Trans Stories Part 2

I took a brief respite from reading for research this weekend to delve into Kim Fu’s For Today I Am Boy. What a wonderful book! Fu’s novel was on my reading list as part of my research on Transgender lives, but it’s also great fiction. For Today I Am A Boy tells the coming-of-age story of Peter Huang, a woman trapped in a man’s body. Peter grows up in small-town Ontario and eventually moves to Montreal, where he works in restaurants, dresses in women’s clothing on the weekends and lives a life of deeply sublimated desire.  For Today I am a Boy tells a story of transgender angst and pain in a way that make me think of the famous Emily Dickens poem, "Tell all the tuth but tell it slant." Fu comes at her story from an angle that gives it depth and a deeper picture of the way gender dysphoria affects people.

 

I’ve read several other transgender novels this past year, all of which I have enjoyed immensely. Mostly I've read YA novels that have dealt with transgendered teens in a more straightforward narrative. Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger is the story of a girl named Angela who feels she is really a boy named Grady and goes to high school under this new identity. I chose this novel because I really wanted to read about Female to Male Trans people. The novel has quite a light tone for a transgender story. Grady deals with bullying, his crush on a beautiful girl, but also his father’s annual Christmas pageant.

 

 

Cris Beam’s I am J, also a YA novel, is a heavier read, also about a boy trapped in a girl’s body. J cuts himself off from his family and their inability to understand that he is a boy as he takes on his real male identity. This book, with its detailed information about alternative schools for queer students and the process of taking hormones is both informative and has a deeply developed character and an interesting storyline. I like to imagine teens reading this book and taking solace and guidance in their own gender quests.

 

 

All three of these novels helped me understand on a deeper level what I read about in Kate Bornstein’s useful (and occasionally hilarious)  My Gender Workbook. In Bornstein’s book I learned several things. Primarly, I now understand that gender and sexual orientation are two very different things. Prior to that, the grouping of trans people within the queer umbrella had always confused me. Weren’t transpeople automatically gay since they were lumped with gay people? The answer is no. Gender and sexual orientation fall on two different axis and people fall in lots of different places within the quadrant. For example you can be a Female to Male trans person who likes men, or a Male to Female trans person who also likes men.

 

The second most important thing that I learned from Bornstein’s book has to do with why someone like me should learn about transgender people. I have to admit that sometimes my reading feels like curiosity, like voyeurism: who are these people and what are they like? What are their bodies like? Yet my interest is deeper than that. Reading about a variety of people's differences, be it culturally, sexually or in another way, deepens my tolerance for difference. As an educator, my students come from a variety of backgrounds and I strive to be compassionate to them all. Reading about trans people on a theory level helps me understand, but reading fiction about them helps me empathize.

 

I also highly recommend Kate Bornstein's A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today. Not only is Bornstein utterly hilarious, her story (and title) is compelling reading. And unexpectantly, her experience as a  scientologist is even more fascinating than her gender journey. Who knew that scientologists operated off a ship off the Californian coast?