"Trans is Hot Right Now": On Cisgender Writers and Trans Characters in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy

Abstract

Trans is “hot right now” (Winterson 1226). But who gets to write about trans issues? Winterson’s and Fu’s books follow in the upsurge of trans visibility in the mainstream media referred to as the “transgender tipping point” and marked by Laverne Cox’s appearance on the cover of Time Magazine and prominent trans celebrity interviews on the Piers Morgan and Katie Couric shows in 2014. However, visibility can also be a “trap”, as Gossett et al. have argued, in that they “accommodat[e] trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew to hegemonic modalities” (xxiii). Mia Fischer explains that “the popular assumption that the increased visibility of trans individuals in public discourse automatically translates into improvement in transgender people’s daily lives” needs to be challenged (5). In addition to the disparity between visibility and real-life problems, the question of how trans people are represented is also problematic. As Brynn Tannehill put it, “when nearly every media portrayal of a transgender [person] is as someone who is incapable, sad, and/or pathetic, it makes it that much harder for us to be taken seriously and dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in”. I take Kim Fu and Jeanette Winterson as two recent examples of cisgender writers taking up trans characters, representing them in outdated and offensive ways, and basing their research about transness on sources – traditional trans memoirs, medical facts, and mainstream media – that replicate patterns which trans authors have identified as harmful. Following Jacob Hale’s “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans,” I propose five new rules cis fiction writers should adhere to when writing trans characters.