Trans Children and their Books - Cathy Butler

I’m currently at the Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, which takes place every two years at exotic locations all over the world and this time happens to be in Worcester. For a children's literature nerd like myself this is a wonderful occasion. There are many dozens of academic papers being given, as well as storytelling, performances and readings. This morning, for example, we were treated to the legendary Roger McGough reading from his work. (Thought for the day, courtesy of one of Mr McG: "When one glove goes missing, both are lost".) It's a great conference, but alas the internet is patchy, so I'm having to write this blog quickly in a local Costa (other coffee shops are available). Apologies if it ends up rather undigested…

One of this year’s themes is the body, and when I gave my own paper a couple of days ago it was on a relatively new subject that has emerged in children’s literature only within the last decade or so: books for transgender children and young adults. I was particularly focusing on books about children who had either transitioned from the gender they were assigned at birth to the gender they felt themselves to be, or else were wishing, hoping or planning to do so.

So new is this genre, in fact, that I can list almost every book in it. To give sense of numbers, there were apparently more than 90 children’s books with LGB (lesbian, gay or bisexual) content in 2013 alone, 8 of them in the UK. Here, by contrast, is a chronological list of all the children’s and YA books featuring transitioning child characters published in English anywhere.* So far, as you will see, there is only one from the UK.

Author	Title	Date	Country	Age	Genre
Julie Anne Peters	Luna	2004	USA	YA	Novel
Ellen Wittlinger	Parrotfish	2007	USA	YA	Novel
Brian Katcher	Almost Perfect	2009	USA	YA	Novel
Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray	10,000 Dresses	2009	USA	PB	Novel
Cris Beam	I am J	2011	USA	YA	Novel
Kirstin Cronn-Mills	Beautiful Music for Ugly Children	2012	USA	YA	Novel
Rachel Gold	Being Emily	2012	USA	YA	Novel
Alyssa Brugman	Alex as Well	2013	Australia	YA	Novel
David Levithan	Two Boys Kissing	2013	USA	YA	Novel
Ami Polonsky	Gracefully Grayson	2014	USA	MG	Novel
Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings	I am Jazz	2014	USA	PB	Memoir
Katie Rain Hill	Rethinking Normal	2014	USA	YA	Memoir
Arin Andrews	Some Assembly Required	2014	USA	YA	Memoir
Lisa Williamson	The Art of Being Normal	2015	UK	YA	Novel
Alex Gino	George	2015	USA	MG	Novel

I’ve helpfully listed these books not just by author, date and title but also by age group: YA for young adult books, MG for middle-grade books, and PB for picturebooks. Unlike LGB books, which are naturally primarily aimed at readers who have reached puberty and are exploring their own sexuality, trans issues crop up from a very young age – from the time, in fact, when children first start to understand and articulate whether they are boys or girls. This is new territory for fiction writers, and reading these books it's clear that they are still working out the best ways to approach it. Even within the short time these books have been appearing, it’s fascinating to see how the genre’s developed, from books in which trans people are essentially tragic figures who have to forego their home and family (as happens in Luna or Almost Perfect) through to ones in which they start to overcome the many challenges involved in coming out, accessing medical care, surviving rejection and making a life in their true gender. We have yet to reach the stage beyond that one, in which being trans is seen as simply one aspect of a person rather than as the site of an almighty life-defining struggle, but when society gets there (and it is getting there) then so, I hope, will books about trans people. 

I could say a lot more about these books with my academic hat on, but I’d like to stop for a moment and think about them as a writer for children. Of all the books on my list, there are only three that were written by authors who are themselves transgender: these are the three ones I’ve labelled as memoirs, which were all written by trans teens. None of the authors of fiction have actually transitioned themselves.

Is this a problem? I’m not one to say that (for example) no man could ever write a convincing woman, or that no American should presume to write about the experience of someone from China. No doubt part of the attraction of writing about trans experience lies in the opportunity it offers any writer to explore questions about one’s embodied and gendered condition, about the relationship between self-perception and the perception of others, and about the various ways in which all of us are engaged in "performing" gender" all the time. Fair enough. Empathy, imagination, and other kinds of experience can all be brought to the task by authors who aren't trans themselves.

Even so, just as it would be a strange world in which the only stories about women and Chinese people were written by men and Americans respectively, a situation in which the only stories about trans people are written by people who aren't trans strikes me as… odd.

There are some very good books on this list. For my money (if you would like recommendations), I am J, Being Emily, Gracefully Grayson and 10,000 Dresses are a good selection, for a range of age groups. Most of all, though, I would like to see trans authors find a way to write about trans experience in fiction, in a way that is authentic without being narrowly confessional.

And yes, I’m looking at myself sternly when I say that.

* At least, that I could find before I gave my paper. I've since been alerted to a few more, and I’d love to hear about any others in the comments. Remember, though, to make the list they must be about children or teens who are transgender, and who have either transitioned or are intending to do so. Something like David Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress does not qualify.