Trans Fiction Writers in the 20th Century
and the Self-Determination of Trans People in the 21st Century
Dear Friends,
The semester is in full swing for me. If you’re new here—or just don’t know—I’m pursuing a PhD in English. I received my MFA back in 2018, and after a few years of teaching I made the decision to go back to school again. Maybe when this whole thing is behind me, I’ll feel like writing more about the doctoral journey. For now, I can talk about where I currently am in my program.
There pressure is on this spring because I am finally in the process of taking my comprehensive exams (i.e. comps). I say finally because for timeline purposes I really should have taken them last year and began dissertating this year. I would not say I’m a scholar by nature though. I love to learn. I could spend an entire day just staring at a wall thinking about things. My education before this was also very piecemeal—and often autodidactic. School itself (at least the traditional kind)… well… I had little love for it and often felt it had little love for me too. Maybe that’s why I ended up going to art school three times before winding up in a doctoral program. That might also be the reason by the time I entered my PhD program I felt secure in identifying as an artist or creative writer, but felt faint around the word scholar or academic.
And there lies the conundrum. You don’t get to the PhD level while absconding scholarship. If you feel a general sense of curiosity toward all things, like I do, it might be hard to move away from the safety of seeing yourself as a generalist. To complete a doctorate degree means to specialize in something, so I’ve spent the past few years trying to figure out how to do just that.
Some people enter a PhD program in English and declare with certainty, “I am a Victorianist!” or “I’m a Medievalist!” I never identified that strongly with a time period though. Perhaps that’s because, as a creative writer, the pressure is always on me to exist in the absolute moment—because what I create exists in the now it comes out of. There is also an expectation to know what my peers are writing and reading. Some may think of this as an unnecessary peer pressure, but I’d frame it more as a prerequisite for being in a literary community. I want to know what books are making my peers think and talk and gush and rage—inspire them to turn to their own blank pages to write. I want to know what my friends are authoring in this now.
At the same time, entering a PhD program with only vague notions of my non-creative interests has made the experience a slow burn. It’s made me an outlier among all the people who approach their terminal degrees knowing exactly what niche topic they want to think deeply and write about. I’ve stuck with this degree because my specific program is a bit of a rara avis in that in that students with creative backgrounds may pursue a creative dissertation once they have reached ABD (all-but-dissertation) phase. I also have a history of nodding politely to whichever sunk-cost fallacy is currently swallowing me whole in the present moment.
It might have been the weight of having to exist in the present as a writer that made me want to move slightly into the past as a scholar—despite feeling like my acutest knowledge is about twenty-first century literature. Why look back at the previous century? As I wrote recently in the rationale document for my exams, “it feels salient to study the previous generations of novelists who serve as chosen ancestors.” This is how I’ve moved the planchette around the Ouija board, trying to locate something that felt right. I started with a vague notion of modernity, then moved into twentieth century writers, finally settling on Post-WWII as my period. I also moved from the general category of fiction to focusing specifically on novels. I settled away from global literatures to focus on the U.S.
Although, for a PhD student, “Post-WWII Novels in the U.S.” is still too broad. To make a long story short, I ended up settling on trying to focus on the relationship between “queer literatures” and “transgressive fiction” as two distinct (yet often abstract) categories. As I said in my rationale: “Like thread and needle, queer literature cannot exist without the structures of restriction and prohibition, and transgressive fiction cannot exist without gender and sexual minorities whose existence and bedroom practices have been rendered into taboo.”
Recently a question was posed to me as to whether I was engaging with trans literatures (or trans theory) enough while focusing on queer literatures. My immediate (albeit defensive) thought was, well, isn’t it self-explanatory why there is a scarcity of trans literatures in the twentieth century when compared to gay, lesbian, and bisexual texts authored by cisgender writers? Especially when it comes to fiction. The majority of trans literatures from the previous century come in the form of nonfiction: letters and essays and memoirs and theory and criticism and science writing—and even travel writing.
Trans creatives—and queer creatives at large—lived under slightly different risks in the twentieth century. There were still threats of censorship and criminalization, but there was also a lack of representation that rendered one to the shadow life. Life in the underground meant anonymity, invisibility, and erasure. In the twenty-first century, there has been much greater visibility and representation—yet it has come with tangible costs. This year alone, Donald Trump signed an order recognizing “two sexes only,” declaring gender and sex as these immutable categories that cannot be changed. I cannot underscore enough the threat of a government telling trans/non-binary people like myself that they lack autonomy—not just as a thought experiment—but as something that has tangible, legal ramifications.
Framing these types of conversations as “culture wars” neglects the legitimate, legal consequences that trans people are now facing when it comes to paperwork, licenses, passports. What we are currently living under is a hostile takeover which aims to use the government to scapegoat and further marginalize a group that is threatened and criminalized. I should not have to point out the extreme dangers of trans people being placed in the carceral system based on the sex assigned at birth—in particular—the physical and sexual violence that trans women face when placed into men’s jails and prisons.
So while we continue to witness an attack on healthcare, education, scientific research and even art-making—all of which intersects with trans self-governance and self-determination—we are often asked how to continue with our daily lives. I’m not a natural multi-tasker. I operate gradually, and often due to health issues have extremely limited bandwidth. I worry at times that my primary and continued focus on writing and scholarship is selfish. I also know I cannot continuously give my entire body, soul, and mind to the stress of the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” initiatives which pour out into my feeds on the daily. It would be self-aggrandizing, I think, to try to frame my continuing education as anything radical; however, continuing to be able to write about and think about queer and trans stories does, in the smallest of ways, feel like a site of resistance for me.
That being said: there are ways to resist the threats to trans personhood that people in the United States are currently experiencing. If you are ever in a position and being asked by someone in power to refuse trans people (or silence their voices), do not comply.
Support trans people—not just creatives. Yes, buy the books of trans authors (ideally directly from them—so they’ll receive the largest profit), but also engage in mutual aid with trans people in your everyday lives. If you don’t know any trans people in your everyday lives, try to seek out local (or national) grassroots organizations who could use your money or your time. I’ll step down from my soapbox momentarily to return to that question I was initially asked.
Am I failing to critically engage with trans writers and trans scholarship? After spending some more time with the question, I felt the need to acknowledge its legitimacy—and re-frame is as a productive challenge. I had Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues on one of my exam lists—as well as Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite; however, it made me wonder if I had actually done enough research to pull overlooked texts from the margins that might fit into my exam projects.
It turns out I hadn’t. After doing some transvestigating online, I realized there were some authors I hadn’t even heard of—or authors like Kate Bornstein who I associated solely with nonfiction, drama, and performance—who had published novels!
As a quick side note: I’m actually required to have to have a secondary scholarly area as far as my comprehensive exams are concerned; this topic is “Post-WWII Global Postmodernisms and the Fairy Tale.” I’ve been fortunate to discover not only a swath of trans speculative writers I wasn’t aware of—but also encountering novels like Godmother Night by Rachel Pollack which specifically engage with fairy tale and myth.
I would also be, remiss, not to add that, well, there’s a lot we don’t know for historical reasons. There are probably twentieth-century “cisgender” authors I’m engaging with, who, if resurrected and plucked and placed in the twenty-first century, would identify as non-binary and/or trans. There’s also novels by cisgender writers that open themselves up to trans analyses (e.g.: Orlando by Virginia Woolf), which is another legitimate approach to trans literary scholarship. I just want to make clear I don’t have any essentialist ideas of scholarship tied up solely with show-me-the-receipts author identity.
But I’ve already been talking so much, so let’s get to the thing I wanted to share: trans writers who published fiction in the twentieth century.
Research is, of course, easier when you have someone else’s research to build off of. So, I end this newsletter with an alphabetical list of trans1 writers who published at least one novel in the twentieth century. It’s my hope that someone stumbles across this post while posing the same question I plonked into Google—and finds a new literary ancestor of their own that they did not know existed before—but arguably might need in their lives more than ever.
Kate Bornstein
While probably best known for her 1994 nonfiction book, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, as well as their 2012 memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, Bornstein has also written fiction (in addition to playwriting and performance as well). Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure was a novel published in 1996. Nearly Roadkill was co-authored with Caitin Sullivan (an author of “several plays, 2 1/2 novels, a comic book.” She “worked as a journalist, and was the editor of the Seattle Gay News for many years.”). There was a 30th-anniversary “reboot” edition published by Simon & Schuster, with the new subtitle “Queer Love on the Run.”
The novel itself operates in the mode of the then-newfangled internet, full of its early AOL chatrooms and cybersex. Or, as S&S describes it, “In this rowdy cyber-romance originally written in the 1990s, two people meet online and fall in love in every guise they can manage. As Scratch and Winc go from anonymous lovers to accidental heroes and gender outlaws, they expose the shadowy Web stretched between technology and capitalist greed, nearly becoming roadkill on the internet superhighway. With a little help from their friends including a brave teenager and a mysterious hacker, these darling rebels fight government intervention and find chosen family in this eerily prescient tale.”
Poppy Z. Brite
Poppy Z. Brite is no stranger to the horrific or twisted. His gothic novels (many of them set in and around New Orleans—or other Southern locations) include vampires, serial killers, cannibals, and all the company they keep. I’ll include descriptions of three novels he published in the nineties below:
Lost Souls (1992): At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, look for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not; Ann, longing for love; and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself. Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds—Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah, whose eyes are as green as limes—are on their own lost journey, slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh. They find it in Nothing and Ann, leading them on a mad, illicit road trip south to New Orleans. Over miles of dark highway, Ghost pursues, his powers guiding him on a journey to reach his destiny, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Nothing from himself. . . .
Drawing Blood (1993): Something of a haunted house tale, the novel was originally titled Birdland but the publisher retitled it to make a thin connection to Brite's first novel, Lost Souls, a vampire tale. The novel concerns Trevor McGee, a comic book artist and sole survivor of a family murder-suicide, and Zachary Bosch, a bisexual hacker, and their arrival at McGee's old family home in Missing Mile, North Carolina, a fictional town featured in Lost Souls.
Exquisite Corpse (1996): To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the ambition of bringing his art to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his own art to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim. Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of New Orleans’s French Quarter, Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer.
Catherine Butler
Catherine Butler is best known as a scholar of children’s literature. Perhaps her most critically acclaimed scholarly work is 2006’s Four British Fantasists, which explores the work of four of the most successful and influential fantasy writers of the generation who rose to prominence in the "second Golden Age" of children's literature in Britain: Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Penelope Lively. However, she also published two speculative novels with Orion Children’s Books in the nineties.
The Darkling (1997): A chance meeting between fifteen-year-old Petra and elderly Mr. Century unleashes a terrifying series of supernatural events involving Mr. Century's long deceased fiance and a shadowy figure that has haunted Petra for years.
Timon’s Tide (1998): When Daniel finally becomes accustomed to the changes in his life since his brother Timon's death six years earlier, his brother reappears and Daniel is plunged into a world of intrigue and danger as he tries to unravel the mystery surrounding Timon's demise.
Leslie Feinberg
Stone Butch Blues (1993) is an autobiographical novel by Leslie Feinberg, which touches upon lesbian identity, stone butch identity (which has both subcultural connotations as well as sexual ones), and transmasculinity. Written from the perspective of stone butch lesbian, Jess Goldberg, the novel intimately details Jess’s life in the last half of the 20th century around Buffalo, New York. I want to say more, but this novel is a queer cult classic for a reason—and probably the best-known novel on this list.
Jan Morris
Catharine Jan Morris was a Welsh historian, journalist, author, and travel writer. Although she was best known as a prolific travel writer and essayist, she had a couple of novels and a short story collection to her name as well.
Last Letters from Hav (1985) is a Booker Prize-shortlisted novel. Although originally published in 1985 as a standalone novel, Last Letters from Hav was republished in 2006 together with another novel called Hav of the Myrmidons (not to mention an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin) in a collected volume entitled Hav. The novels themselves are speculative works of travel fiction.
Last Letters from Hav is a narrative account of the author's six-month visit to the fictional country of Hav. The novel is written in the form of travel literature. The work is structured in an episodic format with each chapter corresponding to a month spent in Hav. Hav itself is imagined to be a cosmopolitan small independent peninsula located somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. The novel proceeds with little in the way of connecting plot but contains several episodes describing the author's subjective experience in Hav. The author narrates a string of evocative episodes including visiting a languid casino, a courteous man claiming to be the true Caliph, watching a citywide roof race, and a visit to the mysterious British agency. The novel concludes with the author's invited visit to a strange ritual conclave where she observes several cowled men whom she thinks she might recognize as her acquaintances from her time in Hav. The author then recounts the rise of strange and ill-defined tensions in the country. The author decides to leave the country amidst the growing unrest. On the last line of the novel the author writes that she could, from the train station, see warships approaching on the horizon.
Decades before that—Morris also published a short story collection called The Upstairs Donkey, and Other Stolen Stories in 1961.
Esdras Parra
Esdras Parra was a Venezuelan writer, poet, artist, and editor (she was a founding editor of the literary magazine Imagen). She began her career as a writer with three paradigmatic books of fiction: El insurgente (1967), Por el norte el mar de las Antillas (1968) and Juego limpio (1968). Afterwards she devoted herself exclusively to poetry and drawing, publishing the collections Este suelo secreto (1995), winner of the II Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas.
While not a lot of her work (particularly her fiction) has been translated into English yet, The Collected Poems of Esdras Parra did come out in 2018.
Rachel Pollack
Rachel Pollack was perhaps better known in the world of divination. She wrote over twenty books on divination, tarot, and the occult. However, she was also an accomplished novelist and short story writer. Most of her novels moved through genres of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. She published five novels in the eighties and nineties.
Three of Pollack's novels won or were nominated for major awards in the science fiction and fantasy field: Unquenchable Fire won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award; Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award, was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature; while Temporary Agency was nominated for the 1995 Nebula Award and the Mythopoeic Award, and shortlisted for the Tiptree.
Golden Vanity (1980): Earth was finally entering the galaxy... The 'Allies' had arrived, sweeping down from the stars to offer a jaded Earth the marvels of the cosmos. And Earth had gone crazy. Farmers sat back to wait for Vita Flakes to fall from the sky. New York City drank itself into a permanent starstruck stupor. Blissed-out teenagers wandered into the Great Mexican Defoliation Desert to wait for the New Gods to bear them off to the astral plane... But the 'Allies' weren't in the business of trading something for nothing. This impertinent little marketworld might fetch a nice price on the interstellar auction block... particularly if a runaway wondergirl named Golden Vanity was tossed into the bargain!
Alqua Dreams (1987): An Earthman seeking to exploit a rare mineral essential to interstellar flight enters into an alien world--where the inhabitants are dedicated to a religion based on the concept that life is a hallucination--and becomes obsessed with one of the young women.
Unquenchable Fire (1988): In a near-future America that has been transformed by a feminist revolt and where magic and the miraculous have become commonplace, Jennifer Mazdan finds herself chosen as the vehicle for a bigger change yet to come after a visit from a divine messenger.
Temporary Agency (1994): When I was fourteen, a cousin of mine angered a Malignant One. It was a big case, a genuine scandal. Maybe you remember it. At the time, when it ended, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. But a couple of years have passed and I guess maybe it's time to think about it again. Thus begins Ellen Pierson's story of how she helped her cousin Paul contend with the Malignant One running a temp agency in the office building where he worked. Ellen's story is a bright and moving tale set in the same fabulous, fantastic America as that of Rachel Pollack's award-winning Unquenchable Fire. Funny and frantic, poignant and powerful, Temporary Agency is an enduring fable….
Godmother Night (1996): Almost a set of short stories, this novel breaks into discrete episodes, centered on identity, love, and death. Jaqe has no identity until she meets Laurie, introduced and named by Mother Night; in that moment, she knows herself, and that she loves Laurie. But once Mother Night has become part of their lives, Laurie and Jaqe and their daughter Kate cannot live as other people do. Knowing Death, inevitably each of them seeks to use the knowledge, to bargain with Death, and to change the terms in the balance of life and death in the world. Pollack's characters, major and supporting, living, dead, and divine, are memorably human. As she transplants myths and folklore into a modern setting, she gives new life to old tales and a deeper meaning to a seemingly simple world.
Cameron Reed
The Fortunate Fall is the debut (and only) novel by Cameron Reed, originally published in 1996. The book itself was critically acclaimed, placing it in a lineage of other cyberpunk (or postcyberpunk, if you want to be technical) texts. Although it should be noted that a new version was published last year (2024) by Tor Books as part of their ‘Tor Essentials’ line:
“Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure. On its first publication in 1996, The Fortunate Fall was hailed as an SF novel of a wired future on par with the debuts of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Now it returns to print, as one of the great underground classics of the last several decades in SF. Maya Andreyeva is a "camera," a reporter with virtual-reality-broadcasting equipment implanted in her brain. What she sees, millions see; what she feels, millions share. And what Maya is seeing is the cover-up of a massacre. As she probes into the covert political power plays of a radically strange near-future Russia, she comes upon secrets that have been hidden from the world...and memories that AI-controlled thought police have forced her to hide from herself. Because in a world where no thought or desire is safe, the price of survival is betrayal - of your lover, your ideals, and yourself.”
Reed gave a recent interview about The Fortunate Fall over here.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Jessica Amanda Salmonson is an American author and editor of fantasy and horror fiction and poetry. As a novelist, she is best known for her Tomoe Gozen trilogy: “Set in an alternate universe resembling feudal Japan, the book combines the tale of historical female samurai Tomoe Gozen with the legends and creatures of Japanese mythology to create an action-adventure fantasy. … The series is notable for its unusual, highly researched samurai background and feminist story slant.” In addition to this trilogy (and countless other books she authored and edited), Salmonson also published three other novels in the eighties and nineties.
Tomoe Gozen (1981): First book in the Tomoe Gozen trilogy.
The Golden Naginata (1982): Second book in the Tomoe Gozen trilogy.
Thousand Shrine Warrior (1984) Third book in the Tomoe Gozen trilogy.
The Swordswoman (1982): Kendo is a thing of the spirit, or so Erin Wyler thought of the ancient art of Japanese sword fighting—until the day in the fencing hall when her bamboo sword was transformed into a supernatural steel blade and her sparring partner became a loathsome demon. Suddenly kendo had become a thing of madness.
Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman (1985): Lu Khen was in love with the madwoman who lived in the forest. But the Powers had decreed that an ordinary mortal could never marry one blessed with the gift of madness. To win it for himself, Lu Khen set out for the crumbling tombs of the Lost Dynasty, a period of demonic rule so horrifying that it had been erased from the history books. There he would find the power to win the love he sought... or perish!
Anthony Shriek, His Doleful Adventures; or, Lovers of Another Realm (1992): Buried in the world of his own imagination, painter Anthony Shriek finds his dormant emotions awakened by the arrival of a bizarre and alluring woman whose presence turns his paintings into gateways to another world.
As a final note, this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, so please post a comment if you have any additions! I’d also like to point out that all the images used in this newsletter are by Jeffrey Catherine Jones, a trans artist, illustrator, and comic artist who notably created the cover art for over 150 books.
Until Next Time,
JD
I’m using “trans” as an umbrella term here. Some of these writers might currently identify as non-binary or genderfluid or genderqueer rather than use the term “trans” to self-identify, but I’m using the term to denotate people whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what is associated with their sex assigned at birth.