Gender novels

March 18, 2015 10:41 AM

Rise of the Gender Novel: Too often, trans characters are written as tortured heroes. We’re more complex than that
posted by roomthreeseventeen (17 comments total)

Really interesting article. Thanks for the post. I'm going to seek out some of the authors she recommends.
posted by billiebee at 10:48 AM on March 18, 2015

I feel like something about these books sums up why I will probably never do a story about My Transition. Well that and the fact that I find autobio comics to be ineffably tedious.
posted by egypturnash at 10:53 AM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks so much for this -- as billiebee said, I'm really pleased to have a list of excellent trans* writers included and I will definitely seek them out.

I thought this line early on from a cis classmate was interesting: “Maybe I was asking you to explain something that is simply unexplainable.”. I think maybe it's true; my gender is not completely aligned with my body, although more so than when I was younger, but even so I am just never going to be able to understand exactly what it's like for someone who is trans*, and that's okay. It's not a trans* person's job to teach me. If they're a writer, it's their job to write and create good and nuanced characters, trans* or cis. It's not their job to explain their personal experiences to me. There can be compassion and friendship and empathy without understanding exactly how someone else feels. I think the cis writers making everything about a heroic struggle is because heroic struggles is something we can conceptualize, but trying to fit other people's experience into our mental space isn't necessarily going to work and can make them less human even as we're trying to help. Sometimes we just have to acknowledge that we don't understand someone else's experience precisely but we still care about them and they're still a person and not an ideal.

I am also trying read more novels and watch more movies starring trans* characters, even if it's only in my head. For example, I believe that Independence Day is a documentary about the first trans* president.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:01 AM on March 18, 2015 [10 favorites]

I believe that Independence Day is a documentary about the first trans* president.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, please.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:03 AM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

I recommend this book a lot on Metafilter, but it's the rare trans-book-by-a-cis-person I really like:

Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus is about a Chicano struggling to accept his father and salvage his relationship. His transness is just an established fact, not part of the plotline; I love that it's not a transition story, and I love that it's by a queer Latina.

I also looooooove her book Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, which is about baby dyke love; it's super fun and cute and I want to go to all the fictional bars and homes described within.
posted by Juliet Banana at 11:04 AM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Five books by transgender authors that everyone should read from the same author as the article.
posted by Juliet Banana at 11:12 AM on March 18, 2015 [10 favorites]

An excellent article. On a more abstract level, a lot of those same issues could be raised about books by a straight person about a gay protagonist, or a racial "majority" author about a "minority" character. Reaching for understanding often leaves us holding the "easiest" stories. I suppose that's, in part, because those parts of the journey about being in direct conflict with 'normal' society are the parts with the closest, most visible contact.

Also: oh good, a whole list of books to add to my to-read shelf.
posted by ghostiger at 11:32 AM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Five books by transgender authors that everyone should read"

The only one of those I have read (so far) was Nevada by Imogen Binnie and it was fantastic. Highly recommended. When I got to this part of the main article:

"Their portrayals of gender-identity struggles are ham-fisted, and despite the authors’ apparently good intentions they often rehash stale, demeaning tropes"

all I could think was, "I really do hope that Casey goes on to give good counter-examples like ... wait, yep, there's the mention of Nevada."
posted by komara at 12:17 PM on March 18, 2015

I'm reading Casey Plett's short story collection A Safe Girl to Love right now. Was just going to come in and recommend it as a collection that centers the experience of trans women without being all about The Transition, and then I noticed she wrote the linked article--how convenient!

Seriously though--her characters have awkward conversations with exes, and have good sex, and make their shitty jobs work for them, and all those fun things regular people in the world do. Sometimes in the course of those things they have occasional brushes with transphobia, but that is never the central point of a story. (I'd never considered trans characters surviving one traumatic assault and then never encountering violence again as a problematic trope/narrative, but it makes total sense!) Some of them are very much of the 20-somethings figuring out big city life, MFA-ish mold, but Plett actually made me like that mold for a minute, which is a pretty impressive feat.

Also, there is a story about an overworked escort and her sometimes-neglected cat which just hit me with all of the feels.
posted by ActionPopulated at 12:18 PM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

An excellent article. On a more abstract level, a lot of those same issues could be raised about books by a straight person about a gay protagonist, or a racial "majority" author about a "minority" character. Reaching for understanding often leaves us holding the "easiest" stories.

I thought as I was reading this about movies about race that are aimed at white people, and re-tell narratives which make white audiences feel good about themselves: focusing on white protagonists who ally themselves with black characters, suffer for it, and are the force that changes black lives for the better.
posted by not that girl at 12:47 PM on March 18, 2015

Something Whoopi Goldberg said in an interview regarding Boys on the Side has stuck with me. Minorities go through stages of representation: punchline, tragedy, and then just like anybody else. Her suggestion was that at the time, gays and lesbians were in the tragedy phase. I wonder if that's part of what's happening with trans narratives.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:50 PM on March 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

This is only barely tangentially related but I have recently read my way through the Rivers of London series (shut up don't judge me.) One thing that really struck me all through the series is that this is a white author writing a black protagonist and every time he introduces a new character, he specifies when that character is white:

A young man appeared by the wall. He was white, in his late teens or early twenties with a shock of unnaturally blond hair gelled into spikes.

Surprisingly, this really challenged my ideas as a reader of who is visible, how they are visible, and how that visibility is used. I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience, and I'm hoping reading books with trans characters presented this way will give me something similar as a reader.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:10 PM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is only barely tangentially related but I have recently read my way through the Rivers of London series (shut up don't judge me.)

I'm judging you to have great taste in books; that's a good series. And recommended by my favorite author (Bujold).
posted by jb at 2:23 PM on March 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

An excellent article. On a more abstract level, a lot of those same issues could be raised about books by a straight person about a gay protagonist, or a racial "majority" author about a "minority" character. Reaching for understanding often leaves us holding the "easiest" stories.

Which is why I'm increasingly skeptical about any "experience novels" not actually written by somebody who is gay and/or trans and/or a person of colour, or. In the best case it still feels like adding unearned gravitas to your fiction, in the worst case you are actually silencing the very same people you claim to represent by providing an ersatz experience.

Not to say though that I don't want to seen trans characters written by cis writers, just don't use them to tell The Trans Experience.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:35 PM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

ghostiger: "On a more abstract level, a lot of those same issues could be raised about books by a straight person about a gay protagonist, or a racial "majority" author about a "minority" character."

I made almost exactly the same complaint as the author about Middlesex being annoyingly formulaic (protagonist on a journey to self-understanding; distant, hard father; soft, ineffective mother; violence as a symbolic stand-in for more serious internal struggles that the author doesn't explore; sexual experience as the sole signifier of adulthood), only in the context of, my book club read three or four "American immigrant experience" novels in six months, and they all hit those EXACT SAME BEATS and they were all decent novels on their own, but reading them right in a row, it was so obvious that they were a very formulaic "hero's journey" with just the details changed to give it the required cultural specificity and that the protagonist was not a CHARACTER but a blank space that the author didn't want to make TOO specific and idiosyncratic and realized and let the readers color in the outlines of the sketched-in hero. And not in a good way, but in a lazy "I don't really know how to fully realize this character so I'll make some gestures in the hero's journey direction and count on readers mentally filling it in because it's familiar" way.

(Which is to say I am entirely on board with the author's complaint! Same shit, different day.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:00 PM on March 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can't speak for its authenticity, but I thought Zoe Whittal's Holding Still for as Long as Possible (recommended in the linked article) was excellent.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 7:49 PM on March 18, 2015

Kind of expanding on the article, I think the inspirational tragedy genre is something that non-profits and charities will also fall back on (I mean, maybe it's not so great to encourage someone's savior complex, but you're not going to make enough money to sustain your programs if you demand that you only accept money from donors who are fully educated about the complexity and intractability of the social issue you're trying to address) and I wonder if that also encourages this kind of story to become popular in novels.
posted by ana scoot at 11:57 PM on March 18, 2015 [2 favorites]