A friend who read one of my earlier blog posts about transgender novels recommended me Casey Plett’s excellent article about transgender fiction, The Rise of the Gender Novel in The Walrus. Plett argues that transgender characters in contemporary fiction (such as Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab, Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy, and Kathleen Winter’s Annabel) are written like tortured heroes and lack the dynamics of full characters. Their transgender story takes over the novel at the risk of other elements. Plett clearly has issue with transgender stories written by cis-gender authors, and I get this. Can cis-gender people really understand the trans experience? I'm not sure. However, the books that I really loved from my original list of transgender reading were written by trans people: Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon’s Gender Failure and Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger.
So why am I thinking about this again? Well, a few years ago at a writing festival a student from the audience asked the panel I was hosting if any of the authors would write a transgender novel. The panel all agreed they felt ill-equipped to write a trans story, but I was intrigued. (My mind instantly went: Jewish trans person!) The student clearly had a desire to be represented in a book, and hadn’t yet had this experience. I started reading about the trans community with the thought or eventually writing a trans character.
All this was before Orange is the New Black and before Kaitlyn Jenner came out and before my own students started asking me questions about trans people. I’m hoping the trans community will fill the YA book world with diverse books about the trans experience the way they are filling the media world, and I can stick to things I know.
In the mean time I’m become obsessed with the Amazon show Transparent. I don’t often binge-watch a series, but my brother recommended this show to me. He said, “You’re going to wish you wrote it.” And he’s right. Transparent is the stuff of my writing dreams: a show about a Jewish family delving into their queerness. Mort Pfefferman is the trans-parent who reveals himself to his children as Maura, a woman. Yet the show goes way beyond any YA coming-out tropes. All three adult Pfefferman children cope with their father becoming a mother (from Poppa to Moppa) differently, but it isn’t his queerness or gender
Jeffrey Tambour as Maura
transition they care about. The Pfeffermans are too selfish for that kind of questioning. Sarah Pfefferman discovers her father dressed as a woman while starting a lesbian affair in her father’s bedroom, and her own sexual journey will always be more important than her fathers. Similarly, the youngest Pfefferman, Allie, uses her father’s transition to continue her own sexual adventure where queerness isn’t an issue but a landscape to be explored. When Josh Pfefferman does mourn the loss of his father in the final episode of Season Two, (with a rescued duck floating in the bathtub behind him), his grief is so long in coming it feels fresh and unexpected.
Carrie Brownstein and Gaby Hoffman as Allie and Sid |
