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Trans writers have so much more to offer than stories of tragedy and pain.
Trans women have long been trapped in other people’s fetishes.
In fiction, transgender women have mostly been written about, talked about and portrayed by others. We have been reduced to a misunderstanding of our lives, wants and needs, and then we have had to watch that misunderstanding erected in the public eye, as if it is anything more than someone else’s fantasy. We have been fetishised as muses (Lou Reed’s song "Walk on the Wild Side") and we have been fetishised as objects of disgust ("Ace Ventura: Pet Detective". No, really: this 12-rated comedy movie has a lengthy section in which Jim Carrey vomits after learning that a woman he has kissed is trans) and we have been extensively fetishised as mysterious, sexual, tragic creatures, perhaps gifted with a hidden strength but always doomed to suffer at the hands of men. For that last one, take your pick, but perhaps consider starting with "The Crying Game".
When the portrayals — again, rarely written or played by us — turn ostensibly sympathetic, when people who are supposed to represent us get to be the stars and the main characters, it is usually with a fetishistic focus on our pain. In Sheila O’Malley’s review of the 2019 movie "Girl", a story about a teen trans girl ballerina, O’Malley notes that the movie fails because it discards what is interesting in favour of an "obsession with what her body looks like". "There’s something voyeuristic about a camera zooming in repeatedly on a teenager’s groin," O’Malley says. And all this concludes with what O’Malley describes as "a very graphic scene of self-harm".
This is par for the course. Trans women have not, historically, been people in entertainment media. You could argue, however, that the movies mentioned above are excellent representation in one way, and one way alone: they are a perfect illustration of how trans women are treated in the wider world. Muses, monsters, sexual deviants; tragic bodies, sites of pain.
The trans woman may finally have become the author, but she is still the exhibit
Naturally, such a public perception does not make it easy for trans women to succeed in our careers. Trans women writers have historically found ourselves limited in how our writing is allowed to reach a wider audience. Confessionals, whether fictional or autobiographical, for a time comprised almost the entirety of trans women’s published output. A transition biography fits nicely into established trans media tropes, being focused on a sympathetic portrayal of what is to cis people the most fascinating aspect of our lives: the process of transforming our bodies and our lives; of becoming authentic. It is its own fetishisation, the elevation of narrative over personhood: the trans woman may finally have become the author, but she is still the exhibit.
It is only recently that this trend has waned. Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (Topside Press) examines its characters as people, rather than as a function of their transition or tragedy. People who are forced to reckon with their transness, yes — but the novel takes care to present this as a consequence of living with and around cis people, rather than something intrinsic to trans women ourselves. "While gender is a construct," the narration notes, "so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs."
After Binnie came a relative rush of trans woman authors such as Gretchen Felker-Martin, who writes horror novels that are deeply informed by and infused with her own experiences as a trans woman, and Torrey Peters, who wrote the fantastic Detransition, Baby, a book more interested in life post-transition — and post-detransition— than in the bloody mechanics of how, biologically, its trans woman characters got there. And in these books, the trans women are not muses, or monsters, or fascinating creatures on whose genitalia the metaphorical camera focuses. They are people. Messy, vibrant, alive people, whose transness is only one aspect of their lives; in many cases, it is the dominant aspect, but this is again because of the imposition of cisgender society, because of the requirement that these characters, like real-world trans women, navigate a world that was constructed around the assumption that people like us do not exist and must only barely be tolerated.
This is the future of trans women writers, then: exploring our world and the fictional worlds we create, outside the boundaries of fetishisation; probing and exposing the cisgender society that contains us as harshly as it has spent the last several decades attempting to examine us. And, hopefully, we’ll take our cisgender readers with us, teach them that we are more than our bodies and our suffering; that we are not, pointedly, the monsters the news press seems intent on portraying us as. That we are complex, weird and wonderful people just like everyone else, who ought to be given a chance to tell our complex, weird and wonderful stories.