as a function of multiplicity. Associations are drawn but not reduced, between modern cross-dressers and transsexuals, or between eunuchs and transsexuals.

The way forward into transgender pasts may already be nascent in the term, “genre,” that Stryker employs and which draws her back to a source that she regards as “an important cornerstone for transgender studies,” that is: Sandy Stone’s “the Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”[6] In the essay, Stone suggests that in articulating the meaning of transgender that scholars begin to think of gender in terms of genre as a way to move towards a multiplicity inclusive of the past. Stone writes, “I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic "third gender", but rather as a genre— a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored. In order to effect this, the genre of visible transsexuals must grow by recruiting members from the class of invisible ones, from those who have disappeared into their ‘plausible histories.’”[7] These “plausible histories” include those who deny or are denied trans identity by choice or circumstance, making them “invisible.” This invisibility may offer the benefit of passing but it denies them the agency being generated within trans discourse. Transgender as an umbrella must be in a sense evangelical, recruiting beyond those already present and speaking to consider those not in the room, those who never made it in the room, those nobody thought to invite. Genres as creative enterprises are necessarily inclusive, generating new forms of art, identity, and association by continually mixing of “embodied texts.” By following a person or a culture from blues to jazz to rock n’ roll, not only does a fuller more accurate history given but affirm they do not arises out of nothing.[8] Cultures grow and change, finding new forms of expression as circumstances, language, and technologies change. Rock and roll is not jazz but would not exist without it, so transsexuals are not all eunuchs but owe a debt of history to the music they made.

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Genealogies of transvestism and genealogies of transsexuality cross and combine at places but also diverge, substantiating multiple genres with multiple histories. A critical part of the inclusivity of non-modern forms of transgender is the further divesting of any one form of transgender as monolithic. There is more than one way to be, to embody, to culturally occupy transgender. Even among modern trans person, different forms seem to take president at different times. At one moment, wearing the clothes of a gender other than the one assigned by society was key. At another moment, sex reassignment surgery (SRS), now “gender affirming surgery” (GAS) or Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS), operations were the hallmark.[9] Later, a psychiatric diagnosis, such as gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria, seems to hold a privileged place of authority over who and what is “really trans.” Stone writes, “So long as we, whether academics, clinicians, or transsexuals, ontologize both sexuality and transsexuality in this [or any one] way, we have foreclosed the possibility of analyzing desire and motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple contradictions of individual lived experience.”[10] As feminists have argued that there is more than one way to be a woman, trans feminists truly say that there is more than one way to be a trans woman. The challenge is one of imagination as well of careful analysis. Being able to imagine other forms of trans embodiment requires letting go of certain preconceptions of what transgender is. Likewise, being able to see trans life in other forms requires a certain careful insistence on seeing the same in the other. An eunuch’s castration and a transsexual’s sex change operation observe different techniques, products, and cultural meanings. Yet both share a lineage of surgery, scar tissue, and a focus on the genitals as significant for gender identity.[11] Indeed, as inroads into the past begin to be built, the modern forms of transgender seem to point down different roads.

Moving from transgender as a monolithic identity to trans genres of embodiment pushes scholarship to consider the multiplicity of creative forms of being and relating in the world that nonetheless have particular themes, technologies, plots, and functions. Stryker argues that transgender does not arise out of a single discipline or mechanism but spans several, “linguistic, social, and physical categories.”[12] As a result, many communities within the larger transgender umbrella can be identified through linguistic networks. In this way, it is true that one way of studying and identifying transgender is by the use of the modern English word “transgender.” Yet other peoples that share social and physical traits with transgender may possess unique words that identify them within non-English speaking communities. This particularity should not automatically disqualify groups or persons from trans identification. Thus while linguistic differences might be noted, there may be reasons to consider transgender as a social and physical category, or even a historical and literary community as well. As a field that combines many disciplines, transgender studies benefits from developing a wide range of methodologies to develop the increasing number and complexity of ways to be trans. “In a world bent on becoming one, transgender studies grappled with the imperative of counting past two, when enumerating significant forms of gendered personhood,” writes Stryker.[13] Transgender studies turns out less a dissection of a single discreet but understudied gender and more a field of discourse where many genders meet. Towards this end, in the next sections, I will examine how a theory of transgender as “genres of embodiment,” gets scholars closer to the complex creative interdisciplinary work that is transgender studies, giving particular focus to disciplines, gender and genre studies, each featuring an intellectual source for Stone’s genre theory, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler.

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Notes

[1]Susan Stryker. “Desubjugated Knowledge: An Introduction to Transgender Syudies.” Transgender Studies Reader. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. 4.

[2] "genderqueer, adj.". OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com. proxygw.wrlc.org/view/Entry/77468?redirectedFrom=genderqueer (accessed April 21, 2017).

[3] Stryker, Desubjugated Knowledge, 12.

[4] The silence in the archive on Eleanor Rykenor reflects a politically silenced life. Dinshaw 100.

[5]Stryker, Desubjugated Knowledge, 14.

[6] Ibid. 4.

[7] Stone 231.

[8] Rock n Roll is generally defined as a hybrid and evolution, an amalgam of rhythm and blues, country music, and Chicago electric blues (typically played by Southern musicians).” "rock 'n' roll, n. and adj.". OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com (accessed April 21, 2017).

[9] “Transgender Terminology.” Human Resources. Cornell University. Web. https://hr.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/trans%20terms.pdf. (Accessed 1 April 2017).

[10] Stone 231.

[11] Piotr O. Scholz. Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History. John A Broadwin and Shelley L Frisch trans. (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999). 3, 234.

[12] Stryker 9.

[13] Stryker 8.

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More on Genres of Embodiment

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