How To Read A Trans Fem Writer

an essay, an instruction manual, a trans fem writer manifesto, a plea, and a prayer by Maya Deane & Kai Cheng Thom

What you are about to read is an essay, an instruction manual, a trans fem writer manifesto, a plea, and a prayer. Written by Maya Deane and Kai Cheng Thom, two notoriously brazen trans woman authors, and citing a number of contemporary trans feminine writers, this piece is an intervention into systemic hostility against trans fem literature. This is a call for all readers, especially those who claim to be our allies, to stop engaging our work through the eyes of suspicion and instead open the eyes of love. 

Painting by Maya Deane

The genesis of this essay was sparked in spring of 2022 when Maya’s debut novel Wrath Goddess Sing, a retelling of the legend of Achilles that reclaims the famous warrior of Greek mythology as a trans woman, was about to take the world of fantasy by storm. A long-time lover of “woman warrior” fantasy since Xena, Kai Cheng reached out to Maya - whom she had never met before - to request a review copy in a shameless attempt to read it early. 

Reading the book was a profound experience for Kai Cheng. Having debuted as an author herself six years prior, she had emerged into a very different literary scene. For one thing, published trans feminine authors of fiction (let alone genre fiction) were extremely rare in 2016, and those who did publish almost exclusively did so through small press or self-publishing. For another, many of the trailblazing trans fem writers of the early and mid 2010s were no longer active, in large part due to the precarity of trans lives and the publishing world’s general lack of support.

Yet Maya’s book seemed to signal a shift. Wrath Goddess Sing is an epic fantasy novel put out by HarperCollins, a major-league press. The book does not seek to educate or pander, but rather gives voice to trans feminine rage and strength. And alongside Maya, there seemed to be a whole new wave of prolific and fantastic trans fem writers emerging, with bold visions of their own. It seemed, to Kai Cheng, a hopeful sign - the possibility of a future she had not thought possible. 

But two weeks after the publication of Wrath Goddess Sing, furious backlash towards the book exploded across the internet. People were trashing it on Twitter and review bombing it on Goodreads. Maya was being publicly denounced as a “violently privileged white queer” whose book was an act of racism, transphobia and homophobia. 

Kai Cheng was bemused. Was this the same book she had just read? Looking more deeply into the so–called controversy, she found that the book’s apparently deplorable transgressions boiled down to portraying the horrors of homophobia and wartime enslavement in the ancient world, and portraying trans suffering.

Where before Kai Cheng had glimpsed a profound hope, now she felt an equally profound sorrow. Her worst fears were being confirmed once again: that trans feminine brilliance is not allowed to shine in this world, nor even to survive. Not even among our own communities and those who self-identify as allies dedicated to “social justice.”

For her part, Maya was taken aback by the attacks on her book, but she was also not surprised. The only other trans woman published by a major publisher in 2022, Gretchen Felker-Martin, was slandered in the international press in seven countries. Four years before, Maya’s friend and mentor Alina Boyden had been abused relentlessly on Twitter when her own fantasy debut Stealing Thunder was first announced. 

This is part of a larger trend in how trans fem writers are received across the political spectrum. In 2017, comic writer Mags Visaggio experienced what she calls “a yearlong campaign of harassment and abuse and doxxing for the crime of writing comics while trans,” largely driven by readers on the right and alt-right. A disturbingly parallel incident occurred among a queer and ally identified readership in 2019: The infamous Isabel Fall incident, in which a trans woman sci-fi writer was hounded to near suicide over the title of a short story. And from the supposedly leftist but “gender critical” crowd, author Torrey Peters’ faced intense backlash from “gender critical” (trans-exclusionary) readers for being nominated for the 2021 Women’s Prize. 

Over and over, the pattern reasserts itself: trans women storytellers are scrutinized, shunned, and vilified. As comic artist and children’s novelist Sophie Labelle observes, “The violence that transfeminine people get for putting themselves out there has been so normalized that people are numbed to it.” 

We are here to say: No more. 

Given the recent publication of Kai Cheng’s latest book, Falling Back In Love With Being Human, we decided to write this article. Readers need a guide, a roadmap: For engaging skillfully with our work, for resisting their own transmisogynist conditioning, for reading us with curiosity and love. 

Read Our Work

In the year since Wrath Goddess Sing came out, Maya noticed a fascinating pattern when her readers talked about the book. She had expected trans women to appreciate her work, and they did–but she also kept seeing comments like “as a straight white cis guy, I had no idea I could relate so much to a trans woman’s story!” She was delighted that her book could reach readers so different from herself, but this gets at the core of the problem: because most cisgender readers don’t read trans women’s fiction, they’re surprised when they love it. As one prominent trans author told us, trans women’s literature is often positioned as “a sub-genre of a sub-genre within queer or LGBTQ+ literature,” teaching readers to assume that our work is inaccessible, obscure, too niche to be of interest. 

Ironically, though, stories about trans women are big business; books like Alexis Hall’s A Lady for a Duke, Kim Fu’s For Today I Am A Boy, or James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta don’t bear much resemblance to the fiction trans women write about ourselves, but non-transfeminine readers tend to assume they’re accessible and profound in ways that actual trans women’s fiction isn’t and cannot be. 

For many decades, the only accessible form a trans woman’s story could take was the classic Trans Memoir of Edifying Suffering, Dysfunction, and Perversity, sob stories full of exotic pain and extravagant gender puzzles who will go to any lengths to be fabulous. Meanwhile, atrocious anti-trans writers like J. Michael Bailey, author of the debunked pop-psych book The Man Who Would Be Queen, made their careers with lurid, sensationalized theories about us that bury our humanity under layers of exoticizing grotesquerie.

This history makes readers expect trans women’s stories to be what the brilliant SFF writer Violet Allen calls “stories of sadness and struggle that enrich the reader”: Uplifting and Meaningful, but not fun to read. As cyberpunk writer Aubrey Wood puts it, trans women’s genre fiction “is expected to champion proper ‘representation’ by both readers and industry professionals and this has led to one-dimensional demands for characterization and plot.” Gretchen Felker-Martin puts it more bluntly: “There's still tremendous pressure from without and within for trans women to create only ‘helpful,’ ‘healthy,’ ‘constructive’ art. We need to make ourselves seem inoffensive, we need to demonstrate our humanity, we need to soulfully show others our suffering. It's all bullshit, frankly.”

It is bullshit. Trans women’s fiction is weird, funny, endlessly inventive, nothing like the eat-your-vegetables morality plays that so many readers expect. Those who know how to read it love it. It’s neither alien nor unrelatable; it’s gorgeous and human, and since it had to overcome the headwinds that keep trans women out of publishing, it tends to be very good. But you have to make an effort to see it, to read it, to encounter its surprise and delight. 

We asked Violet Allen to speak to the Catch-22 trans women writers find ourselves in. She said, “As a Black trans woman, whose image in popular culture flickers between rank abjection and noble suffering, I have a sense that people want to see work from me that is ‘important’ more than they want to see work that is ‘good,’ even though I mostly write romantic comedies about dragons and spaceships.” 

But her romantic comedies about dragons and spaceships are hilarious and beautiful, endlessly surprising and just plain fun–and you won’t get to read them until publishers put money behind them and you buy them. We think you’ll love them as much as we do, but you’ll never find out unless you get the chance, then leave your expectations at the door and read our work instead of supporting endless variations on the same stories about us that pander to readers’ expectations.

Read Without Paranoia 

To engage meaningfully with a trans fem writer’s text, it is essential to be aware of how transmisogyny can impact your reading. Transmisogyny is the cultural tendency to view trans fems’ words with suspicion, our bodies as inherently dangerous, and our voices as harmful until proven innocent, leading to what Felker-Martin asserts is “an enormous, disproportionate amount of harassment in order to participate in the arts.”

This takes the form of a social panic about trans fems, in which our literature and our personal lives are constantly being monitored for impurity. This is a kind of witch hunt, because no matter how “good” we are, if you look for monsters in our work, monsters are what you will find.  Perhaps this is why Felker-Martin defiantly encourages trans fem writers to “Write whatever sick, twisted nightmare shit you want. They're going to hang you for it regardless.”

We are held to ideological perfection. Failing to meet that, we are cast as predatory, violent, harmful, treacherous. If a trans fem writes an action story, she may be criticized for “promoting violence”; if a trans woman writes a sweet romance, she may equally be criticized for “ignoring oppression.”

Even representations of transmisogyny and homophobia in trans women’s literature may be accused of endorsing bigotry - a trans woman who writes about her character being called a “f*ggot” is accused of slinging slurs for the purpose of hurting readers’ feelings - precisely what happened to Maya. 

Aubrey Wood speaks eloquently to this dynamic, referencing the affaire Isabel Fall: “I will never get over what happened to Isabel Fall [...] the SFF community has a serious problem with talking about revolutionary politics on Twitter but revealing extremely reactionary attitudes the moment they are inconvenienced.” 

Such reactionary attitudes disguise themselves as justice, but in fact boil down to “this trans woman wrote a thing that made me uncomfortable, so she must be evil.” Jeanne Thornton, author of the 2021 Lambda Prize-winning Summer Fun, cautions readers: “Memorize this litany--there is possibly more to the story than that the trans woman is bad--and let it serve you in times of moral doubt.”

The deeper antidote to paranoid readings of trans feminine literature is appreciation. As Kai Cheng noted on Twitter when Maya’s book emerged, we could instead recognize trans women’s voices as an important and precious part of our culture. What if we remembered the leadership and vision that trans women and fems have historically offered the queer and trans movement, the resilience and brilliance and vulnerability we have gifted the world? 

Perhaps romance author May Peterson says it best: “I see trans women as representing a challenge to the rest of the species, a challenge to learn compassion anew and deeply feel where it lies within. Trans women remind the species that we all experience vulnerability, a frightening truth of human life that we may wish to reject. I urge readers to instead use that fear to see us, and each other, with fresh clarity and tenderness.”

But to meet that challenge, readers need new skills.

Read Like A Learner

In addition to reading our work without paranoia, read it with an open mind, eager to discover how our stories surprise you. As May Peterson put it, “I hope for readers to read my work in the same spirit in which they might enter a friendship—with curiosity and charity, and a desire to enjoy.” Here’s some advice for doing that.

1. Be ready for a literary challenge. Our work is routinely misclassified as young adult even when explicitly written for an adult audience, which it usually is (trans women almost never get to publish in the lucrative young adult market). But it is often sophisticated, technically innovative, gloriously creative, with challenges for the reader that pay off. 

2.   Be ready for discomfort. Our stories are often not what you’re expecting–sometimes you will read about suffering when you want everything to turn out fine, dark humor when you expect pious sorrow, all the messy complexity of our lives. This is how art works! If you want to take us seriously, you have to break the tyranny of positive representation and stop expecting us to portray suffering in an instructional, edifying mode. Prepare for work that startles you, that affects you in ways you didn’t expect. Sometimes, trans women’s stories will hurt your feelings, disturb you, reveal the awesome cosmic horror underlying all things. Deal with it. 

3.  Read us as women. As Violet Allen puts it, understand us “as actually women … not just in a political ‘trans women are women’ way, but holistically. Trans women characters (and other trans and gender non-conforming characters) should not be seen by default as gender puzzles.” When you’re expecting gender puzzles, you will be confused when our literature centers transfeminine character processes – trans fem ways of living and changing and maneuvering in the world that you have been taught not to see, because our lives are treated as unknowable and our literature is hidden away. But our work shows trans women being trans women. The point is not to teach or inspire, but for trans feminine writers and readers to tell our stories, ask big questions, and bring our ways of being out of the shadows. If you surrender to our stories and read them on their own terms, you will know us, and maybe yourself, as you have not before. 

4.  Read us in our genre context. Gretchen Felker-Martin calls her books “nasty genre shlock”; read them like nasty genre shlock, not political theory or a revolutionary manifesto. Violet Allen wants readers to “focus on how I do words good”; read her stories for their beauty and wit. Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing is first and foremost a lurid fantasy novel set in the ancient world; Aubrey Wood’s Bang Bang Bodhisattva is messy cyberpunk in the tradition of “Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Snow Crash, or Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.” Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby is tongue-in-cheek realist fiction that challenges notions of identity, relationship, and family.  May Peterson’s books are swashbuckling fantasy romance. Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton is a deliciously haunting historical character study.

Let our transfeminine character processes and storytelling show you how we fit into the genres you know and love, rather than assuming we cannot fit into them or cannot innovate within them. Don’t assume we don’t know the game; assume we’re changing it.

5.  Stay with us. We’re not going anywhere. Readers are learning to appreciate our stories, publishers to present them more effectively, and we’re helping each other survive and thrive in this industry so we can keep telling our tales. You can come to the party early and help it happen, you can show up late and play catch-up, or you can wait outside in the dark–but if you do that, you’ll miss out on the magic.

6.  Be fucking normal, you little weirdos. If you see other readers reading our books like Isaac Newton doing numerology to discover the End Times, tell them to touch grass. If they’re talking about how our books leapt out of a dark alley and violated their poor defenseless eyeballs, remind them that this is not A Clockwork Orange and reading fiction is optional. When they try to mob us for alleged thought crimes, you don’t have to participate.

Ultimately, if you read us as human beings rather than morality pets, you will find depths the world has taught you not to see. So, dear readers: Enter those depths with curiosity. Look for the treasures in our stories. What you look for is often what you find.

Maya Deane is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Wrath Goddess Sing.

Kai Cheng Thom is the acclaimed author of six award-winning books in multiple genres, a two-time Lambda Literary Award Nominee, and a winner of the Stonewall Honor Book and Publishing Triangle Awards. Her latest work, Falling Back In Love With Being Human, is due from Penguin Random House Canada and The Dial Press in August 2023.