This is the text of a plenary speech delivered to the Queen’s Graduate Literary Conference on 25 May 2024
“And queer and trans survival is itself monstrous in the best and most powerful of ways:
We live in the dark and embrace the dark. We die, we are destroyed, we are killed with fire, and yet we always come back. We make and remake ourselves, reshaping bodies and identities with anything and everything we have at hand, including the poison and refuse of the dominant culture…”
Hello everyone, thanks so much for having me. I’d like to extend an enormous thank-you to Jessica, Wilde, and Drumlin, and everyone else who is responsible for putting on this wonderful conference. I’d also like to acknowledge that the land we are gathered on today is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and the Anishnaabek, and that the legacy of ongoing settler colonialism in which we live today plays a significant role in deciding whose stories are included in the so-called “canon” of literature, whose stories are relegated to the margins, and whose stories are silenced entirely.
I’d like as well to acknowledge the labor it takes to put on an event like this, and the labor it takes to keep an institution like Queen’s University – all of the people on these lands, and in others, whose living bodies and complex stories are used, often exploited, to maintain the powers and privileges associated with the academic elite. I’d like to acknowledge that we are currently in the midst of yet another cycle of intense and virulent hatred being directed at trans people and our participation in public life. And of course, I must mention as well that on this campus, as on many campuses around the world, had until recently an encampment of impassioned young people protesting against one of the most blatant and horrifying expressions of genocidal violence that we have seen in recent history.
All of this is to say, we are immersed today in an immense and terrifying social struggle that forms the context in which all stories are told, and it is with this awareness that I’d like to speak with you today about speculative fiction, storytelling in popular culture, and the role that the weird, the horrifying, the freakish and the fabulous play in dreaming a better world into being.
So there’s an old creative writing trick that can be boiled down the following: When you’re unsure of how to write something, or if you’re feeling insecure about what you have to say, start by writing about your own experience of insecurity. That is to say, begin by telling the reader that you have no idea what you’re doing. Dear people: I have no idea what I’m doing here. For one thing, I am not a scholar (or even a student) of literature, I don’t have a degree in any related field, I have never formally studied either literature or creative writing, and when I was looking at the conference program, I was frankly quite intimidated by the titles and topics alone. In a sentence: I’m not sure I’m smart enough to be here! Does anyone else here ever feel that way?
Yet here I am, having somehow cheated, lied, and stolen my way to the position of plenary speaker at a graduate literary conference, which I suppose is a propos for a writer giving a talk on speculative fiction whose first (and only) speculative fiction novel has the word “liar” in the title. In some ways, I think it would be a propos for any trans person, particularly any trans woman of colour, to dance with the archetypes of Outsider and Deceiver when invited to take the stage, because these are the roles that the dominant culture assigns to us. In the great story of the society, we are located as not only external to the cannon, but external to truth and to the world itself.
To gloss on the words of queer writer, sex worker advocate, and my dear friend Amber Dawn, “lying is the work of those who are taught that their truths have no value” – and I have to say that in today’s economy, the truth of a trans person is valued at less than nothing and the truth of a trans woman even less than that.
No wonder, then, that so many queer and trans writers embrace the lie: I refer here not only those whose fiction centres literal tricksters and liars such as Jordy Rosenberg whose novel Confessions of the Fox follows the daring exploits of thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard; or Torrey Peters, whose novella The Masker delves into the disturbing intersection between sexual subculture and self-deception, but also to the general affinity for heightened and extended realities that we find in queer and trans cultural production.
For we, it must be said, are a community rather adorably obsessed with speculation and confabulation, with magical realism and fabulism, with the extended metaphor of other worlds and otherworldliness; we might as well admit that we are for the most part a strange assemblage of geeks and freaks, weirdos and queerdos who thrill to the sound of a hero’s journey – the more outcast the hero, the better. I dare any queer or tran here to deny it. How many of you here are fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? How many of you here have watched all of X-Men 97 even though it only finished a couple weeks ago? How many of you have seen it more than once? That is what I thought.
We are born into a world that our truths are not a part of. No wonder we find ourselves better reflected in realities outside of this one. Perhaps Susan Stryker said it best, in words that made my bones sing the first time I read them as child over fifteen years ago: “I will say it as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.”
Those words are drawn from Stryker’s seminal text, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix,” an ostensibly academic performance piece-turned-essay that nonetheless finds an unmistakeable lineage in the fantastic. Stryker’s ferocious, intoxicatingly unrepentant identification of transfemininity with the monstrous and unnatural has been echoed repeatedly in trans (and particularly transfemine) speculative writing over the 30 years since its first articulation, including the work of horror writer Gretchen Felker-Martin (author of Manhunt), speculative fiction novelist Awaeki Emezi (author of Freshwater), fantasist Maya Deane (author of Wrath Goddess Sing), science fiction writer Porpentine Charity Heartscape (author of Psycho Nymph Exile), as well as my own Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars among others.
I believe that the monstrous and the magical as metaphor speak powerfully to queer and trans people because to live a queer and/or trans life in a time that does not want us to be alive is in itself magical: An act that defies the imagined bounds of possibility. And queer and trans survival is itself monstrous in the best and most powerful of ways:
We live in the dark and embrace the dark. We die, we are destroyed, we are killed with fire, and yet we always come back. We make and remake ourselves, reshaping bodies and identities with anything and everything we have at hand, including the poison and refuse of the dominant culture. We become powerful, beautiful, irresistible in our revolt. As Porpentine Charity Heartscape writes in her essay “Hot Allostatic Load”: “Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms.”
This is what I did to survive. This is what I did to become a woman. This is how I became a writer, why I am standing before you today: I am a hybrid creature, a mixed metaphor, a chimera of my own creation. Like me, this speech is an assemblage, a coming together of disparate things in a place where it does not belong, a confabulation in search of the truth. This is the only way I know how to do things, the only way I know how to love, how to get a story told. Perhaps some of you have lived and survived in this way as well – aways weaving and reweaving the stories you were given until you had a new one that told the truth of your body.
And I suspect there is something to learn from this – from queer and trans writers and readers, storytellers and story listeners, and our preoccupation with the monstrous and the magical. From our predilection for the fantastic. I believe that there is a wisdom to what we love and why we love it, a wisdom that can tell us more about the role of storytelling in a world that is currently being torn apart by injustice, fascism, ecocide and genocide. I believe that this wisdom offers those of us love stories – particularly those that come from the margins, that spring up from outside of dominant culture notions of what “good” literature is – a particular gift for the struggle ahead.
I recently had the honor of co-hosting the launch of trans feminine non-binary author Daniel Sarah Karasik’s new novel, Disobedience, a speculative fiction coming-of-age story set in a dystopian world overrun by the prison industrial complex (that is to say, a world not so very different from the one we live in). As frequently occurs in public discussion of a politically engaged fiction, the question arose of what literature contributes (or doesn’t contribute) to revolutionary struggle. What is the value of a novel – or a play, or a movie – in a time when so many are suffering and dying all around us? Why sit in a room and write or read a work of make-believe when the real world is burning? I think it is a fair question, and I can only answer it from my own body, my own lived experience.
I have been working with, dreaming with, reading with, and writing for queer and trans communities since I was sixteen years old – for seventeen years. I have been a group facilitator, a writing teacher, a therapist and community worker, a performer and an author, among many other things, in my communities since the beginning of my adulthood life. In all that time, I have had countless opportunities to observe and discuss queer and trans relationships with speculative fiction and visionary storytelling – I can’t even begin to tell you how many comic book readers, D&D players, video game aficionados, and yes, readers of speculative fiction I’ve met.
What I have come to believe is that for many of us, the stories that resonate with us are the mirror through which the self is made. We come to story to discover ourselves, to learn more about who we are and what we could be – and in receiving that reflection, we strengthen ourselves, our capacity to be in the world with resilience and conviction. Stories of the fantastic, of weirdos, queerdos, freaks and outcast heroes, expand our ability to imagine selves capable of living, grieving, and searching for meaning and joy in a violent and terrifying dominant culture.
I am deeply moved by the profundity with which certain speculative narratives offer marginalized readers the opportunity to experience and integrate forbidden aspects of the self – to touch and enter such frequently repressed experiences as grief, rage, and eroticism.
In David Demchuk’s horror novel Red X, for example, the reader is taken on a journey through the story of a supernatural being who has been killing gay men for centuries from the shadows in Toronto’s Gay Village. As I read it, struck by the eerie real-life parallel of living in the Toronto Village at the same time as the arrest and trial of serial killer Bruce McArthur, I came to realize that horror in the right hands was more than cheap thrills and sensationalism: it was a place for my grief and my terror to go. Similarly, Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing, a retelling of the myth of the invincible Greek warrior Achilles where Achilles is characterized as a trans woman is an awe-inspiring evocation of transfeminine rage and sexuality, a collective experience too often totally repressed and brutally punished within the dominant culture.
Suffused with symbolic imagery and archetypal meaning, speculative fiction illuminates hidden possibility within the self. My own journey through childhood, starved of queer and trans literature in the 90s, was heavily impacted by fantastical children’s literature, most particularly the then-hit series, Animorphs, a middle-grade children’s book series by Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant that followed the struggles of a group of child shapeshifters consigned to secret guerilla warfare against an alien invasion of mind-controlling slugs from outer space. This series, delving deeply into the psychological impact of warfare on children and the horrors of colonization (yes, looking back, I’m surprised these were published by a children’s book publisher) gave me the foundation I needed as a child keeping a secret and fighting a war of my own.
In the same vein, countless clients of my work as a former counselor and present-day embodied leadership coach, have spoken of the works of Tolkien, Ursula K Le Guin, Tamora Pierce, Neil Gaiman, and many other speculative authors as deeply formative to their adult sense of self.
All of this is to say, I believe that the role of storytelling amid the struggle for justice to make us stronger: To remind us how we are made and what we are capable of. To help us dream not only of the better world yet to come but of how we might become the ones capable of giving birth to it. This is the gift that stories have to offer us – the mirror image of the monstrous and the magical that dwell within, in all of their unsettling and revolutionary potential. The implore us and invite us to never forget it, to never forget our power or our purpose. Let us never forget who we are.