First Attempt
I stumbled across a delightful 4chan post a few weeks ago. It read: “basically every trans book I’ve read felt like the author shaking me by the shoulders going ‘DON’T DO IT ITS NOT WORTH IT MY LIFE IS HELL.’” As examples, the post listed the names of many of my favorite writers: Casey Plett, Torrey Peters, Imogen Binnie, Alison Rumfitt, Jeanne Thornton, Grace Byron, Davey Davis, Emily Zhou. And there, down near the bottom, was my own: Katherine Packert Burke.
How nice to be included!
“It’s all just torture porn dude,” the post finished.
The real delight wasn’t being named in such auspicious company, but that I had, myself, written an essay about this very phenomenon back in 2022, when FSG reissued Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada. In 2019, I explained, I was “reading every book I could find by a trans writer. I read Casey Plett’s Little Fish and…Davey Davis’s The Earthquake Room…I read Torrey Peters’s Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. At the time, what stuck with me was how many of these books are about deeply unhappy people. How badly, I thought, am I going to fuck up my life?”
The point of trans lit is to find out what literature can do. We are only beginning to make the merest dents in this question.
Now, as my old essay goes on to describe, I may have been scared back into the closet by the combined pressures of scary transgender literature and the punishing demands of Alabama’s healthcare system (it is left to the reader to guess which of those exerted greater pressure), but I did, of course, eventually transition.
I failed to say this in that essay, so I’d like to say it here, because I still believe it deeply: the point of trans literature is not to make transition easier.
This raises a corresponding question, though: what is it for? I love it, I’ve dedicated an entire shelf—double-stacked—in my apartment to it, and I keep making more of it myself. But what is it for? What can I point to for young trans writers, or readers, to say: this is what makes it worthwhile, this is the feeling you should be chasing?
This question has become all the more pressing as I prepare to see my new novel, All Us Saints, into the world. In contrast to my first novel (the aforementioned torture porn) Still Life—in which a trans woman is sad at lots of parties and sleeps with the hottest trans boy she’s ever seen—All Us Saints is about a closeted trans girl whose murder of her sister’s best friends ultimately gives rise to a transphobic horror film franchise, damning her family to twenty-plus years of processing the impact that night has had on their lives. I have had people come out to me at readings I did for Still Life; it is hard to imagine anyone coming out in response to Saints.
But are these just different flavors of torture porn? Is that just what I like?
The thing is, a lot of literature is about being miserable: The Bell Jar, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Misery. If you think trans lit somehow needs to evoke a more beautiful vision of life when many of us are broke, microaggressed daily, and constantly on the verge of losing healthcare, well, perhaps your problem is with literature writ large.
But god, is this getting us any closer to answering this essential point of: what is our goal here?
The goal of any literature, regardless of the subculture it arises out of, is to be good art. So what makes trans literature good?
Second Attempt
The point of having a body, I’ve told some of my cis male friends, is to find out what it can do. You can take a couple of green pills every day and your body will learn to soften and grow tits. You can find out just how much pleasure there is in being the one to get fucked, instead of doing the fucking. You can turn your genitals inside out and they work—isn’t that wild?
I don’t think this is limited to gender. BDSM, rock climbing, getting tattoos, and—okay—anal sex all allow you to experience embodiment in some deep, concrete way that, if you haven’t before, you are probably not fully able to imagine or understand.
Art, too, exists to be broken. Isabel Paban Freed’s novel School defies almost every expectation one might have for the campus novel (to the point where it is hard to even say what it’s about, besides a kind of viral AI and a school where people all have food names and are sometimes eaten). By its end, there is even less coherence between the characters and plotlines, diverging into a few pages from the perspective of a desperately horny lesbian crab. If that sounds silly, it is! But it’s also one of the few trans novels of the 2020s that seems more interested in being a novel than it is in its own “transness.” Almost every character in it is trans—but that’s secondary to the actual work of the novel, which is to explore the bizarre intersections and failures to intersect of these characters’ lives, and the political consequences of how they live.
The point of trans lit is to find out what literature can do. We are only beginning to make the merest dents in this question.
Third Attempt
“Don’t you hate it,” a friend of mine said the other night, “when someone is trying to be transphobic and they’re unable to come up with anything original?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s like, this is your first time being transphobic to me but it’s my thousandth time being transphobia’d, at least work for it.”
Later that night someone quotes one of my tweets saying, “You know, I can always tell someone’s gender based on how they write on this website,” which, assuming they mean I post like a man, my friend and I agree does sting.
Fourth Attempt
In Anton Solomonik’s short story “Cassandra,” a trans man dresses up in women’s clothing and the trans girl he is with dresses up in men’s. “I really did have sexual fantasies about being a woman with a man,” he reports, “the fantasies were about being constrained, in every part of my life, in and out of the sex encounter, by imagined social norms for women.” I will never get past how amazing this story is. To take the—largely pre-/early transition—mode of disguising oneself as ones assigned gender and instead turn it camp (not girlmoding, but “girlmoding,” as Sontag would have it), turn it into fetish—is the kind of double turn that I only see in trans lit.
Fifth Attempt
Any great literature comes from a place of alienation; there’s a reason that the modern novel was invented by gay men. Garielle Lutz, whether or not she writes about trans characters, radiates alienation in every sentence and it’s brilliant every time. “The kid will grow up to leave a heritage of assery on high chairs, campstools, love seats, rollaway beds,” one of her stories all-but-concludes. “The kid will soon enough lose its place on its blunt stub of a body.”
Sixth Attempt
All transsexuals have made the choice to become, or are in the state of not-yet-having become. Tiresias, famously, detransitioned and was blinded for saying that women enjoyed sex more than men. He was compensated by becoming the most famous prophet of the ancient world.
I have often joked that my favorite work of trans lit is Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, for how its love interest, Sarah Miles, comes to Catholic conversion almost against her will, but unable to resist. This, I thought, is exactly what transition was like! See also films like Seconds (1966), in which a schlubby middle-aged man gets The Surgery to change him into Rock Hudson.
It is this becoming, or not-yet-become, that makes these works feel trans to me. In Some Like It Hot (1959), Tony Curtis does not feel trans; he is always pushing back against his crossdressing, pretending to be someone else. But Jack Lemmon becomes Daphne. She is so taken with the millionaire Osgood, after their night of dancing, that she forgets that she is “in disguise.”
At the start of transition, I felt like I was pretending to be a woman; after a few months, I felt like I was pretending not to be.
In Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, this feeling’s mirror image is metaphorized in Paul’s ability to shapeshift, transforming into a girl when he needs to sleep with a hot lesbian or sneak into MichFest. But this isn’t a tale of predatory transfemininity; it is a tale of “born this way” transmasculinity—of being a boy from the start, and only ever, when circumstances demand it, pretending to be otherwise. By the book’s end, Paul isn’t pretending anymore.
In Torrey Peters’ novella “The Masker,” the protagonist has to evaluate which is a more appealing path to follow: that of the obnoxious, loud-mouthed older trans woman, or of a male(?) fetishist who dresses in a full-body rubber woman suit like a chill Buffalo Bill.
Don’t worry about good or bad representation, don’t worry about scaring the eggs into sealing up the cracks in their carefully constructed shells. Just make something good.
In Jeanne Thornton’s A/S/L, Sash is the only girl in the IRC channel #teen-goetia and everyone wants to flirt with her; it’s only when she and her friends, Abraxis and Lilith, have all transitioned and grown up that anyone learns that she was pretending—or rather, that she wasn’t.
Seventh Attempt
What is trans lit for? Obviously it’s not to rehabilitate our image in the minds of cis people. The trans people I know mostly fuck one another, get messy, get hurt, stay hurting. I do not need soft polite trans people in my literature; I need people who are absolutely fucking feral.
There’s nothing wrong with writing about early transition. A lot of us were writers before we were transsexuals, and it’s inevitable that we’re going to want to think through it. My first novel, Still Life, specifically arose out of the intensity with which I missed particular friends, a particular version of myself. But that was a pre-transition self—and of course I didn’t want to be that person again, did I? I had to write roughly 60,000 words to figure out what to do with that (or figure out, in fact, that there was nothing I could do).
But I wonder—or worry, maybe—that the reason we tell those stories of transition is because we already know how they will end. That people want comforting stories about trans lives because they want some outside affirmation that transition is the right thing to do. If you’ve somehow made it this far in this strange and silly essay and are still looking for that, I’m here to tell you: it probably is and you should try it.
If that is insufficient, here is a piece of affirming trans literature I made in about 30 seconds. This could be your life:
But what comes after affirmation? Besides making out with other transsexuals, I mean. We deserve a literature that goes further than this, no matter if it means showing the misery that, sometimes, comes with the territory.
Fuck it, not just misery. We deserve evil trans characters (or deeply flawed ones, like the commune leader/demon-communing Ash in Grace Byron’s Herculine). We deserve murderers, and racists, and worse. We deserve our equivalent of Samuel Delany’s Hogg, that gay rapist for hire, or any of Dennis Cooper’s predatory men. Because in a truly equal world, we have nothing to fear from these depictions, these ideas. Trans people are people—flawed, hurt and, sometimes, dangerous.
Final Attempt
I suppose like any art, the point of trans lit is to keep making it. We are still so early in the process that, perhaps by the time this essay comes out, it will already be dated. There are so many stories yet untold, and more of us all the time. We deserve our stories just as anyone else does. Don’t worry about good or bad representation, don’t worry about scaring the eggs into sealing up the cracks in their carefully constructed shells. Just make something good. Make something no one else has before. And, if possible, make out with other hot transsexuals on your way.
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All Us Saints by Katherine Packert Burke is available from Bloomsbury Publishing.
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