How Trans Happens
There’s a fight going on, but not many people know about it. It boils down to what most fights look like after a long time simmering and evaporating away their unnecessary parts—the right to tell a story. Like many other battles this one is about a people, power, and ownership.
I’m talking about where transgender comes from, why it occurs, and what meaning to draw from it.
If we left it up to The New York Times and David Letterman, transgender people, all, struggle with being the wrong sex in the wrong body. Chances are they know it early on, they suffer tremendous amounts of angst and depression, and they demonstrate their trans-ness by loving every activity ever singled out for the opposite sex, the one they want to be so dearly. And anyone else who feels a bit differently—a person who doesn’t always feel totally female every day, a man who still loves to wear pink, someone who doesn’t feel the need to go on hormones—they become invalidated. They are not authentic transsexual people, or they would be marching in lockstep to the narrative of the greatest biological trick ever hoisted against human beings, hemophilia and cystic fibrosis notwithstanding.* Somehow the whole conversation reminds of people from different Christian denominations arguing about who’s going to heaven faster or better.
The whole thing is a red herring, folks. There is no single narrative that describes the emotional and physical nature of being trans, and there is especially no singularity with regard to how one understands coming to identify as trans-anything. Call those statements generalizations, but I see them as opening up a space for people to be their authentic selves without impinging on anyone else’s identity, and so I’m comfortable with saying that.
Okay, why does this matter to the YA writer? Two quick reasons:
- Readers infer what writers imply, so if we regurgitate this story about pelicans bringing the messed up trans babies into the world, we give it more power and presence.
- We need to be prepared as writers for criticism from transfolk about how they are portrayed in our work. This is particularly important given the overall dearth of transgender characters or ideas in YA fiction.
What do I propose about this? Well, namely that we create characters who are whole people but don’t fit “the narrative.” This doesn’t mean that we need to debunk the narrative—there are many people who believe it describes them and their history, and that’s fine for them. And us, I presume. But let’s not stop there. It’s actually better for us as writers to be able to use the full reach of our imaginations in writing stories with trans themes, elements, and characters. We should explore gender for a YA audience in new ways:
- Put the trans character front and center, not as a sidekick
- Show mentors in the story who have struggled with their gender identity or expression
- Use the genre to push transgender themes
- Invent new gender paradigms (maybe there are 5 genders that are self-selected at a certain age? a town in which everyone dresses androgynously and never thought about gender?)
- Talk about gender via another coming-of-age moment, or as part of understanding other emerging parts of the character’s identity (how being trans affects playing on the basketball team, for example)
- Show characters who aren’t afraid, hateful, or ashamed of their past gender history but who are trans nonetheless
Regarding criticism, if we stay away from stereotypes about transfolk (and other communities), and allow for multiple paths to trans-ness, I think we’re on solid ground as writers. At the end of the day, if we are able to say we opened up space for readers to see themselves or understand each other, we’ve had a damn good day.
*That’s tongue in cheek. I wish more trans folks thought about what taking up disability rhetoric meant for people with disabilities.
Review of Jennifer McMahon’s My Tiki Girl
I read Francesca Lia Block’s Dangerous Angels (the collected Weetzie Bat books) when I was about 17. My best friend Monica gave it to me, and that book changed my life. It’s the first place, after Ellen, that I encountered any openly gay people. I grew up in southern Idaho, which is just about the reddest part of one of the reddest states in the country, and to see major gay characters, characters portrayed in a positive light, as though their lives are the most natural thing, just another way of living, was so powerful. Couple that with Block’s beautiful magical realism, and I have a book that has stayed with me and book to which I return every year or so, a book that is a marvel of beauty.
I bring it up here because when I first started My Tiki Girl, a novel about a young girl, Maggie, and her magical friend Dahlia, I thought I was seeing the second coming of Dangerous Angels. When Maggie was in 8th grade, she was involved in a car accident which left her with a damaged leg and which killed her mother. Maggie’s life BTA (before the accident) was one of carefree popularity. In her life ATA (after the accident), she is a freak and a loner. So when she meets the equally freaky Dahlia, Dahlia’s sensitive younger brother Jonah and her irrepressible mother Leah, Maggie thinks maybe she’s found a place and a family where she can truly be herself. She loves the creative spontaneity of Dahlia’s family. They visit a graveyard and have a tea party with the dead on Halloween. They stay up late telling stories and dancing. And Maggie finds herself falling in love with the bright and shining Dahlia.
But what Maggie first takes for irrepressible and shiny and wondrous is cover for a mother with schizophrenia; Dahlia’s bright shining personality is a cover for a girl who desperately wants to fit in, to be admired and to be taken care of. When Dahlia and Maggie’s relationship is exposed and they become the stuff of malicious high school gossip, their carefully constructed fantasy of a light and perfect world crumbles.
By the time you reach the e
nd of Maggie’s story, you desperately wish she could have found a place with Weetzie Bat and Dirk and the crew. However, though there isn’t a simple happily ever after for Maggie or Dahlia or the others, the story ends with the hope. Though the characters suffered as they tried to figure out just who they were and where they belonged in their world, McMahon lets the reader glimpse a little light and the promise of some joy at the end of their tunnel.
Debra Touchette is an assistant librarian, grad student, fledgling blogger and wanna-be teacher. She blogs about her reading at Library Lass: Adventures in Reading, and is @threelefthands on Twitter (but mostly just to see what shenanigans @maureenjohnson and @realjohngreen are up to).
The GBLT Genre
I’ve been musing over the labels we give books, especially labels in sales lists: ‘Gay Books’, ‘Lesbian Books’, ‘GLBT Books’. I’ve been wondering if everyone has the same understanding of these labels, exactly, and whether they are an entirely good, helpful thing, or have the potential to be negative in some way. I’d like to know what people think.
I’ve been scanning several ‘genre lists’ and in one alphabetical list ‘Gay and Lesbian’ found its place between ‘Dark Fantasy’ and ‘General Fiction’. So, I thought, when does a book become ‘Gay and Lesbian’ as opposed to ‘Dark Fantasy’? What if a ‘Dark Fantasy’ book has gay central characters? What if the story is quite general, but has a lesbian character in it? What if a bookseller decides it only just pops up when someone searches for ‘Gay’ or ‘Lesbian’ books?
I scanned the same genre list for ‘Heterosexual’ – it wasn’t there, of course. So this list could lead some to think that 31 of the 32 genres (from Action & Adventure to Young Adult) do not include gay or lesbian central characters. To be honest, if I was just starting out as a gay teen reader, I’d feel a bit fed up about that. My greedy eye would scan ‘Horror’ and ‘Erotica’ and I’d think: those look exciting, why aren’t they for me? Authors might also feel a bit fed up too – if a fair-minded writer has a strong gay character in a Dark Fantasy book, I think they’d worry if it was slotted exclusively under ‘Gay’ or ‘Fantasy’.
So, a genre list is an example of how labels can make people feel sidelined or excluded – even labels that set out to empower and guide vulnerable groups. Of course, it is essential for people to be able to locate books with GLBT characters because there are sadly so few – but do the books have to carry such an exclusive label on sales lists?
I completely agreed with Sarah Diemer’s post that more straight people should read books that contain gay characters. But will they, if we put the ‘Gay and Lesbian’ stamp on them? Let’s be honest: how many non-LGBTQ people would buy a book like Fifty Gay Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read. I hope masses do. But I’m not sure that, in reality . . .
Politically, of course, it’s important to fly the GLBTQ flag but wouldn’t it be wonderful if GLBTQ characters and themes ran powerfully through the blood of all genres. That way, everyone would get to read them and no one would feel excluded by labels. Wouldn’t it be great if the quality of masses of stories with non-heterosexual characters were so strong that ‘Heterosexual’ replaced ‘Gay and Lesbian’ on that genre list.
Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we need to encourage more authors to write quality literature from the perspective of a greater variety of characters – and to not worry about what genre box it will be squeezed into – so their work filters out naturally into the hands of all kinds of readers. I did attempt something along these lines when commissioning ‘Truth & Dare’ (an anthology of short stories). I wanted to gather stories with a wide variety of real-life characters, and not sideline quality or inclusivity for the sake of genre. I don’t know what genre the anthology will fall under other than YA. In fact, I challenge anyone to ‘genre’ it more specifically.
Lots of bloggers gather together lists of books of specific ‘genres’. I’ll finish with a quotation from a blogger’s own ‘gay’ booklist, called ‘The Gay Fiction Booklist That Doesn’t Suck’.
‘The sad thing about gay fiction is that there isn’t enough of it for a reader to be discerning. No matter how shoddy it is, it will end up on gay booklists just to fill up space. And if you try to leave something off because it sucks, people will assume you haven’t read it. As a result, a lot of crap ends up getting recommended on gay booklists.’
Food for thought, eh?
Liz Miles is the editor of the inclusive anthology Truth and Dare. Truth and Dare will be released tomorrow in the UK and is already available in the US.
Considering Intersectionality
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about creating multi-layered characters as one of my goals as a transgender writer. I was talking about LGBT characters at the time, but pulling back a bit on those parameters, I think the dedication to crafting believable, complex characters should extend to every personality in the narrative. And if we’re going to support well rounded character development as writers, we should remember to support intersectionality while we’re at it.
All I mean here about intersectionality is that I want to include a liberatory understanding of the differently positioned, race, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual orientation-related communities while I’m writing, playing against what are either tropes in literature or stereotypes of culture. It doesn’t do my writer’s agenda any good if only the LGBT aspects of the book are well thought out and explored. Besides, and this is a mammoth besides, many LGBT people are also in other communities—they may be people of color, working class, resident aliens, Buddhists, and so on—and if there aren’t enough YA books out there with LGBT characters, there are certainly fewer of them with minority LGBT characters. So, some of the things I try to think about when I’m drafting my character sheets:
Stay away from racial stereotypes and genre tropes of that stereotype—It’s a no-brainer to avoid racist overtones like writing about “dark villains,” but there are less obvious problematic characters, like having very religious characters be Hispanic or African American. Science fiction has even taken on the trope of the “magical Negro,” at times executed as an extension of religiosity. I’m not saying we can’t have wizards of color, but we need to create a context in which those characters aren’t present just to help a white protagonist (I’m looking at you, Bagger Vance).
Look at how intersectionality affects reality for the characters—Often, when faced with a crisis, our protagonist will seek help, from the people around them and from places or institutions they know about. We could show something interesting if it’s only the private girl’s school that has the rare book in the library with the clue to a secret past and our heroine attends public school in a low-income neighborhood. Then just “passing” to get into the school and find the book becomes something of a challenge. Friends of the protagonist may relate to each other across differences in their backgrounds, or bicker over those differences. For YA characters, there may be “first” moments captured in the story—the first time they were denied some kind of service, the first time someone said something derogatory to them because of their background, etc.
Remember that everyone has race, everyone has gender, and everyone has a class position—When a character has privilege with regard to one of these power vectors, that needs to be explored, too. Those girl’s school students may be more aware of their class standing than a middle class white character understands their race privilege, but these awarenesses can be part of the story, too. Writing in the affects of all of the characters’ social positions, and not just the ones with minority status or who are oppressed, will make the story stronger and move it away from reinforcing problematic ideas about race, class, and gender.
Think about how intersectionality affects LGBT identities—All kinds of adolescents worry about how their families will react when they come out, but there are different specific concerns depending on the cultural history of the family, and its standing in the community. Maybe a working class Latina girl and a wealthy African American boy find ways to come out to their parents because of seeing how each other is negotiating their own journey. Or a young trans woman with Roma parents discovers an unlikely mentor in the form of her art teacher, who is an Asian gay man. What kinds of disparate experiences could be brought together, and what kinds of lessons could they learn from each other?
I value diversity for just such a reason: we live richer, fuller lives when we open up to each other, respect our differences, and work together to improve our lives. I love to see those messages in stories, and I think acknowledging and working with intersections of these communities makes those narratives more accessible to all YA readers, and more interesting to boot. Next week I’ll present a short story of mine with these goals in mind.
Winners: Ink Exchange and Old Habits & Poll For Next Giveaway
Our winners for Old Habits and Ink Exchange are below:
Old Habits: Alison, comment #3
Ink Exchange: Twitter user @eas770
Please email us (maria@gayya.org) with your shipping information to receive your book!
Today’s poll is up on our Facebook Page: http://on.fb.me/lp7tV1 Answer the question to pick what book we give away next week!