Trans Femme Lit Hurts
Re: It’s All Just Torture Porn: A Record of Failed Attempts to Explain What Trans Lit is “For”
I hate that this has been the state of trans femme lit for a decade: reading the dank corners of the internet, writing pain, and performing introspection, all while claiming “Trans Lit” as ours. Where are the trans men? Where are the enbys, genderqueers, people who don’t fit this so-called “trans lit” narrative?
The problem is in the tense, or that we use any tense at all to describe our way of being. The problem is the binary.
One has either transitioned or not. One is either a woman or not. Trans femme literature talks in absolutes, and it can’t find its home because it is never happy with the in between. It is never happy with “transitioning” and always has to be “transitioned.”
All the authors in that list are, to my knowledge, she/her trans women. Trans men are mentioned in passing and are only fictional.
It is as if trans femme authors believe two things that cannot be true at the same time:
- After passing a definitive point in time, one has “transitioned.” There is a “before” and “after” and never an in between. However, to have transitioned, one has to transition. Which means there are points in time where one is transitioning. Where “becoming” is the current state.
- Gender is binary, and after a never-talked-about in-between period, one has “transitioned.”
False Dichotomies, Dimensionality
Gender can’t be binary if gender “transition” is linear. What is in between the two sides? The dichotomy of “before” and “after” erases the in between.
In between is expanse, momentum, change, and discomfort. But trans femme lit focuses on the pain and hatred of being in between. In between is where the joy is. In between is where creativity happens.
Gender is not linear—it is not even two-dimensional—and it’s certainly not static. Add a third dimension to gender, and you get possibilities—vectors, nodes, plateaus, clusters, connections. Step outside of time and look again. I can be all genders. I inhabit all space and hold every version of myself.
I think cis people occupy many gendered selves throughout their lifetime—even throughout a day. They don’t notice it and rarely talk about it because this is a normal experience for them. Largely, their gendered selves cluster around an identity that they understand and others consistently perceive the same way.
Trans people do this too. The nodes of our gendered experiences have a greater distance between them. We spend more time on the edges between these genders than we do in one spot or another. For some of us, our core self clusters in one area or another, for others, our core self is travelling, transitory, transitioning.
There is no “transitioned” because we are always, all of us, in flux. We transition moment to moment to occupy a new self to fit a new context. We create new meaning with every movement between these selves. We collect stories, find space, expand meaning, and discover new ways of being.
There is no one or the other. There is no divide between the genders I have been and the ones I will be. They are all me and always will be.
Transitioning ceases to exist as an event and becomes a continuum. I am not a “trans woman,” I am motion, energy, connection. I am all genders that I have been and will be; all genders that are comfortable, necessary, painful, joyful, abrasive, and calming.
There is no “transitioned” because I am always being what I need to be.
The hurt of occupying a self that isn’t true is what trans femme lit writes about today. What about the joy of finding a new self, the strength in comforting ourselves for the painful selves we’ve been, and the power in honouring our whole, true, core self for carrying us through all of it.
For me, there is strength in this. In its current state, trans femme lit writes in the tension of the in between without embracing it and cuts the divide deeper.
I chose to embrace the full dimensions of genders and honour all the ways of being I have and will experience.
Some painful.
Many joyful.
All of them me.