David Davis XX
on the trans literary renaissance
I wrote my first book while in utero. the earthquake room came out in 2017, when I was in my late twenties and still in denial about needing to change. I wrote my second book a few years later, when the change was finally beginning, from the birth canal, as it were (2022, baby!). Now that the changes are enough to enrich my life as much as they complicate it, whatever comes next—if it hasn’t come already with this newsletter—will be my first real work. Umbilicus sheared and posterior spanked, a parasite-turned-personage.
The womb is not necessarily a place of safety and nurturance, as much as we would like to think it is. Before birth, before life, even, there is much to be feared, and I’m not talking about abortion (we are learning about epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, girls!). Cliched as it is, I like pregnancy as a metaphor for my experience of transsexuality, and not just because it’s close at hand. When looked at honestly, it provides for potential and vulnerability both simultaneously and constantly.
Before I changed, I was not alive. My world was static. My senses were dulled. My interiority slouched. I had neither introspection nor desire, save for the jetsam of sentience that bubbled to the top to form menisci in the mud, the Bumpass Hell of grey matter. I often dreamed that my eyes would neither open nor close all the way, and that I was fumbling around, squinting, unable to see what I was seeing. Like a blinkered horse, I was present but limited, though instead of my blinkers granting me greater focus, they stole almost all of it that I had, reducing my perception to the six walls of the womb: fuzzy, mysterious, often cramped, sometimes cozy, foreclosing on all possibility (for what fetus can suspect that the bottom will drop out, not to mention what comes after?).
It may seem cruel to talk like this about the person who lived in my body for the 15 or so years between puberties, but I don’t think they were ever truly thinking, not any more than a sleepwalker scratching a mosquito bite. Most of my decisions were stupid, and I’ve lived to regret a lot of them. My formal education is almost beyond recollection. Events big and small, good and bad, have disappeared, unless I wrote about them, though most of my journal entries are the same boring obsessions and wishes for death. It was a nothing little life, and this was reflected in everything I thought and produced1.
It’s only now that I have begun to think that I have begun to feel like an artist among artists. This comes at a lucky time, because in 2021, I can look back over the past two or three years of thoughtful reading and see a coterie of trans authors that I can not only enjoy, but flatter myself to be in conversation with. It’s a simple thing, to be able to read their work and to think about it, but I can, and I do, and it’s a pleasure.
I’ve transsexualized in a world very different from the one in which I came out as ~gay~. Post-trans tipping point, in a milieu crowded by the capitalist profusion of microidentity and on the cusp of communal commodification, it’s one in which I’m often asking myself what a trans literature renaissance (another way of saying that it’s become just slightly easier for a very tiny fraction of a very tiny minority to publish mainstream work that isn’t solely about the process of medical transition) can mean to trans people here and now. It’s not an easy question, and it’s never not inflected by concerns of power, access, capital, and other cynicism-inspiring realities. It’s what a lot of us might call fraught, and you can bet your ass that every single one of us with something to say about it publicly is saying a lot more when the cis gaze isn’t on us.
Fraught though it may be, and tempted as we all are to analyze and unpack, I’m also allowing myself to just enjoy the fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, music writing, advice column, essay, hybrid, podcast, published and unpublished—whatever—that this moment has granted. There’s much more to us than memoir, though there are plenty specimens there, too.
Below, you’ll find a list of some of the trans writers I’ve been enjoying since I started to change. All of these books were released post-“tipping-point,” and all of them, I’d argue, inform that renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about.
Darryl, by Jackie Ess
Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters
Trans Girl Suicide Museum, by Hannah Baer
Little Fish, by Casey Plett
Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl, by Andrea Lawlor
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, by C. Riley Snorton
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Heaven, by Emerson Whitney
The Chaser, by Torrey Peters
Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through, by T Fleischmann
Hall of Waters, by Berry Grass
I’m Afraid of Men, by Vivek Shraya
We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, ed. by Zach Ozma and Ellis Martin
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir, by Kai Cheng Thom
Pass With Care, by Cooper Lee Bombardier
I've Got a Time Bomb: A Novel, by Sybil Lamb
Manhunt, by Gretchen Felker Martin
Greyhound, by Aeon Ginsburg
How To Be A Good Girl, Jamie Hood
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, ed. by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel2
If you come across something that looks interesting, I hope you’ll grab a copy and support a trans writer while you’re at it. If you’ve already read everything here, or if what you want isn’t out yet, be patient—I can think of some really exciting work on the horizon from trans writers, scholars, and artists who I won’t name here, but who I assure you are changing the world.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
Everyone’s experience of dysphoria, dissociation, and pre-transition, if one even conceives of one’s gender in that way, is different. I’m just talking about me here.
This list doesn’t include the older and/or more established trans writers I’ve had a longer reading history with, like Leslie Feinberg, Red Jordan Arobateau, Patrick Califia, Susan Stryker, Kate Bornstein, Mckenzie Wark, etc. etc. etc.
the chaser by Torrey is gone. bummer.
I'm compelled to point out the geographical specificity of the emerging narrative of the trans literary renaissance: i.e., it's North American. This isn't your exclusion (I *think* the only non-NA writers in your list are the half a dozen or so of us in We Want It All): it's an exclusion in the socioeconomic conditions of both literature and transness. In that regard, it's notable how many of the trans writers who are of my islands write or move through North America: Roz Kaveney, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Lauren John Joseph, Cat Fitzpatrick... And the dynamic goes both ways: the influence of Rachel Pollack's time in London and Europe on UK trans politics and writing is important. In thinking about this I'd like to of course avoid a periodisation in which transness and its literature happens in North America and then is exported to the rest of the world, which has to catch up -- and yet I also need to find ways of talking about why there is *so little* trans literature in these islands, in at least comparative terms. Though what there is is very good (big shout out to Shola von Reinhold, and I'm always happy to talk about more). Nor do I want to suggest that the power relations between the old empire and the new are a valid goal of, yikes, diversity: better to ask how trans literature is appearing beyond the Anglosphere, how to work through the portals of linguistic and cultural difference, i.e. translation is an urgent task, as is how to move beyond European and settler constructions of transness as our political frame. As one wave in that direction, here's a zine of takatāpui/genderqueer/trans writers from across Aotearoa: https://easterroadpress.wordpress.com/portfolio/this-gender-is-a-million-things-that-we-are-more-than/